Enlightenment Part 5

THREE HERMENEUTICAL CONSTRUCTS – LIVING IN THE SHADOW

           The idiom “living in the shadow of” has a number of connotations. If it is living in the shadow of some body, the implication is generally not positive. In this context it usually carries the idea of receiving little attention because someone else is better, prettier, handsomer, stronger, smarter, etc. As in, “I had to live in the shadow of my older brother all the way through high school.” However, if this idiom is used in reference to living in the shadow of some thing, it is a different story. The nuance is generally more positive and palatable. In this context the idiom generally communicates the notion of simply being influenced by something that has happened in the past. As in, “My grandchild is growing up living in the shadow of September 11^th, 2001.” It is in this latter connotative framework that we now consider the “long shadow” of the prominent individuals and isms of the Enlightenment. As Westerners, and this includes Christians of the western world, we are living in that long shadow of the Enlightenment.

            So far in our cliff-notes look at the Enlightenment, we have seen that it was the beginning of the modern age, the age when belief in reason and the scientific method came to hold sway over the western world. We noted there were three historical contexts leading up to the Enlightenment, three monumental characters within that time period, and three principle concepts arising out of this long century. Those last three concepts that arose during this period of philosophic upheaval were rationalism, empiricism, and deism. From this triad of enlightened soil mixture grew our modern day proclivity to three fundamental approaches to interpretation. These approaches form a significant portion of our current hermeneutical bias. Each approach is a formative piece of the overall interpretive grid through which the culture interacts with and interprets reality. The three hermeneutical constructs are a segmented focus, a scientific focus, and a secular focused interpretation. Drum roll fades. As the action begins.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT                                             (A BIRD’S EYE VIEW)
Leading Up to the Enlightenment	Within the Enlightenment		Emerging Out of the Enlightenment
THREE HISTORICAL CONTEXTS	THREE MONUMENTAL CHARACTERS	THREE PRINCIPAL CONCEPTS	THREE HERMENEUTICAL CONSTRUCTS
Reformation Wars Scientific Revolution	Rene Descartes David Hume Immanuel Kant	Rationalism   Empiricism   Deism	Segmented Interpretation Scientific Interpretation Secular Interpretation

Figure 2.4 – Three Hermeneutical Constructs

Segmented Interpretation – From University to Diversity

            The first universities opened their doors in Europe around the twelfth century. For the first few centuries they were, indeed, real universities; that is, they operated with the presupposition there was one universal that acted as the umbrella for all academic subjects. That universal was the fact that the natural and social universe was created and sustained by God. Those early universities held that “any study of physics or history or political science or psychology that omits all reference to God will be importantly incomplete (MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective  p. 15). Such a presupposition concerning education is no longer the case. Not by a long shot. Not in Europe. Not in North America. Even the sacred cow, theology, has become “almost exclusively a specialized and professionalized discipline” (MacIntyre, p. 16). The very thought that there needs be/must be some unifying universal concept or motif is irrelevant, not even given a passing thought. And that appears to be as true of sacred universities as it is of those secular. Subjects, holy or profane, stand on their own. Or, at best, they can gather in small similarly minded clusters. Our universities are, heart and soul, diversities. I attended Montana State University on paper, but I attended Montana State Diversity in principle.

            And for that we can thank, in large part, the Enlightenment. For it was her combined isms that contributed heavily to the resulting humanism that changed the ensuing hermeneutical landscape of the Western world. Thanks to the likes of Descartes and crew, the one unifying umbrella of God was gone with the wind (in perception only). Segmentation and compartmentalization began their sway. Every subject became its own little autonomous empire. The Enlightenment played a significant part in fashioning the way we, in the West, tend to see things, hear things, and interpret things in segments, bytes, compartments, and detached pieces. Physics has nothing to do with forestry; geometry has nothing to do with grammar; biology does not cross over into bibliology, and what do Gideon and Goliath have to do with Galatians. In the post-Enlightenment world (let alone the postmodern one[1]), one lone overarching universal story is not allowed[2] (except the overarching story that there is no overarching story). Faith and reason began to part company.

            Attesting to the western world’s present proclivity to interpreting the world through glasses tinted with the bias of compartmentalization is our tendency to remove religion and religious activity from public domain, not make connections between various disciplines of study, emphasize ethnic diversity over national or regional unity, emphasize personal rights over communal cohesion, and interpret written and spoken words with insufficient attention to the overall story/context in which the words occur.

            Concerning this last tendency, Hans W. Frei (1974) argues that the Enlightenment period was liable for a significant portion of the eclipse of the biblical narratives In place of the biblical narrative as the hermeneutical source and target came “the single meaning of a grammatically and logically sound propositional statement” (p. 9). The road from university to diversity traded story for proposition, mystery for the exactness of rules, and a deductive slant for one that was largely inductive. Thus, western biblical hermeneutics followed the Enlightenment-influenced trail that saw hermeneutics as ‘the study of right principles’ or as the laying out of rules governing the discipline of interpretation. Its purpose was predominately normative, even technical.”[3]

           

Scientific Interpretation – Prove It, in the Lab

            Just as we can lay substantial blame on Descartes and his rationalist friends for being prime instigators in putting God out to pasture and thereby crumbling the unifying foundation of European education, we can likewise credit Hume and his empiricist crew for setting science firmly on the pedestal of Western interpretation. Whereas Descartes opened the door for an emphasis on science, he still held that the “knowledge of God serves as the necessary foundation for all human knowledge.” Hume and his empiricist friends broke that door down. In his Treatise, Hume argues that the science of man is the foundation for all the sciences. Faith and reason became, not only more separated because of the empiricists, but rivals. Science now trumped religion. 

            Along with science replacing God as the basis for all knowledge, came the shift from story to proposition. With the one unifying overarching story erased from the books, propositions took over – propositions, that in order to be valid, had to be proven and propped up by science. Science, by nature, is a propositional thing not a story thing. Science deals with the likes of hypothesis, which is a testable proposition and with theory, which is a set of propositions that explain something and is supported by factual data. Science and proposition replaced religion and story. Reason subject to the empirical data of science took over for reason subject to the faith act of religion.[4]

            Attesting to the West’s inclination to interpret life via science, notice how something unproven scientifically is generally suspect as to its credibility. Take, for example, the subject of homeopathy. “The American Council on Science and Health has repeatedly opposed homeopathy as unproven ‘black magic’ in no way stacks up when compared to evidence-based medicine”[5] (emphasis added). Did you catch the camp in which homeopathy resides? If this were a true play and not merely text, those words black magic would have been rehearsed over and over in order to capture the right subtly sarcastic tone. If something does not measure up scientifically, it is deemed either voodoo, children’s fairy tale material, or pure hocus-pocus nonsense. Mind you, sometimes it is (of course). But, all the time?

            For further evidence of the pervasiveness of the scientific basis for knowledge and interpretation, notice also how a Westerner thinks of a tree, rocks, the Milky Way, germs, wind, lightning, a water-witching stick, and fungus. If you are a true Westerner you likely have a difficult time thinking of those things outside a predominately scientific mindset.

            For testimony of the tentacles of science in religious circles, take note of the in-house debate between differing theologians as well as the debate between some conservative and emergent evangelicals concerning propositional truth. In the former debate the focus appears to center on whether truth is only propositional; in the latter debate the question is more whether truth is propositional or personal.[6] My focus is in neither of these evangelical sparring arenas. In this discussion the point is that truth can be found in forms other than proposition. For a dyed-in-the-wool Westerner with science-enlightened glasses on that can be hard to fathom. Vanhoozer (2005) tells us:

The Bible is more than a system of philosophy or moral truths. It is good news. The instinct of cognitive-propositional theology is sound. The gospel is informative: “he is risen.” Without some propositional core, the church would lose its raison d’être, leaving only programs and potlucks. At the same time, to reduce the truth of Scripture to a set of propositions is unnecessarily reductionist. What the Bible as a whole is literally about is theodrama—the words and deeds of God on the stage of world history that climax in Jesus Christ…It is Scripture that reveals God, not a set of detached propositions... Revealed truths are not abstract but canonically concrete. This is our evangelical birthright—truth in all its canonical radiance, not a diluted mess of propositionalist pottage (p. 100, 108).

Secular Interpretation – The Tyranny of the Immediate

            In writing of the rebirth of secular philosophy, Frame (2015) reminds us that

the Reformation marked a rebirth of biblical Christian thought...But in the seventeenth century there was a similar rebirth in non-Christian thought, in which secular thinkers renewed and pressed the claim of autonomous knowledge more consistently than anyone since the Greeks...[It was a time of] convulsion in the intellectual world...the rebirth of a pure form of secular thought...It began in Descartes’ determination to doubt everything that he had thought he knew. That included Scripture and church tradition (p. 177, 215).

            The other enlightened philosophers of that era followed suit in seizing the moment (or, millennium) for the secularization of a society.

            With God being so transcendental that he is out of the picture (even if he shows occasionally for ultra-special functions) and human reasoning and science being viewed as the basis for knowledge, it would qualify as a no-brainer that general interpretation would take on a decidedly secular perspective. I cannot argue with that. I will not argue with that. As a general rule, when we hear/use the word secular it is used to mean non-religious or of-this-world. Worldly, irreligious, and materialistic are apt synonyms. To be secular in the Western world generally means one holds to a naturalistic or humanistic worldview that is propped up with science evidence. In this sense, secular interpretation is very much the same as that of a segmented or a scientific slant. The commonality is that God is gone and man is left on his own to reason or empirically test his way to truth.

            However, I would like to define (or, rather, redefine) the word secular. I do so in order to focus on a nuance from this word’s roots that captures an additional noteworthy aspect of how Westerners, thanks to the Enlightenment, do their secularized interpreting. Most any good dictionary notes that secular stems from the Latin word saecula, which means ‘age’ or ‘relating to an age.’ It originally referred to the period of life on earth as opposed to life in the hereafter. It did not mean the opposite of religion or being religious; rather, it referred to life in the here and now (temporal space and time as opposed to the eternal). It is this nuance I want to underline. Yes, a secular mindset focuses on the worldly and the material, but it does so because it has, at its very foundation, eyes on this age in terms of the immediacy of time and space. Such a mindset interprets everything in light of the here and now. And generally for good reason – this age is all that is perceived. The past is irrelevant and the future (especially in terms of the hereafter) simply does not exist.

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[1]  M. A. Girma, in his PhD dissertation, The Interplay between Religion and Society in Ethiopia: Towards a Hermeneutic of Covenant, discusses the overlapping issues between postmodern thinking and the paradigm of compartmentalization. He notes, for example, that both are suspicious toward the idea of metanarrative.

[2] This was the main point of Lyotard in his description of postmodernism as “as incredulity toward metanarratives.” Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 7.

[3] Grondin, 1.

[4] I should note here that I am using the term religion in complete agreement with John M. Frame. He writes, “I do not follow theologians such as Barth and Bonhoeffer, and many preachers, who use religion to refer to self-righteousness, man’s attempt to justify himself before God by his works, Dictionaries never define it that way. More commonly, dictionaries equate the term with faith, belief, or creed...Religion is a perfectly good word, and there is not justification for redefining it in order to make a theological or rhetorical point.” John M. Frame, A History of Western Philosophy and Theology (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 2015), p. 5.

[5] http://acsh.org/news/2016/03/01/homeopathy-is-therapeutic-dead-end-researcher-finds/

[6] See a debate on this issue in Christianity Today, where one side says, "Propositional truth is not the highest truth. Indeed, the highest truth is personal." And from the opposing corner we hear, “Scripture is never less than revealed propositional truth” (Colson, 2006).

Enlightenment Part 4 -- RED Isms

THREE PRINCIPLE CONCEPTS – THE R.E.D. ISMS

            The Enlightenment was an intellectual revolution (Shelley, 1995). As such it was an age of isms. Those three letters (i, s, m) do extraordinary things to a word, concept, or idea. They turn a completely neutral concept into a cemented mindset. For example, take the word human. Now add our three letters – humanism. No small difference. Do the same with feminine, commune, particular, pragmatic, subjective, fanatic, or real.

            We now turn our attention to three of the most prominent isms of the Enlightenment period. This will be a fly-over, a crash course in “The Philosophical Isms of the Enlightenment for the Philosophy Rookies of the Postmodern.” But before we press on, an important point: These three isms are not presented as though they, for the first time in world history, raised their we-can-do-better-than-God fists in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. To think otherwise would be myopic, not to mention intellectually irresponsible. All three isms have been, to one degree or another, part and parcel with being human ever since that first snake and forbidden fruit picnic.             

Given that generality, it does appear that during the long century, this trio experienced sizeable spikes in press and prestige in European thinking. Although the Enlightenment cannot claim exclusive rights on these isms, it can claim to be a major stockholder in the history of the concepts.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT                                             (A BIRD’S EYE VIEW)
Leading Up to the Enlightenment	Within the Enlightenment		Emerging Out of the Enlightenment
THREE HISTORICAL CONTEXTS	THREE MONUMENTAL CHARACTERS	THREE PRINCIPAL CONCEPTS
Reformation Wars Scientific Revolution	Rene Descartes David Hume Immanuel Kant	Rationalism Empiricism Deism

Figure 2.3 – The Enlightenment & Three Principle Concepts

Rationalism – I Reason Therefore I Know

            There is a reason the Enlightenment sometimes goes by that other name, the Age of Reason. We have already established, with the help of Hunnex, that rationalism “can be defined as a theory of knowledge (epistemology) that ‘believes some ideas or concepts are independent of experience and that some truth is known by reason alone’” (p. 3).[1] This mindset holds (the exact opposite of empiricism) that humans are born with some “innate knowledge;” that is, we are not born a blank slate; we know some basic things even at birth. With this presupposition regarding knowledge and reason, rationalism views human reasoning as the primary source and test of knowledge. The focus is on the brain – human thinking, reasoning, and logic.  

At the very dawn of the Enlightenment, Descartes gave rationalism its enlightened kick-start with his writings and, of course, his famous “I think therefore I am” statement. With the thinkers that immediately followed Descartes this ism became one of the primary early philosophical movements of the long century. However, whereas rationalism was in the lead early on in this time period, it turned that lead over to empiricism in the early 1800’s.

Rational Name-Dropping

            Here is a short-list role call for a Who’s Who of Enlightenment Rationalists (using the analogy of a train):[2] Rene Descartes was the engine. He “got the ball rolling.” He would likely qualify as a moderate rationalist, holding that some truths could be attained by reason alone, other truths required sensory perception with the help of the scientific method, and still other truths are given by God. Immanuel Kant comes in as the caboose. He started out as dyed-in-the-wool rationalist, but, after reading and contemplating Hume’s work, converted to somewhere in the middle of the rationalism/empiricism continuum. Kant’s seminal work was largely instrumental in bringing the Enlightenment to a close. In between the engine and the caboose stand rationalists such as Baruch Spinoza, who essentially followed Descartes with some modest expansion; Gottfried Leibniz, who revisited Aristotle in order to solve weaknesses he saw in Descartes founding work;[3] and Nicolas Malebranche who as a devout Christian, attempted to reconcile his Augustinian convictions with Descartes rationalism.

            These men, and others, ushered in the greatest emphasis on human reasoning since the Greeks of 600 B.C. For both these men and their Greek predecessors, human reasoning was viewed as “the ultimate authority of truth and falsehood, right and wrong...[such] rationalism always degenerates into irrationalism” (Frame, p. 177).

Empiricism – I Experience Therefore I Know

            I have a hunch this was the camp in which I spent my formative years. In Montana cattle ranch country during the post-Korean war and the tumultuous 60’s, there was a preeminent way regarding how we know and learn about stuff. This way was never discussed as a philosophical alternative to rationalism around the dinner table after a day of branding. At breakfast there was no talk of Bacon, and after dinner there were not discussions around the fireplace concerning how Kant merged rationalism and empiricism. The way one learned how to bridle and saddle a horse was to “git out there an do it.” Same for milking a cow, fixing the hay baler, or roping a steer. The watchword for learning was, “Watch and learn.” We were expected to learn by experience – touch it, milk it, tighten it, weld it, rope it, brand it, smell it, and (if need be) taste it.       Empiricism is the mindset that experience is the key to knowledge. Washburn (2007) gets a bit more technical in defining it as “the theory that all of our ideas originate in sensory experience”[4] (p. 328). He goes on to explain that “people’s environment determines how they develop their inborn potential, or whether they develop it at all...the most important part of the environment is probably the social environment...A person is also molded by the cultural environment” (p. 327). The focus is on the heart – our experiences, our feelings, and our passions.

Those British Imperial Empiricists

            The British philosophers of that day were not content to merely go along, lock-stock-and-barrel, with European mainland’s emphasis on rationalism. Rather, they reacted “against the rationalism of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz...[and] dismissed the idea that reason is our only reliable source of knowledge and developed the opposing movement known as empiricism” (Weeks, n.d., p. 212).  Once again a word of caution and balance: history and philosophical debates (and life) are seldom absolutely black and white. It was not that the two sides of the English Channel were firing flaming epistemological cannon balls at each other night and day for hundred-plus years. Despite this conciliatory nod and the fact there exists a sizeable number of historians that leans toward “no clear distinction” between rationalism and empiricism, there is also the argument, illustrated by Stephen Priest (2007), that sees these two approaches, at their core as completely “incompatible” (The British Empiricists, p. 8-10).

            Our “Who’s Who” short list of Enlightenment era empiricists[5] includes: 1) Thomas Hobbes, who “laid the foundations of modern empiricism with his materialist and mechanistic views – although its roots could be traced back to Aristotle” (Weeks, 212). 2) John Locke, who built on Hobbes work by fine-tuning the empiricist arguments in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). 3) George Berkeley, who took empiricism to an extreme, claiming that material substance did not even exist. Berkeley, a Christian bishop, believed reality existed only in the mind of God, and as such humans do not experience things at all, but only their qualities (Weeks, 220). Try explaining that to your grandchildren. 4) And finally, David Hume, whom we have already met. In addition to what we have already learned concerning Hume, he believed there were two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. Concerning those truths of fact, Hume concluded that nothing can be both certain and tell us something about the world. This essentially and effectively removed all legitimacy for relying on reason to interact with and interpret the world around us.

The End of Empiricism

            There is a direct, paved, no-speed-limit route from pure empiricism to relativism. R. A. Rausch (2001) puts it this way, “Since there may be a variety of interpretations of what constitutes an experience, any appeal to experience as the sole arbiter of meaning and significance is problematical. Such an appeal is completely dependent on which interpretation of the experience ones applies” (p. 376). Should this approach to knowledge be applied to the realm of theology, the result should not be one of shock. Enter Friedrich Schleiermacher. Given his presuppositions regarding epistemology, his deductions fall in step with a far-left empiricist party line: interpretations and theologies are as many as there are universes, cultures, and individuals.[6]

Deism – God, Put Out to Pasture[7]

            The phrase, put out to pasture, is based on an old agrarian tradition of keeping farm animals that are no longer useful, usually because they were too old to work. Instead of slaughtering them, the farmer would put them out in a pasture to live out their last days in relative peace. We had several horses on the ranch that earned this type of retirement. We were too attached to them to send them to “the big house.” So they grazed in the pasture, not doing any work; they were just there, something to look at and reminisce about their past usefulness. The phrase is used of someone who has been forced to stop their work or responsibilities because they have outlived or outgrown their usefulness. Metaphorically speaking, the bulk of the Enlightenment philosophers put God out to pasture. They did not deny his existence, nor his part in ‘getting things going.’ But now, with the progress of reason and science, he had outgrown his usefulness. God was put out to pasture. He was someone to look at and reminisce about his past usefulness. (I am writing as a fool.)

            With God out to pasture, it was “out of sight; out of mind.” Or, in the case of deism, “Out of sight; out of this world.” It is interesting to note that deism would be absolutely impossible to exist in any form if God were visible. Invisibility is what bolsters deism’s arrogance (and ignorance). Imagine a world where God were visible. And omnipresent. Think of what that combination would mean. That would mean we could not see anything but God all the time. Everything else would be hidden behind the visible God, who is everywhere, therefore there is no such thing as behind him. In this present world it is possible to see the handiwork of God all around us. We “see God,” as it were, in the world he has created. But if he were literally and completely visible, his omnipresence would block out all handiwork of his creation. Everywhere we looked, God would be in between us and the created world beyond. (Oh, and how does one get ‘beyond’ omnipresence?)

            But God is invisible. And because of that characteristic deism is, not only deemed a possibility, but has also gained great traction at certain times in history. The Enlightenment was one of those gaining traction eras.

            Deism is the mindset that God created the universe, but then left it to run on its own. It is the transcendental nature of God gone to seed. At the core deists are really rationalists who choose to believe in an absentee God and a world that relies on science to lead us to truth. Technically deism falls in the category of theism, since it holds to “belief in the existence of a god or gods and therefore [is] the antithesis of atheism” (M. H. MacDonald, “Deism,” Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. by Walter A. Elwell, p. 329). MacDonald goes on to explain 

the basic doctrines of deism are (1) the belief in a supreme being; (2) the obligation to worship; (3) the obligation of ethical conduct; (4) the need for repentance from sins; and (5) divine rewards and punishments in this life and the next. These five points were stated by Lord Herbert, often called the father of deism. Deism contradicts orthodox Christianity by denying any direct intervention in the natural order by God. Although deists profess belief in personal providence, they deny the Trinity, the incarnation, the divine authority of the Bible, the atonement, miracles, any particular elect people of Israel, and any supernatural redemptive act in history. (MacDonald, p. 329)

             Pagden (2013) concurs with the general consensus that during the Enlightenment period not many of the enlightened were actual atheists, but “the deists were numberless” (The Enlightenment, p. 129). And so it was, God was put out (in the passive sense). And he, because of his nature, was also put out (in the active sense).

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[1] Mathematics is a leading contender of an area of knowledge that is independent of experience. We do not know 2 + 2 = 4 because we have experienced such a thing. We know this because “no world could exist in which 2 + 2 = 5” (Washburn, 1997, p. 333). It should, therefore, not be a tremendous shock to learn that Descartes was, not a theologian nor a university professor, but rather a mathematician.

[2] Find this particular list of prominent Enlightenment era rationalists at: http://www.philosophybasics.com/movements_rationalism.html

[3] Incidentally, these first three men (Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz) “hold that ‘God exists’ is true since God is the most perfect conceivable being by definition and so must exist.” Such reasoning is shown to be contradictory in Robert G. Meyers, Understanding Empiricism, (  

[4] A very similar definition is given in Walter A. Elwell (ed.), Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, Empiricism – D. A. Rausch (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001) 375.

[5] See the short list of both rationalists and empiricists of the Enlightenment period in Janice Thomas, The Minds of the Moderns: Rationalism, Empiricism, and the Philosophy of the Mind (New York: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009). Ms. Thomas sites Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz as the main thinkers in the rationalism camp with Locke, Berkeley, and Hume the main players in the empiricism camp. Other reliable sources include Hobbes in with the empiricists. See

[6] See Schleiermacher’s emphasis on experience in, Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (New York: T & T Clark, 1999). Note especially pages 67-75.

[7] It is interesting to note that both deism and dualism hold to some type of separation; that is, separation of the natural world (with no divine intervention) from the supernatural world (with active and current divine intervention).