Sometimes it’s much easier to believe in our comfortable traditions and worn-in ways of thinking than believe in the raw power of God and understand that we do not have access to every answer we want. This is the lesson of Job, as we briefly discussed in my last post. In the end, we saw a vague connection to postmodernism: but where does the rubber meet the road? How do we identify whether or not we hold these sorts of beliefs that are actually false (like the kind of ‘rules’ and ‘standards’ that Job’s friends held)? 

Interpretation

Here we must peer into what is traditionally known as the enemy of the evangelical world: interpretation. Christians are generally (I stress the word generally here) eager to overcome interpretation. That is, we don’t want to believe that when we read the Bible, all we get is our own interpretation of what it says–we want to believe that we have unmediated (uninterpreted, or ‘untainted’) access to the real thing! Allowing for variance of interpretation, so the thinking goes, leads to relativism or something equally sinister. As such, interpretation is generally held as something bad, something that must be moved beyond.

James K. A. Smith discusses these ideas within a Christian context in his book The Fall of Interpretation. While discussing the question of what is actually Biblical, and what might be purely social or cultural when it comes to ‘Christian traditions,’ Smith says that “Much of what evangelicals of differing stripes consider to be a divine imperative is actually a highly mediated interpretation.” (FOI, p 41) 

What he means is that the things we believe to be direct orders from God himself might actually be things imposed upon us by culture or society via interpretation. What does this mean? It means we are just like Job’s friends! 

A quick example. Among conservative evangelicals, consumption of alcohol in any amount is usually considered grounds for intercessionary prayer. But why is this strict stance held so dearly? After all, Jesus himself turned water into wine when those at the party had already drank every last drop. The Pharisees even accused Jesus of being a drunk! It would be easy for the uninitiated evangelical to interpret these New Testament passages as condoning the responsible consumption of alcohol–only to be met with hostility by his ‘wiser’ and ‘more knowledgeable’ evangelical brethren. Is this tradition of prohibition scriptural, or merely interpretive? In Smith’s words, is it a divine imperative, or a mediated interpretation? 

That question will be left open for debate, but there is much evidence to show that prohibition was not a strong stance in the church until the constitution was amended in the 1930s, banning alcohol consumption, sale, and manufacturing. After its repeal, the church remained anti-alcohol, and it continues to this day. 

Our beliefs

So what can we say about ourselves? Do we have highly mediated interpretations that we believe to be God-ordained and enforced commandments? Modern thinking certainly says so. What did Job learn from his experience? What did Job’s friends learn? When we have hard-and-fast, black-and-white rules that do not tolerate bending in any way because things couldn’t possibly be different than what we believe, then we ought to step back and take a hard look at ourselves.

How far does this go?

The biggest question that arises from all of this is “Where does it end?” If we admit one thing is tradition, what keeps us from discarding everything? Will we lose the center, the core, the truth of Christianity? This is what we will discuss in part three of this series. In it, we will hopefully dig deeper to find what we mean when we say truth, and better understand ourselves as we relate to God. 

Here’s a question: what do you believe in first and foremost? What has the final say in your life when everything boils down to the rock-bottom heart of the matter? Since this question is primarily aimed at a Christian audience, I’ll frame it this way: Do you believe in God, or do you believe in your beliefs about God? 

It may seem obscure at first, but trust me when I say there is a wonderful point to be made here. Is there a creed, a standard, a ‘rule-sheet,’ so to speak, that you believe God must act by? Are there ways that he ‘must’ act? Is he predictable in this sense? To make this a bit more clear, let’s examine the story of Job. Much of this analysis has been taken from Oswald Chambers amazing book, Our Ultimate Refuge. 

The Bible tells us that Job was the most powerful man in the east. He was blameless and upright. How many people does the Bible accord those adjectives? Not many. And yet, despite his goodness, calamity befalls him. To make matters worse, once everything has been stripped away from him, three friends come to ‘comfort’ Job. 

Spiritual physicians

When Job’s friends initially see him, they sit in silence for days. When one of them, Eliphaz, finally finds his voice, he does not speak kindly to Job but instead ridicules him. Eliphaz claims that Job has done something wrong. Otherwise, this sort of tragedy would never have happened to him. All of the friends agree, and it is implicitly noted that prior to these events, even Job himself believed in such a creed. God punishes the wicked, and prospers the righteous is what their belief claimed. Anything outside of this was not allowed for. Eliphaz, the others, and possibly even Job for a time, believed their beliefs before believing in God. 

The postmodern connection

What does this have to do with postmodernism? Everything. The creed that Job and his friends lived by dictated the actions of God. To use a phrase currently popular in the contemporary church, it put God in a box. Any way of thinking that puts God a box is unhealthy–our beliefs cannot attempt to dictate or even predict what God might do in a given situation, because honestly, what answer could we ever arrive at? How could we ever know? Beyond personal affirmation, there is not much hope for a leaflet dropped from the sky. We will not get the kind of hard-and-fast, black-and-white answer we would like. 

And yet, this is the way in which a great majority of modern thought operates. In coming posts, we will explore the ways in which this happens, as well as what thinkers such as Soren Kierkegaard have to say about believing our beliefs before believing in God. 

One of the biggest and most persistent objections from the Christian community against postmodernism is the so-called ‘denial’ of Truth (with a capital T). Postmodernism, they claim, rejects the idea that we have access to absolute truth, and so it becomes relativism, and then all religions are correct, and then no one is wrong, and then Jesus becomes just a man, and….. well, you get the idea. Eventually, the way that postmodernism is presented by most Christians, everything snowballs into relativism. 

One of the most prominent Christian critics of postmodernism is J.P. Moreland, who has written several articles and books against the ‘dangers’ of postmodernism. For example, you can find a highly one-sided article by Dr. Moreland here (http://www.boundless.org/features/a0000928.html), where he goes to such lengths to define postmodernism as something implicitly heretical, writing that “postmodernism sets itself on a collision course with Jesus Christ himself.” 

Before this enormous claim is made, Dr. Moreland says that an “implication of postmodernism is an institutionalization of indiscriminate anger, and this is facilitated by postmodernism’s rejection of the idea that that one’s intentions determine the meaning of his or her utterances and writings.” Further, he says that, in quite confident fashion, that “ As anybody with international travel experience could attest, America is a country of unduly angry people. Postmodernism is to be blamed for its share in creating this situation.” How these grandiose claims are justified is beyond me.

The truth is, these claims have very little merit. Detractors such as Dr. Moreland rely on ad hoc arguments that ground themselves not in what Christians postmodern thinkers have to say, but what they want them to say. 

One (quite large) problem with ‘Objective Belief’

Not wanting to pen a tome, I’ll focus on just one issue of the debate here and see whether or not Dr. Moreland has got things right when he levels what amounts to the charge of heresy at postmodern believers. One of his biggest concerns is that postmodernism rejects ‘objective truth.’ But what do we mean by this? Let’s be very philosophical for a moment and consider the question.

Would we say that math is objective truth? Let’s suppose for a moment that it is. 2+2=4, we’ll say, is a prime candidate for objectivity. In this manner, we want to establish that belief in God, religion, ethics, or anything else can truly be ‘objective.’ This is, implicitly or explicitly, what Dr. Moreland and those like him want to say. (See his article for his thoughts on this.)

But here’s the problem–why do we need to prove God’s existence? Can it even be done? Further, if God were proven on the same level that we hold 2+2=4 to be proven, would we still need faith to believe? 

Dr. Moreland is after what he calls ‘reasonable’ faith. He wants to show that God can somehow be ‘argued’ or ‘reasoned’ to–that being a Christian is intellectually respectable. But what price does he pay for this? For one, I would argue that faith itself is surely damaged in the process. How can you have faith or even belief in something that has been ‘objectively proven’? After all, when something has the moniker of ‘objectivity’ attached to it, it presumably no longer needs to be believed, because it is simply the way things are. 

For example, it would make no sense to say “I believe that I am Stephen.” For if this is objectively true, then I have wasted air in saying it. It doesn’t even need to be believed–the objective status that my being Stephen has is given as a presupposition rather than a belief. If anyone would like to debate this idea, you are more than welcome. 

Faith and Certainty

Let me ask you: do you have faith that 2+2=4? Do you have faith that the sun will rise in the morning? Do you have faith that there will be 24 hours in tomorrow’s day? Or are all of these examples of things that we know and classify as ‘objective knowledge’? Here, I won’t even go into why the idea of objective knowledge makes no philosophical sense, but for the time being, lets remember that God has never been part of our objective knowledge. Belief in him has always been subjective. See for yourself:

You can prove to your atheist friend that 2+2=4, and you believe that you can do so objectively. It will be a completely different story, however, when you attempt to prove God’s existence to him. The matter–when it comes to belief and faith–is subjective.