by Matthew Gaetano

Joshua Shaw has been presenting Eusebius’s rich and complex polemic against paganism alongside his dialogue with Platonism. He has illuminated the reasons for the contrast between Eusebius’s approach and C. S. Lewis’s way of defending Christianity. Like many defenses of the Christian religion in the Renaissance and beyond (and in Late Antiquity as well), Lewis highlights certain points of continuity between the religious longings of pagan antiquity and their fulfillment in Christianity:

And what did God do? First of all He left us conscience, the sense of right and wrong: and all through history there have been people trying (some of them very hard) to obey it. None of them ever quite succeeded. Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was—that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

Although Lewis believes Christianity to be true in a way that no other religion can be, his apologetic approach often pits the near universality of religion against the relatively small number of people who have embraced atheism. And he also points out the possibility for Christian generosity towards the partial truths in all other religions when compared to the way in which atheism must conclude that all religions are “simply wrong” in the most fundamental way:

If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic—there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others.

The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority—lines up with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc., against the modern Western European materialist.

Herman Bavinck, whom we have introduced before, made similar arguments earlier in the twentieth century. As a writer of a multi-volume Reformed Dogmatics, Bavinck is a different sort of thinker than Lewis, whose apologetic writings tend–rather famously–to avoid systematic theology and the teachings of a particular confession. Nonetheless, Bavinck opened his lectures on the Philosophy of Revelation as follows:

The well-known Assyrian scholar, Hugo Winckler, some years ago boldly declared that “in the whole of the historical evolution of mankind there are only two general world-views to be distinguished,–the ancient Babylonian and the modern empirico-scientific”; “the latter of which,” he added, “is still only in process of development.” The implication was that the religion and civilization of all peoples have had their origin in the land of Sumer and Akkad, and more particularly that the Biblical religion, in its New Testament no less than in its Old Testament form, has derived its material from that source. The pan-Babylonian construction of history has, because of its syncretistic and levelling character, justly met with much serious opposition. But there is undoubtedly an element of truth in the declaration, if it may be taken in this wider sense,–that the religious supranaturalistic world-view has universally prevailed among all peoples and in all ages down to our own day, and only in the last hundred and fifty years have given way in some circles to the empirico-scientific.

Like Lewis, Bavinck states clearly that Christianity is not one religion among many; one must avoid such “levelling” in our thinking about the religions of the world. Nonetheless, the way in which so many human beings have throughout history shared a “religious supranaturalistic world-view” is the first point that Bavinck makes in his lectures at Princeton.

He continues:

Humanity as a whole has been at all times supranaturalistic to the core. … [R]eligion and civilization have not appeared as contradictory and opposing principles, but religion has been the source of all civilization. … The ancient view of the world was thoroughly religious, and in consequence of this bore a unified, harmonious character, so as to impart to the whole of earthly life a higher inspiration and sacredness. Christianity introduced no change in this respect. Towards the pagan world it assumed, to be sure, a negative and hostile attitude, because it could not take over its corrupt civilization without radical cleansing. But this was precisely the task it set for itself, namely, to subject and adjust the whole of earthly existence to the kingdom of heaven. It succeeded in conquering the old world and leavening it with its own spirit. (1-2)

Would both Eusebius and Lewis be able to agree with this formulation? It seems so.

Bavinck then lays out a brief account of medieval Christianity, its genuine achievements, and its dangerous tendencies as well as the changes brought about by the Reformation. After formulating the transformations of the Reformation period, he makes this qualification:

Great as was the importance of this religious-ethical movement of the sixteenth century, it was after all a reformation, not a new erection from the foundation. No assault was made upon the system of the old religious world-view; it was rather reinforced than weakened. (3)

Perhaps Bavinck is not stating the following point directly, but the reasoning of these pages seems to suggest a genuine connection between modern Reformation Christianity (in its orthodox, confessional, dogmatic forms) and ancient religion. In the opening passages of his lecture, he argues that Christianity “introduced no change in this respect”–that is, with all of the theological, ethical, and liturgical changes made to paganism (“radical cleansing”), Christianity could nonetheless embraces key elements of the supranaturalistic view of the ancient, pagan world which “imparted to the whole of earthly life a higher inspiration and sacredness.” And then he argues that the Reformation did not assault but reinforced the “old religious world-view.” The continuity is quite clear. And Bavinck uses this point to challenge the view of Protestantism as leading to the Enlightenment and to the rationalistic rejection of the ancient (and basically universal) religious vision.

We will explore other elements of Bavinck’s lectures in future posts. We will also be addressing other formulations from this period and from the Renaissance and Reformation about how Christianity stands in relation to other religions of the world.