Christianity and Symbolic Realism

Abstract

l7here is probably nothing more important than intellectual history to help us understand how our culture has become so fragmented and dissociated that we find it almost impossible to communicate the integrated meaning our young people so passionately require of us. Aware of my lack of competence in intellectual history I must nonetheless venture into it in order to deal with one central aspect of this fragmentation, namely, the split between theological and scientific (and here I mean mainly social scientific) language about or more generally the split between religious man and scientific man in the West. Without going back before the seventeenth century one can perhaps say that from that time almost to the present the dominant theological defense of has been what may be called realism. The roots of this historical realism can be traced back to biblical historicism, Greek rationalism, and the new awareness of scientific method emerging in the seventeenth century. The figural and symbolic interpretation of scripture which was characteristic of medieval thought was almost eliminated by Reformation and counter-Reformation theology. Modern consciousness required clear and distinct ideas, definite unambiguous relationships, and a conception of the past as it actually was. The proponents of reasonable Christianity worked out a theology which seemed to fit these requirements. It is true that some of the most significant theological minds-Pascal, Edwards, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard-don't quite fit this formulation. Nevertheless for broad strata of educated laymen and above all for the secular intellectuals it was this understanding of that was decisive. Lest anyone think this kind of Christian thought is dead let him pause for a moment to consider the recent popularity of apologists who have argued that must have been who he said he was or he was the greatest fraud in history. There have always been those willing to pick up the gauntlet with that kind of argument. Particularly in the eighteenth century many secular intellectuals argued that Christ or, if not Christ, certainly the priests were indeed frauds. Meeting on the ground of historical realism they rejected it. When faced with the inevitable question of how something clearly fraudulent and indeed absurd could have been so powerful in human history they answered that religion was propagated for the sake of political despotism, maintained by an unholy alliance of priestcraft and political despotism. This argument was a species of consequential reductionism, the explanation of religion in terms of its functional consequences, which in cruder or subtler form has