The Crumbling Empires of the Mind

American Christianity ultimately formed itself around competing empires of the mind. They are crumbling, and that is why there is little left for coming generations in need of good news. 

(A warning. I note that in dialogue the other must represent itself, which makes any overview like this fraught with the possibility of misrepresentation. I'll only note that while I was educated in a classically liberal tradition, I grew up in an orthodox/traditional tradition and taught for most of my career in self-consciously evangelical schools. Mea culpa if I misrepresent anyone, but I have been listening from within both sides for a long time.)

If one wished to have a representative image of Christendom it would be hard to do better than an illustration from 1579 by Diego de Valedes work Rhetorica Christiana. It is entitled "The Great Chain of Being." It depicts a clearly hierarchical world, rising through the different orders of creation  encircled by golden chains that rise to God's feet. Its complement would be an engraving from Peter Apian's Cosmographia, 1524 that depicts an earth centered cosmos of concentric circles including the sun, moon, planets, the stars, and ultimately surrounding all "The Heavenly Kingdom, Realm of God and all the Elect." 

Christendom as thus depicted in a worldview that integrates scripture, the church, and nature in a single complete comprehensible whole. 

That worldview was beginning to be challenged even as these illustrations were being published. The rise of science based on observation and independent reason would eventually overthrow both the hierarchy of nature as found in scripture and the earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy.  Then the emerging early modern understanding of human nature and society disrupted and finally overthrew the hierarchical understanding of human society and the Church.

If one wished to mark the first moment in which Christian theology recognized and responded to early modernity in a comprehensive way it would be in Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers, followed by The Christian Faith. From one perspective Schleiermacher's work reimagines the Christian worldview within the Enlightenment  worldview. Thus one traditionalist response was to accuse Schleiermacher of reducing Christian claims to fully comprehend Reality. It was Christianity as less than Christendom.

But I think this is a failure to recognize the scope of Scheiermacher's reworking of Christian theology. It would be more accurate to say that Schleiermacher incorporates the Enlightenment worldview  within a fully enlightened Christianity, making it possible for Christians to engage in the task of comprehending any aspect of Reality using any means available to the Enlightened mind. The cultured despisers of religion were incapable of understanding religion and the religious insights that are clearly part of human reality. but in Schleiermacher’s reworking of Christian theology enlightened Christians can comprehend not only themselves, but every aspect of the human and natural worlds. 

What Schleiermacher created, and this was the power of liberal theology, was a Christendom of the Intellect, a Holy, if not Roman, Empire of the Mind.

The second moment of response to emerging modernity unfolded more slowly as some Christian theologians reacted against Schleiermacher and other liberal theologians. The initial integration of those responses came with the Fundamentalists. They sought to defend the "fundamentals" of Christian belief and scriptural authority as the central facts around which any comprehensive Christian worldview must revolve. Initially this only resulted in constant conflicts between scriptural depictions of the natural world and those of science and common sense. Fundamentalism couldn't integrate the distinctly Christian experience of faith in God with the Christian experience of either human society or the natural world in the way that Schleiermacher had. 

This changed with the 1919 publication (English 1933) of Karl Barth's Commentary on Romans and his subsequent Christian Dogmatics. While the Fundamentalists were fighting over evolution Barth was establishing a far more comprehensive defense of Revelation as both the only valid source of theological insight, and as a valid source of knowledge of Reality. 

Barth had this in common with Schleiermacher: even as he grounded and validated the Christian knowledge of God through revelation he offered a Christian basis for participation in the quest for all other forms of knowledge. Like the Schleiermachian, the Barthian could claim a more comprehensive knowledge of Reality than those who limited themselves to scientific knowing. 

So Barth too laid the ground for a Christendom of the intellect, a holy empire of the mind, even if it looked very different from that of Schleiermacher. And it was one that naturally appealed to post-Fundamentalists tired of a fruitless battle with science. They, Evangelicals, had decided that what was at stake in modernity was worldview and cosmology. These underlay all issues of authority and interpretation of scripture. Barth and their own best lights provided ways to make an intellectually coherent argument for a “supernatural” worldview that embraced the entirety of human experience. It is an effort that continues right up and through the work of scholars like Lesslie Newbigen, Alvin Plantings, and the Veritas movement. 

To contest the Liberal empire of the mind Evangelicals could offer their own Evangelical empire of the mind. Thus by the 20th century there was a struggle within the Church between two different understandings of reality. And there was a growing conviction on both sides that the Gospel could be fully expressed only within one of them. Systematic Theology became the central focus of theological education for both groups.  Priests and pastors became the guardians of not just orthodoxy (however construed) but of one of the two possible empires of the mind. 

And this has had a profound effect on dialogue between the theologically educated, because there is no possible compromise between two different empires of the mind. Each claims to be comprehensive and complete and thus effectively excludes the possibility that the other is valid. Empires conquer, they don’t compromise.

Thus despite sharing similar language, history, and sources these two empires of the mind effectively relate to each other like two different religions rather than like two forms of the same religion. Like different religions they have fundamentally different world views, different interpretations of the meaning of supposedly shared symbols, and different understandings of and relations to the larger cultural environment. Even when they use the same language they mean different things. A simple affirmation like “Jesus is Lord” has a fundamentally different meaning in liberal and evangelical contexts. Indeed, given what is said about him Jesus, “name above all names,” really designates two different people who happened to have the same name and inhabit the same body and social location.

Is there a way out of this dilemma? One approach is obvious: Grant those in the other empire the dignity of representing themselves instead of being caricatured, and grant them the dignity of being interesting instead of being dismissed. These are the essential basis of all dialogue. But I think we really need to go further, and strike at the root of the whole imperial impulse running through the division of liberal and evangelical, progressive and traditionalist. 

The key characteristic of mid-20th century Christianity was that both liberals and evangelicals saw apologetics; making and defending truth claims, as an essential witness of faith in Jesus Christ. An empire of the mind is built on and sustained by truth claims. Their coherence and comprehensibility is the structure which empowers the empire and on which it depends. And putting forward and defending truth claims was contextually appropriate in the 19th and 20th centuries. It perfectly matched the dominant culture and its zeitgeist. After all, these were the centuries in which socialism and capitalism, communism and democracy took the shape of political empires vying for global power. The Christian empires were their religious counterpart, and in the larger cultural setting were perfectly comprehensible. 

But just as the context of Rhetorica Christiana was already changing when it was published, so the era of Christian truth claims as Christian witness was passing even as it reached its theological high point. 

We no longer live in a culture in which religious truth claims embedded in Christendoms of the intellect, however brilliantly defended, convey good news. Like comprehensive political ideologies, such claims have, and continue to generate too much conflict, too much violence, and too little peace, mutual understanding, and reconciliation. 

At the same time contemporary Americans have every reason to be suspicious of the "religion of the heart" that bypassed intellectual integrity in favor of emotion driven commitments that like everything driven by emotion have proven capricious, unfocused, and inconsistent. 

Perhaps this is why we live in an age in which we find ourselves in the stories we can tell, and tell together. We find ourselves in enacting our own story in the messy, incomplete, and sometime incomprehensible stories being told in the lives that surround us. These stories simply cannot be reduced to, or limited by, some imagined empire of the mind any more than they can be reduced to or limited by a series of emotional states and capacities. The art of being human cannot be contained by a critical review or the observations of a therapist. 

So is there a future for ecumenical dialogue? Yes, but it will set aside both the search for mutually embraced truth claims and emotional satisfaction in favor of telling one another our stories until we begin to see how they may in places converge, and in other places have a common theme, and in others a shared outcome. The cultivation of the intellect will always be necessary to guard the integrity of our tales just as our feelings will always be part of those tales. But empires of the mind, however brilliant in their time, will crumble in the coming age of stories that also account for heart, soul, and strength.