The scriptures are sacred and true, and useful in their place. Although they are not the fountain of knowledge, nor do they contain all knowledge, yet they point to the fountain, and are every way calculated to encourage men to come to the fountain and seek to obtain the knowledge and gifts of God.
Showing posts with label epistemology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label epistemology. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
The Wisdom of Parley Pratt
From a historical standpoint, the following obviously needs to be read in the context of Pratt's ardent Mormonism, which brings to the quote a subtle endorsement of the divine authority of Joseph Smith generally and the Book of Mormon specifically. In a strictly inspiration context, however, one can view Pratt's sentiment as a bulwark against the perennial temptation of bibliolatry; in it can even been seen a hint of the Orthodox notion that all things good and true function as icons directing a person toward God who is Goodness and Truth. In "The Fountain of Knowledge," Pratt argues:
Friday, February 3, 2012
Truth is Stranger Than Fiction is Truth
Paul Auster's aptly named Travels in the Scriptorium takes the reader on a journey through the human condition, which is astounding, exhausting, and fulfilling all because the reader has a sense throughout that the books delights and disappointments are life's delights and disappointments. The book is not, in any traditional sense, pleasurable to read. Make no mistake. With his deliberately dry, encyclopedic style of narrative, Auster is not prone to cheap titillation. He is an absurdist author, as much as anything, and his novella deals with deep-seated questions of identity, knowledge, and existence. Travels will not make you laugh and cry and scream (except from boredom). It will make you think.
The premise of the story (and I give nothing away here, because there is nothing to give away) is that a certain Mr. Blank finds himself in an unfamiliar room almost completely without memory. Within moments of beginning the account, the narrator reveals to us that Mr. Blank, because of his strange condition, will find himself grappling not with trivialities but with more basic questions: "His mind is elsewhere, stranded among the figments in his head as he searches for an answer to the question that haunts him. Who is he? What is he doing here? When did he arrive and how long will he remain? With any luck, time will tell us all." As is so often the case, however, it turns out we don't have any luck at all. At the end of the story--through the means of a less than sophisticated plot device--the narrator reintroduces the questions to us as if to say, "Just in case you forgot, these are the important questions that didn't get answered."
The questions that form an inclusio for the entire piece are presented as peculiar to this unfortunate man in this extreme situation, but it should be immediately apparent to the reader that these are the very questions which are universal to mankind regardless of circumstance. Who am I? Why am I here? How long do I have? These are the most foundational of existential quandaries which transcend time and culture. In perfect concert with his absurdist forefathers, Auster sidesteps the primal impulse to construct answers to these questions. He clearly finds it more compelling to thrust the reader headfirst into the brick wall of reality: these questions never get answered. They are phantoms which disappear the moment we try to grasp them, like the "figments" that dance around in Mr. Blank's head throughout the story. Laments Mr. Blank, "I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist, whether I've ever existed at all." He cannot prove that he is, not even to himself. How is he then to demonstrate conclusively where or when or even why he is? Unifying theories are no sooner expressed than they prove to be inadequate, the falter under the crushing weight of everyday experience.
It is this everyday experience which forms the meat of Auster's tale and which makes the reading so dense. Auster takes pride in describing in minute detail every occurrence within the very limited frame of the story. Because of this, the story--like life--is both mundane and disgusting. Auster takes note of activities ranging from putting on a shirt to moving one's bowls. The narrative consequently proves dreary, non-linear, scatological, and pornographic in the way that life really is. There is a certain irony to the realization that in spite of the fact that we must constantly stand up, sit down, bend over, consider inconsequential choices, and actualize our decisions, we can barely stand to read about Mr. Blank doing all these things and more. At one point--apparently not above teasing his audience--the narrator declares that he sees no point in describing with microscopic precision some normal activity of Mr. Blank's, and the reader lets slip a deep sigh of relief.
There are of course countless other avenues which Travels offers to the reader's mind. One that particularly delighted me was the narrator himself, who takes great pains to present his narrative as if it is the result of hidden cameras and microphones yet he has no qualms about telling us not only what we can see and hear but what Mr. Blank thinks as well and how many seconds it takes him to think it. The narrator is, at any given moment, a character in the story, an entity on the same plane as the reader, and an omniscient observer. (The conclusion is likely intended to shed light on this, but I won't tip Auster's hand.) At the same time, the story often seems to be trying too hard. Still struggling with the question of existence, Mr. Blank wonders, "When was the last time someone took a photograph of someone who did not exist?" This strikes one, or at least struck me, as more akin to a lyric from a hipster anthem than a serious philosophical musing. Then again, it would be possible to argue that Auster does this deliberately since only rarely do people express themselves with any marked profundity.
That, in the end, is the beauty of Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium: it is as much or as little as the reader wants to make it. Any reader may pick up the work and decide, with equal justification, that Auster is a deeply engaging philosophical novelist or a tiresome author whose lack of compelling plot leaves the reader with only a drudging, unrewarding prose to suffer through. For my part, I would recommend the novella to anyone who delights in absurdism, fiction with a philosophical bent, or offbeat novels in general. With the exception of an extremely disappointing ending--which was a grossly transparent attempt to dress cheap Hollywood tricks like serious discourse--I found the work to be successful at its most obvious goal: provoking thought.
Friday, August 12, 2011
The Absurd and Christian Knowledge
In the course of a discussion on humanity's attempt to find clarity in the world, Camus wrote:
It is intriguing how closely this idea parallels the hesychast understanding of what it was to know. For Camus, the act of trying to know was an attempt to impress a distinctly human character onto a decidedly inhuman world. Understanding was at its heart the human superimposition of its nature onto the nature of everything. This is his recognition of the human character of constructed meaning: because understanding is the effort to compose meaning and because meaning has the human intellect as its composer, to understand is ultimately to give an artificial human quality to reality.
This behavior is born from a desire for clarity and unity which is absurd insofar as real clarity and unity is impossible. This despair in the effort to know and the total inaccessibility the object to be known is echoed (or perhaps prefigured) in the hesycahst thought of the fourteenth century. Like Camus, the hesychasts recognized that the effort to know was an effort for unity (though they understood this unity metaphysically rather than in terms of mere logical clarity) but that the foreign nature of the world which was to be known made this ultimately impossible.
Unlike Camus, who stressed the flaw in humanity's expectation of unity, the hesychasts stressed the flaw in humanity's perception of ultimate disunity in the world. Relying instead on the knowledge the unity must be there (in part because of an existential predisposition to assume a unified, comprehensible universe) they translated the desire to find unity from a natural human yearning to an ethical imperative. Unity existed in the world and to know that unity was to have transcended the human predicament. This, incidentally, was achieved through union with the one object, unlike the perceived world, with which that union was possible: God. In union with the divine, the hesychasts expected to achieve a unified understanding of all reality. In an eschatological vision of perfect knowledge, Gregory Palamas writes of a time when humanity will know everything as it is because, through God, humanity has become a participator in the unifying principle of everything that is: light.
This is by no means an attempt to collapse Christian eschatology (or even epistemology) with absurdism. Camus and Gregory could hardly have arrived at more divergent conclusions about the possibility of knowledge. They begin, however, with a similar observation that when humanity attempts to understand the world the behavior is essentially unitive, born out of an innate human desire to collapse everything into a single system or schema. They both recognize the natural human despair when, by our own efforts, the desired and expected unity cannot be achieved. What is left, then, is to decide what to do with those observations.
Whatever may be the plays on words and the acrobatics of logic, to understand is, above all, to unify.
It is intriguing how closely this idea parallels the hesychast understanding of what it was to know. For Camus, the act of trying to know was an attempt to impress a distinctly human character onto a decidedly inhuman world. Understanding was at its heart the human superimposition of its nature onto the nature of everything. This is his recognition of the human character of constructed meaning: because understanding is the effort to compose meaning and because meaning has the human intellect as its composer, to understand is ultimately to give an artificial human quality to reality.
This behavior is born from a desire for clarity and unity which is absurd insofar as real clarity and unity is impossible. This despair in the effort to know and the total inaccessibility the object to be known is echoed (or perhaps prefigured) in the hesycahst thought of the fourteenth century. Like Camus, the hesychasts recognized that the effort to know was an effort for unity (though they understood this unity metaphysically rather than in terms of mere logical clarity) but that the foreign nature of the world which was to be known made this ultimately impossible.
Unlike Camus, who stressed the flaw in humanity's expectation of unity, the hesychasts stressed the flaw in humanity's perception of ultimate disunity in the world. Relying instead on the knowledge the unity must be there (in part because of an existential predisposition to assume a unified, comprehensible universe) they translated the desire to find unity from a natural human yearning to an ethical imperative. Unity existed in the world and to know that unity was to have transcended the human predicament. This, incidentally, was achieved through union with the one object, unlike the perceived world, with which that union was possible: God. In union with the divine, the hesychasts expected to achieve a unified understanding of all reality. In an eschatological vision of perfect knowledge, Gregory Palamas writes of a time when humanity will know everything as it is because, through God, humanity has become a participator in the unifying principle of everything that is: light.
For it is in light that the light is seen, and that which sees operates in a similar light, since this faculty has no other way in which to work. Having separated itself from all other beings, it becomes itself all light and is assimilated to what it sees, or rather, it is united to it without mingling, being itself light and seeing light through light. If it sees itself, it sees light; if it behold the object of its vision, that too is light; and if it looks at the means by which it sees, again it is light. For such is the character of the union, that all is one, so that he who sees can distinguish neither the means nor the object nor its nature, but simply has the awareness of being light and of seeing a light distinct from every creature.
This is by no means an attempt to collapse Christian eschatology (or even epistemology) with absurdism. Camus and Gregory could hardly have arrived at more divergent conclusions about the possibility of knowledge. They begin, however, with a similar observation that when humanity attempts to understand the world the behavior is essentially unitive, born out of an innate human desire to collapse everything into a single system or schema. They both recognize the natural human despair when, by our own efforts, the desired and expected unity cannot be achieved. What is left, then, is to decide what to do with those observations.
Friday, April 29, 2011
A Musing about the Difference between Fact and Truth
In conjunction with the work that I have done on hesychast epistemology, my mind has been continually drawn back to the question of truth: what is truth and, particularly, what distinguishes truth from fact? Several possible answers come to mind, the most obvious of which is that there is no substantial difference. If something is factually accurate than it is true. If something is a fact than it is also the truth. This certainly accords with our everyday usage of the term. A truth is the opposite of a lie, any statement which is not factually accurate. There is a sense, however, in which this understanding of a lie is dependent on this assumed definition of truth. Another option, which also finds expression in common speech, is to understand truth as that macro-reality which is the accumulation of particular facts. All the individual scientific facts which point away from an intelligent creator and toward total human autonomy make the conclusions of secular humanism true.
A decidedly less modern view of the relationships between facts and truth makes the former the common bricks of a personal or cultural paradigm and the latter the appropriation of them. The translation into the vernacular would be “what is true for you is not necessarily true for me.” Few, if any, dispute the fact that the earth is round, that gravity keeps us bound to it, and that death is the inevitable end of all. How those facts are incorporated into one another in order to shape a picture of the world shared by an ethnicity, a community, or even kept private is what constitutes truth. What is true for me in my rendering of facts is truth.
While we toy with and borrow from both the scientific and the post-scientific mindsets described above, Christians cannot draw a meaningful conception of truth from any of these suggestions. With these as our tools, how are we to meaningfully understand Jesus famous declaration in John 14:6? Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Is he the truth merely because he preached only that which was factually accurate, that which corresponded to reality? Or is he the truth because what he preached and who he was functioned for those societies, communities, and individuals who have elected to have faith in him? If he were talking to A. C. Grayling would he be forced to say, “For someone else, I am the way, the truth, and the life. I don’t work for you.”
The temptation when reading John 14 is to treat the three terms as referring to three complimentary aspects or qualities of Jesus. Undoubtedly hundreds of excellent three-point sermons have been based on this reading. After reading the hesychasts, however, I am inclined to think that all three terms are ultimate futile attempts to describe a single, ineffable reality. Jesus is not the truth because he always speaks the truth. Jesus is not the way because he is the means for getting where we are going. Jesus is not the life because he brings with him the promise of eternal life. That makes for a nice Sunday morning soporific but it ultimately trivializes the nature of Jesus. Those may be factual representations of what Jesus does but they do not get to the nature of the thing being commented on, namely what Jesus is.
Here then, is my proposal, for what the triad of epithets means, admitting beforehand that just as language proved inadequate for Jesus to convey his meaning to his disciples my own language is more feeble still. When Jesus declares that he is the truth (and all the correlative terms which aim toward the same reality), he is revealing the mystery that God, in the self-giving act of Incarnation and redemption, is the normative Reality on which all other reality is contingent for whatever truth content it may possess. Jesus is the way not because he is the means to the appropriate end but because he constitutes means themselves. Jesus is life because everything apart from the self-giving, self-effacing, self-sacrificing God who enfleshes himself is dead. It may have a heartbeat. It may have neurons firing. It is dead nevertheless. Jesus defines what life is, and his use of the term is less an accommodation to our language than it is a corrective for it.
Thus, when Jesus makes the definitive declaration about his character and claims exclusivity (“no one comes to the Father except through me”), he clues us in to the absolute and transcendent nature of these claims. Gregory Palamas rights that terms like truth “would not, properly speaking, apply to [God], or else would properly apply to [God] alone.” This is because,
When we admit that Jesus is the truth and that there are no other truths, it is not merely a rejection of religious pluralism. It is a rejection of idolatry in any form. Whatever we do is either true because it imbibes of the Truth, because the Truth works in us and through us or it is a lie. In every moment we are either alive because we partake of the Life, because Life enlivens us or we are dead. For every end, we achieve through the Way because there is only the Way or our means are in fact anti-means which achieve nothing. All other grounds for all other absolutes are illusory. Only in this way does Jesus declaration fully and appropriately answer Thomas’ question, “We don’t even know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” Thomas missed the mark. He was looking for a contingent means to a finite end, much in the way we often understand faith as a concert ticket into heaven. Thomas didn’t know the way, but only because he did not yet know Jesus. To know Jesus is to know the way. To know Jesus is to know truth and to make all the facts known true.
This then is my conclusion. If we take the essentially tautological (and Socratic) definition that truth is that normative reality by which all true things are true and translate it into the Christian terminology above, we are left with this: the loving, saving, self-emptying God is that normative reality by which all things-factual or not, rational or not, scientific or not, pleasant or not-are true. Facts may be correct but they can be declared true only from the perspective of the One who created them and defined their content and purpose.
A decidedly less modern view of the relationships between facts and truth makes the former the common bricks of a personal or cultural paradigm and the latter the appropriation of them. The translation into the vernacular would be “what is true for you is not necessarily true for me.” Few, if any, dispute the fact that the earth is round, that gravity keeps us bound to it, and that death is the inevitable end of all. How those facts are incorporated into one another in order to shape a picture of the world shared by an ethnicity, a community, or even kept private is what constitutes truth. What is true for me in my rendering of facts is truth.
While we toy with and borrow from both the scientific and the post-scientific mindsets described above, Christians cannot draw a meaningful conception of truth from any of these suggestions. With these as our tools, how are we to meaningfully understand Jesus famous declaration in John 14:6? Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Is he the truth merely because he preached only that which was factually accurate, that which corresponded to reality? Or is he the truth because what he preached and who he was functioned for those societies, communities, and individuals who have elected to have faith in him? If he were talking to A. C. Grayling would he be forced to say, “For someone else, I am the way, the truth, and the life. I don’t work for you.”
The temptation when reading John 14 is to treat the three terms as referring to three complimentary aspects or qualities of Jesus. Undoubtedly hundreds of excellent three-point sermons have been based on this reading. After reading the hesychasts, however, I am inclined to think that all three terms are ultimate futile attempts to describe a single, ineffable reality. Jesus is not the truth because he always speaks the truth. Jesus is not the way because he is the means for getting where we are going. Jesus is not the life because he brings with him the promise of eternal life. That makes for a nice Sunday morning soporific but it ultimately trivializes the nature of Jesus. Those may be factual representations of what Jesus does but they do not get to the nature of the thing being commented on, namely what Jesus is.
Here then, is my proposal, for what the triad of epithets means, admitting beforehand that just as language proved inadequate for Jesus to convey his meaning to his disciples my own language is more feeble still. When Jesus declares that he is the truth (and all the correlative terms which aim toward the same reality), he is revealing the mystery that God, in the self-giving act of Incarnation and redemption, is the normative Reality on which all other reality is contingent for whatever truth content it may possess. Jesus is the way not because he is the means to the appropriate end but because he constitutes means themselves. Jesus is life because everything apart from the self-giving, self-effacing, self-sacrificing God who enfleshes himself is dead. It may have a heartbeat. It may have neurons firing. It is dead nevertheless. Jesus defines what life is, and his use of the term is less an accommodation to our language than it is a corrective for it.
Thus, when Jesus makes the definitive declaration about his character and claims exclusivity (“no one comes to the Father except through me”), he clues us in to the absolute and transcendent nature of these claims. Gregory Palamas rights that terms like truth “would not, properly speaking, apply to [God], or else would properly apply to [God] alone.” This is because,
Every nature is utterly remote and absolutely estranged from the divine nature. For if God is nature, other things are not nature, but if each of the other things is nature, he is not nature: just as he is not a being, if others are beings; and if he is a being, the others are not being. If you accept this as true also for wisdom and goodness and generally all the things around God or said about God, then your theology will be correct and in accord with the saints.
When we admit that Jesus is the truth and that there are no other truths, it is not merely a rejection of religious pluralism. It is a rejection of idolatry in any form. Whatever we do is either true because it imbibes of the Truth, because the Truth works in us and through us or it is a lie. In every moment we are either alive because we partake of the Life, because Life enlivens us or we are dead. For every end, we achieve through the Way because there is only the Way or our means are in fact anti-means which achieve nothing. All other grounds for all other absolutes are illusory. Only in this way does Jesus declaration fully and appropriately answer Thomas’ question, “We don’t even know where you’re going. How can we know the way?” Thomas missed the mark. He was looking for a contingent means to a finite end, much in the way we often understand faith as a concert ticket into heaven. Thomas didn’t know the way, but only because he did not yet know Jesus. To know Jesus is to know the way. To know Jesus is to know truth and to make all the facts known true.
This then is my conclusion. If we take the essentially tautological (and Socratic) definition that truth is that normative reality by which all true things are true and translate it into the Christian terminology above, we are left with this: the loving, saving, self-emptying God is that normative reality by which all things-factual or not, rational or not, scientific or not, pleasant or not-are true. Facts may be correct but they can be declared true only from the perspective of the One who created them and defined their content and purpose.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Critique of Virtue Epistemology's Critique of Cartesian Skepticism
On a whim, I read through the article by John Greco on “Virtue Epistemology” in the second edition of MacMillion USA’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Most of the article I found to be very enlightening, and certainly I thought the virtue epistemology deals with Gettier problems very handily. I was less impressed, however, when Greco turned virtue epistemology on skepticism. He sets up this scenario from Descartes:
He proceeds to remind the reader of the definition of virtue epistemology. Virtue epistemology alters the classic definition of knowledge as true, justified belief in an effort to exclude true beliefs which are justified but nevertheless arrived at accidentally or through deception. Instead, virtue epistemology suggests that knowledge is true belief which is arrived at through intellectual virtue. Only when the true belief is reached through the right exercise of reason is it truly knowledge. With this, Greco answers Cartesian skepticism.
There are two problems with this argument, and the first ought to be obvious. It is by no means self-evident that demons do not induce incorrect perceptions in the accurate world. The assumption that they do not and that the problem may be therefore dismissed as theoretical represents a bias which Greco enters the argument with. Even if he does not believe that demons actively deceive people, he lacks the epistemic tools to prove definitively that they do not. I doubt that Descartes would have been very much convinced by the argument, “That’s all well and good, but demons do not in fact possess people in the actual world.” What is even more galling, is that this line of reasoning only applies to the possibility of demon possession. Certainly Greco would not suggest that in the actual world people do not in fact sleep or go mad. If our intellectual faculties are admitted to be unreliable in a world where we sleep and go mad, then that is very relevant given that in the actual world we both sleep and go mad.
It may, of course, be objected that when we sleep or go mad (or even are possessed by demons) that we lack the intellectual virtue that is a prerequisite for knowledge. While that may very well be true as a theoretical way for ordering reality, there is a problem with applying it practically. The evaluation that Descartes is sleeping is only possible from an exterior standpoint. For Descartes, who is concerned with his own ability to know whether or not his perception is reliable, he is impotent to accurately deduce whether he is sleeping or not. Certainly those who are mad would be the last to admit that they lack the epistemic virtue necessary to possess knowledge. It may be nice for Greco to be able to point to an asylum and say that virtue epistemology explains why the true beliefs of the inhabitants are not knowledge while his is, but as the knowing agent he is actually incapable of demonstrating that he is not in fact in that asylum being pointed at from without by those he believes are inmates.
What is left is an epistemology which is sound in theory but no more immune to the problems of skepticism in practice than any other theory of thought.
René Descartes believes that he is sitting by the fire in a dressing gown. Presumably, he has this belief because this is how things are presented to him by his senses. However, Descartes reasons, things could appear to him just as they do even if he were in fact not sitting by the fire, but were instead sleeping or mad or the victim of a deceiving demon.
He proceeds to remind the reader of the definition of virtue epistemology. Virtue epistemology alters the classic definition of knowledge as true, justified belief in an effort to exclude true beliefs which are justified but nevertheless arrived at accidentally or through deception. Instead, virtue epistemology suggests that knowledge is true belief which is arrived at through intellectual virtue. Only when the true belief is reached through the right exercise of reason is it truly knowledge. With this, Greco answers Cartesian skepticism.
…to say that someone has an ability to achieve X (hitting baseballs, for example) is to say that he would be successful in achieving X in a range of situations relevantly similar to those in which he typically finds himself. But then possibilities that do not de no occur in relevantly similar situations…do not count in determining whether a person has some ability in question. For example, it does not count against Babe Ruth’s ability to hit baseballs that he cannot hit them in the dark. Likewise, it does not count against our perceptual power that we cannot discriminate real fires from demon-induced hallucinations. Accordingly, virtue theory explains why our inability to rule out Descartes’ possibility of a demon is irrelevant to whether we have knowledge. Namely, knowledge is true belief grounded in intellectual virtue. The fact that our intellectual faculties would be unreliable in world where demons induce perceptions is irrelevant to whether they count as epistemically virtuous in the actual world.
There are two problems with this argument, and the first ought to be obvious. It is by no means self-evident that demons do not induce incorrect perceptions in the accurate world. The assumption that they do not and that the problem may be therefore dismissed as theoretical represents a bias which Greco enters the argument with. Even if he does not believe that demons actively deceive people, he lacks the epistemic tools to prove definitively that they do not. I doubt that Descartes would have been very much convinced by the argument, “That’s all well and good, but demons do not in fact possess people in the actual world.” What is even more galling, is that this line of reasoning only applies to the possibility of demon possession. Certainly Greco would not suggest that in the actual world people do not in fact sleep or go mad. If our intellectual faculties are admitted to be unreliable in a world where we sleep and go mad, then that is very relevant given that in the actual world we both sleep and go mad.
It may, of course, be objected that when we sleep or go mad (or even are possessed by demons) that we lack the intellectual virtue that is a prerequisite for knowledge. While that may very well be true as a theoretical way for ordering reality, there is a problem with applying it practically. The evaluation that Descartes is sleeping is only possible from an exterior standpoint. For Descartes, who is concerned with his own ability to know whether or not his perception is reliable, he is impotent to accurately deduce whether he is sleeping or not. Certainly those who are mad would be the last to admit that they lack the epistemic virtue necessary to possess knowledge. It may be nice for Greco to be able to point to an asylum and say that virtue epistemology explains why the true beliefs of the inhabitants are not knowledge while his is, but as the knowing agent he is actually incapable of demonstrating that he is not in fact in that asylum being pointed at from without by those he believes are inmates.
What is left is an epistemology which is sound in theory but no more immune to the problems of skepticism in practice than any other theory of thought.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Evdokimov's "Proof"
Paul Evdokimov, Les Ages de la vie spirituelle, on knowledge of God (quoted by J. A. McGuckin in The Orthodox Church):
The insufficiency of the proofs for the existence of God can be explained by the basic fact that God alone is the criterion of his own truth. God alone is the argument for his own being. God can never be the subject of logical demonstrations, or enclosed in chains of causality…This means that faith is never invented: it is always a gift.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
"Reason and Revelation"
During the course of my adventure into the 1880-1881 issues of the Gospel Advocate, I have chanced upon a number of amusing articles. I have particularly enjoyed some of the marital advice contained therein. It has, at one and the same time, a kind of amusing antiquity and a certain timelessness. I had something of the same reaction when reading an article by F. D. Srygley titled "Reason and Revelation." (I regret that I do not have the exact date for the purpose of more accurate citation.) Srygley, who was very nearly the subject of a recent term paper of mine, wrote the article to correct a misprint in his "Missionary Spirit vs. Missionary Plans" which said that "the Bible was given to supplant human judgment." Srygley clarifies:
My immediate reaction to that was pronouncedly negative, given my belief about the fundamental nature of Scripture. Nevertheless, as I read on I was struck by the way he expressed this belief. His language in several places (particularly when presented out of context as I am about to do) has a ring of orthodoxy - dare I even say Orthodoxy - that appealed very directly to me.
In the article, Srygley develops the idea of complementary provinces of reason and revelation such that they form a mutually exclusive but "harmonious whole." He reacts to two opposite and equally dangerous extremes. Some make reason all sufficient and revelation only a marginal improvement on reason:
Others reject reason altogether in a perverse pietism:
Srygley rejects both of these. Reason and revelation both have their root in God. They must each have their ordained purpose. To reject either outright or even to diminish either is to reject or diminish God. One can just as easily reject reason as proper to the human person as he can reject the Bible as the revelation of God. "Both sins are rebellion against things of divine origin. Both proceed from a common cause." This whole philosophy gives Srygley a very healthy view of the role of Scripture in my opinion. I certainly reject the idea that the Bible is somehow synonymous with revelation - something Srygley would undoubtedly affirm - but when it comes to questions of the Bible and science or logic, I think Srygley hits the mark:
In the end, however, Srygley still comes out with a position on the adequacy of reason that I cannot endorse. "Human judgment properly cultivated, like revelation correctly interpreted, is absolutely safe as guide on all matters in its jurisdiction." This sentiment was enough to make me suspicious (especially because I know that Srygley is part of a tradition that sees the "correct" interpretation of revelation as being dependent on the powers of human reason), but where he finally concludes was enough to make me recoil.
I agree with Srygley that reason has its proper province. I even support that it is ultimately reliable within that province (though I would say it was functionally reliable while Srygley would say its reliability is unqualified). What I cannot agree on is that God's self-revelation is in any sense restricted by human reason. I not only affirm that God's revelation can overrule, overwhelm, and even contradict human reason, this is one of the fundamental realities of the faith as far as I'm concerned. Revelation is the light which is superior to reason, even regarding things which reason purports to have grasped.
I suppose the real difference is that Srygley has confidence that what reason apprehends is in fact reality. I am more skeptical about our ability to adequately apprehend reality by the means of reason. Reason, for me, is only competent to allow us to function within reality. Reality cannot be circumscribed by reason. After all, God is real.
It is far more reasonable to conclude the Bible was given to supplement, not supplant, human judgment. In fact, this is the only view of the matter which will comport with reason.
My immediate reaction to that was pronouncedly negative, given my belief about the fundamental nature of Scripture. Nevertheless, as I read on I was struck by the way he expressed this belief. His language in several places (particularly when presented out of context as I am about to do) has a ring of orthodoxy - dare I even say Orthodoxy - that appealed very directly to me.
It is the province of the Bible to supply what reason cannot furnish.
The axioms which constitute the foundation and beginning of revelation are wholly without the scope of unaided reason. To the mind enlightened by revelation these principles are clearly axiomatic, but to the mind destitute of inspired light they are darkly incomprehensible.
If the Bible does not occupy ground beyond the reach of human reason, it is not a revelation. Can it in any sense be considered a revelation to tell a man what he already knows?
In the article, Srygley develops the idea of complementary provinces of reason and revelation such that they form a mutually exclusive but "harmonious whole." He reacts to two opposite and equally dangerous extremes. Some make reason all sufficient and revelation only a marginal improvement on reason:
...they seem to consider the Bible only a better guide than reason concerning matters of which both have jurisdiction.
Others reject reason altogether in a perverse pietism:
Some seem to think a total rejection of human judgment an indication of great fidelity to God.
Srygley rejects both of these. Reason and revelation both have their root in God. They must each have their ordained purpose. To reject either outright or even to diminish either is to reject or diminish God. One can just as easily reject reason as proper to the human person as he can reject the Bible as the revelation of God. "Both sins are rebellion against things of divine origin. Both proceed from a common cause." This whole philosophy gives Srygley a very healthy view of the role of Scripture in my opinion. I certainly reject the idea that the Bible is somehow synonymous with revelation - something Srygley would undoubtedly affirm - but when it comes to questions of the Bible and science or logic, I think Srygley hits the mark:
To talk about a conflict between science and the Bible, is about as sensible as to apprehend an actual quarrel and assault between one's manhood and boyhood.
God never explained in the Bible what man by reason could find out. There can never be a conflict between the Bible and geology because the Bible proposes to give no light upon the science of geology.
In the end, however, Srygley still comes out with a position on the adequacy of reason that I cannot endorse. "Human judgment properly cultivated, like revelation correctly interpreted, is absolutely safe as guide on all matters in its jurisdiction." This sentiment was enough to make me suspicious (especially because I know that Srygley is part of a tradition that sees the "correct" interpretation of revelation as being dependent on the powers of human reason), but where he finally concludes was enough to make me recoil.
Where reason is guide at all, revelation never interferes to offer a more excellent way. In fact, I apprehend that it is absolutely impossible for God by revelation to give a light superior to reason on themes within the scope of human judgment.
I agree with Srygley that reason has its proper province. I even support that it is ultimately reliable within that province (though I would say it was functionally reliable while Srygley would say its reliability is unqualified). What I cannot agree on is that God's self-revelation is in any sense restricted by human reason. I not only affirm that God's revelation can overrule, overwhelm, and even contradict human reason, this is one of the fundamental realities of the faith as far as I'm concerned. Revelation is the light which is superior to reason, even regarding things which reason purports to have grasped.
I suppose the real difference is that Srygley has confidence that what reason apprehends is in fact reality. I am more skeptical about our ability to adequately apprehend reality by the means of reason. Reason, for me, is only competent to allow us to function within reality. Reality cannot be circumscribed by reason. After all, God is real.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Knowing God...in the Biblical Sense
More than any of my very outspoken and radical stances, my belief about the suprarational nature of God (or the "illogicalness" of God if you prefer) has caused the most controversy. As an ardent proponent of non-resistant pacifism and "Christian anarchy," and an equally outspoken opponent of therapeutic and eugenic abortion, I find it somewhat odd that the simple and somewhat esoteric assertion that God could make A equal not A should engender the most antagonism toward me. (For previous posts, see my response to Ron Highfield and Barton W. Stone.) I would like to think that somehow people sense the inherent threat to their worldview that comes from admitting that God is not constrained by logic. On the one hand, atheists have objected, I feel, because they know that a God which cannot be logically assaulted cannot be assaulted. On the other hands, Christians have objected because their theology and, more critically in some ways, their biblical hermeneutic is based on the supremacy of logic. (Interestingly, through the influence of John Behr I can no longer understand why our biblical hermeneutic is not founded primarily on the supremacy of Christ.) There is something frightening about the possibility that we might not be able to put God in any box at all, not even the box of logic. There is an understandable anxiety about the fact that the Creator may not be able to be circumscribed and thereby made impotent by the creation.
Nevertheless, I firmly believe this to be the case. I would gladly argue the point for the rest of my life using nothing but rhetoric, existential appeals, and unaccompanied quotes from church fathers, theologians, and even, strangely, rationalist philosophers. Yet, I feel compelled to address the question biblically, in part because I know that I can never convince anyone in my own movement without making direct appeal to the Bible, and then only through the preferred hermeneutic of Baconian induction. Conveniently, regardless of how I feel about the ultimate validity of the strict application of logic as a hermeneutical tool, even when all the instances of divine revelation are lined up neatly for the reader, the God of illogic is revealed and vindicated. That is, in part and crudely, what I propose to do here.
The Bible is replete with stories of God's self-revelation to humanity. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that the Bible is the story of the history of humanity coming to know God. If I had the time and inclination, I could make an exhaustive list of all theophanic activity in Scripture, and I am confident that my conclusion would be the same. I would gladly demonstrate that no one in Scripture arrived at God rationally. Each was called by God apart from the powers of his or her own intellect. Moreover, it would be a pleasure to show that these callings and the regular inbreaking of God into reality was more often explicitly contrary to logic rather than in line with it. I do not, however, have the time or inclination.
So let it suffice to examine the text more generally with special attention paid to a representative example: Moses and the burning bush. With the arguable exceptions of Adam and Eve and the disciples at Mount Tabor, no one experienced a more direct revelation of God than did Moses. He heard God's voice directly and frequently. More importantly, he would even "see" God at one point in his life. For all the spiritual intimacy typified in David or the faith typified in Abraham, no one compares to Moses in terms of direct personal contact.
The burning bush, moreover, as the beginning of the long and close connection of God with Moses represents a particularly potent example to demonstrate the irrationality of God and His self-revelation. It is not merely that Moses did not discover God after contemplating the logical inevitability of a supreme being. It is not enough that Moses encountered God rather than deducing His presence. Moses experienced God in a way that was supremely irrational: a bush which while on fire was not consumed. The experience of God was not merely overwhelming within the bounds of reason but violated the principle of reasons which govern existence. Modern science only serves to elucidate this story by highlighting its blatant idiocy. Fire, we know, is no independent thing, merely the visible byproduct of the process of rapid oxidation. In other words, there is no fire without consumption since fire is itself only the tangible product of consumption. A fire that does not burn anything is an impossible contradiction, a square-circle right in the Bible.
Hallelujah to the impossible contradiction. This is the God of Israel, the violator of reality and the defier of the "laws" of reason, the precepts of logic. This is the God we see manifest throughout the Bible. The God who parts the waters, who turns water into blood, who turns water into wine, who turns water bitter, who makes water come from a rock, who walks on water, who destroys the world with water, and redeems the world with water. Sometimes the sun stops. Sometimes the earth swallows people up. Sometimes storms quiet. Sometimes food multiplies. Sometimes people raise up from the dead.
That last one is my favorite, if for no other reason than I believe I will get to experience it myself.
We do not grasp God logically in the same way that I do not understand my love for my wife logically. Even if we concede that science can exhaustively explain my love for my wife in neuro-chemical terms (and I think this would be unnecessarily generous), I do not understand my love for her as biological. My love for her is experienced irrationally. In the same way, even though some may delude themselves into believing that they may approach God through unadulterated logic, humanity does not understand God rationally but existentially, and even then as an irrational experience. We do not believe that seventy-two mathematicians went into seventy-two different rooms and emerged seventy-two days later all holding identical translations of Euclid's Elements into Koine. We do not believe that 318 logicians made the trek to Nicaea in order to confirm as orthodoxy that A =/= ¬ A. If we believe the tradition (and I see no reason not to), then we believe that seventy-two Jews, contrary to all reasonable expectations, produced identical translations of the highly irrational stories just outlined and that 318 bishops assembled at Nicaea to confirm the radically illogical orthodoxy that A = ¬ A.
John Locke was confused to speak of the reasonableness of Christianity and his confusion is like an epidemic in the Christian consciousness. We worship the reasonableness of Christianity and the logic of its rational God like an idol. With all the trouble caused by the biblical anthropomorphisms of a God who speaks and walks, with hands and eyes and a mouth, there is no more perilous anthropomorphism than the rash assumption that God is logical and reveals Himself logically. By insisting that God must conceive of reality as humanity does, must interact with creation as humanity does, and must operate within the same binding strictures that humanity does we come closer to making God over in our image than if we were to insist He had hands. In fact, I am ready now to confess that it is easier for me to suggest that God may have hands than to insist that He must be logical. The former speaks only of the possibilities open to an unfettered deity while the other is the supreme fetter which ties Him down and make Him little more than an unspeakably powerful wizard in a children's story.
The God of the Bible does not behave logically and people do not arrive at Him rationally. It is, therefore, quite inappropriate as far as I'm concerned to suggest either that God is the solution at the end of a metaphysical equation or that God is bound in any sense by the mathematics that produce such equations. If God is real, and He is, He necessarily transcends logic, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than His activity in the world as recorded in Scripture.
Nevertheless, I firmly believe this to be the case. I would gladly argue the point for the rest of my life using nothing but rhetoric, existential appeals, and unaccompanied quotes from church fathers, theologians, and even, strangely, rationalist philosophers. Yet, I feel compelled to address the question biblically, in part because I know that I can never convince anyone in my own movement without making direct appeal to the Bible, and then only through the preferred hermeneutic of Baconian induction. Conveniently, regardless of how I feel about the ultimate validity of the strict application of logic as a hermeneutical tool, even when all the instances of divine revelation are lined up neatly for the reader, the God of illogic is revealed and vindicated. That is, in part and crudely, what I propose to do here.
The Bible is replete with stories of God's self-revelation to humanity. In fact, one might even go so far as to say that the Bible is the story of the history of humanity coming to know God. If I had the time and inclination, I could make an exhaustive list of all theophanic activity in Scripture, and I am confident that my conclusion would be the same. I would gladly demonstrate that no one in Scripture arrived at God rationally. Each was called by God apart from the powers of his or her own intellect. Moreover, it would be a pleasure to show that these callings and the regular inbreaking of God into reality was more often explicitly contrary to logic rather than in line with it. I do not, however, have the time or inclination.
So let it suffice to examine the text more generally with special attention paid to a representative example: Moses and the burning bush. With the arguable exceptions of Adam and Eve and the disciples at Mount Tabor, no one experienced a more direct revelation of God than did Moses. He heard God's voice directly and frequently. More importantly, he would even "see" God at one point in his life. For all the spiritual intimacy typified in David or the faith typified in Abraham, no one compares to Moses in terms of direct personal contact.
The burning bush, moreover, as the beginning of the long and close connection of God with Moses represents a particularly potent example to demonstrate the irrationality of God and His self-revelation. It is not merely that Moses did not discover God after contemplating the logical inevitability of a supreme being. It is not enough that Moses encountered God rather than deducing His presence. Moses experienced God in a way that was supremely irrational: a bush which while on fire was not consumed. The experience of God was not merely overwhelming within the bounds of reason but violated the principle of reasons which govern existence. Modern science only serves to elucidate this story by highlighting its blatant idiocy. Fire, we know, is no independent thing, merely the visible byproduct of the process of rapid oxidation. In other words, there is no fire without consumption since fire is itself only the tangible product of consumption. A fire that does not burn anything is an impossible contradiction, a square-circle right in the Bible.
Hallelujah to the impossible contradiction. This is the God of Israel, the violator of reality and the defier of the "laws" of reason, the precepts of logic. This is the God we see manifest throughout the Bible. The God who parts the waters, who turns water into blood, who turns water into wine, who turns water bitter, who makes water come from a rock, who walks on water, who destroys the world with water, and redeems the world with water. Sometimes the sun stops. Sometimes the earth swallows people up. Sometimes storms quiet. Sometimes food multiplies. Sometimes people raise up from the dead.
That last one is my favorite, if for no other reason than I believe I will get to experience it myself.
We do not grasp God logically in the same way that I do not understand my love for my wife logically. Even if we concede that science can exhaustively explain my love for my wife in neuro-chemical terms (and I think this would be unnecessarily generous), I do not understand my love for her as biological. My love for her is experienced irrationally. In the same way, even though some may delude themselves into believing that they may approach God through unadulterated logic, humanity does not understand God rationally but existentially, and even then as an irrational experience. We do not believe that seventy-two mathematicians went into seventy-two different rooms and emerged seventy-two days later all holding identical translations of Euclid's Elements into Koine. We do not believe that 318 logicians made the trek to Nicaea in order to confirm as orthodoxy that A =/= ¬ A. If we believe the tradition (and I see no reason not to), then we believe that seventy-two Jews, contrary to all reasonable expectations, produced identical translations of the highly irrational stories just outlined and that 318 bishops assembled at Nicaea to confirm the radically illogical orthodoxy that A = ¬ A.
John Locke was confused to speak of the reasonableness of Christianity and his confusion is like an epidemic in the Christian consciousness. We worship the reasonableness of Christianity and the logic of its rational God like an idol. With all the trouble caused by the biblical anthropomorphisms of a God who speaks and walks, with hands and eyes and a mouth, there is no more perilous anthropomorphism than the rash assumption that God is logical and reveals Himself logically. By insisting that God must conceive of reality as humanity does, must interact with creation as humanity does, and must operate within the same binding strictures that humanity does we come closer to making God over in our image than if we were to insist He had hands. In fact, I am ready now to confess that it is easier for me to suggest that God may have hands than to insist that He must be logical. The former speaks only of the possibilities open to an unfettered deity while the other is the supreme fetter which ties Him down and make Him little more than an unspeakably powerful wizard in a children's story.
The God of the Bible does not behave logically and people do not arrive at Him rationally. It is, therefore, quite inappropriate as far as I'm concerned to suggest either that God is the solution at the end of a metaphysical equation or that God is bound in any sense by the mathematics that produce such equations. If God is real, and He is, He necessarily transcends logic, and nothing demonstrates this more clearly than His activity in the world as recorded in Scripture.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Rational or Spiritual Creatures?
We must believe that the Bible was addressed to rational creatures, and designed by God to be understood for their profit. When we open the Bible under the impression that it is a book of mysteries, understood only by a few learned ministers, we are at once discouraged from reading and investigating its contents. But believing it was written for our learning and profit, and therefore addressed to our understanding, we are encouraged to read and diligently search its sacred pages. - Barton Stone
I think Stone may have more closely approximated the truth if he had begun this thought with "We must believe that the Bible was addressed to spiritual creatures, and designed by God to be understood for their profit." The text of Scripture gives no indication that its contents are primarily rational, not in the way that Stone indicates, and it certainly gives just the opposite impression of divine truth. In 1 Corinthians 2:13:16, Paul writes:
This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man's judgment: "For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.
Paul explicitly denies that human wisdom can grasp the truth about God. He contrasts human discernment with a "spiritual discernment" that is rooted in our redeemed, indwelled state. Spiritual truth is expressed in spiritual words, words that presumably do not accord with human modes of thinking. For this reason the unspiritual man is incapable of accepting or even adequately grasping truth about God. It is, to him, foolishness.
Paul explains, so far as I can tell, that this is because of the radical otherness of God. Who can know the mind of God from which spiritual truth flows? It seems self-evident to Paul that humanity is incapable of knowing God apart from His spiritually discerned truths. Normal human methods, what he terms "human wisdom" earlier in the chapter and what Stone would call rationality, are inadequate because God ineffably transcends our standard modes of thinking. Only through the transformative work of the Spirit, conforming our minds to "the mind of Christ" can we begin to grasp God. Only when we teach ourselves to "think" as God "thinks" is truth made known.
It is amusing to me that if the first sentence of Stone's quote is corrected in the way I suggested, the remainder of the quote seems to follow Paul's thinking quite nicely. It becomes a critique of hyper-rationalism and the belief that the truth of the Bible rests in the hands of an intellectual elite rather than, as I think Paul would assert, in the hands of a spiritual elite. Read it again:
We must believe that the Bible was addressed to spiritual creatures, and designed by God to be understood for their profit. When we open the Bible under the impression that it is a book of mysteries, understood only by a few learned ministers, we are at once discouraged from reading and investigating its contents. But believing it was written for our learning and profit, and therefore addressed to our understanding, we are encouraged to read and diligently search its sacred pages. - Barton Stone, with revisions
Monday, April 19, 2010
Reading Titus with John Chrysostom (1:1-4)
More and more my reading turns away from both Scripture and the Fathers to secondary literature in my field. This is, unfortunately, unavoidable. As much as I would like to make a life of reading only the Fathers and interacting only with blessed dead, occupational necessity requires that I examine the literature of my contemporaries as well. Thus, in an effort to keep myself devotionally grounded both in the apostolic documents and the Fathers, I am going to (attempt) to read through Titus with John Chrysostom. John preached six extant homilies on Titus while he was a priest in Antioch (386-398) which I hope will help to direct and challenge my own thoughts both on the text and on the early theology of the church.
His first homily concerns Titus 1:1-4
Underserved Grace
“Observe how the introduction is full of the mercies of God, and this whole epistle is especially of the same character…”
This is John’s overarching analysis of the text. It is, for all its other nuances to be discussed at length below, a text about the wonderful gifts of God to His people. Paul himself is a gift; he was made a servant of God not for his own sake or for God’s sake but as a blessing of God for the His elect.
The most glorious of these gifts, however, is that of eternal life, something which is sealed by the very fact of God’s perfection and foreknowledge. Our gift of eternal life is “not now upon a change of mind,” but has been part of God’s plan since before time began and is inviolable since God cannot lie. That this was achieved by foreknowledge rather than by a decision in time further displays the goodness of God to us since it shows “our high origin, in that He did not love us now first, but from the beginning.” John makes a particularly compelling point here that “it is no little matter to be loved…from the beginning.” Consider how much God loves us such that from before the beginning of time He had already begun to love us; before we existed, before anything existed, God had already begun an eternal, inexhaustible outpouring of love for His elect. In this love, he ordained for those elect eternal life with an unbreakable promise.
Paul even concludes, in typical fashion, by praying even greater mercies upon them: “grace and peace” from the Father.
To what end has Paul reminded us of the manifold blessings of God? John suggests “nothing profits us so much as constantly to remember the mercies of God, whether public or private.” The constant reflection on what God has done is a constant inspiration for Christians. In realizing what He has done for us, we are humbled. In realizing what He has done for us, we are stirred to do even greater works of righteousness for him. After all, “if our hearts are warmed when we receive the favors of our friends, or hear some kind word or deed of theirs, much more shall we be zealous in His service when we see into what dangers we had fallen, and that God has delivered us from them all.”
Thus, in this short exposition about God and the work that He has done through Paul for Titus and the church in Crete, we see the picture of a Father who has provided abundantly for His children. Paul in the act of writing it is imitating this example by providing also for his “true son,” Titus so that he might continue to provide for his flock. And we too should seek to live a life of response to the great blessings which have been showered on us, none more great than the promise of eternal life, ordained for us before the ages.
A Theologically Consistent Methodology
John is the beneficiary of a rich, systematized theological tradition which had not yet developed in the time of the apostle Paul. To that end, John presents some interpretations which would undoubtedly seem foreign to Paul had he read this homily and is equally likely to seem forced and eisegetical to modern readers.
For example, that Paul is “a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ” is fundamentally an anti-Arian statement for John. The fact that Paul can be something at the same time “of God” and “of Christ” here suggests that the two are coequal (or, in Nicene-Constantinopolitan language, consubstantial).
He will also develop with regard to this first part of the passage in question a doctrine of the free will activity of man in relation to God in the process of election. He begins by emphasizing that it was through God’s providential activity that the elect were entrusted to Paul. “It was wholly through the effect of His goodness who intrusted [sic] me.” This divine activity of God takes primacy in Paul’s election as an apostle, but it is not the entirety of that election, because “the whole was not of Him, for why did He not intrust [sic] it to others?” Instead, John understand Paul’s election as the act of God followed by the free will response of the apostle. He extrapolates this process onto his readers: “First we are apprehended, and afterwards we apprehend; first we are known, and then we know; first we were called, and then we obeyed.” In doing so, John believes he can at the same time say that it is in no way Paul who merited election as an apostle, that it was solely for “the sake of the faith of God’s elect,” but at the same time Paul is not chosen arbitrarily nor is he appointed apart from his response to God.
Later he will attach the reference to Titus as a “true son” to this question of the free will of man. Sonship, for John, is dependent on one’s behavior, and he cites 1 Cor 9:16 for a list of behaviors which may make one a “spurious” son. What’s more, these categories of true and spurious sonship are not absolute or static but “subject to frequent changes.” “For one who was a true son may become spurious, and a spurious son may become a true one. For it is not the force of nature, but the power of choice, on which it depends…” An example: Onesimus, who John says was a true son, become “unprofitable,” and then was restored again to true sonship. (I wonder to what degree these very early doctrinal beliefs on free will contributed to the fierce reaction to the Eastern Church when Calvinism started creeping into its doctrine.)
Finally, John’s interpretation of “truth that is after godliness” (ESV “truth, which accords with godliness) is intriguing, particularly given my recent studies on Eastern epistemology. According to John, Paul is drawing a distinction here between two types of knowledge of the truth. “For there is a truth in other things, that is not according to godliness; for knowledge in matter of agriculture, knowledge of the arts, is true knowledge.” These natural truths which are acquired naturally (i.e. through intellection and sense perception to borrow later theology) are distinct from truth which is “according to godliness.” The other kind of truth is the truth of faith which transcends rational knowledge: “This acknowledging then is from faith, and not from reasonings.”
This raises the question for the modern reader: to what degree can these four seemingly insignificant verses bear the weight of all of John’s theology? The simple answer: they can’t. But as easy as it would be to write off John’s exegesis with that matter-of-fact evaluation, there is value in his methodology even apart from the immense value of the theology which it betrays. Certainly, Titus 1:1-4 cannot be seen as the definitive text to settle the Arian, Calvinist, and Palamite controversies. (Would that it were that uncomplicated?) Nevertheless, John does provide a stark corrective to the way modern readers might normally treat these verses.
The superscriptions of Paul’s letters, and perhaps of an underappreciated letter like Titus in particular, are generally only glanced at by clergy, laymen, and scholars alike. Yet, of the six homilies recorded in NPNF that John preached on Titus (and they by no means cover the full text of the epistle), this sermon was recorded and saved for generations. John treats this passage not only with dignity and care, but with urgency as if it contained great answers to life’s questions, to the turmoil of the church, and to the personal struggles of his congregants. Each word, each sentence, is richly layered with meaning and importance. It seems to me ironic that while the Bible has assumed a theoretical importance in our day which would probably scandalize most people in the time of John, it is then and not now that we see a great plumbing of Scriptures depths. John takes what has devolved into an insignificant introductory formula and makes it a rich statement of orthodoxy meant to encourage, to vivify the faithful. He is theologically consistent in his treatment of Scripture in that he looks for God in all its parts, not only where He is most evident.
Certainly I am not suggesting that Christians ought to neglect other texts to focus on the introductions and closings of the epistles, nor do I suppose that we can found any great theologies on closer examinations of these texts. We can, however, afford to them the same respect which is afforded to the rest of Scripture and read them with the same theological presuppositions (whatever those happen to be for the reader). Paul is certainly not intending to combat Arianism in Titus 1:1, but that does not mean that his dual reference to God and Jesus does not have theological implications. And what does it mean to be a “servant” and an “apostle” for the faith of others? Is there truth which is according to godliness and how is it distinct from other truth? These are some questions, among countless others, which should be addressed by the minds of the faithful in ways not so unlike John tries to address them here.
“By grace through faith” should not be treated as more inspired than “God who cannot lie.”
His first homily concerns Titus 1:1-4
Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the faith of God's elect and the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness— a faith and knowledge resting on the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie, promised before the beginning of time, and at his appointed season he brought his word to light through the preaching entrusted to me by the command of God our Savior. To Titus, my true son in our common faith: Grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Savior. (NIV)The text of the homily may be found here.
Underserved Grace
“Observe how the introduction is full of the mercies of God, and this whole epistle is especially of the same character…”
This is John’s overarching analysis of the text. It is, for all its other nuances to be discussed at length below, a text about the wonderful gifts of God to His people. Paul himself is a gift; he was made a servant of God not for his own sake or for God’s sake but as a blessing of God for the His elect.
The most glorious of these gifts, however, is that of eternal life, something which is sealed by the very fact of God’s perfection and foreknowledge. Our gift of eternal life is “not now upon a change of mind,” but has been part of God’s plan since before time began and is inviolable since God cannot lie. That this was achieved by foreknowledge rather than by a decision in time further displays the goodness of God to us since it shows “our high origin, in that He did not love us now first, but from the beginning.” John makes a particularly compelling point here that “it is no little matter to be loved…from the beginning.” Consider how much God loves us such that from before the beginning of time He had already begun to love us; before we existed, before anything existed, God had already begun an eternal, inexhaustible outpouring of love for His elect. In this love, he ordained for those elect eternal life with an unbreakable promise.
Paul even concludes, in typical fashion, by praying even greater mercies upon them: “grace and peace” from the Father.
To what end has Paul reminded us of the manifold blessings of God? John suggests “nothing profits us so much as constantly to remember the mercies of God, whether public or private.” The constant reflection on what God has done is a constant inspiration for Christians. In realizing what He has done for us, we are humbled. In realizing what He has done for us, we are stirred to do even greater works of righteousness for him. After all, “if our hearts are warmed when we receive the favors of our friends, or hear some kind word or deed of theirs, much more shall we be zealous in His service when we see into what dangers we had fallen, and that God has delivered us from them all.”
Thus, in this short exposition about God and the work that He has done through Paul for Titus and the church in Crete, we see the picture of a Father who has provided abundantly for His children. Paul in the act of writing it is imitating this example by providing also for his “true son,” Titus so that he might continue to provide for his flock. And we too should seek to live a life of response to the great blessings which have been showered on us, none more great than the promise of eternal life, ordained for us before the ages.
A Theologically Consistent Methodology
John is the beneficiary of a rich, systematized theological tradition which had not yet developed in the time of the apostle Paul. To that end, John presents some interpretations which would undoubtedly seem foreign to Paul had he read this homily and is equally likely to seem forced and eisegetical to modern readers.
For example, that Paul is “a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ” is fundamentally an anti-Arian statement for John. The fact that Paul can be something at the same time “of God” and “of Christ” here suggests that the two are coequal (or, in Nicene-Constantinopolitan language, consubstantial).
He will also develop with regard to this first part of the passage in question a doctrine of the free will activity of man in relation to God in the process of election. He begins by emphasizing that it was through God’s providential activity that the elect were entrusted to Paul. “It was wholly through the effect of His goodness who intrusted [sic] me.” This divine activity of God takes primacy in Paul’s election as an apostle, but it is not the entirety of that election, because “the whole was not of Him, for why did He not intrust [sic] it to others?” Instead, John understand Paul’s election as the act of God followed by the free will response of the apostle. He extrapolates this process onto his readers: “First we are apprehended, and afterwards we apprehend; first we are known, and then we know; first we were called, and then we obeyed.” In doing so, John believes he can at the same time say that it is in no way Paul who merited election as an apostle, that it was solely for “the sake of the faith of God’s elect,” but at the same time Paul is not chosen arbitrarily nor is he appointed apart from his response to God.
Later he will attach the reference to Titus as a “true son” to this question of the free will of man. Sonship, for John, is dependent on one’s behavior, and he cites 1 Cor 9:16 for a list of behaviors which may make one a “spurious” son. What’s more, these categories of true and spurious sonship are not absolute or static but “subject to frequent changes.” “For one who was a true son may become spurious, and a spurious son may become a true one. For it is not the force of nature, but the power of choice, on which it depends…” An example: Onesimus, who John says was a true son, become “unprofitable,” and then was restored again to true sonship. (I wonder to what degree these very early doctrinal beliefs on free will contributed to the fierce reaction to the Eastern Church when Calvinism started creeping into its doctrine.)
Finally, John’s interpretation of “truth that is after godliness” (ESV “truth, which accords with godliness) is intriguing, particularly given my recent studies on Eastern epistemology. According to John, Paul is drawing a distinction here between two types of knowledge of the truth. “For there is a truth in other things, that is not according to godliness; for knowledge in matter of agriculture, knowledge of the arts, is true knowledge.” These natural truths which are acquired naturally (i.e. through intellection and sense perception to borrow later theology) are distinct from truth which is “according to godliness.” The other kind of truth is the truth of faith which transcends rational knowledge: “This acknowledging then is from faith, and not from reasonings.”
This raises the question for the modern reader: to what degree can these four seemingly insignificant verses bear the weight of all of John’s theology? The simple answer: they can’t. But as easy as it would be to write off John’s exegesis with that matter-of-fact evaluation, there is value in his methodology even apart from the immense value of the theology which it betrays. Certainly, Titus 1:1-4 cannot be seen as the definitive text to settle the Arian, Calvinist, and Palamite controversies. (Would that it were that uncomplicated?) Nevertheless, John does provide a stark corrective to the way modern readers might normally treat these verses.
The superscriptions of Paul’s letters, and perhaps of an underappreciated letter like Titus in particular, are generally only glanced at by clergy, laymen, and scholars alike. Yet, of the six homilies recorded in NPNF that John preached on Titus (and they by no means cover the full text of the epistle), this sermon was recorded and saved for generations. John treats this passage not only with dignity and care, but with urgency as if it contained great answers to life’s questions, to the turmoil of the church, and to the personal struggles of his congregants. Each word, each sentence, is richly layered with meaning and importance. It seems to me ironic that while the Bible has assumed a theoretical importance in our day which would probably scandalize most people in the time of John, it is then and not now that we see a great plumbing of Scriptures depths. John takes what has devolved into an insignificant introductory formula and makes it a rich statement of orthodoxy meant to encourage, to vivify the faithful. He is theologically consistent in his treatment of Scripture in that he looks for God in all its parts, not only where He is most evident.
Certainly I am not suggesting that Christians ought to neglect other texts to focus on the introductions and closings of the epistles, nor do I suppose that we can found any great theologies on closer examinations of these texts. We can, however, afford to them the same respect which is afforded to the rest of Scripture and read them with the same theological presuppositions (whatever those happen to be for the reader). Paul is certainly not intending to combat Arianism in Titus 1:1, but that does not mean that his dual reference to God and Jesus does not have theological implications. And what does it mean to be a “servant” and an “apostle” for the faith of others? Is there truth which is according to godliness and how is it distinct from other truth? These are some questions, among countless others, which should be addressed by the minds of the faithful in ways not so unlike John tries to address them here.
“By grace through faith” should not be treated as more inspired than “God who cannot lie.”
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