A s Evangelical Christians we be lieve that basically Christianity is not a philosophical system nor a rational apologetic. We believe that Christianity is a factual revelation of God to man through His Son Jesus Christ for the purpose of redeeming man and bringing him back into fel lowship with God. Without this fac tual relationship between man and God the complete Christian system would degenerate into a meaningless formalism, verbalism and legalism. For this reason all rationalizations, philosophizing and the construction of apologetic systems necessarily have to be secondary and subordinated to the factual implications of the situa tion. As Thomas a Kempis correctly observed: “ Better surely, is an hum ble rustic that serveth God, than a proud philosopher that, neglecting himself, studieth the course of the heavens,” and again, “ I had rather feel contrition than know the defini tion thereof.” Here we may have one of the basic differences between ’ Christianity and Greek philosophy, especially of the Platonic type, which defined reality in terms of idea and the soul in terms of continuity of thought, all amount ing to a glorification of reason. The Christian, in defining God, pro claimed to the world God is love, and without having to go to extremes of holding that thought is a falsification of Being or entirely separated from it, we may have to admit that pure thought by itself lacks some essential element as found in this Christian definition of reality. But though in fundamental Chris tianity pure reason is subordinated to faith and revelation, faith becomes more and more involved in reason as it tries to understand itself. St. Augustine defined theology as “ Faith trying to understand itself,” and be yond this the function of reason be comes that of an attempt to gain an ordered, coherent account of existence as a whole. Some professing Christians, realiz ing that the essential aspect of Chris tianity is not to be found in ration alizations, have mistakenly assumed that these have no value whatsoever, and have been satisfied with either dogmatic authority, subjective experi ence or plain “ common sense.” But there is no good reason to suppose that common sense, consisting of un- reflective or uncritical thinking, is sounder or more profound than the views which are the outcome of strenuous intellectual labor. And that this assumption often results in misconceptions is equally apparent. Thus, in the name of common sense one may easily confuse the apparent
odology. It may be more personal, subjective and not subject to universal objective experimentation as the em piricist would like it to be, but since the empiricist admits that his episte mology has not given him metaphysi cal certitude, but has led him straight into skepticism, the least he could do would be to examine the claims of other epistemologies instead of forming a priori judgments concern ing them, the very thing he de nounces in his opponents. In 'general terms, the modern thinker of the secularist variety tries to avoid the mistake of finding true knowledge exclusively through rea son ( a priori) or just through sense- experience ( a posteriori), but tends to regard these as combined functions in which reason, including deductive logic and mathematics, has only formal but no factual validity except when dealing with data as supplied by the senses in the form of intuitions According to this viewpoint, pure reason apart from sensation is ana lytic, analyzing ideas without adding anything new to knowledge. Syn thetic statements however which do increase our knowledge, are a pos teriori, derived from experience and rest on probability as far as the neces sary universal propositions are con cerned. Kant’s attempt to demon strate a priori synthetic knowledge has not been successful and the issue still rests with attempts to improve on Hume. MORE^
with the real. As Casserly aptly com ments: “ Some Christians confuse a certain kind of temperament with spirituality. Some fear a supposedly cold, theoretical temperament at the same time forgetting that other types are subject to their own dangers: the practical man to superficiality and self-satisfaction, the emotional man to spiritual crudity and religious insta bility.” Bernard Ramm in his Types of Apologetic Systems correctly observes that since the function of Christian apologetics is to mediate intellectual tensions as they arise, to an extent all apologies are outmoded by the pas sage of time. Thus it would have been impossible to construct an effective Christian apologetic say around 1800 A.D. which would have included in its system the geocentric theory of the universe. It may be equally in effective, as we shall shortly see, to construct a contemporary apologetic based on old-fashioned, a priori ra tionalism which ignores Kant and his impact on the main development of modem thought. The thought development of west ern civilization exhibits certain gen eral trends. From Greeks to modem times, there has been a general shift in emphasis from primitive theories of reality to an examination of con ditions under which knowledge is pos sible, from ontology to epistemology, from substance to function. As a re sult of this shift certain viewpoints have crystallized which to a great ex tent dominate modem thought today. Especially since the time of Kant, the modem thinker has found it dif ficult to maintain strict ontological viewpoints. The strong contemporary emphasis on naturalism, positivism and pragmatism has resulted in an agnostic or skeptical attitude towards metaphysics in general or has dis missed the problem as “meaningless,” even though the least reflection would indicate that existence, even in terms of the slightest organization, would necessarily imply some basic meaning, no matter how trivial, and to deny existence itself is patently impossible. The modem thinker has also failed to see, that in order to clear the deck he not only has to throw overboard all a priori ontological speculations, but also all a priori notions as to which epistemology is the valid one in the search for metaphysical truth. For “ truth” is by his own admission still an unknown entity and may re quire a totally different epistemology than the one which he claims has sole validity, namely empirical sense-ex perience. The Christian also claims a meth
T IMO TH Y FETLER Timothy Fetler is professor of Philosophy at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles and an instructor at the California Baptist Seminary, Covina. Fetler was educated in Europe where he learned to speak five lan guages fluently. After coming to America he attended Northwestern University where he received his Ph. D. He later taught there for three years and at USC for four.
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