Where Everybody's Crazy

I recently realised that one of the things that really bugs me about the Church Planting Movement is nothing to do with the CPM itself, but with the theological crisis you generate in examining it. Because, to caricature the debate, they would say that God is strategic and efficient and He wants all men to be saved as soon as possible, and I would say that no, God is not strategic or efficient, but condescends to work at our pace. Is God efficient or not? Here we have two Christians who fundamentally disagree about a basic attribute of God's personality. They can't both be right. Houston, we have a problem.

But both opinions are relatively ad hoc, informal statements about God's personality. And many "theological" statements we make are actually very flippant. The job of theology is to put a bit more weight behind these statements, to enable us to investigate and evaluate them. To evaluate them, of course, we need to agree on a set of criteria by which we can tell whether to accept or reject a given statement of theology. In short, not only do we need to know about God, (theology) but we need to know how we know about God. This is the epistemology of theology.

Now one of the things that deconstruction has set out to show is that everyone works from a set of assumptions about how the world ought to be seen, and this decides how we think about truth. There is a choice of epistemologies, and they're all biased. This is a problem in all spheres of knowledge, not just theological knowledge.

So for instance, one very common claim is that we should base our theology on the Bible. This is a good claim. I would not dispute this claim even though we have twenty thousand different viewpoints on how the Bible ought to be interpreted. (By what criteria do we choose the right interpretation? Biblical criteria? Which interpretation of Biblical criteria? How do we know?)

Instead, I would ask how we know we ought to base our theology on the Bible, why that is the right thing to do, and how we know that is the right thing to do. At this point, you can either say something like "because the Bible says so", at which point you are espousing an epistemology based on a circular argument (which you're quite entitled to do, so long as you can find a good reason for knowing that's what you ought to do), or you can give a justification which is not based on the Bible, which belies the fact that you're not actually basing your theology on the Bible at all.

Another common claim is that, at bottom, there are certain things we have to take on trust. This is called a fideistic epistemology, and there's nothing wrong with it at all. So long as you know which things you have to take on trust, and why those particular things instead of another arbitrary collection of principles. That's assuming, of course, you have some good reason for thinking that theology ought to be fideistic rather than rationalistic in the first place.

Because it all depends on what you're optimising for. There are epistemological problems in the hard sciences as well, but at the end of the day, the scientist can put his hands up and claim a pragmatist position: we will take any epistemological stance that lets us do experiments which work and give us results we can use, and who cares why we should or should't do so. Theologians do not have such a luxury. Some say we should optimise our theology for rationality, or for truth, or for beauty, or for ethical standards, or for ... but there is simply no way to break outside of the process of epistemological choice to state clearly which system we should be using because to do so is already of a statement of a presupposed epistemological position. Essentially attempting to evaluate one system against another requires a higher set of values on which to base the judgement. (This is called the regress argument) And it's all very well saying that God holds the higest set of values, but He didn't give us an epistemological system on a plate, so we have to try to pull up theology by its own bootstraps, and I'm not sure it can be done. (Although Peter Klein maintains that an infinite "tower" of reasoning is OK.)

I'm assuming all of this matters, that theology has to try hard to get the right answers. I don't have any evidence for that position either. Maybe everyone ought to do their own theology in whatever Dadist way they like. Maybe it's OK to work within your own theological presuppositions and come up with your own answers so long as you're honest and consistent. (Choosing another pair of arbitrary virtues, of course...) I don't know. I doubt it, but would find it hard to argue against.

I'm personally comfortable with the idea of working within a system that I can't completely justify, if only because the skeptical approach to the regress argument says that you can't completely justify any system. (Peter Klein again maintains this is OK for other reasons, because you don't have to personally justify a system for it to be justified.)

And there are some lights at the end of the tunnel: Kirk and Vanhoozer's "To Stake a Claim" points out that "Jesus is God's truth-claim"; Jesus did not merely claim to be "a witness to the truth", but he claimed to be "the way, the truth and the life." He chose twelve ordinary men to be the jury to his truth-claim. He is not merely the medium, nor merely the message, but the foundation. He is our epistemological basis. What we do with that basis, on the other hand, is rather more difficult to see. I can now understand why people are drawn towards systematic theology. But who says theology ought to be systematic?

It's turtles all the way down, and the theologian has no clothes.