Church & Fate

Mark C. Henrie in Commentary reviews The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success by Rodney Stark.

Is it really true that Christian theologians uniquely understood their work as tantamount to a progressive research agenda? No. They were explicating "the faith once delivered to the saints." In this they were not very different from their Muslim and Jewish counterparts. The Christian difference lies not in a superior devotion to reason, and certainly not in "progress" through reason alone, but rather in the peculiarity of the Christian revelation.

What had been revealed was not a law but the personhood of God and His relation to man. As a result, the burden of Christian theology was not only to make disparate scriptural norms logically coherent, but also to demonstrate that there was no contradiction between the revealed God and what was known from "natural philosophy." Philosophy was seen from early times as a necessary preliminary study to Christian theology in a way that was not true, or not true in the same way, for Jewish or Muslim theologians who also sought to reconcile the two ways of knowing.