Am I Emergent?

Thanks to Brian LePort for the link to this theology quiz. This is probably about right. Maybe I'd go a little lower on emergent, but then I'd have to go lower on everything else too. I certainly wouldn't self-identify with the emergent movement, but I'm not terribly far from it.

This is such a cheater post, but I haven't even looked at the computer for all of Christmas week. This is my first time getting on and just for a short time. Just wanted to let you know that I'm still here. I have only read about 1/3 of the blogs I usually read, so sorry I haven't interacted with you all in awhile. Right now I'm busy trying to increase my vocabulary enough to understand David Bently Hart's Beaty of the Infinite that I just got for Christmas. Also, I am still planning on switching to Wordpress in a couple days. So there's still time for you to get that free book.

What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Emergent/Postmodern You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don't think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this. Emergent/Postmodern 79% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 79% Neo orthodox 64% Charismatic/Pentecostal 57% Classical Liberal 50% Reformed Evangelical 36% Roman Catholic 32% Fundamentalist 29% Modern Liberal 25%

Roger Olson's Postconservatism

Last week I checked out Roger Olson's new book, Reformed and Always Reforming. Ironically, I found it in the library at our local fundamentalist college. I may not have picked it up otherwise, but I was so surprised to see it on their shelves that I had to read it.

The book is essentially a manifesto for postconservatism, a term with Olson essentially coined. Olson defines postconservatism mostly in reference to conservative evangelicalism, which he believes is dominated by theologians that are obsessed with setting boundaries and tightly defining what it means to be an evangelical. Conservatives, he argues, are almost always opposed to fresh theological proposals and operate from a reactionary standpoint towards any revision of classical doctrines.

Postconservatives on the other hand are open to new ideas. They tend to be frustrated with theological systems that confine theology to head knowledge (which consensus has unfortunately labeled 'propositional truth'). Without rejecting the intellectual component of theology, postconservatives want to refocus theology on heart knowledge and our response to God. Postconservatives are more concerned about orthopathy (right experience, referring, I assume, to the need to be 'born again') and orthopraxy (right action) than with orthodoxy (right belief).

One can sense that Olson is frustrated with the reactions he has received from the theologians he has grouped under the conservative banner, including Millard Erickson, Wayne Grudem, D.A. Carson, and J.I. Packer. Olson's tone sometimes conveys the message that he just wants these guys to stop picking on him. Though I agree with him that conservatives often go too far in their reactions against postconservatives, Olson's focus on their differences makes it more polemic than necessary. He lacks the nuance of a postconservative like Kevin Vanhoozer, and draws more fire upon himself as a result. "Some [conservatives] have expressed harsh criticism, if not condemnation... of [another postconservative's] theological project while embracing and applauding Vanhoozer's. The fact is they are very similar." (121) Hey playground bullies, he shouts, shouldn't you be picking on him too! That's not fair!

That is not to say that he is necessarily wrong in his appraisal of the reaction from conservatives. In reference to Open Theism, his observations are right on: "It seems to me that conservative evangelical reaction to open theism has been nothing short of hysterical... All in all, it seems that the open view of God needs much more careful study and dialogue among evangelicals, whereas many conservatives seem to wish to halt study and dialogue and focus energies on drawing boundaries that exclude open theists from evangelical communities." (125-6) Amen.

Olson does a good job of commending postconservative theology, especially to those that are disenchanted with the similarities between fundamentalism and evangelicalism. The book functions as a sort of 'on ramp' to progressive evangelical theology. Or, to alter the metaphor slightly, he effectively draws the map of what he considers postconservative theology. It is no surprise the Yvette recently came away from the book with a massive reading list. Olson marshalls an impressive array of theologians in at least partial support of his program: the late Stan Grenz, Alister McGrath, Kevin Vanhoozer, Henry Knight III, Clark Pinnock, Miroslav Volf, and F. LeRon Shults.

Unfortunately, Olson draws and redraws and redraws the map several times. Readers are re-introduced to Stan Grenz an Kevin Vanhoozer four or five different times. He examines several aspects of postconservative theology in turn, often repeating himself each time. For instance, he mentions Grudem's (inaccurate) list of thirty-four conservative theologians four separate times (pp.9, 21, 173, 188). The book has about 125 pages of valuable information stretched into 237 pages. If he were fun to read (like N.T. Wright for instance) I wouldn't mind so much, but the last hundred pages or so were a chore rather than a delight to read.

The biggest flaw I can see with Olson's view of postconservative theology is that in attempting to straddle between liberal and conservative soteriologies, he ends up falling into a chasm of inconsistency between them. He states, "where right experience (orthopathy) and right spirituality (orthopraxy) are present in Jesus-centered living, authentic Christianity and even evangelical faith may be present even if doctrinal correctness is not yet fully present -- provided that movement in the right direction is clearly discernible." (84) In other words, you don't have to be orthodox to be a Christian, just moving towards orthodoxy. But he provides no reasons for this to be so. If salvation is dependent on an experience with God alone, why assume that such an experience will necessarily lead one closer to orthodoxy? If orthodoxy is an important component of salvation, then why simultaneously deny its importance. Either orthodoxy is necessary or unnecessary for salvation. In this matter, postconservativism has either moved too far from conservatism or not far enough. One senses that this is a vestige of conservatism that Olson is (inconsistently) not prepared to part with. Thus to liberals, postconservatives are still conservative in every sense that matters.

Is Belief in Jesus' Resurrection Justified?

May I suggest that, fundamentally, the way we know Christianity to be true
is by the self-authenticating witness of God's Holy Spirit? Now what do I
mean by that? I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him
who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or
evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact
experiencing the Spirit of God... How then does the believer know that
Christianity is true? He knows because of the self-authenticating witness of
God's Spirit who lives within him.

- William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 32-4

What bothers me about Bill Craig (pictured here with two people I have never met) is that he is so absolutely overconfident that he is right. There are very few self-authenticating experiences in life - experiences that you can be so sure of that there is no way that you could possibly be wrong. Decartes' famous statement, "cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) seems to be self-authenticating; statements of feeling are self-authenticating, like, "I feel hungry." The fact that you feel it is proof that you feel it. But outside of a few examples, no experience is ever self-authenticating. There is always some room for doubt - maybe you misinterpreted, or don't have all the information, or have been deceived or something.

If you allow this line of reasoning, then you have to allow the legitimacy of Mormonism. They tell you to pray about the book of Mormon and God will confirm to you that it is true. They have this same sort of confidence that their religious experience is self-authenticating. It just doesn't hold up. I'm not saying anything here that Craig himself is not aware of, so I'm really not sure why he advances this argument.

But the place where this reasoning really bothers me is in his defense of the resurrection. There has probably not been anything that has shaken my faith so much as reading Bill Craig's defense of the resurrection. Take, for instance, his argument with Gerd Lüdemann in Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment?. Craig acts as if he has an absolutely rock solid case for the resurrection and that you couldn't possibly doubt it so long as you have all the historical evidence. Lüdemann, who has no philosophical training, is a really lousy debate partner and presents a confused and weak argument. There are gaping holes in Craig's argument, but you'd never know it from Lüdemann's presentation.

I will leave the holes in Craig's argument for another post. What really bothered me was how he came back to this idea of self-authentication in his concluding statement. He was smart enough to save this point to the very end, because it does not count as real evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. And yet the real reason Craig believes in the resurrection is not the historical evidence. "So if you ask me why I believe Christ is risen from the dead, I would not only point to the historical evidence, but I would reply in the words of the old hymn, 'You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart!'" (p.65)

The orthodox Christian faith rests, at least in part, on a defense of the resurrection. But the evidence to compel someone to believe in the resurrection is not that good. Say, for instance, that we had the same historical evidence for the resurrection of Abraham Lincoln. Would he be inclined to argue that Lincoln too had risen from the dead? I doubt it. The real reason Craig feels the evidence is so good is because it is confirmed by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. But the inner witness of the Holy Spirit cannot function as valid evidence any more than it can function as valid evidence for the veracity of the book of Mormon.

I still believe in Jesus' resurrection. I believe for the same reason that Craig does: He lives within my heart. But I don't think I have sufficient epistemological justification for that belief. Moreover, I am skeptical that any historical argument will really be satisfactory (not even N.T. Wright's, with all his scholastic superpowers). When the early Christians first proclaimed Jesus' resurrection, they were not advancing historical arguments. It seems I am searching for a different line of reasoning that is more in line with theirs.

So I think we are within our epistemic rights to believe in Jesus' resurrection. That is to say, if we accept the resurrection on fideistic grounds, we can come up with rational arguments to justify the fideistic jump we have already made. But the belief still ultimately rests on fideism. I think this is what I was getting at a few weeks ago with my Theology is not Knowledge post. Theology cannot be truly public because it rests on this fideistic assumption that Jesus rose from the dead.

You may not agree with me that Bill Craig's (or Tom Wright's) historical arguments are not compelling. I hope to revisit that issue soon. But if you were to accept my premise that the Craig's arguments are not compelling, do you think the rest of what I've said follows?

Theology is not Knowledge

I so totally don't get theology right now. This is another perennial issue that I revisit every so often. Right now I am working through Vanhoozer's Drama of Doctrine, which is generally a very stimulating book. But I find myself butting up against two internal obstacles that keep me questioning the validity of the entire theological project - not Vanhoozer's specifically, but Christian Theology in general. So I decided to blog about it, not to advance an argument against the discipline of theology, but to try to articulate the reasons that lie behind my involuntary emotional reactions. I hope, perhaps with the help of some commenters, to make some sense of it all. So here, to the best of my ability to discern it, is why I get frustrated with theology:

1. Theology is not knowledge. Knowledge, at least the concept I have in mind, is inherently public. It can be confirmed or denied by others. Theology, on the other hand, depends on certain judgments made by a private community, the church. Now I think there is such a thing as private knowledge, knowledge that is legitimately held by only one individual, but these are typically about personal matters (personal health or sex life, for instance). If the claim to knowledge refers to something in the public domain, then I don't think it can be called knowledge if it is only held by a private individual or community.

By way of contrast, Biblical studies, whether Old or New Testament, deal with knowledge because they are essentially historical disciplines. Regardless of what private views people may have about God, they may all equally discuss Paul's view of God as presented in the New Testament - the data is publicly accessible. Likewise, philosophy of religion counts as knowledge because it is dependent on the laws of logic. Regardless of people's private views, they may all equally discuss whether certain beliefs are logically consistent. Perhaps a shorthand way to express this is to say that if you can't teach it at a public university, it's not knowledge.

2. Closely related is the notion that theology is speculative. Now I know that theoretically theology is not speculative, but theologians define a method and then follow that method to produce results. Yet I still get the feeling that what Karl Barth did was sit around and think up cool ways to think about God, and he made everyone go, "Wow, that's deep." But it's still just thinking; it's still just speculation. The real work, it seems to me, is being done by the biblical scholars, who continually work to help us get a fuller sense of what the biblical texts mean.

On the other hand, the main reason why any of this matters is because Christians believe it and want to order their lives accordingly. Thus I could make a case that the work of theologians is vastly more important than the work of biblical scholars. That is the main reason I sometimes feel a pull to pursue vocational theology. But I am not excited about the thought of devoting my life to a discipline that is speculative and doesn't result in knowledge!

I suppose the way through this is either to redefine theology, or to redefine knowledge and the value of speculation. It seems that my objections to theology are themselves theological , and I suspect they are somehow self-referentially defeating. The point of this exercise, though, was not to advance an argument, but to sort out my life. I welcome your thoughts.

N.T. Wright Wrecked My Life

Once upon a time the Christian faith made sense to me. There were some things that I did not understand or some things that did not seem to fit perfectly, but overall the whole thing worked pretty well. Then I started reading N.T. Wright and my whole world crashed down around me.

See, I read somewhere that you ought to pick one author and read as much of their writing as you can so that you can interact in depth with their thought. This was well before I started seminary, back when I did not care a whit about scholarship. I decided to read Wright after first encountering him in a "Life of Jesus" class at church. We had read through the little book The Life of Jesus, and even though it was not that impressive I felt Wright had more under the surface than I had been able to garner from this little volume. He seemed to be a highly regarded Jesus scholar, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

So I went to the library at our local Catholic college where I found and checked out his two massive works, The New Testament and the People of God and Jesus and the Victory of God. I also picked up The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, in which he and co-author, Marcus Borg, defend and critique one another's historical reconstructions of Jesus. I began with The Meaning of Jesus, since it seemed the most accessible of the three, and I started to get hooked. But it was when I moved on to The New Testament and the People of God that everything I believed was shaken.

The problem is that it was not a frontal assault. In fact, I stood behind N.T. Wright as we took the liberal onslaught from Borg in The Meaning of Jesus. But as Wright prepared to deliver an uppercut of historical scholarship to Borg, I moved in to see things more closely and got elbowed in the face. I have spent the past decade trying to recover from that injury.

What is this great injury? Simply this: to understand the New Testament, we must read it in light of the world of first century Judaism, which is a lot more alien to us in the twentieth century than we like to think. It is especially rooted in the apocalyptic genre, especially in Daniel. Specifically, Daniel 7 is a particularly important passage for understanding early Christianity and the message of Jesus: the Son of Man is enthroned beside the Ancient of Days as the Kingdom of God is ushered in.

The book of Daniel represents in a microcosm the locus of most of my theological problems. Was it really written by Daniel or was it actually written centuries later during the Maccabean period? Scholars can make a good case for the latter, which even Wright accepts. Why should we even accept Daniel as scripture? It is not enough to say that we accept it because Jesus accepted it, since this whole examination of Daniel was prompted because it is the linchpin which holds together the New Testament. The book of Daniel (and the Old Testament as a whole) provides the entire foundation for the New Testament. As I see it, if Daniel falls, so does the New Testament.

The book of Daniel presents the primary OT basis for belief in an end-time resurrection of the dead. If it was written just to encourage the faithful that were being martyred by the Hellenistic king Antiochus Epiphanies, then what reason do we have to believe it? Would we not have warrant to judge that it was just wishful thinking? ...that as the Jews looked around at the injustices against their people, they speculated that there must be a resurrection to put things right? Wright himself proposes that this sort of eschatology (God will one day make all things right) arises from the combination of the doctrine of monotheism (God is in control), election (He has chosen Israel), and reality (Israel is suffering). Am I to believe in the resurrection of the dead because there was a pogrom against the Jews over two millennia ago? Please forgive me if this is a bit of a stumbling block in my faith.

Finally, even if I can get past all of this, the message of Daniel looks very different from the gospel I received. The gospel I know says you can be forgiven for your sins if you trust in Jesus, but if you do not, you will be damned for eternity. The message of Daniel is much more intuitive: that even when the bad guys seem to get away with it in this life, they will not in the end; and even if the good guys seem to get screwed in this life, they will ultimately be vindicated. It is a much more 'pluralist-friendly' message than orthodox theology seems to allow.

N.T. Wright does a fine job of making the New Testament seem historically plausible, but only at the expense of making its message seem utterly implausible.

O Dr. Wright, why tormentest thou me?

Theological proclamations

I confess that I blew off the confessions meme that was so prominent in the theoblogosphere because it seemed like it was turning into an ironically hubristic enterprise, becoming a vehicle for people to "confess" things they were already saying (or usually ranting about) anyway. I proclaim that the proclamations meme started by Halden is a worthwhile meme.

I confess that the word proclamation conjures up memories from my camp counselor days when, at the slightest mention of the word announcement, the entire camp would break into the song, "Announcements, announcements, announcements; what a terrible way to die, what a horrible way to die, what a terrible way to be bored to death, what a horrible way to die; announcement, announcements, announcements." Thus we were forced to give 'proclamations' instead. It still sort of freaks me out. As I attempt to force such horrible memories out of my mind, here are my proclamations:


I proclaim: that propositional truth is necessary but not sufficient for an adequate theological system.

I proclaim: that theology is not a list of hard-and-fast doctrines but about entering 'the great conversation'.

I proclaim: that theology is meaningless unless it is infused with life by the Holy Spirit.

I proclaim: that Wayne Grudem is a fabulous model for attempting to infuse theology with the life of the Holy Spirit but a dismal failure at participating in 'the great conversation.'

I proclaim: that one of my greatest theological fantasies is getting Jim West to speak in tongues.

I proclaim: that Jesus sent His disciples out to preach the gospel, heal the sick, and cast out demons, and we are not at liberty pick-and-choose which we will throw out.

I proclaim: that most liturgical churches are no longer properly contextualized within their given cultures.

I proclaim: that N.T. Wright is amazing when he speaks as a New Testament scholar and mediocre when he speaks as an Anglican.

I proclaim: that evangelicals need to recognize that they are not the only Christians, and non-evangelicals need to recognize that evangelicals are not all out to lunch.

I proclaim: that reformed theology offers the best theological options on just about everything but the five points.

I proclaim: that Augustine's contributions to theology have been almost completely disastrous.

I proclaim: that dispensationalism is the most absurd and bizarre theological system ever devised.

I proclaim: that nature itself teaches that theologians ought to drink beer (especially dark beers and microbrews).

I proclaim: that more theologians need to live out their faith, and more people who are living out their faith need to read theology.

Blogging, Theology, and Worship

I have discovered how much blogging requires creativity, and all creative works find their best fulfillment in worship, or at least in service to God. Similarly, at least one goal of theology must be worship, since theology gets us talking and thinking about the object of our worship. Thus theoblogging has a two-fold worship mandate. But because of our natural tendency to twist and distort things, it is easy to turn our creative works into a shrine of narcisism and our theology into a body of knowledge that is entirely independent of God Himself. Theology without worship is like foreplay without sex. Theology that is constructed independently of God's Spirit becomes spiritual pornography, an enticing but illegitimate endeavor.
In my experience, the days that theoblogging flows from or leads to worship have been very fulfilling. Days where I have blogged about theology without God Himself being particularly central have felt frustrating and unfulfilling. I'm not saying that everything we write should be explicitly about God, but I do think that no matter what we write, God should be first in our hearts.

Raising the Issues

I have a lot of issues in my faith that I am sorting through right now. Lots of things that I once took for granted don't seem to line up anymore. I feel like I am standing atop a giant rock pounding it with a sledgehammer in order to find out what is permanent and what is merely dirt. This is, I think, a good place to be. I would hate to treat my faith delicately only to find that much of it washes away in the storm of life. I believe that Truth is solid, able to take any blow because of the simple fact that it is true. In an email correspondance on this subject with Harold Netland last fall, he counseled,

You need to rest confident that God can handle some scrutiny and his truth can withstand some pretty rigorous questioning. I doubt that you have qustions or issues that 2000 years of Christian intellectual history has not already dealt with in some form or another. So do not worry about raising the issues and wondering whether this will lead you down a path you don't want to walk. Believe me, it would be much worse to have these nagging questions and just suppress them because you are afraid of where they might lead. If the Christian faith is not the truth, I for one do not want to believe it and keep teaching it (seems that is Paul's point in 1 Cor 15).

Here is my list of hot topics:

1. Non-Christians: Phonemonologically it seems that God interacts with people outside of the Christian tradition. How should we explain this theologically?
2. Eternal damnation: Though rooted in the justice of God, this doctrine seems to totally subvert the logic of justice.
3. Jesus' Resurrection: The historical evidence is just not as strong as some would like to make it out to be. It's not that I think the historical evidence is lacking, but it seems that I am searching for a different kind of evidence, perhaps theological.
4. Jesus' Return: Every time I think about the second coming I feel like I have embraced a total science fiction plot. God just doesn't seem to work this way. It is the one part of my doctrine that feels more like Scientology than rationality.
5. Scripture: I cannot find a theological mechanism that allows me to establish the Bible as God's eternal Word to all humanity. See my discussion a few days ago, as well as my proposed solution.

I have some ideas on number five that I will post in a few days, and I hope to explore the rest of the topics further over the next several weeks.

The Gospel and Spiritual Formation

Scot McKnight has posted an outline from a talk he gave on spiritual formation in Milwaukee last weekend. Unfortunately I was not able to be there. (If I remember right I think it seemed too expensive. Plus I would have had to find a sitter for the kids.) He includes a great discussion of the difference between the modern evangelical gospel and the biblical gospel, which is, I think, quite close to the one I laid out in my last post. Scot is solidly evangelical, so I'm obviously not out in left field on this. The major difference is that I see this as way to affirm soteriological inclusivism, a conclusion I'm sure he would strongly object to. The minor difference is that I would want to emphasize the concept of covenant more than Scot.

What I Believe

For many people, struggles with faith come after their their conversions rather than before. I have had a significant number of struggles over the past three or four years. Typically they have been different kinds of struggles than the kinds I had before becoming a Christian. I have never had serious doubts about whether God exists, but I have gone through all kinds of doubts about what I believe about Him.

A couple years ago I began to have serious doubts about whether I even believed in Christianity or the gospel anymore. I did not doubt my encounters with God, I did not doubt the miracles, and I did not doubt the answered prayers. But I had serious doubts about whether Christian theology offered the best explanation for those experiences. Thinking Charismatics have long believed that supernatural experiences do not count as evidence for the authenticity of one's beliefs, as history demonstrates. What makes my theology any different? I was sick of being forced to write off everything God seems to be doing in the world that is happening outside of a Christian context.

In particular I was reacting against a particular version of the Christian story. The story goes something like this:

1. Each individual human is destined to spend eternity in conscious torment (Hell) because each individual human is sinful. Even if the only sin you ever committed was stealing a pencil from work, your are worthy of hell.


2. God is merciful and does not want to punish us for our sins, but He must punish sins because He is also just.


3. Jesus took our punishment for sins in our place when He died on the cross.


4. The work Jesus accomplished is only effective for you if you become a Christian.

Most of my Christian friends have never even thought to question this story. But a lot of it doesn't add up to me. How is spending eternity in hell for stealing a pencil considered just? Why does God's mercy mean that He doesn't want to punish us for our sins? I think we instinctively understand this because somehow we feel that sending us to hell really would be unjust. Consider this: on this model, God would have been totally just if He had never sent Jesus and allowed us all to be eternally damned for our sins. Do you really think God would be just if every single human that had ever lived was going to hell forever, end of story? And God's command for Israel to slaughter the Canaanites seems particularly unjust if by doing so they were instantly condemned to the fiery abyss for all of time.

The turning point came for me last year when I began to see that this is not they only way to tell the story. The solution I have come to is to view the Bible through the concept of covenant. The Bible seems to tell a different story than the one I had been told. It tells the story of a fallen humanity and a just God. God's plan was to restore humanity through a covenant with Abraham, and ultimately the people of Israel. However the people of Israel failed to uphold their end of the covenant they had made with God, thus bringing judgement upon themselves. God then sent Jesus as the embodiment of the true Israel, taking their convenantal punishment upon Himself, ushering in the fulfillment of many of the eschatological (end times) prophecies that Israel would become a blessing to the nations, the answer to the problem of sin. Thus gentiles are no longer cut off from the Abrahamic promises but are offered entrance into God's covenantal people through their true King Jesus.

This has caused me to rethink my position on non-Christians. Instead of seeing an overarching dichotomy between the saved and the unsaved, the Bible seems to tell the story that God does not damn those who are outside of the covenant simply for that fact. Consider the Ninevites in the story of Jonah, who repented but clearly did not enter into a covenant with God; or Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings 5); or Melchizedek (Genesis 14). In general, God does not seem to have written off those who are outside the covenant. But to those who are members of the covenant, He has made promises, particularly to promise to be our God and to have us as His people.

This story has not totally taken care of all my concerns, but I feel much more confident about this story than my old evangelical story. So I can affirm that I am a Christian, in covenant with God again. As to whether I am still an evangelical, that depends on how closely you think being an evangelical is tied to the first story.

I can't wait for the comments I'm gonna get on this one. None of this is substantially different from what I've believed for the past year or so (some of it for longer). I'm not sure how prepared I am to defend it, and definitely not prepared to try to convince others. But now I've made it public, I suppose this is a sort of crossing of the theological Rubicon.

Vanhoozer's Epistemology

So I have this dilemma. I believe I have a call to be a vocational theologian, but I have trouble recognizing theology as knowledge – at least anything more than natural theology. It’s like playing FreeCell when you get stuck, so you keep looking and looking at the board trying to figure out how to get that last ace free – then suddenly you find a way to move the cards you need to move, and suddenly half the deck’s gone. I keep struggling to find a defense of Christian theology that I think is epistemically sound.
Last semester I approached my theology professor, Kevin Vanhoozer, for an answer. “I don’t believe theology is really knowledge,” I quipped. He offered to share with me the epistemology he had developed that he felt provided a satisfactory answer. Unfortunately we ran out of time, and he invited me back a different time. I tried to meet again but missed our appointment because of traffic delays. It hasn’t worked for me to reschedule this semester, so instead I went to his article “The Trials of Truth: Mission, Martyrdom, and the Epistemology of the Cross” in To Stake a Claim (1999). I was very hopeful, but I finished the article disappointed.
Vanhoozer believes the task of the theologian is to stake the truth-claim that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” He believes that a proper epistemology must be concerned with wisdom in addition to knowledge. If epistemology is concerned with how we know the things we claim to know, then I take it he means that we should also be concerned with how we know how to apply what we know. He goes on to say that proper epistemological task is hermeneutical: to interpret the ‘text’ of reality. Following Kierkegaard he allows that the proper starting place may rightly be labeled hermeneutical fideism – we must accept the authority of the scriptures in order to understand. He cites Kierkegaard approvingly that if this were not the case, if we could make a philosophical case for the authority of scripture, then “God and the Apostle have to wait at the gate, or in the porter’s lodge, till the learned upstairs have settled the matter.”
It is exactly here that I have always strongly disagreed with Kierkegaard, and therefore with Vanhoozer. This approach would maybe work if the only other options on the table were atheism or agnosticism. (He is primarily arguing against Van Harvey, a modernist; Nietzsche, a post-modernist; and Socrates, a rationalist.) But the Christian missionary mandate forces us into dialogue with Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, or neo-Paganism. If Koranic-fideism were to produce a similar wisdom, then would that not similarly count as evidence for the veridicality of Islam? In fact, John Hick makes essentially the same argument in defense of Normative Religious Pluralism: all the major world religions produce an equal proportion of ‘saints,’ (we could call them ‘people of wisdom’), and therefore they are all equally valid religious traditions.
But Vanhoozer argues that his system can resist collapsing into normative pluralism. He notes the need for an ethical dimension in epistemology: those who interpret reality must have epistemic virtues like passion for truth, humility, and courage to stand for one’s convictions; they must likewise avoid epistemic vices, like intellectual pride or ignoring inconvenient evidence. He notes that the wrong actions can refute a truth-claim more effectively than an opponent’s counter-argument. Through a play-on-words where the Greek root of martyr means witness, He argues that the Christian truth claim is best defended when Christians witness to the truth of their faith and are consequently persecuted for it, perhaps leading to martyrdom. Martyrdom confirms the veridicality of the doctrines of Christianity but not of Socrates or fanatics, he contends, because Socrates offered no answers, only questions; and fanatics have only a desire for truth, but lack other epistemic virtues like humility.
But again, this is not a compelling defense for the particularity of the Christian faith. Christians are not the only ones who possess these virtues. Even if it can be shown that Christians have a greater proportion of ‘true’ martyrs than other religious traditions, why this is anything more than an arbitrary standard remains a mystery. But even more disturbing is the counter-argument that follows: if epistemic vices count as evidence against one’s truth-claim, then there is significantly more evidence against Christian truth-claims than there is for it.