Immanuel Kant, one of the dead guys, divided all there is into two categories: the noumenal and the phenomenal.  Who cares, you say?  Just a couple of long words borne into the world, you say?  Well let’s see …

I’m phenomenal.  My writing is phenomenal.  I play phenomenal basketball.  But lest you think I’m boasting, let me explain phenomenal: that which is subject to observation.  That which can be measured and sniffed and placed under a microscope and seen through a telescope.

Carpenters live a phenomenal life.  They cut the trim piece at “two-and three eighths” and it squeezes exactly in the space they’ve measured.  So the phenomenal world is all about precision and technicalities, accuracies and inaccuracies.

What about God?  What about theology?  What about faith?  Alack, all these Kant banished to the realm of the noumenal, and that turned out a disastrous move.

Because by definition the noumenal world cannot be observed but rather can only be apprehended, the tendency since Kant has been to approach God and theology and faith mystically and anti-intellectually.  In matters of faith, intellectual precision became gauche; sloppiness ruled.

Kant’s dastardly deed is, all the way up to 7 Oct ’11, harming the church:

“The growth of ignorance in the church, the growth of  indifference with regard to the simple facts recorded in the Bible, all goes back to a great spiritual movement, really skeptical in its tendency, which has been going forward during the last one hundred years – a movement which appears not only in philosophers and theologians such as Kant and Schleiermacher and Ritschl, but also in a widespread attitude of plain men and women throughout the world.  The depreciation of the intellect, with the exaltation in the place of it of the feelings or the will, is, we think, a basic fact in modern life, which is rapidly leading to a condition in which men neither know anything nor care anything about the doctrinal content of the Christian religion.” (J. Gresham Machen)

How can we then avoid the trap of the noumenalization of our faith?  Six principles:

1. 1446 BC – what is that?  That’s a date you should know, the probable date of Israel’s Exodus from Egypt.  The point is that, in your faith love and gain dates, facts and other solid things.
2. Memorize passages in Scripture.  Among other things, you’ll begin to associate growth in the faith with labor as it commonly feels in the “phenomenal” world.
3. Beware of the practical monkey.  That’s the monkey running throughout society that says, “If its not practical [by which the monkey means, ‘If I don’t immediately feel this truth can be practiced in my everyday life as I now know it’] I don’t want to hear it.”  Imagine the chemist being bored by learning the minutia of the periodic table!  Think of the foreign language student who wants to be done with all this vocabulary and just get out there and talk with people!
4. Spit out the lofty spiritual phrases that aren’t true or that, upon closer inspection, don’t mean anything at all.  For example, the words “bless” and “grace” are often spoken without any concern for what they actually mean.  They’re being used connotatively and emotively, as the noise of the cello gives the feel of profundity, whether the music is profound or not.  Practice precision in your theological thoughts and statements.
5. Tie your beliefs to the statements of Scripture, whether they be minor or major.  Here’s the challenge in that:  Sometimes, or perhaps most times, our emotions don’t respond to the truth.  And so because Kant said our faith is in the noumenal world, and because we’re not emotionally apprehending a statement of Scripture, we unconsciously conclude that the statement just isn’t important.  Not so – we have to learn the truth by rote and then train our feelings to respond appropriately.
6. Warning- think carefully of warnings against “cold, dead theology.”  If the warning is actually against disobedience or becoming blase to the truth or doctrinal confusion, then heed it!  But if the spirit of the warning is rather against the “elitism” of doctrinal precision, long study, a doctrine of hard facts, the taking of words seriously, kindly ignore it.

Let’s give Chesterton the last word here:

“Last and most important, it is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The Church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. Once let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shepherd was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to false religion and lay waste the world. Remember that the Church went in specifically for dangerous ideas; she was a lion tamer. The idea of birth through a Holy Spirit, of the death of a divine being, of the forgiveness of sins, or the fulfillment of prophecies, are ideas which, any one can see, need but touch to turn them into something blasphemous or ferocious. The smallest link was let drop by the artificers of the Mediterranean, and the lion of ancestral pessimism burst this chain in the forgotten forests of the north. … If some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in the definitions might stop all the dances; might wither all the Christmas trees or break all the Easter eggs. Doctrine had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.”