The public square is always tended by a gatekeeper, and as I've said before, the gatekeeper in our day is Enlightenment secularism manifested culturally in the materialism of the hard sciences. This is to say that the public square and all conversation allowed in the public square is implicitly in dialogue or in open agreement with the philosophical assumptions of science.
So, then, the public Christian has three ways of speaking. First, he may fully adopt materialist presuppositions and compartmentalize his mind, so that he is a Christian in some spheres and a secularist in the other. A subset of this is that he may refuse to compartmentalize the two and live buffeted by the tension. Second, he may retreat from the the metaphysics of modernity into a neoclassical metaphysics. My hypothesis is that the Intelligent Design community is pursuing this option, and that this option fuels the success of that effort to revive the argument from design. Third and finally, he may adopt the extremely new metaphysics of process or emergence.
I believe that an orthodox confession can be made within any of these three strategies--and, for me, this is a very new idea! Using the metaphor of a car, where orthodox confession is the body, the underlying metaphysic is its engine. One can swap out an engine and retain the integrity of the body (to lesser and greater degrees.) And, stepping further out, my guess is that the publicly thinking Christian cannot remain neutral forever but will, by steps known or unknown, inevitably choose one of the above three options.
Final caveat: in the course of time more options may develop. These are the ones I'm aware of presently. The Radical Orthodoxy movement of ten years ago (to the present?) was, to my mind, a variant of option two. And it is demonstrable that process or emergence has yet to produce what could be called thick orthodoxy, or something that the Nicene Fathers might recognize and agree with. This, however, does not mean it cannot, but only that it has not at this point in its development.
"And by publicly thinking I mean the Christian who is interested in thinking outside of the ecclesiastical circle, the Christian interested in speaking in the public square."
ReplyDeleteDo you mind if I ask you a question or two about this? I've been thinking about the concept of Public Reason lately -- by which I mean something pretty specific, but that doesn't matter -- and your comments above relate to my thinking. Note that I'm coming from a basically a-religious perspective.
My question is: if one felt limited to adopting an intellectual orientation consonant with orthodoxy, what is the motivation for wanting to "think outside the ecclesiastical circle" or "speak in the public square"? I'm not trying to be snarky, I've just been trying to get to the bottom of that urge. I used to be someone committed to Christian orthodoxy who certainly wanted to do those things, but I can't anymore even figure out what my motives were. Was I seeking to leverage thought and the public square in the service of orthodoxy? Was I possessed by a disconnected desire to think and speak in the public square, which desire I simply had to square with my orthodoxy? Or what? Obviously you can't answer those questions about me, but as someone who is engaging similar problems, if you wouldn't mind, how would you characterize the motivation to speak and think in the public square, even while holding onto the priority of orthodoxy?
Hi, Robert. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to write a comment. And, incidentally, I loved your advice about choosing an ancient philosopher for a sidekick. That's good advice! At any rate, I've been thinking about how to best respond to your question about the motivation behind a desire to combine an a priori commitment to Christian Nicene orthodoxy with public reason. As you pointed out, there are a lot of ways to come at this. So allow me to choose the plainest sense that I can think of. The motivation is that I am a member of the polis. And as a member of the polis, I have been caught up in a larger story--the story of God's redemption/restoration of the cosmos. This story is not a limiting story, but a freeing story. Nor does it remove me from political responsibility. Think of the vertical and horizontal of Jesus's synopsis of the Torah, to love God and your neighbor. And the Johannine riff on the same that anyone who doesn't love their neighbor, does not love God. So, to sum up, the Christian unifies orthodoxy and public reason because she herself is a citizen of both. Perhaps I go to far to say that it is an ontological thing, not simply an epistemological position or evangelical impulse. As for public reason, I am defining that as public speech that is at least minimally recognized and understood in the public square. Last thought, simply because I can't help myself. The incarnation is God "speaking" in the public square. The confession "Jesus is Lord" is an assertion of orthodoxy even as it is political speech sui generis. Anyway, hope I am getting at an answer to your question, and, again, thanks for writing.
DeleteThe book _Four Views on Christian Metaphysics_ Timothy Molsteller. Wipf & Stock, 2002, divides its content up into four options: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Idealism, and Postmodernism.
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