Sermon from December 12, 1999
Have you ever heard someone talk about a person who had "honest doubts?" Have you ever heard someon talk about a person who had "naïve faith?" Almost certainly you have. Those two phrases have become part of our mental furniture. We hardly notice them any more, but they carry two of the unwritten assumptions that help to shape our outlook on life. Try reversing them, and you will see how deeply they have shaped us.

Have you ever heard someone talk about a person who had "naïve doubts?" Have you ever heard of someone talk about a person who had "honest faith?" Probably not. The reason we do not talk like that goes back several hundred years to a French philosopher, named René Descartes, who taught Western Civilization that "doubt, not faith, was to be the path to knowledge," (Newbigin, Proper Confidence, 21). This habit of mind often expresses itself in a statement that we have all heard: "Question everything!"

If you were a person of faith when you learned that, then you know the statement means, "Question everything, including your faith." This goes down so deeply in our intellectual traditions and mental habits that we cannot imagine a world in which people did not think this way. The fact is that until Descartes the intellectual habits of very smart people were opposite those that we take for granted.

The great African Christian, Augustine, expressed concisely those very different intellectual habits when he said, "Credo ut intelligam." "I believe in order to understand." The intellectual habits of Western Civilization since Descartes exactly reverse that. "I must understand in order to believe." And of course fundamental to understanding is doubt – question anything and everything.

150 years after Descartes, something else happened in Europe and North America that allowed this skeptical way of thinking to dominate Western intellectual culture. The thing that happened is called the Enlightenment, and the Elightenment said that truth is only what we can prove by human reason. Human reason thus became the standard by which all serious human achievements were to be measured, and nothing vindicated this point of view quite like the success of the physical sciences. It is not hard to see why we say doubt is honest and faith is naïve.

The Englightenment philosophy posed a threat to Christianity as great as any it had ever faced. The Yale historian of the Church, Kenneth Scott Latourette wrote this about attitudes toward Christianity 200 years ago: "There were intelligent and apparently well-informed men who seriously believed that Christianity would not outlast another century," (A History of Christianity, 1054-1055). The 19th century brought with it four ideas that seemed only to confirm that conclusion. For the past 150 years those four ideas have challenged the Christian view of reality to its roots.

The first idea came from Karl Marx, and we know it as communism. We who may know nothing of Marx's ideas know that he said, "Religion is the opiate of the people." He meant "that if you have the assurance of an eternal fulfillment, you will not fight in a revolutionary way for the temporarl fulfillment of man on earth," (Tillich, Perspectives on Protestant Theology, 186). Marx cared about that because he saw millions of people having their humanity crushed out of them by the industrial revolution's use of machines and money. He wanted to do something about it.

As he looked around Europe for help, "all the great European churches, the Orthodox, the Lutheran, and the Episcopalian, were on the side of the ruling classes. The Roman Catholic Church was better in this respect ..." (ibid.). Marx saw the Church using theological ideas to rationalize the oppression of working class people. He saw the Church as hypocrite. He rejected God as did his Soviet and Chinese followers.

The second disturbing idea entered Western Civilization through the work of Charles Darwin. Genesis 1 said, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Darwin said in effect, "In the beginning were particles of matter." By a process he called natural selection, and over millions of years, lower forms of life evolved gradually into ever higher forms of life until Man as we know him appeared on the earth.

In 1860, one year after Darwin published Origin of the Species, a meeting took place in Oxford, England, that involved the Anglican Bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, and the spokesman for evolution, Thomas Henry Huxley. Wilberforce said in that meeting that "the principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God," (quoted in The Church in an Age of Revolution, 117). He made several other statements like that.

Among them, he said this to Huxley: "'If anyone were to be willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be equally willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother?'" (ibid.) It was a facetious statement by a Christian leader (the first of many), and Huxley's crushing reply (the first of many) went as follows. "'If I had to choose, I would prefer to be a descendant of a humble monkey than of a man who employs his knowledge and eloquence in misrepresenting those who are wearing out their lives in the search for truth,'" (ibid.).

The third idea entered our common thought in Vienna, Austria. There Sigmund Frued, for the first time in the secular, modern world, "revealed the existence of a whole world of secret desires and all-powerful elementary drives which, disguised and unrecognized even by the individual himself, govern his behaviour, betraying themselves only in dreams and inadvertent actions," (The Meaning of Person, 56), the so-called Freudian Slips.

Frued denied the existence of God and explained our belief in God as a projection of our deep needs. In other words we have this psychological need for something greater than ourselves, and so we make up the idea of a god.

A fourth idea deeply affected the Church and was in part a response to the other three. It said Christianity would not be able to keep up with the modern world unless it changed its archaic ideas. Many people expressed this idea, going back as far as Thomas Paine at the time of the American Revolution. A German theologian, Rudolph Bultmann, put this Enlightenment idea into words this way. (Readings, 71).

"Can Christian preaching expect modern people (to) accept the mythical (New Testament) view of the world as true? To do so would be both senseless and impossible. It would be senseless, because, there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical (New Testament) view of the world ... It is simply the (view of the world) of a pre-scientific age. Again, it would be impossible, because nobody can adopt a view of the world as a matter of choice; it has already been determined by our place in history ... It is impossible to use electric light(s) and the (radio) and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles."

It is difficult to appreciate just how huge the challenge of these ideas was to Christians in Europe and North America. Perhaps we can catch a glimpse of why 200 years ago "there were intelligent and apparently well-informed men who seriously believed that Christianity would not outlast another century." Before we consider the triumph of the Word, I would like to make two observations about these ideas.

First, all of them arose from the Enlightenment's confidence that human reason, guided by honest doubt, would lead humanity not only into indisputable knowledge but also into something approaching an earthly paradise. Second, the most striking thing about the four ideas we just considered is how profoundly they undermine reason. When Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Bultmann get through with us, we may have questions about Christianity, but we have even more serious questions about the validity of reason. We begin to have doubts about doubt.

Marx's ideas, interpreted and applied by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, expressed theselves in collectivist societies in which the government did all the thinking for you – hardly a paradise of reason. Closer to home, in the 1960s, when it was fashionable for university radicals to be leftist, we heard some of them proclaim, "Power to the people." When I saw them blow up the science building at the University of Wisconsin and shut down Syracuse University so that there were no classes and no final exams in the spring of 1970, it was clear that reason was dead.

The same hostility to reason appeared in Darwin's theories. Natural selection, by which everything has come into existence, is a blind, irrational force. No reason guides it. What you call reason is really just the random chemical movements in your brain. Any relationship to truth is a fantasy left over from a pre-Darwinian age.

Freud was very explicit that what matters about human beings is not reason. What really makes human beings tick are "secret desires and all-powerful elementary drives which, disguised and unrecognized even by the individual himself, govern his behavior." "Disguised and unrecognized even by the individual himself." There is no place for reason here. What we call reason, said Frued, is really nothing but an ideology, an effort to put a good face on our "secret desires and all-powerful elemenatry drives."

Then, along comes Bultman with the liberating thought that "nobody can adopt a view of the world as a matter of choice; it has already been determined by our place in history." In other words, you can't resist Hitler, because you are German. Then he asks how can anyone believe in miracles and listen to the radio at the same time. To which you just want to say, "And why not? I just don't get it."

By the way, Bultmann spoke that nonsense 18 days before Hitler invaded Russia. I do not say that to take a cheap shot at Bultmann. I say it, because after Hitler, it was easier to believe in evil spirits than to believe in radio, especially after Hitler and Goebbels perfected it as an instrument of mass propaganda.

I say it also because of something profound Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount. "Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruits you will recognize them," (Matt. 7:15-16). Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Bultmann were all brilliant men. They were also false prophets, and inwardly they were ferocious wolves. By their fruit we know them.

We saw the fruit of Marx's doctrines clearly in Stalin's purges and in the Gulag. Freud has became almost an historical curiosity, almost irrelevant in present-day therapy. Bultmann's disciples filled theological faculties in Europe and North America, and the pastors who trained under them went forth and emptied mainline church after mainline church. Darwin's ideas find themselves challenged severely by the doctrine of intelligent design, a doctrine held by religious and secular scientists. Darwin is the last of the four great false prophets still on his feet, and he wobbles as we watch.

How did Christianity, whose outlook seemed bleak to many at the beginning of the 19th century – how did Christianity fare in the face of those four ideas? Again, Latourette, writing in 1953, said that in spite of the dangers and dire predictions of its coming collapse, the years 1815-1914 "constituted the greatest century which Christianity had thus far known," (ibid., 1063), and then he explained this way.

"The materialism and secularism which were reinforced by the scientific and mechanical advances of the day dominated thousands and seemed to make Christianity irrelevant or a pleasant but optional adjunct to the good life. ... In the face of the adverse factors Christianity displayed striking vitality and came to the end of the (19th) cnetury more vigorous and more potent in the affairs of mankind than it had been at the outset of the century or at any previous time. This was true of all three of the main branches of the faith," (ibid., 1469). By their fruit you will also recognize true prophets.

Latourette wrote only of the 19th century. What would he say of the 20th that is now drawing to a close? Perhaps it is enough to point out that in these waning days of the 20th century there are more professing Christians on the planet than there were people on the planet in the opening days of the 20th century. And Christianity has achieved this without government or military coercion. I wonder if Islam would shrivel without the political and military coercion of Arab countries. Christianity is the greatest people movement in the history of the planet. Isaiah of old explains where its power comes from.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
  neither are your ways my ways,"
                                                           delcares the LORD.
"As the heavens are higher than the earth,
  so are my ways higher than your ways
  and my thoughts than your thoughts.
As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
  and do not return to it without watering the earth
  and making it bud and flourish,
     so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eather,
so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
  It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
  and achieve the purpose for which I sent it." (Isaiah 55:9-11)

That is not religious rhetoric, my brothers and sisters on the journey. It is the marrow of reality distilled into human language. The Church's vigor, creativity, and expansion in the face of Marxism, Darwinism, Freudian psychology, and apostate Christianity draws their power from the Word. Let us not talk about a triumphant Church. Let us talk about the triumphant Word, whose symbol and repository is the Bible.

Many people will still call such faith naïve and even childish. But from the lips of children and infants God has ordained praise because of His enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger (Psalm 8:2). A kind of silence awaits the coming of the new millennium, and in the congregations of Jesus there is exceeding joy.