Anti-Expertism

An old, updated paper from the seminary days:

The confidence proper to a Christian is not the confidence of one who claims possession of demonstrable and indubitable knowledge. It is confidence of one who had heard and answered the call that comes from God through whom and for who all things were made:  Follow me. –Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence.[1]

Confidence, etymologically speaking, comes from confidere, broken down to “cum + fidere” or “with + to trust.” What, then, does this with trusting modify? Where do we place confidence? A good wager would be “I know with trust,” I confidently know.  But this would not fit with Newbigin, the adverbial force of the word(s) places the emphasis on the one knowing. Looking closer at the quote above, the reader will notice that the second sentence very intentionally emphasizes confidence  as the subject with one in the genitive. So, the weight of the word, loosely speaking, shifts away from the cum and towards the fidere: we are concerned not with what is acting confidently but what the confidence is in. Newbigin discusses this a few pages earlier:

“When Jesus called the first disciples with the words Follow me, he was certainly calling for an act of faith. He did not offer any demonstrable certainties. And so it is with everyone who has been so called through the faithfulness of the first apostles and their successors. To regard this as cognitively inferior to the rational demonstration of supposedly certain truths is to assume that the ultimate reality with which we have to deal is not personal but impersonal.[2]

This unpacks his understanding of God’s call in the first citation. The confidence we have comes from God. He calls and we listen. If we are concerned with the adverbial force then we are moved to view knowledge with an emphasis on the knower. Ultimate reality would only be grasped through bare facts (a cold, Cartesian objectivism) rather than our engagement with God’s expression of Himself. Prototypically, we should view this expression as Christ (John 1:1-14) and, secondly, as Scripture expressing Christ in his redemptive context. He furthers the argument as follows:

The truth is surely is not that we come to know God by reasoning from our unredeemed experience but that what God has done for us in Christ give us the eyes through which we can begin to truly understand our experience in the world.[3]

So, if we are to rest, secure in truth, we must rely not on our minds but by recognizing God’s faithfulness.[4] Because of this view, Newbigin became uncomfortable with words like inerrancy which, as he calls them, Protestant fundamentalists use to assert a Cartesian certainty which is unbecoming to Scripture (and finally impossible in itself):

“…[Christ's disciples] witness has come to us invaried forms; we know about very few of the words and deeds of Jesus with the kind of certainty Descartes identified with reliable knowledge. To wish that it were otherwise is to depart from the manner in which God has chosen to make himself known. The doctrine of verbal inerrancy is a direct denial of the way in which God has chosen to make himself know to us as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.[5]

To put it simply, the authority, reliability, and trustworthiness of Scripture is inevitably bound to the question of the truthfulness of the biblical materials. [6] And the truthfulness of the materials, according to the fundamentalist, is rooted in permanent expressions of unquestionable and irreformable truths.[7] The fundamentalist is, then, arrogant because the certainty in his mind is asserted over Scripture thus asserting himself over God and denying his creatureliness.

But is this just? Or are the Protestant fundamentalists he discusses just gremlins created to scare theologians? Sinclair Ferguson attempts to dispel that myth:

“Belief in the infallibility of Scripture does not imply that we know how to resolve every prima-facie inconsistency in Scripture. Indeed, we are not under the obligation to do this in order to believe in biblical inerrancy, although we will seek to do so for exegetical and apologetical reasons. We believe in the perfect love, righteousness, and sovereignty of God, although we cannot understand their operation in the connection with every individual circumstance of life. So too our faith in the inerrancy of Scripture rests on the Bible’s own testimony and in view of the consistency of that testimony, we anticipate further resolutions to those passages which as yet we do not fully understand[8].

Is it not very similar to our first quote? They clearly agree about the nature of Scriptures truthfulness; it is rooted in God’s character which is manifested in his acts in history. While Newbigin may find “So too our faith in, etc.,” an impish passage, there, inerrancy does not rely on man’s judgment but biblical testimony. Ferguson continues to unfold his claim:

“We ought not to be driven by the existence of some ‘problem passages’ into abandoning inerrancy, on the grounds that we are unable to prove it in every conceivable instance. It is important to recognize that there are difficulties in Scripture which are at present insoluble and will probably remain so until the last day. [9]

This is to say that inerrancy of Scripture does not mean complete objective knowledge. While it may not testify to the truthfulness of the gospel, it does not affirm man’s ability to understand it; so, he is called to continually reflect. Ferguson has no intention of finding absolute certainty, even with biblical testimony of inerrancy. The words of Scripture are not magical (hoc est corpus is not hocus pocus); rather, they are all too human.[10] Recall Ferguson’s Warfield quote:

“No one claims that inspiration secured the use of good Greek in Attic severity of taste, free from the exaggerations and looseness of current speech, but only that it secured the accurate expression of truth, even (if you will) through the medium of the worst Greek a fisherman of Galilee could write and the most startling figures of speech a peasant could invent. [11]

The biblical language robed in men’s expressions is a clear proof that Scripture is not simply propositional. In fact, language’s nuances are, with inerrancy, still found in Scripture, e.g.  the sun rises is not wrong. And so, we find that Ferguson rightly views language as fluid and contextual rather than rigid and abstract. Does Ferguson now conquer Newbigin’s gremlin? No, being only a nominal problem, Ferguson never had to fight him. The text is clear: there is a mooring for proper humility through God’s character in the impish section, a realistic view of knowledge in Ferguson’s unfolding claim and recognition that the language of Scripture is not merely propositional in the Warfield quote. Regardless of either man’s terminology they both show that language has its breathing room, man his mind, and God His authority.

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[1] Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995, pg 105
[2] Ibid., pg 95
[3] Ibid, pg 97
[4] Recall Dr. Williams’ example in his discussion of Revelation. He claimed he was once in trouble at a different institution because “I did not believe in the Bible but rather believed what the Scripture said.” The mind is queried rather than queries.
[5] Ibid, pg 89
[6] Dr. Williams’ notes on his Revelation lecture, pg. 11.
[7] Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995, pg 89.
[8] Sinclair Ferguson, How Does the Bible Look at itself?, chapter 3 in Inerrancy and Hermeneutic, edited by Harvey Conn. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House Co., 1988, pg. 64
[9] Ibid, pg. 64-65
[10] In fact, the discipled exegesis rings of Newbigin’s discussion of attending to Scripture on page 91.
[11] A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield, Inspiration. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1881, pg. 43. Quote found in Ferguson essay pg. 63.

or so I try (via):

“… those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians will do well to be extremely reticent on the subject. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn’t one, either in faith or morals. Where faith is concerned, very few of us have the right to say more than—to vary a saying of Simone Weil’s—“I believe in a God who is like the True God in everything except that he does not exist, for I have not yet reached the point where God exists.” As for loving and forgiving our enemies, the less we say about that the better. Our lack of faith and love are facts we have to acknowledge, but we shall not improve either by a morbid and essentially narcissistic moaning over our deficiencies. Let us rather ask, with caution and humour—given our time and place and talents, what, if our faith and love were perfect, would we be glad to find it obvious to do?”

— W.H. Auden

A few days ago a fellow flocker asked for a theological analysis of Jung’s notion of Synchronicity. Admittedly, I haven’t read any of his work for about five years but his question was less academic and more concerned with the broad perspective of coincidence and meaning so wikipedia was a reasonable place to start for information on the subject:

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together by random chance must be very small.

In other words, there is acausal meaning for coincidences which aren’t from God. Hence my friend wrote, “I think Christians are conspicuously firm in disregarding synchronicity, but certainly there are, at least for me in my research, questions regarding what happens in our free will that appear to have meaning, a synchronicity, yet the answer is not revealed or may never be revealed so we can feel strongly that it isn’t from God,” and then posed this question: “If there’s meaning and we conclude that it isn’t of God, then is it the universe? Time and space to connect with the subconscious?”

I took, not surprisingly to those who know me, a fairly circuitous route to answer the question. The first part gives some context and analysis of the Christian perspective of human free agency and God’s will and the second discusses the question posed. Below is a revised and reformatted version of my answer, rough but ready enough.

(more…)

A few weeks ago I did a couple of posts over at Arbitrary Marks. This is a shortened version of a longer, more cofusing response to ck’s post. I apologize for its lopsidedness, I am looking for a blog post here, not an essay. Please ask questions if you are confused. I’ll try to answer them.

One caveat: I don’t pretend to be an expert on anything I am writing here, but I do promise I have thought long and hard about it.

Derrida, in Of Grammatology writes:

Thus, with this epoch, reading and writing, the production or interpretation of signs, the text in general as fabric of signs, allow themselves to be confined within secondariness. They are preceded by a truth, or a meaning already constituted by and within the element of the logos. Even when the thing, the “referent,” is not immediately related to the logos of a creator God where it began by being the spoken/thought sense, the signified has at any rate an immediate relationship with the logos in general (finite or infinite), and a mediated one with the signifier, that is to say with the exteriority of writing. When it seems to go otherwise, it is because a metaphoric mediation has insinuated itself into the relationship and has simulated immediacy; the writing of truth in the soul, opposed by Phaedrus (278a) to bad writing (writing in the “literal” [propre] and ordinary sense, “sensible” writing, “in space”), the book of Nature and God’s writing, especially in the Middle Ages; all that functions as metaphor in these discourses confirms the privilege of the logos and founds the “literal” meaning then given to writing: a sign signifying a signifier an eternal verity, eternally thought and spoken in the proximity of a present logos. The paradox to which attention must be paid is this: natural and universal writing, intelligible and nontemporal writing, is thus named by metaphor. A writing that is sensible, finite, and so on, is designated as writing in the literal sense; it is thus thought on the side of culture, technique, and artifice; a human procedure, the ruse of being accidentally incarnated or of a finite creature. Of course, this metaphor remains enigmatic and refers to a “literal” meaning of writing as the first metaphor. This “literal” meaning is yet unthought by the adherents of this discourses. It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the “literal” meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself.

There is quite a bit there and the reader would do well to read it again before you continue on (even if you read it twice before reading this sentence). You would also do well to read from 278a in the Phaedrus and recognize that the story of Thoth is a story in the story.

I do not understand everything in that little paragraph–at least not all of the implications. I have suspicions my tangled assumptions stem from my confusions–and its implications for violence narratives–in my earlier posts. Essentially, Derrida is trying to sketch the genealogy of writing in Western thought, starting with philosophy’s Father, Plato. The “discourses” he refers to is the Great Discourse, the Great Conversation of Western Philosophy. And, if we grant his conclusion, “It is not, therefore, a matter of inverting the literal meaning and the figurative meaning but of determining the “literal” meaning of writing as metaphoricity itself.” Then we are forced to talked of Being/being (i.e., ontological/Metaphysical studies) from the Heiddegarian posture Being under erasure, or Being, since the immediacy of the referent/signifier is ruptured; there is no simple arrow to the referent, no “one to one” correspondence between a vocable and the signified: it is an approximation, a best guest, not “certain.” (The best analogy I have found for Being is negative theology, i.e., in speaking of God’s goodness we do violence to his goodness. Instead it is “Supra-Good,” a Good which cannot be described.) Writing–under the Western philosophic tradition, thus, effaces itself.

The practical implication is the (best) rhetoric (i.e., narrative) rules (dominates?). If there is only approximation, then there cannot be a final discussion of Truth or Being as Western Philosophy has described according to its own understanding of language (i.e., description). Some have claimed, consequently, that analytic philosophy becomes an impossibility–as far as its postivistic goals are concerned–since the “deep,” the abstract, is either too distant (Heiddeger’s ontology of Being) or non-existent (the denial of both the traditional ontology of Being and Being: nihilism).

This leaves with two possible definitions of “violence:”

1. From The denial of the ontology of Being and the affirmation of traditional ontology (be it Platonic or Aristotelean):
A knowable discontinuity between the reality and the expression, treatment, articulation, etc.

2. From the affirmation of the ontology of Being and the denial of its more traditional form or the denial of both:
Two competing narratives describing the same problem or situation which, in turn, negates its Other and can never finally be resolved (i.e., knowledge of discontinuity is impossible).

And so we get to the heart of the matter: the confusion about violence. The student of philosophy, I hope, should clearly see that all of this discussion about violence is itself a Nietzschean discussion. The question of Will to Power is the heart of the postmodern dillemma, it is the source of violence. My confusion, if my limited reading of Nietzsche is correct, is the same as Nietzsche’s. I have always reckoned that on the one hand he critiques philosophy–particularly metaphysical philosophy–under the rubric of our first definition, but then demands “Truth” falls under the second. I suspect (and only suspect) that scholarship would bear this out. Regardless, the postmodern critique is the application of the will to power on itself: those who buy into the Nietchzean perspective have themselves be “dominated by another’s will to power” and it is this tension, rooted in the second definition, which is most immediate and demands attention.

Simply put, whether or not you agree with Nietzsche, there are fundamentally differing perspectives of what truth is in the West and this finally stems from some sort of metaphysic. The two possibilities that the history of philosophy has granted us could be described as ontologies of peace or violence (These are terms I first discovered in David Bentley Harts book, The Beauty of The Infinite and are apparently employed by folks in the Radical Orthodoxy camp).

So, when I write, “until philosophy can comfortably situate itself in the difficulties of the pluralisms which these narratives of violence draw strength from, it will not progress and has no business talking safely about metaphysics,” I am speaking of the “difficulties of pluralisms” as violence between competing narratives (“Competing narratives” is, in a certain sense, a tautology since narratives which differ, by that very difference, negate each other) whereas the philosophy’s comfort must be understood through the faux-peace of the Heracletian Turn, a tension which falls under definition number one.

An ontology of violence would basically argue that Being constantly effaces itself (which is why language as an expression of beings does so). one often hears that “fiction is the new truth” and the violence ontology is its most basic expression, as Heraclitus said “Changing, it rests.” If this is so, then Being and Truth are in constant flux (do we see Nietzsche here, I should think so) and Pluralism’s “strength” its validity is the (perceived?) legitimacy of the claim. Faux-peace, then, is the inversion of violence for peace, progession for nonprogression, change for status quo. Despite classical claims (and according to the above perspective), the mind does not crave rest but requires consistent pressure and force to know. It is fractured knowledge which can never be resolved because:

a.) (Classical Skepticism) True knowledge cannot be determined because we can never know what continuity between expression and truth is

or

b.) (Consequences of Nietzsche) True knowledge cannot be determined because there cannot be continuity between between expression and truth because there is NO SUCH THING as Truth qua firm foundation (i.e., God, Being, etc.)

So, if we take my comments of phobosphic humanity to be true, I would argue it stems from the commodification of ideas: we name something true because it “appeals to us.” Appeal, in itself, is not bad but coupled with phobosophism it can become a problem. In the case of Christianity, I think many of the ideas are ridiculous and offensive but for some bloody reason–despite their lack of appeal–I believe the bible to be true. But to make this claim “rationally” yet give other perspectives there fair due, I would have to appeal to something higher, some sort of metaphysic (via Reason) to moderate the perspectives (or so it seems) lest we fall back into the clashing rhetorics (contra Reason) of differing narratives. In short, the consequences of Nietzsche moves us away from rational discourses and proofs and prima face justifications towards rhetoric and political spin which assumes a latent or hidden ontology of violence (the Will to Power’s assumption). Pluralism’s strength disarms Reason. While this is not bad, it is dangerous.

I suppose my posture is mostly rhetorical at this point. I don’t really have a clear solution, just a concern that we think and operate, particularly academics, on a level of utility that does not do justice to our ideas. We don’t live them, we just trade and bludgeon with them. We shouldn’t forget that in a capitalistic systems money is power and, therefore, economic metaphors are shaped by this perspective. When I speak of “commodification”, I am speaking of more the bare bones “utility.” I want to bring all “commodification’s” connotations in to stark view.

Part one may be found here.
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There are, roughly, three ways of using language: charged language, conversational, and bullshit. Conversational and bullshit have obvious overlap, not all of which is bad.

Regardless, I submit to you, as my professional opinion as a liquor store clerk, that 98% of all philosophical and theological discourse falls under the bullshit category: it’s complete unprofound tripe (whether this piece resides in the third category falls to the readers discretion). This includes the Big Names in both disciplines (Kant especially) with the exception of few stray sentences here or there. I only pay attention to them because other people pay attention to them and name dropping can be a useful, time-saving idea marker.

This is because most of these men think that a carefully worded essay can solve a problem (theologians can be particularly bad about this). Alas, words have only ever caused problems, e.g. Socrates’ apparent affinity to hemlock or that strange Galilean Jew’s fascination with nails and wood. Both the response to and utterance of words are guide by a fundamental human problem: we are phobosophic ((Philosophy comes from the roots philo + sophia which literally means ‘love of wisdom’. Phobosophic comes from phobo + sophia meaning ‘fear of wisdom’)). Experience as well as biblical texts confirm this. This is why Caputo and Kearny, two philosophers, do not speak of sin: it annihilates the very grammar of Western philosophy (of which they are reluctantly but self-admittedly moored to, perhaps more than they realize) and its “systems.”

This does not mean that we should not write or respect language. Quite the contrary! Instead, we should see language as an arrow pointing towards things already experienced, seen, and/or understood. Language vivifies, it is robust, ‘Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree ((E. Pound in the ABC of Reading))’ This is why recently I have greater trust in professional writers and poets than I do in philosophers, theologians, and scholars. Great writers describe the human condition, they don’t try to solve it. Take, for example, Wendell Berry who is a poet/writer/farmer ((This is an excerpt from Standing By Words. It is, by my reckoning, one of the most important collections of essay in the 20th century for a theologian or philosopher to read. The book is largely about poetry and should be read as a reasonable and clear Derrida without the extremism or vacuity. There are probably a dozens of books like this.)):

So far as I can tell, it is unlikely that one could speak at all, in even the most casual conversation, without some informing sense of what would be best to say–that is, without some sort of standard. And I do not believe that it is possible to act on the basis of a “tentative” or “provisional” conclusion. We may know that we are forming a conclusion on the basis of provisional or insufficient knowledge–that is part of what we understand as the tragedy of our condition. But we must act, nevertheless, on the basis of final conclusions, because we know that actions, occurring in time, are irrevocable. That is another part of our tragedy. People who make a conventional agreement that all conclusions are provisional–a convention almost invariably implied by academic uses of the word “objectivity”–characteristically talk but do not act. Or they do not act deliberately, though time and materiality carry them into action of a sort, willy-nilly.

Brilliant, and at the very pulse of the postmodern whine.

The Emergent Church felt this pressure, I think, and has been slowly coming out of the woodwork to call for a more substantive theology. A theology of action, one in which its grammer and language impels and compels us to do something. This is what I like about these folks. Unfortunately, most of them are caught in the same trap and simply continue to “talk seriously about the issues.” When I was at the conference I kept meeting people who said, “I originally thought the Emergent movement was about contemporary worship, but now I realize its about so much more.”

This “so much more,” however, lacks teeth since nobody seems to ever say what this “so much more is,” instead you get head nods, smiles, and grunts of approval. This is the heart the movement’s disquiet and the Evangelicals’ rejection. The movement is so ecumenically minded that, in order to make all feel welcome (I won’t mention how subtly unwelcomed I felt at the conference), they flatten out the heart of the biblical message: that Jesus is the only way. You don’t have to like the idea, you also don’t have to believe it, but respect the blasted text. The reason I trust good writers and poets more than academics is because they have a greater appreciation for narrative/story (despite all the hipster, academic chatter to the contrary) which is the backbone of any language. It is the sort of thing which would give the “so much more” bite.

Let me be clear: the Emergent Church lacks teeth because they are uncomfortable with exclusivity and, consequently, fear creeds and final conclusions since they want to emphasize “”love of neighbor” or, more specifically, “enemy” (the least of these). This, in turn, makes many of them uncomfortable with the biblical narrative, sin, and the unique work of Christ which puts a strain on the word “Church” in their moniker. Until they resolve that, they will be unable to act in any substantive way.

I think that the answer to their tension is being wrestled by the Federal Vision/New Perspective folks. I do not endorse a particular view on the subject, nor do I have the knowledge to do so, but nevertheless, I do find the PCA’s official perspective recent study on it a bit myopic. They seem to completely miss the point, but that is another conversation.

So, I guess what I am saying is that in order for the Emergent Church to do anything they need to define what they are which means solving a problem with language. I suppose this may place this post under our illustrious “third category” since it seems to contradict itself.

There has been so many different strands of conversation at the conference I almost don’t know where to begin. I must say that both Kearney and Caputo are less wily in person: they shoot straighter than they read. Caputo defined rather clearly two concepts which I have been wrestling with and which this blog has discussed with great confusion: deconstruction and onto-theo-logic.

Deconstruction (roughly in Caputo’s words) recognizes the ambiguity inherent in hermeneutics which is to say, simply, that interpretation is not translation without remainder, or, more banally, what you say and what I think you say are not the same. Understood this way, it is nothing new just as Derrida suggested.

Onto-theo-logic is a scheme which judges God by ontology. It places reason above the Divine, God is judged by the court of reason, he must be proven. You know onto-theo-logic is rearing its head when a thinker names God a causa sui (cause of himself). This is a perspective that is drawn out of scholastic thought. It is not Thomas Aquinas’ perspective, mind you, he would call God an uncaused cause. The onto-theo-logic is best typified by Descartes or Leibniz. Those who fail to recognize God’s greatness, his infinity (to put it crudely), placing him in an easily parsed out scheme which would make St. Thomas blush since he wrote his highly systematized theology on his knees.

What I found interesting is the language that Kearney and Caputo used, language I had not heard before but intuitively grasped, theo-poetics. This is the reason I became interested in poetry, specifically Pound’s imagism, since it demands that language be concrete and vivid rather than abstract and vacuous. This same fascination draws me to Professor Strunk (“Vigorous writing is concise,” and “Omit needless words”). I am, frankly, not entirely sure what these two men mean by it and, more frankly, I am unconcerned since I will appropriate for my own uses.

The general backdrop for the whole discussion goes something like this: The grammar of Western thought flows from Plato and the Grecian tradition. This grammar involves a dualism which is destructive in philosophy and anti-theological (read: “anti-biblical”, although they would shy away from that term, I think). This dualism led to abstract thought as “more true” and “really real” to the determent of the concrete, the historical since it is “subjective.” The Nieztchean/Keirkegaardian (speaking of strange bedfellows) critique argues that the abstract (which nobody has ever met, seen, or experienced, incidentally) is a fiction. In the case of Keirkegaard, God is too big for the categories of the abstract, they burst in his presence, are hallow, empty, vacuous. For Nietzsche, the abstract God who is a pure fiction, is the “great totalizer” (not his words), Platonism for the masses (his words) and, consequently, the great violence of the history of the world. A violence because it sissifies men and sucks the joy out of life, particularly because Platonism (and, therefore, Christianity) disdains the body.

It is of no small significance that truth is supposed a women.

The postmodern turn, then, realized among a great many other things, that “God is dead” is equally as totalizing, the Nietzschean critique folds in on itself. Such is the world we live in, however simplified my explanation.

Now those in the Emergent Conversation take varied perspectives on this turn which is why it is perceived as so slippery. Many, embracing the postmodern critique, a la Nietzsche, what to chuck all the traditional categories and creeds since they are bastardized forms of Hellenism, other’s recognize some truth in the traditional creeds but a truth contingent since it only has vivid meaning at that historical time (similar to the Thomas/Scholastic problem above) and, thus, require reinvention: a betrayal of tradition in order to contextualize the truth for today. Their are others still who think we should reject the postmodern turn and return to some premodern state, my alma mater would be a good example of this, albeit outside of the Emergent conversation.

More importantly, they recognize a tension between totalizing claims and the exclusivism of Christianity: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” The tendency, in my experience, is that they prefer the unexclusive over and above limited atonement and only discuss Romans with great discomfort.

The most frustrating thing about the conference is that, literally, the only time I heard the word “sin” uttered was by my own mouth or those who where responding to something I said ((Actually, it was obliquely referenced in a question this morning, now that I think about it)), but I’ll take more about that and my take on all this in part two. But, before you leave, I want you to understand two things:

1. I am making very generalized statements about the folks at the conference and the historic sweep of intellectual culture in the West, both should be obvious.

and,

2. For all the critiques I have about the Emergent Conversation, these people are concerned about good things: the marginalized (the least of these), justice, ecumenicism, and love of neighbor/enemy.

Until next time.

Today begins The 2007 Emergent Theological Philosophical Conversation in Philadelphia. The two speakers are Jack Caputo and Richard Kearney who might be loosely categorized as deconstructionists (if such a thing as deconstructionism, let alone deconstruction, does indeed exist). As the sort of fellow who is equally frustrated with young progressives as I am with stodgy old men*, this conference will most likely place me around those of the former rather than the latter category and very possibly excite a state of aggravation.

Case and Point:

Our dream

Our dream is to join in the activity of God in the world wherever we are able, partnering with God as God’s dreams for our world come true. In the process, the world can be healed and changed, and so can we.

Emergent

In English, the word “emergent” is normally an adjective meaning coming into view, arising from, occurring unexpectedly, requiring immediate action (hence its relation to “emergency”), characterized by evolutionary emergence, or crossing a boundary (as between water and air). All of these meanings resonate with the spirit and vision of Emergent Village. In other languages, names for regional networks will be chosen with similarly evocative meanings.

Sounds a bit wishy-washy doesn’t it? Such is the problem with ecumenical movements. However, as always, its biggest weakness is also a strength, since it is attempting to model the sort of inclusiveness the Church ought to have. The consequence is strange bedfellows and I’ll take strange bedfellows if it means–ahem–good pillow talk.

Any-hoo, I hope this will kick start some of my thought on foundations. Lately, I feel like I have lost my theological mojo.

NB: You should check out BittersweetLife on the Emergent Church. Ariel has written a great deal about it.

*Unfortunately the perception between oneself and the actuality often differ.

John B., via clusterflock, directed me to Driscoll’s “theological reasons” for preaching from the ESV. Now I am not the sort of fellow who takes potshots at individuals, but–as far as I can see–his reasons either wildly naive or down right deceptive.

For instance, he argues for an almost mathematical equality of words and their translations:

One of the more popular arguments for thought-for-thought translations and paraphrases is that people do not understand the theological nomenclature that Scripture uses to express doctrinal concepts. The reasoning follows that words like “justification” and “propitiation,” which the original text of Scripture used, should be replaced with more modern vernacular that people can understand. To illustrate this point two examples will be helpful

While I am not advocating for paraphrases (what does he consider a “paraphrase,” incidentally?), the word “justification” and “propitiation” are not (obviously) used by original text, Greek words are. Further, “propitiation” is a translation which has, in the past, been up for debate. I, for one, think it is the correct translation–but that is neither here nor there–if Driscoll is to give “theological reasons” then he shouldn’t gloss over possible difficulties.

Further, shouldn’t it be clear to anyone who has done language work that every act of translation is an act of interpretation? The last thing we need is a ‘word-for-word’ translation. Translation is not a science but an art. An art that looks at the word itself and the word in context–this is particularly salient to translation since a word does not have meaning outside of its context. Or Am I way off base here? Maybe I am pushing the equality between translation and interpretation too hard? Yet I cannot help but think that Driscoll is asking for the impossible when he writes:

Before we can interpret the meaning of Scripture, we must first accurately understand the message of Scripture. Or, to put it another way, only after knowing what Scripture says can we understand what it means. Practically, this requires that Bible translations be separate from and prior to Bible commentaries. A word-for-word translation best enables this to occur by seeking, as much as possible, to not insert interpretive commentary into the translated text of Scripture; rather, it lets the text breathe as a living word and speak for itself.

John B. aptly observed,

But I think in the first sentence he gives the game away: “message” and “meaning” are actually awfully close in meaning, and if one of the “messages” (what Driscoll says means “words”) of Scripture is, as he says later, the privileging of the word “mankind” over, say, “people,” well, then, one can derive any number of “meanings” from those “messages,” as we’ve discussed before in this very forum. In other words, I’m afraid I suspect Driscoll of already having a “meaning” in mind and that it’s that which directs his search for the “message.”

In other words, the “message” is the “meaning.” Therefore, it is impossible to decipher a “message” without knowing its “meaning.” When John writes, …I suspect Driscoll of already having a “meaning” in mind and that it’s that which directs his search for the “message,” he is quite right. But I ask you, who doesn’t? The art of translation is being aware of this and working out the authorial meaning dispite it. (I think they call it biblical hermeneutics.)

Driscoll is particularly frustrating since he is clearly not writing to the scholar but the layperson who has no means of judging his claims. Most, I think, would take him at his word and this word, if I am correct, is an oversimplification. And oversimplification, intentional or not, is misleading and may lead to a “one true translation” attitude which can sow dissention and discord in the church. And that, I will not abide.

For the record, I highly recommend the ESV and this will not turn into a rant against Driscoll blog.

UPDATE: This comment pretty much says it all.