Emerging Thoughts: Deconstructing the Walls of Reason

By John O'Hara

"What's your foundation? If everything is relative, how can you ever arrive at the truth?" I'm sitting across an outdoor lunch table with one of my best friends. He's peering across the now-cold remnants of our Chinese food as I pick at some rice with my chopsticks. A note of concern had cast a shadow across his face when I mentioned that, in a pluralist society like the San Francisco Bay Area, one can't realistically expect others to share our basic assumptions about the authority of the Bible, much less a Jesus-centered mysticism regarding the Holy Spirit. My experience with Jesus, empowered and made totally real through the Holy Spirit, is a personal mythology that's not likely to be shared by most of the people I come into contact with throughout the day. "This is my story, this is my song; praising my savior all the daylong..." It might interact at some level with their God-myths; but on a subjective, relational level, mine is not superior.

 

"So, what about absolute truth?" my friend re-iterates. The shadow is now gone, replaced by raised eyebrows and just the slightest hint of a smile. This, of course, is the death-knell proposition used by modernists to poke a giant hole in postmodern spirituality. If a person allows Christianity to be a subjective, experience-based phenomenon, how does one know it is any truer than somebody else's story of enlightenment or agnosticism? What my table friend and many other Christians who are drawing battle lines on philosophical jurisdictions may not realize is that this argument is not really about faith in Jesus - it's about faith in rationalism, that Platonic epistemology which champions deduction and reason over what can be appreciated through the senses. This western approach to reality has provided a framework for the rise of such helpful applications as the scientific method, literary criticism, and titanium golf clubs. Unfortunately, rationalism takes no prisoners; and when the Bible and faith were placed under the microscope, Christianity responded by defending itself by the same criteria; namely, truth by deductive reasoning. It's from this challenge that evangelicalism has arrived at such concepts as "reasonable faith," "four spiritual laws," and "systematic theology." And like those golf clubs, these concepts yield useful results.

The problem inherent in placing our complete faith in tidy systems of reason is their vast limitations in appreciating the other side of reality: the grand Otherness of God's involvement in creation. This is the mystical, supernatural phenomena that fill the pages of Hebrew and Christian scripture. It is faith whose roots are in experience: that beautiful, subjective art of interpretation based not on rules, but on tradition passed down and held together by our collective narrative, and how we continue that story in our time. John celebrates this experiential faith in his proclamation, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life," (1 John. 1:1). This is not faith in experience alone; rather, it's faith in the One whom we have experienced. And that's where the Pentecostal tribe perhaps has the most to offer a Christianity weighted down with the burden of reasonable proof - our vibrant, present-reality trust in the active role of the Holy Spirit to, in the words of Jesus, "guide [us] into all truth," (John 16:13).

The trick of life, for a follower of Jesus, who finds she is navigating the tension between modern and postmodern epistemologies, is to constantly recognize the limitations of each lens. When my friend and I were standing in line for zesty orange chicken and steamed rice, we were hopeful that the cook would trust deductive reasoning and operate within the framework of what's measurable: food temperature, cleanliness and the like. My friend's subjective affection for this particular restaurant is tied irrevocably to those objective standards - bad deductive reasoning equals bad lunch. At the same time, the development of our friendship, our appreciation for a particular dish, and the notion that we are somehow communing with Jesus when we meet together as followers and believers - all this is impossible to apprehend through rigorous deduction. We might use reason in our deconstruction of the intangible when we're identifying the spices in a bite of Mongolian chicken, but the experience itself exists on a different plane of reality than what can be explained scientifically. To express this reality, it could be boiled down to its' measurable elements; but to taste it first hand is nothing short of a revelation.

I was talking to another friend recently, and as she explained her fears of enrolling in seminary, I was reminded of the delicate balance between revelation and deduction. "I'm afraid," she said, "that by dissecting God I run the risk of killing him." A healthy postmodern approach to faith, partnered with our pentecostal heritage of experiencing God, doesn't deconstruct God; but might just be able to deconstruct the fortress walls of modern rationalism within which our living faith has too long been imprisoned. After all, what's so reasonable about a burning bush, a virgin birth, a bodily resurrection, or even our own stories of spiritual vitality through a connectedness to Jesus that transcends time and space? What's so reasonable about prayer, worship, or attempting to live out the Sermon on the Mount in a world ruled by power and greed? What's so rational about tongues of fire descending on a small band of faithful followers of Jesus, leading them on an adventure to turn the world upside-down?

Here's a prayer for the postmodern pentecostal: "LORD, give us the courage to follow in the footsteps of that people called 'the Way'; that no matter the spirit of the age, we will yield to and be carried by the wind of the Spirit, who leads us into all truth."

John O'Hara is the Family Ministry Pastor at Sequoyah Community Church in Oakland, CA. He is a pentecostal that is highly engaged in the 'emerging church' movement and will be contributing an article once a month that focus on the intersection of these two movements. You can read his personal blog here.

Comments

[John C. Poirier]

John,

I have some big problems with what you are saying here. Let me point out two of the biggest: (1) you are committing the classic postmodernist blunder of confusing the categories of truth with the categories of knowing, and (2) you have misunderstood the basic alethiological shape of the Christian gospel.

As for (1): confusing epistemology with alethiology is a very common mistake, but it results in a total meltdown of the belief systems (or meta-systems) of those who commit this mistake. This confusion basically allows epistemic concepts to bleed over into the ontological ground of truth proper (alethiology), which in turn allows an unpacking of these epistemic concepts to make it appear that truth itself partakes of the same indeterminacy as knowledge. You do this in your article, when your friend asks "what about absolute truth?", and you respond by addressing what people are willing *to accept* as truth. What someone is willing *to accept* as true is an epistemological question. By contrast, the question of what *is* true is ontological. To confuse the two is to commit a category mistake. In fact, you commit this blunder very transparently by saying that the question "What about absolute truth?" is beholden to an "argument . . . about faith in . . . Platonic epistemology". In point of fact, the question "What about absolute truth?" has nothing whatsoever to do with epistemology, and it cannot be answered properly unless epistemology is kept out of the way.

As for (2): You disparage "reason" in a way that does not correlate with the alethiological profile of the New Testament faith. It is true that people often dismiss the supernatural (including the miracles of the Bible) in the name of "reason". But that would not mean that a properly trimmed application of reason cannot line up with a biblical faith. When you ask, "What's so reasonable about a burning bush, a virgin birth, a bodily resurrection", etc., you are using "reasonable" as an epistemological criterion rather than as an alethiological criterion. Those things you name are *all* "reasonable" in the sense of being alethiologically homogeneous. (That, of course, is more than can be said for any attempt to saddle Christianity with a postmodernist hermeneutic.)

When it comes to the question of truth--*viz.* of its basic shape within the Christian belief system--1 Corinthians 15 is where the rubber meets the road. Ask yourself this: When Paul writes, "If Christ is not raised from the dead, then your faith is in vain", what is the implicit understanding of "truth" that underpins Paul's claim? That is, in what sense of does Paul require the resurrection to be "true" in order for our faith in the gospel not to be in vain? Does Paul implicitly define "truth" as "storytime actuality", so that it is the narrativity of the resurrection within the gospel "story" that saves us, or does he not rather define it as "spacetime actuality", so that it is the historical actuality of the resurrection that matters? I think it is very, very, very, very clear that Paul thinks that the resurrection must be true in the sense of obtaining *spacetime* actuality, and therefore that truth, not only for Paul but for the NT kerygma in general, is a matter of correspondence with spacetime.

So your friend was right: truth *is* absolute. The gospel depends on it.

[David Sirka]

This reminded me of a class discussion I had long ago in my 12th grade English class. The teacher asked if anyone present believed in moral absolutes. No one, except for me, raised their hands. I was shocked but the discussion that ensued helped me to understand some things that still continue to ring true. Many people in our culture are unwilling to accept absolutes of almost any kind, especially when it comes to world-views.

So if John is suggesting this post-modern approach in evangelism, I couldn't and won't disagree. Absolutism pushes people away. People are more open to an experience and Pentecostalism is certainly special in that regard. Let the absolute-ness of Christianity grow on them and the spirit lead them to truth. I've seen this work.

But if John is suggesting that the church view itself in this paradigm, it's simply incompatible. The Bible doesn't allow for it and Jesus certainly doesn't allow for it.

I understand the role faith plays in coming to Christ or any world-view and understand the short comings of reason. But once we come to faith, we must believe this thing is absolutely true or we're wasting our time in self defeat.

[James K.A. Smith]

John O, I wouldn't get to worried about Poirier's worries--at least what I can understand of them. (What, exactly, does "epistemology" mean for you, Poirier?! And "alethiology?" I've read alot of Heidegger and I'm still not sure what you're on about.)

While I worry that John O's framework could spiral into a kind of subjectivism (where's the church? where's tradition?), I don't think one has to invoke the big modernist club of mythical "absolute truth" to ward off that concern. (What, exactly, does appending "absolute" do to the word "truth, anyway?)

But what I find most curious in Poirier's comments is this final slice:

"When Paul writes, "If Christ is not raised from the dead, then your faith is in vain", what is the implicit understanding of "truth" that underpins Paul's claim? That is, in what sense of does Paul require the resurrection to be "true" in order for our faith in the gospel not to be in vain? [...] I think it is very, very, very, very clear that Paul thinks that the resurrection must be true in the sense of obtaining *spacetime* actuality, and therefore that truth, not only for Paul but for the NT kerygma in general, is a matter of correspondence with spacetime." [Poirier]

Um...where exactly does Paul invoke the notion of truth in 1 Corinthians 15? I don't think he does. He appeals to the _event_ of Christ's historical, physical resurrection, and he takes his appeal to be "true." But Paul doesn't require the resurrection to be "true;" his emphasis is that it _happened_. [Does Poirier think that O'Hara is really rejecting this?] Truth in the NT is much more of an adverb than a noun. It is a matter of knowing Christ "truly," not--as Poirier suggests--getting your propositions to square with some "truth"-thing that is "out there."

But here's the rub: Paul also thinks that the ability to "know" this event--to see it for what it is--requires the regeneration and illumination of the Holy Spirit. While the resurrection of Christ is "objective" in the sense of being a physical reality, it is NOT "objective" in the sense that it can be grasped prima facie or is self-evident. Throughout his letters, Paul emphasizes that the illumination of the Spirit is necessary in order to be able to see or know this "fact." That means (I hate to tell you) that knowledge of Christ's resurrection is (gasp!) "relative"--it _depends upon_ the illumination of the Spirit (1 Cor. 2).

Perhaps more to the point: I don't hear John O'Hara rejecting the notion of truth. I hear him only rejecting a construal of "truth" that emerged well after Paul, and which folks like Poirier now anachronistically read back into Paul.

[John C. Poirier]

Thank you, James, for your response. I'll try to stick to the logical lines of your argument in what I say below.

Your argument seems to treat "truth" at the level of terminology rather than the level of conceptuality. As such, I don't think it really goes anywhere *logically*.

First, you ask what I mean by a couple of terms. It might help for me to clarify this, especially since "alethiology" is (sadly) such a rare term. I am using the terms "epistemology" and "alethiology" in the most general sense possible--by the former, I mean "the theory of the order of knowing", and by the latter I mean "the theory of the order of being true". I'm not taking any of this stuff from Heidegger (or Lask, etc.).

My point of departure is not a specific Pauline use of the term "true", nor indeed any use of the word "true" as given by any authority. My point of departure is what is *universally* implied by the word when someone is asked (as John O'Hara was asked) about whether there is such a thing as "absolute truth". As far as the implicit identity between the notion of "being true" and the notion of "being the case" goes, it doesn't matter how one answers the question, for one is affirming the identity as definitionally operative merely by treating the question as a real one. In other words, those who agree with the notion of absolute truth affirm the identity of "being true" with "being the case", while those who disagree are implicitly acknowledging that the term is usually understood in this way. In other words, the question of whether "being true" is the same as "being the case" is the implicit point of debate in asking about "absolute truth".

And the fact that the implicit point of debate is the question of this identity between "being true" and "being the case" (and really nothing else) is what brings me to Paul's gospel. In asking whether Paul held what "is the case" in spacetime to possess a causal hold over the efficacy of the gospel, I was asking whether, in fact, Paul answered the question about "absolute truth" in the same way that I would answer it. Yet I was also upping the stakes in that I tried to show that the question is not only answerable in terms of Paul's presuppositions, but also that it is an urgent one. In reading that concern into Paul, I was not bringing a "big modernist club of mythical 'absolute truth'". I was simply reading Paul along the lines of the inference that he wanted his readers to draw (*viz.* that the spacetime actuality of the resurrection was the *sine qua non* of the gospel), and showing that, for Paul, the ability for something to "be the case" (in spacetime) was the philosophical underpinning for the gospel. I take this to answer the question of "absolute truth" from a Christian perspective. If this answer is "modernist", then the apostles were the first modernists.

As I see it, the only way out of this line of reasoning is to rearbitrate the meaning of "truth", which in fact is what many people do. But it is important to note that this is just what I said it is: a *rearbitration* of a key definition, rather than an act of logical analysis. At that point, we're really doing little more than playing a game with words, for if we deny that "truth" means "being the case", then the conceptual possibility of "being the case" is still there, no matter what we call it. Suppose "absolutists" like myself agree to let go of the term "truth" (in spite of the confusion that would cause), and opted instead for the term "grape jelly". Nothing of our arguments would go away. We would have the same concepts, the same lines of argument--we would merely have a new key term. And the question of whether there is such a thing as "absolute truth" would simply have to be asked using a different term (like "absolute grape jelly"), but the logic in answering the question would be the same.

So I don't think I'm being anachronistic by reading Paul along the lines of the cardinal alethiological question of whether truth is a matter of spacetime actuality. As Paul is clearly interested in spacetime actuality in his argument, the only remaining question is whether it is proper to call this "truth". But if we elect to call it something else, then this "something else" would simply take the place (terminologically) of our question about "absolute truth". The question would still remain, and it could still only be answered it in the way I answered it.

Now that that's over (for now): I feel that, in a way, I owe an apology to O'Hara and to the owner of this list, as clearly the sort of heady stuff I'm posting here was never the intention. But I also feel that when an issue is important enough, then I must speak up. The question of whether there is an absolute truth is certainly one of those issues. It strikes at the very heart of the gospel.

[Nick Norelli]

John,

I can't speak for John O'Hara or Brian LePort, but this is exactly the type of interaction I'd like to see over here. It moves beyond the usual fluff of "good post" or "nice thoughts" into the realm of critical engagement and edifying conversation. I don't think you need to apologize for that.

[Brian LePort]

I agree with Nick. This is good for everyone. There is nothing wrong with intense, yet respectful, debate. Especially over this issue regarding the nature of truth.

[James K.A. Smith]

Just a few quick points in reply to John P. before I'm out the door for church:

1. I'm not sure why you'd take from my comments the sense that I think this sort of discussion is appropriate. What I meant was that, despite the fact that I'm a professional philosopher, I find your use of terms (jargon) quite idiosyncratic, so it was difficult for me to pin down your claims. Of course I'm all for this sort of discussion. May your tribe increase!

2. You say: "My point of departure is not a specific Pauline use of the term "true", nor indeed any use of the word "true" as given by any authority. My point of departure is what is *universally* implied by the word when someone is asked (as John O'Hara was asked) about whether there is such a thing as "absolute truth"." In response, first, I get a bit nervous whenever someone tells me what is "universally" implied by a word. (It's like when someone use the words "of course" instead of actually offering an argument. Second, what I'm saying is that when someone asks about "absolute truth," they're asking a bad question--a tautological question.

3. Finally, you say: " I don't think I'm being anachronistic by reading Paul along the lines of the cardinal alethiological question of whether truth is a matter of spacetime actuality." But that's not quite true. When you ask this question, you are assuming much more than this, viz., that Paul also has adopted some kind of "correspondence theory" about the relationship between his claims and the "spacetime actuality" of the resurrection. And it's that point I reject. But--PLEASE NOTE--rejecting the correspondence theory of truth is not rejecting either "truth" or the claim that Jesus' resurrection was, as you put it, a "spacetime actuality."

[John O'Hara]

I have to admit my great surprise at the immediate and impassioned response to this article. I must also admit that, unlike Dr. Smith, I am not a professional philosopher; and while appreciating John Poirier's proclivity for technical jargon and scholarly source texts, most of his references fall on uneducated eyes by the time they reach my screen.

Neither my surprise or my relative ignorance should, however, be permitted as an excuse from engaging in vigorous debate about these weighty issues of faith and life.

As far as this particular conversation is concerned, I do take issue with the notion that drawing a distinction between what can be known and what is true somehow denigrates the latter. I think both phenomena can live quite comfortably in the same house. My premise, and what I might have stated more overtly in the article, is that faith in reason can and should be challenged when it impedes a lived-out faith, especially when we as followers of Christ are sent into a world characterized by religious pluralism and philosophical relativism. In other words, we would do well to learn to live in both hemispheres of our brains: the rational-logical as well as the relational-frenetic.