When I was in Basel in the early 1980s, theological liberalism held sway in large swathes of Europe. Becoming a liberal or a neo-orthodox was all the fad. Liberalism ruled the day.
Today, liberalism is an abject failure. It failed because it wasn't true. It put human reason above the mind of God. It claimed exclusive title to the cognitive and denied biblical revelation as objective truth. In so doing, it became estranged from its roots.
I'm writing about this because I had a long talk today with a student of mine who is contemplating going on for his doctorate in Europe. "Can an evangelical survive in Basel?" "Yes," I told him. "Remember that it was to Basel that young Calvin fled and where he wrote his great Institutes. Or that it was in Basel that Erasmus edited his Greek New Testament that turned the world upside down." When I went to Basel in 1980, it was "liberal" in the original sense of the word -- they were "open-minded" when to came to your dissertation topic as long as it was a quality piece of scholarship. True liberalism is reasoned, conceptual, and principled. In the view of all early Christian thinkers, Christianity was no leap of faith into the unknown. Neither was it a subjective attitude. It was a reasoned conviction.
The tension facing theological students today is not between faith and reason. It's between a reasonable faith and a faithless reason. Or, as I heard Francis Schaeffer put it, "When you become a Christian, you don't have to put your brain in park or neutral."
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| Nadelberg 10, housing the Theology Department of the University of Basel. I spent hours here every day researching and writing my dissertation. It was one of the happiest times of my life. |