checking in with epistemology, 2006

It is a good thing that ideology progresses slowly. I am finally reading an issue of Christian Scholar's Review from the summer of 2006. I kept it in stack for years and years, and I am glad that I did; the opening paragraph is a nice snapshot of the present state of western epistemology. It reads:

"This special issue . . . explores the implications of a world of relative values for the scholarly enterprise. The postmodern fixation on relative values has a certain appeal for a young man or woman interested in sex without entanglements, but it raises a different set of issues for scientists who desire 'honest' reporting of research data. With quantum mechanics we discovered that certainty has its limits, but have we also begun to discover that relativism has its limits as well? How do we preserve the cognitive knowledge and aesthetic achievements we have acquired and build on these if the culture no longer has a basis for judging between ideas? One of the insights of our age that people have increasingly recognized is that knowledge is multi-dimensional. Without a basis for judging and comparing ideas, however, the pursuit of knowledge and the gains of culture are threatened. The modern period made the mistake of reducing knowledge to facts, but the postmodern age has the tendency to confuse knowledge with information, and in its use of the World Wide Web, information is traded for data." (447)

The conclusion of the introduction picks up the thread:

"The postmodern critique of modernity has had its impact on the academic disciplines, but it presented little constructive help except in pointing out that the modern emperor had no clothes. These essays [which make up the summer 2006 issue] suggests how a few of the disciplines have begun to cut new cloth. These essays illustrate that the discussion belongs to more disciplines than philosophy and literature. The discussion of beauty belongs to the sciences as much as to the arts. Discussions of 'the good' belong to economics as much as to ethics." (449)

all that from a book review?

A few bits jotted down from a book review by Jerry Walls, professor of philosophy of religion at Asbury Seminary, in the 6/21 2006 edition of The Asbury Journal:

Quoting Kevin Vanhoozer's essay "Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture and Hermeneutics" he writes, "Biblical interpretation is the soul of theology. Truth is the ultimate accolade that we accord an interpretation. Christian theology therefore succeeds or fails in direct proportion to its ability to render true interpretations of the word of God written" (106).[1] Wells then goes on to say, "Of course much contemporary hermeneutical theory denies that there are any such privileged interpretations that can be recognized as true ones, or doubts if we could ever determine what they are. . . . Vanhoozer takes seriously the evangelical doctrine of biblical inerrancy but rejects what he calls a "cheap inerrancy" that would use the doctrine to sidestep legitimate issues of interpretation" (106).

Moving on, Walls discusses an essay entitled "The Rule of Love and the Testimony of the Spirit in Contemporary Biblical Hermeneutics" by Mark Wallace. He writes:

Wallace's attempt to make sense of scripture has led him to the conviction that "discerning the theological truth of the Bible is largely a constructive rather than a descriptive enterprise." The thesis that he defends is "that biblical truth is the ethical performance of what the Spirit's interior testimony is prompting the reader to do in the light of her encounter with scriptural texts." As a practical example of his method of interpretation, he offers as a case study an examination of the "pressing" issues of the ordination of homosexual persons and the blessing of the union of homosexual couples. He suggests that if we take the "Spirit-inspired ideal of love and hospitality toward others as the hermeneutical lodestar" that should guide us in our encounters with scripture, then we will be inclined to accept practicing homosexuals as ministers and bless their unions. (109)

When he gets to Alan Padgett, Wells saysm "[Padgett] sees "the act of interpretation primarily (not entirely) as the discovery of something that is there in the text rather than the creation of something new." . . . Beginning with the broad notion that truth is "the mediated disclosure of being," Christ is the truth because he is the incarnation of God's very being, and the Bible is true because it mediates Christ to use through its texts" (110).

In the conclusion of his review, Wells takes to task the supposed humility of postmoderns who desire to remain so tentative about truth claims. He asks if this is really humility. Quoting the Pope, he says, "In his Introduction to Christianity, the newly elected Pope observed that 'it is nothing short of a fundamental certainty' for contemporary people that we cannot know God himself, which contemporary people somehow understand as 'humility in the presence of the infinite.' The irony here is not merely in the inversion of what we can take as certain, but also in the ground of humility. Whereas classical Christianity would say humility is required precisely because of what we know about God and ourselves through revelation,[2] humility now is understood as a concession that we cannot really know anything about God" (112). I like how he concludes: "As Plantinga points out, the Cartesian standard for certainty and knowledge is an unrealistic one, and many people have made the unfortunate mistake of throwing out claims to knowledge and certainty because they cannot meet this standard."

Though disjointed, and despite Dr. Walls’ overt suspicion of postmodernism, I find these assorted thoughts helpful bricks in the construction of my own understanding of the pervasive, hermeneutical tradition whose skeleton gives shape and orders the motion of that thing called "a Christian worldview," which is in itself the product of a Christian mind. I believe that Plantinga was right. As my friend John G. would say, "it is about knowledge versus certainty." Christians have knowledge, but we don't have Cartesian certainty. For, if the rumors be true, no one does. The human world is thoroughly hermeneutical--interpretation all the way down as Caputo says--for the scientist as much as for theologian.

Nevertheless, some hermeneutics are better than others. Walls's quote from Padgett gets at this, as does my own renewed appreciation of the fundamental aspect of the logos doctrine.[3] The disjunction between hermeneutical systems is absolutely pervasive--that's where that quote about humility comes from. I'm discovering this same sort of thing in other places, where the obvious meaning of a word turns to be something very different when seen in the context of the Judeo-Christian hermeneutical system.[4] This is true for words like self control, faith, love, hope. Hermeneutical systems, then, can be radically different in meaning though syntactically quite similiar.

I can hardly believe how pervasive and thorough-going these differences can be. I feel I'm swinging over an infinite abysss when I glimpse the cultural collusions and the social impotence of the churches. I scarcely know if it is possible any longer to really live anything like the Christian life. Maybe the only thing you can do is ask for God's mercy as you marinate and unwittingly participate in the golden-calf-collusion of the world systems? Maybe we just have to wait for a better age, when it can be possible again? Maybe some future Ambrose, Augustine, Benedict, or Luther will arise who can not only glimpse the real critique a properly understood Christian hermeneutic makes upon the world, but can hold it strongly and clearly enough to demarcate it plainly in word and life so that the example, then, can be better emulated.

I included the bit from Mark Wallace because when you begin to see how meaning changes at the slightest demarcations in hermeneutical method, the differences are often astounding! They well-explain why, in my own ECUSA denomination for example, members of the same tradition come out on such different ends. I think there is some truth in Wallace, but I believe that you cherry pick your "Spirit's interior testimony," without a rigorous historical-critical discipline which attempts as much as humanly possible to respect the author's original intent, however off we may, in fact, be (and I think in most cases we don't go too wide of the mark.)[5] At a recent conference, one of the speakers, Fred Dallmayr of the University of Notre Dame, defined postmodernism in a very helpful way. He said, "Postmodernism means that particularity is being taken seriously again and that no particularity should be allowed to become a generality." I like postmodernism because it takes the legs out from under scientific arrogance, and it reflects to a great degree my experience as a creature seeking understanding. I don't, however, follow it to the end so that no particularity can be a generality. I think one did and is: Jesus the logos. But it isn't that we grasp this incarnated-now-glorified Messiah-God as we would grasp a syllogism. Our grasp is a hermeneutical grasp, and even that is enabled and perhaps even directed by the illuminative, regenerating power of the Spirit working through the medium of canonical Scripture and sacrament, primarily, and ecclesial ministration, secondarily.[6] I've gone on long enough. These are notes are for my own benefit, anyway. I have much further to go, and perhaps have forgotten some important point.

__________

[1] Church historian Rowan Greer in his essay in Early Biblical Interpretation has claimed that the debate about how scripture is to be interpreted, especially how the OT is to be read, definitively shaped the more famous debates about Jesus, the Trinity, and Salvation.

[2] Luci Shaw, Breath for the Bones. "If the gospel is foundational, out of it will naturally flow an art that does not deny its foundation but assumes it. If it is a given, we do not need to be reminded of its existence at every point. If our lives are centered in God's reality, we can risk working out from that center in new directions. And if the work of art truly reflects like experience, then it is itself a small facet of the truth of which Christ is author and co-municator. That is the benison of the sacramental view of life: our realization that all of creation rightly belongs in the house of faith. Put another way: the Logos, which first called the universe into being now embraces and defines it, assigning it meaning and value at every level. As C. S. Lewis said, "I believe in Christianity as I believe the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." Yet with all the phenomena of the universe to write about, we are not free agents. Because we are residents in the house of faith, we are accountable and must shape our gift responsibly to perceive and penetrate to the heart of the matters we address and reveal their true shape and significance to the human community."

[3] Marke this well and take it for a sure conclusion. when god commaundeth us in the lawe to do any thinge he commaundeth not therefore that we are able to do yt but to bryng us un to the knowledge of oureselves that we might se what we are and in what miserable state we are in and knowe our lack that thereby we shuld torne to god and to knowlege our wretchednes un to hym and to desyre him that of his mercy he wold make us that he biddeth us be…” ~ W. Tyndale, from his treatise on the Lord's Prayer

[4] Hannah Arendt grasped this problem of same word different, and perhaps hostile, outcome. Here's a quote I picked up: Arendt's phrasemaking and popularization of notions such as "totalitarianism" developed because she "wanted thoughts and words adequate to the new world and able to dissolve clichés, reject thoughtlessly received ideas, break down hackneyed analyses, expose lies and bureaucratic double talk, help people withdraw from their addiction to propagandistic images."

[5] Peter Machinist. Foreword to Hermann Gunkel, Creation and Chaos trans. K. William Whitney Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), xviii. "[Hermann Gunkel, as other scholars of his late-nineteenth-century German age, believed that] to understand the meaning of a text, its language and motifs, is to understand first where they come from. it is not enough, indeed, it is misleading, to focus simply on the individual text alone, as thought it were a completely independent, free creation of its author. The text must rather be seen as one link in a complex chain of tradition; and interpretation, therefore, must try to discover how its author worked within the tradition, what conditions in his community he was responding to, and why he adapted the tradition as he did in order to produce the text that he did."

[6] Ellen F. Davis. "Introduction" from The Art of Reading Scripture ed. Ellen Davis and Richard Hays. (Eerdmans 2003). "The capacity for fruitful theological wondering resides chiefly in the imagination. Theologian Garrett Green has argued persuasively that in many instances the biblical term "heart" refers to what we call imagination. This notion wonderfully illuminates the use of that word in the eucharistic liturgy: "Lift up your hearts"--lift up your imaginations, open them toward God. Yet an aroused imagination is not in itself a holy state, for the "heart" can be healthy or perverted. Perhaps it is in tacit recognition of this fact that Anglican eucharistic worship begins with the Collect for Purity:

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name, through Christ our Lord.

The Collect for Purity introduces the Ministry of the Word. Thus we ask that when the appointed lections are read, we may be changed in order to hear them with healthy "hearts." Yet at the same time, the church understands that through the action of the Holy Spirit, "the word of the Lord" may itself be an agent of cleansing for our imaginations. Therefore, the subsequent reading of Scripture is part of God's gracious answer to the Collect for Purity." I note also a bit from an advertisement for the conference "After Ricoeur" held Oct. 20-21, 2006 at Oklahoma U:

"One of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century, Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was the author of numerous works addressing the vast spectrum of human experience. His works addressed such topics as myth, language, cognition, religion, ethics, politics, law, and literature, to name only a few. These diverse subjects informed his study of the human experience, which includes the dimension of suffering in addition to action. Ricoeur came to believe that the human experience is laden with multiple layers of meaning and thus the task of understanding and organizing our world is comparable to a text. We shape its meaning through interpretation and, in so doing, discover the significance of the text as well as the meaning of our own lives."

Benedict XVI praises logos

September 12, 2006 lecture at a meeting with representatives of the sciences at Regensburg University said three interesting things. First, he makes the argument that the “profound harmony” of Jewish and Greek elements summed up in John’s doctrine of the logos is a good thing. Christian thinking (based on the LXX and expressed in the Greek language) did not side with Hellenism in general but with the best portions of it. The Jewish shema-confession of a monotheistic, transcendent, creator-God cuts away the idolatry from Greek metaphysics in a manner reminiscent of Socrates’s iconoclasm. John’s logos, which is “reason” at its fundamentum, “reason” which ties together God’s transcendence, God’s revelation (Deus dixit), and humanity’s ability to understand, represents a “mutual enrichment.” It is the basis by which Benedict can say,

The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason, there exists a real analogy in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV).

This in hand, Pope Benedict takes to task those who have desired to strip out every Hellenistic element from Christian theology, which includes (though gently) the Reformers, Duns Scotus (who receives no applause), and Adolf von Harnack (who receives even less). Discretion should be exercised, he says, because, with John and the Church Fathers, “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.” So that “not to act 'with logos' is contrary to God’s nature."

Second, then, this logos-harmony defrocks any confession of a capricious God. Dun Scotus’s voluntarism, where our knowledge of God is simply what he wishes us to know (voluntas ordinata), and beyond that he is free to be or do whatever he wants, is simply not reasonable. Such a god does not act reasonably, and so he cannot be the seat of logos itself. And here Benedict does something interesting. He links Scotus’s theology with the Islamic understanding of Allah codified by eastern theologians such as Ibn Hazn who “went as far as to state that God is not bound by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.” Benedict uncovers, then, a subtle apologetic in the gospel link between the revealing, tabernacling logos of John 1.1 and the creating and creative Word of Genesis 1.3. And, if you follow it out, there is an argument here for why Christianity, and even Christian fundamentalism, should not be treated or feared in the same way as sects or religions which derive from unreasonable foundations. For Christians, reasonable action is godly action. Christian theology does not threaten the dialogue necessary to a free society of mutual respect and responsible political action. Such dialogue is part-and-parcel of its deepest theological confession.

Third and finally, Benedict XVI uncovers an element in our modern, scientific notion of knowledge that I’d never thought of before. Scientific reason, he says, has a platonic core. Scientific reason assumes something about the material world that is immaterial, namely, “the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently.” The core simply goes without saying, perhaps pointing to the success of the technologies which it has produced, or the boon to human life and livelihood which have followed. It is true, human beings and cultures have thrived underneath this assumption, and so much so that “the West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality.” The West doesn’t want to ask why our capacities to understand and the ability to understand correspond so well together. Frankly, I’d never thought of this assumption as a latent Platonism, though I’d well-enough identified it as “the modern victory of Aristotle.” Now, the best portions of postmodernity do ask this question. They do seek and discover epistemological room to include much larger portions of human knowing than simply the empirical. But, as above, some kind of nihilistic extreme is avoided in Christian thought because it is unreasonable in the context of the logos.

Sorting some of this out

There is a need to restate the problem, or at least one of the problems, which Charles Taylor is dealing with in The Malaise of Modernity.

His primary bogey so far has been the cultural slide into soft relativism, a personal and political narcissism which erodes all motivation for personal and political involvement and leads potentially to soft despotism. Why, if self-fulfillment is my goal, should I stay in long term relationships after they have ceased to be fun? Why should I learn the art of political involvement, the give and take of promotion and compromise? Why shouldn't the circle of responsibility be drawn skin-tight around my own changing desires and choices? Aren't I pursuing the authentic life? Isn't the best life that in which I come to realize and maximize myself?

The religious and the secular can make different but parallel arguments. For the secular, I offer Baruch Spinoza: "To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life." And here is Carl Jung, "Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flung in the face of life." Is there any need to raise the specter of Emerson: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," "what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men," or Thoreau or Whitman? Here’s John Stuart Mill:

“If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode” (Three Essays. Oxford University Press, 1975), 83.)

The religious have their own anecdotes as well. A prioress at a Benedictine convent describes her philosophy of life this way, "I try to live my life in such a way that when I die and my Maker asks, 'Did you live the life I gave you?' I can honestly answer yes." Add to this the usual reading of Jesus's parable of the talents.

Wherever you go in the West, the impulse to excavate and assume a larger self, or to release or augment the self and its experiences by means of commerce, is all pervasive--and this is as true in religious literature as secular. We are all caught up in it, e pluribus unum.

But it doesn't have to be this way. The slide into soft relativism by those who value individualism needn't occur. Taylor says that soft relativism is simply the product of a shallow understanding, and he argues for a better one: the ethic or ideal of authenticity.

A major pillar of his argument rests in the importance of a background of intelligibility which he calls "horizons of significance." The argument, see, is between what is valued. Soft relativism values anything it perceives as contributing to self realization, but its basis for argument is in the power of choice. Choice, personal or cultural, bestows value. It is a commercial statement, forever subject to fetishism according to the invisible hand of--we aren't quite sure, are we? I suppose we may have discovered the Powers themselves. At any rate, I want to see explicitly how his argument for these horizons of significance goes, because, again, it is part of the backbone of his argument.

(1) Authenticity requires definition over-and-against, it requires contextual field of differences that matter

"However one feels about it," he writes, "the making and sustaining of our identity, in the absence of a heroic effort to break out of ordinary existence, remains dialogical throughout our lives." (35) Taylor asserts that the creation of identity does not occur in monologue, but in dialogue, in agreement or struggle. Difference is a big part of this. "Defining myself means finding what is significant in my difference from others." (36) But what are real and meaningful differences, and what are not? Is being taller a better goal than, say, carrying on a tribal tradition? How do we know.

We know, says Taylor, because every option comes to us against a background (horizon) of significance. Taylor is pretty pragmatic here, he doesn't say how this horizon came to be, simply that it is, and that it is determined largely by what is sacred. He also says we can't just ignore this horizon.

Soft relativists want to do just that. They argue that choice is what makes an option significant. Again reflecting an instrumental, or commercial, free-market sensibility, choice is the arbiter of all horizons; whether a choice is arrived on the basis of reason or feeling doesn't matter. Any other horizon is dismissed.

The problem with this is that choice alone is cheap. If gold grew on every tree, it would lose its value. That's what choice does. By removing any common horizon and making significance absolutely subjective, everything and every option or possibility becomes as easily obtained and easily discarded as any other. If the goal was to become more authentic by choice, then every option can get one nowhere.

Indeed, by exalting choice, soft relativists undermine their own position. "Unless some options are more significant than others, the very idea of self-choice falls into triviality and hence incoherence." (38) There is no longer a way of telling what is more or less good. The value of an option has to come from without, independent of my will, and that applies even to the value of choice: "Self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues (I have also called the options, potentials, variables, etc.) are more significant than others." (Ibid.)

The choices required for authenticity require options that have real substance against a horizon of significance.

"The ideal of self-choice supposes that there are other issues of significance beyond self-choice. . . . It requires a horizon of issues of importance which help define the respects in which self-making is significant. The agent seeking significance in life, trying to define him- or herself meaningfully, has to exist in a horizon of important questions. I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. [Therefore, unlike soft relativism,] authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands" (39-41).

(2) Authenticity requires a way of recognizing differences without flattening them

The above argument means that simply making the choice to value others, simply asserting that a multicultural society is a good thing, does not proscribe value. The ability for those statements to have meaning requires that some common horizon be found for differences which make them valuable. "Mere difference can't itself be the ground of equal value." (51) "There must be some substantitive agreement on value, or else the formal principle of equality will be empty and a sham." Taylor turns to politics.

A political definition will not do it. Definitions of themselves exclude some differences even as they draw a wall of commonality around other differences. This is nothing but choice put in the hands of the polis, and the argument goes the same way as it did for individual choice as a ground for meaning. So what horizon of value does make sense?

Taylor doesn't answer the question definitively. Rather, he encourages his reader to begin to find "commonalities of value," and labels the most crucial of these "sharing a participatory political life." It is a necessary point on the way. Taylor has certainly gone further than narcissism, but it isn't enough in my opinion. What a commonality of value is, Taylor doesn't say. His result is shallow. Offering a political becoming--finding the answer in the process--though culturally a winner, is, in my mind, unsatisfactory.

Taylor's plea not to notice that man behind the curtain suggests a way for theology to provide a better answer. There is more to Taylor than soft relativism, but he does not arrive at a true and satisfactory Truth which would, by its very assertion, provide a touchstone, a north star, a schema of meaning in relation to all other suggested values. Interesting, too, that Taylor suggests a fundamental anthropology during his argument, writing, "There is a picture here of what human beings are like." He may not be sure what this anthropology is--perhaps it is a topic that will come up later in his book--but it is certain that the matrix formed between the relationship of God and humankind is a horizon of value that theology has long understood.

Previous entries in this series are:
The Need for Recognition.

Charles Taylor; individualism; social theory; modernity.