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Personal Religion, Public Reality?
This book is about knowledge and about claims to knowledge in relationship to life and Christian faith. It is concerned, more precisely, with the trivialisation of faith apart from knowledge and with the disastrous effects of a repositioning of faith in Jesus Christ, and of life as his students, outside thecategory of knowledge. This is one result of the novel andpolitically restricted understanding of knowledge that hascaptured our social institutions and the popular mind overthe last two centuries in the Western world.
Serious and thoughtful Christians today find themselves in a quandary about knowledge, on the one hand, and religious belief and practice, on the other. It is a socially imposed quandary. In the context of modern life and thought, they are urged to treat their central beliefs as something other than knowledge - something, in fact, far short of knowledge. Those beliefs are to be relegated to the categories of sincere opinion, emotion, blind commitment or behaviour traditional for their social group. And yet they cannot escape the awareness that those beliefs do most certainly come into conflict with what is regarded as knowledge in educational and professional circles of public life. This conflict has profound effects upon how they hold and practise religious beliefs and how they present them to others. Those effects are most clearly seen, on the public stage, in the repositioning of Christian teachers and leaders during the last century. They have been left to preside over the rituals of one or another cultural sub-group that, from the viewpoint of received knowledge, is nothing more than a sociological phenomenon - an 'opiate' of certain people - having nothing to do with knowledge of a reality with which all human beings must come to terms.
This means that Christian teachers are left in the position of trying to coax and wheedle people into professing things and doing things by some means other than providing them knowledge of reality - hoping, perhaps, for 'divine lightning' to strike their souls and bring them around. The perceived gap between what is counted as knowledge and the offerings of Christian teachers is a reflection of the worldwide acceptance of the science and technology of the Western world, but not of the Christian framework of knowledge that gave rise to it. As Anglican theologian Lesslie Newbigin remarks, however: 'No faith can command a man's final and absolute allegiance, that is to say no faith can be a man's real religion, if he knows that it is only true for certain places and certain people. In a world which knows that there is only one physics and one mathematics, religion cannot do less than claim for its affirmations a like universal validity.'
Dallas Willard is professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California.
© 2009 Hodder Faith - purchase from the Hodder website
