We’ve lost touch with reality. Technology is certainly a factor. A few years ago, people on airplanes began pulling down the window shades. The world outside, alive with light, interferes with the screens that have become the focus of our attention. The darkened airplane cabins epitomize much of our existence these days. We’re cocooned in a shell of technology.
Our flight from reality has other and earlier sources, however. As Henry Vander Goot details in Creation as an Introduction to Christian Thought, a great deal of modern theology has turned its back on God’s creative work. Theologians concede the task of analyzing reality to modern science, purporting to focus on the greater truth of salvation in Christ. The effect, Vander Goot argues, is acquiescence in a practical atheism beneath the veneer of a “personal relationship with Jesus.”
Vander Goot’s nemesis is Karl Barth. Vander Goot argues that the great Swiss theologian overdetermined his thought in reaction to National Socialism. By Barth’s reckoning, German Christians were susceptible to blood and soil ideology, because they had already been seduced by “natural theology.” The notion of a created nomos paves the way for the perversion of a Volksnomos. Barth’s solution was to absorb creation into salvation history. From the very beginning, God was “saving” reality from the dark void of “nothingness.” In Vander Goot’s reading of Barth, redemption in Christ becomes the be-all and end-all of Christian revelation. In practical terms, this “Christomonism” means that theology does not contend with secular academic culture’s statements about everything else, ceding the terrain. Again, a practical atheism reigns.
As Vander Goot recognizes, there were deeper forces at work in twentieth-century theology than the crisis of National Socialism. At the end of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant claimed to solve the difficulties in Enlightenment theories of knowledge, which swung uneasily between dogmatic rationalism and despairing skepticism. Kant shifted the quest for certainty away from our perception of things, urging us to place our trust in the ways in which we analyze and synthesize our mental images of things. Put differently, according to Kant, we don’t know things “objectively.” To use his terminology, we can’t know the “thing-in-itself.” Rather, we know things rationally, which is to say in accord with reason’s a priori patterns, which impute cause and effect and other relations.
Kant developed an elaborate technical vocabulary to describe these forms of understanding, but we need not be detained by the details. More important is the overall effect. After Kant, philosophical emphasis fell on how we think rather than on what the world is like. Very quickly, philosophers questioned Kant’s presumption that reason’s pre-set patterns are universal. Having articulated the project of modern idealism (the mind frames reality), Kant opened the way for the many modern reflections on how our thinking is shaped by historical, social, and psychological factors.
Karl Barth’s theology had tremendous influence in the middle decades of the twentieth century. He defended the “realism” of God’s revelation in Christ, which was an exciting break from liberal theology. But he did so without challenging Kant’s anti-realism, his strictures against knowledge of things-in-themselves. This accommodation of modernity was as much a source of Barth’s influence as his theological bravado.
Vander Goot offers an especially astute assessment of Jürgen Moltmann, who followed in Barth’s footsteps. Vander Goot wryly notes that “the future” is the topic of Moltmann’s book, The Future of Creation—not creation as we experience it here and now. In this conception of Christianity, the power of reality rests in the future, the coming realization of Christ’s lordship over all things. Theology is thus excused from the task of describing (and defending) the order and distinction of things established “in the beginning” by God’s creative Word. Again, the upshot may be lots of theological talk about Christ, but everything else falls under the authority of science. Practical atheism.
Vander Goot does not wish to gin up a revival of Aristotelian metaphysics. He endorses an aspect of Kant’s skepticism about knowledge of things-in-themselves, noting that we lack firm bases on which to determine which metaphysical schemes are correct and which are misguided. But we are not unmanned. Following Calvin (and the Dutch Reformed tradition), Vander Goot holds that Scripture provides Christians with a divinely authorized construction of reality, as it were, one that avoids metaphysical conundrums and vindicates things as they appear.
The inspired text authorizes us to trust our common-sense perceptions. The matter-of-fact tenor of the creation account in Genesis licenses us to reason about the nature of things without worrying about philosophical foundations. Moreover, the first chapter of Genesis does not encourage speculative efforts to get underneath or above what we experience. Vander Goot quotes Calvin to good effect: “It must be remembered that Moses does not speak with philosophical acuteness on occult mysteries, but related those things which are everywhere observed, even by the uncultivated, and which are in common use.” Moses was the first common-sense realist.
St. John Paul II often spoke of the anthropological crisis of modernity, our confusion about what it means to be human. He regularly cited a passage from the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, which teaches that we discover the truth of humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. I don’t think Vander Goot would disagree. But he recognizes that modernity has fomented a metaphysical crisis, a despairing sense that we cannot know the stable, enduring place in which we live out our lives. Modern science offers little consolation, because most presume that its tacit metaphysics is a mute materialism, epitomized by Richard Dawkins’s metaphor of a blind watchmaker.
Vander Goot warns against too much talk of the doctrine of creation. By his reckoning, Scripture authorizes us simply to talk about things, all things, as Christians formed by the self-same Scripture. He recommends what the Church Fathers called Christian philosophy, by which they did not mean an academic discipline, but the wisdom that arises when the eyes of faith are trained on all things—and report what they perceive.
I would add liturgical worship to Scripture as the divinely authorized means by which our perceptions of reality are trained and sharpened. And I’m inclined to defend the precision found in the Catholic tradition of natural law, which Vander Goot criticizes. But we should take to heart the larger point of Creation as an Introduction to Christian Thought. Vander Goot often returns to an epigram: “Life is religion.” God asks us to live in accord with his creative will, here and now. This vocation will not get us to heaven. But it is religious nonetheless, because it cleaves to the order and purpose God has ordained “in the beginning.” That God has done more, that he offers us fellowship, despite our sin and defilement, is another matter, more important, to be sure, but distinct. And this offer does not efface or supersede the way things are. As St. Thomas teaches, grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.
