The 20th century saw the demise of the
Enlightenment project. In the postmodern world, people are no longer convinced
that knowledge is certain, objective or good. Behind the idea of the inherent
good of all knowledge was a myth of inevitable progress. But after two World
Wars and countless other human-made atrocities this myth began to wear thin. As
Grenz says, “Members of the emerging
generation are no longer confident that humanity will be able to solve the
world’s great problems or even that their economic situation will surpass that
of their parents” (Grentz, p. 7).
More importantly for the conversation we are
having in this presentation, postmodernism no longer sees truth as purely
rational. Rather truth is understood in a more holistic fashion. In other
words, there are other valid paths to knowledge besides reason. We will shortly
look at some of those paths.
Finally, contrary to the modernist view of
knowledge as objective, postmodern thought sees the world as much more
relational and interdependent. Again, Grenz: “Knowledge cannot be merely objective, say the postmoderns, because the
universe is not mechanistic and dualistic but rather historical, relational and
personal. The world is not simply an objective given that is ‘out there,’
waiting to be discovered and known; reality is relative, indeterminate, and
participatory.” (Grentz, p. 7)
Postmodernism is perceived by some as a threat
to Christianity because it tends to view all truth as relative to the knowing
agent’s experience. It sees truth as socially constructed. This means that my understanding of truth is
a construction of my own personal experience and identity. But there is a difference
between saying that there is no absolute truth and saying that absolute truth
cannot be known absolutely. Some postmodern theorists contend that there is no
absolute truth, in knowledge or in essence. Others argue that there may be
absolutes in the universe, but human being’s knowledge of these absolutely is
always contingent and relative.
When it comes to Christian theology and
practice, we encounter major problems with the idea that absolute truth does
not exist. Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other religions all hold that there
is a God and that God is absolute. However, there is no problem for Christian
theology to say that absolute truth cannot be known absolutely. In recent years
some in the Christian community have realized that this “epistemological
humility” is precisely the thing we need and indeed required by the teachings
of the Bible. Indeed, one key feature of a postmodern epistemology is
precisely this humility. Our postmodern context today requires us to be
tentative in our truth claims and rock solid in our practice of our faith.
Experience: Postmodern
philosophy says that the universe is profoundly interactive. Contrary to Isaac
Newton, the universe is not like a machine. New developments in physics like
quantum physics and chaos theory teach us that the world we inhabit is far less
predictable and more beautiful than we had previously imagined. Therefore, says
postmodernism, we can know things experientially. Our experience of life and
the world carries real knowledge.
Faith: We now know that faith is a
part of all processes of knowing. Earlier in this lesson I quoted these words
from Grenz, describing modernity—“absolute faith in human rational
capabilities.” Notice that it is, “absolute faith.”
The Bible, of course, teaches that faith is a
way of knowing the truth. “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain
of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. By faith
we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen
was not made out of what was visible.” (Hebrews
11:1-3) “For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness
that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous will
live by faith.’” (Romans
1:17) “We live by faith, not by sight.” (2
Corinthians 5:7).
For too long, certainty has been overrated.
Oddly it is Christians who are the most concerned by the demise of the “myth of
certainty.” Of all people, Christians should know that a scientific, Cartesian
kind of certainty is not a part of the Christian narrative. The author of
Hebrews says “faith is being certain of what we do not see.” Faith is
certainty. Paul says, “The just shall live by faith.” Notice also that it is
not faith as an abstract principle but something upon which one bases their
life. We live by it. That’s a different kind of certainty.
Thomas is a good example of an epistemology of
faith. Like many who have been raised on empiricism, Thomas
is your classic skeptic. He would make Francis Bacon and John Locke proud. When
the other disciples say that they’ve seen the risen Lord, Thomas protests, “Unless
I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and
put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.” (John
20:25)
A week later, Thomas gets his wish. Jesus
appears in the house with the disciple and this time Thomas doesn’t miss out.
Though Jesus grants him his empirical evidence—seeing and touching the wounds
in Jesus’ hands and side—Jesus then invites Thomas to a new epistemology of
faith: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have
not seen and yet have believed.” (v.
29)
This is not a cop-out or a blind leap of faith.
It is rather the acknowledgement that with the death and resurrection of Jesus
the world has fundamentally changed. As N.T. Wright has said, in Jesus ministry
with the disciples post-resurrection, he is working a “refashioning of
epistemology itself, the question of how we know things, to correspond to the
new ontology,
the question of what God’s new world is like.”
Hope: Hope also, is a way of
knowing in a Christian worldview. This is a key theme in Paul’s ministry.
Notice this definitive passage: “We know that the whole creation has been
groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only
so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly
as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For
in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes
for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait
for it patiently.” (Romans
8:22-25).
Love: In John
21 we read of the restoration of Peter after his horrible three-fold denial
of Jesus. After several days of what must have been utter despair, Jesus
encounters Peter on the Sea of Galilee with these words, “Simon son of John, do
you love me?” (John
21:17) Just as Thomas was invited to a new kind of faith that would meet
the new reality of the resurrection, Peter is invited to a new kind of love
that could believe the resurrection. About this episode N.T. Wright comments:
The resurrection is not, as it were, a highly peculiar event
within the present world, though it is that as well; it is the defining,
central, prototypical event of the new creation, the world which is being born
with Jesus. If we are even to glimpse this new world, let alone enter it, we
will need a different kind of knowing, a knowing which involves us in new ways,
an epistemology which draws out from us not just the cool appraisal of detached
quasi-scientific research, but the hole-person engagement and involvement for
which the best shorthand is ‘love’, in the full Johannine sense of agape. (Wright lecture, May 2007)
This is what we mean when we refer to an
epistemology of love, “a knowing that involves us in new ways.” What this means
is that you cannot truly know the truth of the resurrection without fully
committing yourself to it. The truth of it only opens to those who are captured
by God’s love expressed in the event itself. It is not surprising then, that
the same John who records the remarkable post-resurrection story of Jesus and
Peter on the beach later speaks of an epistemology of love in his later
epistles.
“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love
comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever
does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed
his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might
live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and
sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved
us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love
one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” (1
John 4:7-12)
It would be hard to make this any more explicit.
“Everyone
who loves … knows God.” John understands, love is knowing.
Peter Rollins put it this way in his ground
breaking book, How (Not) to Speak of
God. He argues in the opening pages that we need to “recover
a more Hebraic and mystical notion of the orthodox Christian as one who
believes in the right way; that is, believing in a loving, sacrificial and Christ
like manner. The reversal from ‘right belief’ to ‘believing in the right way’….
Thus orthodox is no longer (mis)understood as the opposite of heresy but rather
is understood as a term that signals a way of being in the world rather than a means
of believing things about the world. It is an approach that emphasizes the
priority of love: not as something which stands opposed to knowledge of God,,
or even as simply more important than knowledge of God, but, more radically
still, as knowledge of God. To love is to know God precisely because God is
love.” (pages 2-3).
Faith, Hope and Love: three new ways of knowing that are completely open and accessible
to anyone who cares to risk everything on an entirely different narrative about
the world. “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest
of these is love.” (1
Corinthians 13) N. T. Wright, once again:
That is why, although the historical arguments for Jesus’ bodily
resurrection are truly strong, we must never suppose that they will do more
than bring people to the questions faced by Thomas and Peter, the questions of
faith and love. We cannot use an supposedly ‘objective’ historical epistemology
as the ultimate ground for the truth of Easter. To do so would be like someone
who lit a candle to see whether the sun had risen. What the candles of
historical scholarship will
do is to show that the room has been disturbed, that it doesn’t
look like it did last night, and that would-be ‘normal’ explanations for this
won’t do. Maybe, we think after the historical arguments have done their work,
maybe morning has come and the world has woken up. But to find out whether this
is so we must take the risk and open the curtains to the rising sun. When we do
so, we won’t rely on the candles any more, not because we don’t believe in
evidence and argument, not because we don’t believe in history or science, but
because they will have been overtaken by the larger reality from which they
borrow, to which they point, and in which they will find a new and larger home.
All knowing is a gift from God, historical and scientific knowing no less than
that of faith, hope and love; but the greatest of these is love. (Wright lecture, May 2007)
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