Thinking Faith blogs

Chris R. Armstrong, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis (Brazos Press, 2016)

From time to time at FiSch we review books that might either help you with the task of integrating your particular work with your faith, or which themselves are the result of that integration. This book, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians, falls into the second category. Written by Wheaton professor Chris R. Armstrong, it aims to counter the unhelpful assumptions and generalisations often made about medieval Christianity by evangelicals, and to open up some of the riches which this age of the Church can offer today.

As a doctoral student researching medieval religious literature, of course I’m somewhat biased when I say this book is important! Centrally, though, I think the book is a helpful (though not perfect) example of historical work done for the church, in a way which is well-grounded and researched but still accessible to the non-specialist Christian. Armstrong is explicit, even polemical, in his belief that ‘we must derive lessons for today from the study of history’, and he’s convinced that the view of the medieval Church current in modern evangelical circles, as well as being lacking in historical accuracy, is preventing us learning valuable lessons.

The book begins with a methodological chapter which is perhaps its most academic section. Armstrong discusses (from a chiefly US-based perspective) the reasons why the medieval period gets such short shrift from many modern Christians, taking us through a brief history of the developments that led to the impression, rife among evangelicals, that real Christianity essentially slept between the early church and the Reformation (or even until the eighteenth-century revivals). He also diagnoses the problems caused by the widespread ‘immediatism’ of today’s church – its desire for novelty, for simple solutions to present problems, its reliance on the ‘plain’ meaning of Scripture, and its emphasis on knowing God without mediation.

The body of the book is dedicated to exploring how aspects of medieval theology and practice can speak productively to these problems, describing key figures and institutions as well as lucidly explaining sometimes alien theological and social concepts. The topics covered are:

• Respect for and use of tradition
• Commitment to integrating reason with faith
• Precision when talking about virtue and vice
• Valuing the works of mercy
• Honour for and interest in the physical world
• Emotional engagement in religion
• Emphasis on understanding humanness through the Incarnation

I haven’t got space to go into all the interesting and edifying themes included here, from the invention of the hospital to the intense emotional practices of later medieval devotion: the book covers lots of important ideas, and for me Armstrong is largely convincing in his appeal for their rehabilitation, though you can make up your own mind!

The aspect I haven’t mentioned so far is the use Armstrong makes of C. S. Lewis. The second chapter discusses Lewis as one of the author’s heroes, and as a ‘modern medieval man’ who studied and loved medieval philosophy, theology and literature. Throughout the rest of the book, the material on the medieval period itself is intermingled with examples of Lewis’s understanding and uses of it in his writing and thinking.

This is part of Armstrong’s attempt to make his topic accessible and attractive to the average Christian reader, and to some extent it works, bridging the gap to the strangeness of the medieval world with the familiarity of Lewis’s popular theology and fiction. Personally, however, I found it distracting: the description and interpretation of Lewis often falls into uncritical idealisation (so common in evangelical circles), and I usually felt that Armstrong was more engaging and discerning when talking about his medieval subjects than about Lewis. The cynical part of me says that this aspect of the book was mostly intended to get sceptical readers on board with the main topic, but it doesn’t add much to the argument and makes the mistake of taking Lewis’s self-identification as a ‘medieval’ too seriously.

On the whole, however, I would recommend Medieval Wisdom to anyone interested in how the modern church can do its history – explicit and implicit – better. The book concludes with a chapter calling for the cultivation of a more thoroughly incarnational spirituality, countering the gnosticism of modern Western culture with medieval and other resources for integration of the whole person, and perhaps more controversially for the recovery of some kind of monastic ideal for the contemporary church. These are much debated topics today and Armstrong’s book is a readable and thoughtful contribution to that discussion, as well as a good introduction to parts of church history you or your church family may have overlooked.

I'm pleased to announce that the Church Scientific project, which began in Leeds in 2016, is beginning a new phase this month with a series of six workshops about Christian philosophy for scientists.  These will improve on the course that was delivered last year - thanks to input from last year's participants and a number of philosophers of science.

Church Scientific is an independent project with links to FiSch via myself, Dr David Hanson and Prof. Andrew Basden, three of this year's tutors; it also owes a great deal to the reformational philosophy tradition espoused by Thinking Faith Network. So I thought it might be helpful and interesting to preview some of the planned content of the Church Scientific curriculum here, and to bring it into dialogue with other readers and contributors of FiSch.  For example, we're currently part-way through a series by Richard Vytniorgu on the transactional perspective on science, which resonates well with the Church Scientific perspective and may well influence that project.  We also have an ongoing series on Christian perspectives on evolutionary biology, an area that was purposely avoided by Church Scientific last year but may be a little more visible this year.  And the new course will also draw upon Christian philosophy in diagrams - probably prompting some additions to that series.

Three key distinctives of Church Scientific were outlined in a post this time last year, but one of them deserves special emphasis here.  We are attempting to build a Christian philosophy of science, for scientists.  In denial of the memorable view that scientists need philosophy of science as much as birds need ornithology, we assume that scientists can benefit from a kind of philosophy that provides a framework for scientific activity.  This kind of philosophy might be seen as "meta-science": an analysis of what the sciences are and how they seem to work. And it's important to seek a Christian philosophy of science, linked to good theology, because if Jesus Christ is lord of the cosmos which is upheld by the word of God's power, then aligning our thinking with His wisdom should help us better understand its structure and workings.

The validity of this approach will be seen in whether it actually helps any practising scientists with their work.  So - if you know any scientist Christians in Leeds, or you are one yourself, here's an opportunity to be part of this investigation (see the web site for details).  The course overview is as follows:

1. Workshop 1: Christian Faith, Worldview and Philosophy of Science: What is science and why pursue it?

2. Workshop 2: Introduction to Aspectual Relations (an Ontology): What is there to know? How can we understand the complete dependence of the created order on God?

3. Workshop 3: Theorising and its Limits: “Theory” originally means “seeing” - but what can we hope to see without a God's-eye view? What's wrong with reductionism?

4. Workshop 4: Scientific epistemology and methods: What is scientific knowledge? What approach will align us with Lady Wisdom rather than the rebellion of Eden?

5. Workshop 5: Norms and Ethics So what is good science? After all, only God is good...

6. Workshop 6: Communicating christianly: How can we talk about scientific work and scientific beliefs in ways that promote harmony, mutual understanding and fellowship?

We'd welcome comments, connections and ideas about this plan. Further detail is available upon request! 

Richard Vytniorgu continues his series on the transactional view of scientific development. 

In my first post exploring the transactional approach to science, I explained how twentieth-century transactional philosophy developed out of dissatisfaction with a Newtonian understanding of human existence and inquiry. Human beings don’t stand apart from their environment or their inquiry; humans shape and are shaped by their activity in the world. In this post, however, I explore the transactional approach in more detail, particularly in relation to language.

            In 1949 the philosophers John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley created a new epistemology which complemented developments in Einsteinian subatomic physics. As the literary theorist Louise Rosenblatt wrote in her 1994 essay The Transactional Theory of Reading and Writing, "Even the physicists’ facts depend to some extent on the interests, hypotheses, and technologies of the observer. The human organism, it became apparent, is ultimately the mediator in any perception of the world or any sense of 'reality'”. In Knowing and the Known, Dewey and Bentley used the term ‘transaction’ to “imply unfractured observation of the whole situation”, meaning that the scientist’s inquiry must be seen in a broader context.

            Such a broad context is filtered all the way down to the nature of experience itself. The pragmatist philosopher William James is perhaps best known among some for coining the term ‘stream-of-consciousness’ to denote a new perception of the mental activity of individuals. Modernist novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf famously perfected the stream-of-consciousness method in works of the 1920s such as Ulysses and To the Lighthouse. But James also developed a theory of ‘selective attention’ which, to quote Rosenblatt, denotes the way individuals are ‘constantly selecting out of the stream, or field, of consciousness’ – a phenomenon which thinkers sometimes refer to as the ‘cocktail party phenomenon’. Selective attention means that human beings are active in having an experience, at the subliminal level in the case of the mundane, and in big experiences, at a more conscious level. The transactional paradigm posits experience as something dynamic rather than fixed. Paintings such as Édouard Vuillard’s series, L’Album (1895), capture the transactional view of reality very well. In these images women peer over an album and arrange flowers, but the figures deliberately flow into one another; the activity of reading is seen as part of a ‘total situation’. There are few sharp lines. Instead, the curves create a journey for the eye, a dynamic to-and-fro between different individuals and activities happening simultaneously. The stretched nature of these paintings, moreover, adds emphasis to the panoramic effect.

            Rosenblatt applied the transactional view of reality to English education because she sought to emphasise the ways in which reading is an active process. Texts require individuals to transact with textual symbols in order to create meaning, either in an aesthetic way, by paying more attention to the private, sensuous, and affective aspects of words, or in an ‘efferent’ way, by seeking to extract information from a text which can be verified publicly. Any text can be read aesthetically or efferently, with most readings happening around the middle of the continuum.

            The transactional theory of reading takes a broad epistemological paradigm shift and applies it to one sort of inquiry. In science, the transactional approach envisages a dynamic ecosystem, whereby scientists and their ‘material’ are part of a generative process of continuous transactions, each taking into account previous ones in order to move forward.

            Those with Christian sympathies will find the transactional approach especially pertinent. Not only does it seek to describe human experience and the process of inquiry, but it also seeks to alter it. In the final post I shall talk about the relationship between the knower and the known – to see transactional inquiry as a spiritual journey. 

Richard Vytniorgu introduces a way of thinking about scientific work by rooting it in its social context.

This is the first in a series of three posts in which I introduce the transactional approach to doing science – an approach which encourages us to position scientific work within a broader matrix of beliefs and values. Although I’m not a scientist, my work in literary theory has brought me into contact with the transactional approach via its American advocate in literary studies and English education, Louise Rosenblatt.

For Rosenblatt, the transactional philosophy of science developed by the twentieth-century American philosophers John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley represented an important shift in beliefs about how humans engage with the world, including how they do science. Away went static conceptions of human life and naïve ideas about objectivity, and in came a vision which saw the knower affecting the known. In other words, a certain element of relativism and social constructionism was admitted as part of the scientific method. Beliefs and values were seen to actively shape what was ‘discovered’.

In this first post, I’m going to outline why the transactional approach came to be seen as a valuable alternative to what went before it. The second post will explore the dynamics of the transactional approach, and the third and final post will look at some of its implications, particularly for people of faith in science.

In philosophy the transactional approach was properly developed for the first time in 1949 by Dewey and Bentley in their book, Knowing and the Known. In this work these thinkers tried to present life as dynamic, shifting, and generative. Human beings were not fixed entities which interacted with the world like billiard balls bouncing off each other, unchanged by the interaction. And scientists certainly didn’t look at the world as impartial observers. What was needed was an admission and exploration of the ways in which we as humans change and are changed by our transactions with our environment, including with our various inquiries. Because if experience and inquiry is seen to be dynamic and something which impacts us more than we previously thought, then our ideas about life and our scientific ‘conclusions’ have to be treated as provisional rather than final. Indeed, we ourselves as persons have to be treated as provisional too, subject to change.

For Dewey especially, the provisional and tentative nature of inquiry was absolutely important to stress. Society only grows and humans only change if the provisional and tentative is seen to be at the crux of life. In light of such a reality, people would need to talk with one another more about their inquiries, to be ready to revise opinions based on new knowledge. Only such a way of life would guarantee the maintenance of a democratic system.

Dewey of course worked out his thought in a secular context; for him democracy was effectively positioned as a secularised Kingdom of God – the ideal to work towards. The transactional approach was developed at a time in history when democracy was threatened by authoritarian regimes which repudiated a dynamic view of life and inquiry. By emphasising the transactional alternative, Dewey and Bentley were pushing the human into the foreground. According to Rosenblatt, along with Einsteinian theory, the transactional approach ‘opened the way to increasing recognition that the observer must always be taken into account in any observation, that human beings are the mediators in perception of their world’. This meant that when coming to consider scientific inquiry, the human beings involved in transacting with their world would have to be considered much more seriously. Who were they? What did they believe? What were their assumptions about life, the world, the process of scientific inquiry, and so on?

In the past these questions were superfluous. Now they weren’t. They were crucial. Scientific inquiry was much more than an interaction between impartial observer and a stimulus. Scientific inquiry is in fact a transaction between the knower and the known – a dynamic process in which the human’s mediation is crucial. This transactional process will be the subject of the next post.