The Duel Continues: Sam Harris Sees No Progress in Religion

Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century.  The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of faith. (emphasis mine) His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about God.  Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is the center of the cosmos, ... his religious ideas would still be beyond reproach.  There are two explanations for this:  either we perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago- whil our knowledge of all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate - or religion, being the mere maintenance of dogma (emphasis mine), is one area of discourse that does not admit of progress.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith, p. 22
Cross posted at Gadfly's Muse  and UTI

As is often the case, it is the critics of Christianity that force us to confront our own inadequacies.

What Sam Harris has done here is ignore a few things and then commit the logical error of the "excluded middle".  I will deal with that.  But I find that we Evangelicals far too often agree with him.  It is astonishing to me how many Christians talk and act as if our "deposit of faith, handed down to us through the generations" consists of a few propositions preached by the early church and retained in relative purity ever since.  Sam Harris is in error because Christians have not only allowed but actually promoted the idea that God stopped leading His Church in the developing understanding of His Gospel after John the Evangelist died.  Christians don't see progress in their own history and therefore shy away from any responsibility for continuing and advancing that progress in our own times.

First:  Let's deal with Harris' basic position.  What Harris fails to realize is that the fourteenth century Christian was heir to a multitude of church councils wherein God lead His Church to an improved and much more penetrating understanding of Jesus' nature, His work of atonement and the manner and extension of spiritual discipleship.  He stood on Anselm's shoulders and look back at Augustine, Tertullian and the rest.   Further more, the fourteenth century Christian was not content with this.  In the fourteenth century the undercurrents were present that would lead to the Reformation, probably the single most important and far reaching cultural upheaval in the last 2000 years. 

Beyond the fourteenth century came Leibniz and Newton, intensely religious men whose work in science were outgrowths of their Christian world view.  The progress toward modern ideas of civil government , social equity, and world-community cannot be separated from the force of religious thought in Holland (democracy, religious toleration), the United States, and the pressure to reach the world through evangelism.  The Christian religion is not just a deposit of settled doctrine.  It is a living, vibrant energizing force which has confronted the status-quo in every age, forced those who were motivated by its precepts to critique the world around them and motivated them to deal with those issues in a manner which reflected their own growth in understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What I am saying here is that , though the fourteenth century Christian, might hold certain doctrines in common with the modern Christian, he would not have the benefit of the subsequent dialog and therefore would be astonished at the progress in the faith accomplished since his time.

Thus there is a third possible explanation for the scenario posed by Mr. Harris.  The third possible explanation is that the man would recognize that he did not  know "more or less" everything there is to know about God at all.  He would confess that God had lead His church into an even greater understanding of what He has accomplished in Jesus Christ and how the Kingdom of God which Jesus ushered in was to interact and be expressed in the lives of His disciples.

But, that does leave us with the uncomfortable fact that too often we Evangelicals not only agree with Mr. Harris but seem to intransigently defensive in maintaining it.  It seems particularly so among my brothers in the Reformed Faith who seem to think that other than the tinkering we did with it in the 1700's, that the Westminster Confession of Faith is the Sunnum Bonum of all creedal formulations, that the work is done and nothing is to be added or subtracted from it unless all the penalties listed in the book of Revelation shall fall on our heads.

Such ought not to be.  There is much work to be done.  Christians need to be not only defending against the arguments raised by the secular culture of our time, but we ought to be advancing the faith even more.  There are crucial issues of ecclesiology facing us today and we ought not to shy away from the hard work of addressing those questions.  We should seriously consider modifications to our ancient creeds, both to expand the questions being addressed as well as removing  some of the more obscure phrasing.

We need to recognize that the world around us has a legitimate right to demand that we put forth authoritative statements regarding our views.  Statements which should distinguish the boundaries of Evangelicalism in a more definitive manner such that the confusion about who is a Christian, how is such a person to be recognized and how are we are to be distinguished from the plethora of religious ideas which hide under our common label, is removed.

But this all requires work, painstaking, exact work.  And it is work that will never get started unless we stop agreeing with Mr. Harris.