What I really meant to say here, but lack the insight, ability, skill, and intelligence to do so poignantly is:
The great movement for independent thought instilled in the modern mind a desperate refusal of all knowledge that is not absolutely impersonal, and this implied in its turn a mechanical conception of man which was bound to deny man’s capacity for independent thought. Such objectivism must represent the public good in terms of welfare and power and set in motion thereby the self-destruction of freedom. For when open professions of the great moral passions animating a free society are discredited as specious or utopian, its dynamism will tend to be transformed into the hidden driving force of a political machine, which is then proclaimed as inherently right and granted absolute dominion of thought.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, pg 214
The refusal to allow personal knowledge a voice within greater society will diminish the society over time. It rules out of court the entire realm of value propositions (posited, at least, by Christianity) based on the common welfare which is unquestionably right to do so and ought not be challenged.
One thing I keep reading and hearing about is the separation of religion from politics. One fallacy I keep seeing is that “religion and politics” means the same as the separation of “church and state.” Historically this is purely untrue. The actual statement in the Constitution when applied to its historical context means something very different than the reification it gets today. It means that the structures of the church can in no way institutionally support, or validate the actions of the government. The head of Britain is the head of the Anglican church – this is the kind of thing the clause is actually talking about.
That being said – we’re constantly reinterpreting everything. I understand that, and it is a necessary element. But it is only valuable when you can still remember the original context and meaning (if you’re not doing that, you are a revolutionary – not one who stands in the tradition).
Why does this bother me? Because under that clause we are systematically removing the values and morality of religion from speaking about public life. There is a grand delusion that people have fallen into where only science or fact can talk about public life. Only objective data (which boil down to Kantian ethics) are useful at all for the public domain. In this way the project of modernity is still ticking right along.
The movement to ban the ability of churches, or people of faith, from acting on behalf of that faith in public is growing. In effect, the message of Christianity is being censored out of public life. At this point it is only Christianity. But as soon as an imam or rabbi says something people don’t like, they’ll be out too.
The hypocrisy of it all, for me, is that Christian theology is only one way of talking about meaning and value. Other religions perform the same task. Other philosophies, including the materialist, secular, scientific philosophy which is in dominance today is performing the exact same task. All these systems of value do it on radically different terms and premises. But they are all playing the same game. The hypocrisy is that one value system, which now has power, is ruling out of court the other value systems that have the ability to topple it. They’re not doing it by appealing to an argument, or that their system is “better”. They are merely doing it by mischaracterizing what is actually going on. They say they’re not playing the same game, but different games – and that religion game is outlawed from public life.
I’m not worried for a minute that they’ll “win” and something will happen to religion. Religion has been the primary mover of humanity and culture until the mid 1800′s in Europe, and the mid 1900′s in America. It is still the primary mover in Africa and South America. Asia is a little harder to diagnose. I’m just worried that we’ve stopped actually thinking about what is going on. Because should the tables of power turn, voices for value should not be arbitrarily silenced.
I am, by and large, shocked that Protestant theology has refused natural theology a place. I’m reading De Visione Dei by Nicholas of Cuza right now, and I love every chapter. I am so taken up by this neo-Platonist natural theology. I find it so very compelling. It makes so much sense out of our experience, Scripture, and the place where both meet. I can’t ignore it’s argumentative force, I am compelled to agree with so much of it.
But Protestantism has gone hand in hand with the “Enlightenment” ideal of rational objective Aristotelian proofs. And correspondingly they’ve got no natural theology. The best they can do is the best Aquinas could do – God in the uncaused causer. Neo-platonism is capable of so much more.
I don’t understand why we’ve given it up. I really don’t.
Update
Kind of elucidates my point. Reading over that seems to be far less than what my, admittedly, cursory readings of Augustine, Bonaventure, and Cusa accomplish.
Thank you Steve Holmes at Shored Fragments for your stunning defense of theology being objective. I cannot count the number of people who think the only objective things, and therefore only things worth knowing (or at least talking about), can be “proven” under some sort of materialistic empiricism. Oh how that circle makes me tired. Under the definition, their method is not objective since it does not lay out its assumptions and make an effort within the discipline to critically engage them. Thank you.
A fantastic piece by Paul Helm on the discussion of what happens when we read, specifically the presuppositions inherent in reading Scripture as Scripture.
There are various ways of articulating and defending our sensory and intellectual capacities in their role as gatherers of reliable information about the world around us. None of these is ‘biblical’ in any direct sense, of course. We cannot lift an epistemology off the pages of Scripture as we can lift a doctrine of justification off them. The epistemologies that have been used, in the history of Christianity, are at odds with each other, though parts of one are not necessarily at odds with parts of others. What matters is that we have reasons that support our belief in the reliability (though not the infallibility, of course) of our epistemological equipment. This will be sufficient to identify a book as the Bible, and to read and understand some, if not all, of what it contains. And then we are in business
The inherit understanding that the Scriptures, actually the truth contained in them, is available to us wholly, completely, and without mediation, is the primary mistake most people make when arriving. In Paul’s words “It [the Scripture] is not free from the vagaries and perils of sense-experience, something which has immediately descended from heaven and entered immediately into our souls.” It is this sense-experience contained within the Scripture that we must deal with. And we must deal without our own world and all its sense experience. Only by bringing those two pieces together can we actually approach an answer to the question of a Christian life.
As Paul again makes clear it is this experience that must be dealt with: “A person may be a disciple while not knowing even whether there be such a thing as Holy Scripture. Remember the thief on the cross. And the hymn ‘There is life for a look at the Crucified One.’” It’s great that we have a book – but the words in the book is not what this is all about. Don’t get sidetracked by it.
“Myth is never plausible narrative. It asks for another kind of assent. To anyone for whom it does not strike an important equipose, it seems absurd. The myth of the Fall makes it possible to think of humankind and the world as at the same time intrinsically good and intrinsically evil. Those to whom this vision is not compelling grumble about the apple and the snake.”
[HT: McGrath]
Based on my last post and some conversations I am having with friends, I want to try and attempt to think through approaching the biblical text. In one sense I am trying to re-trace my own path leaving fundamentalist territory. In another sense, I am trying to clear a path for others to find their own way out as well.
We have to admit where we are coming from. Inspiration means, on a most basic level, that God is responsible for each word in the holy Scripture. It originated from God, and was not the work of men primarily. Of course, some fully deny that men had anything to do with it whatsoever. As the text has come from God directly it is therefore authoritative and inerrant.
To put it at a more practical level, the Scriptures are perceived according to a story that runs something like this:
God delivered this book to his people so they would know him. It is delievered by God for the Church to tell them what to believe and how to live. God has given it to me so I can read it and know he loves me, and what he expects of me.
I am no spinner of tales but that is close. If you have got a better way to put it please let me know. The three terms working within that storyline frame the entire issue. There is no objective reason that inspiration, inerrant, or authoritative mean precisely what fundamentalists want them to mean. However, without dislodging the story you are fighting uphill to redefine the terms, and thus the battle.
That story is flawed. Those definitions are flawed. They are not supported by the Scripture itself, nor the variagated tradition of Christianity. That tends to become the battleground on which the war is fought. To peel back the layers and understanding of the Scriptures themselves is to use critical study. And to peel back the layers of history is to use historical study. From a fundamentalist point of view this is to concede the war before you’ve even started the battle, a Catch-22. How then have I found my way out of the fundamentlist mess I was previously in?
For starters, the group I came out of has some unorthodox beliefs. And if fundamentalists are always right, someone has got to be terribly wrong and we have got to tell them about it. Scholarly sources that agreed with our positions were studied, and thus critical methods were smuggled in the back door. The methods changed slowly, while the underlying narrative in which I placed the Scripture for the Christian life never changed.
I read about the stories that the Jewish people told about the Exodus. I understood that the prophets retold Israel’s history with their own perspectives and motives. The same goes with the gospels, and particularly Paul. Is it so foreign to think that we are telling our own stories about how we got here, and what we ought to do? Of course not! That is exactly what humanity has always done to understand their purpose. And this is why the very concept of narratives and story is so intriguing to me. It contains so much power.
Mark and Luke are telling their own stories about who Jesus is. It doesn’t matter that certain details aren’t congruous. It doesn’t matter that the stories depict Jesus differently. If I were to tell a story about my parents I am certain it would be different than the stories either of my sisters tell. And if you were to put us together in a room we would recognize we are still talking about our parents. We might disagree when it comes down to our perceptions about their intentions or what have you. That is to be expected. Isn’t it?
Over at the Tea Shop they’re talking about fortifying SBL against theologizers. I felt curious about the issue, since last year when I was at SBL here in Boston – Nawlins is just too far for a poor student like myself – I was not under the impression that SBL was being taken in such a fashion. It might be my naivete, or I picked some good sections, who knows.
In going through his discussion, I found this little bit: “some presentations seem to construe the Bible as the primary human text“. I find the objection to the possibility of such an idea strange. If one looks at the text through the critical lens, two billion people religiously find the text as their own. If we were to add in Muslims who honor the Biblical texts to a degree, that is another one and a half billion people. That is over half of the world who identify primarily with this text. That does not even count those who culturally are informed, either actively or passively, by this text. And that is only at this point in history. So, it seems an argument could be made to suggest that this is the primary text by which humanity sees itself, or has seen itself, or is at least in tension or heavily informed by. All this within a critical point of view. It would seem the existence of such a society named The Society of Biblical Literature and the lack of any other major religious literature society would have brought this point into clarity. But, whatever.
I commented to try and find the perimeter, the shape, of this secularizing argument:
I’ve often wondered about where the line of theology is drawn, so I’m glad you’ve brought it up. There must be some element of doing theology that is equally critical as critically examining someone else’s theology. Wouldn’t restricting sessions to only critiques create a situation in which theologies are only destroyed/lessened/rendered lame, rather than be constructive. And that constructiveness need not only be constructive for a specific group (e.g. the church), but for any group, and perhaps, hopefully, all groups? I guess I wonder at the specific audience-focused nature of some sessions that are permissible (feminist, lgbt) while some are not (faith-based). Granted, anyone refusing to be critical or academic in any of these specific audience-focused groups should be refused. I would find it strange that a group for theological readings of lgbt or feminist issues would be permissible while a group for theological readings of ecclesiastical issues would be denied (especially while lgbt and feminist issues are more and more being brought directly into ecclesiastical situations.)
I think the aspect of being constructive is important, for all disciplines. Critical science is able to construct an understanding based on its premises. In all of this thinking I’ve found Jon D. Levenson’s twoessays on this topic to be very formative. It is incredibly valuable that we all agree on the historical and critical methods by which we investigate these texts. We flatly do not, and cannot know about the authorship and history behind theses texts. The texts aren’t intended to tell us about this information. The critical methods have been developed to get us some of these answers. However, as Levenson argues, this method is just another system of knowing. All systems of knowing have an equal claim. Religious knowledge is another system of knowledge.
As the tea shop was so quick to point out, critical scholarship is incapable of making a value judgment. I would agree. However, one must recognize the critical project as a value judgment as well. Philosophers have gone well past recognizing the modernity project as failing at the attempt to be fully objective. Of course, religious knowledge are also making value judgments, that is no where in dispute. Why are we unable to recognize this fact? As a person of faith I am able to live in two worlds, the critical world as a would-be-someday scholar, and the religious world. I find some critical results to impact my world of faith. And my world of faith often gives interests and leads to my critical world. I don’t find these two offices to be antithetical whatsoever. As far as SBL goes, if the organization decides to make some sort of statement towards groups that are operating outside the critical method, that is fine. But as Levenson points out, those who only operate within the critical world have no business saying that the value judgments another system of knowledge (within which they don’t operate) are unbelievable.
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