Several generous correspondents have asked follow-up questions from my recent trip to McCormick Seminary, and since I promised to answer them soon, Jane knows that I have to keep my word, and she’ll scold gently remind me till I do. So here I go.
“Yes.”
Well, actually, I should do better than that. Let me take the queries one by one.
Mark Diebel asks,
When you say that you don't disbelieve in universal truth ... I wonder if we can't whittle that down to simply "truth"... but you disbelieve anyone who says that he or she knows it... are you meaning to say that "no one should believe anyone who says that they know the truth?"Or is this a report of your particular stance alone... which others may or may not consider worthwhile, especially considering his or her own experience?
As usual, I ought to have expressed myself more precisely. I do indeed believe in universal truth — in the expectation (for a non-controversial example) that whenever Somebody relying on his or her natural buoyancy walks off the edge of a building, that person plummets earthward, at grave peril to bodily integrity. I do, however, maintain that when someone claims to know a universal truth so as to be able to use the universality of the alleged truth for discursive leverage, I doubt that they’re on the right path. My point is that we’re not equipped to recognize universality; our sensorium, even (and this is the controversial part) our mind doesn’t have what it would take validly to determine “universality.” When someone wants to claim this or that is universally true, they’re usually trying to force me to accept something the alleged universality of which is non-obvious at best. If you can’t make an effective case for your position without invoking a controverted notio0n of universal truth, I suspect that the case itself may be weak.
A correspondent asked in an email,
What are the implications of your understanding of knowledge and history for evangelism today?If I am absolutely positive that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that the rest of the world should hear the good news too, how can I preach that good news, if I also know that their understanding of the world, history, and theology is no better or worse than mine? Can we still preach the good news with the intent of bringing our sisters and brothers closer to Christ?
I think evangelism must not depend on historical consciousness, since evangelists pursued their vocation more or less successfully for more than a millennium without a single historical-critical thought crossing their minds. The more closely one studies the history of the people and texts in question, the more wisely, I think, one may expound them — but that wisdom isn’t (to cite Stendahl’s metaphor) a public safety officer who determines what may or may not be said, but rather one among many helpful advisers (one who has unique expertise and authority on particular questions, but not an oracle of legitimation).
But your second paragraph entails the supposition, “if I also know that their understanding of the world, history, and theology is no better or worse than mine,” and that doesn’t by any means follow from my position. Let us suppose — absent compelling evidence to the contrary — that you and I are exchanging ideas aboutthe gospel. I may justifiably suppose, and may perhaps even demonstrate, that my understanding of history is better than yours. It would be harder to show that my understanding of the world is better than yours, thgough given enough time I might be able to do it. I can certainly make a case that my understanding of theology is better than yours (this last is purely hypothetical, I assure you). Moreover, I pretty much have to think all those things; my brain isn’t capablew of believing something, and at the same time to believe it is wrong.
But that’s the catch, since if I disagree with the other, then I must recognize that my interlocutor has to figure that she knows better than me, until one of us has given a case for thinking that the other was off-base that convinces the other.
That makes a big difference for evangelism, since it means thinking of our conversation partners not as benighted Heathen who suffer from a known lack that only we privileged Christians can alleviate, but as people with (generally) quite adequate ways of negotiating the impedimenta of worldly life. If (as tends to be my experience) our neighbors are managing their affairs quite ably without the intrusion of Christian faith into their lives, my job is not to persuade them that really they’re miserable, or even that (contrary to appearances) my theological explanation for the way of the world is better than their secular explanation, but to manifest the truthfulness of that which I claim in such a way as to evoke the question, “Why isn’t my life more like that?” If we can’t elicit that question from neighbors, then it would be coercive to try to oblige them to adopt a way of life whose attractions they can’t detect. If we by our lives commend the gospel, so that people want to know why and how we live that way, we make known the truth in the truest way: by allowing truth itself to attract people (and if we don’t, won’t, can’t live so as to make our faith appear true, of what value is a strident insistence that no, really, really, it is true, even though my life depicts it as false?).
In my article in Interpretation, I cite Marx’s second “Thesis on Feuerbach”: “The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.” I find that utterly convincing as a basis for evangelism; if I don’t testify to the truth of the gospel with my life, then all the fanciest rationalizing in the world will only construct an idol toward which it would be pernicious for me to “convert” people’s faith.
Finally, the patient Rebecca Proefrock, who gave the elegantly-reasoned response to my book that began the class session, asks, “Do you believe that at least part of the heavy reliance on the historical-critical method is an attempt (for many Protestants anyway, consciously or not) to find a replacement for the intermediating presence and work of the church?”
I have to be careful here, because I do trust that my Protestant sisters and brothers have much to teach me (though I’m not alert enough to have figured out quite what yet) (that’s a joke, honest). But yes, to at least an extent, I think that the Reformation involved rejecting the legitimating interpretive authority of the communion of the saints, and in order to adjudicate the conflicts into which Christians fall, Protestant churches have tended to make “history” the arbiter. Of course, the problem is that they then construct more-or-less plausible versions of history that fit the theologies they want it to support, and history is generally pliable enough to permit this. Oddly enough, though, I was only an incipient Anglo-Catholic when I started down the road to thinking this way; my conversion to a postmodern perspective on inteprretation, for instance, came before I grew into a robust commitment to an Anglo-Catholic understanding of my particular account of church life. Indeed, one might well say that my postmodern, or more precisely my counter-modern thinking opened up for me the more coherent allegiance to Anglo-Catholic theology that integrated my convictions about church, interpretive theory, sacramental theology, mission and evangelism, and lotas other stuff.
It remains entirely possible for a thoughtful Protestant to wright an account of interpretation that relies on a Protestant account of the church’s interpretive tradition; indeed, before the advent of historical criticism, that’s all one could do. It’s not uniquely available to Anglo- (or Roman) Catholics, or to the Orthodox — although those ways of discipleship have an easier job of making sense of their recourse to that authority.
And having alluded to the title of my book in that last phrase, and being late to dinner, I will rush away — confessing that in my blogging haste, I’ve surely misstated something, or failed (again) to write carefully enough. I’ll try to clarify my thoughts when you, dear reader, press me so to do.
Posted by AKMA at October 15, 2004 06:30 PM | TrackBackWell, I'd prefer "gently remind" to "scold;" but this way is better, as I need do neither.
And thanks for adding me to your blogroll; that was a smile in my day, even if I'm not sure I qualify as "blogeny." (^_^)
Posted by: Jane Ellen at October 15, 2004 06:50 PMThank you for the reply! I agree that the use of the term "universal truth", especially joined to some advantage in argument feels wrong. This whole thing of discovering universal truth is not actually appealing. It has the feel of coerciveness.
Therefore I am more drawn to the notion of reality. What IS is appealing. To know or to become convinced that something really is the case, is reality, involves a deeper and happier process than knowing "universal truth."
The problem of logical pursuits is that we must always assume something, and whatever that something is, unless it is real, it is hypothetical. Universal truth and reality are not the same idea at all because the former suggests something merely formal or even logical and the other is a a natural human assent required even for a conviction of our own existence.
Keep me far from universal truth! But of reality that I heartily long to know.
Posted by: Mark Diebel at October 16, 2004 02:43 PMWhoops, Jane — wrong siglum.
That’s along the lines I was aiming at Mark. I suppose that once you have to argue about an alleged “universal” truth, the point is lost anyway. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t one; just that it can’t advance our discourses any way (at the same time that it’s hard, if possible, to participate in a discourse that doesn’t tend to presuppose a kind of truth beyond that which the discourse can recognize as open-to-question).
Posted by: AKMA at October 16, 2004 09:49 PMmuahahahaha i have returned
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Posted by: Baron-o-beef dip at October 25, 2004 11:56 AM