Is Their Famine Ours?
Groping about in the shadow of the Enlightenment, our culture suffers a crisis of intellectual authority. Reason, human reason that is, has been crowned king and all truth claims must now submit themselves before its judgment.
One of the deposed authorities sentenced to execution is the Christian tenet that all Scripture is God-breathed. Self-contented modernists have denied Scripture all relevance in adjudicating truth. Even in many Christian circles the Bible commands but a quaint sentimentality as people pay their respects to the church’s old-time favorite.
Though the consequences of so lightly esteeming Scripture may not be immediately obvious, Christianity cannot long survive having its very foundations undermined. In one of his last works, Attack of “Christendom”, Sören Kierkegaard observes, “[T]he Established Church is, Christianly considered, an impudent indecency…. it is openly an apostasy from the Christianity of the New Testament . . . an effort in the direction of making a fool of God, making a fool of Him, as though we did not understand what He is talking about in His Word.” (trans., W. Lowrie, Princeton, 1944, p. 19). Unfortunately, Kierkegaard’s assessment of the present-day church does not seem grossly exaggerated.
Even in many Christian circles the Bible commands but a quaint sentimentality as people pay their respects to the church’s old-time favorite.
How then are we to uphold the authority of Scripture, we who are confronted by the Enlightenment dictum of the supremacy of Reason? We could begin by realizing that Reason, if indeed reasonable, will recognize its own limitations, especially when addressing issues pertaining to God.
Even an enlightened thinker will concede that if there is a God, this God would be transcendent. That is to say, He would somehow exceed and surpass the sphere of our humanly perceived reality. Yet this presents a curious problem: how can we know anything about Someone who presumably transcends our sphere of reality?
We cannot see God or hear God or touch God in the way that we do with everyday objects and persons. Laying aside human pride, we must confess that if Someone transcends us, then by that very fact, we cannot precisely analyze Him by our own means of investigation, however rational they may be. Our only hope derives from the possibility that the transcending One is revealed to us.
We can never surmount our limitations to perceive the transcendent, but the transcendent may intersect our world, thereby making itself known. As we Christians maintain, ‘the transcendent’ is the God who has revealed Himself to us in the Incarnation, and in the Holy Scriptures that attest to Him.
To the astute skeptic, this might appear to be a specious argument, assuming what one is trying to prove. If we identify God as Someone who transcends us and then assert that we can know Him only through His self-revelation, what makes us think that He exists in the first place? This is a fair challenge, and Reason alone cannot provide a satisfactory answer—not because Christian claims are unreasonable, but simply because Reason itself is limited.
Human intellect, apart from a vital relation with its Creator, is mainly equipped to engage the tangible, physical world, not the reality of the transcendent. Assuming that God, as God, must be transcendent, Reason cannot exercise the final authority in issues concerning the divine. But God can; and it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that if God does exist, He would have made Himself known to us, realizing that we cannot know Him unless He graciously reveals Himself to us. After all, the unknown God would be wise enough to recognize our limitations and do something about it.
The good news is He has done something about it: He came to earth as Jesus Christ, to live and die and rise again, and He has ensured that we, even two millennia later, would have access to these truths through the Bible, the authoritative Word of God.
Sang Joon Yoon, Ezra Stiles ‘93