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.

I was never any good at history in school; I gave it up as soon as I could, prefering languages instead. I hated the rote memorization of years and events and their consequences.

I remember clearly when history came alive for me. It was in the second term at Oxford, in a modern Japanese history class by Ann Waswo. We were given a title for a seminar - "Discuss the implications of the Japanese Emperor's renunciation of divinity", or something like that. We were given no reading; find it out for yourself, come and discuss it at the seminar. So we looked through the history books and the contemporary sources, the newspapers and so on, and we found something very strange. Some people seemed to think that the Emperor was worshipped as a god; others denied this. They couldn't both be right.

Suddenly we were plunged without warning into the depths of historiography. Now I felt I could create in history classes, something which was unthinkable before; I could evaluate the sources and bring my interpretation to the seminar. History wasn't just a simple timeline of events - there was something much more complicated but much more delicious going on.

But I've also learnt that history can and does teach us about the present. In the same way that no man is an island here and now, we are all part of the span of history, and this is particularly true of our brothers and sisters in the church in ages past. This is why I have such an interest in patristics: because we have had this conversation before. That is, since there is nothing new under the sun, we find that all the debates that we're having now have been discussed and sometimes even dealt with many years ago by people much closer to the action.

Now, though, it dawns on me that the majority of people are ahistorical; they don't share the same high view of history. In the same way as people can be ethnocentric - not being able to see beyond the modus operandi of their own culture - people can also be, as it were, aeonocentric - unable to see beyond their own age. One of the things that the Modernist Enlightenment taught us was that we were for the first time able to investigate things rationally and reasonably for ourselves without relying on the authority of others. One of the things that the Postmodern Enlightenment will hopefully teach us is that that is a load of rubbish.

For instance, and I apologise for picking on the UCCF but it's such an easy target. From Athens to Jerusalem, UCCF Religious and Theological Studies Fellowship^*, claimed that the Enlightenment gave us historical textual criticism; for the first time people were thinking about the textual variants in the Bible and trying to piece proper meaning out of it.

Funny, I thought. I'm sure we've had this conversation before. Of course those without a high view of history would not be able to cast their minds back through history and recall...

Here there is a textual difference between the Latin version and some of the Greek manuscripts. The Latin says that death reigned over those whose sins were like the sin of Adam, but those Greek manuscripts say that death reigned even over those whose sins were not like Adam's. Which of the two readings is the correct one? ... The Greeks have different readings in their manuscripts. I consider the correct reading to be the one which reason, history and authority all retain. For the reading of the modern Latin manuscripts is also found in Tertullian, Victorinus and Cyprian.

Ambrosiaster, Commentary on Paul's Epistles, late 4th century

Of course, Ambrosiaster now appears to have been wrong on that particular piece of textual analysis, but he was doing it, and did it throughout the commentary. This was not an Enlightenment innovation. That is our historical bias coming in again.

There is a serious issue here. Those without a clear view of where we've been in the past will not be able to see where we're going in the future.

^* I can't tell you which issue or give an exact quote because it was on the freebies table and someone took it before I could grab the quote, and their website is a year out of date.

Argh. I've got a cold and a headache and just had four hours of social anthropology. Thankfully, we didn't cover much; just worldview, prototype theory, philosophy, linguistics, the development of American cultural anthropology, the native American tribes, the beginnings of missiology, neo-paganism, art, the philosophy of science, cosmology, relativism, secular humanism and the New Age.

I think I shall spend the afternoon playing computer games.