We
cannot know everything. We must rely
always to a large degree on the expertise of others. I don’t know much about pharmacology, but I
trust my pharmacist.
As
believers we have doubts. We should go
to a “doubt doctor”, so to speak. This takes humility and this is something
honestly which those who doubt are often duped by.
There is
a more than subtle tendency among those who doubt and leave the faith to
suppose that they know better. They are
enlightened. They are advanced.
Again, I
think of a Lewis reference. In the novel
Perelandra Professor Weston has become the “Unman.” Weston was seduced by “forward”
thinking. He believed that he controlled
the future of the human race and eventually the whole universe. He was seduced by his “advanced”
thinking. He was the expert. He was the master. All others were caught in darkness or were
too unevolved to understand.
Too late
Weston realized that he had been seduced by Satan. Though he wanted to fight back, it was too
late once he had become the Unman, once he was animated by the devil. The spirit who animated him allowed only
glimpses of the old Weston to appear.
Weston had given himself to a lie and in the end the lie consumed him.
Am I
saying that all doubt is satanic?
Yes! What else would it be? Someone desperately wants us to give up our
faith. That same person wants to
paralyze us with doubt or make us ineffectual in our faith.
I don’t
mean to be irrational. I have a PhD in
philosophy. (That certainly taught me the difference between truth and foolishness.)
However, there is also a spiritual battle going on.
It
is not irrational to believe in the devil.
The devil uses pride as one of his chief tools with intellectuals,
though not solely with intellectuals.
Perhaps
intellectuals are more prone to a sort of scholarly pride than other
folks. Certainly, Christian
intellectuals who work on doctorates at state universities face challenges to
their faith all the time.
From
my own sphere of philosophy there have been many challenges to faith. The current major contender is
“Postmodernism.”
Postmodernism
has many faces. It appears in literary
criticism and hermeneutics (literary interpretation), as well as in
philosophical epistemology (theory of knowledge) and anthropology, sociology
and ethics.
The
main thrust of “Postmodernism” is that we finite humans located in space and
time (limited not only by our human sense organs, but also bound to one place
and a certain era or time period) cannot know truth objectively, if at all.
There is no “true truth”, to borrow a phrase from Francis Schaeffer. The gist is that since we are so bounded,
limited we cannot know truth. All we
know is our own viewpoint, what we think truth is.
In
biblical and theological studies this spills over into questioning how we could
know whether any revelation is true. All
revelations are the work of some author(s) limited in space and time and
reflect their values and desires. Worse,
following some thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, all such
“revelation” or revealed truth is nothing more than the attempt of the priest craft
to control a society. There can be no
objective truth which applies to all. All
such attempts to define such a universal truth are attempts at “power ploys,”
attempts to control others. This sort of literary criticism of the Bible, then,
becomes by its very nature a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” While Postmodern hermeneutics says that we
cannot know what the author intended when he wrote, we must at the same time, incoherently,
identify what “power ploys” are at work in the text.
In
terms of theology there can be no “objective” arguments for the existence of
God. Most Postmodern thinkers follow Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Ludwig
Feuerbach saying that all “gods” are merely products of human imagination,
“projections.” “God” is either a father figure who protects us and gives us
what we want or “God” is a projection of our twisted fantasies and fears. “God” might, according to some like Ludwig
Wittgenstein, be a word which has meaning to theologians, but which has no
meaning outside the discipline of theology.
There is no way to reach God epistemologically, that is through sense
perception or thought.
As
I was wrestling with these subjects while pursuing my MA in Philosophy, I came
across an article by Douglas Groothuis, who is a Professor of Philosophy at
Denver Seminary in Colorado. Groothuis
entitled his article “Apologetics, Truth and Humility.”[1] In this
article and elsewhere Groothuis has explained the limits of human knowing (epistemology)
and the role of humility in our knowing.
I usually refer to it as epistemic humility.
Obviously,
I am a human and limited. Again, it’s
clear that I am located in a certain place and time. I tend to think like the people around me and
see the world as they do. However, a normal response would be, “OK I have a
tendency to be biased in these matters. So, I’ll try to take that into
consideration.” However, with Postmodern
epistemology the stakes are much greater.
Postmoderns argue that NO ONE can know THE TRUTH. We only know something which is biased and we
cannot escape that bias. There is no
“God’s eye view”, that is no one has a universal third person observer stance. Everyone is biased and limited to the point
that no one can know THE TRUTH. There is
my truth and your truth and her truth and his truth.
The
Postmodern view or epistemology is very persuasive and tenacious once it gets a
grip. Some of its tenets seem true: I am
finite. I am located in time and space.
I do have biases. However, the
idea that I cannot know any “true truth”, to borrow a phrase from Francis
Schaeffer, is patently absurd. I know what I had for breakfast. I know who my wife is. I know who my children
are. I know that my feet are cold since I don’t have socks and shoes on. We may not know everything and there may be
some things we will never know or know with absolute certainty, but it is a
mistake to expect anyone ever did or could know everything truly. The issue is: Do we know some things
certainly, truly?
Don’t
get me wrong. I think Postmoderns are worth listening to. They hold a lot of beliefs which technically
they shouldn’t, but which are true: love for minorities, support for women’s
rights, care for the oppressed, love of democracy, and other issues. However, this may be a case of “Do as I say,
not as I do.” While being sure there
are no absolutes, Postmoderns hold some things absolutely.
Which
brings us back to Postmodern biblical interpretation. We should beware of our biases and
prejudices. We should listen to the
other and take the other’s views into our accounts. We should protect women, minorities, the
oppressed and work for democratic society.
However, the rejection of revelation as a possibility would exceed even
the Postmoderns’ claims to knowledge.
The best they could say is, “I can’t prove or disprove that any
revelation is true.”
However,
we have a right to affirm biblical revelation based on our experience of God,
Jesus and the Bible to use a “hermeneutics of generosity” when we read the
Bible. Our experience and our research
have shown us that the Bible is true in so far as we can test it. Clearly we cannot test every statement. That would be absurd and we do not trust or
distrust anything else in this way. If
challenged by a defeater we look for a rebutting defeater. We do not easily give up our biblical faith
in the face of every supposed challenger.
We seek truth as we can and have faith (not blind trust, but reasonable
trust) that we can find answers. Our
knowledge is more like an asymptote, a curved line approaching an axis. We never have “absolute” knowledge, but we
have knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt which is ever approximating, getting
closer to truth.
So,
a “hermeneutic of generosity” towards the Bible will usually bring us closer to the truth. A “hermeneutics of suspicion” may be useful
to identify our biases and power ploys, but it cannot explain why we believe
anything at all and it cannot produce any “truth” or even any pragmatic goals.
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