Is it possible to have pragmatic faith? This was the question we asked ourselves in part one of this series, and in the process we considered a pragmatic way of thinking called recontextualization–a difficult sounding (but very simple) concept by the philosopher Richard Rorty. We left off with the question: is this compatible with faith? Is there room for Christianity in a pragmatic world-view? The answer is absolutely yes. 

Change Through Experience

Recall our example of the spider web, and its representing the human mind. Now, what is it that prompts the mind (or a spider, for that matter) to re-weave its web? Experience is what causes us to re-weave. The example where I was forced to accommodate a new belief that real cars could have two doors (see part one) shows this. We don’t just wake up and say “Well, today I’m going to change my long held beliefs!” Our beliefs are changed forcibly, most often by surprise, through experience. This experience I’m talking about is the kind that slaps us in the face and forces us to realize that our current beliefs may not be the whole story. 

Maybe you can already see where I’m going with this. If experience is what’s needed for recontextualization to take place, recontextualization must allow for faith if the believer has actual experience of her faith. Our experience of God, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Spirit, allows our web to be re-weaved so that we afford ourselves belief in those entities. So what happens when someone denies an experience that some would say is from God? Well, that person, instead of re-weaving their beliefs to accommodate God, has re-weaved their beliefs to re-enforce old beliefs that God can’t exist, and so the source of her experience must have been something entirely natural. (This is discussed at more length in part one.)

So while we are free to interpret our experiences and allow our ‘webs’ to be re-weaved, the process of re-weaving our beliefs is something we cannot escape–it happens every day. Most likely, it’s happening right now as you evaluate what I write and either accept or reject these ideas against the background of your other beliefs. 

Anti-Spirituality…? 

At this point, the question may be popping up in your mind to ask ‘Why might this be considered hostile to faith?’ The answer is this: the model of the mind that Richard Rorty gives us (the web) is supposed to be all there is. For Rorty, there is nothing outside the web–nothing transcendent, nothing spiritual, nothing mystical, etc. For Rorty, all humans are is this complex web of beliefs and desires. 

So, now that we’ve established that recontextualization can be seen as something friendly to faith (despite its appearance and original intent), it appears that we’ve hit another road block. How can the idea of recontextualization be of any value to us if it denies the existence of a soul? 

This is the question we will explore next time, in part three of this series.