IT'S KIND OF FUNNY that I'm accused of holding up Stanley Hauerwas as an idol when he certainly would never want anyone to do that.
I could have written that in the book I quoted from, not far into it, he made a huge whopper of a mistake, one typical of his and my generation of educationally credentialed people and which is probably most typical of the materialist-atheist devotees of scientism, such as yourself.
Christians, our theologians told us, are in the rather embarrassing position of having a faith rooted in ancient parochial, Near Eastern writings, which present life of an ancient, parochial, Near Eastern Jew named Jesus. Modern Christians stare at the life, death and resurrection of Jesus across what the German philosopher Lessing called the "ugly wide ditch" of history. Copernicus, despite the church's efforts to silence him, finally convinced us that the sun did not go around the earth, and everything changed. The Copernican Revolution was the first, we were led to believe, seismic shift for the church. Everyone's world view had shifted to something called "the modern world view." The poor old church, however, was stuck with the legacy of a "pre-scientific (i.e., pre-modern) world view."
This explains why, at least for a century, the church's theology has been predominantly apologetic. The church did not want to duplicate the mistake we made with Copernicus.
First, since Hauerwas is a Methodist who is a communicant at an Episcopal Church, he's taking on a big mistake of the Catholic hierarchy and SOME continental Protestants taking on that embarrassment for English Protestantism. Some of the Protestant opposition was biblical though Luther thought that Copernican cosmology was horse-feathers because it overturned the science establishment of his day. Science is no more of a progressive force than anything else that relies on the old guard dying off, eventually. It's ruthlessness just makes it seem that way.
He mentioned Copernicus one more time in the book at the start of the passage I posted (with my own typos), I was tempted to point out that what he said, though it fits in rather exactly with the common-received-wisdom on the Copernican cosmology got it pretty much wrong as none other than the man he probably meant when he talked about "the church's effort to silence him," would have known. Galileo, certainly among the most important scientific figures in the early modern era noted that not only had Copernicus been a cleric, himself, the patrons and supporters of his scientific work on the calendar and, as a result, the conclusion that the Earth revolved around the sun were none other than bishops, cardinals and even popes, who Copernicus thanked in the preface to his work, in fact, noting that it was they who had encouraged him to publish when he seems to have been reluctant to do that and one of whom he dedicated his major work to. Copernicus and his followers lectured on his sun-centered universe in Rome and at the Vatican, itself and was championed and encouraged by bishops and Popes.* Galileo certainly had read the book in the original and, so, he did what virtually no modern, self-asserted champion of Copernicus or Galileo has ever done with Copernicus or Galileo or, for that matter, Darwin READ WHAT THEY WROTE!
If there is an actual modern habit of thought it is to read the secondary, tertiary and even more remote junk and to totally ignore the primary documents, something certainly as true of Scripture as it is modern science. Most typically, they don't even read those, they watch a movie that lies about history or just pick up the lore that pervades popular media.
Actually, "the church" didn't oppose Copernicus, even the Catholic hierarchy didn't until Galileo insulted a particularly touchy and scientifically ignorant Pope (the last of the humanist Popes) in one of his books. Galileo had been teaching Copernican cosmology for a while before that and had previously been friendly with the rich guy who became pope. The foremost opponents of his cosmology were the university men, the scientific establishment of his time, some of whom were clerics but many weren't. They were the ones who Galileo bitterly complained to the very religious Johannes Kepler wouldn't even look in his telescope, the ones who in modern a-historical fiction and several often reproduced paintings (never trust a later artist to get it right, trust 20th century dramatists even less) are replaced with cardinals and bishops, a number of whom even championed Galileo within the Vatican while his long trial was being conducted.
Also, it should be mentioned that not a single cosmologist or astronomer today is a Copernican. Anyone who championed his model of the universe, or that of Galileo, for that fact, would be considered a wacky nut-ball because, of course, our sun isn't the center of much of anything, isn't static and revolves and moves through the universe as much as any of the things that can be said to move around it, and the physics of today could as happily say that the sun revolves around the Earth as to say the Earth revolves around the sun as Arthur Stanley Eddington amusingly noted in one of his more popular lectures more than ninety years ago**. Odd how many of those who love to think they're up and with it haven't caught up to that.
While I get what Hauerwas was getting at, what he said was not only not true, it was very inaccurate in the typical modern manner which holds no falsehood is to go unsaid when you can use it to slam religion. I still am finding enormous amounts of what he has said to be extremely useful and extremely interesting. No one gets it all right but I find that theologians are usually better at getting more of it right than their "cultured despisers." They're more careful and, sometimes, seem to really believe it is a sin to bear false witness.
I am not, by the way, a humanist because I reject that human beings are the measure of all things. It is the limits of our mere humanity we are stuck with, humanism misidentifies that misfortune with the definition of reality which surpasses it. It seems to me it exacerbates every parochialism attributed to ancient Near-Eastern religion with an even more radically presumptuous position deifying an often very particularly defined human point of view. Modernism like scholasticism and all other previously dominant isms are things we should get over, not something we should rest on as so many lazy modern academics and those they credential insist on.
* Twenty-five years after his university career, he had finished his great work, at least in his own mind, but hesitated a long time, whether to publish it or to imitate the Pythagoreans, who transmitted the mysteries of their philosophy only orally to their own disciples for fear of exposing them to the contempt of the multitude. His friends who had become interested in the new theory prevailed on him to write at least an abstract for them, manuscript copies of which have been discovered in Vienna (1873) and Stockholm (1878). In this commentary Copernicus stated his theory in the form of seven axioms, reserving the mathematical part for the Principal work. This was in 1531, or twelve years before his death. From this on the doctrine of the heliocentric system began to spread. In 1533 Albert Widmanstadt lectured before Pope Clement VII on the Copernican solar system. His reward consisted in a Greek codex which is preserved in the State library of Munich. Three years later Copernicus was urged by Cardinal Schonberg, then Archbishop of Capua, in a letter, dated at Rome, 1 November, 1536, to publish his discovery, or at least to have a copy made at the cardinal's expense. But all the urging of friends was in vain, until a younger man was providentially sent to his side.
It was George Joachim Rheticus who quitted his chair of mathematics in Wittenberg in order to spend two years at the feet of the new master (1539-41). Hardly ten weeks after his arrival in Frauenburg he sent a "First Narration" of the new solar system to his scientific friend Schöner in Nuremberg, in the form of a letter of sixty-six pages, which was soon after printed in Danzig (1540) and Basle (1541). Rheticus next obtained for publication the manuscript of a preliminary chapter of the great work on plane and spherical trigonometry. Finally Copernicus, feeling the weight of his sixty-eight years, yielded, as he writes to Paul III, to the entreaties of Cardinal Schonberg, of Bishop Giese of Culm, and of other learned men to surrender his manuscripts for publication. Bishop Giese charged Rheticus, as the ablest disciple of the great master, with the task of editing the work. The intention of the latter was to take the manuscript to Wittenberg and have it published at the university but owing to the hostility prevailing there against the Copernican system, only the chapter on trigonometry was printed (1542). The two copies of the "First Narration" and of the treatise on trigonometry, which Rheticus presented to his friend Dr. Gasser, then practising medicine in Feldkirch, may be seen in the Vatican Library (Palat. IV, 585) Rheticus then turned to Schöner in Nuremberg, who, together with Osiander, accepted the charge and engaged the printing-house of Petreius in the same city. In the meanwhile Rheticus tried to resume his chair in Wittenberg, but on account of his Copernican views had to resign (1542) and turned to Leipzig (1543). He was thus prevented from giving his personal attention to the edition, nor was the author himself able to superintend it. Copernicus became paralyzed on the right side and weakened in memory and mind many days before his death. The first copy of the "Six Books on the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbits" was handed to him the very day he died. Fortunately for him, he could not see what Osiander had done. This reformer, knowing the attitude of Luther and Melanchthon against the heliocentric system, introduced the word "Hypothesis" on the title page, and without adding his own name, replaced the preface of Copernicus by another strongly contrasting in spirit with that of Copernicus. The preface of Osiander warns the reader not to expect anything certain from astronomy, nor to accept its hypothesis as true, ne stultior ab hac disciplinâ discedat, quam accesserit. The dedication to Pope Paul III was, however, retained, and the text of the work remained intact, as was ascertained later when access was had to the original manuscript, now in the family library of the Counts Nostitz in Prague.
** If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results. Would it be altogether unfair to imagine something liked the following series of letters in our correspondence columns? It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home. A. writes deploring that in this progressive age few of the younger generation ever notice a sunset; perhaps this is due to the pernicious influence of the teaching of Copernicus who maintains that the sun is really stationary. This rouses B* to reply that nowadays every reasonable person accepts Copernicus’s doctrine. C is positive that he has many times seen the sun set, and Copernicus must be wrong. D calls for a restatement of belief, so that we may know just how much modern science has left of the sunset, and appreciated the remnant without disloyalty to truth. E (perhaps significantly my own initial) in a misguided effort for peace points out that on the most modern scientific theory there is no absolute distinction between the heavens revolving around the earth and the earth revolving under the heavens; both parties are (relatively) right. F regards this as a most dangerous sophistry, which insinuates that there is no essential difference between truth and untruth. G thinks that we ought now to admit frankly that the revolution of the heavens is a myth; nevertheless such myths have still a practical teaching for us in the present day. H produces an obscure passage in the Almagest, which he interprets as showing that the philosophy of the ancients was not really opposed to the Copernican view. And so it goes on. And the simple reader feels himself in an age of disquiet, insecurity and dissension, all because it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.
Of course, what those who endlessly go over the imagined wrongs they believe the Church did to Copernicus or the grotesquely exaggerated ones claimed as having been done to the, admittedly, wronged Galileo really looked out for wasn't the truth, it was just another experience of hatin' on religion and reaffirming their inness with the in-crowd who does such stuff more reliably than they can recite the 7's times table.
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