Evangelical Tradition
I am exploring aspects of the evangelical tradition. I want to set some of its emphases within a broad philosophical concern for the role of feeling in human life. This means that the central event nature of Christian faith that we find in evangelicalism is set aside for a moment. This event separates into two. One is its focus upon the event of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ that has a reconciling and redeeming impact upon the relationship between God and humanity. The second is the inward event through the work of the Spirit in a human life today that allows the person to participate in the saving work of God in Christ. The validity of these two events would require a separate philosophical and theological discussion.
My concern here is to show that that evangelical in interest in feeling, which unities it to a broader mystical and pietist tradition, has some validity philosophically.
Our notion of reason needs to expand. It includes reasoning, and thus the capacity for logical thinking and the capacity for inference (drawing conclusions from premises). It includes conceptualization as an expression of the intellect that emerges out of sense perception. Since both thought and feeling can be irrational, our notion of reason needs to embrace thinking and feeling as important dimensions of our experience. Faith or trust is as deeply personal activity as is rationality and thus rationality embraces faith as well. We are not simply computers that dispense information and ideas. Thus, there are cases when it is reasonable for us to believe and trust where we are not able to adequate logic, inference, or conceptualization. The context of reasoning is the mutuality of us as persons, identified well by Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel. Personhood and sense of self arises out of relatedness. Implicit in the mutuality of the personal is a principle of personal growth and the rhythm of withdrawal and return. the original field of interpersonal relatedness, the withdrawal of the individual from the field into the self to develop identity and individuality, in the return of the individual to the interrelation of persons to enrich it with the fruits of individuality and to endow individuality with its fullness and significance, is central to this rhythm. This suggests that we are first acting and engaged agents of relatedness, and thus, thinking follows this activity, which may well be rational, even if our action arises out of feeling and faith more so than conceptualization. Our withdrawal from relatedness provides the opportunity to reflect rationally upon our activity and thereby either verify or amend that behavior. Rational activity is self-transcendent in that it is both free and it reacts to the drives, impulses, and instincts of the other. Our capacity to act irrationally is part of our human rational nature, which in turn implies an agent who is free, finite, and fallible. Still, irrationality is a subordinate aspect of reason. For rationality ought to predominate over irrationality, keeping the latter in potency, we should always act rationally rather than irrationally. We apply rationality to matters involving action/behavior and the practical, feeling/emotion, and the intellectual/conceptual. Science is the obvious mode of conceptual rationality, the aesthetic is the mode of rationality in feeling, and morality is the mode of rationality in action. Philosophy is the synthesis of feeling and the conceptual. Since rationality is deeply relational, its structure is determined by the object to which it relates. The sub-personal realms of the inanimate or the biological, the relatedness of human beings in political and economic systems, the validity or falsity of moral action, and the supra-personal relation to ultimate reality (the spiritual realm or the divine). Each will require a different form of personal engagement of faith, feeling, logic, inference, and conceptualization. Since moral action arises from the field or interrelation of persons as persons, its primary purpose is to promote and maintain the good or well-being, the rationality or transcendence, of persons in relation. Freedom implies acquired freedom, which signifies two interrelated qualities that of being oneself, and that of self-mastery. Equality denotes the personal rather than the net the natural, social, or legal equality. Personal equality simply denotes the intention of the self to treat their personal other as a person and with the respect that is commensurate with the dignity of a person and thus as Kant put it to treat the other person as an end and never simply as a means. Justice is giving the other person what is due as a matter of right. The concern of religion also emphasizes human well-being, rationality, and community. It goes beyond it in three significant respects. First religion is unlike morality in that it is explicitly and necessarily based upon the human relation to God. The second difference between religion and morality is that religion involves the celebration of community especially in rituals and ceremonies. And thirdly religion involves reference to the realm of the Infinite and Eternal, what we might also call ultimate reality or the divine and the relation of the finite and temporal to it. [1]
We reveal the brokenness of the human condition as we clearly see the anxiety and dread (Kierkegaard) with which human beings approach their lives. Anxiety is a form of bondage. Our anxiety about the future creates bondage in the present. It becomes a prison. Anxiety leads us to grasp at things that cannot give us the security we desire.[2] Isolating the Infinite and Eternal as a context for our personal lives, our striving for self-fulfillment takes on a desperate character. Our legitimate striving for self-fulfillment becomes excessive desire and focus upon self. We care for self and security, but the striving then becomes an unhealthy form of self-love.[3] Anxious striving for wholeness invites us to grasp at transitory and finite things to give us the wholeness for which we long.[4] It becomes a deforming of our lives. It becomes the source of despair, care, and aggressiveness. We seek recognition by others at any price. Our brief time and limited space become our sole definition of any fulfillment we can expect to have in this life. Further, the uncertainty of the future leads to anxiety. Anxiety keeps us from a thankful and confident approach to life. It diverts our attention from the possible wholeness of life. It reflects our basic alienation from the world. We fall from our true and authentic life. Our experience of everydayness and idle talk reflect boredom of life. It shows itself in slothful approaches to life. It reveals our misery. It leads to seclusion and isolation. Anxiety reveals the basic alienation we have from our true and authentic self, from others, and from our world. The state of alienation makes itself known to us in feelings of malaise, discontent, anxiety, and general depression; alienation makes its presence known by means of such feelings. Such feelings reveal the attempt to find our identity through preoccupation with self. Our anxious striving for personal identity reveals the brokenness of human existence. Our anxious striving becomes dread when destiny discloses the real possibility that Nothingness is the end.[5] Mood discloses our brokenness and our striving toward wholeness.
Our alienation is a form of bondage that we experience in individual and corporate ways. Political power tends toward its absolute exercise over the lives its citizens. Money is a form of alienation in that it reduces humanity to an abstraction. Technology expresses the attempt to create a world that is exclusively human, betraying its spiritual implications. Religious ideology is alienating because it can dream up an illusory supreme being out of all that we think is best about us as individuals. It degrades itself toward formulas, dogmas, and morality. Religion becomes an opium at that point because it impedes action by causing individuals and groups to transfer human possibilities to another being. Religion becomes the moral sanction of this alienated world. Civilizations advanced in democracy, science, and technology still reveal alienation and therefore bondage. Socialism or capitalism do not change this situation. The tendency of each of these alienating forces toward totality makes them spiritual forces that seek to place people in bondage. Although humanity creates these forces, they develop a life of their own that places participants in bondage. As the struggle to provide the basics recedes into the background, questions regarding meaning and purpose assert themselves. We experience the alienation brought about by loss of ends or reasons for which we engage daily life. Science would focus upon the ways in which genetics and culture determine us. Human history has focused upon the constant profound needs for security, conformity, adaptation, happiness, economy of effort, and so forth. Many would gladly sacrifice freedom to gain these conditions. Little wonder that existentialism as a philosophy focused upon the experience of the absurd. The first step toward genuine freedom is the recognition of the forces of bondage.[6]
Our anxiety and alienation heighten with the prospect of our death. We approach death with fear. True, birth and death have facticity to them. Yet, we wrestle with the meaning of both. We rarely take the time to reflect upon meaningfulness. Instead, we seem content with malaise, discontent, anxiety, and depression that express our alienation. We could receive the gift of our allotted time. We have received the loan of life (Barth). It has its limits. The loan is full of meaning. We need to receive the loan seriously and joyfully. The loan begins with birth and death removes the loan. The period in which we have the loan is our unique opportunity to seize and use the loan. The allotted time is a precious gift. The challenge is to use it fully.
The struggle between actualizing our true self and finding a reliable basis for trust on the one hand with our anxiety and alienation from the world on the other, provides significant background for understanding the evangelical tradition.
[1] Walter G. Jeffko, “A Personalist Concept of Human Reason,” International Philosophical Quarterly XIV (June 1974), 161-80.
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