Knowledge
It is ironic that Paul has suffered a reputation as a dogmatist, often considered the first doctrinaire, authoritarian, know-it-all theologian of Christianity. Admittedly, Paul can come across as authoritarian at times: “Shall I come to you with a rod?” (1 Cor 4:21); “I consider myself not at all inferior to these ‘superapostles’” (2 Cor 11:5); “If I come again, I will not hold back” (2 Cor 13:2).
But this is the same author who otherwise demurs about what he claims he knows, what any person can know, about God. Paul quotes Isa 40:13, “Who has known the mind of God?” (Rom 11:34). At least in this context, we are doubtless to assume that Paul’s implied answer would be, “No one!” Paul insists that we mere human beings, even apostles, must accept the inscrutability of God’s will, even to the point of not understanding whom God chooses to save or not (Rom 11:33). Elsewhere, Paul quotes the same passage from Isaiah but follows it up by saying that believers, because of the spirit, actually do “have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16). The context, however, indicates that what Paul means is that we have enough of the guidance of the spirit to recognize that what is “foolishness to the world”—in particular, the crucifixion of the son of God—actually constitutes the “wisdom and power of God.” But that does not detract from Paul’s insistence that our knowledge, especially about God, is limited.
In other contexts Paul first makes some positive statement about knowing God but then remarkably retracts it and seems to correct himself. To the Galatians, Paul first writes, “Now that you have come to know God” but then reverses himself from the active to the passive voice, “or rather to be known by God . . .” (Gal 4:9; my emphasis). Paul makes a similar move in 1 Corinthians: “Anyone claiming to know does not yet know; but whoever loves God is known by him” (8:2–3; my emphasis). In fact, this is a foreshadowing in the letter of the much more famous passage that perhaps should be studied less for what it says about weddings and romantic love than about the much less romantic notion of Christian agape and its relationship to knowledge: I mean chapter 13.
The chapter begins with the relationship between love and speaking in tongues, or glossolalia: “Even if I speak in human or angelic languages, but do not have love, I am merely a loud gong or clanging cymbal” (13:1). But Paul quickly brings in the much more important relationship of love to knowledge: “Even if I have [the gift of] prophecy and I know all mysteries and all knowledge . . .” (13:2). After his justifiably famous and moving description of love—and in our sentimentally obsessed culture we must constantly remind ourselves that Paul is speaking not of romantic love but of ethical concern and action for others—Paul returns to knowledge: “Love never fails. Though there are now prophecies, they will end; though there are tongues, they will cease; though there is knowledge, it will come to an end. For we [now] know in fragments and we prophesy in fragments” (13:8–9). And then the climax: “For we see now as if in an enigmatic mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in fragments, but then I will know just as I have been known. For now, faith, hope, and love remain, these three. And the greatest of them is love” (12–13).
Note how Paul concludes the section with an echo of the theme of “being known” we have seen him use elsewhere—precisely in order to emphasize the lack of certain knowledge we human beings can expect to experience in this life. Paul admits that he was known, and here the implication is “by God.” And in the eschaton, at the end of time, he will finally know as he has been known. Note also that of all the attributes and virtues Paul ascribes to love—it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—Paul never says that love “knows all things.” Love, like us, also must wait in order to know. We as Christians don’t know; we believe.
Paul’s reticence about what we currently know is not matched by those New Testament letters later written in his name by his followers and imitators. The author of Colossians, a later follower and imitator of Paul, expects full knowledge, even for his readers. He prays for them, “in order that you might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, that you may live worthily of the Lord in all sufficiency, in every good work bearing fruit and growing in the knowledge of God” (Col 1:9–10). This writer may have good reasons to claim that he and his readers already possess all knowledge they need for salvation. Apparently, he was writing to refute claims by other Christians that they possessed extra or special “knowledge” or “salvation” needed by the Colossians. So he writes to insist that the Colossians already have sufficient knowledge for salvation.
Later still, the author of Ephesians imitates the author of Colossians (who was attempting to imitate Paul, we remember, though in these points he departed from Paul’s own theology) in claiming full possession even of “the heavenlies.” His readers, he insists, have already been filled with “all wisdom and knowledge,” or φρόνησις (Eph 1:8). God has already “made known” to them “the mystery of his will” (1:9). These sentiments may well be understandable if these authors were defending “Paul’s gospel” against teachers who were offering something “more”—a “more” they were claiming was essential for salvation, but the assurances of Colossians and Ephesians show the extent to which later disciples of Paul would go beyond Paul’s much more eschatologically reserved epistemology.
In fact, Paul’s radically reserved epistemology allows us to rethink a modernist assumption that we no longer need or can afford: the assumption that there is a difference in kind, a foundationalist difference between belief and knowledge. As critical theorists have argued and demonstrated in the past few decades, the actual difference that can be demonstrated between what we normally distinguish as knowledge as opposed to belief is simply a difference in degree of assurance about things we believe are true.
In many of her writings but perhaps best argued in her book Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy, Barbara Herrnstein Smith shows that a firm distinction between knowledge, that is, facts based on a firm foundation of empiricism or logic, and belief, say, notions about reality that are contingent and changeable, unlike knowledge, cannot be sustained. I would make the point by showing that what we call knowledge consists of beliefs we hold especially firmly and experience as common sense or ultimately provable by something like science or history. I would attempt to make the point by insisting that knowledge and belief are simply different locations along an epistemological spectrum of certainty to uncertainty.
What I call epistemological foundationalism is the modern notion that we can know something, anything, in a way that can never be disconfirmed, and we can do so simply by looking at “just the facts” or observing “nature” or any other supposed source for “certain knowledge.” On the contrary, there is no knowledge that is arrived at without recourse to persuasion. All knowledge is, in the end, simply belief held very confidently—confidently enough that we feel completely safe acting on that knowledge. As I have shown elsewhere, much modern thinking about the “meaning” of texts shares a similar foundationalism: some people seem to believe that if we just read the text more carefully or with completely open minds or play by the proper rules of interpretation, we will see or hear or discover the “true meaning” of the text.1 Few instances of this kind of “textual foundationalism” have caused more harm than the modern interpretation of the Bible. If we give up this kind of modernist epistemological foundationalism, we may find better, more fruitful, indeed, more Christian ways to read scripture. If we, along with Paul, give up the idea that we can “know,” we may end up with a more feasible notion of knowledge itself.
Other parts of scripture may come into play for this topic. The Gospels are often taken, at least by modern, conservative Christians, to be all about “making known” truths—about Jesus, God, ethics, the world, and life. That is far from the case in many instances in the Gospels. Mark is especially frustrating for a reader who wants “just the facts.” People often, for instance, expect the parables to be morality lessons or plain indicators of an obvious or perhaps a hidden truth. But in Mark the opposite seems to be the case. Jesus teaches in parables so that people will not see or understand. Jesus ends the parable of the sower with the enigmatic, “Let whoever has ears to hear, hear” (Mark 4:9). This has never received, to my mind, a sufficient interpretation. It could mean, “You want to listen? Listen, for all I care. Or not.”
The Gospel of Mark continues by noting that only when Jesus was alone with his closest followers, including but not only “the twelve,” does he say, “To you the mystery of the kingdom of God has been given; but to those on the outside, it happens only in parables, in order that ‘Those seeing will see and not understand, and those hearing will hear and not comprehend, lest they repent and be forgiven’” (Mark 4:11–12, quoting Isa 6:9–10). After an interpretation of the parable of the sower, one that strikes most scholars as perhaps more confusing than the parable, and after a few other parables, the author claims that Jesus spoke to the crowds only in parables, “but privately he explained everything to his disciples” (4:34). As many scholars have pointed out, however, the “explanation” referred to does not really make sense of the puzzles, confusions, and misunderstandings experienced by the disciples themselves in Mark—or countless generations of readers since. The Gospel of Mark is the Gospel of the “messianic secret,” the Gospel in which Jesus’s closest disciples continually seem to “get it wrong,” and the Gospel whose abrupt ending—an empty tomb but no sight of a risen Jesus; a promise of an appearance to the disciples “in Galilee” but no narration of one; a Gospel with a risen but absent Lord—inspires unending, differing interpretations by scholars and lay readers alike. Knowledge in Mark is more mystery than certainty.
This is clearly what Matthew, who used Mark as a source, made of the story, even emphasizing it beyond Mark. After quoting Mark 4:11, Matthew adds, “For whoever has, it will be given to him and he will overflow; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be snatched from him. That’s why I speak in parables to them, because seeing they will not see, and hearing they will not hear and not understand” (Matt 13:12–13). Matthew then expands Mark’s quotation of Isaiah, as if to emphasize the fact that it is God who keeps knowledge from the people and gives it only to a select few.
One would think that with the Gospel of John we would find at least some security in knowledge. After all, the Fourth Gospel emphasizes “knowing” and “knowledge” and revelation constantly, like the ringing over and over again of Johannine thematic bells so characteristic of his style.2 John’s favorite word for “know,” οἶδα, occurs almost eighty times in the Gospel, far more than in any other Gospel. The word “see,” ὁράω, occurs some thirty times, again more than in any other Gospel. Another word for “see,” βλέπω, occurs sixteen times in John, which is comparable to the frequency of its use in the other Gospels. βλέπω seems to have a bit less theological or epistemological connotation in John, often referring simply to someone seeing something happening. But some form of βλέπω is the word used for the coming “to see” of the man born blind in John 9, a story that can be read practically as an allegory for how believers come to “see” the truth that Jesus is the Messiah (John 9:7, 11, 15, 18, 19, 21, 25, 39, 41). In spite of all this emphasis in John on knowing and seeing, the Gospel turns out to be no less of a puzzle than any other canonical Gospel. Moreover, Jesus is there more a “riddler” than in any other Gospel.
As is well known, Jesus is presented as “the revealer” par excellence in the Fourth Gospel: “No one has seen God at any time. It is the only begotten God, the one in the embrace of the father, that one has made him known” (John 1:18) The Greek ἐξηγήσατο, translated here as “made known,” might be rendered with the barbarism “he has exegeted him,” that is, interpreted God, made the meaning of “God” clear: “The one who sent me is true, and what I heard from him, these things I say to the cosmos. . . . Just as the father taught me, these things I speak” (8:26, 28). These are only a few instances of the many in John where Jesus is presented as the revealer, the purveyor of true knowledge. The trope is everywhere.
But the Fourth Gospel itself works against these claims of lucidity. Even in the chapter just quoted, chapter 8, we find a pattern that is repeated throughout the Gospel: a dialogue is begun with people believing in Jesus, accepting his claims, only to end with their rejection of Jesus and hostility toward him—and the apparent hostility is usually provoked first by Jesus. The encounters begin well only to end in confusion and confrontation. We are told, for instance, at 8:31, that many of those listening to Jesus at that point believed in him. As if to emphasize the point, the next verse reminds us that what Jesus is about to say, he is saying “to those Judeans who had believed in him” (8:32; my emphasis).
But the dialogue goes downhill from there. When they ask why Jesus says they will be made free, since they are not after all slaves, Jesus ends up accusing them of plotting to murder him (8:37). When they claim that Abraham is their father, Jesus again insists that they are trying to kill him (8:40). When they react by insisting that they are not bastards but children of God, Jesus retorts that they are children of the devil (8:41–44). By this time Jesus has successfully turned those who began by believing in him into his enemies, so they end up convinced he is possessed by a demon (48). At the end of the (non-) dialogue Jesus makes the astounding claim (astounding at the time, at least) that he himself is the “I am” revealed originally to Moses and as a person who existed before Abraham. This finally provokes his hearers to fulfill Jesus’s (self-fulfilling) prophecy: they do take up stones to kill him, though for the time being he escapes (8:58–59).
The pattern recurs many times in the Gospel of John. Nicodemus begins as an inquirer and learner, but by statement after inscrutable statement Jesus seems to rebuff him (3:1–10). In chapter 6 Jesus again engineers events so that he seems to go from success to failure. In reaction to those who had followed him, even sought him out, Jesus first accuses them of wanting only the bread he had provided. When they ask instead for the “true bread from heaven” (6:34), Jesus first claims that he is that bread and ends up with what certainly would have been heard as demands for cannibalism (6:52–59). And when the people understandably balk, Jesus finally insists that only those to whom “it is granted by the father” will believe in him anyway (6:65). So why bother?
Even apart from this repeated plot structure, in which claims to clarity end up repeatedly in fact with opacity, the Fourth Gospel leaves us with riddles, puzzles, and questions. How should we translate the terms in 3:3, when Jesus tells Nicodemus that one must “be born ἄνωθεν”? As “born again” or “born from above”? The Greek means both. In spite of an entire “born again” industry among conservative American Christians, mostly based on this very verse, we have no idea whether the author meant one or the other—or both. Nicodemus initially takes it as meaning “again.” But with Jesus’s subsequent comments about “spirit” and “wind,” we might just as easily take it as meaning “from above.” After all, the themes of “above/below” and Jesus being “from above” are much more dominant in John than any theme of “rebirth.”3 But that still can’t completely settle the exegetical question. We just don’t “know” what the Greek “meant” to the author.
What is signified in John 19:34 by the statement that “blood and water” gushed out of Jesus’s side when he was pierced? Is this a reference to baptism and the eucharist? Is it supposed to be an indication that Jesus is really by this time dead? The text doesn’t give us adequate hints to know. When Jesus refers to eating his body and drinking his blood in John 6:51–58, is this a reference to the eucharist—the establishing of which John omits from his Gospel at the Last Supper, apparently supplying in its place the foot washing (John 13:1–12)? Scholars disagree, but there is no way to be certain simply on the basis of the text as we have it.
When the disciples see the resurrected Jesus, why don’t they recognize him? Is his body in a form so different that they just don’t recognize him until he does something “special,” such as saying their name or showing them where to fish or making them breakfast (20:14, 17; 21:4, 12)? What does Jesus mean in his prediction to Simon Peter, “When you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will put a belt around you and take you where you do not want to go”? (21:18). The author then explains, “He said this to indicate by what sort of death he would glorify God” (21:18). But what sort of death is that? By legend Peter was crucified upside down. But this text cannot very well be made to mean specifically that. What does it mean?
And finally, who after all is “the beloved disciple”? By tradition, again, it is John, son of Zebedee, who is depicted throughout history in art as a young man, beautiful and often girlish. But there is no reason from the Fourth Gospel itself to identify the beloved disciple with John. Yet there are no other good candidates indicated by the text either.4 It must remain, in spite of popular opinion and the confident assurances of misguided scholars, a riddle, a puzzle, a mystery. But that fact becomes another, this time huge, indication that knowledge is not, after all, such a certain thing in the Fourth Gospel. Knowledge is not a ready commodity in John.
But what can we say about knowledge in John? First, I have hinted that the Gospel teaches that only those people God chooses may actually receive true knowledge (see also 6:44). And in fact John 12:40 echoes Matthew and Mark in teaching that God has “blinded the eyes” and “hardened the hearts” of many human beings so that they are unable to turn to God for healing. It is a common early Christian explanation of why so many people don’t accept the gospel: God has not elected them, and therefore they cannot truly hear the good news.
John also suggests, moreover, than when people come to belief it is usually as a result of being led to knowledge by other people. Faith is social. The message of much of the Gospel is “Come and see!” (1:39). “Signs” are given, even enumerated, in the Gospel, and these are for the most part presented as perfectly acceptable means of coming to faith, though there are, again, some comments that seem to denigrate “faith” that has depended on “signs” (for example, 4:48; 20:29)—another puzzle. The author, in the end, admits he wrote his Gospel as something like a sign meant to produce belief (20:30–31). The idea that faith is socially produced is indicated in other New Testament passages: “How are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without someone proclaiming?” (Rom 10:14). The entire book of Acts is a story of people coming to faith mostly as social events. Even Paul, who receives his own special revelation, must have Ananias explain its significance and consequences (Acts 9:5, 15–18), and Peter’s private revelation must be interpreted through the events at Cornelius’s house and the meeting of the church in Jerusalem (10:44–48; 11:18). We all must depend to some extent on others for knowledge of God and Christ. Knowledge is social—as are we.
Finally, the Fourth Gospel suggests even that some kind of belief, faith of some sort, must precede knowledge. If we take “darkness” in the Gospel to symbolize lack of knowledge and “light” to symbolize its possession, Jesus’s statement in 12:46 is suggestive: “I, as light, have come into the cosmos in order that everyone who believes in me will no longer remain in darkness.” We all make a move toward knowledge only when we begin with a willingness and hopefulness to learn. Some sort of faith is necessary before knowledge is possible.
Traditional Ways of Debating Knowing
Christians have often debated how they should conceive of how they know. Traditional terms, topics, and concepts tend to recur and in fact tend to be opposed sometimes in misleading dualisms or dichotomies. Is there some kind of knowledge of God that exists in human minds by nature? Is “natural theology” possible or commendable? Or are all human beings completely dependent on “revelation,” even the “special revelation” of the Word in Jesus Christ, for having any proper knowledge about things divine at all?
The New Testament has most often been hauled into this court on the side of revelation, which is not surprising since so much of the New Testament suggests that the gospel is itself a revelation, sometimes the only revelation, of the truth about God. But there are resources in the Bible and even a few in the New Testament for thinking that at least some kind of knowledge of God has always been available to human beings. Most biblical indications of “innate” knowledge of God come from Old Testament documents. In his book on theological anthropology, for example, David Kelsey focuses his exegetical attention mostly on the Old Testament “Wisdom” literature, especially Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, which, he claims, works with a more pragmatic notion of knowledge and wisdom: wisdom of the world, human nature, and even God derived more from the everyday than from some special revelation. He calls it “epistemologically anthropocentric.” Knowledge in Wisdom literature is “human-centered in its way of knowing the quotidian.”5 As Kelsey notes, much of Wisdom literature talks little about revelation, except what we can learn with our brains and our eyes: “Go look at the ant! Observe its ways and be wise” (Prov 6:6).
Though mine is a book on using the New Testament for theology, we cannot neglect the Old Testament completely. In the interests of orthodoxy we reject the Marcionite objection to the scriptures of Israel, even if we may allow ourselves to interpret them through Christian lenses (as I will argue more fully in the next chapter). The dominant emphasis on revelation over “natural theology” in the New Testament documents is understandable given the fact that those New Testament texts were so often written from a distinctly minority position, even from a sectarian social position and ideology. They therefore tend to stress the “special” knowledge available only from their own sources. We might do well to balance that emphasis by returning regularly to these Old Testament sources that allow for an admission of universal and innate knowledge of (at least the existence of) the divine.
In fact, in the ancient world it was important to many Jews that gentiles were “without excuse” in their idolatry because all humanity had once upon a time been monotheistic and worshipped the true God, that is, the God of Israel. The idea becomes popular especially in certain second temple Jewish circles reflected in noncanonical writings, such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees. They assume that humanity originally all worshipped the God of Israel, but that human beings had been deceived, perhaps by the “Watchers,” those superhuman, angelic beings who mated with human women and caused the birth of giants or monsters. This reading of the story of the “sons of god” mating with the “daughters of men” from Genesis 6 was taken to mean that polytheism and idolatry (and warfare, cosmetics, magic, and many other evils) entered human and cosmic history at precisely that time in the deep past. Originally, “all the nations” had known the true God. So they are “without excuse” in their rejection of God and in the creation, by their own hands, of “gods.”6
This is precisely the assumption lying behind Paul’s condemnations of idolatry in Rom 1, and so, not accidentally, this is where Paul comes closest in his writings to something that might be called an “innate knowledge of God,” at least theoretically and originally available to all human beings. In Rom 1:18–32 Paul is not talking about all humanity, including the Jews. Rather, he is talking about the gentiles: “For what is knowable about God is obvious to them. For God made it obvious. For God’s invisible attributes, his eternal power and divinity, have been discernible and knowable since the creation of the cosmos by means of those things he has made, in order that they may be without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not give him the proper glory or thanks. Rather, they gave way to worthless speculation in their thoughts, and their senseless minds became dark. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and they exchanged the glory of the invisible God for likenesses of images of a mortal human being and birds and beasts and reptiles” (1:19–23). This is as strong a statement as one can find in the New Testament of the universal knowability of at least the existence of God along with some of God’s attributes. Not all theologians have been willing to accept it as really teaching some kind of “natural theology.” But I believe it is certainly patient of just such a reading.
Indeed, another New Testament passage that approaches this sentiment is the speech put in the mouth of Paul in Athens by the author of Acts. Speaking to Greek philosophers, who had their own ideas about innate knowledge of divine things, Paul insists that all human beings descended from one original ancestor, with God intentionally fixing the “times” and “boundaries” of human existence to encourage all people to search for God, to grope for him, and perhaps even to “find” him, “though in fact he is not far from each of us” (Acts 17:27). This is not the point in his speech where Paul “loses” his audience. That happens when he mentions Jesus and the resurrection. At this point most of the Greek philosophers would have agreed with much of what Paul was saying, with the exception of his rather rude, presumptuous rejection of all “other” gods. But they would have had no problem admitting there was some kind of natural knowledge of the divine in all of humanity.7
In spite of the long debate and sometimes fierce arguments against any kind of “natural theology,” there are ways we may make use of the notion.8 We may, without denying a doctrine of special revelation, even as necessary for Christian faith, think about how “natural” some knowledge of God is. Even agnostic and atheistic philosophers and scientists have been offering theories of why we human beings may be “naturally” inclined to “religion.” From the point of view of experts in religious studies, what many of these scientists are taking as “religion” is perhaps simplistic. They tend to assume, showing an enduring modernist Protestant assumption that colors popular views of what counts as “religion” even among those who are not religious, that “religion” is mainly some kind of cognitive belief in a supreme being or many supreme beings.9 Cognitive scientists working in biology and psychology have argued that the brains of human beings seem to be hardwired for religious beliefs.10 Some evolutionary biologists believe they have “solved the problem” of “religion,” that is, why human beings everywhere seem to have religion of some sort, by suggesting that coming up with meaningful systems related to higher beings or making sense of reality in “religious” ways, like the “supernatural” or some such notion, made evolutionary sense for the development and survival of the human species.11 If scientists can see a rationality in proposing some kind of “innate” religious impulse in human beings, why can’t theologians make some kind of sense of the idea? One could see that the older theological notion of an inherent, innate “knowledge of God” is a theological version of a scientific proposal that human beings are, by nature, a religion-making or a god-making species.
After all, even apart from Christianity or any other “revealed religion,” it does seem that most human societies throughout history and the world (not to say all) have “made sense” of their world by imagining that they themselves were not the most intelligent or powerful beings occupying the universe. People looked at the universe around them and assumed or came to believe that there were beings superior to human beings in power and intelligence, if not in morality, somewhere in the universe, sometimes visible, sometimes not. Since we human beings tend to relate all our universe to ourselves, an admittedly self-centered trait, it surely can’t come as a surprise that we imagine that there may exist other beings who are of higher intelligence and who are otherwise superior to us. Why should humans have believed that there existed in the universe no being superior to us in intellectual power and sophistication? A belief in God or something like gods must surely be one of the most natural things about us as a human species. Some kind of theological version of “natural theology” is the “making sense” of that observation via the doctrines of Christianity.
There is much more about knowledge coming by revelation in the New Testament, so much so that explicit demonstration by examples is doubtless unnecessary: they are in just about every book. What may merit a bit more attention is the great variety of ways in which knowledge is revealed to people in the Bible. It comes most centrally through the revelation of the divine in the person of Jesus Christ himself (prime examples may be John 1:14–18; Mark 9:2–8 and par.; 1 Cor 1:3–7; but there are many others). But knowledge from God comes also through angels (Luke 1:26–38), through dreams (Matt 1:20–23), through visions seen while in the body (Acts 10:9–16), through visions seen while out of the body (2 Cor 12:1–4), through live prophecies (Acts 21:10–11), through glossolalia once it is “interpreted” (1 Cor 14:27), through the pneuma, or spirit or breathing, of God (1 Cor 2:10–16), and through the written text itself, both that of the Jewish scriptures and the evolving New Testament texts (2 Pet 1:20–21; 3:14–16), to provide only one incomplete list.
I will return to the topic of revelation especially in the chapters on scripture and the holy spirit below. For now I wish to comment further on the traditional pairing of knowledge of God from nature, or innate in human beings, and from revelation. For much of Christianity it was believed that Christians could accept both as sources of knowledge of God. In certain forms of Protestantism “natural theology” was treated with suspicion or rejected entirely. But the pair has done something of a dance throughout theological history.
And it is not difficult to see how that pair, innate knowledge of God combined with revealed knowledge of God, can be correlated with other traditionally paired oppositions. Much philosophy has concerned itself with the opposition of “rationalism,” or deductive reasoning, with “empiricism,” Descartes being a classic example of the former and John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume of the latter.12 And here again we may look to the New Testament to consider the role of empiricism in the doing of Christian theology.
The New Testament is full of self-aware proclamation of truths: “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:22). For the Gospel of John, knowledge of God, Jesus, and sin is not inherent in people naturally. They get knowledge of sin from the teachings of Jesus. And after Jesus leaves his disciples and returns to the Father, the Paraclete is the “spirit of truth” who provides knowledge in the absence of Jesus (15:26; 16:7, 13). Paul’s proclamations include his speech and letters but also his body. He uses his imprisoned body as proclamation of truths: “What does it matter? Just this, that whether through false motives or true, Christ is proclaimed, and in this I rejoice” (Phil 1:18). Paul even uses the empirical fact that the gospel is being proclaimed to demonstrate the truth of his gospel.
But we see instances of the importance of empiricism in theologizing also in the practices of the church itself as portrayed in the New Testament. The church in Jerusalem is caused to “change its mind” about whether gentiles can be fully members of the church without being circumcised or keeping kosher. The initial impetus had been a revelation given to Peter. But the other members of the church seem to become fully convinced only by the fact that, even before their baptism in water, the gentiles had received the outpouring of the Spirit, demonstrated by their speaking in tongues as the first Christians had done on Pentecost. As Peter reasons, “If then God gave them the same gift he gave to us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to hold God back?” The people’s response is just as important: “Upon hearing this, they were silenced and gave glory to God, ‘Then also to the gentiles has God given the repentance that leads to life’” (Acts 11:17–18). Recently, scholars have urged that our own contemporary churches should take a lesson from the story: since it seems obvious that gay and lesbian Christians have been given the holy spirit by God and manifest its inspiration by their lives in the church, the churches should also accept them fully as they are, without requiring them to reject their homosexuality.13 Though others have rejected the analogy, it seems to me a perfectly good example of scriptural reasoning. In any case, this is certainly an example of the church in the Bible doing theology by empirical observation.
Paul tries the same, though we can’t know in this case if he succeeded. Paul asks the Galatians, “Did you receive the spirit through works of the law or through the hearing of faith?” (Gal 3:2). The empirical fact that these gentiles received the spirit at their baptism (it is, at any rate, an empirical fact for Paul and presumably for them) is used by Paul in an argument to make a theological point. Another point to be learned from the example of Acts 11 as well as Paul’s arguments in Galatians is that knowing, in a Christian epistemological context, is a communal affair. We do not learn the truth simply as individuals but in communion with the saints—all the saints, that is, all other members of the body of Christ now and forever, even those now dead. Paul appeals to the church to recognize correct knowledge about the law and faith and justification. Peter and James appeal to the gathered church for true knowledge about inclusion of previous “outsiders” within its bounds. For Christians, knowledge is communal.
Yet empiricism is not a completely dependable foundation for knowledge. I argue in this book that there are no completely indisputable epistemological foundations available to human beings, at least not in this world. But our experiences can be used—I argue must be used—along with the experiences of others for theological reasoning. What we see of the world around us is to be used, in fact will be used whether we realize it or not, when we think theologically.
The fact that our seeing may not be reliable is also addressed in the New Testament: “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is ἁπλοῦς [a word that can mean simple, single, sound, healthy, generous, or different combinations of those], your whole body is illuminated; but if your eye is πονηρός [painful, bad, evil, ill], your whole body will be dark. If therefore the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matt 6:22–23; par. Luke 11:33–34). These verses are about the importance of perception; we may say even attitude. If my faculty of observation, whether of the world, of other things, of other people, of one’s own situation, is bad or unhealthy, I will myself be in a bad, unhealthy state. Having good perception is necessary for having good internal health. This is not, therefore, just a statement of fact, though it is that; it is given as a moral lesson: we ourselves are morally responsible for how we perceive things. Jesus is telling us to train our eyes to see well, not badly, not in an evil way.
But this also means we are not destined to only one way of seeing. We can learn to see properly. We can train our eyes to see in a godly and loving manner. And in fact, we have to. Seeing properly—godly perception, correct seeing—is a learned and practiced skill. Through much of my life one of my favorite sayings has been, “Everyone is responsible for his or her own happiness.” That would be cruel to say to someone who is truly grieving, clinically depressed, in terrible pain, or in a truly dire situation. But it is something most of us would do well to tell ourselves regularly. Seeing the world around us in a positive, accurate way is a moral, personal, and social responsibility (naïve optimism that denies the facts is no virtue either). Thus, though empiricism cannot be an absolutely reliable means to correct knowledge, we must learn to use it and use it well, even when doing theology.
Thus I am heartened when Pavel Florensky calls theology “an empirical science.”14 In the context, he is making the point that “formulas” attempting to depict certain activities of the holy spirit are unsatisfying because people tend to want to derive those formulas from exceptional personal experiences of the spirit. But it is not possible to derive such formulas that way, “for the formulas grow in the soil of a common, everyday Church life, in a field of common, constant phenomena, and not in connection with singular points of spiritual life.” He is making the point that, special “revelations” aside, theology should be derived from common Christian experience. That makes theology “an empirical science.”15
In the end, we should embrace notions of both empiricism and innate knowledge. We need not believe that the human mind is a “blank slate.”16 Neither need we deny the cultural construction of all specific content of “knowledge.” We are both natural and cultural animals. The problem with much Christian debate, in my view, has been an uncritical assumption of a dichotomy between the two and the fact that they have so often been overlaid with other dichotomies: innate knowledge versus revelation; rationalism versus empiricism; nature versus nurture. Even the opposition between “Christ” and “Culture” has done much theologically misleading damage. For example, some Christians insist that “nature” and “Christ” go together: homosexuality is “against nature.” Only a mistaken “culture” could say otherwise. Other Christians claim that “nature” is opposed to “Christ,” and only “revealed” knowledge of God is “true.” Does this kind of confused thinking then make “revelation” something “cultural”?
The problem with these pairings is that they can lead to false conceptions or disjunctions or dichotomy. As noted above, many sciences are debunking older notions that people’s minds are completely clean slates whose every way of thinking is formed by culture. Indeed, the idea that our selves are completely constructed by culture was a progressive reaction to older beliefs that gender and sexuality are, at least in all “normal” persons, “naturally” constituted and not a matter of choice, cultural relativism, or historical construction. In that political moment, it was a good strategy to demonstrate how gender, for example, is to a great extent culturally variable and constructed. One is not “naturally” a man but must learn to be a man by the terms of a particular culture.17
Several years ago many gay people were alarmed when some scientists, or popular writers trying to use science, wondered if they could find “the gay gene.” Other gay advocates, though, were eager to do so. Some people believed that if science could find “the gay gene” they could then demonstrate scientifically that being gay is, for some people, completely “natural.” Others worried, though, that finding a “gay gene” might just cause heterosexist persons or institutions to urge genetic engineering to “ungay” people or fetuses. The problem here (besides the fact that some people and institutions, it seems, will always try to use science for evil and unjust ends) lies in the dichotomy itself. It really does not matter, from an ethical point of view, whether people are gay “by nature” or “by culture.” The fact is, many people simply are gay, cannot imagine themselves otherwise, and are quite happy about it.
The facts we must keep in mind here are that, for one thing, any piece of “knowledge” or technology can be turned to either positive or negative uses. Knowledge about “nature” does not prescribe the ethical ends to which that knowledge will be put. That issue requires ethics and politics. Second, all such dichotomous thinking is probably wrong. Even if we gay people experience ourselves as “always homosexually oriented in a natural, hardwired way,” we must also recognize that we can conceive of and act out our sexuality only in learned ways. We may have been “born gay” in some way, but any way in which we “are gay,” even in ways we “experience” our sexuality, is cultural and learned. This is also true, and also for many people, whether or not they are Christian or even religious at all. For the person who is such, it likely doesn’t matter, from a purely intellectual point of view, how it came about. Dichotomies between nature and nurture or nature and culture need to be deconstructed and avoided.18 Likewise, we may properly give up all older arguments about whether knowledge is innate or learned, whether theological truths are internally and naturally “known” or can be had only via revelation. The proper Christian answer must be “both.”
Traditional Theological Proposals for “Knowing”
Different Christian communities and institutions have sometimes attempted to bring order and clarity to theological-epistemological debates by offering schemata or labels for the diverse “sources” or “resources” for Christian knowing. For Roman Catholics, traditionally, sources such as scripture and tradition as well as reason and empiricism are cited, but as a final recourse most Roman Catholics point to the church’s magisterium, the teaching office of the Vatican, including the pope. How one is to interpret scripture, for instance, must bow to the instructions of the church’s actual institutional hierarchy. Anglican churches have traditionally pointed to reason, tradition, and scripture, sometimes called the three-legged stool. Methodists broadened that model to speak of a quadrilateral, which adds to the Anglican three experience, usually thought of as the specifically religious or spiritual experience each individual and the collected church can attest to and recall.
Such models need do no harm and may even be helpful if they are taken as heuristic examples or tropes. But they must not be taken in a foundationalist manner that denies or hides the necessity and vagaries of actual human interpretation. None of these “sources” serves simply as an innocent source of information outside human interpretation. Thus an avoidance of epistemological foundationalism can permit the use of these tropes for thinking about knowledge without getting caught in the uncritical beliefs that these sources or authorities can somehow save us from the uncertainties of human interpretation.
And each religious community must recognize dangers with its citation of particularly delineated “sources” for divine knowledge. Since for the Roman Catholic Church, as a particular human physical institution, the magisterium is composed of and controlled by particular human beings—in fact old men of limited worldly experience, not to mention limited experience of women and sex (let’s hope)—simpleminded obeisance to those particular men, even though they may claim to disappear into the spiritual institution, gives authority to specific, historical, embodied men in a way that may justifiably be seen as idolatrous. The structure, in actual practice thus far, is certainly antidemocratic and perpetuates the past injustices of hierarchy, monarchy, and patriarchy.
The problem with “tradition” is that the word refers not to something one can point to in nature or observe as it stands still. Rather, tradition is the flow, the changing current, we, as Christians, live in. It cannot be separated from scripture because scripture is the early Christian tradition (or at least a few strands of it that survive in texts). And we never interpret scripture except within tradition. Tradition is simply the church in its memory and presence. Scripture also should not be separated from the rest of our lives but should provide the textual context in which we live our lives. All our theologizing and living should be informed by scripture, as I will argue further in the next chapter, which means that it doesn’t actually function as one source among several others. In a similar way, “experience” does not refer to one source separated out from the rest of our lives. Everything we do, say, think, and believe is experience.
These different sources overlap and flow into one another. Moreover, there is no reason not to add other sources, named and differentiated. We could, for example, separate modern science from “reason” and consider it a special source. “Reason” then would refer to general human rationality, but we could recognize modern science as a special source alongside simple, general rationality. We could separate, as some theologians have, a privileged “hermeneutic of the oppressed” as a special source of authority. The systems proposing these different sources of Christian knowledge at various times by theologians may have been useful in previous debates among groups with dissimilar priorities, for example, Protestants versus Catholics, Anglicans versus Roman Catholics, Methodists versus Anglicans, but they have also caused problems by mistakenly convincing at least many Christians that more security than is actually possible in interpretation may be had and that theology could be rightly constructed by appeal to a particular “method.”
The Necessity of Interpretation
Any statement may be true or false. In fact, all statements may be both true and false. This is a central supposition and technique of my analysis here. And for this book, as I will demonstrate much more in the chapter about the nature of God, it is an important aspect of religious statements. I argue that people should learn how to recognize that any statement about God must be seen to be potentially false in any context but may also be true in some contexts. My proposal about statements always being potentially both true and false, however, is not just a proposal about God or religious propositions: it is an observation about language in general.
We must recognize at the start that language is not simply a matter of propositional statements about fact or simply proposals that are either true or false according to whether they correspond to reality or not. We human beings do many things with language, as I will repeat on occasion. Saying “I love you” may indeed be a proposition about a fact, but it does much more than that. As philosophers of language have taught us, language is about performance as much as about propositions having to do with reality.19 If we didn’t all already assume that, we would be in a state of constant confusion and muddle. Imagine a person coming out of a theater after watching a play in which one of the actors had said, “It is raining,” and the person complains to another that the man in the theater had been lying because it wasn’t raining at all. If the audience member took the statement within the play actually to be a statement about current reality outside the theater, she or he was just not understanding how the language was working.
Even if we limit our analysis, however, to linguistic constructions that claim to be propositional statements about reality, we must remind ourselves how they can be true and false. This is so because statements don’t tell us how to interpret them or in what context they are taken to be working. The naked statement doesn’t bring its context or correct interpretation with it—when it is, that is, a naked statement. So the simple statement, “This man is my father” cannot even be evaluated as true or false or even as meaningful until we assume a context. It may be true if I am pointing to my biological father or to my adoptive father, but those are not the exact same “meanings” or “propositions.” It may be true if I am pointing to my spiritual director or to my academic Doktorvater. The statement must be interpreted by someone, who must either be supplied a context or assume one. If even the meaning of the statement may change given different circumstances, so also will its truth.
Some people think that arithmetic or mathematical propositions must always be true universally if they are true at all. In all cultures and times 2 + 2 = 4, they will say. But that should be accepted only if we are taking those mathematical statements as “mathematical” statements. If someone tells me 2 + 2 = 4 always and in every imaginable circumstance, I may respond, “I don’t believe you. If I put two male cats and two female cats in a room with plenty of food and water and then open up the room again in six months, I’m unlikely to find four cats. I may find fewer, though I’ll probably find more. So two plus two doesn’t always make four.” Someone may well note that I’m being intentionally contrary or even loopy, but that still doesn’t prove that the statement “two plus two equals four,” as a bare statement, is always true. Even that statement has to be interpreted within a context.
Mathematicians know that even if taken as a mathematical statement, 2 + 2 = 4 may still not be true. It is true if we are assuming a system of ten integers, in which the first number is 1 and the numbers “turn around” at 10. It would also be true if we were assuming only four numbers, in which case 2 + 2 would in fact equal 4, but 2 + 3 would equal not 5 but 1 since after the 4 the next available number would return to 1. This is often explained by pointing to a clock with twelve numbers. Nine o’clock plus five hours will not equal 14 o’clock because there are no numbers after 12 on a 12-hour clock. In this system, 9 + 5 = 2, two o’clock, that is. Even statements that many people believe are necessarily and universally “true” are true only if they are interpreted correctly within the appropriate system and in the appropriate way.
The truth of statements becomes even more complicated, it seems, in the realm of religion. Christians who accuse only “liberals” of “interpreting away” the “truths” of Christian scripture are by that very accusation being hypocritical because there are no Christians who believe literally in everything one can find in the Bible. Even to get into the discussion we must assume how we establish the meaning of statements in scripture. For the moment let us assume that when conservative Christians talk about accepting the truth of a biblical account or statement, they mean accepting what the original author is likely to have intended or the meaning of the text as understood by an imagined original audience. If that is what they take to be “the meaning of the text,” which is, in fact, what most conservative Christians mean, they themselves certainly do not adhere to their own standards.
There are many things ancient texts relate and ancient Jews and Christians believed that almost no modern people believe any longer, no matter how theologically conservative they are. Almost no one believes God tells world leaders to attack and annihilate entire populations, including children and infants (1 Sam 15:1–3 is just one such example). If taken literally and historically, the Bible describes a world in which the sky is an actual, physical, firm dome, like bronze or glass, and stars are literal lights affixed to that ceiling, and behind that dome was water (Gen 1:6–8; Job 37:18; Ps 148:4).20 Almost no one in our modern world believes that hell is a literal, physical space one may visit if one could burrow down far enough underground, but that is certainly what was being described for ancient persons when Jesus was said to have “descended into hell” to preach to the dead (1 Pet 3:19). Very few Christians today, even when they confess to believe in “the resurrection of the flesh,” insist that the resurrected body will necessarily be composed of the exact same physical flesh—the same molecules, we might say, to use a modern term—though that is what seems to be described by the Gospel of Luke, and it is certainly what was considered the “orthodox” view eventually of the ancient church.
Modern Christians, as all Christians have always done, are constantly interpreting scriptural or doctrinal statements so that they can believe them.21 In the twentieth century many people criticized Rudolf Bultmann because he insisted that modern Christians needed to “demythologize” Christian language and concepts for modern belief to continue at all. There are quite legitimate ways to critique Bultmann and his particular brand of modernism.22 But if one takes “demythologization” to refer to all modern interpretations that take an ancient literal, historical statement that is obviously not acceptable to us and reinterpret it to have a less literal or less historical meaning, just about all Christians do that all the time if they use the Bible for their own lives and faith.
This raises the question, though: how is a statement of scripture or doctrine true or not? I will argue that for a scriptural account to be “historically true” it must pass muster by meeting criteria commonly used by modern historians to establish an account as “historically true.”23 But I argue that a statement that may not be “historically true” may indeed be true in a different sense, that something may be “Christianly true,” that is, theologically true for Christians, even if it is not “historically true.” It is almost certain, if one “plays by the rules” of modern historiography, that Jesus of Nazareth was not born in Bethlehem. But I find nothing wrong with taking it as true in the discourse of scripture and Christian tradition. The two accounts of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem in Matthew and Luke (and we should note that the two accounts have almost nothing in common except that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and born of a virgin named Mary who was betrothed to a man named Joseph) may be interpreted to express theological truths acceptable to modern Christians. Since statements may be true or false according to how they are interpreted, I argue that “historical” interpretations are simply not the same kinds of things as “theological” interpretations. A historical account of the likely birth of Jesus may be good and true history but not theology. And a theological account of the birth of Jesus may be good and true theology but not history. Sometimes in this book, therefore, I contrast the truth of an interpretation of scripture when it is interpreted theologically, “Christianly,” or even “mythologically” with the falseness of the account if it is taken as a piece of historiography, and vice versa.24
If we take the word “myth” to refer to a narrative account that is not “true” literally or historically—that is, it describes something that cannot be constructed and accepted by modern historiography—but that we may take as expressing “something true” about our world or experience in our world, there is nothing wrong with talking about “true myths” of the Bible or Christianity. Accounts that I as a historian would insist cannot be accepted as “historical” but also that I, as a Christian theologian of a sort, would accept as “myths that are true” would include the myth of Adam and Eve; the tower of Babel; the story of the “fall” and later doctrine of original sin; the origin of the rainbow; the story of Jonah, the great fish, and Nineveh; the story of Job; Jesus’s exorcism of Legion; the desert temptation of Jesus. It seems obvious to me that to take any of these stories as historically “true” is to show a complete lack of understanding of the standards of modern historiography. But since I do believe that with proper interpretation each of these stories can be seen to express larger truths about the world and human nature and God’s grace, I must be able to differentiate “historical” truths from “mythological” or “theological” truths.
Then there is another category that perhaps is even more controversial. There are myths or stories in the Bible I believe we ought to doubt even on purely theological grounds. In other words, I would argue that these are not historical truths, but I would also provide arguments (and will at different points in this book) as to why I reject them even as “true myths.” In that case I must provide theological as opposed to historical arguments and reasons. Included in this category for me would be the existence of hell as a place of eternal suffering and punishment engineered and operated by God. There may be other ways I could use some notion of “hell” theologically, but it wouldn’t be that particular myth with God’s agency so construed. I also believe we must argue against any myth depicting God as causing disease and suffering. These myths, I would argue, are not only “historically” false but also “theologically” false or at least not true in any way I can now imagine.
Much of this book, therefore, will be dedicated to illustrating how religious beliefs, doctrines, and stories may be analyzed through the lens of modern history but must be analyzed through the lens of Christian theological reasoning. Illustrating how those two different kinds of analysis and evaluation may be done is the main purpose of the book. But we must begin by acknowledging that (1) statements may be both true and false, (2) their truth and falsity depend on how they are interpreted, and (3) a theological evaluation of truth is different from a historical evaluation of truth, though the former may indeed at times use the latter.
What Is Faith?
According to quite dominant popular assumptions, especially modern assumptions, “faith” refers to mental assent to some proposition about reality. There are certainly places in scripture to support this notion. The most famous is James 2:19, where the author is arguing against the more “Pauline” teaching that faith apart from works is what justifies: “You believe God is one. Fine. Also the demons believe—and shudder.” Here the author is obviously taking “faith” to mean basic mental agreement with the proposition of monotheism.
But in so many other scriptural passages we can see that faith has a much broader and deeper meaning. The Greek word πιστεύειν may also often be translated as “to trust.” The author of 1 Pet 2:6 quotes Isa 28:16: “Behold I am placing in Zion a stone, a cornerstone elect and honorable, and everyone who trusts [πιστεύων] in it will not be put to shame” (NRSV). “Having faith” in Christ is not merely believing that he exists or even believing certain propositions about his nature; rather it is more than anything trusting him with one’s life.25 This meaning comes out also when πιστεύω, but in the passive voice, is used to refer to someone “entrusting” a thing or task to someone else. Paul regularly speaks of himself as having been “entrusted” with the gospel of his ministry (1 Cor 9:17; Gal 2:7; 1 Thess 2:4; see also 1 Tim 1:11; Titus 1:3). God “trusted” Paul to carry out his assigned task; God “depended on” Paul.
The Letter to the Hebrews brings out this meaning by a long string of examples. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (11:1, NRSV). Noah proceeded in building the ark by faith (11:7). This reference to Noah’s boat reminds one of a statement by Alister McGrath: “Faith is not simply about believing that a ship exists; it is about stepping into it, and entrusting ourselves to it.”26 Abraham’s faith is demonstrated by his stepping into an unknown future on the basis of promise and acceptance of that promise (11:8–12). His faith is an openness to an unseen future: that the future will bring good. Note that Hebrews does not dismiss a notion that “faith” may include an aspect of “believing that,” as in an assent to a proposition: “Without faith it is impossible to find favor; for it is necessary that those who will approach God believe that he exists and that reward will come to those who seek him” (11:6). But the overwhelming meaning of “faith” in Hebrews is one of a willingness to depend on something, a willingness to begin a journey without fully knowing the end. Indeed, this is precisely the Christian notion of faith Martin Luther King, Jr., was invoking when he made his famous statement, “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
We see this aspect of faith also when we notice how often in scripture it is linked to “hope.” Again, the classic case is provided by 1 Cor 13, where faith, hope, and love are strung together. Love comes out as superior but faith and hope are close behind: “Now remain faith, hope, and love, these three. But the greatest of these is love” (13:13). The connection occurs elsewhere. In Rom 4:18, Abraham believed παρ᾽ἐλπίδα ἐπ᾽ἐλπίδι, usually translated as “hoping against hope.” But it can also be translated, at least from the point of view of pure grammar, as “by hope upon hope.”27 Abraham believed through hope that he would become the “father of many nations” when there was as yet no firm evidence of that beyond the promise of God. In Rom 15:13, Paul writes, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, to the end that you abound in hope in the power of the holy spirit.” Note that joy, peace, and hope come with believing. Believing is an attitude, a way of living in joy, peace, and hope.
In fact, theologians have been saying for a long time that we should conceive of Christian faith more as a way of life than as assent to a list of propositional assertions. As Herbert McCabe puts it, “So far as God is concerned what we are offered in the Church and its scriptures is not further information but a share in his life.”28 And one need not be a theologian or even a believer to recognize the fact. The philosopher Simon Critchley, speaking about Paul but making a point that would apply to much Christian theology, explains, “Paul’s conception of faith is not, then, the abstraction of a metaphysical belief in God. Nor is Christ some Hegelian mediation to the divine or a conduit to a transcendent beyond. Faith is rather a lived subjective commitment to what I have called elsewhere an infinite demand.”29 Terry Eagleton, professionally a literary critic though no stranger to theology, makes the point: “Faith . . . is not primarily a belief that something or someone exists, but a commitment and allegiance—faith in something which might make a difference to the frightful situation you find yourself in, as is the case, say, with faith in feminism or anticolonialism.”30 With his characteristic wit, Eagleton complains that many people commit “the blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus” (50).
These statements are much in line with the portraits of faith in Paul and Hebrews but also elsewhere. Faith may sometimes refer to belief “that” something is true, but in its most profound Christian sense it is a way of life, a commitment. We may also evoke the notion, often linked with the names of Aristotle and Pierre Bourdieu, of habitus, which may include a notion of “habit” in the English, meaning an action that comes so naturally to us from having done it so often that we don’t even think about how to do it. Like playing a piano: if I think too much about what my fingers are doing I likely won’t be able to do it. Or, as both Bourdieu and Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, playing a game the rules of which we usually follow automatically and with no need for self-reflection. To Bourdieu, habitus is much more than that; it is a complex notion used to analyze how societies organize themselves and people learn socially how to behave.31 But it is a useful theological notion as well, as Michel de Certeau has demonstrated.32 To evoke another image, faith is a “stance” we take toward the world.33 It may be a decision or it may be just the way we find ourselves standing as we face reality and the future. At any rate, all these ways of thinking of the nature of faith deliver us from the mistaken, and especially modernist, idea that Christian faith is mainly assenting to intellectual propositions about nature and God.
To address a related issue, many people either lose their faith or criticize Christianity because they mistakenly take it to be a philosophy or something very like a philosophy, by which I mean they expect Christianity to be an intellectual system that is responsible for providing satisfactory answers to just about every conceivable intellectual question or problem. True, Christianity can bear some of the blame for this in that Christians themselves have too often presented Christianity to be just that. So if evolutionary biology is true, then Genesis is wrong because it is now just outdated, bad science. Many people, through, I believe, inadequate theological education, have assumed a “God of the gaps” kind of theology, that is, “God” is just the causal force or fill-in for things we cannot yet “explain” with science or philosophy. Or since people ask about the problem of evil or suffering in the world—“Why, if God is both good and created the world, do we have such evil and suffering in it?”—and they are, wisely, not satisfied with any of the answers different Christians have historically given, that just proves for them that Christianity is not “true.” But the better idea is that Christianity was never “supposed” to be a philosophy in the first place.34 Christianity, understood correctly, should not claim to offer intellectually satisfying answers to all intellectual questions, even legitimate intellectual questions.
Christianity does offer some answers to the problems of evil and suffering, but they are answers of this kind: “In spite of suffering and evil, God is still love and healing.” Or recall the answer given by God to Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”35 That is not an intellectual, propositional answer to the philosophical question of evil. But it may well be an existentially, emotionally, or psychologically helpful “answer.” The mistake is to take Christianity to be a philosophy responsible for answering all our questions. Christianity offers a gospel and faith, not answers to all our questions, even our very good questions. Christianity is not a philosophy.36
Another common mistake is to think that faith need always be a choice. Protestant emphasis on individualism, again especially in the modern world, has so influenced popular ideas about religion that many people conceive of religious commitment as fundamentally a choice, even to the extent of exaggerating the presence or need of “conversion” in all religious experience. But many Christians who have grown up in the church will not have experienced it that way. It is, for them, just natural. Just “the way I feel.” As Eagleton puts it, “Faith—any kind of faith—is not in the first place a matter of choice. It is more common to find oneself believing something than to make a conscious decision to do so—or at least to make such a conscious decision because you find yourself leaning that way already.”37
Eagleton goes on to make another valid point about faith and choice or at least a Christian idea of faith: “The Christian way of indicating that faith is not in the end a question of choice is the notion of grace. Like the world itself from a Christian viewpoint, faith is a gift.”38 Recall Rom 15:13 from above and note that, according to that passage, faith is not produced by the believer but is a gift from God. To the Philippians, Paul writes, “Because of Christ, [God] has given to you not only to believe in him but also to suffer for him” (1:29). The Greek verb for “given” here, ἐχαρίσθη, may also be translated as “granted” or even “graced.” The Greek is a verb form of the noun we also translate “grace.” To the disciples in Rome, Paul says, “Thanks be to God, because you were slaves of sin, but you obeyed from the heart the form of teaching to which you were entrusted [that is, “handed over”: παρεδόθητε]” (Rom 6:17). Note that the believers did have something to do: they “obeyed.” But what they obeyed was the gospel to which they “were entrusted.” The passive indicates that the initial action was done by God. God “handed over” these people to the gospel. God is the source of their faith.39
The logical extension of this line of thinking, an extension adamantly rejected by most modern people, including perhaps most Christians, is the doctrine of predestination. I treat the themes of election and predestination more fully in the chapter titled “Human” below, where I address more fully issues of salvation, but I do wish to bring the topic up briefly here for what it may tell us about Christian knowledge. If Christians think of themselves as “preordained” to believe (see Rom 8:29–30), that God is the one who brings about “the obedience of faith” (Rom 16:26), that God “elected us before the foundation of the cosmos (Eph 1:4–5), that we are saved not “from ourselves” but “as the gift of God” (Eph 2:8), then we certainly can take no credit for our faith or our knowledge. We didn’t produce it, we can’t be proud of it, and we shouldn’t worry about it. Our faith springs so little from our own effort that we may imagine God having decided to give it to us, as a gift, before we ever existed. Predestination is a radical way of saying not only that we cannot save ourselves by works; we can’t even save ourselves by our faith, since it is only by God’s grace that we even have it.
As we have already seen to some extent, however, there are stories and passages in the New Testament that imply that faith is the responsibility of individual people and that if they don’t have it they’d better conjure some up. One can get the idea from some biblical texts that faith is something like a virtue one gets credit for or can attain on one’s own. Or elsewhere faith seems to be something like a tool people can use to get what they want. “And seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, ‘Child, your sins are forgiven’” (Matt 9:2). “Your faith has healed you” (Matt 9:22). To his disciples who could not heal a boy with a demon, Jesus says that it was because of their “little faith.” “If you have faith even the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there!’ And it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matt 17:20). I take these examples from Matthew, but they are often paralleled in the other Gospels.
We may interpret such passages as teaching us to encourage ourselves and others to believe, to buck up at times. We can indeed help one another’s faith: “So we may be mutually encouraged by one another’s faith, yours and mine” (Rom 1:12). People can learn to be more faithful, filled with hope, and less cynical. So there is some place for these lessons that we, at least to some extent, are responsible even for our hopes and fears and so in some way for our faith. In other words there’s no reason to let Paul win the day and reject James. Both views—that faith is a way of life and a gift from God (Paul) and that faith includes believing some truths and must be supplemented by our effort (James)—may be true when interpreted truly.
But passages such as these have been used to great harm also. When people who want to believe are berated by others when they cannot, no good is done. And the terrible evils of modern “gospels of prosperity,” by which people are urged by “superpastors” to “name it and claim it”—even when the “it” is not love, peace, or hope but a new Cadillac or a huge house—that is the gospel perverted until it is no gospel, much less a gospel of prosperity. To twist the promises of Jesus about what faith can do into simply an underwriting of capitalism or consumerism is immoral.
And so it is that we must continually remind ourselves that the higher Christian doctrine teaches that faith itself is a gift from God. This is one of the many places where we see that something in scripture may be true when taken one way and false when taken another. And two apparently contradictory theological teachings may both be true when interpreted rightly.
The relationship between faith and knowledge is complicated in philosophy. It is perhaps even more complicated in theology when it is good theology. But my argument has been that no firm dichotomy may be made between the two and that both must be continually placed in the context of grace. Since faith is a gift from God given through divine grace and not attained by our efforts or merit, we Christians need not be very concerned when someone asks us, either sincerely or sneeringly, “Why do you still believe? With so little absolutely firm evidence and some heavy counterevidence, why do you have faith?” If faith is a gift from God, we need not explain it.
But we are reminded of 1 Pet 3:15: “Always be prepared to give an answer [a “defense,” an apologia] to anyone asking for an account concerning the hope within you.” So let me attempt two. In keeping with the methodology I sketched out above, these will be two quite different accounts, one sociological, the other theological. I want to insist that although they are very different “explanations” of “why I believe” and although they may be taken to be contradictory, I believe they are both true accounts. They explain, however, by using two separate discourses.
I have been asked many times, actually, why I still believe, almost always from people who have come across writings or lectures of mine that seem to challenge the historical veracity of the Bible or that expose much of the tawdry history of Christianity. My first answer is, “I don’t know.” But then I offer my sociological-psychological answer.
It may well be that I have faith just because I was raised that way. Having grown up in a religious family, itself the product of generations of Christian people, I may be psychologically inclined or habituated to assume some ultimate meaningfulness of the universe and the centrality of faith for life. Moreover, my family, though attending a very conservative church, was generally liberal and progressive. We weren’t particularly bothered if others did not go to church or went to a different church. We tended not to worry if other people weren’t as “religious” as we were. One could say that we didn’t have a chip on our shoulder—a “faith chip.” But just because we didn’t have a “faith chip” on our shoulder, we perhaps did have a “faith chip” in our brains, something like a computer chip that inclined us to be religious. That is to say, whether from socialization, familiarization, nature, or culture, we were, so to say, hardwired to believe. And because I grew up and imbibed Christianity in such a social situation and always found it meaningful, I have been socially structured to have faith. This seems to me a completely good sociohistorical answer to questions about my faith. And I think it is certainly true.
But now for the theological answer. As should be obvious from this chapter thus far, my favorite answer to people who wonder why I have faith is, “Because God allows me to. For some reason beyond me, God gave me the gift of faith. You’ll have to ask God why.” For some reason, I and many other Christians—fully cognizant of all the historical problems about Christianity, of the checkered history of Christian institutions, of the hypocrisy and intolerance of so many Christians, and of the paucity of evidence that love will prevail in the end—find ourselves still willing to take the great myths of traditional Christianity as saying something we find to be true. We can hear scripture read, recognize where it is no doubt problematic and dangerous, and yet perceive something in it that sounds like the word of God. We participate in the liturgy and, even when wary of its residual notes of violence and patriarchy, nonetheless experience within it the beauty and glory we believe must be signs of God. We find faith a comfort in affliction and sickness, and we find our joy increased in its celebrations. We don’t know why. We just do. And scripture allows us to take that as it is: an inscrutable and inexplicable gift from God. We need no other reasons or explanations.
As we have seen in this chapter, there are at least two reasons for epistemological humility for Christians, reasons for us to force ourselves to be content with not knowing in a full, final, or foundationalist sense. We might call one the mythological reason and the other an empirical or philosophical reason. As shown by writings of Paul analyzed above, we don’t know now because the end has not yet come. This is the eschatological reservation of Christian epistemology. Christianity should make no attempt to answer all questions, and even the answers it does give must always be seen as provisional. We don’t yet know as we will know. Though Paul is the clearest advocate of eschatological reservation in the New Testament, he is not the only one. “Nothing is hidden that will not be revealed, or secret that will not be made known” (Matt 10:26; par. Luke 12:2). In thinking theologically, Christians must remind themselves of the temporary, incomplete state of all our knowledge.
Then there is the empirical or philosophical reason. We know by our own experience that our knowledge is precarious and our experience not completely reliable. We and all others have been wrong many times. We cannot actually trust our own eyesight. Though we can think theologically only by depending on our experiences (which, remember, include reading scripture, hearing tradition, and listening to one another, among all other ways we experience God’s word), we must remember that our experiences are never infallible, are always possibly misleading, and are always subject to human interpretation, as undependable as that may be. Our very experiences teach us to be wary of experience, even when we have no other way to think, indeed even to think theologically.
Thus we are in what could be felt to be a sad state. But it may also be interpreted as a state of grace. As human beings we can never claim certainty for our knowledge or credit for our faith. But that is not a bad place to be. It simply reiterates that we must be content to trust God. We must remember that we are nonetheless responsible for how we use our knowledge and our faith. We have been given gifts by God, but we are responsible for how we use them. “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required, and to whom much has been entrusted, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48). Our goal is to rest in the knowledge that we cannot now know fully but to determine that we will exercise our brief and partial knowledge as ethically and lovingly as we can.
I have made the point before: we can probably do no better than to follow Augustine’s advice that any doctrine—and here he is specifically discussing different interpretations of scripture—cannot be “true” in the Christian sense unless it promotes the double commandment that we love God and our neighbor.40 Any interpretation of scripture that does not work for the good of ourselves and our fellow human beings to the glory of God cannot be the “literal” and true meaning of that passage of scripture. The rule is applicable to all Christian epistemology. The beginning and end of Christian knowing must be the rule of love.
Notes
1. Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 1–16.
2. For fuller discussion and examples, see Martin, New Testament, 159–65.
3. See, for example, John 3:13, 31; 6:38, 41–42, 50–51, 58; 20:17. Said of the spirit: 1:32–33.
4. One might guess that the puzzle about who the “beloved disciple” is can be settled by citing John 11:3, where Martha and Mary mention to Jesus their brother, by saying “he whom you love.” I think this to be a possible but unlikely interpretation. I provide a few reasons in chapter 5 below.
5. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, 200 (the book is in two volumes, but pages are numbered throughout sequentially, so I cite merely the page number).
6. See my discussion and references cited in Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 52–54.
7. If Romans 7:14–21 is taken to be a reference to the human being before coming to faith and Christ, the “I” who claims to “know” what is good even when unable to “do” it could be taken as an admission by Paul that there is some knowledge of “good,” and therefore in some way of “god,” even in the unregenerated human being in a sinful and “natural” state. But there is much debate nowadays about what kind of speaker is being constructed here by Paul. It seems not to be strictly autobiographical and may be an instance of “speech-in-character” (προσωποποιία or ἠθοποιία), in which Paul is taking on a “character” of a generic human being outside the grace of faith. For Romans 7 as an instance of Paul using “speech-in-character,” see Stowers, Rereading, 266–72; but see also “speech-in-character” in Stower’s “Subject Index.” For discussion of the different possibilities, see Sanday and Headlam, Epistle to the Romans, 184–86; Jewett, Romans, 455–66.
8. One of the most famous being the attacks by Karl Barth against Emil Brunner, in what came to be called the Barth–Brunner debate of 1934. For the two main pamphlets conveniently included in one volume in English, see Brunner, Natural Theology.
9. For one of the best arguments that it is anachronism to retroject the modern category of “religion” back into the ancient Mediterranean, see Nongbri, Before Religion.
10. See a popular account of these ideas presented by Paul Bloom, “Is God an Accident?” In my opinion, one problem with Bloom’s account, a problem that besets many scientists who write about “religion” without having studied different things that might count as “religion” in a theoretically or philosophically informed way, is his very assumption about what “religion” and “the supernatural” are supposed to be. See the critique of these assumptions in Nongbri, Before Religion.
11. For example, Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral. See also evolution.binghampton.edu/religion/ (accessed September 6, 2014).
12. I am here collapsing much larger debates into this simple opposition. I do not intend to enter debates about intuition, deduction, induction, or many other topics. But the simplicity is merited by the limited work I am here asking this opposition to do theologically.
13. See, for example, Siker, “Homosexual Christians”; Fowl, Engaging Scripture, 97–127; Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 159–60.
14. I quote from the excerpt anthologized in Rogers, Jr., Holy Spirit, 217–36, at 224; for the full text: “The Comforter,” in Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth.
15. See also the essay by Stephen Fowl excerpted in Rogers, Jr., Holy Spirit, at 304. Though she does not use the term “empirical” to describe her method, that is precisely what Mary McClintock Fulkerson did when she based her study of theology on her observation of the ways a specific church went about both interpreting scripture and doing theology publicly over several years: Places of Redemption, see esp. chapter 6. Something like what I mean by “theology done empirically” seems to be similar to recent developments in German language scholarship using the concept of gelebte Religion (“lived religion”). See, for example, the various essays collected in Grözinger and Pfleiderer, eds., “Gelebte Religion.”
16. Famously criticized by Steven Pinker, Blank Slate.
17. Perhaps the most famous study is the philosophical one by Judith Butler, Gender Trouble; see also Butler, Bodies That Matter. Another study of the cultural construction of gender and sexuality, published the same year as Butler’s Gender Trouble, is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology. Both scholars were influenced by the multivolume History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault.
18. See Tanner, Theories of Culture.
19. The classic study along these lines is J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words.
20. See the discussion in Dudley, Broken Words, 134.
21. An excellent ancient example is the long discussion of biblical passages that Origen insists cannot be taken literally but must be interpreted “spiritually.” See his On First Principles, book 4, chapters 2 and 3.
22. See, for example, some of my own criticisms of Bultmann in the introduction above.
23. This is similar to a principle delineated by Kelsey: when theological arguments are mounted from other disciplines (e.g., history, literary criticism, philology, and metaphysics—he doesn’t mention sciences, but I would), those kinds of arguments must meet the “formal standard of excellence” of that discipline. So an argument from “history” used even in theology must nonetheless meet the standards of normal, modern, academic historiography. See Eccentric Existence, 23.
24. My entire project assumes the conclusions of what broadly may be called discourse theory and associated with the theories of language, textuality, and meaning making of the work of, especially, Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin. Modern historiography is a “discourse” in which only some kinds of statements even make sense, much less can be judged to be “true” or not. Theology and even “mythology” function as different “discourses,” in which the “rules” for judging the sensibility or “truth” of a statement are different from those within “history.” The question, for example, “Will you close for me?” will make sense only within some particular discourse. If said in an operating room, in the discourse of medicine, it might mean one surgeon is asking another to suture up an incision. In a court of law, on the other hand, within the discourse of jurisprudence, it might mean one lawyer is asking another on the same team to “close” an argument. Or it could signify a storekeeper asking his clerk to close up shop. Thus, modern historiography is one “discourse” that plays by one set of rules. I take both theology and mythology to be other “discourses” that play by different rules.
25. The “cornerstone” quotations, also from Isa 8:14 and Ps 118:22, must have been quite popular in early Christianity, probably because they helped explain the “rejection” of Jesus by “the Jews.” See also 1 Pet 2:7; Rom 9:33; Matt 21:42; Mark 12:10; Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11.
26. McGrath, Theology, 11.
27. Some commentators note that the more literal translation of the phrase would be “hope beyond hope” or “beyond hope in hope.” See, for example, Jewett, Romans; Cranfield, Epistle to the Romans, 1:245–46.
28. McCabe, God Matters, 19.
29. Critchley, “You Are Not Your Own,” 226.
30. Eagleton, Reason, 37.
31. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 9–12 et passim. Sedmak, taking his lead from Duns Scotus’s teachings that “faith is a practical habitus” (“Der Glaube ist . . . ein praktischer Habitus, ein praktischer Akt”; “theologia est practica”), pursues how we may think of “orthodoxy” and “heresy” as related less to pure statements than to lived life or “form of life.” “Der Glaube ist praktisch.”
32. De Certeau, Practice.
33. I first used this term “stance” to describe faith in my essay “Promise of Teleology.” I borrowed the image from Van Fraassen, Empirical Stance.
34. “There never has actually been a philosophia christiana, for if it was philosophia it was not christiana, and if it was christiana it was not philosophia.” Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1, p. 6.
35. See, for example, Frykholm, Julian of Norwich, 55.
36. As Chesterton would insist, the book of Job does not constitute a “theodicy.” It is rather the refusal to give one. See Ker, G. K. Chesterton, 615, citing J. P. de Fonseka, ed., G. K. C. as M. C., 37–39, 45–49, 51.
37. Eagleton, Reason, 137.
38. Ibid., 138.
39. The rest of Rom 6 goes back and forth between the actions of the believers and the actions of God upon them. And the treatment culminates in Rom 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The entire section is built on the metaphor that the believers are “slaves” of God. The people can respond to their deliverance to righteousness, but they are “slaves” in the entire process, beginning to end. They are, at least in a sense within Paul’s rhetoric, deprived of “free will” to exercise what will lead to their righteousness. It is God’s action from beginning to end, though they can “obey” it—that is, accept the free gift willingly rather than unwillingly. One is reminded (though it is not completely the same) of the older Stoic notion that a person is to fate like a dog tied to a cart. The cart (fate) goes where the divine providence of the universe destines it to go. The dog can go along willingly or unwillingly; but it will go along. Though Paul does not talk so rigidly, this passage goes some way in that direction. At any rate, it surely indicates that people may take no credit for their righteousness and therefore no credit for their faith.
40. See Augustine, De doctrina christiana 3.33–34, 35 (10.14); 3.55 (16–24). See also Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 12 et passim (see “love” in the index); Martin, Pedagogy, 83–85. Johannes Hoff, in discussion of Nicholas of Cusa, also comments on love as the ultimate guide in epistemology: Analogical Turn, 199–200.