The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History by C. Stephen Evans

Author:C. Stephen Evans [Evans, C. Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religion, Christian Church, Unknown, History
ISBN: 9780198263975
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1996-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

8.6. THE SOCIOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE AND APPEALS TO AUTHORITY

In the end I suspect that Harvey and others who share his view will be unmoved by arguments such as I have put forward. For Harvey, defences of miracles are difficult to take seriously; such thinking violates ‘what we now call the common-sense view of the world’.57 Such claims go hand in hand with sweeping claims about what it is possible for the ‘modern mind’ to believe.58 Defences of miracles are defences of a lost cause, roughly akin to putting forward arguments in favour of a flat earth. Those such as myself who put forward such arguments are viewed with wonderment; we are living fossils, ‘pre-critical’ thinkers who have somehow survived into the late twentieth century, oblivious to the securely established conclusions of Hume and Kant.

There is a deep irony here, for the mind-set of the ‘critical’ thinker I have just described is anything but critical. In fact, what we have here is an unacknowledged, and perhaps unconscious, appeal to authority, the anonymous authority of the ‘modern mind’. Such an appeal is doubly ironical, for one of the accusations Harvey and his type bring against defenders of the reliability of the biblical narrative is that such defenders uncritically accept the authority of the Bible. Nevertheless, those who find biblical miracles plausible are somehow unreasonable because they do not accede to the supposed common sense that ‘we’ all are supposed to share.

Though I am not a fan of everything in post-modern writers, one thing that post-modernism has usefully taught us to do when someone talks about ‘we’ is to ask ‘Who is this ‘we’?’ Does this ‘we’ include the poor? Does it include women? Does it include non-Westerners and minorities of colour within the West? Since traditional religious beliefs, including belief in the supernatural, are more common among the poor, among women, minorities, and in the Christian Church in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (though not always more common among the self-appointed advocates of those groups), these questions are quite relevant. Nor of course, for that matter, is there any shortage of white, Western, educated males who believe in the supernatural, if one simply looks around at the actual world. It seems to me that theologians who are truly ‘critical’ will begin to ask critical questions about their own inherited intellectual baggage, and will be much less quick to assume that the taken-for-granted assumptions of many secular Western intellectuals over the past two hundred years form a necessary part of ‘common sense’. Though there is much that is bizarre that is being put forward under the banner of ‘post-modernism’, surely one thing that this intellectual movement should cause us to do is to re-examine the ‘modern’ intellectual assumptions about the supernatural that we have inherited from the Enlightenment.

Deciding whether belief in miracles is reasonable on the basis of what ‘most intellectuals’ in the West over the past two hundred years have thought is only a bit more reasonable than deciding who to vote for on the basis of who is leading in the opinion polls.

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