The RA gedankenexperiment and the Russell Scale

In physics, we have technique for contemplating the consequences of a theory called the gedankenexperiment or, in English, the thought experiment. It was perfected by Einstein (hence the German) who launched himself down the path of Special Relativity with his legendary “what would I see if I could catch up to a beam of light?” thought experiment. 

I like to look at theology with a thought experiment based on the skills of an imaginary polymath called the Rational Agnostic (RA). The RA is smart, educated, scrupulously neutral, and prefers the pronoun they. They look at everything without bias, going where the evidence leads them. We want to use the RA to evaluate doctrine. We are not trying to convince the RA of anything. In particular we are not proselytizing. We give the RA a simple task. We assign to them a doctrine, and ask to what extent the Bible supports the doctrine. We do not care whether or not the RA accepts the doctrine. ^[1] We only care whether our scholarly friend does or does not find support for the doctrine within the pages of scripture. 

We cannot limit our RA to binary yes or no. We need to give them a standard non-logarithmic hundred-point scale for their evaluations.  And we need units for our scale, which, speaking of polymaths, I have dubbed Russells, after my favorite atheist (can a believer have a favorite atheist?) the philosopher, mathematician, writer, and Nobel laureate (Literature) Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). They don’t make atheists like they used to. ^[2] A score of 0 Russells means there is no support for a doctrine to be found from Genesis to Revelation. A score of 100 Russells means that, without question, the doctrine is unambiguously taught in the bible. 

We will also call the scale the Russell Scale. 

For example, if we asked our RA to evaluate the doctrine of the Resurrection of Christ, they would surely give it a score of 100 Russels, not because they believe it but because there is no question whatsoever that the Bible teaches of the Resurrection of our Lord. You can't weasel out of it, nor should you want to.

Now if you asked whether the Bible teaches of the eschatology known as post-millennialism, I think the RA would come back with a very low score. Not zero, but low. Maybe 10 Russells. I think the score would be low for all the dreaded end-times views. 

There is an exegetical spectrum from biblicists to whatever is on the other end of the scale, let's call them scholastics. The scholastics, who derive a lot of doctrine, don't think very highly of the minimalist biblicists, while the biblicists simply don't think about the scholastics at all. Or at least that's how I imagine it. 

In reality, they're not so different. Everyone has a threshold on the Russell Scale. If a doctrine evaluates below your threshold, you will not accept it as dogma. What we call a biblicist has a high threshold, while a scholastic has a low threshold. But no Christian has a threshold of 100 (a pure biblicist.) Nor does any Christian (I hope) have a threshold of 0, at which point you'd accept doctrine even if the Bible had nothing to say on the matter. An example of a pure scholastic would be one who affirms this doctrine which achieves a score of 0 Russells: "Seth found his wife through temporarily genetically safe and moral incest with an unnamed sister." (Come to think of it, maybe there are some pure scholastics.)

One reason that there cannot be a pure biblicist is that the doctrine of the Trinity would not score 100 Russells. You can make a really good case for the Trinity, but you can't make a bullet-proof case. Therefore, positing the Trinity as a necessary doctrine for Christians to affirm, every Christian has a threshold on Russell scale less than 100. QED.

Every Christian, even the biblicists, and even if they deny it, accepts that some doctrine (at least the Trinity) is derived by Lutherian "good and necessary consequences." Your Russell threshold simply determines your tolerance for what achieves the designation of "good and necessary."

How would you score the Trinity? I would give it somewhere around 90 Russells. 

I would give a "yes" on infant baptism somewhere around 40 Russells, and a "no" on infant baptism a complementary score of 60. ^[3]  

For now, that's all I have to say on the Russell scale. I do hope Bertie had a death-bed conversion; he would be an interesting person to talk to.

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^[1] In real-life we would, of course, care a great deal abot our RA's accepteance, at least if the doctrine at hand was the Gospel. 

^[2] To be fair, they don't make theologians like they used to either.

^[3] The Russell Normalization Law requires that the scores of a yes on a doctrine and no on the same doctrine add up to 100 Russells.