Christianity as Comprehensive Cultural Tribunal?
July 13, 2009
Once conversation replaces confrontation, the notion of the mind as the Mirror of Nature can be discarded. Then the notion of philosophy as the discipline which looks for privileged representations among those constituting the Mirror becomes unintelligible. A thoroughgoing holism has no place for the notion of philosophy as ‘conceptual’, as ‘apodictic’, as picking out the ‘foundations’ of the rest of knowledge, as explaining which representations are ‘purely given’ or ‘purely conceptual’, as presenting a ‘canonical notation’ rather than an empirical discovery, or as isolating ‘trans-framework heuristic categories’. If we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practise, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature, we will not be likely to envisage a metapractise which will be the critique of all possible forms of social practise.
– Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), p. 170-171
In this central chapter of his well-known work, Richard Rorty rejects a dominant conception of philosophy and gestures towards his own vision of what philosophers ought to be doing with their time. Ever since Kant, he claims, philosophy has been wrongheaded as it has been concerned with the comprehensive search for foundations and justifications and consequently has come to see itself as the final adjudicator. Rorty makes much of Kant’s phrase that philosophy is to function as ‘a tribunal of reason’, which gives the impression of a special body — philosophy — sitting in cool, wise judgment over all other areas of life and thought. Rorty famously rejected this conception of philosophy, and urged philosophers not to see themselves as more privileged than practitioners of other disciplines, but rather to consider themselves as one voice in an ongoing cultural conversation with many different contributors, and urged them to keep the topic of the conversation focused on the actual human needs of a society.
My question is, ought Christianity place itself in the position that Rorty is asking philosophy to vacate? That is, should we agree with Rorty that philosophy ought not to have special priority over other disciplines, but insist that Christianity ought to have some sort of priority? Taking the tribunal metaphor a step further, ought Christianity have the warrant to comment upon all areas of life and thought in a non-reciprocal way, the way in which a tribunal is able to pass judgment on an individual whilst the individual is not able to scrutinize the workings of the tribunal?
Rorty argues that the Kantian conception of philosophy emerged because it followed Descartes and Locke in establishing the mind as a separate entity and a particular field of inquiry. Hence, philosophy was in the business of explaining how the mind functioned and consequently what constituted genuine knowledge and how it was attainable. This then gave philosophy a self-assured sort of dominance over every other discipline – it was the business of philosophy to have the final word on whether the claims others disciplines were making could actually be justified. Whenever a claim was made from the fields of politics, anthropology, physics, art, religion, gender studies, law or chemistry – philosophy was able to step in with its special access to the workings of the mind and the conditions of knowledge and dissipate the fog by designating certain claims valid or objective, and others nonfalsifiable or speculative.
I suspect it is the gut reaction of Christians to laugh this off as human hubris and, once we are finished laughing, to say something about how philosophy can’t do that, but Christianity can do something like that.
Why is that?
What is the unique subject matter which Christianity has privileged access to? And how does this access qualify us to comment upon all other areas of life, culture and thought? Does Christianity even want to be, in Rorty’s words, ‘a metapractise which can be the critique of all possible forms of social practise’, or is Christianity altogether something different, and so ought to remain silent or neutral on some things?
Great stuff.
I believe the way it works, from Scripture and history, is this:
The church humbly obeys the Bible concerning both worship and morality. If it is faithful is self-judgment, God gives it dominion over the surrounding culture (modern evangelicalism, like Adam is trying to grasp dominion without obedience).
All of the wonderful strengths and beauties of our culture flowed out of the church.
To answer your question, if the Bible replaces philosophy in the church, the Bible will replace philosophy in the culture. Judgment begins at the house of God.
I wrote a (slightly) related article today here:
http://www.bullartistry.com.au/wp/2009/07/13/communist-theology/
hey.. another interesting post.
i do find it slightly surprising that you imply that christianity is a sort of ‘discipline’.
“should we agree with Rorty that philosophy ought not to have special priority over other disciplines, but insist that Christianity ought to have some sort of priority?”
i always viewed religions as belief systems rather than as disciplines or modes of analysis. There are people who look at christianity philosophically, people who analyse it scientifically, psychologically, etc. But i never viewed christianity as a discipline in itself.
Disciplines such as physics or philosophy are not, and cannot, be based on an inquestionable text or dogma. The whole notion of a discipline (in my understanding) is that it employs recognisable forms of analysis, but does not include any fundamental precepts. In other words, although dominant beliefs emerge within any given discipline, these are always open to scrutiny and will be overturned with time.
Now christianity, which is based on the bible, seems completely different to this. Although there is clearly huge variation amongst christians with regard to how literally the bible should be interpreted, mustn’t they all accept certain indubitable truths about God and Jesus?
In my experience, at least some christians take the bible very literally and accept that it is the word of the divine, although it was written by mortal men. (of course, some of them seem to be quite selective in what they take literally – ie. passages on homosexuality vs. passages on shellfish and corporal punishment.) Speaking of human hubris… it seems to me incredible that a person could believe that a single piece of human literature could capture the divine will (whatever that may be) and exert any kind of meta-dominance over our intellectual horizons and social structures.
hope i haven’t offended you.
what do u think?
– Lucy
Hi Mike,
Thanks for you thoughts. I agree with you about ‘judgment starts with the house of God’, and often changes within the church can result in the church having a greater positive impact upon society.
What do you mean by ‘God gives it dominion over the surrounding culture’?
Also, your comment about the Bible needing to replace philosophy within contemporary churches intrigues me – where do you see this happening?
I’ll check out your article – it’s certainly got a catchy name!
Hi Tim
Thanks for your reply.
I believe the gospel will be victorious in history. But this isn’t achieved in our strength. As the church is faithful, like Joseph, and like Christ, God gives it dominion on a platter. It will always be separate from state (like Jachin and Boaz) but the advisor able to open the mystery of God at the ruler’s right hand (again, like Joseph and like Christ).
I recommend reading ‘The Dominion Trap’ by James Jordan:
http://www.biblicalhorizons.com/biblical-horizons/no-15-the-dominion-trap/
Regarding philosophy in the church, I think we have moved so far from biblical thinking that the Bible is strange to us. It is not just about salvation, but about growth to maturity and cultural dominance. The Reformers understood this. The early church understood this. But it is dominance through service and sacrifice and most often it is blood-bought. It is dominance given to the church the same way that the Father gave all authority to the Son.
I have nothing against philosophy, but so often Christian philosophy is dangerously adrift from and ignorant of the patterns we see in the Bible.
Hey Lucy,
Thanks for your thoughts. You’ve gone right to the heart of a vagueness I was hoping would go unchecked for a while! I’ve been referring to Christianity in pretty loose terms, and you’re right, it doesn’t easily fit into a description of a discipline as a field of inquiry or method of analysis, and probably is better described as a religious belief system.
But for some reason, I feel like it’s accurate in a way to speak of Christianity in this way. Perhaps because it is a certain way of seeing the world, and it is able to provide a framework from within which to conduct analysis or inquiry. Perhaps a better description of this would be ‘theology’, which would then only be a part of Christianity. I guess I am still thinking through how to clarify this, but I don’t agree that it ought to be written off as a discipline altogether. I suspect the reason I think this is because as a Christian I hold views of subjects which are the outcome of thinking and analysis, rather then checking the book for the answers. An example is torture. In my reading, I’ve never come across anything in the bible that forbids torture, but I hold that I have Christian reasons for thinking torture is abhorrent.
Your thoughts on the place of the bible and the foundations of a discipline are thought provoking. But I disagree that Christianity is fundamentally of a different kind to those disciplines which ‘employs recognizable forms of analysis, and do not include any fundamental precepts’. It seems like heaps of disciplines have fundamental precepts which require ascent before you can fruitfully contribute to that discipline – these could be as vague as granting in psychology that all people have minds or in quantum physics that it is not odd for particles to spontaneously decay – both premises which have been controversial at some time. Theology as a discipline does require ascent to certain truths about God and Jesus from the Bible, but I don’t think that this has to set it aside as completely different to other disciplines, since they also require ascent to claims which have been justified within their tradition/area.
Your questions about interpretation of the bible, and the Christian claim that it was written by God feels like a Big question to tackle here! But I can see how it is related as other areas of inquiry don’t claim that God wrote their textbook, as it were.
Thanks for your thoughts – and no offense taken at all!
p.s. just on your remark about Christians being selective- i hear you on this one! To take your example of homosexuality, the number of times the New Testament mentions greed and worshiping money completely dwarfs the number of times it mentions homosexuality. This is really neither here nor there, and doesn’t say anything about the reliability of the bible – but shows Christians do tend towards having selective hearing!
Lucy,
Don’t forget that much of modern philosophical method (in both analytic and continental traditions) came from (or at least came via and was modified by) the scholastic Christian theologians. I mean, what we now refer to as hermeneutics, or the art of understanding (of reading, of interpreting) comes from interpreting the Bible!
Tim,
To take the tribunal metaphor even further, tribunals themselves are subject to review and oversight by which the person subjected to judgment is allowed to ‘scrutinise the workings of the tribunal’, at least the procedural workings. Could we conceptualise of theology in the same way? I mean, from an outsider’s perspective, I understand the search for understanding of God to be at the same time a search for self-understanding. In this way biblical authority becomes much more open – any interpretation of it is both checked against and is a check upon our consciences. I guess this then becomes a question of the ‘privilege’ that attaches to a religious doctrine… a matter of whether Christianity ought remain silent where it does not claim privilege, or whether it can speak, but see itself as one voice amongst others?
yarran,
I am not unaware of the influence that christian philosophers, or even christianity, has had. I don’t see how that changes the issue of whether a belief system based on a book containing certain sancrosact truths can be regarded as a discipline unto itself, capable of judging the validity of other scholarship. care to elaborate?
tim,
thanks for your reply.
“It seems like heaps of disciplines have fundamental precepts which require ascent before you can fruitfully contribute to that discipline” –
i am not sure about the examples you have used.
Not all psychologists agree that all people have discrete minds – Jung comes to mind? Now i don’t know anything about quantum physics but is it really impossible that scientists might change their mind about the spontaneous decay of particles? I dont know.
Anyway, I guess the reason i like philosophy is that, more than any other disicpline, it strives to avoid any underlying assumptions. i think it is for that reason that philosophers feel that they can judge all areas of life. they feel they are at a remove from the bias of other diciplines. i don’t actually think it is because philosophy involves a “comprehensive search for foundations and justifications” that philosophers feel they can adjudicate. I think there are philosophers who do not see themselves as final-truth-seekers yet would still like to be able to comment on all areas of scholarship. so maybe i disagree a little with rorty.
christianity is certainly a way of seeing the world – as is Marxism, Newtonian Physics etc. But that doesn’t mean it provides sound justifications within itself. for instance, you may feel that you have Christian reasons for thinking torture is abhorrent, but you probably wouldnt try to convince your classmates of the status of torture by referring to god’s will would you? I dunno, maybe you would, but i wouldn’t be convinced!
the reality is that not everyone are christians, and plenty of people subscribe to no religion at all. therefore the idea that christian scripture could be used to judge the validity of other ideas contradicts everything i take to be good debate. in rationalistic terms it seems unreasonable, and in non-rationalistic terms it seems like a failure to enlarge one’s mind outside one’s own cultural niche. either way, it strikes me as hubris and poor judgement.
i simply do not think that any scripture or doctrine should be given that power, not the bible, not das kapital, not the koran etc. I think there are important elements of all these books and I have a lot more to learn from them. But any disicpline/belief system that does not update its textbook makes me nervous! Especially when people (selectively) cling on to elements of the books that are clearly relics of the socio-historical context in which they were written.
I guess this gets back to my incredulousness that a book physically transcribed by mortal men could capture the divine will. I don’t understand how, if someone truly believed that there was an infinite divine force that contrasts with our mortal finitude as humans, they could believe that His infinite will could be contained in a book written by humans. I might even go as far as to say that the belief in an infinite divine seems to CONTRADICT the worshipping of an unchanging book. It makes more sense to me to view God/ the infinite Other as something which continually makes us call into question, and revise, our moral principles – which are neccessarily historically conditioned, finite, not divine.
cheers
Hi Tim
Your thoughts inspired me to write a post on this concept through biblical history. It is at:
http://www.bullartistry.com.au/wp/2009/07/14/church-and-state/
Let me know if you are not happy about it.
Kind regards,
Mike
P.S. You are a master of the gracious reply.
Thanks for all the comments, guys!
Yarran, I totally agree with you. A tribunal can be reflexive or scrutinized from outside. No need to conceive of it as a static thing. And your suggestion suggets a hermeneutics which I would be quite happy with.
Lucy, thanks for unpakcing your thoughts more. I like your reasons for being attracted to philosophy, but I can’t answer all your points right now! I feel like this is central point that was driving the rest:
‘the reality is that not everyone are christians, and plenty of people subscribe to no religion at all. therefore the idea that christian scripture could be used to judge the validity of other ideas contradicts everything i take to be good debate.’
I totally take your point about this making for poor debate – being a ‘conversation stopper’ as my friend Rorty would say. I don’t have answers for this right now, but I’ll keep thinking about it, and hope to post more on this topic.
However, I think we are on the same page about something:
‘But any disicpline/belief system that does not update its textbook makes me nervous!’ – I agree!
Christians are always going to be pretty immovable on certain issues – the existence of God, the purpose of the death and resurrection of Jesus and such big things like that. But part of the task of theology – what I have sloppily been referring to as Christianity – is to attempt to think about the world now given these premises. This is different from trying to over-simplify the world, or ignoring present real needs. I see it more like theatresports or taking a solo in jazz – you don’t just repeat what came before, you improvise and move the story forward, but always being mindful of what came before of what key you are playing in. For example, take climate change or peak oil: Christianity doesn’t ignore these real needs of NOW in order to affirm an ancient worldview, but, mindful of the propositions it is convinced about, seeks new answers. This is different to philosophy, but I still don’t find it to be outrageously different.
Mike – No problem at all, I’m glad to hear my post has stimulated further discussion! I’ll be sure to have a read of your post – thanks for the link.