Is Objectivity Merely a Cultural Invention?

How does one reason with someone who does not believe in reason?

Rationality is facing some hard times these days.  Postmodern thought has relegated truth to subjective cultural bias and not surprisingly, we now are told objectivity itself is a racist construct of the white European culture.   

One sophomore level course will have students “explore how systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race.”

At Redstate, an essay titled "Towards a truer multicultural science education: how whiteness impacts science education" is quoted in reference to the destruction of objectivity.

While “the [science] culture attempts to be unbiased through peer reviewing and consistent methods and methodologies,” this interpretation “falsely makes us believe that science is an objective enterprise and transcends culture. 

“For many scientists, we are convinced that objectivity prevents an oppressive culture because discoveries are independent of identity... Consequently, we unknowingly spread whiteness ideology.

I Think, Therefore ...

At Discovery Institute, Michael Egnor takes note of the inherent self contradictions in materialism in the article Descarte's Blunder.  We are all aware of Descarte's famous "I think therefore I am" phrase.  The idea being one has to exist to think.  Egnor flips the script, or more accurately, points it back a step.  

"Notice that we cannot conclude that we exist unless we can conclude. That is, we must first know the principle of non-contradiction — that being is not non-being — before we can conclude that “I think therefore I am.”

The idea that "A" cannot be "non-A" is a necessary axiom for any knowledge.   If we can't distinguish between this and that, we simply can't think.

Language Games

One of the tenets of the postmodern drift is that "language is a mask to power".   I've been chewing on a brief post at Powerline for a few days that tersely dismisses that postmodern credo as a failed canard.

Basically, the claim of the secular progressive academia has often been that truth is determined by cultural consensus.  Different cultures make different truth claims.  Since ultimate truths are beyond the reach of reason, if they exist at all, we are left with the uncomfortable suggestion that whoever has power gets to control the language, and as a result gets to impose its version of truth on everyone else.  So the "rich" usually have the most power, thus they are usually the oppressors who control the language, creating words and destroying un-words according to their whim.

What they don't tell folks until they have been indoctrinated, is that their remedy to this injustice is for someone else to control the language.  (More)

Slippery Slopes

Progressive Christians often decry the use of the “slippery slope” argument when it suits them.  One example here.  On the one hand, I see their point.  I recall the old line from my early days that one drink necessarily leads to alcoholism or one rock and roll riff leads inevitably to Satan worship.  

There is a problem with such arguments that progressives would be correct in opposing if they stated the problem correctly.  It is fallacious to say that because some who have taken step A wind up at point Z, it is true that taking step A will always and inevitably lead to step Z.   Of course that is not the case, but I don’t think anybody ever said it was.

Reverse discrimination

There appears to be growing evidence that the advancement of gay rights, particularly gay marriage, does cause discrimination against people of faith.  So "no bullying" leads to bullying.

In one case a Portland couple is under investigation for declining to fashion a wedding cake for a lesbian couple

There are similar cases in the UK, one involving a marriage counselor who felt giving marriage advice to gay couples violated her faith.

While the secular society claims there can be no absolutes, it is clear full acceptance of gay inclusion is a secular absolute that is increasingly enforced with public accusations of irrational bigotry and now the threat of legal ramifications. So the force of law, the courts and eventually the police will almost certainly be used to make sure everyone complies with the new sexual ethic.

A Conversion Story

Stunning article in CT called "My Train Wreck Conversion" the story of one Rosaria Champaign Butterfield.

The header for the article reads, "As a leftist lesbian professor, I despised Christians. Then I somehow became one." 

What was her worldview?  "As a professor of English and women's studies, on the track to becoming a tenured radical, I cared about morality, justice, and compassion. Fervent for the worldviews of Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Darwin, I strove to stand with the disempowered. I valued morality. And I probably could have stomached Jesus and his band of warriors if it weren't for how other cultural forces buttressed the Christian Right."  More

Tony Jones Slays a Unicorn (Updated)

Tony Jones posted last week on the question of whether Christian progressives have a moral foundation.  The discussion  was raised with a question from Steven Kurtz

Johathan Haidt’s new book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. He says that research has shown that Western and Educated people from Industrialized, Rich, Democratic countries (or WEIRD people) who self-identify as “progressive” (socially) use, almost exclusively two moral “foundations” as criteria for making moral judgments: Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity. We progressive WEIRD people do not use the remaining 3 foundations: Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, or Purity/sanctity – the 3 that conservatives do use, in addition to, and in a higher priority manner than Harm and Fairness.

But progressives then have a problem with the God of most traditional and especially Christian formulations – especially with retribution, punishments, curses, condemnations, as well as problems with the unfairness of the treatment of women, slaves, and other outsiders. This gives us a huge problem with the bible and the god it describes, which forces us to re-think everything. Thus our problem speaking much, or coherently about God. Where do we go for information? Obviously from the comments I’ve read, anywhere available to our tastes.

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Wisdom from Down Under

Being a devotee of Francis Schaeffer, for whom the "propositional truth" of the scriptures was the cornerstone of all knowledge, I've always bristled at the contention, quite common these days among emergents and post-conservatives, that propositional truth is a false hope of the enlightenment. Always struck me as odd - isn't the statement "propositional truth is false" itself a proposition?

Many - I think most are well meaning - will say that revelation is not found in propositional statements about God, but in God's saving acts in history, that it is the Acts that are revelatory and not the verbal descriptions of them.

So I was tickled, when googling a different topic, to find this article by Evangelical Anglican Canon D.B. Knox, who I don't know much about, save that he was Principal of Moore Theological College, Sydney, Australia, from 1959-1985. The article is titled "PROPOSITIONAL REVELATION, THE ONLY REVELATION".

Can Faith be Rooted in the Symbolic?

Chuck Colson has an interesting little bit today about how the emphasis on symbols may be contributing to overall illiteracy. The example he focuses on is how automobile dashboards are increasingly covered with symbols, pictures and no words describing the function of this or that button or switch. As someone who currently works in education I find that a point of interest - how kids who do not read well have difficulty in every other area of education and how well meaning educators from time to time have emphasized other ways of learning to accommodate those kids, only to find that they sacrifice long-term essentials for short term gain.

But this is the quote that really struck me...

As the late Neil Postman wrote in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the medium of communication actually helps shape the way people think. The printed word requires sustained attention, logical analysis, and an active imagination. But television and video games, with their fast-moving images, encourage a short attention span, disjointed thinking, and purely emotional responses.

Deconstructing Tony Jones - Part 4 - The Silenced Voices

I really have no desire to be mean or nasty or attack Tony Jones personally. I hope my rather miniscule readership will recognize that my admittedly polemic prose is directed at ideas, not personalities. Tony, if you are reading, my tone reflects the seriousness of the topic, not a desire to call names and assault your person. Perhaps my problem is with the imprecision of language, but it would seem in Theology, precision matters, and implications of ideas matter.

Having said that, in this last post I have to take issue with the insertion of power politics into Jones’ reading of history. Of course human beings tend to assert themselves in any and every meeting. Yes, politics happen. But does it necessarily follow that one must “deconstruct” every decision and conclude that power politics played a central role in the outcome? Perhaps he was merely being hyperbolic, but Jones claims:

"The Chalcedonian creed of the two natures-one person of Jesus Christ, as well as every other theological construction from every other council, has human fingerprints all over it. These were messy meetings, rife with power and politics."

Notice the “totalizing metanarrative” Jones suggests. “Every” theological construction is “rife” with power politics. In reference to the debates regarding this or that doctrinal development, he notes that disagreements were sometimes heated – but takes it one step further…

Deconstructing Tony Jones - Part 3 - Tepid Liberalism

Tony Jones claims that EC is a great way to navigate between the “cocksure certainties of conservatism and the perceived tepidness of liberalism.” Odd, he seems pretty cocksure that consensus is a misguided notion. And in the place of “cocksure certainties of conservatism”, Jones inserts what can only be described as, well, tepid.

Jones quotes from a book, “The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event”, by one Jack Caputo:

"To think theologically is to make the mind’s ascent toward God, which means toward whatever event is astir in the name of God, where the name of God is not a linguistic object that can be stretched out on the table for analysis. To use the name of God is an unstable, destabilizing act that exposes us to whatever event is transpiring in that name, to whatever chain of events this name provokes."
Hmm. “Whatever chain of events this name provokes”. In the place of a rule book, be it rules about strike zones or foul balls, we now have the theology of “whatever”. I am looking in vain for what are the precise or even imprecise limits of “whatever”? How do we know if a “chain of events” leads us heavenward or toward the pits of hell? In the absence of definitions, propositions, truth statements, what is the means of discerning the difference between ascent and descent?

Now I’m sure Jones will protest he is not advocating an “anything goes” viewpoint. He writes:


"To look at it from the side of our weakness, orthodoxy is an event and not a statement because, to put it colloquially, not one of us will score a perfect 100 on the Big Theology Exam in the Sky. We’ve all got a little heterodoxy mixed in with all the orthodoxy, and most of us will admit that. I’m wrong about some things; the problem, of course, is knowing what parts I’m wrong about. “O my fellow orthodox theologians, there are no orthodox theologians”.
While admitting that we all have a mixture of orthodox and heterodox ideas rattling about in our limited brains, he again throws down the “provocative” gauntlet, “there are no orthodox theologians”. None. Wonder why so many who might consider themselves to be orthodox theologians were upset with him.

Deconstructing Tony Jones - Part 2 - Vincent of Lerins

Back to Tony Jones' paper and it's rejection for publication in a book detailing the conference at Wheaton in which it was presented.
My quibble with Tony Jones' use of the strike zone as an analogy to the task of theology is pretty much just that, a mere quibble. When Jones takes on Vincent of Lerins and the very definition of orthodoxy, I believe he goes way over the edge and “disaster”, a word used by his critics at the Wheaton Conference, seems an accurate description of his position.

The title of his paper is “Whence Hermeneutic Authority?“ so he has declared a purpose. He also clearly identifies himself as “Tony Jones, National Coordinator of Emergent Village”, so we should all agree that Tony Jones claims to be a leader in the emerging church movement. His positions cannot be dismissed as just a singular tentative opinion in a large “conversation”, but are instead positions that carry a certain amount of weight and influence. That is why they are troubling.

Jones begins with a quote: “Tipp O.Neill famously quipped that .All politics are local.. Maybe so, but the postmodernists have argued that all hermeneutics are local. It is our local communities that shape how we see the world”. This quote is critical to understanding emerging church viewpoints. The postmodern epistemology that flows through the veins of key EC thinkers colors everything. The disdain for “metanarratives” can only lead, in their view, to one conclusion, that “micronarratives” are the logical replacement.

Deconstructing Tony Jones - Part 1 - The Strike Zone

Tony Jones is miffed that the paper he presented at Wheaton has been rejected for publication in a book that includes the papers presented by others. On his blog he expressed a bit of frustration that some theologians characterized his paper as a “disaster” and a couple of others wrote him detailed responses, critiquing specifics. Of course the several students who approached him later saying they appreciated his talk, in Jones’ estimation were sufficient counterbalance to the concerns of the theologians for him to characterize the response as “mixed”. Hmm.

The assignment, apparently, was for Jones to give some perspective on how the emerging church includes the patristic fathers in their “conversation”. Wheaton apparently told him that his talk was “off message” and “provocative but less than helpful”. Having read the entire paper now more than once, I have to say Wheaton could have been less gracious.

Since Jones chose to “deconstruct” Vincent of Lerins’, a rather important figure in the “new ecumenism” espoused by Thomas Oden and others, to refer to Vincent’s famous charge to seek what has been believed “always, everywhere and by all” as “hollow”, perhaps a bit of deconstructing of Tony Jones will be both “provocative” and “helpful”.

Budziszewski on Tolerance

Jim Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy has an absolute must read article on Colson's Breakpoint site.

He reports on an address by Jay Budziszewski before the Evangelical Theological Society, which addresses the very issues I have been trying to get at in recent posts about conservative evangelicals in politics, the idea that being tolerant of all views is in fact truly tolerant. Key paragraphs...

"...liberals argue that we must suspend public judgments about the nature of the good. After all, as liberal philosopher John Rawls argued, while the Christian sees the good in one way, the Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Marxist, or hedonistic pleasure-seeker each see it in other ways.

"Rawls calls each system a “comprehensive doctrine.” And since comprehensive doctrines can’t all be true, and each is more or less reasonable, the only solution for public discourse is to privatize them all, that is, ban all comprehensive doctrines from the public square. This, the argument goes, creates an environment of moral neutrality in which to make public decisions."

Certainty Equals Fascism

Ryan T. Anderson writes in First Things about another attack by a self-proclaimed Christian on the religious right with the subtle title American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. You can read the article for yourselves, but two incongruous phrases were rather intriguing to me.

The key, Hedges claims, is the certainty of evangelical faith. Confidence, we are told, is a fascist ploy, while real Christians accept that we “do not understand what life is about. . . . Faith presupposes that we cannot know. We can never know.”

Has there ever been a time in all of human history when certainty has been defined as a vice and uncertainty a virtue? In light of this praise of uncertainty, one wonders about this second quote:

“Debate with the radical Religious Right is useless. . . . It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion.”

What is the point of rational thought and discussion if uncertainty is a virtue? Anderson also noted that:

By understanding faith as “an intellectual act, its object truth, and its result knowledge,” John Henry Newman must have been an anti-intellectual fascist, in Hedges’ definition.

So faith cannot deal with the intellect, truth or knowledge and if it does it becomes fascism!

And we are the ones incapable of rational thought?

Going to Chapel at College...

Having two sons of college age gives me an occasional opportunity to see firsthand what sort of influences are present on Christian College campuses. On a campus visit a number of weeks ago, I was treated to the political views of one popular author as part of the chapel experience at one college, and the captivity of the American church to the religious right was alleged. Over the weekend we visited another campus and heard, well, more politics.

I do not know much about this particular speaker, so he will go unnamed, as will the college in this case. I don’t want to misrepresent someone I don’t know much about, nor do I want to be accused of attacking persons. When I am critical of ideas on this page, I try to be critical of ideas, not people. In this case, keeping the individual anonymous might be the best path. Suffice it to say, he was a professor at a Midwest seminary, speaking at a chapel for a Midwest college. I can only state what I heard and saw.

His topic was the shifting demographics of the world wide church. His statistics I’m sure were for the most part accurate, that about 60 percent of all Christians worldwide are now in the Eastern and Southern hemisphere. His main point was that white Christians in Europe and North America need to understand this shift and recognize that the church has a multicolored face, one that is no longer “western”.

...And I Agree Completely

Jim Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy writes in the Weekly Standard about the breakup of the ECUSA and the struggles in the PCUSA. The article is titled Religion Without Foundations.

I've been writing quite a bit about subjectivism in matters of faith, the lack of adherence to both scripture and the consensus of church history. Tonkowich says of the mainliners:

"In contrast to Christians through the ages, the denominational left has substituted sentiments for facts, passions for authority, and subjectivity for reason. Their belief seems to be that if they "create space for dialogue" it will allow them to emote and vote with the result that a simple majority determines the new revised standard version of God's truth and will."

Why I Am Not Emergent - Part 3

"Within Emergent are Texas Baptists who don't allow women to preach and New England lesbian Episcopal priests. We have Southern California YWAMers and Midwest Lutherans. We have those who hold to biblical inerrancy, and others trying to demythologize the scripture. We have environmental, peacenik lefties, "crunchy cons," and right wing hawks." (Tony Jones)

Emergents generally don’t like to be categorized, and there is enough diversity within the movement that any attempt to categorize, including my own, will be inadequate. What I have attempted to show in parts 1 and 2, is that on two key assumptions of a philosophical trend which is categorized as postmodernism, the leaders of the emergent movement tend toward viewpoints which mirror those assumptions.

Assumption 1: There is no such thing as objective knowledge - knowledge unaffected by bias.Emergent leaders Tony Jones and Brian McLaren protest that they do believe in truth, yet they seem to fall back on the notion that objective knowledge of that truth must be held in supreme suspicion, making the concept of truth essentially meaningless.

Assumption 2: Language is a construct of society – words do not signify reality, but a cultural perception of reality.The propensity to want to find new ways of looking at Scripture allows emergents to comfortably remain in dialogue with those of wildly varying viewpoints, and to be suspicious of anyone who would not be open to wildly varying viewpoints.

This leads me to the third assumption, to which Emergents may not actively ascribe, but will tend to fall in line with in practice:

Assumption 3: Language is a mask to power. Those who control the language have the power.
a. History then, reflects the interpretations of those who controlled the culture at the expense of those who did not.
b. Justice means standing against the oppressor and with the oppressed, allowing alternative constructions of reality to be heard.
Emergents are very concerned about the poor and the oppressed, and this good and is consistent with much of scripture. But this seems to include a tendency to assume that all who are disenfranchised are victims and all who are successful by definition oppress. This leads to a corresponding suspicion of traditionally orthodox and established views of the faith and an openness to new and marginalized views.

I have back track to call attention to Brian McLaren’s open letter to Chuck Colson at this point. I think he honestly tried to explain the distinctions between radical postmodern craziness and the more nuanced views with which he is more comfortable, claiming that Colson’s view of “Postmodernism” is itself a straw man.

It is certainly possible to take the worst statements of adherents to a philosophy and string them together in an unfair way. But it is also possible to protest that one does not believe something and then turn around and make numerous other statements that prove otherwise. McLaren's protests about being misunderstood are betrayed by his own confusing and noncommittal statements.

But it is the concept of the metanarrative that is the critical point for this post. The metanarrative, the all-encompassing, totalizing world-view that explains everything in a certain way and as a result, crushes everything that does not conform. This is the key topic which McLaren attempts to explain to Colson.

Why I am Not Emergent - Part 2

So in my last post, I opined that one of the problems with many in the Emergent “conversation” is a significant capitulation to one the central tenets of the postmodern, that objectivity is myth and that all knowledge is determined by experience within a culture. Tony Jones, in challenging Chuck Colson, did make a distinction between truth and objectivity, for example, saying that Stanley Fish did not deny the possibility of truth, but of objectivity. This in itself is an example of the problem, however, because if ALL objectivity is impossible, then the word “truth” can only refer to subjective interpretation, which is the issue Colson was trying to refute.

I argued, essentially, that though no one can be perfectly objective, for most things in ordinary life, we are dependent on the common sense understanding that any two individuals can refer to an object and both can be sufficiently objective to be confident they are referring to the same object. Communication can occur.

But I must move on. A second key element of the general “postmodern” view of reality, which I believe many emergent leaders have uncritically accepted, is:

1. Language is a construct of society – words do not signify reality, but a cultural perception of reality.

And as a subset of the the above, come two other related assumptions.

a. Texts do not reflect objective realities, but interpretations of facts and events within a particular culture.

b. Readers of texts cannot enter into the culture of the author, so the text can only be understood as an interpretation by the reader within his own language and culture.
This leads many to the conclusion that it is the reader who gives meaning to the text.

Why I am not Emergent - Part 1

I've fallen into a bad habit of reading the "Out of Ur" section of the CT website. Out of Ur is billed as "Conversations hosted by the editors of Leadership Journal" and has a subheading of "Following God's Call in a New World". As such, it leans heavily in the direction of "Emergent" Christianity, which is an extremely loose and difficult to define collection of approaches to communicating Christianity in a post modern context.

In recent months, there have been a few controversial exchanges. Brian McLaren started a firestorm when one of his posts implied rather strongly that he could not affirm a traditional view of homosexuality as a sin. Later Tony Jones laid out a feisty apologetic as to why the Emergent movement should not have a clear statement of faith. More recently, Jones, in responding to critics who equate emergent with a new Christian left, directly took on Chuck Colson for his criticism of Emergent as not accepting the notion of objective truth.

Knowing full well that Emergent does describe a broad collection of folks with a lot of views, it has been my impression that most of the key leaders of the movement are influenced greatly by a set of philosophical assumptions. And I find those assumptions troublesome.