Logical Positivism and Neo-Orthodoxy
By Gordon H. Clark, PhD.
In our attempts to preach the gospel, win men for Christ,
and instruct the converts in the full Biblical message, several specifically
different difficulties are encountered. They may all stem from the easy
cooperation of the evil human heart with the whiles of Satan, but they are
different in form and require different treatment.
First there are the ordinary and constant troubles which harass
every congregation in its local program. Non of us, pastor of people, are free
from frailties and failings; and our stubbornness, blindness, laziness, or just
the cares of earning a living hinder the progress of the gospel. Outside the
church, on the other hand, the people whom we wish to reach enjoy their sins,
gross or relatively refined, see no need to alter their mode of life, and display
a massive indifference to the message of salvation. Notwithstanding the full
realization that this sort of thing constitutes the bulk of the pastor’s time
consuming burdens, this article wishes to draw attention to two other matters which,
because of the pressures of immediate duties, are frequently set to one side,
sometimes even unrecognized, and all too often underestimated. Nor are these
two matters unrelated to the immediate difficulties of the congregation’s
weekly and daily work. Insofar as the massive indifference of the population,
particularly in the cities and wealthy suburbs, is a reflection of contemporary
culture, these two factors are its chief causes.
The first of these barriers to the reception of the gospel
is the philosophy of logical positivism, or, more broadly, the viewpoint of
secular scientism, also frequently called humanism. This is the contemporary
form of the older atheistic materialism; but because the modern form is more
sophisticated than the older, because it has avoided some of the earlier technical
fallacies, because it is not “materialism” in the former sense, many of the
arguments which our Christian forefathers used against their opponents do not
meet the modern problems squarely.
The second type of attack which Satan currently makes
against the Biblical position comes in the form of a seemingly devout religious
emphasis. Even Christian terminology is most often used; and for this reason
open and honest positivism may perhaps be less insidious than the second enemy.
The two of course differ widely. The one is not found to any extent in the
churches; the other is solidly entrenched in the seminaries and pulpits of most
of the large denominations. They also differ in their interest: the former
spends time on symbolic logic, mathematics, physics and the other empirical
sciences; the latter talks a great deal about theology. But though so different
in many ways, their theories of language and logic, strangely enough, present a
point of similarity which, since it precludes the possibility of an
intelligible divine revelation, is an item that deserves the careful attention
of every Christian worker. Some patience, however, is required to follow the
analysis to its conclusion.
I. Secular Humanism
Dr. Herbert Feigl, professor of philosophy at the University
of Minnesota, one of the most prominent logical positivists, has asserted that “Probably
the most decisive division among philosophical attitudes is the one between the
worldly and the other-worldly types of thought… Very likely there is here an
irreconcilable divergence. It goes deeper than disagreement in doctrine; at bottom
it is a difference in basic aim and interest.” He does not say in so many
words, “I am an atheist;” but he contrasts his own interest in “the world or
our” with those who consider “nature as an unimportant or secondary thing.” The
positivist has a “respect for the facts of experience… an experimental trial and
error attitude…” in distinction to “the more impatient, imaginative, and often
aprioristic thinkers in the tender-minded camp.” He admits that the older
materialists fell into the reductionist fallacy and held that men are nothing
but machines and mind is nothing but matter. This is an over-simplification
that is to be avoided. Yet “the empiricist will with equal decision reject
wishful thinking of all sorts, the reading into experience of features which
are incapable of test, and the multiplication of entities beyond necessity.”
Discussions on God, the Hegelian Absolute, or cosmic
teleology are “verbal magic.” The nature of language will show, so the
positivists hold, that such discussions violate rules of syntax and therefore contain
no cognitive meaning. Meaningful language, on the other hand, consists, first,
of words that refer to objects of experience, and, second, of logical and
mathematical formulas. The former words contain factual information: the latter
are purely tautological devices, useful for the more efficient handling of
factual problems. Logic and mathematics are therefore purely formal and have no
ostensive reference. These formal propositions themselves give no actual
knowledge. “If and only if assertion and denial of a sentence imply a
difference capable of observation (experiential, operational, or
experimental) test, does the sentence have factual meaning.
Since the term God has no ostensive definition, since
it does not indicate any operational procedure, since God cannot be observed,
it follows that all theology is literally nonsense. The words have no meaning.
The physics and biology of logical positivism, beyond its
theory of linguistics, and the general conflict between science and religion
cannot be convassed in any short article. Besides, must of it is already
familiar. The theological Dark Ages were scientifically sterile; when
experimentation began, progress became rapid. The Church persecuted Copernicus
and Galileo, and the Christians made fools of themselves over evolution. And
look how wonderfully contemporary scientific achievements are! Such are the
ideas, more or less clearly accepted, that influence millions of Americans
against the gospel. Without explicitly advocating atheism, the radio, the T.V.,
the magazines, and the more serious literature enforce a secular culture that
is hostile to Christianity. Whether the discussion concern juvenile delinquency
or international affairs, it is irrelevant and downright impolite to mention
God.
It is impossible here to discuss Galileo or evolution; there
is insufficient space to acknowledge the mistakes of Christians or to analyze
the fallacies of pseudo-scientism; an exposition of the philosophy of science
would be a lengthy matter. Two points only can be mentioned, and only in brief
at that.
First, if all cognitive statements, i.e. sentences that
state true, factual information, depend on observation, what is the experiment
that shows that all truth depends on experiment? Now, laboratory manipulation
of microscopes, balances, electric currents and so on is very successful an
verifying specific items of scientific information. Thus we derive Ohm’s law,
the corpuscular theory of light, and the terrors of nuclear fission. But no
observation of such specific items can ever show that “all truths depend on
observation.” If then this is so, the logical positivists’ basic principle is
itself not based on experiment and is therefore, on their own showing, devoid
of factual information. It is not a cognitive truth.
Second, and worse. If the laws of logic are tautologies and,
as A. J. Ayer says, merely arbitrary conventions which might have been
different, then there is no necessity that Peter and Paul should be two
different Apostles. It would be possible to construct a convention by which the
two men would be the same man. After all, it is merely a matter of the use of
words, and nothing prevents us from defining the words so as to make Peter and
Paul mean the same thing and to make two men the same as one man.
Unfortunately for logical positivism, however, logic is not
an arbitrary convention. No doubt we can arrange the books of a library either
through one set of numbers or through another set. Many methods of classifying
books are equally satisfactory. But there is no alternative to the law of
contradiction. Communication of thought and thought itself is impossible
without it. If therefore the positivistic distinction between formal and
factual and the restriction of cognitive mean to observational sentences result
in making revelation impossible nonsense, logical positivism itself, for the
same reason, becomes nonsense too.
II Neo-Orthodoxy
The second barrier to the successful proclamation of the
gospel in these days is Neo-orthodoxy. Quite different from logical positivism,
it is not secular nor particularly interested in science. It ism very much
interested in theology; it talks about sin and stresses the transcendence of
God; and to this extent at any rate it definitely other-worldly.
Yet though these two philosophies are so obviously
different, though their advocates are men of contrasting temperments, though
the former has no room for faith and the latter no room for anything other than
faith, they have a basic similarity in their disparagement of the law of
contradiction. As logical positivism leaves no place for theology, so Neo-orthodoxy
undermines the verbal and plenary inspiration of the Scriptures. But, likewise,
as the former turned its own principle into nonsense, so too Neo-orthodoxy is
chiefly successful in destroying its own position.
Neo-orthodoxy came into being chiefly because of the inherent
defects of Modernism. One of these defects was the difficulty encountered in
the quest of the historical Jesus. With the assumption that the Bible is
untrustworthy, various critics reconstructed the picture of Jesus in various
ways. One made him a simple teacher of morality devoid of all theology, while
another made him an eschatological fanatic.
The upshot of this is that Jesus is the man nobody knows. A
criticism that denies the historical accuracy of the Bible cannot give us the
knowledge that our spiritual needs require. To base our religion of historical
criticism, so they argue, is therefore to succumb to relativism.
In view of this many modernists tried to rise above what they
called the historical husks of Christianity and tried to find a non-historical,
abstract, universal religion of general principle. This usually turned out to
be some sort of Hegelian idealism. But the attempt foundered on the emptiness
of the abstractions and their lack of relevance to mankind’s real, existential
situation. In particular, idealism’s picture of man was too idealistic –
angelic in fact. The idea of inevitable and rapid progress was brought to a
jarring halt by a world at war.
Neo-orthodoxy aimed to steer between idealism and
relativism. The flight from time and space into a realm of eternal Ideas is
illusory, and the shifting relativism that denies a divine revelation in history
leave us with no hope. Both must be avoided. At the same time Neo-orthodoxy
also aimed to escape another dilemma. The fundamental, evangelical, or Biblical
Christians had argued: Either Jesus lived and spoke as John records, or he is
not the Christ.
The Neo-orthodox want Jesus to be the Christ, even though
they hold that most of what John says is false; and they want Christ as a
Divine Revelation in history without our knowledge of him depending upon
historical investigation.
To work out this program in detail Neo-orthodoxy, or, let us
say, Emil Brunner in particular, makes use of certain categories that involve a
view of human knowledge.
One of the categories is that of Urgeschichte, or a
history behind history. They are not historical events. They did not occur in
time. Therefore our knowledge of them does not depend on historical criticism,
nor are these doctrines then weakened by an admission that the Bible is historically
inaccurate. In one book at least, Brunner said that the events of Christ’s life
and his words are of no decisive importance to Christianity. Somewhat inconsistently
he seems later to have retreated from this extreme position of expression, for
if anything essential to Christianity hasm occurred in time, the attempt to
avoid historical investigation by a flight into Urgeschichte becomes
useless.
This category of Urgeschichte, and its companion
category of Gleichzeitkeit, or Contemporaneity, by which the historical
interval of 2,000 years is cancelled on the ground that we are contemporaneous
with a non-historical timeless event, as well as the other categories that
would take too long to discuss just now, raise two very important questions. One
of these is the role of the Bible in such a view, and the other is the nature
of human knowledge. The two are closely related.
The Neo-orthodox insist strongly on the Word of God; but by
the Word of God they do not mean the Bible. Both Barth and Brunner are liberal
critics. Brunner denies the unity of Isaiah, declares that John is
unhistorical, and, in brief, holds that the Bible is full of contradictions.
The question then arises, especially in view of his efforts to avoid history,
Of what use is the Bible today?
To answer this question Brunner relies on a distinction
between two kinds of truth. First, there is ordinary intellectual truth.
Mathematics and physics and no doubt biology deal in truths about things. These
truths can be grasped and understood by reason. They can be expressed plainly,
accurately and adequately in words. This types of truth Brunner calls: “it-truth”.
But truth about persons, or Thou-truth, is beyond intellectual apprehension. It
is not grasped in concepts and cannot be expressed in words. This is most
emphatically the case when the Thou is God. The mind of man can think or
speculate about impersonal things but a person cannot be thought; a person can
only be encountered.
Therefore divine revelation is not a revelation of doctrine
that can be thought. God does not reveal something; he reveals himself. Thus it
follows that the Word of God is a person, Jesus Christ, and not something
written about him in a book.
Before continuing with the exposition of Neo-orthodoxy, one
ought to pause over the idea of personal confrontation. It is a deceptive idea,
and the antithesis between the living Word and the written words is
unfortunate. Reflecting on our own experiences of other persons, can we
honestly maintain this distinction? How do we come to know other people? For
Brunner, a person cannot be thought he can only be encountered or met. This is
surely not true. When we meet other people, we do not stand dumb before them.
We and they speak. We use words. By considering the meaning of the words we
come to know them. We reveal ourselves in words and concepts. Any other sort of
meeting would be most unsociable.
Now, if Brunner deprecates words and concepts, and stakes
everything on an unintelligible encounter, what role can he assign the Bible?
What is the use and value of its words? What is their status? Brunner describes
Peter when he fact Jesus and said, Thou art the Christ. This is
Thou-truth. Then Peter turns to us and says, He is the Christ. This latter is
It-truth; it is no longer Peter’s answer to God’s call, but a reflective
statement about a personal encounter. It is doctrine; it is not revelation.
Doctrine is of course important. Peter had to tell us about
his meeting with Christ. That Peter and the Apostles, in describing their
encounter, make contradictory and incorrect statements about Christ is
unimportant, for their aim was not to present a system of truth, it was to
produce faith in the person to whom they were speaking. The Gospel writers
never intended to give us history; Jesus probably never said a word of what
John reports; but John gives us a picture of Jesus as seen by faith, and it was
to produce faith that the Apostles wrote and preaches.
On the other hand, one may now pause for a moment to ask a
question. If the Neo-orthodox allow for a divine inspiration of Peter’s
confession; if indeed the Holy Spirit guided Peter to say, “Though art the
Christ;” then this is a case of verbal inspiration. Now if verbal inspiration
is possible for verbs in the second person, verbal inspiration would seem to be
equally possible for verbs in the third person. But this in effect brings back
the orthodox dilemma: either the gospel is true, or else Jesus is not the Christ.
There is more to be said about Brunner’s use of the Bible, but to prepare for
this further material it is necessary to turn to the second problem mentioned
above, viz., his view of logic and human reason.
Reason, according to Brunner, is valid only within the
sphere of It-truth. Within this sphere, however, he is willing to call reason a
most valuable gift of God. He praises it as much as any rationalist could wish.
Yet, as has already been indicated, Thou-truth is not
intellectually grasped and is not susceptible to rational categories.
When Brunner sets faith against reason, he does not mean
that faith includes a certain amount of conceptual information about the
Lordship of Christ and his resurrection from the dead, and in addition to these
concepts that faith goes further and included other elements as well. Brunner
does not mean this. Unfortunately he holds that faith must curb reason. To
follow out the implications of a principle in physics is well and good; but the
laws of logic, he says, lead us astray in religion.
But if this is so, how then can we tell when, if ever, to
draw logical conclusions in religious matters? In one case Brunner argues very
logically that God must have created man righteous, for otherwise there could
have been no fall, and if there had been no fall there could be no redemption.
Since further Brunner does not accept the historicity of Genesis, it is by logic
only that he can speak of a fall. Then too in arguing against Schleiermacher,
Brunner uses logic by pointing out the contradiction between the insistence on
the absoluteness of Christianity and the discovery of a common element in all
religions. Sometimes, then, Brunner is logical.
But when Brunner turns from Schleiermacher to Calvin, his
faith must curb his logic. In discussing Romans IX he asserts that Paul was not
speaking of Jacob and Esau, but of Israel and Edom, and that God had punished
the Edomites for their sins. He overlooks the fact that Paul referred explicitly
to a time before Jacob and Esau were born, a time before either of them had
done any good or any evil. If we drew valid inference from Rom. IX, says
Brunner, we would arrive at the doctrine of double predestination. This he says
is inconsistent with God’s love. Therefore we must choose between love and
logic. We cannot have both. Hence, says Brunner, there is nothing logical about
Romans IX; election is illogical; and because the Bible teaches election it is
consistently illogical.
This decision to be logical when refuting one man and
illogical when refuting another, the practice of drawing conclusions when it
suits one’s purpose and of curbing implications when they are embarrassing,
leads to or is based on a strange view of the Bible.
It was said before that the Apostles in speaking or in
writing to us had no intention of being historically accurate but were trying
merely to give us the faith that came to them in their encounter with God. The
Bible therefore is not the words of God. The Bible is not itself a revelation.
The encounter was the revelation, and the Bible merely points to the encounter
as revelation. The rational or intellectual content of the Bible’s message is
not the real thing, it is not what we really want. We want what it points to.
Therefore it is immaterial whether its message is false or
true. God is not restricted to truth. Brunner explicitly says, “Gott kann, wenn
er will, einem Menschem sogar durch falsche Lehre sein Wort sagen” (Warheit als
Begegnung, p. 88). In English: “God can, if he wishes, speak his word to a man
even through false teaching.”
If these words of Brunner are pointers, then shall we not
say they point to a God who tells lies?
Astounding as this is, what better could be expected of a
view that repudiates logic and rationality? What better could come from an
anti-intellectualism that uses and discards the law of contradiction at will?
For it is the law of contradiction, the intellectual categories of thought, and
nothing else, that establishes the distinction between truth and falsehood.
Brunner may indeed say that he accepts this or that Christian
doctrine. For example, he professes to believe in the Incarnation. His favorite
quotation from the Bible is, “The Word became flesh.” But of what use is it to
believe in the incarnation? If God reveals himself in falsehoods, perhaps the
incarnation, even though revealed, is a false doctrine. Or, again if the Word
became flesh, did the Word also dwell among us? That is did the Word have an
historical life span, or is the incarnation some non-historical event of Urgeschichte
with which we are contemporaneous? At any rate, the intellectual content of the
doctrine, its meaning or significance, the concept of Incarnation is only a
pointer to something unintelligible that cannot be understood or thought about.
Or, again if the accounts of the Bible are untrustworthy, if the Apostles wrote
as fallible men, what reason could there be for choosing and emphasizing this
verse rather than any other? And finally, believe the incarnation as we may, it
cannot control our thought, for we are at liberty as we choose, to accept its
implications or to reject them. There is no compulsion to be logical; quite the
reverse, we are positively obliged to be illogical.
This, I submit, is an excellent way of denying the doctrine of verbal inspiration, an excellent way of divorcing religion from history, an excellent way of discarding unwanted parts of the Bible; but it is no way at all to bring people a message of good news, it is no way at all to publish events that have actually happened, it is no way at all to say something that can be understood, it is no way at all to proclaim the truth of God as it is in Christ Jesus.
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