The rationality of faith

I have always been a snob when it comes to football. It seems to me that the tribalism exhibited by supporters was childish, a fragile attempt at identity and belonging.

I can appreciate how local identity can be transferred to a sporting team, most particularly in the case of Geelong which is more of a discreet community than countless suburbs that merge into each other. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss sport as unrelated to the larger questions of life. Behind the celebrity status, the besotted fans and the marketing there lies a system of rationality.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book Whose Justice? Which Rationality? tells us that rationality is always associated with a tradition in which common presuppositions are held. Indeed, he tells us that there can be no rational discussion unless those common presuppositions are present.

There is no such thing as a rationality that stands on its own, independent of a tradition in which that rationality operates, in other words, rationality is not one thing, there are instead rationalities. The playing of football is sustained by a tradition that has a shared presupposition; it is good to win. This is the presupposition around which all of the different parts of the club orientate themselves.

My hunch is that the reason some people like football so much is that, apart from the silly reasons mentioned above, it represents a coherent rationality. There are reasons behind everything the club does and they are oriented to the one goal, to win. We love seeing this played out. We love discussing the merits of players and coaches and clubs, it is the very stuff of life. The fact that it is artificial and useless does not detract from the fact that practical reason is demonstrated at a high level.

Sport is not the only thing in our society that demonstrates such practice. Medicine is another example of a discipline being unified by a shared presupposition, that health is better than disease.

The practice of scientific research is another such discipline in which the participants learn the virtue of detachment from experimental results to the extent that negative results are taken as seriously as positive. The presupposition that scientists share is that nature may be understood if careful and disciplined investigation is carried out.

There are, of course many traditions of rationality maintained by university and technical education as well as those learned on the building site or on the farm. The fatal mistake made by those who initiated the so called “Age of Reason” was that they did not understand that reason can only exist in a tradition that shares common premises and is directed towards certain goals.

Instead, Descartes, and Locke after, him insisted that all such traditions were untrustworthy and must be discarded to be replaced by the isolated thinking self. They held that radical scepticism cleared the way for reason to take hold and produce certainty where before no certainty was possible. But in turning their back on traditions of reason they left it without presuppositions and without content. On inspection, the only clear and certain ideas that could be attained by the isolated self were mathematical.

The effect of the autocratic epistemology advocated by Descartes and Locke was to destroy the shared presuppositions of communities and thus to remove the possibility for rational discussion.

The resulting void is called liberalism in which every man is his own orthodoxy. This move amounts to the fragmentation of human society in which justice is reduced to individual human rights; faith is reduced to spirituality;, action in life is reduced to lifestyle; and the operation of reason is reduced to serving material acquisition.

The reason that we continue to build multimillion dollar sporting complexes and we have not had a cathedral start in hundreds of years is that sport is seen as a working tradition of rationality and the Church is not.

The popularity of the anti-religious tirades of Dawkins, Dennett and Hutchinson bear adequate testimony that such is the prevailing view of at least that part of the public that reads non-fiction.

While these authors give comfort to the persecutors of faith, their criticism is spectacularly weak in that they classify all religions to be the same and are blind to the many benefits that Christianity has given to the world.

These authors flourish because of the fragmentation of Christianity into myriad pieces many of which are quite laughable. However, it must be born in mind that this fragmentation was largely due to the modern thinkers who proclaimed the new age of reason. If every man is his own orthodoxy this means that Christianity has as many forms as there are believers.

An examination of the belief of individual believers will not necessarily reveal the existence of a rational tradition. This is predictable given the decline in theological culture that has occurred over the last few hundred years. From being the queen of the sciences in the universities, theology is most often not represented at all in Australian universities. Theology is deemed to have lost its object and therefore to be defunct.

While this is a complex story in itself it is enough to say that the atheism derived from the Age of Reason has profoundly missed the point. The Christian God is not the God of Newton and Clarke who exists as immaterial substance but the God who is revealed in the history of Israel and of Christ.

If we did have a robust theological culture that projected itself into the public square what sort of rationality would it demonstrate?

If the rationality of football is based on the premise that winning is better than losing and that of medicine that health is better than disease what would be the shared premise of the Church?

I have noted that Les Murray places a dedication “To the Glory of God” in the frontispiece of his collections of poems and it seems to me that such a premise is basic to the rationality of the Church. This is the shared presupposition that is the foundation for the rationality of faith, that all we do is for the glory of God. Such a foundation has the power to include all other traditions of rationality, even that of football, and to preserve them from the idolatry that tempts them all.

The rationality that is particularly demonstrated by Christianity, while affirming other traditions of rationality, will always point them towards a horizon that they themselves cannot contain.

Unfortunately that horizon has to suffer the cuts of a thousand qualifications in order to make clear what is meant, so crowded has this category become. Every utopian thinker has his own version so it is better to cut to the chase and to state as clearly as possible what this horizon is.

The biblical view is that it is an earthly reality (this side of death) in which the truth of God will be written on every heart and confessed by every tongue. This will amount to God dwelling with his people as described in the somewhat lurid texts of the book of Revelation.

There are many, mostly poetic, descriptions of this future reality in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. They range from descriptions of a reality in which spears are turned into pruning hooks, in which the child shall play over the hole of the asp and the lion will eat straw like the ox to the descent of the New Jerusalem from heaven.

The crucial aspect about these visions of the healing of the earth and of men is that we are not the main protagonists. In an age that celebrates Promethean humanity, drunk on its own achievements, this sounds like heresy. This new reality is brought about by the Word of God which creates all things with the complicity of men.

Traditions of rationality do more than share presuppositions, their main aim is to promote acts in the world. While the disembodied rationality of Descartes and Locke are directed toward certain knowledge about the world, the traditions that we have been speaking of are about action. How do we close down the offence of the other team, what kind of players do we need to have to do so, how should we train the players to be an effective team?

Likewise, the tradition of rationality embodied in the Christian faith is directed towards action based on knowledge. It is acknowledged that such action requires training and discipline. The goal is to live the life of the disciple to the glory of God.

Notice that this goal is not self directed, happiness or fulfilment are not primary but may be secondary results of this orientation. Indeed, the baptismal liturgy makes it plain that the disciple shares the death of Christ and his resurrection; that the way to life is through death. Although this may seem, from the outside, to be the most drastic loss of self in death and enslavement, the reality is that it is the door to life and radical freedom.

When we talk this way we demonstrate the rationality peculiar to the Christian faith that the Age of Reason denied when it attempted to replace it with the rationality of universal or mathematical reason. From then on faith has been found wanting because it was tried at the court of a reason that was foreign to it just as football may be tried in the court of medical reason. The decision, in the light of the injuries received by players, would be that football was bad for health. Just so, faith was judged to be bad for understanding the world and the conflict between science and religion arose.

It is becoming apparent that in many areas of our lives government is powerless. Even though it may throw millions of dollars at a social problem like drug use, single mothers, marital breakdown, suicide and anomy often diagnosed as mental illness, nothing changes.

The only solution that we see for the moral problems that beset us is harm minimisation. Legalise the brothels and abortion, supply clean needles to drug addicts, teach minors about sexual health instead of giving them a healthy respect for what love demands. Harm reduction is the minimalist intervention that shows us that we do not have any idea of how to alleviate the problem.

We have no idea because under the dispensation of liberalism, derived from the Age of Reason, no shared premises are permitted and therefore no rational argument may occur.

Unless we agree on the connection between love and sex and procreation we will never come to a decision about abortion. Unless we agree that the dignity of women is destroyed by prostitution we will never come to an adequate decision about it. Unless we agree about the destructive influence of gambling we will continue to garner taxes from the misery of some of our citizens.

It is time that we realised that government cannot help us and that we must do it for ourselves. By us, I mean the Church. If we want to build up the rationality of faith we must do it through our own schools and theological colleges because only there will we have the autonomy that we require. Our focus cannot any longer be on the survival of the Church but on how the Church, weak as it is, can work towards the survival of our society.