My View of God and Truth

I'm sure I will not do justice to the impulse beyond this post. But if there are curiosities to my views of God and Truth, they reduce in my mind to this. God is bigger than we could possibly imagine and the Truth, that is his thoughts, is beyond human comprehension.

I respect those who believe in open theism (the idea that God limits his understanding so that we can have free will). If I were to listen to them, I'm sure that I might respect process theologians (who believe that God actually is not all-powerful but is evolving with the universe).

1. But I have no interest in a God who is not all powerful and all knowing. Such a god is not actually God. Such a god is rather a god like the Greeks and Romans, only with Christian values. I am interested in a God who knows every single last thing and who can do anything.

I have a slightly heterodox inkling that even God's "nature" as we know it is a matter of his will, that good is good because God says so. My inkling here (I would not call it a "view," since it is more of an intuition) is that to say God has a nature that he did not determine is again to limit him to being little more than what we are.

But if God decided to be loving, then it means something. It is a matter of his free will. To say otherwise, it seems to me, is to make him a slave to some higher authority that made him that way.

Once again, if my intuition here seems off track, I have it because I want God to be GOD and not just some mere anthropomorphic projection of humanity.

2. The same goes for Truth. I do not think it is unorthodox to say that the Bible reflects God meeting his people within their own understandings. Certainly this perspective gels with my own expertise in biblical studies. The words of the Bible almost always make thorough sense within their original historical and cultural contexts.

But hear the implication here. If God revealed the truths of the Bible in the categories of its audiences, then Truth is something much, much bigger than these divine, incarnated moments. To limit truth, therefore, to these words is to reduce God--at least to some extent--to the paradigms and worldviews he used to communicate to people millennia ago.

I am of course also limited to a worldview that is influenced by my own time and place in history. So do not think I am saying that we, finally, today, have arrived and can see Truth on its own objective terms. No, I am saying that God's Truth is on a completely different playing field, one that none of us will ever play on.

Revelation, insofar as it refers to cognitive thoughts, will always be just a shadow of God's infinity. There is a striking concept in a recent movie called Automata. It talks about how, when they let the robots fix and teach themselves, they started to become smarter exponentially. After an hour or so, they started saying things that no one could understand, they had become so smart.

And so I ask myself, how ridiculous it is for us all in the church today to think we basically have God figured out. How completely stupid we must be making ourselves look! The things we say in our Bible studies, in our sermons, in our classrooms, in our devotions--surely it is all the goo-goo ga-ga of babies.

3. So if I ever say something you think is peculiar, know this. I believe God is greater than anything we can imagine and the Thoughts of his mind are greater than any human language could possibly contain. I believe God is GOD, not the god an ant might imagine.

Which Sources Should I Trust?

This is my seminary blog post for the day.

We live in the information age. The glut of potential sources of information is overwhelming, even if amazingly beautiful. Gone are the days when you have to find a library to read a book. Also gone are the days when you can successfully insulate your children or congregation from ideas you consider to be dangerous.

With the internet close at hand, we are forced to become more discerning in how we filter information. Who do we trust? To whom are we going to listen? From person in the pew to minister, which source is right? So many of them seem so convincing, so confident that everyone else is wrong. Many even demonize those with differing positions on the issues.

We are all working out how to deal with this situation, but here are some beginning thoughts on the issue:

1. Faith seeking understanding
There is no reason to start from scratch. You may as well start on the assumption that the form of Christianity with which you are beginning, whatever it might be, is innocent until proven guilty. If you are Baptist, who are the voices to whom Baptists tend to listen? Are you Wesleyan, what are the voices to which Wesleyans like to listen?

No need to start over. If you know the kinds of people to whom your tribe listens, why not start by trusting those sources the most.

And perhaps we should mention that there’s a lot of interpretation that goes on in reading the Bible. Our first instinct is to say, “Well what does the Bible say on this issue?” But what we may not realize is that there are different ways to read the Bible and that these “ways of reading” are part of our traditions too. There is a certain circularity to the “just go to the Bible” idea. We inevitably go to the Bible with a certain way of going to the Bible. Inevitably, we find similar things to what everyone else reading the Bible that way finds.

The overwhelming majority of the churches in your city are reading the Bible, but they still disagree on what it means. Until we recognize that we all are wearing glasses when we read the Bible, we will never advance toward real understanding.

2. Phone a friend
Of course, you may not know what sources your tradition likes the most. Indeed, you may not really know what your tradition is. To be sure, there’s no such thing as a “blank slate” church. Every church represents a mixture of influences, even if it calls itself non-denominational. It probably baptizes a certain way and leans certain ways on certain issues. It probably has a position on tongues or women in ministry. It may say it is just reading the Bible, but its answers to these questions will quickly reveal what its underlying traditional influences are.

Who is someone you trust who has studied stuff? If you can think of someone like that, seek out their advice on good sources for whatever question you are pursuing.

3. God is bigger than one tradition.
If God’s first order of business was getting everyone’s head straight, there would probably be a single church that all the most godly people were in. And it would be obvious to anyone with the eyes of the Spirit that it was the one true Church. The fact that there is no such church suggests that God is primarily interested in our hearts rather than our heads.

But it also seems likely that each Christian tradition has a piece to add to the puzzle. It is human nature for us to go to extremes but is it possible that different Christian traditions preserve different emphases within the overall truth? Some may make God’s authority clearer than others. Some may make God’s love clearer than others.

The point is that you can recognize the strength of your own tradition–as well as perhaps its weaknesses–if you make it a discipline to read things also by traditions other than your own.

4. The more the merrier.
Every interpretation and argument you know makes you freer in what you think. If you have heard all the arguments to the contrary of your starting point, yet you remain convinced of where you started, then you hold that position more freely than you did to begin with. Chances are, the more angles you hear, the more sides you hear to the story, the more of a Christian hybrid you will become.

Don’t just look at one source of information. Listen to several. Figure out what the spectrum of positions are on a question before you reach a final answer.

5. Become an expert yourself.
The current American context is arguably one in which experts are almost distrusted simply for being experts. It’s as if popular opinion feels threatened by the very existence of individuals who know the most about a particular issue. But there are such things as experts, and you can become one on a particular topic. An expert is someone who thoroughly knows the issue, thoroughly knows the various positions that have been taken on the issue and why, and has come to an informed and reasoned conclusion on that issue.

Anyone is welcome to have an opinion on an issue, but not every opinion counts as much as every other.

So these are some first thoughts on how to deal with the glut of information that now lies at our feet. Like someone who cannot distinguish a cacophony of sounds from each other, there can be so many voices that we can’t tell which one we should listen to. It is a skill that we will all need to develop in this age of information.

Truth as what God thinks...

Part of my submission to God is a submission to the truth, whatever it may be.  This sounds fine and dandy at first, until it begins to challenge what you currently believe.  I am convinced that what most people mean by truth is really, "whatever I already believe." When you hear very angry people saying, "We need to stand up for the truth," what they often mean is, "We need to force people to accept what I believe but can't really defend."

Unfortunately, the way most people use the Bible plays into this self-deceiving game.  For one thing, what you think the Bible says is limited by your capacity to think.  A person of relatively little understanding can elevate his or her thoughts to the status of God's thoughts simply by playing the mirror game with the Bible.  I in my limitations see a meaning in the Bible with my puny mind and, voila, I know what God is thinking about x.

Of course this is true of everyone, even the most brilliant.  We're just not going to see more than we're capable of seeing with our puny minds.  What adds to the issue is the fact that God revealed the books of the Bible in the terms of its audiences so that they could understand. This leads to the phenomenon of Christians mistaking ancient worldview for God's thoughts--and making God look stupid today.

For example, there are maybe two places in the New Testament where the Bible uses imagery of a human person being made up of three parts (body-soul-spirit): 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12.  There are other pictures of human make-up in the Bible, of course, since its books were revealed to people separated by as much as 1000 years and this tripartite division is a relatively late one in Greek thought (Philo seems to be one of the biggest instances of it).

So if we were to teach a psychology class today based on this tripartite picture and if we used it as anything but a picture, an allegory, what a bizarre and strange thing we would be doing!  By the way, I have no problem using pictures like these, as long as we know they are just pictures.  But how bizarre it would be for us to use a passing picture of the human constitution from Middle Platonism, one that even Paul and Hebrews may not have taken literally, and to base a modern psychological understanding of the human person based on it!

Christians regularly make God look stupid with this sort of thing because instead of reading the Bible to see God, we read the Bible to see stuff that wasn't really the point of the Bible in the first place.  But by submitting to the truth, I can let the Bible say what it says in the context it said it.

What are the rules for the most likely truth?  The rules are the rules we use everyday.  Does this hypothesis correspond with the data of the world (correspondence test)?  Is this hypothesis consistent with itself or does it contradict itself (coherence test)?  Does this theory work in terms of my ability to predict what will happen under certain circumstances (pragmatic test)? The consistent answers to these questions constitutes the most likely truth on any issue.

The most likely answer is not always the right answer, of course, but I believe the most likely answer over time is most likely to be what God thinks.  Human thinking tends to be tribal, and Christians are certainly no exception.  This is true of Christian use of the Bible no less than anything else.  Political thinking is just as bad. We taut, "truth, truth," but really mean "don't mess with the ideas I'm comfortable with."

This was a strength of the Enlightenment and part of what made America great, especially in the early twentieth century.  If we can see our submission to truth as part of our submission to God, wherever the truth will lead us, then we can find common ground with anyone else who is willing to do the same.  And let me say as a matter of faith, the Christian God is on the side of truth.  If we truly have faith in him, then we won't be afraid of truth, wherever it leads on any subject. Anything less is unworthy of him.

A "thick description" of truth-telling

Leave it to David Drury and friends to get some of the best discussions in the Wesleyan Church going in years.  To no one's surprise, it's on Facebook and the presenting excuse is the approaching general conference.  One of the discussions going has to do with WIF (our money lending body) and, presumably because its a potentially sensitive post, the poster of the thread posted under a pseudonym.

Now of course no lying is involved because everyone knew that "Orange Scott" was not the person's real name (Orange Scott was one of the founders of the Wesleyan Methodist church).  But a number of people took umbridge that the person did not have the guts to post his/her own name, as well as that s/he broke the rules of Facebook by registering under a false name.

I'll leave it to the person's conscience as to their intent, whether benign or spiteful.  And, being who I am, I don't care much about the WIF question.  And I accept the possibility that someone relatively connected, perhaps even "on the inside" might have legitimate concerns they could hardly bring up under their own name.  I'm a philosopher, a Bible-head, and a hermeneutician.  I'm interested in the question of what it means to tell the truth or to have integrity with regard to registering an account on Facebook.

It is an excellent illustration of what I meant in a previous post about "thick descriptions" of things in cultures.  Here are two fundamental insights into meaning:

• The meaning of language is in how it is used, not simply in defining each word.
• The meaning of an action or an event is a function of its socio-cultural context.  If an action has a universal significance, it is because of commonality between every such context.

If I say, "There's an elephant in the room," you cannot know what I mean without knowing the context.  I could be a zoo-keeper.  I could be using an idiom.  Or it could be code for my sister to pour Cool-aid on your head.  If turn my hand and make a V in America, who knows what I'm doing (victory symbol?).  In England I am flipping you off.  

So it is with truth telling.  I remember being at a church where some of the leaders would get very upset that individuals from another culture would tell them they were going to be at church Sunday and then would never show up.  To me, this was a cultural conflict rather than a matter of them being liars or, worse, it being typical of their "lying culture."  I knew what they were doing with their words.

The use of the words, "Yes, I'll be there Sunday" had a social function rather than an informative one.  "Yes, I'll be there Sunday" meant "I like you and don't want to offend you... even though I don't know if I'll come Sunday or not."  I considered it the cultural ignorance of the church leaders to assume that the meaning of words is always propositional, that the meaning of the words must be straightforwardly and literally defined in order to be truthful (if you disagree with me, don't ever step anywhere near a mission field).  The meaning of words has to do with what we are "doing" with them rather than some propositional content... unless of course what we're doing with them is in fact propositional.

It reminds me of sermons where a pastor chastises a congregation for saying, "How are you?" without waiting for an answer.  You guessed it, ignorance of how that language functions in common parlance.  "How are you?" often does not mean "How are you?" in some propositional sense.  It is often closer to "Hi, I want to be on good social terms with you."

So Facebook normally does not care whether you're a 9 year old girl or not really Mahatma Gandhi.  The function of that language is to keep their legal nose clean if you turn out to be a bad person.  They don't really care unless someone takes them to court--or you actually do something bad or do something stupid.  That's what the language really means because that's how it's used, how it works.  It's a game.

It's why I just smiled when someone once chastised me for being willing to go 9 miles over the speed limit.  If the police don't care, then the true meaning of the 55mph on the sign is really 64mph.  In other countries, stop signs mean, "Be careful as you barrel through this intersection, and if you do hit someone, we may very well come after you and kill you."  It's not a lack of integrity if you don't stop.  You'll be rammed from behind if you do.

Again, I'm sure I could have done better, but these are the sorts of things I mean by a thick description.  What does Colossians 3:9 mean when it says not to lie to each other?  To answer it, we have to know the parameters of truth telling in the first century.  We can't get the answer from Webster's Dictionary.

Proverbial Thinking

I was looking at the first chapter of one of the leadership books we use in the seminary and it was going through the various theories of leadership that have dominated from one era to another.  So people used to function with a certain kind of "great man theory," that great leaders were "born not made," that great leaders had certain inborn traits.  But then there was an approach that focused on certain behaviors of successful leaders.  Then there was the situational approach, that different situations call for different kinds of leaders. It goes on--transformational leadersihp, authentic leadership, servant leadership, leadership and followership.

Have you ever heard anyone say with a smirk on their face, "Well, that's the way they thought about x in the 90s, but now scholars think/new studies have shown/etc.  Those with a short view of history can ride these waves to their grave without seeing the overall picture this way of thinking produces.  If this is really how it works, then we can never trust the current wave either.  If this is really how it works, then we have to know that the newest "in thing" we are sharing is going to blow away tomorrow.

"Truth upmanship" is annoying.  You know the type, the person who belittles you and glorifies him or herself by knowing the latest thing you don't.  And how annoying is the preacher or scholar who says, "Here's what's really going on here [and that no one but me has noticed]." I don't know who it is, but I heard several years ago that someone who at at that time was a leader in my denomination boasted that he never read anything that was more than 5 years old.  My reaction was that this guy must therefore be incredibly shallow (and of course, does he read the Bible?).  Imagine only to read things that will become "wrong" in such a short space of time.

A long view of this way of thinking leads squarely to the most pessimistic types of postmodernism.  There must not be any truth.  Or it can lead to a certain anti-intellectual fundamentalism.  Nothing but what my parents taught me is true (because fundamentalisms change over time too--the conservatives of my circles who have buns don't look like people in Bible times but the way people did when their movement was born in the early twentieth century).

The key is to begin to think proverbially.  The traits of leaders often are natural characteristics they haves had from birth.  Different situations often require different leadership skills.  Leadership is often as much about whether people follow you as about the leader's intrinsic capabilities.  We don't actually have to choose between proverbs.  It is rather the nature of a proverb to capture a snapshot of the truth that is limited in its scope.

New thinking usually does involve added insight and often does correct the excesses of the past. But there must have been something true about past thinking or people wouldn't have bought it.  It must have "worked" at least in some respect.

This kind of thinking would go a long way toward helping our current political rhetoric.  I listened in on a conversation the other day that ranged about topics like the Wisconsin walk-out, unions, and such.  It was a thoughtful Republican conversation.  One comment was that unions did a helpful thing when they started but they have come to be a hindrance.

Now whether you agree with this comment or not, I sat there thinking that most sides on these issues had a proverb that was true. "Unions can help their employees not get run over by businesses."  "If unions do not allow a business to adjust wages and benefits, they may go out of business."  "A company will just take its factories to Mexico because they don't have to pay their employees as much."  "It is horrible the conditions under which factory workers in other countries often work."

One of the problems with our political rhetoric is that we mistake our proverbs for absolute statements.  Many if not most of the things people say about politics and religion are true in some way.  The problem is that we treat our proverbs as if they are the only truth rather than a picture of one piece of the truth.

If we could learn to see our opinions on such matters as proverbs and be willing to see the truth in our opponents' proverbs, society would vastly move forward.

A Postmodern Trickle of Semi-Consciousness

So what are we to do with postmodernism? The greatest value of postmodernism in philosophy is the way in which it draws our attention to how little we really and truly know. Of course this idea is not new. We have seen that Socrates and others recognized this centuries before Christ.

But postmodernism points us to the ultimately "mythical" character of our knowledge. We argued in our chapter on the birth of philosophy that we do a disservice to ancient myths when we think of them as "bad science," as if the myths primarily served to explain how the world works. Rather, myths were far more poetic expressions of the mysterious workings of the world. Our scientific equations today are really just very precisely tuned myths. It is not at all clear that they tell us about the world.

What science and math do is express the mysteries of reality in very precise ways. But we have no way of knowing how they might relate to some reality-in-itself. So the distance something travels is the speed it is going times the amount of time it travels at that speed. This formula works very well to tell you how far you have travelled since the last pit stop. We can say that this myth really works when you're talking about things like cars.

But does it really tell us what the reality of these things is apart from us? What is distance, really? Is it a thought in the mind of God? What is time, really? Einstein told an even more precise myth he called relativity. It works even better than the myth above. Perhaps it will prove to be such a great mythical expression of how things works that we will never replace it.

Our attempt to arrive at what is true is our attempt to find the most accurate myths that we can to express the way the world works. We can believe all sorts of things about what is behind the way the world works--or not believe that there is anything behind it. But a good myth and one worthy of being called a "true myth" is one that accounts for the way things work the best.

Where does God and Christian revelation fit into this picture. Because we are stuck in our heads, it does not change the process by which we reach toward truth. As we saw in our chapter on a Christian View of the World, whether we like it or not, revelation still must pass through our reason and experience to get into our understanding.

But as believers we believe by faith that God exists and that He is involved in the world, that He is involved in the process of our understanding. This does not mean that God works around our myth-making ways. We find equally godly people in all the different forms of Christianity--and God lets them go on believing different things. We see over and over throughout biblical and Christian history that God's people have also formulated their understandings of God in ways that were deeply influenced by the culture of their day.

In short, God apparently does not reveal by showing us absolute truth removed from our worldviews and paradigms, our "myths." Rather, God's consistent mode of revelation seems to meet us where we are at, to meet us in our "myths" and make them work far better than they did before. He makes them far more true than they were before.

But the only One with a God's eye view on reality is God. Only He knows all the data of the universe in all of its relationships to all the other data of the universe. We see an infintesimal portion of it and comprehend the interrelationships of that portion only in part and in fact further as skewed by the perspective from which I can never fully free myself.

We are thus all myth-makers. All the words in this chapter are indeed attempts to express the myth-stery of life as precisely as possible. Derrida and Foucault were themselves mythmakers, as are other philosophers like Heidegger or Rorty. Those who urge us to stop thinking of ourselves as knowers and the world as that which is known are only urging a different myth that they think expresses the mystery better. And those who would urge us to stop talking "meta-talk"--talk about talk--are themselves only urging a different myth.

The key is not to mistake these stories philosophers tell themselves for reality. I will continue to use meta-language, and I will continue to discuss myself as a subject reflecting on reality. I do so not because I am committed to a particular subject-object metaphysic or epistemology, but because this mythical construct works really well. I use this language with an eternal footnote that says, "You should not think that I mistake this language for the actual nature of the world in itself." You foolish Lyotard to think I mistook these things for reality. The meta-myths never left the field you story tellers thought you captured.

Another thing that works is a movement toward greater reflectivity. I may not be able to become absolutely reflective, but I can point to places where I have become more reflective. The problem with modernism is that it thought it was more reflective than it was. It labeled the lack of self-awareness of those before it pre-modernism.

But we are all at the same time some mixture of reflectivity and non-reflectivity. The postmodern truth is that we are never fully reflective. We see through a glass darkly. A healthy dose of postmodernism will not lead us to give up on the idea of truth and reflectivity altogether. After all, that approach to life certainly doesn't work. It is to know what we think we know humbly. To listen and learn from others, from all those around us, from all those of the past. Ironically, experience is the best path to greater reflectivity.

When God's kingdom comes, we'll see far more of the puzzle. Perhaps God will miraculously undo the egocentric predicament. Or maybe God will then enjoy watching how our myths become more splendid than anything we might currently imagine.

Postmodernism Etc...

Since the 1980's it has become common to consider ourselves in a "postmodern" age. But what exactly does that mean? Probably the best way to start exploring the question is to recognize that "post" modern surely means in a most basic way "after" modernism. Apparently, we best define postmodernism not so much in terms of what it is, but in terms of what it is not. And what it is not, is modernism.

Now to be sure, we can describe postmodern culture without reference to modernism. Postmodern culture is pluralistic, it emphasizes not only the tolerance of all ideas but professes them all to be just as valid as each other. There is less a sense of an overarching right or wrong. Everybody's business is their own business. Whatever floats your boat is your own business. We could play out this Zeitgeist in all sorts of areas ranging from art to ethics.

But to understand postmodernism as a philosophical development, we best look at what it is unraveling. In the philosophical sense, you can hardly be a post-modern if you have not at least passed through the fires of modernism. Historians of Western thought usually point to Rene Descartes as the father of modern philosophy because of the way he turned philosophy's attention on me as a knower. He asked not what is certain in general, but how can I know what is certain.

This development in philosophy roughly paralleled the rise of science and the decline of the church as sources of truth. The focus in the quest for truth comes to be evidence and the goal objectivity, the ability to look at the world without bias or preconception about where the evidence will point. Stanley Grenz likened the goal of modernist epistemology to Spock in the late 60's TV sitcom Star Trek. [A Primer on Postmodernism] Spock was half human and half Vulcan. He struggled to keep the emotions of his human side under control so that he could think objectively about things.

Grenz considers the transition from Star Trek to Star Trek the Next Generation a metaphor for the transition from modernism to postmodernism. If Spock has emotions but does his best to bury them and keep them from affecting his thinking, Data in the Next Generation has no emotions because he is an android, but he covets them and finally receives them in the first Next Generation movie.

Therefore, postmodernism in the philosophical sense is a movement that recognizes the vast limitations of human objectivity. Such reactions vary among thinkers "after modernism." Some would throw out the concept of truth altogether. The meaning of a text is a free for all, whatever you want it to mean. There is no such thing as reality, I can make my world whatever I want to make it. Then there are those like me, the author of this chapter, who believe that we can still speak of truth and of more and less objective understandings of it.

Reality After Modernism
In some senses, postmodernism on reality is simply a different trajectory than Descartes and Kant took. Descartes concluded that the only thing I couldn't doubt was that I exist because I am doubting. We should revise his answer. Whatever it is I am calling doubt exists. Whether I exist as a person thinking the doubt is a different matter.

Descartes then rebuilds reality with confidence, bringing God in as a deus ex machina, the god of the ancient play who swoops in on some mechanism and rescues the person in distress. Because we can trust God, we can trust that the world basically is as it appears. Kant makes a similar move almost two hundred years later. Sure we can only know the world as our minds process it, but God has made the mind software, so it must work properly.

This tendency among believing philosophers to bring God into the mix highlights the fact that faith is always involved with our belief in reality and in what we know about it. Apart from believing that something exists, everything else that we believe, to one degree or another, requires faith, where faith is belief in the face of varying degrees of uncertainty. In saying that faith is always involved, we should not assume that faith is always blind faith. Blind faith is when we believe in something for which there is very little or no evidence at all, but we choose to believe anyway. Faith is belief without absolute certainty. Most of the time faith is not blind.

So does reality exist? I'll have to admit I can't prove it. I could be a brain attached to wires in a vat somewhere. I could be a sophisticated computer program like the Matrix. I suppose I could even be dreaming (although if so, this is the most vivid dream I've ever had). My belief that I actually exist on a planet called earth in the early twenty-first century requires faith--in some senses an immense amount of basic faith.

But it is a faith that works very well. In the 1700's, Thomas Reid became the "father" of what we might call the school of Scottish Realism. He called it "common sense realism" and others call it "naive realism." This is a sense that we actually do know the world directly through intuition. Over the last two hundred years several philosophers have suggested in one way or another that Descartes set us up for confusion by making the hard and fast distinction between ourselves and the world, the distinction between me as subject and the world as object [see the last chapter].

There is a great appeal, especially on a popular level, just to take the world as it is. I would argue--and because we are talking postmodern now, I intentionally bring myself as the writer of this chapter into view--that this common sense realism is fine as long as it acknowledges that this is an item of faith. Because I can brainstorm other possibilities that the common sense realist cannot disprove on her own terms she must concede that faith is involved. [this also applies to the phenomenologist that we will discuss in the final chapter]

A slightly different perspective that arrives at an ironically similar destination is pragmatic realism. These are those that consider questions about what is truly behind reality as largely irrelevant. What is real is the way things work in our world. Some, like Hilary Putnam, are more optimistic that what we are seeing might have some sort of reality beyond our interaction with the world. Others like Richard Rorty don't think there is any meaningful reality beyond how we function in the world. It seems to me that we are on good ground to accept at least this much. We may not be able to prove or demonstrate much of anything about the nature of the world beyond our interaction with it, but it is not incoherent to operate by faith as if it exists.

We as Christians might want to exercise even more faith and consider ourselves critical realists. We recognize that because of the fallen state of the human mind after Adam (whatever this might mean), we do not see the world objectively. But we have faith in a God who is a God of truth and thus that there is a reality out there that is real. We are critical of our own apprehension of that reality, but by faith we believe in reality.

Truth After Modernism
If Richard Rorty is perhaps the major postmodern philosopher to know in relation to reality. Michel Foucault is probably the one to know in relation to the topic of knowledge. For Foucault, "knowledge is violence." That is to say, all knowing of the world is an imposition on the world.

We might call Foucault a "post-structuralist," because he believes that all the patterns and structures we think we "find" in the world are really ideas we are forcing on the world. In one sense, Foucault's idea here makes sense. The world is an almost infinite collection of individual bits of data. Our finite minds cannot master even the smallest portion of that data, let alone have anywhere near a complete sense of how each bit relates to every other bit.

The result is that our knowing of the world requires us to "select" certain bits of the world as more important than others, which we then implicitly "deselect." We prioritize certain data and "rip" it "violently" from reality. Then we usually claim to have discovered the pattern in reality. Foucault suggests we are rather forcing the pattern on reality.

Truth for Foucault is thus not real but is a matter of power. What is true is what I can convince or force others to "see" with me. Ironically, Foucault studied a number of patterns in history that seem to "work" very well. He not only studied the history of sex but also the history of crime and of insanity. His constructions of reality are at many points very convincing. So he argues that sexuality as a distinct aspect of a person is a fairly recent way of structuring knowledge. And he shows how the punishment of crime has moved in the last century from a technique of public shame to a private revenge ceremony.

In the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn seems to embody this approach to truth well. Kuhn has argued that scientific paradigms or ways of interpreting specific subjects are constantly changing and do not really point to any fixed truth. So at one time the "normal science" perspective was that the sun went around the earth. When Copernicus then argued that the earth went around the sun, his math was not at all the clear winner in the argument. But, in a Foucaultian way, we was able to convince a group of scientists who eventually had enough power to overthrow the geocentric paradigm. It was only with Johannes Kepler that the math actually superceded the other side.

Normal science resists paradigm change. Instead, it uses its power to maintain its status as the dominant paradigm. But there is almost always data out there that doesn't fit very well into the paradigm. I like to call it "naughty data." Eventually, someone notices this aberrant data and rather than using their intellect to try to fit the data into the present paradigm, they brainstorm a completely different one. They generally face resistance and opposition. But if they can gain power in the guild, their ideas might get a hearing. If the younger scientists go for the idea, the older scientists will eventually die off. Viola--a new dominant paradigm!

The history of science seems filled with examples of this process. We have already mentioned Copernicus and the question of whether the sun goes around the earth. We could also mention belief in the existence of oxygen, relativity, and quantum mechanics in physics. This last paradigm shift is particularly interesting, because in its case Einstein was one of the "normal scientists" who didn't accept the new paradigm.

Quantum mechanics operates on the idea that when an electron is moving from one charge to another, it simply jumps--it doesn't pass through all the theoretical charges in between. This shift in thinking entailed all kinds of differences between the way Isaac Newton did physics and the way nuclear physicists do today. Einstein was one of many who opposed many aspects of quantum mechanics.

But he's dead now. Today we find almost no competent physicists who would agree with Einstein. But Kuhn would say they will get theirs eventually. Eventually someone will come along with another paradigm shift. Some would say that string theory may bring a similar revolution, although it hasn't yet. Kuhn initially took a very "pessimistic" view of paradigms, as if no paradigm was ultimately any better than any other. In the second edition of his work, he allowed for the possibility that some paradigms might account for data better than others [Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Ironically, it was the topic of evolution that pushed him to make this allowance. He did not want to allow for the possibility that creation science might be an equally valid way of understanding the scientific evidence]

Texts after Modernism
We might finally mention how postmodernism has played itself out in relation to the meaning of texts. Here the key player is Jacques Derrida, the "father" of deconstruction. Deconstruction is a movement that believes there are no fixed meanings in any text. As soon as you try to construct the meaning of a text, it unravels or "de-constructs" before you.

The following illustration is a caricature of the deconstructionist idea. Let's say I want to know the meaning of the previous sentence. I go to a dictionary and look up each of the words. But what do I find? More words! I could spend the rest of my life looking up the words in the definitions of the words in the definitions of the words in the definitions of each word in that sentence. Meaning becomes like a dog chasing its tail.

Now this illustration does not do justice to Derrida, but it points us in the right direction. The main idea is that words have no meaning in themselves. We find the meaning in the difference between this word and that word, or as Derrida liked to put it, in the differance between them, in the "traces" of meaning left in the movement from one word to the next.

What are we to make of this? On the one hand, Derrida is not as pessimistic as we might make him sound. After all, he wrote books and wanted others (at least some) to understand him. But he seems to bring up a valid point. Take the word gift. What does it mean? If you are an English speaker, you no doubt think of a present of some sort. But if you are a German speaker, you will see here the word for poison.

The meaning of a word does seem to be a function of the mind looking at the word. To be sure, we don't just invent our own individualistic meanings to words. Stanley Fish has pointed out that we get our "dictionaries" for words from the communities to which we belong. Ludwig Wittgenstein put it a different way. The meaning of a word is a function of the "language game" we are playing in a particular "form of life."

If I say, "fire" in a crowded theater, the language game tells me that this is a command to run for your life. If the form of life is a firing squad and I am holding a gun in my hand pointed at someone, I am being told to shoot the person. If a boss tells me "you're fired" or I am on a deserted island and finally someone has managed to rub two sticks together enough to get a spark, all of these situations have different games that tell me what meaning to take from the word fire. The word has no intrinsic meaning apart from a particular context.

So Wittgenstein is also known for asking the question, "If a lion could speak, would we understand it?" The answer he is looking for is "no," because even if you could put its words into Google and translate it, we would not know the language game needed to understand it because we do not know the forms of life that pertain to a lion.

Intro to "Stuck in Our Heads"

I'm writing something for my philosophy class to read. I thought I'd share some of it.
_____________________

The idea of definite, unchangeable truth has come on hard times in some circles these days. For one thing, the Western world has seen so many developments in science these last decades that most Westerners have come to expect constant change and development. Throughout most of history, changes like these have taken place so infrequently that it was always easy to affirm that "there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Most cultures deeply admire the elderly, because they are the ones who have been around the longest and thus know the most.

But Western culture has seen some significant changes in these attitudes. We expect new "truths" to come and overthrow old "truths" on a regular basis. In technology, "Moore's law" expects science to shrink the size of computer circuits in half every two years. The elderly are now the least likely to be able to operate our iPods and laptops. Our children frequently go further in their education than we did and often have much wider exposure to the world than we did by far at their age. In the words of Louis Armstrong, "They'll learn much more than I'll ever know." ["What a Wonderful World"]

One of the most significant scientists at the turn of the twentieth century was initially advised not to go into physics. The one advising him thought that all the major discoveries in physics had already been made! [to Max Planck] Was he ever wrong! And the "truth" everyone knew in the early years of the 1900's was that you couldn't split an atom. After all, that's what an a-tom was supposed to be, something "un" - "cuttable." But Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved this idea wrong under a devastating mushroom cloud!

It is somewhat popular these days in some Christian circles to pinpoint the problem with Western culture as its failure to believe in absolute truth, universal truths that are true no matter who you are or where you go. Ironically, there are also plenty out there who are more than happy to deny that absolute truth exists--that there is only what is true for me and what is true for you. As usual, both sides in this debate are usually guilty of sloppy thinking.

For example, if I were to say, "There is no such thing as absolute truth," I have made a statement of absolute truth. But I cannot make a statement of absolute truth if there is no absolute truth. My statement is therefore false as I have worded it. But the fact of the matter is, it is really only in certain areas that most people don't believe in absolute truth. For example, most people do not think of math as a subject where the answers are a matter of opinion. We tend to think of 2+2=4 as a statement that is absolutely true. No one would say, "Well, 2+2 may equal 4 to you, but it equals 7 to me." It is mostly in areas like religion and ethics where we start to become "relativists" about truth, people who believe truth depends on who's talking.

By the same token, the current relativistic Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, is not just the product of evil hearts and cultural brainwashing. The world has become much smaller than it used to be. When sub-cultures--including Christian subcultures--used to isolate themselves from everyone else, it was easy to attribute differences in beliefs and practices to the "evilness" or stupidity of the other groups. But the convenience of traveling the world, not to mention the internet, has made it much harder to think this way about everyone else outside our group. Rather than being able to dismiss "straw men," simplistic caracatures of other people's ideas, now we regularly come "face to face" with others who disagree with us.

The result is real uncertainty about what is true. Students who have been raised in the church and who go to Christian colleges travel the world and find others who have completely different presuppositions and perspectives on religion and life. Faith crises sometimes ensue. Even among Christians, we get to know godly people from other churches with different Christian perspectives. We find ourselves thinking, "This person is as close to God as anyone from my group, but she doesn't believe the same things I do." One preacher has one interpretation; another has another. Who is right? Is there a right answer? A certain segment of the church today, the emergent church, has accordingly come to espouse what it calls a "generous orthodoxy," one that tries to major on the major and not worry about the kinds of things that specific groups have tended to argue (and kill) over in the past. [Brian McClaren]

So do we abandon the idea of truth altogether? It's hard to imagine that Christianity could be Christianity if we did? What about fixed and definite truths? Again, it seems like Christianity would become something else if it did. At the same time, if God is a God of truth, then surely hiding our head in the sand in the face of legitimate challenges is no good either. If we have true faith, we shouldn't fear asking these questions, at least in theory.

These are all the challenges of post-modernism, the philosophical age in which we find ourselves. It would be bad logic to dismiss all of its challenges simply because of this word, this label. There are aspects to the post-modern challenge that Christians will want to reject. But there are also aspects to the post-modern challenge that seem legitimate. This chapter is about these issues of truth that Western culture is currently facing. How can and should we think about truth in the age "after" modernism?

Relativism, Absolutism, and Other Pop-Misconceptions

I hate it when I look stupid. The main reason I hate it is because it happens so often. My son Tommy unfortunately has to live with the fact that he reminds me of myself. He's so often oblivious to what's going on around him; he drops things and breaks things all the time; he plays great defense but doesn't seem to get the fact that it's goals that win a soccer game.

So when I rant about pop-Christianity making Christians look stupid, I'm doing therapy. I'm yelling at myself twenty years ago and revealing how stupid I think I was as a zealous young college student. I know what it is to move to the next level on a topic and realize how simplistic your thought used to be.

For example, a thunderstorm passed through early this morning, and I found myself comforting my 5 year old girl Sophie. "What is God angry at?" she asked. "Was he fighting someone?"

"It's not God," I said. "It's electricity. The electricity comes from the sky to the ground." Then I started to say, "Well actually..." but by then she was asleep again. I had suddenly remembered middle school science and the fact that lightning is allegedly electric movement from the negatively charged ground to the positively charged sky. But since I'm not sure how that works myself, I'm sure I couldn't have expressed it at all to Sophie.

Now I'm no scientist. But I bet it's a whole lot more complicated than I just expressed.

That's how I now look at Christian icons like Francis Schaeffer and Dobson. I know they have impressive letters after their names, but why do their ideas seem so kindergartenish to me so often?

For example, these types tend to confuse absolutes in terms of epistemology (truth) and absolutes in terms of morality (ethics). These are quite distinct categories. Thus it could be absolutely true that there are no moral absolutes. I believe in moral absolutes, but I'm making a point--this is a coherent position.

By the way, the Bible enjoins two primary absolutes: love God and love neighbor. It is never appropriate to make an exception to these laws. Here is another pet peeve of mine. Absolutes in ethics mean that there are never any legitimate exceptions. If Jesus made exception to the Sabbath law, then he did not consider it an absolute. The Bible rarely treats moral commands as exceptionless--certainly that is not the spirit of Jesus or Paul. In that sense, pop-Christian media is confused when it equates absolutes with the Bible or God. It is confusing contemporary Christian culture with Scripture (as usual).

And relativism is not the only alternative to absolutism. Yet time and time again we hear pop-moralists saying, "We don't believe in relativism so we must believe in absolutes." This is such elementary school thinking it blows my mind. Thank you once again for making us look stupid.

And relativism is not the belief that there is no such thing as right and wrong. That's moral nihilism. Relativism only means that right and wrong is relative either to individuals or cultures. A person who has a conviction against wearing a wedding ring but who believes it is not sinning for some other Christians is a relativist on this particular topic! Don't balk at the example, that's what the word means in its proper sense.

So Dobson and Schaeffer are great coffee table discussion partners. I hope some in the coming generation are prepared to go much deeper.

Truth Conference

The Truth Conference is now over. I think the positive of the conference might be a little different for each individual.

If I leave aside the selfish enjoyment of being allowed to talk, the most beneficial thing about the conference to me was getting better acquainted with my brothers and sisters at other Wesleyan colleges and in church leadership here and there. I was impressed by various individuals from every Wesleyan college.

Just to mention a couple, I would of course have expected a Houghton philosophy professor to be impressive, but I really enjoyed Carlton Fisher's paper, which (at least in my mind) flowed like butter into mine. It is always nice to find that people whose knowledge you respect are thinking in similar ways to you and even nicer to find out they're Wesleyan!

Similarly, I have known Ken Gavel since seminary, but I was really impressed not only by his knowledge of theology, but by his careful, exacting scholarship. Here is a scholar in the classic tradition! He teaches theology at Bethany, and disabuses anyone of the idea that professors at Bible colleges are inferior to liberal arts teachers. I might say that Bethany seems to be a really neat place, perhaps an unsung hero among our colleges.

In my "marketing stereotypes," Bethany to me is the "emergent" college, Houghton is the "academic" college, IWU is the "ministerial training" college, SWU is the "Southern" college (with all the appertinences pertaining thereto), and OWU is the conservative college (not meaning Wesleyan conservative as in legalistic but leaning a bit toward the fundamentalist).

If you were to ask for consensus conclusions, I would say that all agreed we needed to minister to the postmodern, next generation. While that's obvious, the second half of the conference seemed to gravitate to the question of how our ministries and teachings will need to change. It seemed generally agreed that we would need to be more positive, authentic, and loving than divisive, authoritarian, and exclusive.

On the other hand, the lead off to the conference seemed to take a more confrontative, combative approach. So there was some diversity of sentiment.

So the second half tended to focus more on postmodernism as a culture. The first half focused more on postmodernism as an (anti) ideology. The first two presentations (both by the same individual, associated with OWU) tended to see postmodernism strictly as something to fight against, while most of the papers that followed agreed that there was truth to be reckoned with in postmodern (anti) thought, not least that we will need to be much more humble in our pretensions to having everything figured out.

So I suspect the benefit of the conference will vary from individual to individual. Some will continue to treat postmodernism strictly as the enemy. Most will see it as a force to be reckoned with. Some will see it as a helpful corrective as long as room is allowed for faith and a truth that is ultimately beyond our full comprehension.