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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, Secular Man and Ultimate Concern

06 Friday Jul 2018

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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.4

19 Tuesday Jul 2016

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The final aspect of intuition considered by Henry is Christian, rational intuition:

There is a Christian form of rational intuition, such as that held by Augustine and Calvin, which holds that human beings possess a limited set of rational truths which makes cognition and knowledge of God possible:

Augustine held that on the basis of creation the human mind possesses a number of necessary truths. Intellectual intuition conveys the laws of logic, the immediate consciousness of self-existence, the truths of mathematics, and the moral truth that one ought to seek wisdom. Moreover, he held that in knowing immutable and eternal truth we know God, for only God is immutable and eternal. As knowers all men stand in epistemic contact with God. Calvin too held that man’s knowledge of self-existence is given in and through a knowledge of God’s existence, and that the created imago Dei preserves man in ongoing epistemic relationships to God, the world, and other selves.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 76–77.  Contemporary Alvin Plantinga similarly argues that belief in God is “properly basic”:

He believes that we should broaden foundationalism to include belief in God as properly basic. So that means that a person can be rational in believing in God even without being able to produce supporting arguments.

Awareness of God, the sensus divinitatis, comes form how we were created plus, typically, some catalyst of our experience. The more detailed belief in Christianity is also a divine gift. The former is part of our created nature, producing a knowing not unlike perception. The latter, the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit, is not.

Brian K. Morely, Mapping Apologetics (Downers Grove: IVP Academic 2015) 138-139.

 

 

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, “Revelation and Myth”

16 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Bibliology, Carl F Henry, Hermeneutics, Scripture, Uncategorized

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God, Revelation and Authority, vol. 1, chapter 3, pp. 44-69. The prior post in this series may be found here.

This essay (“Revelation and Myth”) concerns the position taken by some scholars (mostly notably Bultmann) that the Scripture is “myth”, a special symbolic language used to express transcendent realities human speech (because human speech is defective for communicating such realities):

Many modern theologians set aside any emphasis on intelligible divine revelation (that is, the view that God communicates to mankind the literal truth about his nature and purposes); they affirm, instead, that God uses myth as a literary genre to convey revelation in the Bible and perhaps elsewhere as well. To them the biblical accounts of creation and redemption are written mythological representations of transcendent realities or relationships that defy formulation in conceptual thought patterns.
Could the God of the Bible have used myth as a literary device? Surely we must allow the sovereign God of Scripture complete freedom among the various possible means of expression. But whether God has in fact used myth as a revelatory means is quite another question. The answer turns in part on whether revelation is objectively meaningful and true, and if so, whether God would and could have employed myth as a communications technique.

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 1, “Revelation and Myth”, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 44.

Henry first notes that careless language on this point quickly runs into absurdities: for instance, all language is symbolic, so what is left for pure “myth”. Henry thus moves to focus the issue on two alternatives:

The precise definition of myth is therefore crucial if we are to answer the indicated questions intelligently. Decisive for the evaluation of myth are how one relates myth to objective truth and to external history, and what religious significance one attaches to rational truth and historical events. The basic issues reduce really to two alternatives: either man himself projects upon the world and its history a supernatural reality and activity that disallows objectively valid cognitive statements on the basis of divine disclosure, or a transcendent divine reality through intelligible revelation establishes the fact that God is actually at work in the sphere of nature and human affairs. (45)

The Scripture itself has a definite answer on this point: God does not speak in myth:

Two considerations are sure: first, the biblical witnesses repeatedly indicate that the revelation they communicate was divinely addressed to them by the living God not in cryptic mystery form but in intelligible statements that convey publicly identifiable meaning; second, they speak of myth only in a disapproving way. The New Testament refuses to lower discussion of myth to a level where the prophetic-apostolic representations correspond to pagan representations of the divine. As Giovanni Miegge emphasizes, “the supposed neutrality of those who offer only a formal definition of myth itself conceals a presupposition, and … this involves bringing Christian faith down to a level of pagan forms of worship, treating the one as commensurable with the other. This is exactly what the New Testament itself refuses to do” (Gospel and Myth in the Thought of Rudolf Bultmann, p. 101). (45-46)

Henry considers the biblical witness, what the ancients thought of “myth” and sound scholars think of the claim. Lest anyone think this is a matter of mere arcane academic squabbling, Henry notes that the integrity of the entire religion is at issue:

The use of myth in the framework of untruth or unfactuality in contrast to the truths of the Christian revelation “is in complete harmony with the classical connotation of the term which from the time of Pindar onwards always bears the sense of what is fictitious, as opposed to the term logos, which indicated what was true and historical.… The Christ of the Bible is The Logos, not a mythos” (“Myth,” pp. 368, 371). Logos, says Stählin, is “the absolutely valid and incarnate Word of God on which everything rests, the faith of the individual, the structure of the Church. If the Logos is replaced by myth, all is lost; the Word is betrayed” (“Muthos,” 4:786). Stählin insists that “the firm rejection of myth is one of the decisions characteristic of the NT. Myth is a pagan category” (4:793).

If the category of myth is a form of expression for events occurring outside the limits of earthly history, then to apply the term to the Word made flesh inverts not simply the traditional sense of the term, but all linguistic usage as well, and all customary linguistic associations and implications.(49-50)

Myth is not God making revelation to man, rather, “myth is the product of man’s religious imagination” (50).

Having set out the seriousness of the issue and the incompatibility of the “myth” thesis with Scripture and the Christian religion, Henry spends 15 pages earnestly and carefully addressing the arguments of those who claim that myth is a proper category to understand Scripture. His analysis is dense, accurate, insightful and comprehensive (he covers an astounding array of ideas in such a short scope)

He sets out the essence of the pro-myth case as follows:

But myth is now held to be the literary framework through which man describes what cannot be expressed in rational or historical categories.1 The operative assumptions are that (1) transcendent reality is not conceptually or historically revealed or knowable; (2) myth is the only form in which the reality and nature of the invisible spiritual world can be expressed; (3) myth properly understood demands not elimination but interpretation of its function; and (4) believing acceptance of the myth involves an inner encounter that leads not to secret information or valid knowledge but to vital awareness of divine presence.

1 American public school children are now taught this positive view of myth, and of biblical religion as illustrative of myth, often without being given the historical view of Judeo-Christian revelation as a credible alternative. (Cf. the curriculum used in Pennsylvania schools for high school students, “Student’s Guide to Religious Literature of the West” by John R. Whitney and Susan W. Home, which arbitrarily adds: “In this course, we use myth not in a negative way, but in a way in which literary scholars and theologians generally use it.”) (51)

As Henry spins through the details of this thinking, he notes the insufferable knots which result. The men doing this are somehow trying to retain the transcendent truth of Christianity without the difficulties of a historical text. But, as Henry notes, they were trying to hide something:

It was the dubious distinction of twentieth-century neo-Protestant theologians that they not only turned the whole biblical drama of creation and redemption into myth, but also and moreover represented this transformation as necessary to one’s comprehension of the Christian faith, rather than acknowledging such manipulation to be a compromise with unbelief. (57)

Moreover, such “myths” cannot really help us in our quest to know God:

Insofar as divine revelation is declared to employ myth as a mode of communication, such myth might indeed convey a fascinating galaxy of impressions, but the one thing that myth cannot communicate is literal truth about God or about anything else. If a literary genre communicates some literal truth, it is not myth; if it is myth, it can at best, as Gordon H. Clark somewhere suggests, communicate myth about myth, but whatever it communicates cannot be valid information. (66)

Henry then ends with the affirmation that Christianity is decidedly not a myth, indeed it is the deliverance from myth:

Novel and diverse indeed as are the convictions mankind has entertained throughout human history, the Christian perspective differs fundamentally in its insistence upon intelligible divine revelation as its governing principle. The special merit of Christianity lies in its deliverance of fallen man from mythical notions of God and its provision of precise knowledge concerning religious reality. Christianity∙ adduces not simply mythical statements but factual and literal truth about God. In freeing religious experience from only symbolic imagery and representations, Christianity manifests its superiority by providing valid propositional information: God is sovereign, personal Spirit: he is causally related to the universe as the Creator of man and the world: he reveals his will intelligibly to chosen prophets and apostles: despite man’s moral revolt he shows his love in the offer of redemption: he is supremely revealed in Jesus Christ in once-for-all incarnation: he has coped decisively with the problem of human sin in the death and resurrection and ascension of the incarnate Logos.(68-69)

God, Revelation and Authority, 1.2

21 Wednesday Aug 2013

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Chapter Two, “The Clash of Cultural Perspectives”:

Should one assume that the world consists of physical alone, we are left with an unstable, chance environment. Such a view quickly becomes untenable:

The ancient Greek philosophers were quick to see that if nothing endures, as Democritus said, if chance and change permeate all reality, including truth and goodness, so that man himself is simply a crafty animal, then human life loses meaning and purpose and culture is impossible. (1.32).

(Since this view is ultimately untenable, one must play all sorts of tricks and grant all sorts or privileges to make it hold together — a sort of fudge figure added to the equations to make sense of it all. For example, if all is merely matter in motion, then all “epiphenomenon” of thought are in the end, necessary, determined chemical reactions. Indeed, the thought that such things are (or are not) chemical reactions is itself required by the chemical reactions. And since the thoughts are not derived by true thought but rather forced by the system, even that thought is a chemical reaction that has no more independence and choice than water has a choice to freeze. In short it is irrational. Moreover, it’s silly: Ultimately one must propose that primordial plasma (a high energy state of matter) and hydrogen atoms, if left along long enough, will feel compelled a create Symphonie Fantastique for a beautiful actress http://www.hberlioz.com/Scores/sfantastique.htm)

Thus, to address the problem caused by a shifting world, the Greeks, most notably Plato posited a spiritual realm of unchanging ideal:

The more insistently its philosophers had asserted an invisible spiritual world, the greater had been the demand for information about God’s nature and ways. And since the philosophers were abstruse, and often disagreed deeply among themselves, multitudes turned to the mystery religions to satisfy their inner yearnings. The classic philosophers had assumed, moreover, not only that finite man could know the truth apart from special divine revelation, but also that even in his present moral condition he could achieve the good apart from special divine enablement. But both these expectations collapsed through the weaknesses of human unregeneracy. (1.32)

In many ways this is the critique of post-modernism (even in its popular forms): How are you to tell me what is real? Don’t I have just as good a place to make such a determination as you? And thus, the eternal realm collapses in either confusion or a pitched battle on the streets before a presidential palace.

In drawing out this point, Henry seeks to make clear the necessity of revelation:

Among the most objectionable features of classic idealism was its connection of human reason in a privileged way with a supposedly autonomous world of order and meaning. Central to the New Testament is the Christian conviction of a divinely structured creation whereby the transcendent Logos sustains the cosmic order and supplies the direction and universally valid meaning of all things. (1.35)

However, as Henry notes, the medieval philosophical work took on the burden of (or at least the potential burden) of human reason possessing access and understanding which reached beyond revelation. This “attracted speculative doubt” (1.35), and lead to the modern period of philosophy:

Christianity had discounted the Greek emphasis on an immanent rational a priori in mankind; but by synthesizing a revelationally grounded theism with the classic Greek view of Aristotle, medieval scholasticism indirectly hastened a philosophy of the autonomy of man and nature independent of the Logos-structured meaning and law of creation. (1.36)

The modern world then took on both the concept that our sensory view of the physical world and thus bizarrely the physical world becomes the source of rationality:

So the modern mind soon gains a viewpoint all its own. Over against both the classic ancient and the medieval minds it declares that nature is the ultimate reality, man is essentially a time-bound animal, truth and the good are relative and changing. (1.38)

This leads to an irrational world in which there can be no unchangeable norm and yet simultaneously contends for an ordering rationality (“scientific” reasoning). Somehow a changing world seen by a fated mind is capable of objective operation (good luck with that).

In the field of ethics, as Dirk Jellema points out, this assertion of human autonomy expresses itself either as the self’s conformity to the crowd or in the self’s repudiation of society. Truth and the good become merely what the pack or the herd wills, or what the individual prefers on his own in the age of hippiemorality. (1.41)

(I recall Jung making a very similar argument about the “individual” from a pscyhological viewpoint. I don’t have the reference just now.)

This leads to the trouble of pragmatism and tolerance (which is necessarily intolerant):

Pragmatism in any event contains the seeds of its own undoing. It professes to be tolerant of all views, but its concealed intolerance becomes clear when, confronted and seriously challenged by the Christian absolute, it dogmatically refuses to reconsider any return to universally valid truth and objective principle. (1.42)

(D.A. Carson has written much on this. Here is a review by Tim Challies, http://www.challies.com/book-reviews/the-intolerance-of-tolerance)

Christianity stands in the end on a different ground than the modern philosophical ground. Yet the Christian must not seek a backwards move to the medieval position:

The task of Christian leadership is to confront modern man with the Christian world-life view as the revealed conceptuality for understanding reality and experience, and to recall reason once again from the vagabondage of irrationalism and the arrogance of autonomy to the service of true faith. That does not imply modern man’s return to the medieval mind. It implies, rather, a reaching for the eternal mind, for the mind of Christ, for the truth of revelation, for the Logos as transcendent source of the orders and structures of being, for the Logos incarnate in Jesus Christ, for the Logos as divine agent in creation, redemption and judgment, for the Logos who stands invisibly but identifiably as the true center of nature history, ethics, philosophy and religion. (1.43)