Michael Horton's Historical Faith: Christianity Today Keeps The Wall Up

Early in December, Christianity Today prepared for Christmas by publishing Michael Horton's essay entitled "Why We Need Jesus."  The subtitle was "Reason and morality cannot show us a good and gracious God. For that, we need the Incarnation."

Horton's thesis is,

Biblical faith emphasizes that we cannot ascend to God on our own; rather, the God of the Bible descends down to us. Our inner self is not the playground of "spirit," but the haunted plains on which we build our towers of Babel. In other words, our hearts are idol factories, in bondage to sin and spin. As Jeremiah declared, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9). We look for a god we can manage rather than the God who is actually there [. . . . ] In other words, our hearts create spiritualities, therapies, and programs that arise out of our natural knowledge of the law, which we distort. Outside our hearts, and at the core of special revelation, is the surprising God, known uniquely in his Son.

To people hostile to Christianity, this will be twaddle from beginning to end, of course.  To Christians it will be no more than the obvious truth: sliding along the continuum between the Fall of Humankind and Calvin's total depravity of humankind, Western Christianity holds human degeneracy to be an empirical fact.

What interests me about Horton's essay is his articulation of the relationship between human reason and faith: 

Many people today act like someone created a peace treaty between reason and faith after reason won the war. Reason cedes territory to faith, as long as faith relinquishes its rational claims. Reason is in the realm of public, objective truth, while faith is relegated to the realm of private experience and personal therapy. So, responding [to an acquaintence] who said faith is "whatever works for you," I said, "Would you say that about World War II—that it happened for me but not for you?" Of course, the resurrection of Christ is more significant than the Battle of the Bulge, but no less historical [. . . .]   The gospel tears down the wall between reason and faith, public and private, objective and subjective truth, by its very content. We need special revelation because we need to be saved. That puts the matter squarely on the historical claims of the gospel: the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The whole question of a self-revealing God is taken out of the merely private realm; it's public truth. [Emphasis added]

Horton, who teaches theology at Westminster Seminary in California, raises here a strange argument.  It seems as though he is saying that the Resurrection "happened."  Fair enough.  But it's not immediately clear why one would think so.   The Battle of the Bulge happened and can be demonstrated on reasonable grounds to have happened. Horton knows that the Resurrection and the Battle of the Bulge are of two different kinds of case if we are to distil the matter down to reasons for belief in each: to claim that a battle happened in Europe is neither an extraordinary claim nor closed to inspection on the evidence.  To claim that a man rose from the dead is extraordinary and opaque to evidence.   (Horton does appeal briefly to the argument from prophecy.  See here and especially here for my take on the weaknesses of that argument.)

Consequently this claim to the Resurrection's historicity is precisely why "people today act like someone created a peace treaty between reason and faith after reason won the war."  The Battle of the Bulge confronts the skeptic with objective evidences, if the skeptic takes the trouble to look at them, while the Resurrection confronts the skeptic with admittedly biased testimony.  ("I have written these things," says one gospel writer, "that you might believe.")

Horton though has in his sites the radical importance of the claim of the incarnation: that is, it is absolutely imperative in his view that Christianity makes a specific historical (that is, objective) claim, and I think he is right to think this.  It strikes me as unfortunate therefore that he chooses the Resurrection as the location of this history.  For while the Resurrection is surely the central Christian claim, the most elevating and important among the doctrines of Christianity, it is hardly "historical" in the sense that the Battle of the Bulge would be.

In other words, any truth-claim lays itself on historical facts: the claim that there are fairy giraffes with butterfly wings, for instance, depends on whether there is any historical reason to think FGWBW's exist.  That you cannot prove that there are FGWBW's is striking and important: it lowers the currency of "historical fact" in that case, just as one's inability to prove the Resurrection in historical terms lowers its fact-value.

Putting it another way, we are entitled to ask, "Yes, but why would I be contrained by reason to agree with you?"  when he argues that

The gospel is wildly improbable—except that it happened. The gospel is not the conclusion of a logical syllogism or an intuition of our universal moral experience. It's not a timeless truth. Rather, it is the announcement that "when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons" (Gal. 4:4-5).

Why would one believe the claim that something "wildly improbable" happened in history without extraordinary evidence?   It becomes very difficult to see how his understanding of faith and reason sustains itself: he seems to be saying that whatever reason says, faith in these wildly improbable things just justifies itself.  Faith trumps reason.

Certainly it is the case that all people live by some sort of faith: but when it comes to saying that "something wildly improbable happened in history," whether it's the existence of Prester John's kingdom or the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are seriously handicapped at knowing what level of credence to give that something in the absence of clear evidence. 

Horton continues:

The question for Christians, and anyone seeking to know God, is: On what basis can we know and trust God? And how can we trust that we know God, and have a knowledge that emboldens us to speak the gospel in our culture and live in a way that befits it? [. . . . ]  Special revelation is precisely where the Christian faith breaks down the wall our culture has erected between faith and reason. We see this uniquely in the Incarnation, as Christ takes on human flesh, and first, by the way in which God delivers this special revelation.

I couldn't disagree more with him: special revelation is precisely where Christianity erects a wall between faith and reason.  It says, "Truth claims can come with no verification whatsoever, with no checks in the observable world of cause and effect."  Only the convinced can see the truth of them, which I could say about anything, including fairy giraffes with butterfly wings.

Unless you have something you can show me right here, right now.

So to sum up, Horton is right that Christianity's really interesting feature is its historicity.  But I think he gets one thing wrong as an apologist.  You cannot locate that historicity in a misty past event, the Resurrection.  It must be located in a clear present event.

The real historicity of Christianity lies in just as spooky a realm, and one far more frightening to most Christians: it lies in the ongoing radical life of love, and in the miraculous, the freaky shit that has haunted the Church for two thousand years.  The resurrection might or not have happened, but its evidences do not really lie open to view, unless it's through miracles. 

About love I won't say too much.  But the miraculous bears looking at.

St. Paul in Galatians 3:5 explicitly uses miracles as the evidence that the faith of the Galatian church is connected to historical reality.  It must be so still, I think.  For while miracles in the name of Jesus can easily turn into the charlatan shows of Kenneth Copeland and others, I really do fail to see how one is to take seriously the staggering claim that God raised Jesus from the dead on the conflicted testimony of first century partisans.

Evangelicalism is apt to shy away from miracles as a rational display that there is a living God who operates through the name of their risen savior.  Can't blame them, really... such things require an intense commitment to the God who is free.

It has haunted me for years that Christianity is thoroughly committed, in so many of its doctrines, to enslaving God.