Modernism, Post-Modernism and the Triune God as Lord of History
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.
4 Responses so far
3:08 pm
OK, Cynthia, I want to push against your Van Tillianism lurking between the lines of these “sketchy” and “nascent” thoughts. I don’t want to start an argument with you over presuppositionalism per se; rather, I’d like to indicate an alternative project that is sensitive to many of the same concerns that you have written about here and in other posts. (I apologize in advance; this comment is going to be ridiculously long!)
The basic phenomenon that is at issue here, I think, is the situation in which we “connect” with things in experience, history, language, and knowledge. In the West, we have attempted to grasp this basic situation from the standpoint of answers to statements of problems. It is the very posing of problems, the speculative questions like “What is being?” that occur when we stand up in the midst of that which is (also) in being. These are not answerable questions, if answering is prescribed in advance and in its style by the idea of the way intramundane things are defined. What is unique to the speculative question, then, is not the final determination of analytic work on an answer, but that the question develops. So, describing the history of ideas or philosophy with the category of paradigms is privileging the variations over the theme, if you will permit the awkward musical analogy!
A speculative project is guided by a historically conditioned analytic framework, but the project itself develops even while it is guided by the search for possible answers according to specific historical constraints. What counts, therefore, is the unrelenting grip upon our wonder by which the question remains as a question, i.e., through “changing worldviews.”
What I think the presuppositional analytic fails to grasp is precisely the force of such questions such as “Where am I?” and “How did I get into the world?” Their force derives from the inescapable and insistent experiential engagement with that-which-is. What the presuppositionalist overlooks is her own presupposition: that such questions, which assume the “topos” of being and are lodged within it, can be seen from a stance that is utopic, i.e., that through an internal treatment of external questions, it is possible to exit from the topos, the world wherein we are there in being with beings.
The speculative questions I’ve mentioned highlight this contrast and show the privilege that presuppositionalism invests in epistemology. As the analysis of knowledge, it works internally in the discussion of “agreement” between a proposition and knowledge and between knowledge and reality, or in the discussion of validity, proof and verification, or, more generally, in any discussion of the way a “subject” meets reality as an “object.” You see how the topos is presupposed in all of this? All such investigations are thus internal to the global situation they presuppose. But what is left as remainder is just this topos itself, on the basis of which the speculative questions emerged, and which cannot be inquired into by the very practices that depend upon it. We cannot pose the question of the topos in terms conditioned within the topos itself. And so back we come again to the problem of trying to do this while knowing full well that we cannot exit the topos to do so.
What it is possible to do, however, is to indicate that topos. So, statements or “theories” of truth then, are not some kind of definitive name for this topos (e.g., “disclosure”), but are quite simply metaphors. But this is a special kind of metaphor that is grounded in the basic experience of our being in the world among beings and in some way “knowing” them (things “make sense” before we thematize them or reflect upon their sensibility and/or our sense-making). This metaphor works by way of noticing a problem ensemble, but one that cannot be dealt with within the framework of adequacy-seeking intuitional evidence (which I take Van Tillian investigation to be).
So our answers to speculative matters cannot delineate and fill in a gap. The “answers,” rather, maintain the gap. Different “paradigms” do not replace the questions with a fully positive knowing (later to be changed out with the newest model), but rather defer the questions in continual questioning. Rather than be unnerved by the “unresting question,” we theists should be defined by it. We are not in pursuit of something that is missing, that is still outstanding, but of a knowing about the known, in a way that is driven into a “deeper” knowing, i.e., the dimension of faith. So, I would take the proper field of investigation for a christian philosopher to be radical reflection, always dynamic, on that same experiential engagement that all human beings are in the grip of: temporality, language, life, solitude, world, community. My hope in the Incarnate One impels me to look for the fingerprints of the Triune God who is the “Lord of History” externally in the speculative matters of just such interminable questionings.
4:06 pm
Hi Joel,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Your suggestion is very interesting and seems to me (though I may be off here) to be a kind of Christian, Heideggarian, phenomenological approach. If this is the case, I am not so sure that many of VT’s concerns or even methodology would be un-harmonizable with much of what you describe. For example, you wrote: “What is unique to the speculative question, then, is not the final determination of analytic work on an answer, but that the question develops.” The flavor of presuppositionalism to which I adhere would not find this repugnant. Also, you write: “So, describing the history of ideas or philosophy with the category of paradigms is privileging the variations over the theme, if you will permit the awkward musical analogy!” Why couldn’t one describe the history of ideas in such a way and at the same time not consider this the only description possible, but rather one aspect of the whole? (By the way—I like the musical analogy—very nice).
Regarding, “What I think the presuppositional analytic fails to grasp is precisely the force of such questions such as “Where am I?” and “How did I get into the world?” Their force derives from the inescapable and insistent experiential engagement with that-which-is.” Why is this necessarily the case? Perhaps you have in mind a more Clarkian version of presuppositionalism? I do not see why VT or Dooyeweerd would fit this critique.
Lastly, how does special revelation fit into what you have described here? “But what is left as remainder is just this topos itself, on the basis of which the speculative questions emerged, and which cannot be inquired into by the very practices that depend upon it. We cannot pose the question of the topos in terms conditioned within the topos itself. And so back we come again to the problem of trying to do this while knowing full well that we cannot exit the topos to do so.”
I really liked what you wrote here—again, I see no reason why my brand of presuppositionalism (though I hate calling it an –ism) would not comport with this: “Rather than be unnerved by the “unresting question,” we theists should be defined by it. We are not in pursuit of something that is missing, that is still outstanding, but of a knowing about the known, in a way that is driven into a “deeper” knowing, i.e., the dimension of faith. So, I would take the proper field of investigation for a christian philosopher to be radical reflection, always dynamic, on that same experiential engagement that all human beings are in the grip of: temporality, language, life, solitude, world, community.”
Again, thank you for your thoughtfulness and for engaging this topic,
Cynthia
10:45 pm
I’ve appreciated your VT fueled interaction with past and current philosophical trends. My trajectory is similar to yours – - member of PCPC, applied to U of D, but our sovereign God has called me to pastoral ministry in the PCA in Canada rather than academia.
One question (though not an accusation mind you) is regarding this sovereign God working through changing paradigms: How would you answer the open theist who welcomes you into their fold since you are now positing God’s “flexibility”?
9:25 pm
Dear Revgot,
What do you mean by “God’s flexibility?” My position is in no way harmonizable with open theism’s teaching that God “changes.”
Cynthia
p.s. I am writing from Starbucks, as we do not have interact access at our new place yet, so this is a relatively quick email. However, after I hear more from you, I can address you question in more detail.
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