Ancient Modernism and Intellectual Individualism

I've been preoccupied with heresy lately because a man I'd consider one of my intellectual mentors recently revealed himself to be a thorough heretic. Less than a year ago, Jack Crabtree of Gutenberg College in Eugene, OR issued a series of lectures at his church (Reformation Fellowship) condemning most of the core orthodox teachings of Christianity and putting in their place a variety of resuscitated heresies.

When I was a teenager, I attended a philosophy discussion group led by Jack and his brother David, in which we read texts and talked about them. I'm guessing we were exposed to some weird ideas (in retrospect), but the value was that we learned how to analyze texts and form ideas, how to interact with the ideas of others, and how to think logically. I'd give my dad most of the credit for my ability to do those things, but many of the skills he'd taught me were focused and honed in the discussion group, and I was forced to defend my statements by people who often didn't agree with me.

In light of this new development, I can see that one of Jack's purposes for the group was to impart a Greek sense of intellectual individualism to each of us, to force us to wrestle with every idea we held and to reconcile them all into a workable whole. On one hand this is an ability every Christian needs to foster: there's too much shoddy thinking, lack of thinking, and pernicious thinking in the Church, and we need to counter it with good theology, good philosophy, and good logic.

At the same time, we need to fit our thinking in to the broader picture already assembled by those Christians who've gone before us. I'm not suggesting we ought to blindly accept everything handed to us by our pastors and elders, by Christian thinkers, even by the Church fathers. No one is infallible, and everyone makes errors. Scripture is our final standard for truth, and it is that rather than human dogmatism to which we submit.

I am suggesting that human fallibility spreads beyond the Church fathers or contemporary pastors and includes every one of us, no matter how intellectually astute we find ourselves to be. We cannot hope to assemble a coherent theory of everything independent of everyone else, not only because we're fallible, but because we're finite, limited, and chronically subjective even when we believe ourselves to be wholly objective. The second someone says they've finally figured everything out, I immediately become suspicious of everything they say subsequently.

Which is how Jack Crabtree began his lectures (available here), positing that he was sitting in a coffee shop when suddenly the whole "Christianity thing" made sense to him. Unfortunately, his "Christianity thing" excludes a meaningful doctrine of the atonement and justification, calls our sin nature "a philosophical fiction" and claims "it doesn't exist," eliminates the beautiful doctrine of the Trinity, and imparts to Jesus mere God-consciousness rather than actual deity. All this is the result, not of humble submission to Church doctrine tempered with arduous and careful study, but of a desire to simply "make sense" of the Bible in purely rationalist terms.

There are plenty who would simply retreat from this extreme individualism into a dogmatism that is deaf, blind, and speechless. As a Reformed and Presbyterian Christian I acknowledge and even celebrate a certain kind of dogmatism, but only a dogmatism that is informed and able to interact with traditions outside itself. The insular dogmatism is certainly not the right response to Jack's radical individualism, mainly because it provides no basis for showing him his error.

The proper response, what I would call the ancient modern solution to this problem, is to admit the necessity of personal study while submitting to the standards for doctrinal orthodoxy handed down through all true Christian traditions. To presume that the entire Church has been wrong for two thousand years, and that one man can finally discover the truth found in Scripture all by himself in the 21st century, simply doesn't make sense. He claims we've been bullied and forced to believe the doctrine of the Trinity, but I challenge you to show me one person who believes in the Trinity who doesn't do so of their own accord.

Do any of us fully understand the doctrine of the Trinity? No, absolutely not. Does that mean it isn't a true doctrine? Only if human reason is the final standard for truth. But if you understand God to be an infinite transcendent being, whose self-revelation in the Bible includes both paradox and mystery, it only makes sense that there would be essential truths about his nature and character that would be impossible for fallen, finite, subjective human beings to grasp entirely. Jack's real sin, therefore, isn't his accusation against the Church, it's his presumption that he can know and understand everything the Bible proclaims about Yahweh, and that he can do so entirely on his own.