Faith and reason ad nauseum

If for Karl Barth, "God is not Man said in a loud voice," then it is also true that for Karl Barth, "Apologetics are dogmatics said in a loud voice."

In other words, if there is no basis for knowing God apart from God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ, and if there is no objective high ground to which we can retreat in order to evaluate this claim (and like it or not it is a truth claim, and merely renaming a truth claim "Truth" itself is an evasion), then when a non-Christian asks, "How can I know that this is true?" the only Barthian/Cultural Linguistic/Radical Orthodox response is to just repeat the testimony--usually with a note of impatience, or shrill defensiveness.

I just don't think that this will do.

I have sort of sat and stewed over this for 15 years. 15 years of stewing over my personal inability to make disciples, or to motivate congregations to make disciples, and stewing over the fact that I've been handed a theology that is really inadequate to the missionary task of the present moment. It just won't do to revel in postmodernity's freedom to allow the Church to speak its own language without apology because postmodernity won't prejudice any truth claim.

In an essay that treats the problem of religious language in a very different way, Horace Bushnell cites the curious case of identical twins who develop a private language only intelligible to them. That, I fear, is what the Church is being reduced to. No one outside the Church can fault the grammar or vocabulary of the Church peculiar way of narrating the world, anymore than it could fault the ability of the twins to coherently describe the world, but no one wants to learn that language either, and the Church isn't much interested in teaching outsiders to speak its language. That would demand translation, and some accommodation to outsiders' modes of thinking.

But I'm reading Wolfhart Pannenberg this week for my attributes of God class, and I'm wondering if he might be of more help. I'm not sure because the book is turgid in that characteristically German theological way (is writing an entire book in the passive voice a literary feat or a monstrosity? I'm inclined to think the latter), and I might have misunderstood it all. Nevertheless...

Pannenberg argues that philosophical categories cannot offer proofs of God's existence, but can provide minimal standards for what constitutes serious God-talk. Thus, while Barth was right to protest any methodological subjection of God's reality to the reality of religion, bald assertions of Christian truth claims aren't enough. "The mediation of reasoning is needed."

So when Jonathan writes,

I agree with Leslie Newbigin, who said, “The resurrection cannot possibly be accommodated within any plausibility structure, except one of which it is the cornerstone.” (Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Uncertainty in Christian Discipleship, 1995, p. 93). And the only analogy for the resurrection is the creation of the universe itself. If there were a principle out there by which we could evaluate Jesus, then we could just worship that principle and forget about Jesus.

it begs the question, because the creation of the universe itself is a widely accepted plausibility structure apart from the specific revelation of God in Christ. Pannenberg, utilizing Schleiermacher, contends (at least as far as I understand him), that humanity's common awareness of finitude necessarily gives rise to an awareness of the infinite. The reality of creaturely existence contains within itself awareness of a Creator. This common awareness, which when worshiped and institutionalized we call religion, is not, as Freud, Marx and the other masters of suspicion assert, simply a projection or misunderstanding of human hopes and fears. Pannenberg convincingly shows that strong religious ideas often drive and defy political and social structures and movements. This awareness is real, even if suppressed in the atheist, and while imperfect, "we cannot conclude that they are all from the root up no more than idolatry," (117) contra Barth (and Luther as well), thus giving us something more to say than "dogmatics in a loud voice." There are some commonalities we must assume with unbelievers in assessing Christian truth claims, and to deny that may be less about maintaining the purity or sufficiency of the gospel, and more about a loss of missionary nerve in our contemporary setting.

Jonathan loves his alma mater and he loves N.T. Wright (see the comment thread here), but I'm not sure he's willing to admit how methodologically divergent the two are. Wright, in my judgment, is better suited for the present moment. He's an updated Moses Stuart, who thought that, while reason doesn't legislate what one can believe, it can interpret it.

A side note: Pannenberg notes 19th century liberal theology's hostility toward Greek metaphysics was combined with an assertion of the absolute uniqueness of Jesus, i.e. unconditioned by his Jewishness. This, Pannenberg argues, is incoherent because it is Jesus's suitableness for the Greek categories that make him a universal and not parochial figure. Interestingly, a lot of contemporary biblical scholars who would eschew 19th century liberalism for all sorts of reasons agree with the liberals on the first count, but not on the second. The effect of that, as Pannenberg might see it, is doubling down on Jesus's parochialness, and hence his irrelevance. So the recent trend to free the God of the Bible from metaphysics for the work of liberation might not be as culturally relevant as liberation theologians, with their preoccupation with praxis, like to think it is.

Comments

[Jonathan Marlowe]

While I have acknowledged the differences between the Duke/Yale school and N. T. Wright, it is also the case that the only text required of all incoming first year M. Div. students at Duke is N. T. Wright's Simply Christian.

Marvin, the approach of liberalism is ALSO

[Jonathan Marlowe]

While I have acknowledged the differences between the Duke/Yale school and the thought of N. T. Wright, it is also worth noting that the only text required of ALL incoming M. Div. students at Duke is N. T. Wright's Simply Christian.

Here's the thing, Marvin: Liberalism is ITSELF also a plausibility structure and a truth claim. When Christians ask, "How do we know that LIBERALISM is true?" the only thing liberals can do is just to repeat THEIR testimony. And their testimony is no more objective than the Christian's testimony.

If you will indulge me while I quote Leslie Newbigin one more time:

To decline the evangelical invitation is not to have the security of objective truth as opposed to confessional prejudice. It is to have chosen another confession. (Proper Confidence, p. 103)

OK, I'm taking a break from this for a while. Just read Newbigin, and the whole world will be fine :)

[Eric Lee]

Marvin,

I am mainly in agreement with this post (yet I also agree with Jonathan above if he is merely talking about liberalism, except for how he seems to conflate Marvin's "reason" with "liberalism", which I think is wrong). It's because of my agreement that I continue to find your repeated lumping of Radical Orthodoxy in with "Barthian/Cultural Linguistic" in this post and "Wittgensteinian--Lindbeckian--Radical Orthodoxy-Postliberal" in your earlier post on Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is-- to be completely bizarre and out of place.

First of all, most RO people have strong critiques of Wittgenstein and Lindbeck and would rather distance themselves from that discourse, let alone Barth whom they really tend to stay away from (not to mention the obverse of the Hauerwasians who don't really like RO). [As a sidenote, I tend to like Hauerwas, Wittgenstein, and Lindbeck, but see their limitations to a degree (and I know nearly nothing about Barth but would probably agree with Ken Oakes' reading of Barth against John Milbank, who basically makes Barth agree with a Thomistic reading of nature/grace but using Barthian language)].

Second, the primary reason that I and main RO types (I study with Conor Cunningham and John Milbank) would agree with this post is because of this: "The mediation of reasoning is needed." Of course the main writers of RO would agree with this! This is due to their high value on reason (see, for example, the CFP for the "Grandeur of Reason" conference, which is calling for a 'new', i.e. not nostalgic, way for reason and faith to come together). It's actually closer to a Roman Catholic view of reason which sees some value in the use of natural reason. But it is not a 'liberal' reason, because it sees reason as already graced. What you talk about concerning Pannenberg's use of Schleiermacher actually sounds very very close to this but just using slightly different language.

In other words, whereas a Hauerwasian/Lindbeckian approach would see cultures as more insulated, needing "thick description" (following Geertz), and encased within Wittgensteinian 'forms of life', Radical Orthodoxy sees cultures, faith and reason as more paradoxically porous (William Desmond's talk of 'porosity' is helpful here). In an early essay, John Milbank even talks about the church itself as a kind of paradoxical nomad city without walls--yet still within boundary of some sort of course, or it couldn't be a city, yet the boundary itself is a bit blurred for good reason.

[Marvin]

Eric, thanks for correcting me. I must admit that what I know about RO is mediated through Hauerwas, hence my tendency to lump them all together.

"Reason (is) already graced." Pannenberg talks about the curious way that "natural theology" began as an attempt by the Greeks to determine what was by nature divine, and ended up being all about what people can know about the divine based on their own mental faculties. I think that we need not fear what reason can teach us about God because General Revelation is still revelation; it is still from God because God created the universe, including the human mind and its ability to process sense data.

Jonathan, I certainly don't want to say that Christians possess only a subjective truth while secularists possess an objective truth. I think we're talking about different concerns here, perhaps speaking a bit past each other. I don't really know any secularists that need points scored against them in the way that Hauerwas skewers liberals, although I'm sure that such people abound in research universities like Duke. But I do know a lot of skeptical people, and I don't think it overthrows the gospel to invite them to "come and reason together" about the gospel message.

[Lee]

I think Eric makes a good point w.r.t. "reason"/"liberalism." These two notions need to be disentangled. Or, so to speak, there are many "reasons" or concepts of reason floating around (Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomist, Cartesian, Humean, Kantian, pragmatist, just to name a few!). I'd argue that certain strands of Enlightenment thought had an unduly narrow understanding of what reason does which, pretty much by definition, excludes faith, but that this isn't true of all such concepts.

On the other side of the coin: liberalism is a political philosophy (or maybe better a family of political philosophies) that can be justified (or not) from a variety of perspectives, including Christian-friendly ones. It's not a comprehensive philosophy of life and doesn't depend on a strong Enlightenment concept of reason.

[Camassia]

Marvin, as one who has been the subject of evangelism proceeding from this general line of thought, I have found it enlightening to see the assumptions of my own (liberal humanist) upbringing as culturally embedded. But I'm as mystified as you are as to how that's supposed to lead to faith. If anything, it tends to lead me in the more typical postmodern direction of feeling that I don't really know anything, which hardly inspires the sort of full-throated, life-surrending commitment that Christianity calls for. I remember, in fact, having that very problem with Newbigin -- I read a different book than Jonathan is referring to, but it did seem to be barreling towards relativism until the last chapter, when it wheeled around and called for evangelism.

I don't remember who it was who said that when people lose faith in traditional authorities they become not more skeptical but more credulous, but I've sometimes felt that's the implicit assumption here. If you can hack away at what the non-Christian believes, then they'll believe you! I suppose a more charitable way of looking at it is that you're clearing away the ground for the Holy Spirit to act, since that's the only thing that ultimately converts people. However, if you're really depending on an unpredictable miracle for this to work, that kind of moots all these methodological arguments.

[Jonathan Marlowe]

You guys have succeeded in waking me from my blogging slumber. More of my thoughts at The Ivy Bush.