For better and for worse, my theological mind is the product (to some extent) of Westminster Theological Seminary, founded in reaction to the “liberalization” of Princeton Seminary, by J. Gresham Machen (and others) in the 1920’s.
Machen most famous book, perhaps, bears the title Christianity and Liberalism. In it he lays down a stark “either/or”: you can be a Christian, or a liberal, but not both. In this stark, antithetical opposition, you must choose sides: are you a Christian, or are you a liberal?
In the introduction to his 1985 Sinai & Zion: an Entry into the Jewish Bible, Jon Levenson displays a completely different attitude. Describing a situation in which premodern Jewish exegetes of the Hebrew Bible were faced with problems (even contradictions) in the text, Levinson writes:
In the great work of post biblical Judaism, the Talmud, for example, one rabbi doubts that Moses wrote the last eight verses of the Torah on the grounds that he could not have written about his own death and burial. The retort is immediately offered that it was not Moses but God who composed these verses. Moses wrote them down in tears. The revealing point is that the … position [that] assumes that a commitment to tradition does not require the Jew to ignore empirical evidence in the name of an increasingly blind faith. One wonders where the Talmudic sage who voiced the doubt would have stood in the modern dispute, when so much more evidence against mosaic authorship has been developed. In any event doubts or ambivalence about Mosaic authorship of the Torah and a host of other traditional beliefs appear on occasion in medieval commentaries which the tradition accepts. Even the possibility of scribal error in the text of the Torah as it reaches us seems to have occurred to some of the great rabbinic exegetes. It is surely the case that a few of them were willing to entertain the notion that the plain sense of a verse can contradict the normative law (halakhah) which the Talmudic rabbis derived from it. In instances of this sort, what is interesting and possibly enlightening for the modern situation is that awareness of the contradiction does not seem to have dampened the exegetes commitment either to the observance of halakhah or to the exposition of the plain sense of scripture. This would imply that Jewish tradition includes a form of biblical scholarship which is more than mere repetition, rearrangement, or extension of data known through the tradition itself. Tradition, so understood, will include novelty, even contradiction. It will not be fossilized, but vital, growing, and to a certain extent, changing.
John Levinson, Sinai & Zion, 6–7.
Now, this posture of Levinson’s—which resonates quite well with the recent emphasis of David Bentley Hart in his Tradition and Apocalypse—stands in stark contrast to that of J. Gresham Machen. It is, quite simply, vastly superior, not least in its admission that tradition (which here would include the Bible which is always already interpreted) is manifold and diverse, riddled with inconsistencies. (Here we remember that our faith is not in the Bible or in any tradition, but rather in the Lord Jesus Christ.)
To put it simply, you can have Levinson and Hart, or you can have Machen. For me, the choice is clear.
In his (admittedly highly eccentric) would-be defense of Christian orthodoxy, Slavoj Zizek chides us moderns for the chronological snobbery which strangely betrays our naive ignorance:
Was there … at any time in the past, an era when people directly ‘really believed?’ As Robert Pfaller demonstrated in Illusionen der Anderen, the direct belief in a truth that is subjectively fully assumed (“Here I stand!”) is a modern phenomenon, in contrast to traditional beliefs-through-distance, like politeness or rituals. Premodern societies did not believe directly, but through distance, and this explains, for instance, why Enlightenment critics misread ‘primative’ myths–they first took the notion that a tribe originated from a fish or a bird as literal direct belief, then rejected it as stupid, “fetishist,” naive. They thereby imposed their own notion of belief on the “primitivized” Other.
Now consider (Jaroslav Pelikan on) Newman:
By contrast with … the eagerness to be explicit about everything possible (in Lewis Carroll’s phrase, ‘to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast’), the tradition of orthodoxy, in Newman’s reading, had always observed a reverent restraint.
Pelikan goes on to point out that for Newman (or Newman’s reading of Church Fathers such as Athanasius and Gregory Nazianzus), in its precreedal history “the content of the apostolic tradition had remained secret” in important ways.
Here Zizek resonates with Pelikan’s Newman in their common indictment of the (post)modern tendency–on the part both of believers who embrace it and their cultured despisers who reject it but project it onto ancient people of faith–to posit direct, literal, irreverent and unrestrained belief.
Nobody ever, Zizek is arguing, believed like that. Hence his claim that “we believe today more than ever.”
Thanks to my friend Tish for posting this, I assume at least partly in response to this. And also one should see this, with which I heartily agree.
Of course “evangelicalism” is a slippery term b/c it is both a sociological descriptor and a theological tradition.
Question: where does Catholic Christianity figure in all this?
Reason I ask: I walked away from evangelicalism (at least in my own mind!) not so much b/c it was so militantly opposed to progressive culture (in terms of science, poverty, & liberal politics … the things cited in the title of Tish’s blog post), as Tish’s interlocutors (eg, Rachel Evans) seem to be saying and against which Tish seems to be protesting, but precisely for the opposite reason.
I see evangelicalism as being part and parcel with secular culture: individualistic, private, trend-obsessed, market based. (Example: show me a church planter’s vision statement [the mere fact that evangelicals use “vision statements” speaks volumes] that does not tacitly try to position itself in terms of the contemporary religious “market” in America.)
Which of course is why many, many of those who decry evangelicalism are themselves … evangelicals. It is now trendy in evangelical circles to be progressively anti-evangelical. (Witness the “emergent church” … as I throw up in my mouth a teency bit.)
Evangelicalism, as best I can discern, is not sacramental; it is not sacred; it is not other worldly; it is not mystical; it is not transcendent; it is not rooted in history (by and large). I say this as an ex-evangelical (said in the most wounded tone of voice I can muster, imagining myself to have gone through a painful “de-conversion” experience.)
I’ve been convinced for about a decade now that evangelicalism is actually the reverse face (the “kissing cousin” or the “other side of the coin”) of our distinctively American secular culture.
Radical Orthodoxy sees the transmission of Christian tradition in terms of “non-identical repetition.” In The Word Made Strange (p 64) John Milbank speaks of “repetition with variety” (borrowed from the 18th century Bishop Lowth, who, against that other bishop, Warburton, argued for the primacy of speech over writing in the origins of language) in which a poet repeats the same poetic lines he has received, learned, and memorized from his predecessor bards … but with a “twist,” with a difference.
Even as the same lines are repeated, the poet adds a different emphasis, pairs a phrase with a novel facial expression, or stresses different syllables of particular words differently than did his antecedent poet.
In this way the original poem, and mutatis mutandis the poem at every stage in the catena, is “pleonastic:” it contains within it the potential for an infinite variety of performances.
In his essay “A Christological Poetics” Milbank speaks of Christ as not only the sum total of the signifying chain or web of Hebrew theology poetically imagined in the Old Testament, but also as occupying a certain place, indeed an “originating place” (Michel de Certeau uses the phrase “inaugurating rupture”) in the chain.
So “on the night before he was betrayed” Jesus Christ performs and repeats the story of the passing over in Egypt but in a radically new way. This inaugurating rupture includes the command to love one another along with the embodied example of washing his disciples’ feet, a performance which the church has been performing and re-membering for two millenia.
In his Whose Justice, Whose Rationality? Alasdair MacIntyre exposes a common and deep seated fallacy by which the disagreements between modern and nonmodern thinkers are destructively exacerbated.
It is often claimed that the “correspondence theory of truth” is the opposing alternative to the “coherence theory of truth” in which what counts for truth is the logical consistency between (sets of) propositions. Indeed, this is one of very first lessons in philosophical thinking, I vividly recall, which I received in my undergraduate studies.
On this schema it is usually claimed that the correspondence theory of truth sees truth as obtaining when propositions about the world link up to and “correspond with” the facts of the world.
But this presentation of the issues, both for those who embrace such a “correspondence” view (usually people who are thought of as “conservatives”) and those who reject it (today, often people who identify as “postmodern relativists”), is an arbitrary development which took root in the seventeenth century. In this era certain thinkers began to think of “facts” as things in the world which are absolutely independent of human language, a view utterly foreign to previous thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas (and, indeed, Cornelius Van Til, who taught that there are “no brute facts”). For these thinkers (possibly excepting Van Til) truth is formulated in terms of adequation mentis ad rem (“the adequation of the mind to the thing”).
For them, it is not propositions which “line up with” the things of the world, but rather the knowing mind, which is — or is not — “adequated” to the things of the world. Language, then, is always, already constitutive of both the knowing mind and the things of the world.
There is no extra-linguistic realm from which the knowing mind can judge the truth or falsity of language propositions. Rather, the way in which truth advances is through the ongoing, multi-generational work of tradition(s), in which subsequent generations reflect upon the thought of previous generations, in light of new developments (culturally, corporately, etc.) which pose challenges to previously held doctrines.
