Broken, Lesson 4: Rationalism

These are a series of lessons adapted from Jonathan Fisk’s book, Broken.  All are encouraged buy Broken to get the full content in the book.

Never follow a rule just because it makes sense (especially if it promises to work because it makes sense)

The third rule every Christian should break as often as possible is this: “You can find God with your mind.”  That approach is called “Rationalism.”

Earlier, we learned about Mysticism.  She sits on her porch with a bottle of wine and sings, “Come and rest with me.”  Moralism is different.  He patrols the streets night and day, vigilant in his continuous warfare against decay.  But Rationalism is the far more “civilized” face of the devil’s original Lie.  He is a philosopher-monk whose habit is the scholar’s gown.  He toils away in the holy rituals of laboratories and libraries, an icon of sacrifice and precision.  His formidable strength is the quiet assurance that he knows the way to knowing better–always, about everything, especially religion and spirituality.

“Give me facts,” he tut-tuts, looking down past his long, bespectacled nose.  “Let me touch.  Let me see.  Let me test.  Let me prove.  That is the only way of knowing anything we can know.”

Rationalism: The belief that you can find God through the clarity of your observations or the consistency of your logic.

Rationalism, then, is nothing more than the worship of your thoughts.  Armed with the annals of history and the microcosms of test tubes, he says, “I am only a humble realist, nothing more.  I’m but a simple logistician and merely being practical.  I only ask that everything and everyone be reasonable. (And, oh, yes, I will set the standards for what passes as reasonable, thank you!)  From this I, therefore, deduce what is only logical: If God exists, we will be able to find Him, and the most certain way of finding Him is through the disciplines of the mind.”

In some way, Rationalism has always existed.  But it was the modern era that ushered him into a booming business, which he had not seen since the glory days of Athens and Rome.  Given how good his business was going, he could afford to add on to the old homestead, in which he had hunkered down during the medieval ages, renovating his monastery into something more of a cathedral-palace.  From this ultramodern, eighteenth-century temple, the strictly sensible King of Reason embarked on a mission to reign on high over all future eras of human history.

Little could his graphs and experiments foretell what an irrational blunder his thinking would eventually become.  For even rationalism and modernistic thinking would get old.  By the 1960s, under a blitzkrieg of “cool man” beatniks and others, Rationalism appeared increasingly old, tired, and disheveled.  Even knowledge became increasingly suspect.

And so in a twist of irony, a flood of volumes poured forth from universities in France and Germany arguing that words did not have any true meaning.  The problem, they said, is the assumption that what “is” can be reasonably known.  The true reality, they said, is that no one can test or share anything in any objective, nonrelative way.  Even your daily conversation about how much you love pizza is a facade.  What is pizza?  Is it St. Louis style, Chicago, or New York?  Everything real is limited to what you have personally experienced.   None of it is true.  None of it can be known.

“What is true for me is true for me, but might not necessarily be true for you.”  After all, isn’t beauty only in the eye of the beholder?

Postmodernism: The belief that reality only seems to be real, consisting of various evolved social constructions, always subject to change.

But Rationalism produced an heir.  This offspring tries to bring us to worship at the Altar of What Makes Sense.  This child came to life when Professor Rationalism and Dame Mysticism came together.  And their offspring has characteristics of both mom and dad.

Trained daily in all skills at Rationalism’s feet, this child grew in favor and stature.  He was more attractive than his father, having received all the charisma of his mother.  Yet, he was more intellectual than his mother, having received the logical thinking of his father.  As the boy came of age, he began to speak openly and rebel.  He said that his father’s ideas about reigning from on high in the cold search for pure knowledge were a trivial and heartless pursuit.  But just as cavalierly, he boasted that his mother worshiped the ancient spirits in tomfoolery and superstition.

Neither parent openly objected to these claims.  For each saw in him an alliance that had brought to bear one of the deadliest deceivers ever to walk the earth.  They named him “Pragmatism”.

Pragmatism is more than a rule that every Christian should break, for he is the spawn of both Rationalism and Mysticism.  He touts, “You will find God with both your heart and mind, or whichever you prefer and whenever you prefer it.  Because, after all, whatever works.”

Pragmatism: The belief that knowledge found by evaluating the results of actions can create more efficient or “intelligent” future actions.

–       Discuss: Is Pragmatism bad in all areas of life?

 

The Hodge-Podge of Our Cafeteria Christianity

Yet, Rationalism hasn’t finished tempting you.  For a war over your soul still rages in both your heart and mind.  Which will we make into the greater idol?  Will it be your feelings or your thoughts?

Chances are that, for most of us, it is a shifting combination of the two.  Like good pragmatists, we harness whatever most suits our needs in the present moment and use it for our advantage.

Yet, as mystical as our culture has become, and as deeply as we rely on our feelings to teach us what is true and what is false, when push comes to shove, we find Pragmatism does have a final loyalty.  His loyalty is not to the feelings of his heart; it is to the limitless trust he will place in the powers of his ability to understand.  Yet, far from Rationalism’s high-browed, intellectual commitments of the past, the logic of his offspring cares far less about the hidden rules that run the universe.  His reasoning is far more basic–it’s the basic black-and-white science of a banker’s ledger.

The Pragmatic spirit rules the roost.  It’s the culminating result of centuries of warfare between heart and mind, searching for the perfect lie with which to tease the human soul away from faith in the one true God.  Proving himself most fit, Pragmatism is Rationalism on steroids, able to live in a truce with Mysticism and use her to continue selling his promises about a human-created, reasonable future.

Pragmatism preaches: “You can find God anyway you want.  You can use your heart, or you can use your hands.  Only remember the key to making both heart and hands work is the power of your mind.”

“Is this the path to Truth, then?” the common man asks.

Pragmatism replies: “Friend, I’ll be honest with you.  I’m no theologian.  I cannot speak of doctrines.  Who am I to put God in a box?  But I can tell you this: follow me, and you will see results.”

“What of the Scriptures?” the man might ask.

“Those are all noble and beautiful words,” Pragmatism smiles.  “We can learn so much from them.  Yet, we must apply our minds, remembering to test the principles we find to see if our use of them is truly Spirit-led.”

“How do we do that?”

“That’s easy.  Look at what you are doing based on your interpretation of Scripture, and then ask yourself, does it work?”

Read Jude 8-13[1]

–       What is destroying the false teachers whom Jude mentions (vs. 10)?

 

–       How do Pragmatism and the Spirit dovetail in such a way that even heresy could be thought to be the will of God?

 

Sola Infide

Results are always easy to sell.  The problem is that whether something works, biblically speaking, has never been a trustworthy measuring stick when it comes to God’s Spirit.  After all, lying works (if you’re good at it) even though it’s wrong.  Meanwhile, the Trinity doesn’t work at all (at least on paper) even though it is God’s own revelation of Himself.

Having everything make sense may be appealing, but a God who is fully comprehensible can’t be much of a God.  This hardly means that being a Christian makes you leave your brain at the door (far from it).  But it does mean that you need to check your brain at the limits of your brain.

Yes, even your brain can’t sense or know everything.  But that doesn’t mean that what your brain can’t grasp doesn’t exist, that it isn’t real, or that it isn’t true.  It only means that you aren’t God.  God is God–and the real God has something He wants to say.

1 Corinthians 1:18-19: For the word of the cross is nonsense to those who are being destroyed… For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will frustrate the intelligence of the intelligent.”

–       Discuss

 

It’s strange.  Today, it seems that we have an almost-infinite ability to find knowledge that our age credits to the human mind and heart.  Yet, at the same time, we seem incapable of imagining an almighty God who might also be almighty enough to do something as basic as talk to us with words we can understand.

Some scholars have even decided that human language is so weak that not even two humans speaking the same language can really, actually understand what the other is saying?  (Yet, ironically, they delivered that information using human language!)  By playing with the subtleties of language (called semantics), those teachers showed how strictly logical and scientifically perfect communication is all but impossible between two humans.

But after these scholars, still more scholars took this communicated information (ironically believing they had understood it fully) and did God a “favor”: They projected our little problem onto Him.  It boiled down to something like this: “Because it is theoretically possible for me to misinterpret the words of the Bible, this means that I can’t understand the words of the Bible without misinterpretation.”

–       Discuss where this line of thinking has some truth to it.  Discuss where it leads astray.

 

That may sound abstract, but you’ve probably been there.  We’ve absorbed much of that thinking without even realizing it.  You see it displayed when you’re talking to another person about what the Bible says.  You say, “The Word was God” or “You shall not commit adultery” or “This is My body.”  Then the other person smiles, relaxes in her chair, and says with a calmly level voice, “Yes, but that is only your interpretation.”

This is insanity.  The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, if they teach us anything, is that almighty God not only can speak in human language, but He does.  And when He does, He uses real words.  And God believes those words have meaning.

Romans 1:16: For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is God’s power for the salvation of everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile.

–       What is God convinced of about the meanings carried in the Gospel, which is through words?

 

Of course, the idea that God’s human words don’t have real, concrete meaning is an ancient idea.  It goes back to where all of our problems first took root.  All the rot, the terror, the chaos, and the suffering go back to the beginning, to the day when the first human first decided the almighty God couldn’t always speak the absolute truth.  It was not Adam’s pride that caused the fall.  Pride was only the result of his first sin: unbelief.

Genesis 2:15-17: The LORD God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.  The LORD God commanded the man: “You may freely eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it, you will surely die.”

The serpent deceived Adam’s wife.  But Adam was not deceived (1 Timothy 2: 14).  He chose not to believe God’s words.  His temptation was not one for a higher, emotional experience than he could find in God’s words (mysticism).  It wasn’t searching for a more-perfect obedience than he could find in God’s words (legalism.)  No, what Adam wanted above all was knowledge (Genesis 2: 17), and to get it, he was even willing to learn “the knowledge of evil.”

Such irony of ironies, for in the “knowledge of evil,” he learned the idea that his path to personal godhood was by learning knowledge.  But that notion is false.  It is a lie.  It is a knowledge that, no matter how much it learns, it will never be the knowledge of the truth (2 Timothy 3: 7).

Read Genesis 3:1-6

–       What was our first, great temptation?

 

As with our emotions, the problem isn’t that we think or have intellect or reason.  Our problem is when we place those gifts from God above the work of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God.

Read 2 Corinthians 4:1-7

–       How is how a love of knowledge an integral part of Christian life and discipleship?

 

The Supreme Stabilizer

Matthew 24:35: Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.

Under the watchful eye of Rationalism, postmodern Pragmatism is the modern world tanked-up on greed, with the throttle at full bore–and all this takes place at your personal, spiritual expense.  Rationalism may dress in casual clothing and preach principles for a better life now.  He may deck himself out as the original, civilized scholar and hold court in a lecture hall.  It matters not, for Rationalism couches himself in many forms.  Despite the form he takes, he is the belief that the ritual of test and trial will lead to enlightenment.

It is because of this misguided trust in the idea that “You can find God with your mind” that Rationalism remains the third rule every Christian should break as often as possible.  God does not want you to discover Him through science or history, reason or experiment, logic or philosophy, any more than He wants you to find His Spirit through trial and error, practice and leadership, tactics and methods.

God wants you to know that He already has found you in Jesus.  And Jesus speaks real words.  He speaks words that He has left behind as His testimony.  And these words are written.  These words are also spoken to you in the Service of the Word.  These words are spoken, making Jesus’ body and blood a divine reality in the Lord’s Supper.  The words are spoken, making the water of baptism into something that saves.

The idea that you can find God with your mind is as false as false.  You find God in His Word and where the Word comes to you.

---