AsenDURE @ Corner of 11th & 20th

In this day and age ruled by empirical, logical and scientific criticism one tends to find oneself adopting two important notion in one’s world view (Weltanschauung) or epistemological beliefs, namely:

(1) To refrain from believing unproven assertions is always an act of intellectual honesty;

or

(2) To believe unproven assertions is to throw oneself wide open to the suspicion of obscurantism.

In short, we demand that any intellectual quest be totally objective. The rationalism of modernity honors objective fact, and disvalues subjective feeling. Modernism is the epistemology that thrusts exclusively the scientific facts.

One of the strongest impact of modernity on modern theology was dividing theology into two camps: liberal and conservative.

The Impact of Modernity on Liberal Theology
Liberals see theological statements as symbolic expressions of religious experiences that are essentially inward and personal and nothing whatsoever to do with factual statements about the world and about history. The bible is to be read not as factual history but as the record of religious experience. Thus subjectivity of faith is emphasized in liberal theology and marginalizes the christian faith and theology into the realm of subjective experience which means abandoning the possibility of knowing anything of an objective, transcendent god. This is something that I see most in those who are less dogmatic and emphasize that christianity is a more a personal experience with god than anything. The danger is that faith now becomes anthropocentric or a manifestation of secular humanism. The problem is that Man’s inner experience did not provide a firm enough ground for proof on a phenomena. Deprived of a guiding principle man could turn anywhere.

The Impact of Modernity on Conservative Theology
In fundamental theology on the other hand, fundamentalists do a disservice to the gospel when they adopt a style of certainty more in the tradition of Descartes than in the truly evangelical spirit. Manifested in several familiar ways that are rooted in the anxiety about the threat that new discoveries in science may pose to faith. Fundamentalism seeks to affirm the factual, objective truth of every statement in the bible, assert the factual inerrancy of Scripture and regard statements of christian doctrine as factually correct propositions of the same kind as physics.

The middle path - liberal conservative?
I think the ideal path to thread is to adopt the scientific-centric worldview of liberal theology to defend the foundations and fundamentals of conservative theology. This is where the beauty and challenge of theology lies, whereby we give meaning and reasons to our beliefs rather than stick to them unquestioningly or mystify them to the degree beyond the grasp of man to avoid conflict with popular culture. The danger though is that human judgment might replace the word of god, but I see this as merely the anxiety that betrays a lack of total confidence in the central truth of the gospel that Jesus is the “word made flesh”. Let us then take the examples of the truly liberal spirit of Jews of Berea, for when confronted by the revolutionary message of the apostle, they did not simply reject it but “examined the Scripture every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11).

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2005 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Apologetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.