Bible Stories

Rationalism here means the belief that unaided reason can reach and judge everything, drawing full metaphysical maps of the whole universe and God too. Reason can judge revelation, if there is such a thing as revelation (and reason can judge that, too). Reason is lord for the Rationalist, and God is what the philosopher declares him to be.

Christians who seek rationality by analysing what has been revealed to us, and those who think Christian belief irrational, are also called rationalists, but (as is obvious) in different senses from the above.

Here are the views of four sample Rationalists:

• Benedict Spinoza (1632-77) was an unorthodox Jew who speculated that the universe is one substance which can be called God or nature. This made him a pantheist, for whom God was an impersonal principle. He was influential, it seems, among eighteenth- century sceptics.

• Gottfried Leibniz (16461716) was a Lutheran who wrote defending belief in the trinity. He speculated that the universe consists of an infinite number of ‘monads’, simple substances without parts which are eternally active. The monads are arranged in an order of importance, with God, the original simple substance, at the top. Leibniz revamped the ‘ontological’ argument, claiming that an absolutely perfect being must necessarily exist. He also argued that this is the best of all possible worlds, because the evil in it is an integral part of a total picture of maximum good: God could not have made a finite world better. Voltaire the Deist satirized this idea in his novel Candide.

• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) used reason to prohibit metaphysical speculation, arguing that we cannot really think about anything except objects in time and space, and we land ourselves in endless contradictions if we try. He rejected each of the three well-known ‘proofs’ of God as cases in point. With them he dismissed all notions of revelation and all claims to know God, either intellectually or in relationship. In order to make sense of the morality which reason imposes, he retained a Deist view of God, as the rewarder of virtue and punisher of vice.

• Georg Hegel (1770-1831) worked out a form of what is nowadays called ‘panentheism’. He thought this was the truth which Christian doctrine expresses in a primitive and mythical way. All reality is an expression of one thing — Absolute Spirit, for which ‘God‘ is another name.

God is the ‘world-spirit’ at the heart of all that exists. Everything that happens reveals God, and all his life is poured into the world. He does not exist in distinction from the world, but only as its animating force. He is shaping the world into the complex whole through which he will one day perfectly express himself.

God after Kant

Kant’s religious philosophy integrated four things:

Rationalism: the view that reason judges everything, including its own limits;

Positivism: we know observed things only;

Agnosticism: God, not being an object in space and time, is unknowable;

Morality: the view that reason’s rules of duty are divinely sanctioned.

This philosophy was a watershed. It opened the era of modern Protestantism, in which God is studied without the conviction that he was revealed himself in the Bible, and with a vivid sense that the basic question is always, how can we credibly claim to know God at all?

Conservative Protestants in the Reformation tradition (which includes puritans, pietists and evangelicals) have been unimpressed by Kant. They have gone on believing that God has really revealed himself in the Bible, and that we can understand and know him on this basis. But, Canute- like, they could not stop the Kantian tide coming in. There have been several influential understandings of God in theology since Kant. They have all been put forward in a world where the centre has shifted from God to mankind.

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