Per Caritatem

Ben Myers, our favorite Australian theologian at Faith and Theology, has kindly asked me to write a “guest post” on Jean-Luc Marion. If you are interested, take a look and while you are there spend some time lingering on Ben’s прекрасный blog.

It is interesting to compare and contrast Aristotle’s account of how philosophy arises in history with Plato’s account and methodology. Aristotle takes a more systematic approach, whereas Plato’s style is more mythical.  In his work, Timaeus, Plato considers what the conditions would have to be for the cosmos to come about, and presents us with the demiurge (craftsman) and the eternal model. 

The demiurge is presupposed in Timaeus’ account, rather than argued for, yet, he is essential to the account.  Likewise, Timaeus doesn’t argue for the necessity of the eternal model, rather, the eternal model becomes the grounding for the truth. Later philosophers, Platonists in particular, reflect a great deal on the difference between the demiurge and the eternal model, and eventually want to conflate them into the same being.  Plato does not do this, but instead he keeps the duality. 

So we have the eternal model and the demiurge who acts to bring the eternal model into the visible.  The demiurge of whom we are only told that he is good, creates on the basis of the eternal model.  So we are given the postulation of an eternal model and then a visible world that comes to be on the basis of that eternal model.  Here Plato is assuming the physics of his day.  Could there be anything outside of those fixed stars, and if so, does it have characteristics that we cannot see, but that others can?  The cosmos according to this account is alive, but does it have a life outside what we see?  Timaeus says, “no,”—there cannot be many cosmoi (contra Democritus).

The demiurge wants to make the visible world as good as possible.  The eternal model is also good, so the demiurge wants to make the visible world as much like the eternal model as possible. 

Interestingly, Timaeus begins his argument with a prayer, and thus sets the account in a mythic context.  The first thing he does is to make a distinction between what always is and what becomes.  (N.b., We are still in a Parmenidean world. Thus, Timaeus must isolate what always is and what becomes). What comes to be, has to have a cause.  With this, we are moving beyond Parmenides because Parmenides says that the world of motion is deception, and he doesn’t attempt to give an account for the orderliness of the world.   Timaeus, however, does want to account for the orderliness of the world, and his account involves a causal sequence.  Here we have to keep in mind that Being is grasped by understanding, and becoming deals with opinion.  Becoming therefore must have a cause.  So Timaeus asks about the cosmos and whether it has a cause.  After all, the cosmos has a body (it is visible and tangible) and thus it must have a cause (28b).  In other words, his argument is that becoming must have a cause, so the world that we see is one of these things that has come to be and must have a cause.  Both the parts and the whole world must have a cause.  To account for this cause, Timaeus gives us the eternal model and the demiurge. 

Then at 29b he takes a break and says a bit about the method of his account and says that accounts of what is a only likeness are themselves not completely accurate.   Here Plato continues the tradition of skepticism about those things that come to be. He does not dismiss them as deceptive (as Parmenides did), but he does qualify the truth in regard to what we can say about things in the visible realm, viz., these are opinions.  They do not give us an account of eternal being, but only of the visible cosmos.  In other words, accounts of things in the visible realm are not perfect—how can they because they are about what themselves are shifting.  So the character of our discourse will be unstable when we speak about that which itself is unstable.  (Later, Aristotle will say also that the natural sciences have the character of the stories that we tell).   One way to interpret what is going on here is that everything that we hear in the Timeaus Plato himself does not think is true, but rather considers as opinion and something always subject to revision. The idea being that if we can come up with accounts more likely than not, then we should be satisfied.    

Tim Enloe at Societas Christiana has recently posted a very interesting series on hermeneutics and modernity many of which come from his reading and reflections from, Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992. The posts are as follows:

1. “What’s All That White Space Around the Text?”
2. “On the Four-Fold Sense Hermeneutic of Medieval Expositors”
3. “Spinoza and the Development of Cartesian Hermeneutics”
4. “Cartesian Hermeneutics and the Bible as Passive Object“

Below are selected passages (with minimal commentary here and there) from Peter Enns’ article, “Apostolic Hermeneutics and an Evangelical Doctrine of Scripture: Moving beyond a Modernist Impasse.” (The article originally appeared in the Fall 2003 issue of the Westminster Theological Journal).

Personally, I found the article extremely helpful and would recommend it, as well as Enns’ book, Inspiration And Incarnation: Evangelicals And The Problem Of The Old Testament, to those interested in engaging hermeneutical issues from a distinctively Christian point of view. (Because I am citing the passages from an electronic copy of the article, there are no “page numbers” to cite. My copy of the original article as published in the WTJ is packed in a box, as we are preparing to move into our first home this week!) Lastly, if anyone wants an electronic copy of the article in its entirety, email me and I’ll be happy to send it your way.*******
In his article, Enns argues that “the Apostles’ hermeneutical goal (or agenda), the centrality of the death and resurrection of Christ, must be also ours by virtue of the fact that we share the same eschatological moment. This is why we must follow them precisely with respect to their Christotelic hermeneutic.” Consequently, if we employ a Christotelic hermeneutic, we cannot simply treat the OT primarily literally (a “first reading”), as this does not lead to a Christotelic reading (a “second reading”).

Rather, “a Christian understanding of the OT should begin with what God revealed to the Apostles and what they model for us: the centrality of the death and resurrection of Christ for OT interpretation. We, too, are living at the end of the story; we are engaged in the second reading by virtue of our eschatological moment, which is now as it was for the Apostles the last days, the inauguration of the eschaton. We bring the death and resurrection of Christ to bear on the OT. Again, this is not a call to flatten out the OT, so that every psalm or proverb speaks directly and explicitly of Jesus. It is, however, to ask oneself, ‘What difference does the death and resurrection of Christ make for how I understand this proverb?’ It is the recognition of our privileged status to be living in the post-resurrection cosmos that must be reflected in our understanding of the OT. Therefore, if what claims to be Christian proclamation of the OT simply remains in the pre-eschatological moment—simply reads the OT ‘on its own terms’—such is not a Christian proclamation in the apostolic sense.”

Enns then asks, “Just how far do we follow the exegetical methods used by the Apostles?” Given that we did not live in the Second Temple period, we cannot follow the Apostles in toto, i.e., we do not have the authority to omit, add or change words as the Apostles often freely did. However, this is not to endorse a strict grammatico-historical approach (GH), because that approach will not yield a Christotelic reading. So is a Christotelic approach just a better “method” than the GH orientation? Here Enns is instructive and asks, “what if ‘method,’ so understood, is not as central a concept as we might think? What if biblical interpretation is not guided so much by method but by an intuitive, Spirit-led engagement of Scripture with the anchor being not what the author intended but by how Christ gives the OT its final coherence?” It is not “method” per se that serves as the impetus of apostolic hermeneutics, rather the arrival of Christ necessitates new exegetical horizons. Thus, speaking in terms of Apostolic exegetical “methods,” is likely to lead us astray.

Enns goes on to say that this is in part why he has been attracted to Biblical Theology (BT) of the Vosian flavor. By BT, Enns has in mind the sense in which Vos used the term, viz., as the “self-revelation of God” as recorded in the Bible. [1]. Further explicating Vos’ notion, Enns writes, “Inherent in Vos’s conception of Biblical Theology are such notions as the progress of redemption culminating in the person and work of Christ in whom Scripture coheres, while also showing a respect for theological diversity as a function of the historical situatedness of revelation. Both of these dimensions of Biblical Theology are central to the thoughts I have outlined here. Such an approach to biblical interpretation is not a “method” that assures a stable exegetical result, but a spiritual exercise wherein a Christian looks at Scripture from the point of view of what she/he knows to be true—Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again—and reads the OT with the expectation that it somehow coheres in that fact. Perhaps Biblical Theology is as much about where one starts as it is about where one finishes. From a more explicitly ‘methodological’ point of view, I have tended to focus on such things as links (both on the lexical and larger syntactical levels) between various portions of Scripture as well as larger OT themes that either explicitly or subvocally come to completion in Christ. But these ‘methods’ do not determine the Christotelic conclusion. Rather, they are employed with the end result already in mind. This is also true for those portions of the OT that have been resistant (and for good reason) to typology, namely, Wisdom Literature. And again, this is why I find the term “Christocentric” unhelpful. Christ is not the ‘center’ of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, but he is the ‘end.’ As in-Christ beings participating in the last days, we are obliged to think of how that status impinges upon what a proverb or Ecclesiastes ‘means.’ And the ‘method’ by which these horizons are bridged is a creative, intentional, purposeful exploration that moves back and forth between the words on the page and the eschatological context that we share with the Apostles but that the OT authors did not.”

Notes
[1] Geerhardus Vos, Biblical Theology: Old and New Testaments (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948), 5.

The following analogies constitute “sketchy” and “nascent” thoughts regarding our embracing rather than eschewing the human element in Scripture, while simultaneously not allowing the human aspect to swallow up the divine and not simply giving “lip service” to the biblical notion of God as Lord over all (including history and the entire process of revelation).

Beginning first with a musical example. Let’s says that the famous cellist, Yo-Yo Ma is given a Bach piece to play, and Russian cellist is given the same piece as well. Both play the same notes on the written page, yet we can hear a difference between the two performances. That is, we can sense that, e.g., Yo-Yo Ma is playing the piece because we recognize his “touch” just as we recognize the familiar voice of our spouse or friend. This personality element in no way makes the piece unintelligible or defiled, but rather adds something beautiful. If you are not convinced, consider the difference between a symphonic piece programmed into a computer or synthesizer verses a piece performed by live musicians. The former will be executed with mathematical precision—not one mistake will occur. However, the effect is a “stiffness” and “inauthenticity,” as we sense a loss of the living, breathing, human element that animates music. The live performance, on the other hand, will indeed contain “mistakes,” slight bendings of notes that cause the tuning to be off here and there, slight rhythmic glitches etc. Yet, with the live performers there is a dynamic and improvisatory element (yes, even in classical music) that comes to life in the performance—e.g., the way that the orchestra intimately follows the crescendos and dimuendos of a solo by the violinist.

Additionally, I am not convinced that the personal element somehow stands between the “original” and the interpretation in a way that harms the (multi-layered) meaning. When we consider Scripture, we see that God has purposed that human personality be part of His work and is so intimately and dynamically involved in his revelatory activity that the levels of meaning that He desires are neither skewed nor lost. Turning to a contrasting (musical) example, Edgar Varese (a French-born composer during the rise of modernism in America) in many ways exemplifies the modern quest for “objectivity.” Varese’s music gradually became more and more machine-like until he eventually proposed using actual machines instead of people to “get rid” of the “middle man” (the interpreter) – the one causing a “block” between what he heard in his head and how it the music is actually played.

As many Christian thinkers have brought to our attention, we as Christians ought to (in the spirit of Augustine) glean the postmodern “gold.” Along these lines, John Frame writes, “postmodernism has rejected fundamental norms for historical study […] the discussion of postmodernism has made it clear that even the commitment to consistency is not religiously or even culturally neutral. Is logic in the tradition of Aristotle and Russell, after all, a necessity for human thought, or is it merely a form of Western, linear thinking, by which wealthy cultures oppress those who think in paradox?” With Frame, I would agree that postmodernism’s rejection of modernism’s lust for “objectivity” is something that we as Christians can (and should) maximize in our apologetic (and of course place within the proper presuppositional context—i.e., within the Christian metanarrative–i.e., Creation, Fall, Redemption in Christ, and Final Consumation of all things in Christ–[not "metanarrative" in Lyotard's sense]).

A second analogy involves a brief consideration of the ways in which scientific paradigms have changed and been replaced by new paradigms over the course of history. Many physicists today would simply consider Newton’s laws as “obvious,” yet in surveying the history of science during the 16th and 17th centuries one would quickly recognize that that prior to Newton, such laws were anything but “obvious.” The paradigm was in no way “fixed” and given this situation any number of solutions to e.g., the problem of motion, were theoretically possible. Prior to Newton, many tried to account for motion in terms of an Aristotelian paradigm, yet this worldview was considered too laden with teleological notions and mystical “movers” exerting force over objects so as to keep them in motion. Then there were those who preferred the Cartesian account of the universe as a mechanistic, clock-work system. Descartes himself thought that he was doing the Church a service with his mechanistic theory and other writings, as he believed that his findings helped to support the position of a rational universe. However, Descartes’ mechanistic framework (as Hume rightly observed) actually works completely contrary to foundational doctrines of the Christian faith (e.g. God’s providence).

Combing the music and philosophy of science snippets, it seems that we have to admit that our paradigms (scientific or otherwise) have been “wrong.” Why could we not think of these different worldviews (i.e., Aristotelian or Cartesian or Newtonian etc.) in a way similar to how we view the divine/human element in Scripture, i.e., God is the Lord of history over these various and changing (scientific) worldviews, and He (knowing the end from the beginning) knows what paradigm will best comport with the corresponding conceptual categories of a certain period in history, thus allowing (ordaining?) that paradigm to basically “prevail,” which in turn provides a certain unity and explanatory power necessary for that time period. Such a suggestion seems to me to harmonize with our idea of God as incomprehensible and with e.g. a Poythress-inspired kind of multiperspectivalism. Stating this in a colloquial manner, given our inability to “wrap our minds around” this Triune God, his revelation, the Truth etc., God—who of course has known this from the “beginning,”—has accommodated us accordingly.

What is postmodernism? This is no doubt not an easy question. On the one hand, given its name, we might say that post-modernism is a reaction to modernity. The term “post-modern,” however, was not originally coined in philosophy, but was first used in architecture in the 1950’s by Charles Jenks in his, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. The title itself at first has an odd rings to it, as language has to do with signification. But perhaps it is not so strange if we consider Jenks’ point to be that edifices necessarily “speak.” In his book, Jenks celebrates the death of modern architecture. His criticism is not that the buildings were destroyed by the communities that erected them for aesthetic reasons, but rather because they attracted crime. Hence, the insight is that human beings could not really exist in these buildings (neither in the structure nor in the theory). The buildings are inhuman—they do not speak, and thus they do not provide meaning/significance. In effect, they rest on the principle of immanence and are produced for “efficiency.” People will eventually reject such rigid environments that are no doubt “rational” but have the smell of death. (Here I can’t help but think of the apartment buildings –доми—in Russia that consist in pre-made concrete squares). The building are “rational,” yet they do not give people any meaning. In contrast, consider pre-modern architecture, in which the structures overflow with meaning. (Again, I think of the beautiful churches in Russia—церкви и соборы—that scream transcendence). With these building, definite patterns of behavior are suggested. Consequently, one does not have to invent meaning ex nihilo, whereas the modern, “rational” buildings demand that one create meaning. The modern buildings are not transcendent; they point only to their own sufficiency. In contrast, pre-modern church buildings point beyond themselves and overflow with transcendence.

So does Jenks suggest that we start building pre-modern structures again? No. Jenks acknowledges that many new construction practices have been introduced and that history itself won’t allow us to capture times past. Rather, he suggests that we build buildings that e.g., use modern materials and innovations, which simultaneously negate modernity through perhaps an eccentric shape or something that communicates “openness” and not just closed-in space.

Relating this back to a more straightforward philosophical focus, there is of course “good” and “bad” postmodernism. “Bad” postmodernism simply becomes a kind of game and language is no longer taken seriously. “Good” postmodernism, such as what we find in Jean-Luc Marion, embraces finitude and sees creation as iconic. In fact, Christian thinkers like Marion are doing an excellent job engaging positively and meaningfully with the postmodern movement, and in so doing Christianity is given a voice in circles that would otherwise prefer that that voice be silenced.