Michael Bauman: Pilgrim Theology: Taking the Path of Theological Discovery. Manitou Springs: Summit Ministries, 2007.
By “pilgrim theology,” the late Michael Bauman doesn’t mean the theology of the Pilgrims. He has a different journey in mind, a pilgrimage of the soul for Christian theologians. “Christian theology is an activity for those en route, and it should be conducted so as to aid those who study it and practice it to travel more efficiently and effectively toward truth. Theology ought to be, in other words, both a statement of present belief and an explorer’s compass for further intellectual navigation.” Regrettably, too many prefer “fortress theology,” system-building, structures whose inhabitants seek to guard themselves against enemy assault, expending their energies in elaborating their defenses instead of ranging out for new discoveries, “open[ing] the door to truth, to beauty, and to goodness.” By contrast, the theological pilgrim achieves not certitude—sure feeling about his convictions—but certainty—reasoned confidence in the steadfastness of the Person in whom we trust and in the convictions we have arrived at, concerning Him.
Our confidence should be reasoned because reason corrects mistakes, which human beings are prone to make. “We have a very good excuse for our distorted perceptions: we ourselves are distorted.” As Jonathan Swift had occasion to observe, human beings are only capable of reason, not entirely, or even very, rational. For this reason, when reading God’s revealed Word, we should try to follow its meaning, not attempt to fit it into a theological system we’ve thought up for ourselves, as if each insight were a stag’s head placed neatly on an inner wall of the castle. In that “fortress” approach, “rather than the theologian having a theology, the theology has him.” “We must not allow our theology to be turned into a hermeneutic,” a system for reading that will likely ignore God’s indications of His intent which do not fit into one’s ‘method.’ Readers should open themselves to words, not pull up the drawbridge of a structure that, however impressive, remains human, all-too-human.
Thus Bauman reprises a contrast seen in the practice of philosophy, the contrast between system-builders and Socratics. He favors the Socratics. As for philosophy itself, “I want simultaneously to endorse [it] and to identify its danger.” As a means of “skeptical debunking” in light of the principle of non-contradiction, “philosophy can disabuse us and our opponents of intellectual hubris and baseless self-assurance because it can strip away error.” In so doing, however, it cannot “supply us with much of the raw data we need for proper theologizing”; philosophy, too, must be undertaken with humility. Its zetetic or skeptical character should not be allowed to shade over into sheer denial, which is no more rational than unthinking affirmation. “Methodological skepticism must be informed by, and tempered by, objectivism, the common sense belief and practice that the working relationship between mind and senses is fundamentally valid and reliable”; “the basic dependability of mind and senses (when the function normally) cannot be denied without self-contradiction and epistemological collapse.” “Objects are what they are quite independent of anything we might say about them.”
Socratic philosophers investigate nature, beyond the cave of opinions, of conventions. Theologians investigate God, who, “unlike nature,” is “not merely passive to our investigations.” “The process of theological knowing entails both the work of the mind, on the one hand, and God’s active desire to be known, on the other.” God intentionally reveals Himself, through His Word. A theologian should respond with “a skeptical and tolerant biblicism”—the skepticism aimed at our own thoughts and those of others, the tolerance offered to those who disagree with us, the biblicism intended as the most reliable window into God’s revelation to us, affording the best view of what He wants us to know about Him. Theologians who refuse to do think this way “have never learned to distinguish between good thoughts and their own thoughts.” They often seek disciples, not students, having stopped learning themselves. “Professors and theologians” like that “have transformed institutions of higher learning into institutions of higher indoctrination,” and not always all that high, either. “Academic freedom has its dangers,” but “no ne loom so large as its abandonment.”
Bauman accordingly recommends three rules for Pilgrim Theologians: “statements of faith should be used as a base from which to explore,” not as a wall against contradictory claims; courage and candor rule out ad hominem attacks and require careful consideration of opposing views (“he who knows only his own side of the case probably knows little even of that”); “the only choice a scholar has is between truth and rest,” as “you cannot have both.” This means that a Christian theologian not only shouldn’t confine his thoughts to the creed of his sect but that he shouldn’t confine his thoughts to Christianity. That is, while remaining a Christian, he should not overlook interpretations of Christianity advanced by non-Christians. It can be illuminating to see oneself, and one’s opinions, as others see us, and them. Otherwise, he is “transform[ing] personal salvation into a way of knowing,” assuming “that one can move only from faith to understanding, but never from understanding to faith.” But “neither faith nor ecclesiastical commitment are a means of knowing” because “the proper functioning of the human mind when it does theology is not fundamentally different from its proper functioning when it does political theory or medical ethics,” for example.
The Bible is authoritative for Christians. “I am not challenging the accuracy or authority of Scripture, which is inviolable, but rather, I am questioning our methods of defending and propagating it, which are not.” “We evangelicals” make several “tactical errors” in that regard. For example, some evangelicals argue that since God inspired the Bible and God does not lie, the Bible must be without error. But “other beings than God have had their way in the matter.” Some evangelicals also say that if you admit that one element of Scripture is wrong, you must throw it all into question, a practice no one follows in considering any other document. Instead of arguments founded upon theological deduction, evangelicals should focus “on the accuracy and reliability of the Biblical data,” the only kind of arguments that non-Christians are likely to “listen to patiently.” After all, “if we counsel our opponents to be open-minded, teachable, objective, and patient scholars of good will, scholars who can feel the weight of the other side’s case, then I believe we ought to insist upon the same qualities in ourselves and our colleagues.”
What, then, does Pilgrim Theology look like, in practice? Bauman shows us by doing some, beginning with the Person of Christ, necessarily the center of any doctrine called ‘Christianity.’ Human beings need to understand God in order to understand themselves. Unlike all other creatures, made “according to their kind,” human beings we “were made ‘in the image and likeness of God,'” which establishes “a reciprocity and kinship” between God and Man “not found anywhere else.” As “living pictures and partners of God,” human beings should not dismiss God as “irrelevant and insignificant in our quest for self-knowledge,” since “to know who we are is first to know who He is.”
The God we therefore want to know is not simply an ‘I’ but an ‘us.” “Let us make man in our image,” He says. He ‘talks to Himself,’ engages Himself in what “we learn later” to be a Trinity consisting of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He does this as He makes, “mak[ing] worlds with words.” So do we, when we make, especially when we make families, tribes, and political communities. We, too are “communal and communicative”; “togetherness, not aloneness, is our natural condition,” and God makes Woman as Man’s companion in accordance with His own Personhood. This notwithstanding, to be like God, to be made in His image, is not to be God or even to be His equal, as Man and Woman quickly learn when they make their attempt to know something God doesn’t want them to know. In disobeying His authority, we defied our just subordination, inasmuch as “we come from the will, and mind, and Word of God,” not the other way around. At the same time, insofar as we are like God, insofar as we are persons, we are responsible for our choices and actions. He gave us “dominion” over the earth but we disobediently gave that rulership away, allowing ourselves to be overthrown by ‘the Satan,’ that is, the enemy of ourselves and of God.
We retain, however, some of the power of speech and of reason with which God endowed us. “God created us not only by his Word, but for his Word,” rightful recipients of that Word. “We were intended for dialogue with God,” and with one another, male and female. “When we fulfill our duty, we are doing what we were made for, doing what leads to our blessing and fulfillment,” whereas “in rejecting or neglecting our duty, we are turning from God and from our soul’s health.” If “we live lawfully with Him,” we fulfill our own purpose. We also fulfill our own need, especially now that “we are fallen and need everything.” “God is to us what water is for fish, what air is for birds, and what earth is for animals—He is our proper environment, our natural habitat,” although to say it in those words is to translate it into un-Biblical, or at least un-Genesislike, language, which does not speak of environment and nature.
As the “Second Adam,” the second sinless man, Jesus Christ shows Christians “both what we are now”—inferior to what we were intended to be—and “what we shall become”—not only forgiven for our sin but cleansed of it. The New Testament promises that “we shall see Christ as he is, for we shall be like Him,” “partakers of the divine nature,” as the Apostle Peter puts it. As a student of theology, “if you ask what is God like, the answer is that he is not like anything. But, if you ask who is God like, the answer is he is like Jesus.” Therefore, “to know God is to know Christ.” To know Christ is also to know ourselves, as “without Christ, we don’t understand rightly the horrifying depth and breadth of our depravity.” We have divine assistance in this task of self-knowledge, still another Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.
Christians who define themselves in opposition to the world, the flesh, and the Devil do themselves a disservice. They have inflated the importance of those things and that person instead of looking to the real standard, Christ. “The negation of a snapshot of the Devil is not a portrait of Christ” and “being out of step with the Pharisees is not the same as being in step with God.” “Christ is the center and standard of Christian existence,” not the apostles, not any segment of the Christian ecclesia, nor the ecclesia taken as a whole. It is important to know ‘about’ God, to gain some of the theologians’ knowledge, but this should not be confused with knowing God as a person. I might be able to know a lot about you, know your height, weight, form, genetic composition, mannerisms. That isn’t knowing you. Knowing God as Jesus Christ is to see how He was indeed innocent as a dove, prudent as a serpent, whether it came to carpentry or verbal combat. Everyone notices his agapic love, but this “shows up in the form of his diligent perceptivity, his resolute teachability, and his train-stopping shrewdness.” As for ourselves, opening ourselves to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, we “must learn to grow as he grew before we can hope to do as He did and be as He was.” Mere admiration is not enough.
In reading the Gospels we are reading stories. They are the ‘data,’ the ‘evidence’ Christian theologians begin with. But “theologians must always bear in mind that the highest and clearest revelation God ever gave us of himself was as a Person, not as either a proposition of a story.” Persons are never as ‘parsable’ as propositions or stories. Martin Luther was right to say that “God hides not only in his revelation but behind it as well.” This being so, theologians need to approach their task with humility, “not contentiousness and bickering about such unknown, and unknowable, things as the functional relationship either between the divine ousia and the divine energies, on the one hand, or that between deity and humanity in the hypostatic union, on the other.” Such matters are beyond our intellectual pay grade. “Because persons are not reducible to propositions, no man, much less a God-man, can be fully or exactly captured in words or ideas, even inspired words or ideas.” For example, the Christian Fathers attempted to press Jesus into a “family of Greek concepts.” This “yield[ed] great insight,” up to a point. But “no theological road goes on forever.”
So, for example, the Christian fathers ruled out the claim of the monothelites, “who said that the will native to the divine nature and the will native to the human nature coalesced into one will.” This cannot have been so, given Christ’s prayer to His Father at Gethsemane, in which He begs to be relieved of physical and spiritual torture on the Cross. But in claiming that Christ “had two natures and hence two wills,” while remaining “only one person,” they implied “that natures will, not persons, and that willing pertains not to persons but to natures, as if a human will and a human nature ever existed without a human persons and as if human nature and human person are (and ought to be considered) a distinct in extra-mental reality as they are in some people’s thought.” In willing, human nature must (as it were) go through human personhood, as human nature can manifest itself only in a person, even as it is recognizable in all human persons.
Beginning with the historical record in the Bible, the Christian theologian should take care not to become a “historicist,” by which Bauman means a historian only. Similarly, he “must be rational, but not a rationalist”; Christ’s prudence is practical reasoning, not a form of theoretical system-building. In examining the Biblical text, we should follow Alexander Pope’s advice: “to read every work of wit in the same spirit as its author writ.” Again, objectivity: After all, is “meaning is the prerogative of the reader and not the author, no professor can properly prevent any student from giving the professor’s course syllabus, the professor’s lectures, the professor’s assignments, or the professor’s test questions whatever meaning the student sees fit.” ‘Deconstruction,’ indeed. We should not “confuse the role of the interpreter with that of the author.”
Some theologians attempt to bend Christianity into a rationalist system with political intent. One such attempt is ‘liberation theology,’ which puts Christianity into a Marxist or neo-Marxist framework. Bauman is well aware of the defects of Marxist ‘critique’ itself; he knows that free markets outperform command economies, the colonialism didn’t cause Third-World poverty. “Democratic capitalism succeeds where other systems fail because it is more firmly rooted in the inescapable facts of economic scarcity, of incomplete knowledge, and of human imperfectability”—all observation one easily gathered from the Bible as well as from experience. However, it is Marxism’s incompatibility with the Bible that he calls upon his fellow theologians to attend.
Considered Biblically, Marxists commit five “cognitive failures.” First, they do not see that human institutions cannot fundamentally change human nature, that “notoriously intractable” thing. As the prophet Jeremiah and the Apostle Paul both affirm, the human heart is desperately wicked. “Marxism cannot succeed because it has no way to harness human depravity for the service of others,” supposing instead that a radical revision of human institutions will eliminate human depravity. Marxism also assumes that economic conditions “shape everything and everyone.” But in fact “public policy and political theory are enacted only by real and identifiable human beings, not by any alleged impersonal forces of change set loose in the world at large.” By overlooking individuals and seeing only aggregates—imperialists and revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—Marxists “applaud or condemn millions of individuals for no other reason than that those individuals happen to fall into one or the other artificial category. For such ‘offenses’ millions of people, quite literally, have died.”
Third, Marxists entertain a faulty view of justice, making it “synonymous with equality.” The Bible never claims that socioeconomic equality is possible on earth, or even desirable there. Hence charity as manifested in uncoerced redistribution of wealth. “Christ indicates that God’s just judgment of human beings is based upon their wise stewardship of the varied gifts (financial and otherwise) that he has entrusted to them., not upon either the allegedly egalitarian initial allocation of those gifts or upon their egalitarian final disbursement.” Additionally, Marxists take a mistaken view of private property. “By abolishing private property rights, Marxism has cut economic rewards loose from risk taking, from effort, and from saving.” But the New Testament shows that when early Christians attempted to hold goods in common, the experiment failed, leading to “complaints and to divisions among believers (Acts 6:1).” “Socialism is a system that not even the apostles themselves could make work.” Moreover, human beings do not belong to themselves, either individually (as libertarians claim) or collectively (as per Marxism). We belong to God. This being so, human beings cannot claim the right to dispose of their property, including themselves, in any manner they please. This is what rules out suicide and abortion. My right to ‘control my own body,’ to swing my own fist, ends not only at or near the point of your nose but at the destruction of my life or of any life that has done no harm to me or to my family or country.
Finally, Marxism misunderstands the nature of wealth, neglecting the conditions of production and the human capacity for inventiveness in its transfixion on redistributing the products we generate. Capitalism or private ownership of the means of production does indeed recognize human selfishness, which is ineradicable with or without capitalism. But it also requires consideration of others. “If you neglect your neighbor’s needs; if you reuse to put your time, talent, and treasure to work providing for his convenience; your enterprise comes to nothing,” whereas “if you carefully consider and then appropriately satisfy your neighbor’s need you will enjoy the fruit of your labors.” In this way, “the marketplace is a school for virtue” in a way that the strictures of socialism can never be.
Marx’s atheist materialism alone makes it hard to combine with Christianity. But what about Christian leftism—seen, for example, in the writings of Jacques Ellul? Ellul is a Christian anarchist who claims that the Old and New Testaments are anti-political. “As is almost embarrassingly obvious, the Old Testament never impugns ‘political power in itself’ among Gentile nations”—as Ellul asserts—it rather “excoriates the abuses those powers sometimes perpetrate.” Nor does it “challenge Gentile regimes” in terms of their legitimacy or in terms of the regimes themselves; God vigorously condemns their idolatry, but not their origin or their regime form. As for Israel, the Book of Deuteronomy specifies an elaborate legal code and, as far back as Genesis 9, God prescribes and delegates capital punishment as a power to be enacted by human beings “at their discretion.” With respect to I Samuel 8, where the Israelites call for a human king, their fault lies in their rejection of divine rule, not “because political power is always and everywhere inescapably evil, or because monarchy is inherently vile.” Nor does Jesus reject political rule. On the contrary, he considers the rule of Pilate to be divinely ordained (John 19:11).
When it comes to politics, Jesus offers no counsels of perfection. Christian political theory instead “seeks that form of government that is attended with the fewest and most pardonable shortcomings, and it knows that anarchism is not that form which it seeks,” inasmuch as “Christian political theory deals with possibilities, not with unreachable goals.” In this, Ellul falls into self-contradiction, failing to understand that “the abolition of power can be accomplished, imposed, and maintained only by means of power,” inasmuch as “it takes a power to check a power.” “Without political power,” freedom is impossible, which is why the ‘ancients’ understood liberty to mean civic participation and why (some of) the ‘modern’ demand representative government and federalism in the modern state. Otherwise, “freedom without law endures as long as a lamb among hungry wolves.” To defend freedom, one needs not the absence of power but a right way of wielding it. Hence the importance of regimes and also of citizen virtue. “The various coercive powers of family, of church, of state, and of school are not inimical to virtue; rather, they help secure it and make it possible.”
Ellul presents the unusual spectacle of a thinker who accepts the Marxist critique of modern society and the Marxist expectation that the modern state can, should, and will ‘wither away,’ while refusing to accept the socioeconomic and political means by which Marxists intend to get from here to there. He decries human alienation, capitalism, money; he embraces determinism (although he prefers neo-Marxist cultural determinism to the economic determinism of Marx and Engels), dialectics, and revolution. Perhaps because he is a cultural determinist, not an economic determinist, a materialist, he supposes that cultural revision can replace coercion.
An even more extreme form of ‘cultural’ politics may be seen in contemporary feminism, which weaponizes words. For his part, Bauman “will defy all those who insist on taking the language and the literature of Western tradition to the verbal veterinarian in order to have them neutered.” In theology, feminists attempt to substitute God, Jesus, and the Spirit for Father, Son and Holy Ghost, “as if the Son were not God, as if the revelation in Scripture could be altered at will, and as if heresy were a trifle.” Jesus almost always spoke of God as Father, “not merely continu[ing] the patriarchal theology of the Old Testament” but intensifying it, inasmuch as God is rarely described as “Father” in the Old Testament. “The feminists, in other words, are fighting with Christ, and they must be made to realize this,” if they do not already. Jesus insists that “no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son reveals Him, and the Son has revealed Him to us as Father. If you reject that revelation, then, in some profound fashion, you can not know God.”
Another way feminists describe the Trinity is as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. This replaces the personhood of God with a set of functions—a variation of the Sabellian heresy, “modalism,” which “denied that God is authoritatively revealed to us as three Persons, but which affirmed instead that God merely fulfills three functions and plays three roles.” To this, feminists add a second well-known heresy, the one advanced by Marcion, who “rejected the authoritative witness of the Hebrew Scriptures,” denigrating the God revealed in them. In their version of Marcionism, “feminists reject the God of the Jews because they think He is merely the culture-bound product of a political an sexist agenda. I reject the God of the feminists for precisely the same reason.”
That agenda includes legalized abortion, again by an act of “linguistic sleight of hand.” To call the murder of babies the ‘abortion’ of a ‘fetus,’ feminist words hide “the real nature (murder) of their action and the real identity (baby) of their victim”; some even go further, calling this the ‘termination of a pregnancy,’ which artfully re-centers the question on the condition of the woman, not the life of her child. This act is done on the basis of the claim that a woman has the right to control her own body. Indeed she does, “but that is not the issue here.” “It is not her body, after all, that is being murdered; it is someone else’s,” and the body of a human being at that—having “twenty-three sets of paired chromosomes,” a set different from her own. “It is not something she may do with as she pleases.” “I do believe in abortion rights. I believe that it is the right of every human being not to be murdered by abortion.”
More controversially, in turning to the foundations of ethical thought, Bauman argues that no firm morality can be sustained without fidelity to God. His target appears to be a form of Aristotelianism that attempts to incorporate modern evolutionary theory into its teleological account of nature. This neo-Aristotelianism holds that human nature has a purpose and that ethical conduct consists in habituating the soul in ways that conduce to fulfilling that purpose. [1] On the contrary, Bauman writes, “one must not contend that human nature and human flourishing yield moral absolutes, properly so-called, because such a theory fails to account for (1) the origin of human nature, (2) changes in human nature, and (3) the selection of ‘flourishing’ as a category of moral discernment.”
With respect to human origins, “if nature arose as the chance result of mindless evolutionary process, a process behind which exists no divine mind and no divine plan, then moral absolutes disappear” because right and wrong themselves must be “accidents, not moral absolutes.” That is, such a theory runs squarely into Hume’s ‘is/ought’ problem. It amounts to “a system of biological relativism.”
Similarly, if changes in human nature occur as the result either of evolutionary theory’s natural selection or of humanly-designed transformation (for example, manipulation of the human genome to get rid of, say, aggression), then that “is the death knell of any and all moral absolutes supposedly rooted in human nature.” What will be produced will no longer be “fully human”; the means will have destroyed the end. Further, as such changes occur, over time, “which version of human nature supersedes the other and is to be considered the fountain from which all right and wrong arise?” We will then present ourselves with “the logical contradiction of having a number of competing sets of moral absolutes.”
Finally, “why flourishing (and not something else) should be the measure of virtue, cannot be proven.” “Flourishing” is a squishy category; Bauman charges that it leaves us with the chaos of personal preferences, whereby there is no real way to choose between the morality of Jesus of Nazareth and the morality of the Marquis de Sade. In arguing as C. S. Lewis does in The Abolition of Man, that there exists among the nations “substantial agreement…about the rules of right and wrong,” and that “therefore these rules of right and wrong are moral absolutes,” makes consensus the “measure of morality.” But “‘majority’ is no synonym for ‘morality.'”
Given these observations, Bauman concludes that “virtue is not known by reason alone, but by revelation and by Providence.” “If there is no God, there is no good.”
The conclusion doesn’t quite follow from the premises, however. The logical contradiction of having a number of competing sets of moral absolutes occurs as well among sets of religious persons as it does among atheists. Substitute ‘piety’ for ‘flourishing’ in the formulation above and you see what I mean. Indeed, Christian moralists are among the first to charge that a man like de Sade has made a (false) god out of his pleasure, especially in the satisfaction of his libido dominandi. And rightly so, one might well argue, but that doesn’t remove the problem of moral pluralism until you can show the falsity of all gods but God. And if one says that reason can’t show that but revelation can, that to know God is to know Him as a Person, noetically by means of His Holy Spirit, not logically as the conclusion of a proof, that still doesn’t show that an atheist can’t sustain a theory of virtue.
Why not? Because a proponent of virtue as flourishing can reply, ‘I base my ethics on a meaning of ‘good’ that differs from yours. There are at least two ways of calling someone or something good. One is on the basis of the judgment of some superior being; I say, “good dog” or “bad dog” depending upon whether the dog obeys me, as its master. The other is on the basis of whether the dog fulfills its nature, instances the characteristic qualities of its species and breed. A good human might well be good (or as good as humans get) in the eyes of God; a good human might also be good according to the standard of human nature. This might include not only bodily health but a rightly-ordered soul, a soul that exhibits the distinctively human characteristics of speech and reason.
Having disposed to his satisfaction of nature as a source of morality, Bauman turns to another putative source of morality, history. He views it favorably, not as a source of morality (in the manner of ‘historicists,’ who tend to claim that the course of events points not only onward but finally upward) but as a source of vicarious experience, from which one’s native prudence may be enhanced. “The history of mankind is a narrative of frauds and deceits,” the storybook of evildoing and evil-saying. “An acquaintance with the ways of evil…engenders for us a protection”; “we need not fall prey to the same old ploys our fathers did.” History provides us with “a treasure trove of wisdom, gleaned from thousands of years of experience and thoughtful reflection.” History also “enables us to make informed predictions about the likely outcome of various possible courses of action.” One comes to beware those who tell us (for example) that the dictatorship of the proletarian vanguard may be harsh but it will yield sweet fruit. Still another benefit of historical study is the study of human reasoning. As Bauman has himself demonstrated, “most current philosophical and theological disagreements stem from presuppositions that reach far back into the history of ideas.” Listening to the latest ‘opinion maker’ or ‘thought leader,’ one almost always finds unoriginality. Intellectual shock tactics become less shocking if you know where the argument is going because you know where it’s been taken before. And the study of history itself delights, “afford[ing] both the excitement of discover and the satisfaction of acquired mastery.”
Still another source of morality is quite familiar to any theologian, pilgrim or otherwise. It is eschatology, a form of prophecy that can be much abused. In keeping with his personalism, Bauman turns away from “macro-eschatology” or “God’s plan for the nations and the world” toward “micro-eschatology” or “God’s plan for individual people.” The latter is “more suitable for a theological pilgrimage,” as Scripture “is more clear and accessible” in this realm than in the Book of Revelation (to take the most striking example). The Bible’s vision for individual Christians is that “they shall be like Christ,” and Christ is the embodiment of a telos on a human, not a ‘world-historical’ scale. As what the world Christians will live in with Jesus will be like, “I don’t know.” He will surprise us.
The final source of moral authority in the modern world Bauman addresses is science, which claims not to prophesy but to predict, with ever-increasing rigor, because it can make its predictions come true, with ever-increasing power. He considers scientists to be more like theologians than scientists care to admit, at least in terms of their cosmological theories, although the theories themselves vary more than Christian theological orthodoxy does. That may be because God assists theologians in their quest to understand him more than nature assists scientists in their quest to understand it: “unlike nature, God wills to be understood and actively reveals Himself to us,” given Christian revelation a finality not seen in scientific theologizing. At the same time, scientists “tend to resist the overthrow of their cherished beliefs” as much as anyone else, they can be as stubborn as theologians in resisting such challenges, albeit with less warrant, since they make so much of experimentation and revision of opinion.
Their claims to empiricism are also misplaced. “Many of the issues of science are neither purely scientific nor genuinely empirical,” inasmuch as scientific presuppositions and procedures are inescapably philosophical and, indeed, empiricism itself rests of philosophic grounds. “If, as some scientists insist, real science is truly empirical and reduces only to empirical methods and to the conclusions reached by using them, then there is no real science, because the theory-independent observation, analysis, and conclusions needed to establish such empirical premises are simply not possible.” “Physics always has its metaphysics.” On the basis of science so conceived, scientists can’t say why science is good.
Nor can it say what it is. To ask, ‘What is science?’ begs a philosophic, not an empirical answer “because the question itself presupposes and requires a vantage point from outside science.”
What has this to do with Christ, as distinguished from philosophy? Science is procedurally a-theist, non-theistic. It implicitly “denies that Christ is Lord of the universe, an inescapably theological denial.” “Because Christ is foundational to the universe, He is foundational to science,” providing the rational ground upon which the sciences stand. By claiming “that only those things that are testable under controlled laboratory conditions qualify as hard knowledge,” that “all else is merely opinion,” scientists assume an empiricism that cannot confirm its own validity. In the moral and political realms, preeminently realms of opinion, this leaves only force, that empirical thing, as the only arbiter.
To make a Person, Christ, the foundation of the universe, indeed its Creator, does not, however, require one to accept Bauman’s own radical personalism. He regards all taxonomies as artificial, even if “helpful and serviceable.” “While the beings that populate those categories most emphatically do exist, the families, orders, classes and phyla into which we have pigeon-holed them do not.” Such categories “do not exist outside the taxonomists mind.” This nominalism is little more than empiricism in disguise. It is also un-Biblical, given Adam’s God-given task of naming the plants and animals in the Garden according to their kind. The many nouns Bauman uses in the course of his book and the logical arguments he makes neither help nor serve any person (except by accident) if they exist only in his own head. Such wise sentences as “Because human nature is what it is, without great volumes of enforceable, law, freedom is impossible” fall into the void.
Bauman ends with a vigorous polemic against the mentality of the New Left of the 1960s, which he once admired. “Those who loved the sixties own today,” having occupied authoritative institutions in the universities, the media, and governmental bureaucracies. But this pilgrim has moved on. “My desire for you is that you throw off the vestiges of leftist cultural subversion” and “become the faithful and ardent friend of God.” That is the true liberation, which the liberationists of the Sixties had not achieved because they could not achieve it on the road they chose to take.
When he wrote this book, Michael Bauman had left that road, although he may have left a shoe behind on it, never having re-shod his thinking with a realism that recognizes not only persons and things as real but kinds as real, too. He was a colleague of mine for fifteen years, and it is one of my regrets that I didn’t read his book until after he had died. I wish I had given myself the chance to talk to him about it.
Note
- An example of this claim may be found in Larry Arhhart: Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.)
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