I hate it when I look stupid. The main reason I hate it is because it happens so often. My son Tommy unfortunately has to live with the fact that he reminds me of myself. He's so often oblivious to what's going on around him; he drops things and breaks things all the time; he plays great defense but doesn't seem to get the fact that it's goals that win a soccer game.
So when I rant about pop-Christianity making Christians look stupid, I'm doing therapy. I'm yelling at myself twenty years ago and revealing how stupid I think I was as a zealous young college student. I know what it is to move to the next level on a topic and realize how simplistic your thought used to be.
For example, a thunderstorm passed through early this morning, and I found myself comforting my 5 year old girl Sophie. "What is God angry at?" she asked. "Was he fighting someone?"
"It's not God," I said. "It's electricity. The electricity comes from the sky to the ground." Then I started to say, "Well actually..." but by then she was asleep again. I had suddenly remembered middle school science and the fact that lightning is allegedly electric movement from the negatively charged ground to the positively charged sky. But since I'm not sure how that works myself, I'm sure I couldn't have expressed it at all to Sophie.
Now I'm no scientist. But I bet it's a whole lot more complicated than I just expressed.
That's how I now look at Christian icons like Francis Schaeffer and Dobson. I know they have impressive letters after their names, but why do their ideas seem so kindergartenish to me so often?
For example, these types tend to confuse absolutes in terms of epistemology (truth) and absolutes in terms of morality (ethics). These are quite distinct categories. Thus it could be absolutely true that there are no moral absolutes. I believe in moral absolutes, but I'm making a point--this is a coherent position.
By the way, the Bible enjoins two primary absolutes: love God and love neighbor. It is never appropriate to make an exception to these laws. Here is another pet peeve of mine. Absolutes in ethics mean that there are never any legitimate exceptions. If Jesus made exception to the Sabbath law, then he did not consider it an absolute. The Bible rarely treats moral commands as exceptionless--certainly that is not the spirit of Jesus or Paul. In that sense, pop-Christian media is confused when it equates absolutes with the Bible or God. It is confusing contemporary Christian culture with Scripture (as usual).
And relativism is not the only alternative to absolutism. Yet time and time again we hear pop-moralists saying, "We don't believe in relativism so we must believe in absolutes." This is such elementary school thinking it blows my mind. Thank you once again for making us look stupid.
And relativism is not the belief that there is no such thing as right and wrong. That's moral nihilism. Relativism only means that right and wrong is relative either to individuals or cultures. A person who has a conviction against wearing a wedding ring but who believes it is not sinning for some other Christians is a relativist on this particular topic! Don't balk at the example, that's what the word means in its proper sense.
So Dobson and Schaeffer are great coffee table discussion partners. I hope some in the coming generation are prepared to go much deeper.
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I don't know about Dobson, but I know that many current Evangelical Christian icons (Groothuis, Moreland, Craig, etc.) revere Schaefer too much for him to lose much steam in the near future. As someone who is constantly aggravated over how so many Evangelicals are quite frankly ignorant cowards as it relates to so-called postmodern thinkers (insofar as I think that is a useless term); they read a few works on a few names and consider themselves knowledgeable enough to debunk those scholars who have spent their lifetime to understand a single thinker (my current beaf with Groothuis). It reminds me of myself when I first started apologetics 7 years ago: so eager to prove everyone wrong that I never really sat down to understand what I was arguing against. It is childish and sad, if I may be frank.
prof. schenck, rich middleton shared at a conf. i was just at a sign regarding absolute truth. it was located in a (well-meaning) church and read: "God has no relatives." hmmm....
the equivocation on "absolute" is a significant problem. for those who mean "unrelated," then surely this is not the Christian understanding of morality OR truth. if, however, absolute is used to mean something like "omnirelational"--related to all cultures at all times, as in moral absolutes, then it is exceptionally Christian (e.g., God loves all people.)
The definition I am using for relativism is a system that considers rights and wrongs a matter of either the individual or the culture. In that sense, I would not argue that Christianity is fundamentally relativistic.
But I would argue that Christianity and the Bible do take a relativist position on many issues. So Paul arguably believed that Jews should circumcise their children as Jews, but Gentiles did not need to. This fits the definition of a relativistic position, since there is one right and wrong for one race and another for others.
Similarly, Paul's instructions on head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11 seem highly relative to ancient customs regarding veiling and hair length. So another instance of relative ethics.
The OT freely allows polygamy (e.g., Deut. 21:15ff) in its time; we do not. Paul leaves the issue of eating or not eating meat up to the individual conscience, an instance of individual relativism.
So to say that Christianity is not relativistic is true on its most basic level. But when you get into particular issues, this claim tells us nothing. It becomes an almost useless assertion... and it is an assertion that these groups use as their starting point!!!
I'd say that Christianity makes universal claims, but is really pretty relativistic in how this is lived out. For example, you must love God and love neighbor, but how one/a community goes about this may be quite different.
BTW, in the early church, ethics was a strong part of epistemology. No breaks. For Gregory of Nyssa (and I would argue Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius) to find truth was to live a virtuous life, which meant seeking with cognition, morality, lived life, etc. etc. Truth came out of living a way of life. And honestly, the way of life promoted by Dobson and Schaeffer was far from showcasing the truth of Christianity.
Nathan, the question I always have when someone says things like "A life of virtue leads to truth" or even "God is truth" or "Jesus is the truth" is, What do these things really mean? These are not concepts.
Do we mean that God and Jesus do not contradict truth? Do we mean that a life of virtue is a satisfying life in some ultimate sense?
Perhaps this is my modernist side coming out, but truth in my paradigm is a matter of claims, which we affirm as truth either because they work (postmodern), correspond (modern), and are coherent. So claims about Jesus may be true (or false). We might say that all true claims cohere with God's claims.
Can you help me make sense of saying a person can be truth (in its proper sense) on anything but a metaphorical, metonymic level?
Usually I take moving comments like "God is truth" (and everyone amens) as emotional language to stir the troops but without much real content in most cases. What do you mean?
Brian, I'll pop over today (red rover, red rover, send Kenny right over).
What impresses me about the Sabbath scene is that Jesus himself does not deny that he is violating the Sabbath law. We can of course make the argument you are making and it makes sense (and fits better in our paradigm).
But the point Jesus is making is that the Sabbath law is not absolute in scope--one must in some circumstances make exceptions to the rules. He substantiates his point by an exception Abiathar made (actually the text of the OT as we have it says it was Abimelech) to a rule about who can eat the bread of presentation.
In short, Jesus' argument is precisely that one of the Ten Commandments is not an absolute. And since Paul tells us that the Sabbath is not binding on Gentile Christians--it actually turns out to be relativist in scope!!!
Is anyone seeing how completely off base Schaeffer and Dobson are in their rhetoric of absolutes!!!
Dr. Schenck, I can offer no help. I was ready to launch into a whole discussion of metaphor, and then you ruled it out. So, I'm stuck.
I will, like a good theologian, cast a net. I will invoke a schema which David Tracy provides. He talks about meaning, meaningfulness, and truth. For Tracy, truth is almost out of the conversation. To make a truth claim is to make some sort of universal, heavy-handed claim that applies across boundaries. The fact is, we cannot really make many claims like this, especially in theological discourse (like you have pointed out so well!). Yet, we make claims. So, our claims must contain meaning and meaningfulness. This means that they must give rise to thinking and understanding and give meaningful expositions of the world. This would include discussion on how we live and how we are. The point is to be "relevant" or to show the meaningfulness for people's lives in what is being said and written. I think that here, Tracy has seriously modified some of Tillich's thought.
Nate, my point was not to rule out metaphor, but to recognize it as metaphor. I'm wanting clarity in our language--what are we really trying to say. I'm sure I have some massive blind spot on truth claims and meta-language. It just seems to me that meta-language works, whether it actually corresponds to anything or not.
I'm acquainted with Tracy's name, but that's about all. Isn't he associated with critical realism?
I don't think you have a massive blindspot at all. Quite the contrary, I think you rightly recognize that it is time for us to recognize that what we do is talk in metaphors. The meta-language we have constructed is full of them and they have died because they have lost meaning (drawing this from Ricoeur and Derrida). It is interesting though, that your reason for wanting and invoking meta-language is "because it works." This does not seem to be very modernist, but very postmodern pragmatist - Rorty?
And, Tracy would qualify himself, but probably fall into the camp of critical realism. I find him quite interesting and helpful because he refuses to have a wholesale dismissal of the modern, but seeks to push it. Actually, what amazes me of many "postmodern" thinkers (especially Ricoeur, Derrida, Gadamer, Heidegger, etc.) is how much respect for and admiration they have for modernity and the philosophical tradition before them. They are not trying to dismiss it, but correct and to actually deal with it. So, they look very modern at times.
Ok, well, rant over.
Hey Derek. I've done some videos that can be downloaded to iPods on www.cafetutor.com. But for fun I should do so in a "Religious Thoughts" format sometime. You know, a weekly, "Hey, how 'bout instead of circumcision as a sign of the covenant, next time we have a holy handshake. It hurts less, and you get to keep your hand." Credit for thought goes to me and Dan Steller, who's in LA and almost finished directing his first "real" movie.
Theists want absolute answers to changing questions.
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