In the seventeenth century, after the long medieval struggles and the seeming somnolence under ecclesiastical authority, after the partial release from the intellectual and cultural imperatives of the church that came with the Renaissance, and after the Reformation rediscovery of the sovereignty of God and the reality of the Creator-creature distinction, a remarkable twofold development occurred. On the one hand there was a consolidation in British and European thought of the systematic statement of biblical doctrine that the new breath of Christianity bequeathed; and on the other hand the century witnessed the birth, as has been said, of a new trend in an anthropocentric orientation of thought.
That latter trend reached definitive articulation in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant at the end of the so-called eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which advanced a new conception on the level of epistemology or the theories of knowledge or of what and how we know. In that, Kant stood definitively for the autonomy of man. Or to put it differently, he stood for the autonomy of theoretical thought. That followed from the way in which, combining elements of the rationalism that Descartes had fathered and the empiricism of Locke and the British philosophers that preceded him, he reached the conclusion that the individual was autonomous and sovereign in the search for knowledge. That was because what was knowable was not, as Kant understood it, objective reality as such (Kant’s ding an sich), but the perceptions of that reality as they were interpretable by certain “categories” existent in the individual human mind. In effect, that is, each individual knower constructed his or her own reality by the manner in which those individual categories of mind brought their interpretative influence to bear on external objects of knowledge. The categories inherent in the human mind, then, impress meaning on external reality.6 Leaving aside Kant’s more detailed argument, it had then become imperative philosophic dicta that man was autonomous and sovereign in knowledge. In essence, that was the meaning of what Kant advanced as his “Copernican revolution” in the theory of knowledge.
It became all too true that so far as assumedly cultured thought was concerned, “all roads lead to Kant.” The shadow of Kant has been cast very long and has had determinative influence on theological thought ever since and up to the present day. It is true that at the so-called beginning of modern theology at the hands of Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century, an attempt was made to rebel against the intellectual strictures of the Kantian system of thought. But Schleiermacher simply proposed the autonomy and sovereignty of man in a different guise. For him, Christian theology was properly characterized by a new subjectivism, thereby again orienting its thought on the assumed autonomy of man, in the development of what became referred to as man’s feeling of absolute dependence on God.7 At that time, consistent with the impulse to thought that the new subjectivism bequeathed, the grand objectivities of the Christian revelation, the being and will and purposes of God, the reality of human sin, and the categories of redemption by the coming into the world of the Second Person of the Godhead in the Person of Jesus Christ, were submerged. Again the individual person was sovereign and autonomous.
But because the escape from Kant was ineffective and abortive, Kantian conclusions have been determinative in Christian thought in a further damaging respect. For Kant, as we have observed, what was knowable in the world of fact was what it was, or what it became, by reason of the interpretation of it by the sovereignty of the human mind, by the so-called categories of mind. But that was not all that was implied. For Kant, the only objects of knowledge were what was observable, or more particularly the impressions or perceptions of what was observable, in the actual world of empirical fact. That world, Kant denominated the “phenomenal realm,” and only what existed in the phenomenal realm was, in the sense that has been indicated, knowable. Objects of knowledge were confined to the empirical realm. Beyond the phenomena thus observable, things and entities as they were in themselves (the ding an sich) were beyond the reach of knowledge. Only the impressions that they generated were knowable. But further, beyond Kant’s phenomenal realm there existed what he referred to as the “noumenal realm” in which objects may exist but were not in themselves knowable.
In that important connection, it is sufficient for our present purposes to observe that for Kant, God was consigned to the noumenal realm and was therefore unknowable. God may exist. Or he may not. Kant insisted that no adequate proof of the existence of God could be stated, and he somewhat gallantly concluded that while, then, it could not be definitively stated that God existed, by the same token it could not be definitively stated that he did not exist. There was no way to know. For Kant, God was not an element of the knowable, or a subject of what he called “pure reason,” but an assumption of “practical reason.”8 Kant said that he “abolished knowledge to make room for faith.”9 But his “faith,” of course, had no correspondence at all with the faith that the sovereign grace of God imparts to an individual and which stands, as a result, as the instrumental cause of salvation.10 We shall return to the point.
It is not necessary for our present purposes to follow all the ways in which the assumption of human autonomy and the elevation to primary determinative status of the introspective individual worked out their effects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We observe that in doing so they further infected Christian theology. Nineteenth-century positivism, early twentieth-century existentialism, the negativism in thought that gave birth to the later “God is dead” theology that revived the thought of the nineteenth-century philosopher Nietzsche, and the now somewhat aborted postmodernism, all exerted their influences.11 But above it all, the upshot of the on-going influence of the Kantian consolidation of the postulate of human autonomy remained. The result was that the fact and the doctrine of the being and sovereignty of God, the revealed attributes and character of God, the declared salvific purposes of his will, and the true standing of man before and in the sight of God, have been substantially evacuated from theological thought.
The Christian, Christianity, and the Church
Our objective in the chapters that follow is to examine at some length two principal questions, the answers to which throw light on the identity and status of the Christian person, the status and meaning of Christianity in the present social and intellectual complex, and the state, responsibility, current health, and prospects of the church. First, bringing into focus the coming into this world of the Second Person of the Godhead to become Jesus Christ, what is to be understood as the reasons for his coming, taking up in that question the revealed identity of the Lord Jesus Christ himself? And second, what, in the light of that, is to be understood as the privileges that accrue to the Christian person who, by the sovereign grace of God, is called into the body of the church of which Jesus Christ is the head?
Reason exists to believe, it must be confessed at the outset, that the Christian mind, particularly as it reflects on the deposit of truth that has come down from the Reformation rediscovery and rearticulation of biblical doctrine, holds the relevant truths only uncertainly at this time. The Christian church is seemingly unaware of its true identity, and its message and witness to the world is, as a result, muted and indistinct. What, in short, has the church to say to the world and to its decaying twenty-first-century culture? Who speaks for the church, and how does, or should, the church speak to the issues of morality that appear at this time in clear confusion? Is there, in fact, any clear demarcating line between the culture of the church and the culture of the world? Does the church possess