the Enlightenment charge

Of trendy criticisms leveled at current (U.S. evangelical) churches, one of the more puzzling to me has been "The church's core beliefs were reinterpreted to better match the Enlightenment, and this is one of the many causes of its decreasing effectiveness". The adaptation of Christianity to the Enlightenment is supposedly characterized by an emphasis on constructing theoretical systems, reaching truth through abstract debate, and generally enshrining eternal propositions. For postmodernists of varying levels of devotion who're attempting to reconcile their philosophy to Christianity, those emphases are considered unhelpful at best and deceptive or distracting "mere social constructions" at worst.

My first issue with the Enlightenment charge is that it isn't accurate. A long time before then, the biblical concept of God had already been firmly established: a static, absolute, spiritual being whose very nature could be better comprehended through the reading of unchanging documents such as the Pentateuch. Of course, He was also a Personal God who spoke, acted, loved, disciplined, and so forth, but never in ways that contradicted those known attributes. Perfection doesn't evolve so neither does the "I AM THAT I AM". His unpredictability and ineffability are not due to "dynamic divine development" but to the straightforward logical fact that finite creatures (us) are unable to capture or summarize infinity completely. While we have faith that He is Good, it's impossible for us to reliably calculate which specific good thing He will do next. Christians used reason to broaden their picture of God before everyone else began to experience the Enlightenment, and in its function of preserving the (Roman) past, the church was at least partially responsible for the Enlightenment.

Secondly, I'm not convinced that the postmodern Christianity I've read about is any less derivative of the Enlightenment. A postmodern Christian will enthusiastically claim that God isn't a figure in a piece of literature or a precept in a doctrinal statement. Rather, He is alive and willing to participate in an intimate relationship. Anyone who seeks Him earnestly will find Him. "Intellectual hair-splitting" cannot analyze Him for He can only be known by what He does. One mustn't think about Him and instead breathe Him in, more or less.

When I ponder the methodology in the preceding paragraph, the resemblance to a particular philosophical position is uncanny: empiricism, which I could informally state as "Nothing can be known except what we directly experience or can relate to direct experience. Therefore the definition of anything can mean nothing more than a person's experiences of that thing." A postmodern God is thus an empirical God. If we can't ascertain any truths about God except through experience, then He must be defined as experience and nothing else.

Hence the postmodern Christian is an empiricist. However, empiricism's resurgence began with the reintroduction of systematic science...the Enlightenment! Before then, "empirical Christianity" would've been virtually nonexistent even as a possibility. At that time the church's hierarchy declared what God is like, what the duties of each Christian must be, how to apply the Bible, etc. The sentiment of "Stop talking to me about your faith in god and just prove it to me!" is quite foreign before the Enlightenment. One learned through the cunning arguments said by the wise, and so long as the explanation seemed plausible nobody demanded vulgar illustrations of it in the dirtiness of everyday life. The model of belief advocated by the postmodern Christian is itself symptomatic of the Enlightenment.

Still, regardless of debates about history and philosophy and "where the church first went wrong", I gladly join with the postmodern Christian in exhorting (although he or she probably would select a different word than "exhort") my fellow believers to exercise their beliefs in good deeds. We use the same Bible, which compares an inactive listener to a house built on sand. Unlike my counterpart I think that one can certainly say true things about God, but in any case the epistle of James instructs us both that an unexpressed faith is a dead faith.