The Reasonableness of Christianity 
By Bruce Shields 

Recently a number of books have arrived on the scene suggesting a) that religion is responsible for most social evils in the modern world, and that b) all religions are equally evil in this respect.  This opinion is to a degree a modernization of Freud’s claim to have discovered that belief in God is simply a psychological displacement of the childhood yearning to be steered and disciplined by a father figure.  It also reflects the views of such famous 19th century skeptics as Karl Marx, who found religion to be the "opiate of the masses," or G.B. Shaw who stated that God was not necessary to any decent person.   Most famously, Charles Darwin hyposthesized that every function attributed to God in the world could be explained by the protracted operation of pure random chance.  The attack on religion thus proceeds from two linked hypotheses: that God is a useless human construct, and that religious leaders consciously use deceptions framed by the God construct to control and subjugate humans.

These arguments have been sharpened in recent political discussion by three phenomena: the rise of radical Islamism, the influence attributed in the US to the "Christian Right," and the eruption in various places of sectarian violence such as between the Muslim and Hindu factions in India or between Muslim and Christian factions in East Timor.  Several popular authors attributed the sectarian violence to a "Rise of Fundamentalism," theorizing that Fundamentalism could be seen as a religious movement regardless of the core beliefs espoused.  By this logic, Jerry Falwell, the Hindu Janata Bhatriyu, and Usama bin Laden can be seen as simply peas in the same pod of violent extremism.

Lumping events in India to this hypothesis is a tribute to the human ability to trace patterns in chaotic assemblages.  The linking of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism has at least the recommendation that to a degree both have Messianic hopes.  But the similarity falls apart on any deeper examination.  Christian fundamentalism is in itself not a unitary movement: to a degree, the term "fundmentalism" is a catch-all term to disparage whatever element of Protestant Christianity a speaker dislikes.  For instance, one recent commentator on television seemingly linked Epsicopalians who opposed gay ordinations with Southern Baptists and Pentecostals.  No members of these three groups would ever agree to such an assimilation, nor would a knowledgeable person ever propose it.

The common thread in these commentators is a suppressed syllogism: religion is irrational, wanton mass murder is irrational, and therefore religious people are more prone to mass murder.  Whatever happened in Islam over the past 500 years, neither Christianity nor Judaism has ignored the issue of rationality.  Thomas Acquinas, to name the most famous exponent of Christian rationalism, compared Scriptural evidences to Aristotelian science on hundred of points.  He and other Scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages debated these issues for more than 300 years.  At the end of the Scholastic period, scholars had carefully examined hundreds of manuscripts of the Bible, and had settled on an authoritative and agreed upon text for both the Old and New Testaments.  So when a Fundamentalist and a member of the religious Left disagree, they can both quote the identical verse and disagree on its interpretation.  Islamic scholars have never been able to agree on a received text, so that disagreements on substance often hinge on disparities between different text tradtions.

As the Middle Age thought patterns in Europe merged into the Renaissance, the issue of the rationality of Christianity was debated very extensively.  Early in the Middle Age, Pierre Abelard set together 100 pairs of statements to be found in Scripture which he believed were contradictory -- his book was called Sic et Non [Yes and No].  Abelard’s teaching developed into the Disputation Method which was retained in English and American colleges until the late 19th century acceptance of the Lecture Method from German universities.  The professor would set a topic, and members of the class would take sides, for and against, with the professor summarizing and synthesizing the findings.  Out of that method arose the findings of Galileo, Newton, & Kepler concerning the organization of the universe.  All three of these gentlemen were very certain that in describing the operation of the universe they were helping disclose the mind of God.

As an English contemporary of Newton, the philosopher John Locke viewed it in his very influential book, The Reasonableness of Christianity, God had a completely rational mind and the only sure way to grasp the mind of God was through the exercise of reason.  That belief has motivated most Western Christian thinkers since that time.  Only with the advent of the French Philosophes and their English adherents like David Hume was Christianity deemed ipso facto irrational.  Much of what some thinkers dislike about Christians is social or class prejudice cloaked in the language of intellectuality.  For instance, G.B. Shaw’s comments about Christians tells us more about his dislike of the Bourgeoisie than it does about any substantive issues.  Likewise, the current effort to claim that except for religion we would have peace in the world expose on the part of the authors a profound ignorance of both human nature and revealed religion.

Bruce P. Shields, Wolcott VT
bshields@pwshift.com