I enjoy blogging, but often do not have the time to do it
as often as I should. I’ve had the following essay running around my head for
some time, but am only now getting around to putting ink to paper—or keystroke
to pixel.
If you ask most people, they would tell you that critical
thinking and theology (or religion in general) are mortal enemies. Religious
people cannot think critically, it is assumed, especially if they happen to
hold to the old creeds. And if one does think critically, it is assumed that no
particular religion or dogma will be held dear. But that is because most people
have assumed that critical thinking is the same as cynical thinking, which it
is not.
There is no lack of cynical thinking nowadays. Name an author
from a bygone era, and an educated smart-aleck will tell you that so-and-so held
to a particular bigotry or engaged in some delicious vice that was disapproved
then but is in favor now. (The sexual indulgences of every literary fop and of
every monarch are well known; what they actually did outside of the boudoir,
less so.) The point of this knowledge is clear. We learn about their prejudices
so that we can congratulate ourselves for being enlightened people who never
succumbed to the sort of thinking popular in those dark eras. We learn about
the sexual escapades of prominent people in history so that we can herald them
for being forerunners of a modern society that has rid itself of all prudery.
We take a cynical view on history and life in general largely so that we do not
have to think critically about ourselves and our own generation.
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| Auguste Rodin, Le Penseur |
For that reason, most of today’s cynical thinking does not involve
critical thinking. Shakespeare is either lauded because he was gay or denounced
because he was an anti-Semite. If you ask people why they say those things
about Shakespeare, they will roll their eyes. How dense can you be? Didn’t you
hear the teacher give that factoid about Shakespeare? But usually the people
who toss out such little tidbits of literary gossip cannot defend their
statements. Of course, they haven’t read The Merchant of Venice, and
even if they had, they wouldn’t know how to evaluate it. It would never occur
to them that literature (and especially drama) can be notoriously ambiguous and
that the attitudes of its characters—even its principal ones—do not necessarily
reflect the author’s beliefs, or else we would have to argue that Shakespeare approved
of regicide and parricide because of his Macbeth and Hamlet. Of
course, this does not in itself exonerate Shakespeare of the charge of
anti-Semitism, but the evidence has to be weighed and evaluated more carefully
and in a more nuanced manner than is done by those who merely parrot the charge.
Unthinking cynicism is nothing new, and neither is
unthinking cynicism passing itself off as critical thought. By all accounts,
Socrates (d. 399 B.C.) was truly concerned to find the meaning of justice,
goodness, courage, beauty, and the like. He engaged in critical thinking, asking
whether the traditional answers given matched the evidence. He poked and
prodded to find out exactly what people meant by what they were saying. But
Socrates was not cynical in undertaking this process. He believed that there
were answers to these questions, even if those answers were not always clear to
him. His student Plato would agree and further develop the notion of Ideas or
Forms. He would grant, as he did in his dialogue Parmenides, that there
are difficulties with that particular notion, but he would not abandon that
thought altogether.
But while Socrates and Plato were engaged in serious
critical thought, there were plenty of contemporaries who substituted mere
cynicism for critical thought. These were the youth whom Socrates was accused
of corrupting, but who in truth loved sophistry and clever argument and were
unconcerned about finding the truth. Plato recognized the difference and he
alludes to it in many of his dialogues. In The Symposium, for example, he
outlines (through the character Socrates) an ascent to beauty that requires a
philosopher to look beyond physical beauty and to discern the beauty of ideas, laws,
and (ultimately) Beauty Itself. It is absolutely difficult work and requires
the discipline of an ascetic. But while Plato commends Socrates’ vision of
philosophy, he has the dialogue narrated by unreliable narrators as a word of
warning to the reader to take Socrates’ method seriously rather than merely to
ape his shoeless style. Apollodorus, the dialogue’s chief narrator, wasn’t
present and knows the tale only third-hand. He relies mainly on Aristodemus,
who was present but didn’t have the wherewithal to compose his own speech and who
had turned Socratic philosophy into mere argumentativeness. With such narrators
garbling the story, it is no wonder that Aristophanes dismissed Socrates as a
sophist and a crank in his comedy The Clouds. Plato begs to differ,
however, and urges us to see the difference between cynicism and real critical
thought.
While cynicism has passed itself off as critical thought for
a long time, it has become more prevalent recently. The reigning philosophies
of the past three centuries have grown rather skeptical about what we can know.
Even those that believed in the value of the empirical sciences have tended to
dismiss talk about aesthetics, ethics, religion, and ontology as nonsense. With
the advent of Postmodernism, the trustworthiness of even empirical science has
been questioned. At the same time, modern society has heralded
the unshackling of the individual from mediating institutions (such as the
family, the community, and the church), even as the individual has actually become quite
beholden to corporations and to the nation-state in a way undreamed of in
pre-modern societies. It is in the interest of the powers-that-be to have individuals
turned into uncritical cynics, who are too cynical to think that anything can
be done to right any wrongs and too uncritical to bother to find a way or even to
discern that wrongs are being committed.
Not all cynical thinkers are uncritical thinkers, but
cynicism can easily take the place of robust critical thinking. And this has
often happened as people evaluate Christianity. Christianity is well grounded
in history if one cares to look at the evidence. It offers a rigorous
intellectual life for those who would follow it. Christian theology does not
consist of mere platitudes (although some have tried to reduce it to them), but
its dogmas are rich in nuance and require an intellectual regimen to be
apprehended correctly. But too often people dismiss Christianity cynically.
They “know” that Jesus never lived or that He never said anything ascribed to
Him. It isn’t that they have weighed the evidence and found it wanting, but
rather they have dismissed it prematurely.
Take, for example, the Jesus Seminar, which has taken the
cynicism of the historical-critical method to its absurd but logical
conclusion. As Korey Maas points out in a recent article in Logia, the
methodology of the Jesus Seminar is anything but grounded in the methods of
sound historical investigation. It purports to find the “real Jesus” by ruling
out any saying of His that sounded like what a first century Jew or an early
Christian might say. As Maas notes, this is not
standard operating procedure for evaluating other historical figures, and he
illustrates his point by using the example of George Washington. Imagine that
historians had to rule out as apocryphal anything ascribed to him that sounded
like (1) what someone in the mid-eighteenth century British
Empire would have said or (2) what an American in the early years
of independence might have said. One would expect that Washington would talk in part like an
eighteenth century British subject and in part like a newly independent
American. Why, therefore, would we want to rule out the possibility that Jesus,
who was raised as a pious Jew, would say things that other first century AD
Jews would say, and that, as the founder of Christianity, He would also talk
like His Christian followers would?
It isn’t critical thinking that is the enemy of Christianity
(including a confessionally robust version of it such as I embrace). It is a
cynicism that has deluded itself into thinking that it is critical thought. In
my next post I’ll explore how Christians ought to employ critical thinking in
theology.
