Liberal religion is often defined as a particular stance on various issues. To be a religious liberal is to support gay rights, be pro choice on abortion, and oppose prayer in public schools. I don't agree. I have friends that wouldn't be caught dead in a conservative church and yet are strongly pro life. I also know a few evangelicals who are not at all fond of the idea of public school prayer. I think religious liberalism is really about epistemology, a fancy word that means "How do you know what you know?"
There are three basic ways we know things: authority, reason, and experience. We use each of these methods every day of our lives whether we give it much thought or not. Most of the time all three methods point in the same direction. I eat something of questionable age and origin and suddenly I don't feel so well. The physical sensation of needing to yif (an obscure term for tossing one's cookies that I picked up from a friend in upstate NY) is experiential knowledge. My thinking, "You know, I don't think I've ever seen that shade of green on a pork chop-I bet it has something to do with this," is reason at work. (In this example it probably should have been at work earlier.) The ER doctor's diagnosis of food poisoning is an example of authority at work. Experience, reason, and authority all say the same thing, "Dave, you were an idiot for eating that piece of long dead pig."
Sometimes, however, the three means of knowledge give different results. Perhaps the doctor in the above example tells me that the green pork chops are not the source of my illness. It's just a coincidence that I ate them shortly before I felt ill. The real cause is of my illness is a virus, not food poisoning. The question then arises, "Which source of knowledge is giving me the true picture-experience, reason, or authority?"
For most of human history, including the time when most of the world's major religions were being founded, authority trumped reason and experience as the best and ultimate source of knowledge. If the village chief or shaman said that something was so, then it was so. If your reason or experience said otherwise, they were clearly faulty. This way of determing truth became even more pronounced as civilization developed. The words of kings, emperors, priests, popes, creeds, and holy scriptures achieved an almost incontroveriable status. To disagree with one of these authorities was to invite a great deal of grief into one's life.
This does not mean that everyone in the pre-modern world agreed on everything. Different people and cultures had different authorities and those authorities did not always agree with each other. Moreover, even among people recognizing the same authority there could be sharp differences of opinion as to what that authority really meant. Hence the old joke about wherever you find two rabbis you will find three opinions. What was universal was the belief that an appeal to a recognized authority yielded the surest path to the truth.
This approach can best be seen in the method of debate used in Medieval Europe, known as the disputato. If the Todedo Inquisitors were debating the Augsburg Brewers, the first step was to find an authority or authorities that supported the team's position. The second step was to draw appropriate inferences and conclusions from the authority. This is known as deductive reasoning. Finally, an illustration drawn from personal experience might be used to drive home the point. It should be noted that the debate itself would be about whether or not the proper conclusions were being drawn. The authority itself could not be questioned. In other words, the rightness of St. Augustine's writings or the Chalcedonian Formula on the divine and human natures of Christ were not debatable. It was one's interpretation of those writings that was at question. Also note that experience was used in a purely illustrative role. If you had a story that illustrated your point fine. If not, no big deal.
This hierarchy of epistemology-authority, reason, and experience-in that order, defined the pre-modern period of human history. It was found not only in Christendom, but in Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese culture as well. If the Torah, Koran, Vedas, or the Buddha said something, it must be true. Then around the year 1600 something new began to develop in parts of Europe.
An Englishman by the name of Francis Bacon began to seriously question the idea of giving authority so much weight. (Others were thinking the same thing, of course, but Bacon tends to be the figure most associated with this initial challenge to authority.) He suggested that the human condition had not benefited much from the old ways of thinking and that a new approach, based upon observation (experience), theorizing (inductive reasoning), and retesting (more experience) might yield better and more useful results. We would recognize this approach as the scientific method.
The first test and clash of methods was the now famous battle over what revolved around what in space and in what shape those orbits were made. The findings of Copernicus (who predated Bacon) and others challenged the authoritative positions of the Church and the Bible. While it wasn't pretty or easy, the early scientists eventually won that battle and the modern world was born, a world based on the reversal of the pre-modern epistemological hierarchy. Now it was exerience, reason, and, where helpful, authority that would direct human affairs for at least the next several hundred years.
This paradigm shift, this different way of looking at the world and trying to discern truth, had a tremendous impact upon first Europe and then the rest of the world. Old certainties were undermined or collapsed entirely. Previously powerful institutions found themselves seriously threatened. One of those institutions was religion, especially the Christian and Jewish Faiths which found themselves on the front lines of modernity's onslaught. This in turn produced two ways of responding to the challenge. One way was to try and defend the authority of Bible, Pope, and Creed. (Exactly which of these authorities or combination thereof you wished to defend obviously depended upon whether you were Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish.) The other way was to recognize that these authorities no longer possessed all the correct answers and that other means of discerning truth needed to be found and utilized. The former option gave rise to conservative forms of religion such as Evangelicalism while the latter produced various forms of liberal religion such as Reform Judaism and the Unitarians.
In my next post I will look at some of the ways these two different appoaches to modernity play out. If you are interested in learning more about the historical rise of modern thought I would very highly recommend the Teaching Company's course on the subject. It really helped me to clarify some issues and a good deal of this post is directly indebted to it. I think it sells for about $50-60 on CD but it is very well done and well worth the monetary and temporal investment.
