Can Jews, Christians and Muslims Unite Against Postmodern Nihilism?

Jews, Christians and Muslims have been fighting, rhetorically and literally, for centuries over the true Abrahamic faith. But, is it time to refocus upon shared beliefs amid the threat of postmodernism? This is the question that the Religious Freedom Institute’s (RFI) “Jews, Christians, & Muslims: Allies in Pursuit of Truth, Virtue, & the Common Good?” addressed.

The 90 minute webinar included distinguished philosophers John Finnis, who was Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch’s doctoral advisor, Rabbi David Novak as well former IRD and RFI co-founder Kent Hill, with Hamza Yusuf, founder of America’s first Islamic college, the Zaytuna Institute, and Ismail Royer, also of the RFI. The panelists focused on how to argue from the perspective of religious truth in a postmodern society that no longer believes in objectivity.

From Yusuf’s point of view the denial of objective moral truth is nothing new: “Every generation has to grapple with nihilism, that this has been ongoing in human civilizations. You have to deal with the fact that you exist, that you have a life, but what do you do with that life? Is it meaningful? Is it purposeful? Overcoming nihilism is something every religious tradition must overcome. The proof is in the pudding, that a virtuous life, a life well lived, will have consequences.”

For his part, Finnis believed that the role of divine revelation is to “clarify and affirm” the things that we can already know through natural reason. Everyone has questions about the world, “everyone actually believes in truth in the matters that concern them, they want to be in touch with reality,” said Finnis.

To know reality secular people usually turn to scientific knowledge. But, according to Finnis: “The key to relating mathematical or scientific truth to transcendent truth is to realize transcendence initially is a matter of pressing on with questions, pursuing questions of the very type that got you to discovering scientific truth, searching for further explanation of what one started with… and you ask ‘what’s the explanation for this?’” Nobody is immune from asking these deep questions and the explanations favor religion.

But, Finnis maintained that, in arguing for the existence of objective truth with postmodern-leaning people, he never found it necessary to reference his Catholicism.

“For the 45 years that I taught Law and Foundations of Ethics and Morality at Oxford I never once referred to Catholicism or sources of Christian revelation and I didn’t need to; I was drawing on that for my full clarity and full certainty, but I didn’t need to appeal to it, and none of us need to appeal to it. We’ve got good reasons. They were good for Plato and Aristotle and the saints and the prophets and they are good for us,” Finnis said.

Novak, whom Hill called the “premier Jewish theologian in the world” agreed with Finnis’ argument. “Our morality is not deduced from our theology. There are certain moral norms that are clearly understood by all reasonable people. What our theology does is inform our morality, giving it a cosmic context which is something we bring with us.”

However, though it may have been true in the past that reasonable secular-minded people could agree on the natural law for things like sexual ethics, this is no longer true. The problem with today’s progressives is that they deduce morality from their political ideologies. These ideologies become “what we would refer to as idolatries,” as the moral axioms of their lives. Quoting G.K. Chesterton, Novak described them as “people who believe in nothing end up believing in anything.”

Royer, who is Muslim, pushed back against Finnis and Novak. Quoting John Adams, he reminded us that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” With this in mind, “a government that is a republican institution doesn’t provide [its own] moral substance, and so when we lack a moral substance, the teachings of virtue, the fear of God, that polity is going to necessarily collapse.” In this way Royer thought it was insufficient to rely on arguments from a natural law standpoint.

Yusuf, Finnis and Novak all agreed that we can rely on references to the natural law, knowable to everyone from Aristotelians to Daoists, in ethical concerns like traditional marriage and abortion. Finnis, for example, noted that Plato’s sexual morality is essentially identical to the morality of Pope Paul VI. Only Royer tended to disagree that the natural law is an insufficient grounding for agreement across secular lines.

Whatever our religious affiliation, it seems the conflict of the 21st century won’t be between different religions but rather between religionists and idolaters. Despite the infinite chasm between Judaism, Christianity and Islam the schism between monotheism and postmodernism is, paradoxically, infinitely greater.