Believing Our Beliefs: Deconstructing Job (Part Two)

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. 

Believing Our Beliefs

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. 

Wait…NO Objective Truth?! Reasonable Faith on the Attack.

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. 

‘Reasonable’ faith…?

There is a clamoring among the Christian community for ‘reasonable faith.’ In the ever expanding light of science, the thinking is, Christianity needs a viable defense–something to separate it, to dignify it, to shake free mystical shackles and say to the secular world “Hey, we’re still a live option, too!” Faith, we cry, is defensible, is reasonable, is something that can, at least in its essence, be understood. But can it? 

What are we seeking to make reasonable? What we ought to ask from the get go is: what, exactly, is so unreasonable about faith in the first place that we need to seek reason? Does it need rescuing? Is it in danger? 

Finding ‘reasonable’ faith is a sad attempt by the Christian world to seek legitimacy in the eyes of a world that increasingly relegates its past to the world of folk-tales and children’s stories with good morals. The real aspect of faith–you know, the inherently unreasonable part–has been all but abandoned. 

Soren Kierkegaard, whose genius could express itself better than many, wrote of ‘reasonable’ and ‘provable’ faith in this way….

“Here is the crux of the matter, and I come back to the case of the learned theology. For whose sake is the proof sought? Faith does not need it; aye, it must even regard the proof as its enemy. But when faith begins to feel embarrassed and ashamed, like a young woman for whom her love is no longer sufficient, but who secretly feels ashamed of her lover and must therefore have it established that there is something remarkable about him–when faith thus begins to lose its passion, when faith begins to cease to be faith, then a proof becomes necessary so as to command respect from the side of unbelief.” 

This, taken from Kierkegaard’s intimidatingly-titled work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, highlights the real problem here: for who are we making the faith ‘reasonable?’ Who are we trying to impress? When men and women come to a ‘saving knowledge’ of Jesus Christ, must they do so in a calculated, proved way, in the same way they would come to believe after much convincing and proving that water really is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen? 

The true problem, the deeper issue, behind this search for ‘reasonable faith’ is actually much worse that the surface problem appears. Reasonable faith means comes from where? A reasonable God. Who makes what? Reasonable demands. 

The God of Abraham, the God of the rich young ruler, and the God of Paul the apostle is, sadly, not the God of ‘reasonable faith.’ Reasonable faith does not account for the God who demands a son from his father, a young man’s full worldly possessions in light of cultural and societal relevance, or demand that a man live unmarried so that his life may be used to spread the gospel. Kierkegaard and others like him say that reasonable faith is an invention–a feel-good figment of the Western, modern, apologetic-minded Christian consciousness. 

What is Postmodernism?

It seems you can’t go far these days without encountering something–whether it be art or architecture, a book or blog, music or anything else–that comes with the label ‘postmodern’ attached to it. The funny thing about it is that this word is being carelessly thrown around, yet most people could not explain precisely what ‘postmodernism’ is. In that respect, it has become something of a buzzword; throw it around and see what sticks to it. The truth is that the idea of postmodernism is anything but that. It is not a simple rebellion against all things ‘mainstream,’ but has roots in a much deeper place. So would you like to know the definition of postmodernism is? Get ready, here it is…

Postmodernism is “incredulity towards metanarratives.” Got it? Good. If not, then I’ll explain. These are the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard, and this definition was coined in his groundbreaking work The Potsmodern Condition. What it means to be incredulous towards metanarratives is, extremely simplified, questioning whether or not we (as in our culture and society) have got the answer to life–the big One, the end-all, the Truth. Metanarratives (don’t worry about the intimidating name) are simply the history and story of our society (in our case, Western Enlightenment thought) that prompts us to believe that we are better suited to find the truth than, say, ancient Greece, or the Persian Empire. Our metanarrative tells us thatwe–although we may owe these past societies various bits of our tradition and customs–are better in whatever regard, and anybody using just plain reason will be able to see that. Postmodernism essentially denies this: it says that we don’t have any way of judging what is ‘better’ (like our method of governance vs. the Persian Empire’s), and anything that asks us to evaluate such things on reason alone is a metanarrative. Let’s break it down a little further.

Metanarrative, as you can probably tell, combines the prefix Meta and the word narrative. A narrative is simply a story. Our nation’s narrative would involve things like the fight for freedom, the history of our country, the story of our becoming and being. But when you attach the Meta and the word becomes Metanarrative, the meaning changes a bit. A Metanarrative will not only claim the same type of story as a narrative will, but place valueupon it. A Metanarrative is not simply a story–it is something that claims to be True (with a capital T–as in absolute truth). 

For instance: America fights for what we call freedom. We have a long and storied history of doing so. Our national narrative chronicles these events as a way of preserving our past, grounding ourselves in tradition and so on. The national Metanarrative that results from these fights, however, tells us that fighting for freedom is the best thing we can do, that it is absolutely True and that it must be right in all places and times. How does the Metanarrative back up this claim? The Metanarrative says that any person with common reason, American or not, will see that this value and claim, is absolutely True. 

Of course, whether or not American values will be perfectly acceptable to someone on an appeal to their reason alone is certainly up for debate. Europeans are sceptical of the brash individualism that Americans display–reason alone dictates to, say, a French or German person that Americans are mavericks or cowboys, not sensible about things, or highly idealistic in their worldview. This is certainly not the kind of conclusion about ourselves thatwe reach on reason alone! Already, we can see cracks in the idea of a metanarrative–everybody, every culture, every society, has a distinct and individual point of view. 

Let’s review:

Narrative: A story.

Metanarrative: A story that claims it can justify itself somehow upon reason alone. 

Postmodern Philosophers

I cannot comment upon how the emerging postmodern trend has affected other parts of society other than philosophy or in a broad social sense, so I’ll narrow my scope to that area. It’s important to narrow the scope of what we mean when we use a term like postmodernism, and be careful to avoid making statements that are too broad and sweeping. What is postmodern for architecture may or may not have any sort of bearing on what postmodernity means for literature, and so on and so forth. While it is tempting, as philosophers such as Richard Rorty have noted, we ought to steer ourselves away from making broad societal observations where the connection is anything less than certain. Lucky enough for us, philosophy just happens to be a discipline whose reach extends (often unnoticed) out as far as the furthest fringes of society. Postmodern philosophy, then, is in a unique postion–in a way, it has the luxury of being able to pick and choose what may or may not be relevant. 

Here is a short list of some notable philosophers who have either assumed or been given the label ‘postmodern’ in one way or another: 

Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Jean Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Soren Kierkegaard, to just name a few. 

This has been an intentionally brief and, admittedly, scant overview of what postmodernism is. Hopefully the framework provided here will be enough to follow along with future blog entries and discussions about postmodernism and what it’s proponents and detractors have to say. Enjoy!

 

What is Pragmatism?

 

The word ‘Pragmatism’ doesn’t sound like a school of philosophical thought. It sounds more like an old time disease–like the story your grandpa told you about how he came down with the Pragmatism when he was a boy. However the name sounds, Pragmatism is not a disease, but rather a philosophy that a lot of philosophers treat as though it were one. So what is it? You might be surprised to find that in many ways (particularly if you’ve ever taken an Intro to Philosophy course, or asked ‘why does this matter?’) you may be a pragmatist!

Most Western philosophies are concerned with questions like: “What is there in the world?” “What can we know?” or “What if there’s another world in my thumbnail, and this world is a part of some other guy’s thumbnail?” Pragmatism takes these questions and hurls them out the window. Why? Because, say Pragmatists, they’re completely pointless. 

Pragmatism gets its name from the Greek word pragma, which means ‘action.’ Consequently, Pragmatism is a philosophy of action. It says that unless your ideas have some sort of practical consequence, then they aren’t of much use. You can imagine the tailspin that this sends traditional philosophers into. 

One prominent contemporary pragmatist, Richard Rorty, says in an essay that pragmatists do not need metaphysics or epistemology–the traditional backbones of philosophical thought! So where does this lead pragmatism? If it rejects the basic tenets of what philosophy has always been, then what does it do? What does it say? Here are a few broad tenets of Pragmatism:

Rejection of ‘Truth’: Pragmatists don’t believe in such a thing as Truth (in the Platonic sense). They don’t think that we can jump outside of our heads and discover what the world is really like–they think that what we know is simply what works, rather than what is inherently true. Instead of seeking some ‘Universal Standard’ of goodness like the Greeks were after, Pragmatists are more concerned that we find a measure of goodness that works. Why must ‘goodness’ come from a standard outside of us? If we can all, or mostly, agree that something is ‘good’ (like Americans agree that democracy is generally good), then what’s wrong with that? Pragmatists say, to continue the analogy, that democracy is not inherently true or good–but that we have found democracy to work better and be more agreeable than anything else! 

Rejection of Epistemology: As a result of the rejection of truth, pragmatists reject epistemology. (Epistemology is the study of human knowledge–essentially asking ‘what can we know?’) We, in a very real sense, say pragmatists, create our own epistemology. We make things like math and science, rather than discover them. Again, society dictates what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ rather than some outside, non-human standard of universal ‘goodness’ and ‘badness.’ Epistemology is no longer a ‘discipline’ of study, but becomes more of a by-product of humanity. 

Rejection of Metaphysics: On a broad scale, pragmatists reject metaphysics. (Metaphysics includes questions like ‘Do I have free will?’ and ‘Is this world a part of a guy’s thumbnail?’) This rejection is based on one simple question: what do the answers to any of these questions matter? Unless there is a practical consequence to the metaphysical question you’re asking, pragmatists will generally tell you to get your head out of the clouds (or other various places). For example: will you ever discover the answer to the question of free will? The answer is most certainly no–the idea of someone discovering the answer as though it were a physical thing is almost comical. So what practical difference does it make one way or another? In fact, why do we even bother asking the question? How do we know that something beyond us (be it the Universe, God, or whatever) has made it so that our will must fall into one of those two categories? Unless something has a real, practical consequence, it is of no use to the pragmatist. 

It ought to be clear now why traditional philosophers have such a difficult time with Pragmatism. Traditional philosophers argue that pragmatists aren’t really ‘doing philosophy,’ and that their ideas bleed off into other academic disciplines. Pragmatists argue back that traditional philosophy has become isolated and stale; unchanging and unwilling to learn from other disciplines. Instead of asking traditional philosophical questions that seemingly have little value or practical application, pragmatists insist that we must do something to change our actual world. It’s better that we produce something of value than simply sit around and philosophize in an ivory tower.

Wicked Postmodernism (Part One)

The easiest way to understand a difficult concept like postmodern philosophy is to examine that concept within a familiar context. Most of us have read books, seen movies, or watched plays that would be considered ‘postmodern,’ but maybe would not recognize them as such. An example of postmodernism, if it wants to be a good example, should not only provide a postmodern perspective, but also be easily juxtaposed against a recognizable modern context. 

To illustrate postmodernism in this way, let’s examine The Wizard of Oz against the broadway play and novel, Wicked. This is a popular example for illustrating postmodernism and it has been done several others besides myself. In Wicked, the postmodern connection goes deeper than mere interpretation by outside observers–it is a postmodern story at heart. 

The Wizard of Oz, is, then, a story we’ll interpret as modern. (After all, the very idea of postmodern dictates that there must be something modern which came before.) In it, Dorothy is swept up from Kansas in a tornado. When the tornado sets her and the house she’s in down, she finds herself no longer in Kansas, but in a strange place called Oz. Her entry, however, has been anything but peaceful–her house landed upon the Wicked Witch of the East, sister of the dreaded Wicked Witch of the West. Helped along by Glenda the good witch, Dorothy heads off on a journey to the Emerald City with an unlikely group of friends, where the wonderful Wizard of Oz lives. Only the Wizard, she is told, can help her get back to Kansas. Along the way, the group must continually fight off the Wicked Witch of the West (seeking to avenge her sister’s death) in order to arrive safely at the Emerald City. 

The question we want to ask about the Wizard of Oz is this: is the Wicked Witch actually wicked? Is Glenda actually good? Is the Wizard (who turns out to be the a phony) actually wonderful? Are we, the viewers, given all the information we can gather from the movie, in a position to decree that yes, the Wicked Witch is not wicked because of any outside circumstance–she’s just wicked. If we decide that yes, we can make this judgment, then we switch from following a narrative (the simple telling of Dorothy’s story) to a metanarrative (making decrees and judgments about the absolute nature of the story [i.e., Glenda’s inherent goodness, or the Witch’s wickedness] based upon reason alone). 

Thus, at the end of the day we are left with a cut-and-dried story. A moral is learned, good has prevailed, and evil has been vanquished. The viewer assumes this, because she believes that she has access to all the pertinent facts of the matter. Case closed.

Enter Wicked. While The Wizard of Oz would have us believe that the battles between good and evil in Oz are all as plain and simple as they appear, Wicked tells us that there is more, much more, to the story than meets the eye. Wicked tells the backstory of the Wicked Witch, of Glenda, and of the Wicked Witch’s sister–and it is nothing that you would expect. 

The Wicked Witch, far from being wicked, is loving and kind, but experiences discrimination for being green. Her powers are unlike anything the people of Oz and the sorcery school staff have ever seen. Events twist and turn until the people of Oz learn that a human girl–Dorothy–has entered their land. Far from being center stage as in The Wizard, Dorothy does not even once appear in Wicked. The real story, it claims, is not so simple as the Wicked Witch being evil, but seeing that there is a greater context beyond the straightforward struggle between right and wrong that we are so familiar with. The Wicked Witch, in fact, believes that Dorothy is the wicked one! After all, Dorothy did kill the Wicked Witch’s sister (who, we also learn, was physically disabled). 

We’ll continue to explore how Wicked embodies postmodern philosophy, as well as the different ways that these principles can be seen in our lives. After all, it’s great if we learn that the Wicked Witch isn’t all that wicked–but what does that have to do with me?