[2] The Sixth Paradigm [R. Holloway--Different Paradigm Shifts in Christianity] - Part 2

 Source (in the public domain): http://radicalfaith.org/holloway/sixth%20paradigm.htm

From a talk Holloway gave in May 2003

Accessed: 2020-09-03

Go to Part 1 

The Sixth Paradigm  [Different Paradigm Shifts in Christianity] - continued

Richard Holloway (former Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh)

 

PARADIGM #4: The Protestant Reformation Paradigm

Kung's fourth paradigm (P#4) is one we're more immediately familiar with - that of the 16^th century Protestant Reformation. It happened to coincide with the discovery of the Bible by ordinary people. Once the new printing presses had swung into action, many thousands of copies of the Bible became available to the person on the street. It was very soon translated from Latin into the vernaculars.

Just as the Roman institution had provided Christians with a feeling of absolute assurance, so also some people found a similar assurance in the words of Scripture. The absolute institution was replaced by texts which were perceived as the absolute truth straight from the mouth of God. The fourth paradigm promoted the same need for authority as did the third paradigm and pandered to the same fear of freedom.

More profound than such similarities is the way adherence to scriptural inerrancy prevents attempts to do theology differently. In order to preserve its internal consistencies, this paradigm must perforce retain an absolute commitment to a pre-scientific paradigm of how this world works.

In this paradigm the sun must be able to stand still, people must be able to walk on water, and the dead must be able to rise again. In contrast, institutions like the Roman Church can change and yet pretend they haven't. But how can anyone move off a doctrine of scriptural inerrancy without admitting it?

From study of the Bible as God's Word to humankind came the great theory that Luther evolved in contradistinction to the fundamentalism if the institution. It's nearly impossible for many Christians today to read Paul's letters to the early Church except through Lutheran eyes, so compelling was Luther's interpretation of the infallible authority of the Bible.

Luther taught that God saves us not through any of our own works or good deeds, be they pilgrimages, or masses or earnest prayer, but only through God's grace by the sacrifice of the Father's son. That really was a paradigm revolution for those times. It blew away the monolithic medieval Christianity of Roman Catholicism.

The Reformation church is today perhaps the most dated in feeling of all the churches.

I don't know if you ever go into a United Reformed Church building or a Presbyterian church. A few have developed new liturgical forms and norms, but on the whole the classic churches of the Reformation are, as we say in Scotland, very dour. They're heavy. You get long sermons. They may be very thoughtful sermons but they're long. It's all minister-dominated. There's no colour or brightness. It's very heavy, it's serious, it's intense.

That is also it's enduring value. It produces very serious people. Presbyterian Scotland was a very serious country which, by dint of focused effort over many years, produced a strongly democratic consciousness.

It also gave birth to the Protestant work-ethic. This was fundamental to Scotland's experience and self understanding. From this paradigm sprang also a well-educated public. John Knox, the Scottish Protestant reformer, wanted a school in every parish and largely succeeded in his ambition.

Despite this enduring value, the Reformation remnant of the fourth paradigm remains depressing and sexless. If you want to have a good time, don't go to one of these places on a Sunday morning. For unless you're solidly masochistic you'll come out feeling pretty rotten about yourself.

I often think that if you want a great exemplar of the virtues and maybe of the downside of the Reformation paradigm, look at Gordon Brown, the United Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer (equivalent to the Minister of Finance in other systems). He is a deeply serious man. There doesn't seem to be any frivolity in him. He's deeply committed to his project - but he's not exactly a laugh a minute (although I'm told that with some decent malt whiskey beside him he can be quite good company). But there's no sense of frivolity of skittishness about him. In many ways he's a brilliant exemplar of the best of the fourth paradigm.

***

PARADIGM #5: The Modern Era Paradigm

The fifth paradigm (P#5) is the modern paradigm, that of the 17^th - 19^thcenturies. It is still powerfully with us, busily influencing and interpreting how we perceive the world and our lives. Nevertheless, we're increasingly able to regard it to some degree dispassionately as we sail into new and unfamiliar seas.

[1] The Sixth Paradigm [R. Holloway--Different Paradigm Shifts in Christianity] - Part 1

Source (in the public domain): http://radicalfaith.org/holloway/sixth%20paradigm.htm

From a talk Holloway gave in May 2003

Accessed: 2020-09-03

 

The Sixth Paradigm  [Different Paradigm Shifts in Christianity]

Richard Holloway (former Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh)

 

I want to take a glance at the whole of Christian history because one of the things I'd like to get at is this widespread notion that Christianity is or ever has been a single thing.

To do this I'll use a large text, but I want to lead into it by addressing first a very slim text.

One of the most important and influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century was a short book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions written by an historian of science called Thomas Kuhn. Now Kuhn was a student at Harvard in the 1960s. He was a young physicist and was invited by the President of Harvard to teach a course on the history of science to humanities students who knew nothing about science. He said to himself, "You don't refuse the President of Harvard!"

In his researches and preparing the course he surprised himself. He came across something that he had not hitherto realised was the case. He had a notion of science as a kind of linear activity - a bit like those machines in a coal mine which eat into the coal face - which bites its way through the facts of the universe. He thought of science as a cumulative process in which these facts were gradually laid out.

He discovered that it was in fact a more violent, interruptive activity. Hence the title of his essay. He discovered that science operates by what he called "paradigm revolutions" or "paradigm shifts". He didn't actually coin the word "paradigm" but he did give it a new kind of meaning. He said that the scientific community worked within what it called a paradigm, a constellation of views based on experiment, a world view or set of assumptions that it operated within. This was the going, working science of the time.

The paradigm was operated until it stopped working - that is, until new questions or new discoveries began to collide with the given view. Let me give you a fairly obvious example.

Aristotelian astronomy, upon which the worldview of the entire Bible is based, proposed a three-decker universe with the earth at the centre and all the spheres going round it. The whole idea was that the earth is the centre of the system both physically as well as theologically.

That was the going paradigm. And it still works. The Ptolemaic version of Aristotelian astronomy can still operate for a yachtsperson. You can cross the Atlantic using Ptolemaic astronomy, guiding your boat by the stars. So to that extent it can still be a working paradigm.

But it was overtaken by the great Copernican discovery which was revolutionary because it said, "Ah! The earth is not the thing which everything else goes round. In fact, we go round the sun."

You'll recall the great struggle which then took place. This was because the new paradigm appeared to contradict both the biblical account as well as the going scientific paradigm. Interestingly, it was only fairly recently that the Pope gave the sun permission to be the centre of the solar system.

What happens then is that you get a working set of systems which operates quite satisfactorily until along comes new knowledge, usually discovered by creatures of genius. They begin to ask questions about the old paradigm. Those who use the old paradigm resist the new - and it is entirely right that they should do so. One doesn't want to keep changing a world view which works. It's a confounded nuisance if you're switching paradigms every few years. You need to get traction, a bit of tradition and leverage on the thing.

So you make it work as long as you possibly can. You use it to try to answer the new information which is coming in. There's also in some people a natural kind of conservatism which doesn't like any kind of change. They prefer the going paradigm to anything which is coming down the road. They do so for purely temperamental reasons - but it's also true that the scientific method itself inherently tests new data until it overturns the old. And then you get a paradigm revolution and you move on.

Kuhn's little book has influenced philosophers, culture critics and theologians since the early 1960s. I want to look now at a great text which has applied Kuhn's conclusions about paradigms to Christianity.

The greatest living theologian is Hans Kung, a Roman Catholic. His is the "large text" to which I referred earlier. He doesn't have the Pope's driving licence because he wrote a book in the seventies attacking the doctrine of infallibility and he had his licence to teach withdrawn.

He still teaches theology at Tübingen University but he teaches it in a secular setting (2020-no longer teaching). Quite movingly, he's an old man now and he would like to get his licence back. He'd like to die, as it were, in peace with the Roman Church. But he has been told that he will only get the licence back if he commits to the doctrine of infallibility.

So he will have to sacrifice his conscience to get back inside the Church (which shows you how corrupt churches are). I doubt if he will do that because his whole being has been one of challenge. He's been a sort of Protestant theologian in the midst of Catholicism.

Kung set himself a few years ago an enormous task. He wanted to describe the religious situation of our day. He conceived three volumes - one on Christianity, one on Judaism and one on Islam (2020-they are all published).

He applies paradigm theory to religion. He says that contrary to what we all think, religion has been a story of shifting paradigms - an essentially dynamic, changing enterprise.

I want to race through his application of paradigm theory to Christianity. He says there have been five Christian paradigms. As we'll see, these paradigms are all still in operation. In science, new paradigms succeed, complete and often oust those that came before. In Christianity, religious paradigms never seem to get discarded or superannuated. They simply get stacked up like trays in the trolleys of self-service restaurants.