A Disquieting Suggestion

In 1981, Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a book called After Virtue that would forever change the way we see and teach moral philosophy. MacIntyre argued that the scholarly discussion around morality had become irrational, and worse, had failed to see or admit its on irrationality. The book opens with a chapter entitled, "A Disquieting Suggestion" that contains a story with three stages: flourishing, catastrophe, and flawed enlightenment.

The first stage is where we find ourselves today. Science is flourishing. Scientists have made incredible progress both in building a framework for understanding much about the world and in applying that knowledge in practical ways. McIntyre doesn't elaborate on this stage much because we experience it every day. We travel in cars and airplanes, rely on weather reports that are accurate at least some of the time, and communicate with devices that would have looked like black magic to our ancestors.

The second stage begins with a catastrophe. A series of disasters occur. The general public blames scientists. The mob riots. They kill or imprison scientists, burn their books and laboratories, destroy their scientific instruments. Eventually a new political movement takes power and bans the teaching of any form of science.

In the third stage, people begin to suspect that banning all scientific knowledge hasn't been such a good idea after all. They push back and try to return to where how things were, but they have a problem. All they have are fragments: facts without any context. They have some books about experiments and their results, but they lack the theory that led to the questions those experiments asked and answered in the first place.

Nonetheless all these fragments are reembodied in a set of practices which go under the revived names of physics, chemistry and biology. ... Nobody, or almost nobody, realizes that what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all. For everything that they do and say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably. (MacIntyre, 2013, p.2)

There is an enlightenment, but it's a flawed enlightenment.

MacIntyre used the story as a parable to explain his problem with the way academics thought about right and wrong in the 1980s. Pre-modern thinkers had a shared understanding of human purpose and what it means to live a good life that drove their thinking about right and wrong. That shared understanding was lost in the wake of the scientific revolution and other developments. The Enlightenment tried to piece together a secular morality from the ideas of earlier writers, but the bigger picture was missing. MacIntyre's disquieting suggestion was that his contemporaries in moral philosophy weren't actually doing moral philosophy at all, but merely arranging fragments, having lost the context to make sense of them.

When I first read this story, I was immediately struck by a different parallel. The Jesus movement flourished in the time of the Apostles. I say, "the Jesus movement" because in the first century, there was nothing like Christianity as we know it today. Jesus, his Disciples, and his first followers never considered themselves as anything but Jewish. They debated the particulars of Jewish law within a Jewish framework and acknowledged the authority of the Pharisees, even when criticizing them (e.g. Matthew 23:1-3). Insofar as modern terms can be applied to New Testament times, the religion of Jesus and the disciples was Judaism. Every idea taught by Jesus, as well as Paul and the other New Testament writers was firmly rooted in Jewish tradition.

Then catastrophe came. Within a few generations, the church had come to define itself not merely as separate from Judaism, but in opposition to it. Eusebius records Constantine saying, "let us have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish rabble" (Kaiser, 2009, p. 223). Books were burned. Synagogues were destroyed. Jews were rooted out and imprisoned or killed.

Few if any Christians today would condone the antisemitism that has plagued church history, but that history has still left us with a problem. We read Jesus' teachings and Paul's theology. We wrestle with difficult passages about head coverings and food offered to idols. We build theological systems that conform to "canons of consistency and conformance," but we're working with fragments.

It doesn't have to be this way. Twenty-two years ago, I met Rabbi Daniel and began to relearn much of what I thought I knew. What I learned was much more than helpful background to the New Testament. It was the framework that held it all together. Later, in seminary, I was exposed to a significant movement in the Christian academic world toward reading the New Testament "within Judaism." This journey has been much more than an academic one for me. It has helped me to know my Savior like never before. I hope you'll continue to follow along as I share more about what I've learned and how it has transformed my life and faith forever.

Sources

Walter C. Kaiser, Walter C. Jr. Recovering the Unity of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009).

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Bloomsbury Revelations (London; New Delhi; New York; Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2013).