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Carl F. Henry, The Rise and Fall of Logical Positivism (God, Revelation, and Authority)

13 Monday Jun 2022

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(It has been a long time since I summarized Carl F. Henry, God Revelation and Authority. Here is the chapter from vol. 1, chapter 5) The Rise and Fall of Logical Positivism

Logical positivism was an important philosophical school; and its general thesis still holds a great deal of sway.  “In the early1920s the Vienna Circle propounded a criterion for verification that recognized as ‘meaningful’ only statements that are either analytic or in principle supportable by observation. All other assertations were considered ‘nonsensical’.” Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 96. An “analytic” statement is a statement which contains its own definition (more technically the predicate is contained within the subject).  The standard example of such a sentence is, “A bachelor is an unmarried man.”

The first test proposed by the logical positivists was that a statement had to be subject to “empirical verification” could be true and meaningful (we will get back to meaningful). And so since it would be possible to verify that someone who was alive had consciousness, the statement was true. But what of a person who had died? How do I verify his lack of consciousness? I can ask him but he won’t tell me.

This leads to a number of problems? How many people have to verify a proposition for it to be true?

There was a second problem with this test: it confused meaning & truth. The logical positivist conflated truth and meaning. Only true statements were meaningful. And so, a dead man has no self-consciousness is a meaningless statement.

The aim of the logical positivist was to rule out all metaphysical statements as nonsense. In particular, questions about God where put out of reach because there could be no empirical verification pertaining to God.

But this attempt to conflate verification and meaning proved unworkable. Any number of meaningful propositions can be posited which cannot be true or false, or even plain false. I can know what a false sentence means.

The whole thing caused more problems. For example, you could not assert a meaningful statement of general scientific law: how do you prove that gravity always everywhere works? And until prove that point, to say gravity does X is meaningless.

This led to a different tactic: Positivists were already in disarray when Karl R. Popper championed the principle of falsifiability as an alternative to verifiability lest ‘the radical positivist … destroy not only metaphysics, but also natural science’ (The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 9). By emphasizing the principle of ‘falsifiability’ Popper sought to preserve the significance of scientific laws; not empirically verified as universal explanatory principles but having survived elimination over against alternate theories, they nonetheless in principle and actuality remain falsifiable.” Carl F. H. Henry, at p. 106.

A principle of “falsification” works well enough to establish a scientific law. Gravity does X. If we some place where gravity does not X, then we can disprove the law. Since the law can be disproven, we have state a valid, and meaningful, scientific law.

But we are still left with the problem of conflating meaning and truth. And the falsification principle also created a problem with logic:

“A choice between the controversial positivist theory of meaning and the laws of logic is therefore clearly implicit: one either espouses the absurd positivist notion that while a universal affirmation makes sense, a statement denying the same proposition is neither true nor false but nonsense; or one subscribes to the logical rule that if a proposition is true, its contradictory must be false, and conversely, if a proposition is false, its contradictory must be true. Blanshard’s verdict is that ‘to give up logic itself for the sake of a controversial theory of meaning would be irresponsible’ (Reason and Analysis, p. 229) (at 110).

That might be difficult to follow, so here is a further explanation, based upon the work of C.G. Hempel, “Indeed, on the assumption that a sentence S is meaningful if and only if its negation is meaningful, Hempel demonstrated that the criterion produced consequences that were counterintuitive if not logically inconsistent. The sentence, “At least one stork is red-legged”, for example, is meaningful because it can be verified by observing one red-legged stork; yet its negation, “It is not the case that even one stork is red-legged”, cannot be shown to be true by observing any finite number of red-legged storks and is therefore not meaningful.”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hempel/

So logical positivism, whether based upon verification or falsification ran into problems. But there was one final, far more damaging implication.

The propositions of logical positivism are not analytic, nor can they be verified or falsified.  How do you prove that only statements which can be verified are meaningful? You can’t find that lying around on the ground somewhere. Same with the test of falsification. Why does logical positivism get to privilege its own rules? Logical positivism as a proposition was meaningless on its own terms:

“If all propositions must be verified in sense experience, then why not the principle of verification itself? The principle is a complex of meaning, no element of which is identified with sense experience. ‘Every meaningful proposition is verifiable in sense experience.’ The predicate, ‘sense experience,’ is not sensible; it is an abstract, intelligible content; it is not identified with any given sense experience. ‘Meaningful’ is not a sense experience. What is the ‘meaning of meaning’? Whatever it might be, it cannot be identified and understood simply by pointing at something and punching it. The whole proposition might be said to stand for the totality of sense experiences and thus to symbolize them all. If this is so, then there is a ‘meaning’ beyond experience, and this ‘meaning’ is meaning itself. The amusing thing about positivism is that it proceeds to deny the intelligence by using the intelligence denied. It sets up an elaborate criterion to destroy the intellect, and the criterion turns out to be highly intellectual in structure. Positivism is, therefore, self-contradictory, self- destructive, a system that dissolves from within once it is seen to be what it is.”

F. WILHELMSEN, Man’s Knowledge of Reality, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1956, pp. 49-51.

Carl F Henry on secularism

30 Thursday Jan 2020

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Secular man refuses to see himself as merely an animated cog or self-asserting animal, having no real future but only a day after tomorrow empty of lasting life and purpose, a temporary phenomenon without substance and weight that finally succumbs to and in nothingness.

The dilemma of secular man is this: In order to escape the nihilism and personal worthlessness implicit in naturalism, he invests his life with sequestered meanings and values that naturalism cannot sustain

Man is not born with the naturalistic prejudices about reality, and they go against his deepest intuitions and his own essential humanity. The secularist is an intellectual abstractionist who has elaborated a network of premises that even the majority of modern men consider artificial….

The contours of secular life relate the contemporary naturalist to a horizon wider and deeper than his narrow theory of reality permits. Both his attitudes and actions show the contemporary secularist in his authentic selfhood to be a much more complicated being than naturalism itself allows. At the critical point of the nature and destiny of man, he refuses to accept the authority of secular thought, and evaluates other human beings and estimates himself by a standard remarkably different from the naturalistic perspective. The undeniable contrast between man’s actually lived experience and the basic naturalistic world view which the secularist claims to accept, his pursuit of behavior patterns incompatible with this secular Weltanschauung, supply evidence that the contemporary materialistic criterion does not finally and absolutely determine his self-understanding of human existence in the modern world. In the course of daily reflection, decision and action, secular man is involved in concerns of reality, truth and value that exhibit him as a character with an ongoing role in a larger theatre of being and life than his secular perspective would suggest.

Carl F Henry

God Revelation & Authority, vol 1

Secular Man and Ultimate Concerns

Metaphor in Scripture and Analogical Reasoning (How to Talk About God)

07 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in Carl F Henry, John Calvin, Richard Sibbes, Uncategorized, Van Til

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In the previous post on Richard Sibbes Second Sermon on the Canticles, Sibbes makes this point:

Indeed, taking the advantage of such relations as are most comfortable, to set out the excellent and transcendant relation that is between Christ and his church; all other are not what they are termed, so much as glasses to see better things. Riches, beauty, marriage, nobility, &c., are scarce worthy of their names. These are but titles and empty things. Though our base nature make great matters of them, yet the reality and substance of all these are in heavenly things. True riches are the heavenly graces; true nobility is to be born of God, to be the sister and spouse of Christ; true pleasures are those of the Spirit, which endure for ever, and will stand by us when all outward comforts will vanish.

Richard Sibbes, The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. Alexander Balloch Grosart, vol. 2 (Edinburgh; London; Dublin: James Nichol; James Nisbet And Co.; W. Robertson, 1862), 23.

Below, I am going to outline some of the ideas which are relevant to this question of analogy and analogical thinking and talking about God. This is by no means exhaustive — and I am going to end with a conflict between Gordon Clark and Van Til on analogy.

This concept of an analogy between divine and human things was not new to Sibbes. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologiae in response to the question of any name can be applied to God in a literal sens, answered:

I answer that, According to the preceding article, our knowledge of God is derived from the perfections which flow from Him to creatures, which perfections are in God in a more eminent way than in creatures. Now our intellect apprehends them as they are in creatures, and as it apprehends them it signifies them by names. Therefore as to the names applied to God—viz. the perfections which they signify, such as goodness, life and the like, and their mode of signification. As regards what is signified by these names, they belong properly to God, and more properly than they belong to creatures, and are applied primarily to Him. But as regards their mode of signification, they do not properly and strictly apply to God; for their mode of signification applies to creatures.

Thomas goes on to write, that we can only speak of God by means of analogy:

I answer that, This name “God” in the three aforesaid significations is taken neither univocally nor equivocally, but analogically. This is apparent from this reason: Univocal terms mean absolutely the same thing, but equivocal terms absolutely different; whereas in analogical terms a word taken in one signification must be placed in the definition of the same word taken in other senses; as, for instance, “being” which is applied to “substance” is placed in the definition of being as applied to “accident”; and “healthy” applied to animal is placed in the definition of healthy as applied to urine and medicine. For urine is the sign of health in the animal, and medicine is the cause of health.

The same applies to the question at issue. For this name “God,” as signifying the true God, includes the idea of God when it is used to denote God in opinion, or participation. For when we name anyone god by participation, we understand by the name of god some likeness of the true God. Likewise, when we call an idol god, by this name god we understand and signify something which men think is God; thus it is manifest that the name has different meanings, but that one of them is comprised in the other significations. Hence it is manifestly said analogically.

Article 7. Whether names which imply relation to creatures are predicated of God temporally?

The doctrine of analogy brings together rather disparate elements of the Christian tradition (it’s not always that one cites Thomas Aquinas and Van Til).  The doctrine of analogy rests upon the Creator-creature distinction, and here Van Til makes as good a point as anyone:

God is “infinite,” “eternal,” and “unchangeable” in his being. Because God’s being is such, and because man’s being is finite, temporal, and changeable, in short, because there is the ontological distinction, man can have no univocal knowledge of such a being as God. Nor can man, because of the ontological distinction, know what God knows in the same way as God knows it, whether that knowledge pertains to God Himself or to some created thing.

Jim Halsey, “A Preliminary Critique of Van Til: The Theologian A Review Article,” Westminster Theological Journal 39, no. 1 (1976): 122. But we will get back in a moment to that last bit, “know what God knows in the same way as God knows it.” Henry makes a very similar point:

The Bible affirms not simply that God differs from all finite created beings. It declares also that God is the supremely knowable reality, and is so in view of his intelligible self-revelation and disclosure of reliable information about his nature, purposes and acts. It denies, however, that God is in all respects wholly other than man who bears his image.

The analogy of attribution affirms a likeness between God and the creaturely in specific perfections or attributes in distinction from mere analogical relationships.

Carl F. H. Henry, “Methods of Determing Divine Attributes” in God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 5 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 86–87. Analogical thinking, due to the Creature-Creator distinction necessitates some sort of analogical use of language to talk about God:

Thus, when we predicate to God things from creation, we cannot predicate any of their limitations to him. We can only ascribe the actuality the creature received from the Creator. In this sense, creatures are both like and unlike God. That opens the door to understanding by analogy.

The only alternatives to analogy are skepticism or dogmatism: Either we know nothing about God, or we assume that we know things in the same infinite way in which he knows them.

Norman L. Geisler, “Analogy, Principle Of,” Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, Baker Reference Library (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1999), 22. And so Geilser agrees with Aquinas.

The necessity of analogical thinking was illustrated by Athanasius in dispute with some Arians (those who denied the divinity of the Son), when they argued that God “begetting” the Son means that the Son is a creature. He responded by making an analogical argument:

Words so senseless and dull deserved no answer at all; however, lest their heresy appear to have any foundation, it may be right, though we go out of the way for it, to refute them even here, especially on account of the silly women who are so readily deceived by them. When they thus speak, they should have inquired of an architect, whether he can build without materials; and if he cannot, whether it follows that God could not make the universe without materials4. Or they should have asked every man, whether he can be without place; and if he cannot, whether it follows that God is in place, that so they may be brought to shame even by their audience. Or why is it that, on hearing that God has a Son, they deny Him by the parallel of themselves; whereas, if they hear that He creates and makes, no longer do they object their human ideas? they ought in creation also to entertain the same, and to supply God with materials, and so deny Him to be Creator, till they end in grovelling with Manichees. But if the bare idea of God transcends such thoughts, and, on very first hearing, a man believes and knows that He is in being, not as we are, and yet in being as God, and creates not as man creates, but yet creates as God, it is plain that He begets also not as men beget, but begets as God. For God does not make man His pattern; but rather we men, for that God is properly, and alone truly5, Father of His Son, are also called fathers of our own children; for of Him ‘is every fatherhood in heaven and earth named6.’ And their positions, while unscrutinized, have a shew of sense; but if any one scrutinize them by reason, they will be found to incur much derision and mockery.

Athanasius of Alexandria, “Four Discourses against the Arians,” in St. Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. John Henry Newman and Archibald T. Robertson, vol. 4, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1892), 320. We may wish to add here Calvin’s statement in the Institutes that God must accommodate himself to our limited understanding and does this by means of an analogy:

What, therefore, does the word “repentance” mean? Surely its meaning is like that of all other modes of speaking that describe God for us in human terms. For because our weakness does not attain to his exalted state, the description of him that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for him to represent himself to us not as he is in himself, but as he seems to us. Although he is beyond all disturbance of mind, yet he testifies that he is angry toward sinners. Therefore whenever we hear that God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion in him, but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our own human experience; because God, whenever he is exercising judgment, exhibits the appearance of one kindled and angered. So we ought not to understand anything else under the word “repentance” than change of action, because men are wont by changing their action to testify that they are displeased with themselves. Therefore, since every change among men is a correction of what displeases them, but that correction arises out of repentance, then by the word “repentance” is meant the fact that God changes with respect to his actions.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion & 2, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. 1, The Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 227.

And now as promised, back to Van Til:

Van Til tells us that the Christian is always to think “analogically”: “Our reasoning then must always and everywhere be truly analogical.… The necessity of reasoning analogically is always implied in the theistic conception of God.”8 But what does it mean to “reason analogically” in contrast to “reasoning univocally”? If we but keep the three elements of analogy in mind, we cannot go far astray in our answer to this question. To reason analogically will mean, for the regenerate consciousness, reasoning as a dependent creature. “Dependent upon what?”, we might well ask. The answer can only be, “dependent upon the self-revelation of the Creator as that self-revelation has been inscripturated in the Bible. Thinking analogically entails:

 

   (a)      thinking under the authority of the Scriptures and therefore of necessity:

   (b)      being in covenant with God (by regeneration), and hence:

   (c)      recognizing the finite, creaturely status of our thoughts as these thoughts are derivative of their Original (God).

   (d)      Consequently, our reasoning (use of the law of non-contradiction) will accord with (a) above. We will see the significance of this point in a little while.

Jim Halsey, “A Preliminary Critique of Van Til: The Theologian A Review Article,” Westminster Theological Journal 39, no. 1 (1976): 125–126. But there is one further matter of Van Til to consider: how great is the disjunction between human and divine thought. An important aspect of Van Til’s thought is that he posits a “hard distinction” in the analogy between Creator and creature:

Again, because of the emphasis Van Til places upon the ontological distinction between God’s being and knowledge and man’s being and knowledge, there can never be any one to one correspondence between the divine and the human mind. For example, God’s concept of a rose and our concept of that same rose will not correspond on a one to one basis at any juncture.5 This lack of identity does not lie in the fact that God knows more about the rose than does man; rather, the difference lies in the ontological level of God’s knowledge. This is but another way of saying that God’s knowledge of the rose proceeds upon a qualitatively different plane than does man’s. If analogy were simply a matter of knowing “more than,” the distinction to be drawn between divine knowledge and human knowledge would be a quantitative and not a qualitative one. If the difference were only quantitative, emphasis would fall upon the commonality, upon the ultimate univocism, of the divine being and the human being.

It is abundantly clear, from even a cursory reading of Van Til, that it is not the quantitative difference that finds emphasis in the doctrine of analogy: “For man any new revelational proposition will enrich in meaning any previous given revelational proposition. But even this enrichment does not imply that there is any coincidence, that is, identity of content between what God has in his mind and what man has in his mind.… There could and would be an identity of content only if the mind of man were identical with the mind of God.”6

Jim Halsey, “A Preliminary Critique of Van Til: The Theologian A Review Article,” Westminster Theological Journal 39, no. 1 (1976): 123–124. This led to a serious conflict with Gordon Clark (you can read about the history of their conflict in lots of places; just search their names and your find endless posts on the issue). I just want to highlight some of the intellectual nature of the conflict:

But Van Til is equally insistent that this divine self-revelation, by the Spirit’s enabling illumination, can produce in men a “true” knowledge of God, although their knowledge will be only “analogical” to God’s knowledge of himself— it will never correspond to God’s knowledge at any single point! How Van Til can regard this “never corresponds” knowledge as “true” knowledge is, to say the least, a serious problem. Perhaps he means that the Creator is willing to regard as “true” the knowledge that men derive from his self-revelation to them even though it is not univocal knowledge at any single point, because due to human finiteness he had to adapt his revelation to creaturely finite comprehension. God’s verbal reve-lation to human beings, in other words, since it is “creature-oriented” (that is, “analogical”), is not a univocal statement of his understanding of himself or of anything else and thus can never produce anything higher than a creaturely (“analogical”) comprehension of God or of anything else. If this is what Van Til means, it is difficult to see how, with his explicit rejection of the univocal element (see his “corresponds at no single point”) in man’s so-called “analogical” knowledge of God, Van Til can rescue such knowledge from being in actuality a total equivocality and no true knowledge at all. It is also difficult to see how he can rescue God from the irrationality in accepting as true what in fact (if Van Til is correct) he knows all the while coincides at no single point with his own knowledge, which is both true and the standard of truth.

Against all this, Clark contended that Van Til’s position leads to total human ignorance:

 If God knows all truths and knows the correct meaning of every proposition, and if no proposition means to man what it means to God, so that God’s knowledge and man’s knowledge do not coincide at any single point, it follows by rigorous necessity that man can have no truth at all.11

He further argues:

 If God and man know, there must with the differences be at least one point of similarity; for if there were no point of similarity it would be inappropriate to use the one term knowledge in both cases.… If God has the truth and if man has only an analogy [this “analogy” containing no univocal element], it follows that he (man) does not have the truth.12

Clark illustrates his point this way:

 If … we think that David was King of Israel, and God’s thoughts are not ours, then it follows that God does not think David was King of Israel. David in God’s mind was perchance prime minister of Babylon.

       To avoid this irrationality, … we must insist that truth is the same for God and man. Naturally, we may not know the truth about some matters. But if we know anything at all, what we know must be identical with what God knows. God knows the truth, and unless we know something God knows, our ideas are untrue. It is absolutely essential therefore to insist that there is an area of coincidence between God’s mind and our mind. One example, as good as any, is the one already used, viz., David was King of Israel.13

Clark concludes:

        If God is omnipotent, he can tell men the plain, unvarnished, literal truth. He can tell them David was King of Israel, he can tell them he is omnipotent, he can tell them he created the world, and … he can tell them all this in positive, literal, non-analogical, non-symbolic terms.14

Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nashville: T. Nelson, 1998), 99–100.

Carl F. Henry, Secular Man and Ultimate Concern

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in Carl F Henry, Philosophy, Psychology, Uncategorized

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(Chapter 8, God, Revelation and Authority. Btw, these short takes on his essays cannot begin to cover the density and wealth of thought in Henry.  They really must be read, but) Theologian Millard Erickson once said, “I love Carl Henry’s work. It’s extremely important. I hope someday that it is translated into English!”

Secular Man and Ultimate Concerns

There is a Woody Allen joke, “If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit, in my name, at a Swiss bank account.” But what sort of evidence would show that God exists. No matter how power an agent were to display itself, would that ever be proof of God? If something as powerful as the aliens in a thousand movies were to appear about a large city, would that prove God? What if the agent were as dazzling as the sun?

In this essay, Henry argues that the radical secularism – which the is the default “intelligent” position of the age – itself bears witness to God. It is an answer to the question, “If God is real, then why don’t I see Him?” To answer this question, Henry speaks of “cognitive levels of experience”. The reason why God is not obvious is because He is not being sought in the right place and the right way. (This is an interesting sort of presuppositionalist argument.)

Western secularism has made naturalism, a radical empiricism to be the entire basis for rational discourse and understanding. This radical naturalism entails a number of related entailments:

A correlative implication of this theory of the comprehensive contingency, total transiency, and radical relativity of all reality and experience is the absolute autonomy of man. Man alone remains, self-sufficient and autonomous, to rescue the cosmos from absurdity and worthlessness. No divine sovereign places human life under unchanging commands, no divine revelation tells man what is true and trustworthy, no divine book stipulates what is permanently right and wrong. External reality supplies no transcosmic supports for human security. A clean break is required with all transcendent, heteronomous absolutes as alien and arbitrary.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 139. The universe – and us – are contingent, transient, relative – and somehow also autonomous. It is an odd sort of agency, because it is grounded in absolutely nothing.

This autonomous agent, contingent and existent only for a whisper of time, seems strangely to be completely unable to believe this true. For instance, if we are truly meaningless, then what is the basis and what is the point seeking for “meaning” and security. Then why do we do what we do? “Modern man actually has a much wider range of experience than the naturalistic credo acknowledges.” (145)

This simply does not work.

And when we move beyond just our desire to be meaningful, we run into other problems.

For example, how do we explain any moral fact? Why is murder wrong? It certainly and without question is evil. But why? Because we don’t like it? There is no naturalistic explanation. But what if someone were to make the adaptive argument: not murdering was necessary for the survival of the species and those camps which held to the no-murder position survived better than others. That merely proves it is more adaptive, but not that it is truly right or wrong. Moral facts are just feelings about things, not truths. If one were merely able to overcome the feeling, there would be no morality at all.

Here is where makes the argument for God. God is “inescapably an aspect of everyday experience” (149). God is there and cannot be gainsaid or avoided. The fact of God is built into our consciousness; a “primordial ontological awareness of God as the ultimate given.”

If this is so, then why do we deny its truth:

The reality of God as depicted in his revelation best explains why secular man refuses to order his life exclusively by the naturalistic world life view, while the fact of sin best explains why he refuses to order his life exclusively by the truth and will of God. (148)

He makes an interesting observation which deserves further consideration. The conflict inherent in humanity as a result of a conflict with a sovereign God creates psychological damage within the human being, which we attempt to manage by various psychological and psychiatric methods. (149)

Our very existence, our concern for meaning and morality, our refusal to take our own and other life as utterly meaningless (which is precisely what secular naturalism teaches), is constant undeniable evidence of God. Sin makes hypocrites of Christians; God makes hypocrites of secularists:

Not only his secret alternatives to meaninglessness, but also his distressing anxieties concerning personal worth, imply presuppositions that touch upon man’s responsible relationship to his Maker. The ongoing revelation of God and remnants of the imago Dei in man supply the continuing conditions of man’s humanity. The ineradicable convictions we harbor about the character of reality and the way we frame the fundamental questions of our lives reflect, however unwittingly, a response to God’s revelational confrontation of his creatures. The universal disclosure of God penetrates deeply into all man’s confidences and doubts. God is the Eternal with whom unrenewed man, in all his experiences, has a vagabond relationship. Evidence of God’s reality and power and truth and goodness is ongoingly refracted into the course of man’s daily life. (151)

In short, the espoused secularity of the modern world cannot account for itself. Even the bare attempt to “explain” the world in terms of secular naturalism is itself a contradiction of that naturalism.

 

Carl F. Henry, The Jesus Movement and Its Future

29 Friday Jun 2018

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Theologian Millard Erickson once said, “I love Carl Henry’s work. It’s extremely important. I hope someday that it is translated into English!”

Briefly summarized, this essay gives a taxonomy of the Jesus Movement as it appeared. First, he ties the Jesus Movement to the general countercultural movement

Many in the Jesus movement (the name originated with the February 1971 issue of Look magazine) boldy identified themselves with much of the general countercultural protest against contemporary social trends. They deplored racial discrimination and wanton pollution of the environment. They lamented a pursuit of problems and of solutions to those problems indifferent to personal values. They disowned technological totalitarianism which assumes that human needs are primarily technical in character and which by social engineering manipulates and depersonalizes human beings.

However, the Jesus movement differed fundamentally from the general countercultural critique:

But the Jesus movement declared that sin, and not technocracy, is the root of all evil, and disputed the countercultural assumption that man is basically sound and needs only to be liberated. It proclaimed unapologetically that “Christ is the answer.” It boldly emphasized that the Christian gospel carries in it a divine revelation and redemption absent from the counterculture no less than from the technocratic society it assailed. It was aware that historic Christianity is by nature both counterculture and counter-counterculture, indeed has less the character of a protest movement than of a witness movement that affirms Jesus Christ and his kingdom.

 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 123–124.

This relationship to the broader culture gave the Jesus movement peculiar display of Christianity:

The Jesus movement was in some respects as much a product of the times as a manifestation of the Spirit of God. The depersonalizing aspects of rationalistic and technocratic cultural excesses triggered a reaction from which not even the Jesus movement escaped. On the whole the movement was experience-centered and antihistorical in respect to Christian tradition. Theological orientation was minimal, but that was not unlike the plight of many congregations whose pastors were more socially oriented than biblically illuminated. Some Jesus followers no doubt came to know more about the nature ofGod than their former Sunday school teachers.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 126. I would like to note here, that this Jesus Movement, which swelled the ranks of the church for the most part never outgrew its lack of depth in the Christian tradition. The “traditions” which developed from the Jesus movement have seemingly remained largely experiential. And while I have never studied the matter, I would not be surprised to find that the “Seeker Sensitive” its cousins have their roots in this soil. This is of course ironic, because the Seeker churches are marked by their consumerism

The apologetic of the movement took a true strand of Christianity, the doctrine of love, but put it a slogan which left susceptible to manipulation and decay as we have learned. Henry explains:

Most Jesus people—although not all—deplore the fundamentalist reduction of the spiritual life to a list of “don’ts.” Churches prone to such negation displayed the weakness of their own traditions when they refused to welcome young believers simply because, after accepting Christ, they retained long hair and mod dress characteristic of the counterculture. The Jesus movement wanted above all else to be known by its love for God and man. Its greeting to others became “God loves you.” Whereas deference to evangelical traditions ran the risk of straight-jacketing the Spirit, the experiential approach of the Jesus movement ran the risk of spiritual aberration and left many young believers vulnerable to cultic excesses. The ecumenical movement with its focus on “what the Spirit is saying to the churches” rather than on what the inspired Scripture ongoingly says, has meanwhile been more open to an emphasis on charismatic renewal than on a recovery of the Reformation.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 131.

There was an earnestness and a desire; however, that earnestness (from this perspective) never seemed to rightly mature in many (most?) instances. The Charismatic tendency of much of the Jesus Movement reduced to emotionalism. It’s lack of doctrinal depth, left it without resources to develop:

The Jesus movement’s revolt against institutional religion has issued in no clear alternative in the way of a united Christian front. It is vulnerable therefore to personality cults and to fads that lack the stability of a viable permanent movement. Its stance is basically isolationistic and escapist with regard to society, and its life style is countercultural. Some biblical wrestling with the nature of community in the light of the doctrine of the church was ventured by those devoted to pacifism or to a communal life style, but on the whole the Jesus movement was not inclined to serious academic investigation, particularly by those who recognize that communes have not demonstrated themselves to be the family of the future in view of the evident breakdown of open marriage.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 133–134. As we know, a great deal of that counterculture devolved into nothing more hedonistic excess or went indoors and became consumeristic (if there was evolution, it was in the nature of different pursuits around the self). The Jesus movement  came before a generation of Christians who were barely distinguishable from the broader culture. There was a great emphasis on getting people through the door — a great emphasis on the porch: but once inside, there was little Christian to offer, and so consumerism filled the bill.

 

Carl F. Henry — The Countercultural Revolt

15 Friday Jun 2018

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Theologian Millard Erickson once said, “I love Carl Henry’s work. It’s extremely important. I hope someday that it is translated into English!”

The date of Henry’s work God, Revelation and Authority, is important for this essay (and the subsequent essay on the Jesus Movement) because he is analyzing a cultural argument at a particular point in time. Henry published his work in 1976, and so we must understand the status of the culture at that time.

He states the counterculture critique as follows:

Beyond all this, however, and of even deeper significance, was the counterculture’s faulting of the so-called scientific world view which more than any other vision of reality has shaped the outlook of twentieth-century intellectuals. This proud achievement of recent generations the counterculture criticized and caricatured as the grandiose mythology of modern man, the fiction to which Western intellectuals are specially disposed. Not only did countercultural youth opt out of careers in science, but they questioned the indispensability of technocratic science to human well-being, and denied that the secular empirical world view tells the truth about the ultimately real world.

 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 112.  It is a “radical critique and rejection of the reigning scientific-mechanistic view which reduces reality to the empirically observable.” (113)

It seems that Evangelical Christianity, which is itself a rejection of such a reductionistic worldview would be an appropriate answer for the counterculture. Henry faults Evangelicals for (1) not rightly engaging the cultural arguments and (2) “their hurried call for spiritual decision which often leaps over an effective intellectual confrontation.” (114).

He notes that the counterculture was seeking a “new consciousness” which takes the form of drugs, magic, mysticism. But as Henry notes

Neither the hallucinatory nor the occult can definitely unveil a realm of reality behind the statistical averaging to which scientism is devoted. One will not find authentic human values simply by exhuming the nonrational aspect of man’s nature. The emotionally manipulated irrationalities provide no access whatever to the worth and wisdom of the ages. Appeals to noncognitive levels of personality will not supply the rational guidance without which freedom becomes not only permissive but lawless. No anti-intellectual alternative can in the long run serve the countercultural challenge to technocratic omnicompetence. (116)

In short, the compliant against material reductionism is right, but the response will prove — and history has shown Henry to be right — inadequate as a response.

By retreating into an intense subjectivity as a kind of reality — the counterculture left the objective world solely to that which they ostensibly rejected. Irrationality is not a sufficient long-term response to reductionistic technology.

Now here is where Henry made a particularly prescient observation:

Whereas the counterculture may not deplore the technocratic enslavement of reason, the New Left nevertheless demands political liberation from the consequences of the scientific world view and frequently voices sharp disapproval of existing collectivist and capitalist societies alike. Following either Herbert Marcuse or Norman Brown, it often appeals first to the so-called “Marxist humanism” of the early (in distinction from the later) Marx—a contrast many scholars find unjustifiable—and then (in opposition to traditional Marxism) affirms that man’s consciousness determines his social being, rather than that sociology determines his consciousness. (119)

Note that: one’s subjective consciousness may assert one’s social being irrespective of objective consequences. I am what I insist that I am, and, thus, through a transmogrification of nature what I am subjectively must be admitted by others objectively (and inconsistently, because my subjective understanding of your subjective understanding of yourself is illegitimate — your subjectivity defines reality for both of us).

Henry finishes with the observation that Christianity rejects both subjective irrationality and material reductionism.  He refers to our “final faith” materialism and technology as “a form of idolatry peculiar to the twentieth century” (120). Christianity posits and contends for a transcendental reason. He calls upon a Christianity which is well-educated and can articulate its message clearly in answer to the claims of reduction and irrationality.

What Henry did not foresee in this essay was the merger of these two elements into a cohesive whole. The giant technology companies are simultaneously bastions of irrationality, magic, sex and subjectivism.  Lewis’ “materialist magician” has become a reality.

We must realize that a magical — some sort of life force which is “spiritual” and yet firmly captured within the physical universe — nature is profoundly pagan. The idea that the universe is self-generating and that inanimate matter gives birth to life and consciousness is a pagan concept.  While we have renamed the gods, in the end the materialist has moved little beyond Babylon with the exception of having a far more detailed mythology of how the sky created life, and how rocks grew until they fought wars and fell in love.

 

 

The Rise and Fall of Logical Positivism

08 Friday Jun 2018

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[Henry wrote] the six-volume God, Revelation and Authority. GRAis still the most sustained theological epistemology by any American theologian. It deserves to be read more than it is, but it is not easy to read. Theologian Millard Erickson once said, with a twinkle in his eye, “I love Carl Henry’s work. It’s extremely important. I hope someday that it is translated into English!”

Carl F. Henry, God Revelation and Authority, Vol. 1, pp. 96-121

In this essay, Henry reviews the challenge of logical positivism to the Christianity, and Christianity’s responses. First, he defines the challenge as follows:

What they especially affirmed, rather, is that statements about the supernatural simply cannot be regarded as factual, that religious language lacks objective cognitive validity, and that assertions about God are meaningless nonsense. Logical positivists applied the terms meaningless and nonsensical not simply to demarcate statements about nonempirical reality, but also to belittle all but empirically verifiable statements as cognitively vacuous. They held that cognitively meaningful propositions must involve empirical observations that lead either to their acceptance as true or their dismissal as false.

 Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 97.  While there are serious nuances to the the basic propositions about logical positivism, it essentially was a claim that only matters which were empirically verifiable were “true”.  To say that “Murder is wrong” might be interesting, but it was not “true”. Since ethics could not be true, God seemed even more difficult a matter. 

To respond to this philosophical challenge, Christians undertook various tactics.  Henry notes that Evangelical Christians do not deny verification, we admit to its existence and importance. “Instead, it presses the question of what epistemological tests are appropriate to every indicated object of knowledge.”

John Hicks asked the question about the public nature of verification: how many people have to verify a proposition for it to be true?  The incontestably public nature of Christian truth claims will not become universally acknowledged until the Eschaton.  But logical positivism rules out any future verification.

Others, such as John Wilson insists that knowledge of God is true and verifiable, but not in the manner sought by the logical positivists: however, this verification is personal not public and empirical to all. Henry then thoughts the push-back on this idea. Logical positivism is looking for sensory data, something coming through the retina, not the mind.

But there was another means of responding to logical positivism: What if its basic proposition of verification was faulty?

Equally important was the question whether the positivist methodology could bear the weight of all the intellectual traffic that was detoured its way. It makes little difference what lies on the other side if the bridge we are compelled to take is sure to collapse before we cross it. Instead of acceding to positivist demands, the far more discerning course—dictated by the inherent requirement of evangelical beliefs and by the nature of the real world—was to expose how implausible as the test of meaning was the positivist theory of verifiability.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 102. Soon, others besides theologians responded to logical positivism’s demands for verification.  The verification principle was doomed to failure, because it could not bear the traffic. Indeed, it was self-stultifying:

It became increasingly apparent, moreover, that to insist, as positivism did in its earliest formulations, that metaphysical assertions are unverifiable in principle and therefore cognitively vacuous was self-defeating and self-destructive. The demand for empirical verifiability of truth-claims did much more than downgrade to unverifiable speculation those theological and philosophical affirmations of a metaphysical nature that were distasteful to the positivists. For on this same basis—namely, the indispensability of empirical scientific veriftability—all statements about ethics (ought-assertions), including statements affirming universal human rights or requiring integrity in scientific research and experiments likewise become mere speculation. Not only all theological and ethical statements, but all statements about past historical events, because empirically unverifiable, are shorn of truth-status. Assertions about past memories or about present subjective psychological desires and intentions lose cognitive validity for the same reason. The fatal blow lay in this, however, that on positivist premises not even the basic positivist thesis—that only empirically verifiable statements are true—could be cognitively accredited, since it too, was empirically unverifiable. Logical positivists were convinced that they had leveled statements about God, sin and salvation to sheer nonsense; now they found themselves at the mourner’s bench, lamenting the death of their very own dogma. Theologians had been accused of speciously presuming to have knowledge about an invisible spiritual world. Now positivists were indicted of arbitrarily vetoing all metaphysical assertions except their own unverifiable epistemological bias.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 110–111. Translated into English, this is the point: Logical positivism tried to reduce all meaningful, true statements into statements which could be observed by the senses [including instruments] or could be logically deduced from such observations.  However, that rule cannot be true on the basis of Logical Positivism’s rule: You cannot see this rule in nature, nor is it a logical deduction from such observations. Therefore, logical positivism cannot be true.

An interesting note in the essay is the discussion of atheist Anthony Flew who abandoned his atheism prior to his death.

Carl F. Henry, Ways of Knowing.5

11 Tuesday Oct 2016

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The previous post on Henry’s essay, “Ways of Knowing” can be found here.

In the next section of the essay, Henry considers Experience as the basis for knowledge.

Empiricism: Empiricism relies upon the senses rather than upon intuition. However, that simple concept has undergone significant development over history.

Mystics: Mystics argue that their experiences should not be ruled out of court merely because they are not shared by all. However, in contemporary philosophy only objective sense information constitutes an acceptable experience to consider.

Aristotle/Thomas and Modern Empiricism: Aristotle and Thomas considered empiricism as a first step: “perceptual induction”can then lead to propositions upon which one can build. Thomas famously developed proofs for God based upon empirical perception of the world without resort to revelation.

Modern empiricism could not tolerate such a thing:

The special interest of empiricism, moreover, is to identify events for the sake of the prediction and control of perceptual experience, rather than to render them comprehensively intelligible in relation to metaphysical reality (cf. Edwin A. Burtt, Types of Religious Philosophy, pp. 197 ff.).

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 79.

Applied to Theology:  Hume attacked the Thomistic proposition that one could move from empirical observation to proof of God:

Thomistic contention that the existence of God, and the existence and immortality of the soul, are logically demonstrable simply through empirical considerations independent of divine revelation.1 Hume’s contention was that those who profess theological beliefs on empirical grounds have no right to such beliefs unless they produce requisite perceptual evidence, and that in the absence of demonstrative empirical proof, belief is unreasonable.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 79–80.

Henry then draws an interesting line between Hume and Schleiermacher: Schleiermacher expanded the scope of empirical data to “religious consciousness” rather than mere cognition. He grounded Christianity in the human experience — thus attempting to rescue  knowledge of God from Humean skepticism but at the cost of a supernatural Christianity:

Schleiermacher boldly identified the empirical method as adequate to deal with religious concerns and decisive for the fortunes of Christianity, yet he sought at the same time to broaden the definition of empiricism so that—contrary to Hume’s skeptical analysis of theological claims—an appeal to the religious consciousness could yield a positive and constructive verdict. Schleiermacher considered feeling rather than cognition the locus of religious experience, and he applied the empirical method hopefully to the claims of Christian theism. Rejecting the historic evangelical emphasis that the truth of revelation rests on an authority higher than science, Schleiermacher broke with miraculous Christianity and held that all events must conform to empirically verifiable law.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 80.

This trajectory leaves open the development of a completely new religion still calling itself “Christianity” without maintaining the same revelatory content (which has happened in great deal in the West).

As Henry notes, what sort of rationale can ground one’s claim of “religious experience” or “truth”. Even empiricism generally can be of little use beyond analysis of material objects:  “But how does one arrive at a permanently valid ought, at fixed norms of any kind, by the empirical method of knowing?” (P. 83) That of course has not stopped many from claiming an absolute authority for empiricism.

It does boast engineering feats, but such feats do not prove or disprove anything with respect to God. One can simply cannot argue from “I made a bridge” to “There is no God.” As Henry explains:

Taken by itself, the empirical method provides no basis for affirming or denying supernatural realities, since by definition it is a method for dealing only with perceptible realities. It cannot, therefore, validate supraperceptible being; nor can it validate moral norms either or confirm past historical events in present public experience. The empiricist must acknowledge that his method leads finally to one of many possible views, and not to final certainty about anything.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 85.

 

 

Carl F. Henry, Ways of Knowing (3)

30 Thursday Jun 2016

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Henry comes to a third sort of intuition: he begins this section with Hume. Hume is the philosopher of empiricism: all know is what we sense. Period:

Hume’s most important contributions to the philosophy of causation are found in A Treatise of Human Nature, and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, the latter generally viewed as a partial recasting of the former. Both works start with Hume’s central empirical axiom known as the Copy Principle. Loosely, it states that all constituents of our thoughts come from experience. By learning Hume’s vocabulary, this can be restated more precisely. Hume calls the contents of the mind perceptions, which he divides into impressions and ideas. Though Hume himself is not strict about maintaining a concise distinction between the two, we may think of impressions as having their genesis in the senses, whereas ideas are products of the intellect. Impressions, which are either of sensation or reflection (memory), are more vivid than ideas. Hume’s Copy Principle therefore states that all our ideas are products of impressions.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy  Hume’s radical empiricism led to all sorts of problems:

Now as concerns inductive inference, it is hardly surprising to be told that the epistemological problem is insoluble; that there can be no formula or recipe, however complex, for ruling out unreliable inductions. But Hume’s arguments, if they are correct, have apparently a much more radical consequence than this: They seem to show that the metaphysical problem for induction is insoluble; that there is no objective difference between reliable and unreliable inductions.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Henry points to Kant as the one who saw the abyss of Hume’s philosophy and one who offered a solution:

Kant’s profoundest insight is that whoever professes, with Hume, to derive the categories of thought from experience, cannot consistently escape epistemological skepticism. He emphasized that human knowledge is possible only because of innate thought categories which guarantee the universal validity of human knowledge, and provide the basis for the truths of mathematics.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 75. Kant held to a sort of “sensuous intuition”, an intuition of space and time that permits us to under the world reasonably and to communicate with one another. But this comes at the cost of boxing God and the transcendent out of human knowledge. Henry notes the irony with Kant’s philosophical sequestration of God:

His postulation of a cognitively unknowable god encouraged the notion that one may experience what cannot be conceptually defined, that is, the ineffable. Intuition is therefore for Kant, in contrast to the view of rational intuitionists, not a means of cognitively knowing God.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 75.

Hegel tries to solve Kant’s problem by conflating human thought and God:

But, by equating the Absolute with the reflective self-consciousness of human minds, Hegel obscured any real created existence. For mankind in the image of God he substituted God externalized as the universe, so that destruction of man and the world would obliterate divine being and life. Hegel made God an inescapable reality by divinizing man, and thereby he caricatured both.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 76.

 

Carl F. Henry: Ways of Knowing

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

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This chapter is an overview and critique of the various philosophical positions asserted as to how human beings know. Henry arranges the schools as Intuition, Experience & Reason. Henry particularly concerns himself with the way in which a human can know, or claim to know (or why one cannot know) God.

Intuition, Part One

Henry divides the various schools of “intuition” into four. The first is the non-rational immediate experience of the impersonal divine. The claim:

That religious reality is known not by sense observation or by philosophical reasoning but by intuition or immediate apprehension has been asserted by various thinkers who insist that God is to be found in one’s own inner experience as an instant awareness of the religious Ultimate

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 70.

The mystic intuition claims that God cannot be understood in any manner which applies in “daily life”. God even “transcends distinctions of truth and falsehood, and is beyond good and evil” (Id. at 71).  Therefore, the mystic’s experience cannot be verified in any way applies to other knowledge.

This leads to the obvious objection: If we cannot judge the mystic’s “experience” of God, can we may any evaluation of the claim at all? Indeed, how can we judge anything: “What criterion of truth and error remains if God is beyond truth?” (Ibid.)

Moreover, how can we make any determination as to the mystic’s claim to knowledge. If the experience cannot be related in any manner at all, what can any other do with the claim? The mystic’s paradoxical language about God is not subject to any sort of evaluation by any other person.

The mystic’s experiences may be of psychological interest, but they cannot afford a basis for another person to enter into that knowledge.

This intutionist knowledge is the basis of Protestant Liberalism, as founded by Schleiermacher:

Friedrich Schleiermacher—contended that contact with ultimate reality is to be made not intellectually or conceptually but intuitionally, mystically, immediately. The Absolute is to be felt, not conceived. As a result, these men wrote not of God as the Religious Object, but of their own religious sentiments. Schleiermacher, founder of Protestant liberalism, in effect substituted the psychology of religious experience for theology, or the science of God.

Id at p. 72.

Making the subject of God the question of religious sentiment is “implicitly pantheistic” (Id. at p 73). There is no distinguishable person there, just my inarticulate apprehension of some-thing (not some-one).

Pantheism is inherently without moral categories, because there is only what is & my psychological reaction to it. There is no good or evil in such a world.

This, of course, is completely the opposite of the Biblical assertion that God has made himself know rationally, understandably. God is other, but God has also mediated knowledge of himself through the Logos, the Son has made the Father known.

While there is occasionally talk of “Christian mysticism”, it certainly cannot mean this sort of a-rational, incommunicable experience which loses all sense of “I and thou”, Creator-Creation. The talk of Union with Christ does not entail absorption into any infinite:

The Bible nowhere accommodates the speculative notion that ontological disjunction from the Divine is the central human problem, to be overcome by man’s pursuit of ecstatic union with the Ineffable; rather, the basic problem is that of overcoming man’s moral alienation from his Maker, and a revelation and atonement that God himself provides opens the way to the restoration of spiritual fellowship

Id. at pp. 73–74.