Yesterday I wrote that, apart from the Judeo-Christian heritage, religion has been mainly about bringing life into conformity with the cycles of nature. Ordering of lives is achieved through adherence to a set of stories and rituals that reflect these patterns. The stories and rituals give order to existence.
The idea of processing from a beginning to an end emerges in Judaism. Revelation and law were given at a point in the past, and we “look back” to the codes written long ago to determine appropriate action today as we proceed through time, waiting for God’s final act. Islam has had this as a central element as well.
Jesus was completely disorienting. He reoriented our vision from compliance with the past to compliance with the future. Jesus gave a vision of the future and called his followers to live according to that vision. Yes, he gave some prescriptive guidance, but the organizing principle is a vision of a future reality, namely the Kingdom of God and the new creation.
Not only did Jesus orient us toward the future, but the very means through which he passed down his vision ensured that we would have to be active participants in creating and realizing the vision. Despite the endless attempts by some fundamentalist influences in Christianity to use Scripture as a codified instruction manual for human behavior, the Scripture resiliently resists being boxed in this way. Scripture is an unfolding story with a beginning and end. The author invites humanity to enter the story and participate in its completion. One must interact with the story and understand each portion of Scripture in terms of its own context and the context of the larger biblical narrative. It requires wrestling with a general ordering of the world in a future age. One has to deduce and infer appropriate action. In other words, instead of executing directives, we must actively reason our way to good decisions based on a story revealed by a reasonable God.
The necessity of reason in discerning God’s will has had ramifications beyond theology. The discipline of reason eventually turned to the investigation of the material world. The world God created must be organized according to orderly principles if God is a reasonable God. Genesis 1 tells us that God is behind and before all the created order. Passages like Psalm 104 teach us that capricious gods or powers do not run the natural order beyond God’s control. God superintends the workings of the natural order. Scripture also clarifies that God is not part of the natural order and material objects are not to be worshiped.
Therefore, because there is a God-given order to nature, we can systematically study and test ideas against observations until we determine the actual order of things. This belief that the world could be systematically studied and that natural objects are not possessed of will and volition gave rise to science. Without the discipline of reasoning our way to God’s vision, one must question whether scientific rationality would ever have emerged.
This emergence of reason also led to the modern notion of risk. In ancient times, people would embark on a journey and not be heard from again. What happened to them? The gods or the fates did them in. Maybe locals in a distant place invoked magic against them. Whatever the case, people were simply helpless in the face of such events. However, with the emergence of the Judeo-Christian ethos, it became assumed that options could be studied, risks quantified, and decisions could be made that improved success in complex endeavors. The first widespread application began in the 1400s as sea trade began to expand, and investors sought to maximize and protect their investments through insurance mechanisms. This was crucial to the emergence of capitalism in the modern world, which at its core is about assessing the financial risks of competing decisions.
Leave a Reply