2nd Sunday of Easter (Year C)
April 15, 2007
Acts 5:27-32
Revelation 1:4-8
John 20:19-31The readings for today are an historical reminder that the Christian community wrestled for over a century to express in words its experience of the Resurrection.. The New Testament as it came to be called reflects the considerable effort to bring together this experience as the various writers brought together and edited the stories told by those who encountered the risen Lord. Today’s accounts are particularly interesting from this point of view because they all come from non-Pauline sources and lack the coherence that Paul’s theology provided to his accounts. They are further illustration of the fact that the doctrines which we associate with Christian belief while they are based on Scripture are in fact also a reflection of the historical circumstances that were faced by the coming together of individual communities into a structure which required discipline and coherence for its survival - the particular requirements of which brought about the unique amalgamation of Faith and Reason which is crucial for understanding the nature of Christianity as a religion. It is also obvious that within the Christian tradition the between these two thought processes varies considerably so that their roles and the relative weight given to one or the other has been the cause of divisions which over time have produced catholic, protestants, evangelicals and orthodox versions of them with the result that one group often refuses to accept the conclusions these variations produce.
It is well to remember that the context in which Faith and Reason functions is the particular governing principles which determines how the Church broadly speaking should be run. For western Christendom until the Reformation of the l6th century. this order was modeled directly upon that of Imperial Rome. Thus, to be Christian meant first of all to accept this order and the duties, practices and discipline attached to it. Over time, both Roman and Orthodox Christianity assimilated an understanding of reality that viewed the world as formed in a hierarchy of being which reflected the very nature of Creation. Furthermore, this structure of reality was accessible to human reason and when supplemented by revelation all that we could possibly need to know was made available to the Church and its people. The custodians of this knowledge and also its guardians was given to the hierarchy of the Church in the three fold ministry of Bishops, priests and deacons. While it significantly disturbed the s understanding of the role and nature of the Church, the Protestant Reformation did not significantly challenge the notion that the nature of reality was primarily accessible through the combination of faith and human reason . That is to say, there was not a source of knowledge independent of that which was provided by God. The independent role of human experience as a source of knowledge about the structure of nature and humanity was denied by Protestant and Catholic alike. The establishment of an independent or secular world which was capable of providing all knowledge necessary for human life challenged all of the claims of authority put forward by Christianity. The acceptance of the idea that sovereignty lay in the hands of the people created an additional bombshell in the political world that required a serious rethinking of what exactly the Church was talking about when it spoke of sin, salvation, creation , damnation to say nothing about the sources of moral behaviour as expressed in the differences between “is” and “ought”.
It seems obvious that to the contemporary world the combined power of science and critical philosophy has significantly altered the way in which life outside of a religious faith is viewed and understood. For those within the Church it has required us to re-examine the way in which we understand ourselves and the meaning of faith and also to restate to the world in general the way in which we understand the nature of both faith and reason now expanded to include the contributions of science and critical philosophy.
For those who no longer consider themselves committed to a religious view of life the pressure is on to produce an alternative account of the signs of social disintegration within in the west and to account for its inability to communicate with the rest of the world in terms of values.. The influx of immigration from the other regions to the west has demonstrated that there is a desire is to have a share of the largess too long confined to Europe and North America , but it does not imply a willingness to accept the values associated with our society - particularly the anti religious sentiment that has grown up in Europe. It may be that we need to consider that their presence underlines the fact that the west is not engaged so much in a crisis of faith but rather of a paucity in its understanding as to the nature and role of reason in society. Recently Jurgen Habermas remarked that religious institutions are not the nonsense that philosophy has long portrayed them, but rather they pose a genuine cognitive challenge that philosophy to take up. In a 2004 meeting of the Catholic Academy of Bavaria invited the then Cardinal Ratzinger and Habermas to participate in a public forum. There Habermas used ther term “post secular” to describe what modern society might be. Secularization, he and other argued was first the process begun in the 17th and 18th centuries of prying the fingers of the church from government and economy - all the aspects of life in which it had gained control. The idea emerged of the state as a central foundation for its citizens and their varied beliefs. But in Europe, secularism then came to mean ant-religion. Historically, this antipathy was directed at Catholocism as well as the Protestant churches; Muslim fundamentalism has teased this sentiment back to the surface and given it a new target. [1]
For us today the relationship between faith and reason has resurfaced in a more complex way. . For fundamentalists of all stripes the role of reason has been abandoned because they are unwilling to accept its necessary role and the empirical world view which it is created. For others, it is a crisis of faith brought on partially by many of the long term structural problems of the church particularly a reliance upon a hierarchical decision making process which has kept church leaders looking out for their own in ways which reveals the broad gulf between them and the way most people live. For us in the Anglican communion this has surfaced in the recent attempt of the primates to imposes a structural fence around discussion which has previously been celebrated by exposing differences in publications such as Soundings1962) or Lex Mundi(1889)[2] For the Roman Catholic world it has been exhibited in the lack of interest in reforming some of the basic policies affecting the lives of ordinary Catholics. So far as I can tell there seems to be little interest in the Orthodox world in offering their treasury of wisdom to enlighten these new and challenging issues.
In the meantime great opportunities remain for those committed to a life of faith and reason. Like those early Christians who struggled to find the words to express their experience of the Risen Lord, we too struggle 20 centuries later to bring this reality into our lives , knowing well that the last word will never be spoken but the search for it remains.
1. The New York Times, Magazine, 2007/08/04 p.11, part of an excellent article on Pope Benedict XVI by Russell Shorto, “Keeping the Faith”
2. Fredrick Quinn, “An Uneasy Fit”, Covenant and anglicans have never gone together, in episcopallife, April 2007, p.25
The Rev. Roger A. Balk, Ph.d.