Critical Thinking, Cynical Thinking, and Theology

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.

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.

From my article on the Athanasian Creed (which will appear in a companion to the Lutheran Service Book)

Since Trinity Sunday is fast approaching, I thought I would post a portion of an article I had written introducing the Athanasian Creed. There was much that I learned in researching this topic that I had not been taught in the seminary. One thing that I didn't include in my article: this creed is a masterpiece of Latin prose, as can be seen in the way that it consistently follows the rigid metrical rules for ending clauses in Ciceronian era prose while it also still conforms to the dictates of contemporary 5th century prose, whose cadences were based on accentuation rather than syllable quantity. That in itself was a remarkable feat. If you want to read more, you'll have to buy the book.

Once a year, need it or not, cowboys would take a bath—or so the legend goes. And once a year, need it or not, Lutheran congregations are forced to recite the Athanasian Creed. Those who find the annual recitation on Trinity Sunday to be a burdensome chore might well consider that from the days of Charlemagne the Athanasian Creed was to be learned by heart by the clergy and recited at Prime every Sunday. That was not enough for the Cluniac monks, who sang it daily.[1] Only at the dawn of the twentieth century did it get reduced in Roman circles from Prime on every Sunday to Prime on the Sundays after the Epiphany and Pentecost. By the middle of the same century it had been further reduced to Prime on Trinity Sunday only.[2] Anglican usage showed a similar deterioration of use, although it has been waning in those circles for the past two centuries.[3]

Prime, of course, was one of the daily offices sung first by monks and later by all clergy. As one of the more minor offices, it was less likely to be attended by laity than Matins or Compline. Thus, through most of the centuries of its use, the Athanasian Creed has been something pastors confessed repeatedly in their devotional life so that it could shape their preaching, while lay people have not used it as much. History would suggest, therefore, that we should not expect the Athanasian Creed to be an integral part of the average lay person’s thinking or devotional life. A wiser practice would be to encourage pastors (and perhaps elders and commissioned ministers of religion) to recite the Athanasian Creed more frequently than once a year (perhaps weekly) while expecting lay people to make use primarily of the Apostles’ Creed in their daily devotions (as Luther suggests) and the Nicene Creed at the Sunday Divine Service. By praying the Athanasian Creed, pastors would imbibe its rich Trinitarian and Christological language, which would help shape their preaching. This practice would not abolish the annual recitation of the Athanasian Creed on Trinity Sunday, but it might be a better way to steep pastors in the creed’s rich doctrine of the Trinity and enable them to communicate its theology to the laity they shepherd.

Who wrote the Athanasian Creed? Certainly not Athanasius, as it is never referred to by him or his contemporaries or even any later person in the Greek-speaking church, at least not until centuries later. Those who read Latin will recognize instantly that it is too Latinate in its phraseology and structure to be a translation of a Greek original. There are clear verbal parallels between the creed and the writings of Ambrose of Milan (†397), Augustine of Hippo (†430), Fulgentius of Ruspe (†533), and theologians of southern France such as Vincent of Lérins († ca. 450), Faustus of Riez († ca. 490), and Caesarius of Arles (†542).[4] But verbal parallelism is not in and of itself determinative. These theologians may have borrowed language from the creed, or the creed may have borrowed language from the theologians, or the creed may have been written by one of them.

When G. Friedrich Bente wrote his historical introduction to the Athanasian Creed as part of the Concordia Triglotta, he could do no more than suggest its origin in southern France between 450 and 600, which was as far as the scholarly consensus at that time was willing to go.[5] It was recognized by then that the Trinitarian language is drawn from that of Augustine’s treatise on the Trinity, although the creed seems to reflect Augustinianism rather than the hand of Augustine himself.[6] The focus of the creed is largely anti-Arian, but directed at a more moderate form of Arianism than the original Arianism, which would indicate that it was directed more against the Goths, such as had settled in Spain and France. Given the many parallels between the creed and theologians of southern France, that provenance seems more likely.

However, in 1931 the eminent French-Belgian patristic scholar Germain Morin discovered a collection of sermons of Caesarius of Arles that included the Athanasian Creed. This proved that not only had Caesarius been familiar with the creed, but that he had promoted it as well and thus the creed must have been written before his death in 542.[7] It is an intriguing possibility that Caesarius himself may have been the author, but it is unlikely, given some stylistic and minor theological differences between Caesarius and the creed. J.N.D. Kelly argues for the following: “the connexion [sic] of the creed with the monastery at Lérins, its dependence on the theology of Augustine, and, in the Trinitarian section, on his characteristic method of arguing, its much more direct and large-scale indebtedness to Vincent [of Lérins], its acquaintance with and critical attitude towards Nestorianism, and its emergence at some time between 440 and the high noon of Caesarius’ activity.”[8]

Two objections are commonly raised against the Athanasian Creed. The first is its damnatory clauses. Liberal Protestantism, Pietism, and even much of Evangelicalism have objected to the notion that a person could be condemned for failing to uphold certain dogmas.[9] Thus, Samuel Schmucker proposed dropping the Athanasian Creed when he offered his American Platform for amending the Augsburg Confession.[10] Most serious Lutherans, though, will recognize that the Scriptures themselves condemn those who teach contrary to the gospel (Galatians 1:8).[11] The second objection is that it teaches a salvation by works. But this objection does not hold up under scrutiny. The language is biblical (John 5:29) and does not contradict the notion that we are saved by faith in Christ apart from our works. It is only by faith in Christ that anyone can do good works. On the Last Day, Christ will point to our good works to demonstrate that we had true faith, while he will point out the lack of good works to demonstrate that the unbelievers had no faith (Matthew 25:31-46). Moreover, this creed was promoted by Caesarius of Arles, who was a firm opponent not only of Pelagianism (overt works-righteousness) but also semi-Pelagianism and organized the Synod of Orange in 529 to condemn it; nonetheless, he saw no false doctrine in the creed on this topic but rather promoted it instead, as we have seen.

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[1] John Norman Davidson Kelly, The Athanasian Creed (Evanston: Harper & Row Publishers, 1964), 43; Robert L. Wilken, “Introducing the Athanasian Creed,” Currents in Theology and Mission 6:1 (1979), 5-6.

[2] Kelly, 49.

[3] Kelly, 7, 49-51; Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition [hereafter Pelikan, Credo] (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 324.

[4] Kelly, 24-34.

[5] Concordia Triglotta [hereafter Triglotta] (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 14.

[6] Pelikan, Credo, 435-436.

[7] Germain Morin, “L’Origine du symbole d’Athanase: témoignage inédit de s. Césaire d’Arles,” Revue Bénédictine 14 (1932): 207-219; cf. Kelly, 35-37.

[8] Kelly, 123.

[9] Pelikan, Credo, 488-497.

[10] Pelikan, Credo, 324-325.

[11] Pelikan (Credo, 76-78) rightly notes that pharmacists have to follow prescriptions faithfully to a doctor’s intent or else be barred from their profession; the damnatory clauses in the creed serve a similar function for theologians. Wilken, 9, also points out the need for a church still struggling with a pagan environment to delineate sharply between the God Christians worship and the pagan concepts of deity.

Creeds or Deeds?

As we saw in my last post, institutions (including in some sense the church) are simply formalized sets of relationships. All the phenomena we see happening in institutions, including the church, are to be found in any relationship between human beings. Thus, it is foolish to think that one can avoid problems by eschewing the “institutional church” and creating some freeform church instead. The problems of institutions are simply the problems of interpersonal relationships.

One of the alleged problems of the “institutional church” is that it has put up boundaries called confessions of faith, which determine who is in and who is out. Wouldn’t it be better to be not so exclusive but allow anybody to hold whatever creed they want to? And if we want to draw lines in the sand, wouldn’t it be better to demand a certain set of common behavior rather than a certain set of beliefs?

We ought to begin by acknowledging that all healthy human relationships establish boundaries. Sane people do not stay friends with someone who is continually trying to murder them or burn down their house—or even just trying to make their lives miserable. Of course, we may wish that such people would change their attitudes and be reconciled with us. We need not repay them with the same hatred that they show us, but we still place some distance between them and us in order to keep ourselves safe. Even in good, healthy relationships we try to respect some boundaries. I have great neighbors on either side of me, but there are still fences between their properties and mine. This allows their dogs to have freedom to run around without digging up my garden or yard. The boundaries actually make the experience better for everyone.

It should not be surprising, then, that the Christian church will have to draw certain boundaries. But what should be the basis of those boundaries? Should we ask people to confess a certain set of teachings or should we ask them to behave in a certain way? The second option has become increasingly popular, as people argue that followers of Jesus should imitate His behavior rather than get bogged down in doctrinal disputes. “Deeds, not creeds” has become their motto. But there is a hidden tyranny in drawing the boundaries based on actions. Since no Christian is perfect and each individual struggles with a different set of sins, there is a tendency to draw the lines in such a way that one’s own sinful tendencies are excused while those of others are emphasized. Of course, our Lord established perfection as the only acceptable criterion; we are to be perfectly holy as God is (Matthew 5:48). Drawing the line to favor one set of sins over against another distorts our Lord’s teachings. For this reason, the Christian church has wisely emphasized the habit of repentance rather than the achievement of a certain level of perfection. When it comes to conduct, it is unrepentance (or the concomitant refusal to recognize the difference between right and wrong) that puts one outside the Christian church rather than the committing of any particular sin.

But if repentance is what separates a true Christian from a false one, then a true Christian must possess the sort of knowledge that could lead to repentance. Moreover, those who would teach others what it means to be a Christian must know enough about the truths of God that would lead their flock to repentance. And since Christian repentance also includes faith in Christ as the Savior, Christians (including their pastors) must know who Christ is and what He has done that we might trust in Him. In short, both Christian lay people and their pastors must have some accurate knowledge about Christ’s teachings.

But there is so much to know! The Scriptures are not a small book and it is impossible to plumb their full depths. Moreover, there are often disagreements between Christians as to how the Scriptures are to be interpreted. Who is the hero of the story—the prodigal son or his father? What are we to make of the parable of the dishonest steward (Luke 16:1-9)? Is Galatians the first epistle of Paul to be written or is it 1 Thessalonians? How are we to understand Paul’s argument in Galatians when compared to the Council in Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15? Who are the “superapostles” who opposed Paul in Corinth and what did they teach? What were Luke’s sources that he consulted in writing the gospel? Christians have not come to an agreement on all these questions and many scholars have even changed their minds over the years on these questions. But Christians have understood that disagreement on these and similar questions do not impair fellowship.

That is because creeds and confessions sort out the major questions from the more trivial ones and emphasize the truths that must be held by all Christians and taught by all pastors. The Apostles’ Creed sums up the most important tenets of the Christian faith in a few words. The Nicene Creed adds a more detailed explanation of Christ’s divinity. These creeds, along with the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, have been the basis of instruction for the laity for centuries. The commandments give a sound ethical basis for Christians; the creed outlines the faith; and the Lord’s Prayer sets a pattern for all prayer. Of course, a lay person may well know more than these things and indeed ought to grow in knowledge, but these things are a minimum. Those who refuse to learn them or accept them cannot be numbered among our Lord’s disciples, for they do not keep His word (John 14:23-24).

Pastors, on the other hand, must be held to a higher standard, just as teachers in general are expected to know more than their students. Teachers, after all, have to know not only the subject being taught, but also the common confusions students are likely to have and the means to overcome them. They are not only to know the very basic items, but be able to explain the subject in depth to any perceptive student who asks the harder questions. Therefore, pastors have been asked to pledge to a deeper confession of the faith than lay people have. In the West it began with the Athanasian Creed, but more recently it has included confessions such as the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord. Those who familiarize themselves with them soon realize that they have as their intention how to teach people to know God rightly, to repent and trust in Christ for their salvation, and to grow in godly living. They answer important questions and help pastors to read the Scriptures with an understanding of what matters. But they do not answer every last ethical or exegetical question.

These confessions, then, serve as an appropriate boundary. Those who refuse to repent of their sins and to trust in Christ as the creeds proclaim separate themselves from Christ and His church. Those who refuse to preach Christ as proclaimed in our confessions cannot be permitted to preach in our pulpits or else there could be some real damage done to our souls. To be sure, a person can live and die as a good Christian without having heard of the Apostles’ Creed, just as a pastor may be a genuine Christian without having embraced the Augsburg Confession. But to make sure that future generations know the truth and can preach the truth, creeds and confessions are a real blessing.