Speaking of the Weather

Most of us likely knew that something was seriously wrong when they started politicizing the weather. I remember when Richard Nixon became President. Some of you can go further back than that, and others of you reading this may not even remember Bill Clinton’s presidency. A rather prominent radio show host is fond of saying that most people’s historical awareness only dates back to the day they were born. I am afraid there is a lot of truth to that. I especially believe it after teaching high school for 14 years. But my point is that a lot, and I do mean A LOT, has changed, at least on the surface, in America within the last 30 years. And if you are 25 and under and are reading this, 30 years is NOT a long time. Thirty years ago the weather was a topic of trivial, casual conversation; completely innocuous. Today it is the lightning rod (pun intended) for political activism. What is up with that? It is all about power politics. Does the name Nietzsche mean anything?

The 19^th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was famous, among other things for having declared “God is dead.” Many did not get his point. Nietzsche was correct in what he affirmed on that statement. What Nietzsche was affirming was that the biblical conception of God had disappeared from the ideology that had control over Western culture. He was correct. The reason he knew this was because he understood the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). It was Kant who had declared that God was not a legitimate object of human knowledge. According to Kant, we need a concept of God in order to reason and get on in life, but we don’t really know God as a legitimate object of knowledge. Don’t ask Kant, or others who heralded his beliefs, how he knew this. And for goodness sakes, don’t ever point out how it was an act of faith. 

Kant’s definition of knowledge, that Nietzsche understood quite well, was that it was the individual’s interpretation of reality through one’s categories of thought that the individual imposed upon their experience. One could still have faith in God, said Kant, but one should not confuse such faith with knowledge. This is summarized in two of Kant’s famous statement: 1) “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” And 2) “objects must be viewed as conforming to human thought, not human thought to the independently real.” Scores of people who may have never heard of Kant, or know little of his written philosophy, nonetheless have embraced his beliefs. You’ve heard it before: “Well, that’s just your interpretation.” For centuries people believed in a God outside themselves who imposed himself upon them and to whom they were responsible. Their idea of authority was that authority was something outside them. People’s orientation to life was that they needed to bring their thoughts, feelings and actions into conformity with a reality that was outside of them. Kant, Nietzsche and several others changed this.

The Scriptures teach that this outside reality that people believed truly existed, was “independently real” was created by God. Psalm 19 and Romans 1 explain that God is revealed in and through what he created. Humans, because they are created in God’s image, both reveal and perceive God within themselves and the rest of creation. While certainly many throughout the history of Western culture could not claim to obey the most important implications of these truths, nonetheless, these truths, in general, controlled the thinking of people in Western culture for centuries. One’s primary orientation to God was not internal to what was going on with the individual, but what was going on external to the person. It was not that prior to Kant Christians did not give any weight to internal realities. The 17^th century Puritans alone are evidence that many Christians understood quite well the internal life of a person—one’s emotions and thoughts. But such internal realities did not determine what constituted reality, and life was not limited to the physiological or emotional rush you got from your experiences. The difference has been that Kant’s philosophy, when used by Protestant Liberal theologians of the 19^th century to re-conceptualize the Christian faith, has turned “faith” into something private, subject only to dictates of the individual’s perceptions and divorced it from a public realm of rationality. It is questionable as to what degree Kant would have agreed with all that, but that is how his philosophy has been used.

Kant’s philosophy triumphed in no small part because people willfully rejected the God of Scripture. Historians will never tell it that way. Most of them could not. They don’t even have the category for understanding the story that way.  Francis Schaeffer, along with a few others, was correct when he assessed the ideology of the West as one that viewed all reality, or the universe as a closed system. It is thought that there is nothing that transcends the physical material realm. There is only the horizontal realm; no vertical. Human life, in such a philosophy, degenerates to activism and chasing after experiences. There is no definitive interpretation of anything. There is nothing to set one’s thought upon, or to conform one’s thought. This is the foundational reason why the Christian faith and Church life over the last 175 years in the United States and Europe has largely been reduced to activism (think: “What Would Jesus Do?”) and emotionalism (think: worship wars centered around music). In the West, one is left interpreting reality only by how you are affected by that reality, how you feel about it, what you think about it. We are all ultimately set against one another as we struggle against, and occasionally alongside, each other in our attempts to get what we want. Life is just power politics. It’s not about what is right or wrong, but what you can get and get away with, what you want.     

  But in such a scenario it becomes questionable as to why anyone would bother making public arguments about anything. What, after all is the point? If we are all just shut-up within ourselves in our own private perceptions of reality, then how do we actually communicate with one another? And why express moral outrage of any kind regarding anything? Why should I care about your reality or you mine? Either there is a moral standard of right and wrong, good or bad that all people have some access to and understand to some degree or there is not, and if not, then who cares what you think about global warming, genocides, deforestation, or the abuse of animals? The latter, if they are occurring, are only problematic in a world where there is some knowable reality for all people, for all times and places, and a standard of goodness connected to this reality. But this is the repudiation of virtually everything that Western culture currently embraces in mass. Who knew that talking about the weather was so theological?