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.

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”?

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

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.