Ch2 Sect 5 Lutheran Dogmatics

Martin Luther who is known as the father of the reformation, the one who pinned the Ninety-Five Theses or disputes against the Catholic Church, was not, as Bavinck tells us the first Lutheran Dogmatician. That honor belongs to Philipp Melanchthon and his Loci Communes. However, Luther’s rediscovery of the Gospel of Grace, gave new life to the Church and provided the spark to the Reformation that had been building for years. With the reformation beginning in the early 1500’s and the Enlightenment or Age of Reason beginning in a hundred years, it is not surprising to see the influence German modern philosophy had on the Lutheran Church. Just as Immanuel Kant revolutionized philosophy by making the human mind the center of knowledge (more on this below) so did Schleiermacher who considered religion as the enjoyment of God in feeling, and a feeling that leads to desire for community. Just a side not, today there is a vast number of evangelicals who speak of the gospel as a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ”, and negate any talk of the assembly of believers for worship, for discussion concerning “Community”. This Ghost of Schleiermacher is alive and well!

Immanuel Kant was the Father of modern Idealism and his contribution of philosophy was that of Transcendental Idealism. Kant was looking for the principle, the foundation, or better what are the preconditions for human intelligibility. Kant was following on the heels of David Hume who destroyed science and philosophy by asserting that “Cause and Effect” are not observed but rather are assumed by a habit of the mind. Hume suggested that we can only assume that the cause a cue ball has by striking the eight is the effect of moving the eight ball. There is no philosophical or scientific ground in which we can prove or base our knowledge the effect the cue ball has on the eight ball. How do you know that when the cue ball strikes the eight ball, the effect of the eight ball moving is not caused by a butterfly flapping its wings in Canada? You don’t see the “cause”, you can’t touch the “cause” or put it in your refrigerator. There is no evidence for the cause other than our mind expecting the eight ball to move once struck by the cue ball. With this line reasoning Hume essentially destroyed science and faith, since he essentially showed you can’t know anything and can only be skeptical about everything. Well Kant came along to save science and make room for faith, and he did this by turning Hume’s problem of the habit/imagination of the mind into the solution. Here is how Kant did it, I will illustrate in the following dialogue.

Hume: You can’t know anything, since cause and effects are just habits or imaginations of the mind. So we cannot know for certain that for any event A that B was the cause. Causations is not an empirical object found in the world, causation is just the imagination of the mind. Therefore science is dead and there is no room or need for faith. Kant: Mr. Hume, I have a solution, I can save science and make room for faith! Hume: How ? Kant: It is the mind that is the source of causation.

This is absolutely the most hilarious exchange in the history of man. What Hume says is the problem, “Causation is not found in the world, its just a habit of the mind”, Kant says is the solution. “The mind is the source of causation”. Essentially what Kant did was give to philosophy a Copernican revolution in thought. Just as Copernicus showed that the earth is not stable and everything orbits around it, but rather the earth is active, moving, in an orbit of its own, Kant similarly wanted to demonstrate that the mind is not passive in receiving knowledge but rather the mind is active and constructing knowledge through our experiences. The empiricists on hand such as Hume, Lock, Berkley would say that all knowledge could be traced back to an experience, the rationalist such as Descarte, Spinoza, Leibniz would maintain that knowledge can be traced to innate ideas, or some combination of experience and innate ideas. Its not, that the mind that conforms to object’s out in the world, but the objects conform to the understanding of the mind. The mind is active in constructing knowledge. We don’t know things in the world as they really are, we know them as our mind actively provides information about objects. Just a side not, notice this is an anti-realism strain of thought. Because we don’t know things as they really are, we only know things as they appear to us by the active intellect of the mind.

So that is how Kant saved science, now what about faith? He maintained there was a God, and that there was a spiritual realm, but we could not know anything about it, because the mind can only construct knowledge as we experience and come into contact with physical objects. But we all have a feeling of duty and morality, and there is where he made room for faith. His philosophy has been summed up by the following, “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”.

So what does all this have to do with Lutheranism? Well, Scheielermacher took Kant’s philosophy baptized it and came up with his theology of God in feeling, and true pietism is a feeling of utter dependence on God. Since there are know objective truths to be known, all we have to go on is feeling. This is of course is a far cry to where Martin Luther begun the reformation on the objective truth that salvation from God is revealed in the Bible Alone, which is by God’s Grace Alone, received by Faith Alone, in Christ Alone, all to God’s Glory Alone.