For centuries truth had been seen as fairly black and white. Modernism had looked to empirical truth, rationalism, and common experience to validate that truth was in its very essence objective and narrow in its foundation. By narrow in its foundation I mean that the foundation of truth from which all things must build upon was a small foundation, which left little room to build upward. It is similar to an upside down pyramid, with absolute truth being the tip of the pyramid and the rest of reality having to build upward by somehow fitting on the tip of the upside pyramid and trying to balance itself and find room without toppling over. This last century blew a strong gust of wind that was just enough to topple this ill-built structure, leaving the church of the 21st century to put the pieces back together and to figure out how to lay a more sound foundation.
The reason that modernism had created such a small foundation was due to its epistemology. Modern men saw something as either scientifically verifiable and thus true or unverifiable and at best suspect. This created an exhausting and failing search for absolute truth based on scientific verifiability. Now I wish to be clear, scientific verifiability does not equal empiricism. I would argue that even empiricism falls under the larger heading of "scientific epistemology" as does existentialism and rationalism. All these modern ism's fell prey to the assumption that man had the inherent ability to understand truth, to discern it among all possible options, and to prove it by intense investigation.
This is quite contrary to the teachings of the Scripture which teaches that even though man may know much about his surrounding environment (albeit even this knowledge is fallible) there is a supernatural reality in which what can be known is fully reliant on God's revealing the truth to man. Man inherently is incapable of perceiving the reality of God without God first initiating Himself to be received by man. Thus, the church had held in its early centuries that what we know, we know ultimately by God's revelation in and through Christ which has been captured and persevered infallibly in the Holy Scriptures.
Yet modernism outrightly rejected supernatural knowledge as being knowledge or truth because it could not be proven and it was not based on man's investigation but instead was imposed upon man by the Creator. God was basically saying: "This is truth, receive it without qualification for truth cannot adjust to your experience or understanding, but instead you must adjust to it." This understanding of truth modernism could not accept, not even many schools of theology, and thus orthodoxy was dismissed by many as an antiquated way of thinking which had intellectually tied down humanity and had not allowed humanity to find truth by investigation without having to submit to a predetermined concept of reality and truth.
However many theologians attempted to salvage orthodoxy while remaining modern in their thought. They did this by accepting that truth had to in some way be verifiable and so theology could no longer be a handing down of the predetermined, but instead it must be a scientific investigation of what the faith really should be. They embraced the modern epistemology while attempting to maintain the content of the old faith.
It must be noted here that the state of theology becoming evidential and modernistic was not merely due to cognitive paradigms such as embracing rationalism and empiricism as authoritative and primary in epistemological journeys. There were other factors that contributed to the modern church being able to not be bound to the old formulations of historical orthodoxy.
1) The corruption of the Roman Catholic church brought a distrust to the historic church as an institution. The modern man saw that the latter middle ages had given too much power to the central institutions of state and church, and this power had been corrupted. But due to increased social, economic, and intellectual factors the gap between the aristocracy and the common man had narrowed and the common man had a unique opportunity to have a say in matters of state and church. Thus the modern man had and has an inherent distrust of external and centralized authority and a strong self-confidence to make his own decisions and to rule his own domain.
2) What I call "era imperialism" developed in which man developed a strong assumption that his age and era was advanced in all ways over the eras of the past. Since man was progressively moving forward then if one went backward in time man would get more and more "uninformed" and "un-evolved ." Thus the ancients were dull in their thought and must be heavily scrutinized since they did not follow the correct epistemology and simply believed what was given to them.
Thus what we have are independent thinkers who trust in their ability to discern and find the truth, people who are critical of external authority, and distrusting of traditions of the elders. From these circumstances and within this atmosphere rationalism, empiricism, and existentialism thrived because the individual was capable and able to find truth without the ancients, without the institutional church and without being held accountable by either. The individual had the tools to finding truth: His own ability to discern from the various options, his bird's eye view due to his unique and advance stage in history, and his freedom to divert from traditional and institutional formulations to make up his own categories.
From this situation we can see how and why theologians embraced a modern epistemology and articulation of truth. In the next post we will look into how this quest of modern theology failed and we will begin to look at how the 21st century church has begun building a more solid foundation, which answers to the problems posed by the Post-enlightenment centuries.
