Safety, knowledge, faith

Sometimes you come across disagreements that seem to be totally intractable, things where the differences are so great that it seems almost impossible to discuss the issue.  Sometimes this is because we are emotionally invested in particular positions; sometimes, I think the disagreements cannot be overcome because we are not talking within the same epistemological structure.

For example, where Christian views of truth - which have of course been predominant in the West from late antiquity to the mid-twentieth century - think from the top down, beginning with God at the top and proceeding downwards via the concept of revelation, contemporary Western culture tend to think upwards, starting with the safety of the individual, and putting that at the centre of the epistemological world.  Whereas for the Christian view (which has its antecedents in, for example, Plato) there is inherent value in truth, a value which stands irrespective of the human effects of truth, for our culture certain opinions ought not to be held, certain beliefs are automatically invalidated, because they are considered to be harmful to the individual or society.

For Christians who are used to thinking primarily in terms of truth, real truth - what Schaeffer called 'true truth' - this can all be very disorienting, and can even appear so ridiculous as to be worthy only of mockery.  Truth, we know, does not bend to the individual; reality will not shift to make us comfortable.  But it really isn't ridiculous.  It is a move that is more or less required by the loss of faith in God.

If you don't believe in the Christian God, it takes immense courage to pursue truth, and it is not clear that it even makes sense to do so.

Christians have often tried to make the case that without the existence of God the very concept of truth is hard to maintain.  I agree with that, but it's not the point I'm making here.  What I'm saying here is that without the love of God, it probably doesn't make sense to pursue truth at all.  Because the Christian knows that God is love - and the Christian knows what that love means, because it has been demonstrated at the cross of Christ - it is possible to approach reality with a confidence that what is true is also good.  Truth may be hard to take; the truth may hurt me in many ways.  But I can be sure that ultimately the truth is good for me, because the Person who defines truth and creates reality is my Heavenly Father, the God of love.  Therefore the Christian can pursue the truth, with the knowledge that nothing ultimately harmful to me lies there.  I can be safe in the pursuit of the truth, not because every truth that I find will be comfortable, or because there will be no pain in the truth, but because behind every fragment of truth stands The Truth personified - Jesus Christ, the revelation of the love of the Father.

Now take away faith.  There is no reason to believe that truth and reality are good; there is no reason to believe that there is safety in the truth.  It may be that you nonetheless conclude that you want to know the truth.  You may decide to face the potentially very bleak reality.  But why?  What is the value of so doing?  In an atheistic world, what is at stake in pursuing the truth - why is it better to know than not to know?  If knowing the truth is harmful - and we have no reason whatsoever to believe that it will not be - why should we want it?  Shouldn't we value human comfort and safety, which are real, concrete things, which make life more bearable, over the abstract value of truth?

It is only the Christian, who knows that truth is not abstract but personal, who can therefore trust that truth is good, that Truth and Love are essentially the same - the same Person.  Out of this faith can come a genuine pursuit of the truth, in the confidence that however hard the truth is, we are ultimately safe with God.

In praise of postmodernism

It may be just a perverse tendency in me, but I sometimes find that I want to defend intellectual positions which Christians have become accustomed to consider as 'the enemy'.  I've written a few times about humanism.  When I was growing up, humanism was the great evil (sometimes, of course, qualified as secular humanism, but often not).  I have since come to believe that humanism is the fruit of Christianity, and that secular humanism is merely the picked (and therefore dying) fruit.  Christians ought to defend, not vilify, humanism, and they ought to do so in the name of Christ and the gospel.  I think in particular that they ought to defend humanism now, because humanism is under threat.  Secular humanism hasn't the internal vitality, the intellectual strength, to resist the basic drift away from valuing human life, for example.  It hasn't the power to insist on humanity in the face of market forces.  Christians should be at the humanist barricades, not fighting under the flag of humanism but under the flag of Christ.

More recently I've noted that wider Western culture has begun to turn its back on one of those other great bugbears of my Christian youth: postmodernism.  Postmodernism, as we knew very well as undergraduates, was evil because it taught that there was no absolute truth, and therefore made everything relative.  In the wider culture for a long time postmodernism was regarded as both liberating and necessary, the former because it meant that I could live my own narrative without regard to any great metastory, and the latter because it meant the avoidance of bitter conflict.  I can live in my world, and you can live in yours.

In recent years, the growth in 'fake news' and the way in which the postmodern insistence on the inviolability of a personal narrative has become a political weapon has put our culture off.  People who were absolute relativists (so to speak) a decade ago are now crying out that truth matters, that there is real truth.  Lots of people in the church see this as a very positive move.

But I am fond of aspects of postmodernism, and I'd hate to lose them.

The new modernism, the new insistence on real truth which is true for everyone, seems like it accepts the Christian position that there is true truth out there.  But because it doesn't put that claim in a Christian framework, it misses something which postmodernism saw more clearly: that just because there is true truth out there doesn't mean that it is easy to access, or that the truth which I think I know corresponds to this absolute truth.  The new modernism seems to me to be actually a return to the naive modernism of the Enlightenment and of Kant.

Ah, Immanuel Kant.  The philosophy of Kant is something else that I love even though Christians are meant to be against it.  I mean, it's really badly wrong in lots of ways, but the key insights are genuinely, well, insightful.  For Kant the key thing in epistemology (or so it seems to me, though I doubt he would have put it like this; he would have put it in hundreds of pages of incomprehensible German) is that we all think and know as humans.  That means that we think and know within certain limitations, certain forms - we think, for example, in terms of time and space.  For Kant, that limits what we can know, but that's okay; knowing the limits, we can proceed with confidence within them.  And Kant and his ilk really thought that if everyone just used reason (and observation) correctly, they would all come to the same conclusions.

The postmodern development is to insist that not only must I think and know as a human, but I must think and know as me.  My culture, my background, my past experiences - all these shape and influence the way that I think and know, just as my basic humanity (if there is such a thing) does.  Just as, for Kant, I cannot step out of humanity to think things without time or space, postmodernism observes that I cannot step out of my particular place and vantage point.  I am located, and I see and think and know from that location.

Now, this is true.  The Christian revelation clearly shows us two things which are deeply relevant to epistemology.  The first is that there is truth, true truth: Truth.  It shows us that there is Truth not by an abstract philosophical doctrine but by the personal appearance of Truth Incarnate amongst us.  But the second is that we do not have obvious and unproblematic access to Truth.  We are both finite (and therefore have a limited perspective) and fallen (and therefore pervert the truth, both wilfully and unconsciously).  Christians do well to remember both: the insights, if you like, of modernism and postmodernism held together.  We need to remember them because the new modernism is already making our natural human tribalism worse: I can see that something is true, so if you don't agree you must be a spreader of fake news.  Rather than wondering whether the other person's different conclusion flows from a different perspective - and therefore might include elements of truth that I can't see so easily from my vantage point - we assume that they are simply party-biased, denying the truth because it is to their advantage.  Ironically, the response to the fact that postmodern epistemology has been weaponised is to weaponise modernism.

There is no epistemic humility, the kind of humility which should follow from knowing that Truth Incarnate could knock on your front door and you wouldn't recognise him unless Truth Inbreathed enabled you.  You, left to yourself, wouldn't recognise truth if it was throwing the tables around in your temple.

So half a cheer for postmodernism.  There was something profoundly right in it all.  Shame if in our scramble to recover Truth we forgot all about it.

Persuasion, ideology, politics

One thing I noticed about the most recent election campaign was the real lack of effort to persuade.  My social media feeds were full of people posting political things, but I only remember seeing one serious attempt to persuade people to vote one way or another (and even that was framed in terms of 'if you know anyone who is thinking of voting Tory...' - i.e., it wasn't trying to persuade directly, but on the assumption that all our friends think the same as us was advising on how we might evangelise the heathen).  Why don't we try to persuade each other?

My guess is that there are a number of factors.

One is the resurrection, on the left at least, of ideology.  Ideology, which we might perhaps define as a coherent and programmatic set of ideas which are considered to mutually imply or reinforce one another, makes persuasion more difficult, because you have to buy the whole package.  Now, some of us have considered, for example, socialism, and found that it's not a package we want to purchase.  You could still persuade me, though, if you wanted, of various individual policies.  But there is a sense of this being not worth the while.

Part of that sense is driven, I think, by the winner-takes-all setup of British politics.  If you can't persuade me to come over completely to 'your side', there's not much point in trying to persuade me of particular positions.  At the end of the day, one side or the other will be in power.  Note that this is true even after a very mixed election result like last week's.  The Labour party is not talking about how their ideas need to be taken into account, but about how hard they will make it for the Tories to govern.  Similarly, the chastened Conservatives are not chastened enough to consider a cross-party response to anything.

I wonder also if we've stopped trying to persuade because of a combination of statistics and a sense that people will almost always vote their own, predetermined, interests.  One of the most disturbing things about the last election campaign was the division exposed, and I think exacerbated, between young and old.  The implication was that we all know young people vote left, and old people right, and they do so because the right promotes the interests of the elderly and the left the interests of the young.  The determinism implied in this is fueled by stats: we know that the majority of younger people do vote left.  But the assumption that, for example, your dad is bound to vote Tory because he's drawing a pension, and that he does so without a thought for you and your situation is really quite offensive.  This promotes the worst kind of tribalism.  (Speaking from a Christian point of view, I would also want to point out the many, many passages of Scripture which encourage us to respect our elders as those likely to have more wisdom than us!)

Another thought is that we are all thoroughly caught up in post-truth.  No point trying to persuade people who live in different worlds and have different truths.  This is not limited to just the extremists, nor is it a phenomenon of the left or right exclusively (it is interesting to compare, for example, Corbyn's comments on the 'mainstream media' with those of the Donald.  My guess is that if you anonymised the comments people wouldn't be able to tell the difference).  But here's the thing: we're post-truth, but we aren't prepared to go full relativist.  So we're led into this place where we have to assume conspiracy: we know the truth, and all those who disagree are blinded.  It would take something with the force of a religious conversion to open their eyes, and so we don't bother trying to engage and persuade.

There is, of course, a big chunk of reality in the post-truth analysis.  We do all live in different worlds.  We see things hugely differently.  So my last thought is this: we don't want to try to persuade in the political realm because it is really, really difficult.  It is difficult because we can't assume the same priorities, or the same goals - it isn't as if we just disagree on the best way to get up the mountain.  We disagree about what the mountain is, or whether there is a mountain at all.  Attempts to persuade would take us pretty quickly into hard conversations - do we agree on any aspects of human flourishing?  Do we even agree about what a human being is?  And here we're in trouble, because I'm not sure we do.  So persuasion would have to go behind politics to huge issues of anthropology, ethics, and ontology.  Who, frankly, can be bothered?

I am not convinced the future is bright for our political discourse.  I don't think we can assume that democracy can work in such a fragmented society.  I wonder what happens next.

Epistemic attitudes

We recognise that our ability to know is entirely gift, and therefore approach the task of knowledge with gratitude.  That we have faculties directed toward knowing; that there is a world out there which can be known; that there is sufficient correspondence between these two such that we can fairly reliably know things - this is all God's grace in creation.  That this situation is maintained minute to minute is God's sustaining grace.  And given our finitude and capacity for error, any one particular instance of knowing is God's providential grace.  Knowing should be accompanied by deep gratitude.

We recognise that our ability to know is limited by both our finitude and our sin, and therefore approach the task of knowledge with humility.  Perhaps we put this epistemic virtue into effect most clearly when someone disagrees with us.  What we thought we knew is called in question by another knower, and we recognise that we could indeed be wrong.  This attitude flows ultimately from the existence of God, the great Knower, who alone sees things as they truly are.  In his presence, our knowing must be accompanied with humility.

We recognise that to know is a joyful task given by God, and therefore approach the task of knowledge with seriousness.  If God has given us a world to know and the faculties to know it, we must not approach knowledge flippantly or lightly.  It is good to know, and we take our good gifts for granted and act presumptuously if we do not put significant effort into knowing.  This will include working hard to correct our mistakes, to hear the perspectives of others, etc.  Recognising that we are called by God to know, our knowing must be accompanied by seriousness.

We recognise that our knowledge is always constrained by our position in time, and therefore approach the task of knowing with openness to change.  Our knowing is eschatologically oriented.  That is to say, only God knows what things will be, and that means that only God really knows what things are now.  Our knowledge must always be open-ended; we can't ever think we have said the final word on any subject.  The final word always belongs to God himself.  Awaiting that word, our knowing will always be accompanied by a sense of openness.

The new modernism

It has been interesting to see the backlash against the Trump administrations presentation of 'alternative facts'.  Given the obviously propagandistic use of such 'facts', it is not at all surprising that people have been unhappy.  But the reaction has gone beyond this, to an outright repudiation of the postmodern project, and an assertion of some pretty old school values: truth is truth, and is clearly perceived.  Or as someone else has put it:

Liberals are now interestingly revealing themselves as unreconstructed positivists on the question of 'facts'.

— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) 24 January 2017

For those of us - say, orthodox Christians - who have been upholding the objectivity of truth for a long time, this is fairly ironic.  But it's not something I think we ought to be particularly cheering for.  Instead, I think this may be the time to spring to the defence of the genuine and valuable insights of postmodern epistemology.

For starters, we need to recognise that the current trend in liberal thinkers particularly is not in any sense a move in the direction of a Christian epistemology.  Rather, the move is back to an Enlightenment view of truth, which could basically be summarised like this: truth is available to anyone who makes right use of their reason and who is educated in the basic uninterpreted facts of the world.  This is the very foundation of the Enlightenment project: that we have access to the truth, and that the access which everyone has is basically the same.  This is the liberation which the Enlightenment declares from all mere authority: we don't need anyone to tell us the truth, because we can work it out for ourselves.  This is a million miles away from a Christian epistemology which recognises the fallen state of humanity, and the inherent limitations of the creature, and which looks to divine revelation for the ultimate truth.  Let's not get too excited about the apparent resurrection of objective truth: it's actually just Zombie Kant, staggering from his grave to once again trouble the world.

Then again, it is useful to realise that postmodern thinkers helpfully underlined the fact that we human beings have no access to uninterpreted facts.  Every 'fact' is part of a story, and carries different force if transplanted into a different story.  Seeing the world (as even Kant saw, if he didn't quite follow through on the insight) is an active thing, not a mere passive receptivity.  We Christians ought to hold on to this as both an essential part of epistemic humility, and as an apologetic.  Just because liberal thinkers seem to be suddenly convinced (in theory; in practice they have been convinced of this for many years) that their view of the world is the view of the world, self-evident to anyone who just thinks straight, we must point out that no view of the world except God's own view is straightforwardly true in that way.

The question to be asking of the new modernists is: what possible justification do you have for thinking that your view of the world is the right one?  What reason do you have to believe that you have access to objective, uninterpreted truth?  In other words: justify your belief.  And I will wager whatever you choose that this cannot be done without a leap of blind faith.  And perhaps a follow up question, which has a more positive spin: like you, I want to contest the anti-truth stance of the Trumps of this world.  May I not humbly suggest that this is the cause of God, and must be fought under his banner or not at all?

Post-truth: a post-script to 2016

1.  There are no facts that are not embedded in, and dependent upon, wider stories.  It is not that isolated facts don't communicate the whole truth; it is that they communicate literally nothing.  If they seem to communicate, it is only because they carry with them unnoticed shreds of story, or because they are already a part of a story you know and believe in.

2.  In a culture where each person is encouraged to see their life as their own personal story, to be written as they choose, an overarching narrative that goes beyond 'everyone can be who they want to be' is impossible.

3.  That each person can be whoever and whatever they want to be is the lying story which we incorporate into all our children's films, presumably because we can't think of anything better to say.  But adults who still believe this story are surely to be pitied.

4.  In fact, this story is no story at all.  A story adds meaning, but this story negates meaning.  Within it there are no characters, because there is not even a shared world.  It is in principle impossible for us to interact with each other, because we are not characters but authors, writing private stories.

5.  Two things prevent us from actually living in this absurd state: the physical world, which is a given we can't easily deny (hence natural scientists are anchored, and tend to think post-modernity is nonsense, albeit often collapsing into a naive realism); and our own sense that we are not actually in control (reinforced by things that happen within our lives).

6.  Still, given we've spent the best part of two centuries as a culture arguing that there is no truth beyond my own personal sense of what is coherent with my life story as I like to tell it, it's a little bit rich for us to complain about living in a post-truth world.

Revelation and Resurrection

My thoughts once again circle around to the doctrine of revelation.  I am pretty convinced that we (by which I mean, Christians in the evangelical tradition) do not have a handle on it.  I think the reason we don't have a handle on it is that we don't see it as problematic.  God reveals himself - something about Jesus, more about the Bible, bish bash bosh, job done.  Let's call it a doctrine.  Obviously, there are lots more thoughtful treatments of the subject than that, but I haven't come across many which try to get to grips with what is, for me, the central question of our time: 'how could God reveal himself to us?'

A few things about the question:

1.  Methodologically, we need to be committed to a certain weak circularity here.  That is to say, we must decline to look at answers which are not themselves based on revelation.  Rather than imagining channels through which God might be revealed, and then investigating them for revelatory content (which is the procedure of, say, Schleiermacher and the whole liberal school of the 19th century), we need to face up to the fact that we could only find out how God could reveal himself by examining how God did reveal himself. Start with the gospel, and then move to theology and philosophy.

2.  The question is made problematic by the recognition in Kant and post-Kantian epistemology that human beings are not merely receptive in their perception of the world.  Each of us, and all of us collectively in the various groups and societies in which we find ourselves, shape the 'world' that we perceive.  We bring as much as we receive.  I think this is undeniably true, but I think the implications are widely ignored (in analytic philosophy, and in English-speaking theology).  Those implications are manifold, but one huge one is the raising of another question - how could God give himself to be known by us in a way which does not also constitute giving himself away?  How could God reveal himself without becoming another object, becoming just another building block in my construction of my 'world'?  (The wider philosophical question is what forces me, at least, to walk somewhere between a naive realism and a full-blown phenomenology).

3.  The answer, I think, lies in the analogy between incarnation and inscripturation.  God did give himself to us in such a way that he became subject to our deepest distortion of reality.  In the person of Christ, God gave himself, and to all appearances gave himself away.  That is to say, at the cross, the God-man can scarcely be seen as divine at all.  God's revelation, at its highest point, has been incorporated into anti-God constructions of the 'world' - materially, by the crucifixion.  The resurrection, however, shows that this apparent giving away of God is nothing other than the material condition of his final triumph over all such false constructions of the world.  God rescues his revelation, and in so doing shows that it was always his intention to let it walk the way of humiliation.  Is the same true in revelation generally?  In committing the witness to Christ to writing - to Scripture - God gives himself away again.  Here we have a book, another object over which I am a subject, material which I can interpret any which I please, and which I must inevitably interpret according to my situation, background etc. etc.  Is God's revelation lost?  Only if he doesn't come back to it; only if there aren't little epistemic resurrections of the text which triumph over our individual constructions.  God fights back against all our misreading.

4.  Pneumatology must be the end point, as the starting point.  Incarnate of the Holy Ghost - driven along by the Holy Spirit - reminded of all these things.  These phrases are linked historically and theologically.

Still thinking...

Knowing God?

I feel like the question of how we come to know God occupies a lot of my time.  It's a funny question.  For me, it doesn't spring from any anxiety about my own knowledge of God.  Perhaps there is some angst over the fact that other people don't see what I think I see.  Mainly, though, the question is not an existential but a theological one for me.  Given that we know God, how are we to understand that knowing?  Given that it is the case, how can it be the case?  The question is important because at all stages of the theological development of the church the different answers that have been given have represented fundamentally different views of what it means to be a Christian, and by implication what it means to be a human being.  More importantly, different views of how we come to know God lead to different views of the God we come to know.

Consider the first few centuries of the church.  The initial strong consensus that one comes to know God through Jesus Christ - the visible Son of the invisible Father, the precise image of God in the flesh - is challenged by a culturally much stronger and more acceptable form of mystery religion.  Yes, Jesus, but also some sort of mystery - a kind of top-up knowledge.  To really know God, you need Jesus+spiritual experience, or Jesus+secret knowledge.  And of course, because knowing God is caught up with salvation, it turns out that your ascent to salvation is also through secret knowledge.  And given this secret knowledge, one is able to 'see' that of course Jesus was not God in the flesh, but something else, something more refined and more worthy of the dignity of the deity revealed in the mystery.

Or consider the reformation period.  Here there is a more promising starting point, for all are agreed that one comes to know God through Jesus.  The question at issue between Protestant and Catholic is actually 'which Jesus?'  Is it the historical, once-for-all Jesus, to whom the Scriptures bear witness with a finality that cannot be gainsaid?  Or is it the Jesus who is present in the church, to the extent that the church's tradition and teaching reveal him?  That cannot be unrelated to the main difference between the two sides when it comes to salvation: is it by the once-for-all achievement of Christ on the cross, or is it by the repeated sacrifice of Christ on the altar?

Or think about the 'enlightenment'.  The early church period is in some ways reversed.  The prevalent view is that common sense and experience can lead all people to know God.  Jesus helps to clarify that knowledge, and sharpen it, and give shape to the relationship with God that all people everywhere have by virtue of creation.  This view was opposed by versions of the Protestant and Catholic dogmas of the reformation era, both to some extent hardened and weakened, but both demanding (rightly) that Jesus comes in some sense first - although this was sadly muddied on the Catholic side by a strong commitment to the Aristotelian thought of Aquinas.

What is the point?

The point is simply this: whenever you see something co-ordinated with Jesus Christ as a source of knowledge about God, you know you are in trouble.  Doesn't matter whether it's spiritual experience, natural theology, church tradition or anything else.  It's trouble.

On which, more shortly...

Knowing things

I'm banging on about epistemology all the time. It gets boring, I know, but I'm just not convinced that we've got any sufficient answer to the question 'how does one come to know anything?'

It seems like that could be quite an important question to me.

This week, a lecture (on romanticism and theology - intriguing stuff) has got me thinking about the different factors that have an effect on my coming to know something. I'm sure there are loads, but I've been pondering six of them. I suspect that all 'coming to know' or acquiring knowledge involves a mix of at least these six things in different measures. And I further suspect that this makes the process much less straightforward than is often assumed. My six things were:

1. Sense experience. This is the 'given' of our knowledge, the stuff that is just external to us and over which we have very limited control. It is sights, sounds, smells, touch, taste - and perhaps other things too. But it is very limited by itself, being just sensations and nothing more.

2. Reason or understanding. We 'think' our world together into a whole. (Yes, this is Kant. So he wasn't wrong about everything). We don't experience pure sensation, but objects and scenery. That is a product of our brains putting our sensory information together.

3. Imagination. I'm thinking here of the way in which we tell the story of our lives. This experience, this thought, is not isolated, but fits into a pattern. Imagination tells me who I am, and where I have come from. Of course, this is not just me telling my story, although there is that. It is also me fitting my story into bigger stories, the stories of my culture, my religion, and the like. Just to clarify, I don't say 'imagination' because these stories are untrue, but because they are not 'there' in my experiences. The stories are a (necessary) way of construing and understanding our experiences.

4. Will. I believe things because I want them to be true. I am capable of resisting conclusions which appear to follow from my experiences, and of avoiding the obvious explanations to make my experiences fit different stories. As an aside, that is why in the Biblical narrative it is a sin, not just a mistake, to disbelieve in God. Again, this is not purely an individualistic experience. There is such a thing as a collective will, which expresses itself in expectations of belief and behaviour - what we might call, if it didn't have automatic negative connotations for us, peer pressure.

5. Memory. The storehouse of my previous experiences and knowledge is obviously a major source of knowledge, not only because of its basic contents but because of the connections and arrangements between 'things known' that are reflected there. Failure to remember - whether deliberate or accidental - is also, of course, important here. Again, not purely individualistic but includes cultural memory, often reinforced by ritual, like Remembrance Day, or the Lord's Supper.

6. Relationships. Much of my knowledge - indeed, most of it by a long way - is acquired from other people. Often in the process of coming to know something, my opinion of the person giving testimony can be the decisive factor in whether I adopt their point of view or believe that their testimony is fact.

Note that I haven't distinguished between 'coming to know' and 'coming to believe' in any of the above. I'm not sure I can think of any good way to do that. At least psychologically, there doesn't seem to be any difference. I know that there is a God; many people know otherwise. Neither of us would accept that our position is 'mere belief'. Besides, I think that language of belief is too often used to remove metaphysics and religion from the realm of what is 'really true' in a thoroughly illegitimate way.

Complicated, isn't it?

Knowledge and People (postscript)

To clarify all that has gone before...

I do not think that anything that I have written achieves anything more than putting a necessary question mark against the ratio-empiricist view of the world. It proves nothing, disproves nothing. I'm happy with that as a result. Ultimately, it is only the ratio-empiricist view of the world that demands proof in this way.

If I were to begin writing this again, I could begin from a totally different point. Rather than a philosophical starting point, we could have a Biblical one. Consider the throwaway comment of the Apostle Paul in Galatians 4:9...

But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God...

The description that Paul gives of becoming a Christian has two sides to it - coming to know God, and coming to be known by God. They are the two sides of a personal relationship. The 'knowing' here is not an epistemic term, but a relational one. This is therefore a question of revelation - as any personal relationship is. I cannot force you to relate to me, nor can I decide by myself the depth of our relationship: that is decided by the extent to which we reveal ourselves to one another. Similarly here.

But this relationship, for all its genuine two-sidedness, is not symmetrical. The "or rather" is significant. It doesn't undo the first clause, but it does relativise it. Your coming to know God happens in the context of God's coming to know you. His action is decisive in a way that yours is not. He reveals himself - opens himself to personal relationship - in your direction, and you respond. Numerous other Biblical passages, in Old and New Testaments, paint the same picture.

If reality is ultimately personal, this is how it must be. Ultimate reality is personal, therefore ultimate knowledge is relational. This will never sit well with the ratio-empiricist. He demands the right to be a spectator, an analyst. From the point of view of the analyst, all of this relational behaviour can be explained away - and I should say, very successfully and tidily explained away. No person is found here. No relationship is founded here.

Why am I Christian then?

Because I am confronted by an undeniable Thou - the God who reveals himself.

I am confronted by Jesus Christ.

Knowledge and People (3)

Apologies for the delay...

Why does all this matter?

I guess there are two effects that I see. One is relational, the other epistemological, but they're very closely intertwined.

Relationally, it becomes very hard to take other human beings seriously. Reductionism becomes the best approach. We think we can analyse the behaviour of another in much the same way that we would analyse the behaviour of an animal. You hear people say things like "love is just a combination of hormones" - meaning, I think, initially, other people's experience of love. Conversation becomes farcical on this view. The fact that we do actually have conversations, and do actually fall in love, betrays that the ratio-empiricist view does not capture all our experiencs: there is a Thou out there behind the face of this human being. Thank God for inconsistency in this regard!

There is an alarming possibility here. Most recently I have heard several people deconstruct their own experience of love in the way demanded by ratio-empiricism. What is happening? I suspect that we are seeing the loss of the primacy of the subject. People are applying their reductionist understanding of the Other to themselves. I cannot believe that this really reflects their experience of being themselves; it is a stifling interpretive grid. Unable to view others as truly human, they come to view themselves as less than human as well. We truly do need other people to know ourselves at all.

Epistemologically, acquiring knowledge becomes all take and no give, or perhaps no receive. In a world where I am the only subject, all learning is by analysis and systematisation of what I experience around me. This seems to lead into the loss of a concept of testimony. Although philosophers acknowledge that testimony is one of the most basic and common speech acts, and although in actual fact we would all have to admit that the overwhelming majority of what we know has been learned through testimony, ratio-empiricism tends to distrust it. In the absence of a genuine other, what can testimony be?

This then has an effect on the way we approach texts, for example (there is at least one person reading this who knows that I am now trespassing on his area of expertise. I'll try not to leave dirty footprints). Is it not inevitable that a text becomes an object to be manipulated in any direction we see fit on this worldview? After all, we cannot be assured of the existence or significance of the author (and this is as true for a living - even a present - author as it is for a dead or absent one), so why should we not take a text in whatever way we choose? I wonder whether ratio-empiricism makes knowing inherently violent...

To this whole worldview, Christianity asks three questions:

1. Given the fact that your worldview cannot account for central human experiences, why should we follow it?

2. Given that all your arguments against Christianity are based on this worldview, why should we take them seriously?

3. Have you considered that ultimate reality might be personal?

Knowledge and People (2)

So, what exactly is my problem with ratio-empiricism?

It's all to do with the way this epistemological viewpoint understands the relationships between me and the world. Ratio-empiricism inherits from its parent views the basic orientation of a thinking/experiencing subject confronted by a world of passive objects. I am the subject; everything else is an object. Now, in one sense this is a simple truism. As Kant so helpfully pointed out, it must be possible for me to attach the label "I think" to every one of my thoughts and perceptions - that is to say, I am the subject of all my thoughts and perceptions. If it were not so, they would not be my thoughts or experiences.

(As an aside - and feel free to skip this paragraph - this is actually not nearly so simple as it sounds. Kant himself ends up reducing the "I" which is subject to nothing more than a logical tag - quite literally, an ownership label which holds thoughts/perceptions together in one consciousness. The problem emerges most clearly when you consider introspection: me thinking about myself. It must be possible for me to say "I think" about these thoughts, or they are not mine. But the "I" in "I think" is the subject of the thought, whereas the thought itself is of me as an object. How "I" become an object to myself is quite difficult. Kant avoids the problem by maintaining that "I as subject" and "me as object" are completely different, the former being noumenal. Well, that's transcendental idealism for you.)

This orientation - a thinking/experiencing subject confronted by a world of objects - will get you a long way in the natural sciences. Any critique of this viewpoint cannot be absolute, but must be simply a qualification - if you like, a "yes, but..." Still, it is possible for a "but..." to raise such a fundamental question that one is forced to revisit the "yes" and reconsider it. This is, I think, one of those cases.

Because there is simply no room in this world of subject/objects for people. There is, presumably (although this concept is not without problems), one person - me - but there are no others. A person, I take it, is someone who can themselves be a subject in the same way that I can be a subject. Obviously, not a subject of my thoughts/perceptions, but a subject of their own thoughts/perceptions - another centre of consciousness.

Qualifications: obviously, there will be a sense in which another person is an object to me. And strictly speaking, ratio-empiricism does not of necessity deny that the object in front of me could be another centre of consciousness.

But ratio-empiricism does make this concept highly problematic (in both the common and Kantian sense). If knowledge really works the way the ratio-empiricist claims, or rather assumes, it does, then I am bound to treat the other person as a passive object. I am bound to approach them, epistemologically, as if they were not a person in the way that I am. The gap between my consciousness and theirs cannot be bridged in any way on this worldview. The idea of other conscious beings becomes something that is strictly beyond my ability to know: it can be thought, but not tested, and therefore lies outside knowledge.

There is no room for people in Kant's world.

If this isn't making sense, I promise it will start to come together tomorrow when I run through some of the implications as I see them...

Knowledge and People (1)

I haven't started writing yet, and I can tell this post is going to contain massive generalisations and over-simplifications, and yet still manage to be really pretentious. I'm sorry, I really am. Try to bear with it, I think it might be important.

Epistemology. Broadly, the discipline which discusses knowledge and seeks to express just how it is that we come to have it. I think we live in an age that is obsessed with epistemology. And I think that this raises quite a few problems.

Let me explain to you how I see the history of this issue. When I was studying philosophy at A level, we used to talk a lot about rationalists and empiricists. Your average rationalist privileges thought over experience, whilst your common or garden empiricist thinks that experience is what is most important. This is, of course, an over-simplification, but it helps us to see two big epistemological traditions in western philosophy. At the head of each stands a greek.

Plato is, if you like, King of the Rationalists. He thinks that what you see around you is all just shadow. What can be thought is much more important than what can be sensed. Plato loves maths, and also a good bit of mysticism, because these things are in the mind. He thinks general and universal things are much more exciting than particular or limited things. He loves to make systems of thought that are internally coherent, and barely cares whether these systems match the shadowy empirical world around him.

Aristotle, on the other hand, is Captain Empiricist. He loves to look around him at the world. He considers the main source of truth to be the senses, and thoughts are to be directed by experience rather than vice versa. He takes a keen interest in particular things - he enjoys cataloguing animals, for example - and is much less interested in mysticism. He likes logic - a lot- but mainly because it helps with the exploration and understanding of the world around him.

The philosophical descendants of Plato and Aristotle bickered for centuries.

The genius of the Enlightenment is the construction of a worldview which binds rationalism and empiricism tightly together. Science - as opposed to the random observation of facts in nature - is a perfect blend of rationalism and empiricism. A system is thought which explains prior (perhaps haphazard) observations, and then observations are made (systematically) to test the system. Plato and Aristotle are friends. Good friends. Their love-child (eww) is Kant, because Kant extends (or attempts to extend) the scientific method to metaphysics, and with it ethics and religion. He is quite explicit about this endeavour, and he really thinks that he has done it in his critical philosophy. No need to go into detail on that here.

So from Kant onward, ratio-empricism rules the roost in epistemological discussion.

Tomorrow: why ratio-empiricism is very, very bad...

Absolute ignorance and total certainty

Nobody can know the womb, but it is certain everyone came from somewhere.

Nobody can know the grave, but it is certain everyone is going there.

Nobody can know the mind of another person, but it is certain everyone needs others.

Nobody can know themselves, but it is certain everyone is someone.

Nobody can know the will of God, but it is certain everyone is directed by him.

Nobody can know the righteousness of Christ, but it is certain everyone is naked without it.

It seems to me that certainty - absolute certainty - is found only at the boundaries of our experience. Within the limits, there are a lot of shades of grey, but when we hit a wall - a point beyond which our experience and reason cannot take us - then we find ourselves face to face with certainty.

Religion within the bounds of mere reason

Sorry, apparently when I say "tomorrow" I may well mean "sometime next week if you're lucky..."

Kant's starting point has a very serious effect on his approach to religion. Because he starts with the autonomous human being, and makes the autonomous human being the measure of many if not all things, he is inclined to emphasise the things that are (in principle at least) open to everyone, and to minimise anything particular. In religion, that means Kant is keen on things that can be worked out about God by reason, without revelation. He is not keen on anything that requires a particular story to be told, or things that rely on particular facts. He wants us to run after "a plain rational faith which can be convincingly communicated to everyone" rather than "a historical faith, merely based on facts". (This is also tied up with Kant's idea of duty in the field of ethics - possibly more of this later). So natural theology is in (except that Kant doesn't think you can do much of it - again, more possibly to follow on this) and revealed theology is out, or at least is strictly speaking superfluous.

And Kant's direction has a similar effect. He is interested in practical reason, with the emphasis on practical. Kant has no time for any doctrine which does not improve us (morally). Into this bracket fall such things as the idea of atonement, the historical incarnation and the like. If the incarnation is to be of use, it can only be as presenting a perfect example of humanity for us to follow, in which case it must not be strictly a historical incarnation, but a simple idea of reason. Everything is about what it means for me in practice. The further we get from this concern, the more we veer into speculation and useless debates. Religion, for Kant, is basically a department of ethics.

I think both these concerns still lurk in our church culture today. The latter is most obvious - how many times have I been in a Bible study discussing the most astonishing truths about Christ and been asked "yes, but what does it mean for me? What do I have to do?" And this is antiChristian through and through. The former concern shows itself more subtly, most obviously in the desire to make natural theology work, primarily as an apologetic (i.e. an answer to "what about those who haven't heard..?") I think this is also antiChristian.

At some point in the future, I'll suggest some steps to shake these things out of our minds...

Enlightenment

I've been doing a lot of reading in Kant over the last few weeks, partly refreshing my undergrad knowledge and partly expanding my Kantian repertoire. The more I read, the more I become convinced that Kant is Public Enemy Number One as far as Christian theology is concerned. I plan to write a few posts over the next couple of weeks to explain why. Here is post number one.

Kant represents the high point of the intellectual and cultural movement which we refer to as the Enlightenment. He was a self-conscious advocate of this very self-concious movement, and provided the clearest definition of the heart of Enlightenment thought in an essay titled "What is Enlightenment?" The motto of Enlightenment, says Kant, is "Sapere Aude!" - dare to understand! The movement is all about being bold enough to use and rely on your own understanding without external guidance.

We could talk about this in terms of starting point and direction. For Kant, the starting point is simple: oneself. Adopting this starting point is inevitable for Kant - as far as he is concerned, there is simply no other to choose - but it is also essential to his entire project. If we begin anywhere other than with ourselves, we are already denying ourselves enlightenment. Only if I am the starting point can I be truly free; only in a world in which my own reason is an appropriate beginning to thought about life, the universe and everything can I trust my reason to guide me.

As far as direction goes, Kant favours practical reason. In the snappily-titled essay "What does it mean to orient oneself in thinking?", Kant outlines the necessity of restraining speculation and training our reason to be guided by practical usage. Nevertheless, he is clear that reason is king - "only do not dispute that prerogative of reason which makes it the highest good on earth". Reason, oriented towards practical living rather than metaphysical speculation, is the direction of Kant's thought. The further reason departs from experience, the more likely it is to end in dead-end speculations about things that cannot be known. Reason that restrains itself will be able to venture forth from the starting point of autonomy in the direction of good living.

Now try to forget Kant for a moment. What passage of Scripture might pop into your mind if we mentioned the word "enlightenment"? 2 Corinthians 4:1-6 occurs to me. Have a read of it. There is a radical difference of vision here, relative to Kant. For the Apostle, enlightenment comes from above, and he is essentially a passive recipient. God shines in a person's heart - that is the source of enlightenment. The starting point is God, and the direction is toward Jesus and his glory. (Read the end of 2 Corinthians 3 for a description of this journey!)

The point is this: if the most important thing a human being could possibly know - namely, how to relate to God - cannot be found within the framework that starts from the autonomous human being and proceeds in the direction of practical reason, what use is that framework?

To be worked out in more practice tomorrow...