I started thinking about this the other day, in conversation with Si and Pippa, and having been reading Rusty Reno’s book in the bathroom. I’m planning a tutorial for some of my students on “the economy of signification” and the way that meaning always escapes our control, and what we can do relative to that. Then I got an email yesterday morning that provoked me to sketch some ideas (roughly), and I felt impelled to blog some of it out.
What I’m gnawing at concerns the way that theological premises can justly be called “true” (I’ve been in this thicket before, I know). One approach to theological truths assumes that truth has a single, consistent texture, so that theological truths have the same epistemological and scientific attributes as chemical truths or mathematical truths. The strength of this approach lies in its simplicity (Dick Cheney can’t sneer and accuse you of flip-flopping for suggesting that there are many ways of defining “truth”) and its respect for the actuality of truth-claims: their inescapable, unappealable pertinence. (Philip K. Dick defined “reality” as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away” — exactly the point.)
Another very common angle would claim that all truth is perspectival, that especially since theological truth can’t be verified or falsified in anything vaguely resembling lab conditions, we have to regard theological truth-claims as deeply-held opinion, but not at all matters of fact. We can therefore finesse religious disagreement simply by saying, “Well, you have your religion, I have (or don’t have) mine.” By the same stroke we undo authority problems in theology; everyone has her or his own perception of the Deity (or absence thereof), so none of them can appropriately be called “true” — just “true-for-me.”
There are more nuanced ways of handling these positions, but I’m blogging, not writing a book (as my editors would remind me if they caught me at this). Besides, relatively few people bother with the nuanced versions; most adhere to a simplified version of one or the other understanding. The hard-fact version of theological truth just steamrollers other people’s dissenting positions; the no-factual version evacuates theological truth-claims of any durability (they become the things that, if you stop believing in them, do go away).
My stake in “postmodernity,” such as it is, which isn’t that much in the end despite what my rap sheet of publications looks like, derives from the possibility that I learned from reading those French types and their Anglophone fellow-travellers that there might be a way of thinking about truth that respects the complexity acknowledged by the softies, but which nonetheless maintains the conviction that our doubt or belief, our pious adherence to different theological systems, none of these affects the enduring truth that one of these systems may be true in a way that the others aren’t. And each of us shows a built-in propensity to think that her or his own angle on this whole schmeer is right, and rightly so. What, after all, would it mean to think that some (a)theological account of reality is true, but that the one I profess isn’t it?
So the case I keep trying to make to seminarians involves first, the pivotal importance of actually committing yourself to the truth of the thing you claim to believe. Then, I hope to convince them that believing that theological disagreement shouldn’t make a difference traps them in an anti-intellectual (anti-critical, anti-theological, and untrue) position of upholding far-reaching metaphysical and ethical claims whose meaning they simultaneously annul in favor of what they take to be politeness or broadmindedness. That goes double if they want to claim to be right about one or another point of church order (currently it’s most likely to involve sex), about which they want to claim to be right; there’s not much left of one’s intellectual integrity if one suggests that Christians, Jews, and Hindus should get along together because their theological disagreements don’t make a difference, but “fundamentalists” must be set straight because they’re surely off base.
Now, it’s all very well to say, “Neti, neti,” but if I’m correct, then I ought to be able to give a positive account of truth that deals with difference, but still produces hard truth-claims without self-contradiction. Well, yes and no. (That’s a joke — partly.) One element in the problem/solution is the way that the notion of “contradiction” gets thrown around; while I don’t want to solve every problem by calling it a theologically-productive paradox, I do believe that we may need to develop a way of allowing for these antinomies as constituent parts of our discourses of ultimate reality. Until we have demonstrably plumbed the depths and pinned down every subtlety of reality, some antinomies may be truer than either one-and-only-one of their constituent premises.
In the face of the problem of theological truth, then, I counsel that Christians (since I don’t presume to dictate theology to non-Christians) identify those theological claims to which they will adhere, and humbly and peaceably live out the consequences of those claims. Coercion falsifies claims about the character of a God of peace; it’s no cop-out, then, to strive for cooperative neighborliness among our dissenting sisters and brothers, so long as we do not back away from the robustness of our truth-claims. “Nonviolence is not only an ethic about power but also an epistemology about how to let the truth speak for itself” (John Howard Yoder, The Wisdom of the Cross); “Truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power” (Pope Paul VI, Dignitatis Humanæ). That’s no less the truth — but we relinquish the temptation to force others to live by a truth that they do not acknowledge.
Posted by AKMA at September 2, 2004 08:51 PM | TrackBackWow. That was really well said, despite not getting to a refined definition. The last couple of paragraphs are issues which I suppose I have thought about for my whole adult life, in one way or another, though I only came to know writers like Yoder in the last couple of years.
We have a lot of trouble with that last part in our tradition, as I'm sure many churches do. I've been finding that in conservative folks somehow the word "peace" comes accross as "liberal", which is way beyond unfortunate. But for the most part, I think most of us obey in fact what we deny in theory--that the Christian life MUST be characterized by peace, in our discourse and disagreements especially.
Posted by: Paul Baxter at September 2, 2004 09:26 PMYes, excellent post. You might add that unless there is commitment, it isn't really your "belief" at all. I agree that how that commitment is acted out is key (hearing the rhetoric at the Republican convention gives one pause!).
BTW, have you read Bruce Marshall's "Trinity and Truth"?
Patrick Coleman
there’s not much left of one’s intellectual integrity if one suggests that Christians, Jews, and Hindus should get along together because their theological disagreements don’t make a difference, but “fundamentalists” must be set straight because they’re surely off base.
On the one hand, yes, I see your point and it is an excellent one. If I preach tolerance for people who understand God differently than I do, then that tolerance necessarily must extend to fundamentalists as surely as it extends to Christians and Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and so on.
On the proverbial other hand, though, here's the difference that I see: "fundamentalists" tend to be defined by the desire to make others conform to their worldview, whereas garden-variety religious types tend to be comfortable with letting others relate to God in their own way(s). It's that problem I keep running into: I'm happy for fundamentalists and literalists to exist and claim the label of (a)(my) religious tradition, but they're not generally happy for me to do the same unless I relinquish my liberalism and accede to the rightness of their interpretations.
It's a challenge I'm not sure what to do with. If the desire to make me do religion the way they do religion is integral to their understanding of religion, then I have no right to ask them to change that...even though their understanding of religion asks me to change my understanding of religion.
Does that make sense, or should I try again after I've finished this morning cup of tea? :-)
Posted by: Rachel at September 3, 2004 08:35 AMYes. Exactly. This crystallizes for me why I feel so much sadness at the current controversy in the Episcopal Church. Yesterday a friend pointed me to www.standfirminfaith.org . After perusing the site, I felt heartsick to the point of nausea. Yes, I disagree with the stance supported there, but I also know good and faithful people who disagree with me whom I still love. What heartsickened me was the vindictiveness of many of the posts to the site. What I can now identify as the lack of both humility and peacability, a veritable glee in the very process of condemnation.
I sometimes wonder if I am the only person who is so certain of so little. I am certain that for some inconceivable reason God loves us crazy human beings “inestimably” and that all God asks is that we accept that love, return it to its source, and share it with one another. And I am certain that God sent Jesus to show us what it looks like to live that way (and to enable us to actually succeed at it on occasion). Beyond that I’m not certain of much of anything, so I study and pray and participate in the life of the church and try to make the best decisions I can and then trust that whatever I get wrong God will make right in the end. I worry sometimes that this is just naivete or spiritual laziness.
I spent much of my adult life studying the Reformation because I was fascinated with the certainty of Reformation leaders. How could each be so sure that he (male pronoun intentionally used) was right and others wrong, so sure that he would risk not only his own life but that of hundreds of thousands of other people? Thirty years of study and I can give you many a lecture about social/political/ecclesiastical/theological factors, but deep down, I still don’t understand it. Not then, not now.
Holly said (in part)" whereas garden-variety religious types tend to be comfortable with letting others relate to God in their own way(s)."
I assume that by garden variety you refer to american liberal religious thought. I'm not aware that this is a common way of looking at things outside this perspective.
I remember fondly hearing a philosophy prof (I remember his name but cannot spell it) giving a lecture on tolerance. He pointed out that the virtue of tolerance should be defined as tolerating those thing which ought to be tolerated. Like all good virtues, there are two opposing ways to err. It is by no means self evident that MORE tolerance is always more virtuous.
Thank you for your comments. As someone trained in the sciences, your viewpoint is one I naturally resonate with. I have always been taught that truth is absolute, and that our understanding of it is limited. What I find missing on the fundamentalist / evangelical side is the lack of an appreciation for the problem of discernment. A scientist spends his or her entire life in pursuit of understanding of the physical world, knowing full well that only limited progress is possible. If anything, knowledge of spiritual matters must be more difficult, since our conclusions cannot be emperically verifiable.
On the matter of tolerance, let me add one comment. Jesus told many parables about judgement day, and I cannot recall a single one in which someone was cast into the outer darkness due to the "sin" of theological error. We are saved by grace through faith; we are not saved by theological orthodoxy. As we conduct out theological debates, it behhoves us to maintain a bit of humility, and a bit of perspective.
Posted by: Paul Martin at September 5, 2004 12:08 AM