England - Postmodernism 5

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46. I have mentioned a number of my friends in England so far--Neil Evans, Helen Fox, David Fox, Rachel Leonard, James Quirk, David Morton. Another friend was David Mossley, who was working on his doctorate in philosophy.

I have always liked philosophy. Sometimes I daydream about getting another PhD in philosophy. I would love to write some real philosophy book. I did write what I think is a mighty fine introduction to philosophy from a Christian perspective. David was a real philosopher.

It is fairly common to invoke postmodernism as some kind of trendy boogie man that threatened us twenty years ago but that thankfully faded away. I read a paper not too long ago by someone who casually labeled relativism, romanticism, and empiricism as postmodern. Thus post-modernism had come to be an overarching label for anything but absolutism. In fact relativism is modernist and romanticism was a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century phenomenon. Empiricism is certainly modernist and some would even describe Aristotle as an empiricist.

There was an intellectual vastness that was part of my England days. These were days where truth was truly the aim. My own thinking on Hebrews was of course limited by my own limitations. I did my best and I think some of my resulting work was good. I would go for five mile runs out South road to Darlington Road to Neville's Cross and back, thinking all the while about some exegetical decision I needed to make.

In this time I found discussions on postmodernism most stimulating with David Mossley. I already knew Derrida from my literary studies. I never had any sympathy or interest for him. Meaning happens. Derrida is thus a footnote, a reminder that language divorced of context is mere lines and squiggles without meaning. If you specify a language for the lines and squiggles--a general context--a sentence becomes polyvalent and ambiguous, but it takes on certain more probable meanings in a word cloud. But since words can have metaphorical meanings, the polyvalence is still practically infinite. Only in a specific context does the waveform collapse into a specific meaning.

My philosophy of language and meaning has become refined over the years. Wittgenstein has been my greatest partner on this quest. I stopped at Frege's house for a reference but he didn't make sense. J. L. Austin was helpful but was really only clarifying Wittgenstein. Paul Ricoeur gave me language to express the situation very nicely. If I ever write a real philosophy book, it will be on this subject matter.

47. It was from Mossley that I learned names like David Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Rorty. Perhaps I had heard one or two of these but knew practically nothing of their contributions. Except for Derrida and perhaps John Rawls, I knew little of philosophy beyond the existentialists. [1]

The focus of our philosophy discussions, as I recall, was Michel Foucault, who had died ten years earlier in 1984 in France of AIDS. In my mind, Foucault is an extension of the fundamental ideas that Thomas Kuhn set out in science. However, Foucault applied these ideas to history and culture.

The problem I see with Kuhn and Foucault is of course the problem with postmodernism in general. They make it difficult to say that any way of understanding reality is truer than another. When I read Tom Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, I was quite taken with the construct of critical realism--the world is real and exists but our apprehension of it is skewed in our perspective.

This is a little different from Rorty's pragmatic realism, which is agnostic on the question of any underlying reality. Rather, some conceptions of reality "work" better than others. Sometimes I have wondered if my approach became a certain "pragmatic epistemology." By faith I accept the underlying reality. I believe there are constructions that are true and false, certainly ones that are more true and less true. But our language and paradigms are constructions, not das Ding an sich.

I didn't have those things worked out much in my head at the time. That would take teaching philosophy my first couple years at Indiana Wesleyan.

48. I found Foucault's thought fascinating. It had a ring of truth. :-) For example, his book Madness and Civilization showed how societal constructions of insanity had changed over the years. In ancient times, the insane were sometimes viewed as touched by the gods--"Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad." Insanity was thus seen as a divine action. Even today we can sometimes think of insanity as a kind of genius.

Many have wondered whether some of those Jesus healed in the Gospels were mentally ill or schizophrenic. If so, demon possession would be another paradigm by which those at the time of Christ processed certain types of mental illness.

The "ship of fools" might have suggested to some in the late medieval period that the minds of the insane were wandering on a journey. They are looking for their place in the world but cannot find it. Then we went through a period where we locked up the insane, such as in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Currently, the insane are viewed as having an illness that needs to be treated.

Kuhn's notion of paradigms is very helpful here. The current paradigm is a medical one. Where my critical realism takes over is our sense now that insanity has an underlying biochemical, perhaps even brain structural cause. But this is not just another equal paradigm. It corresponds much more to physical reality and can even be treated by real chemical reactions. Some paradigms thus work better than others.

49.  Foucault also did a three volume History of Sexuality and a work called Discipline and Punish. I never plowed through them, but my cursory knowledge of them has again, I believe, brought me insight. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault talks about the shift from execution as a matter of public shaming to its current "revenge" form.

This perspective fit insights I gained from Bruce Malina. His work The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology is a classic that helped attune me to the fact that the ancient world was an "honor-shame" world rather than an individual guilt world. The cross was not primarily about punishing Jesus. That's the way we process executions. The cross was meant to humiliate Jesus and to tell everyone who walked on that path into Jerusalem what happened to people who crossed the Romans.

In England I tried to brush up a bit on my British history. Why were "political" figures assassinated publicly outside the Tower of London? To humiliate and to warn everyone what happened when you opposed those in power.

Now Western culture has shifted toward individualism, away from group identity and collectivist personality. Execution is now focused on paying the individual for what he or she has done. Foucault saw modern executions as private revenge ceremonies. Of course the paradigm has shifted again in the current trend away from capital punishment altogether.

In all these things Foucault and Kuhn gave me a good sense of how any society operates on the basis of paradigms that they think are intrinsic to the world, "the way things are," when in fact we are largely driven and tossed by the winds, ignorant of the forces on us.

This is no bit less true in the church as in broader society. We think we are standing on the Bible when in fact we have no idea of the forces leading us to interpret certain passages certain ways. Sometimes we believe things vehemently and we don't hardly even have a passage.

50. Foucault catalogs similar shifts with regard to sexuality. He posits that sexuality as a category of human identity is a fairly recent development. I have not read his work so my examples may or may not be in his books. As an example, I understand that King James may actually have been what we would call "gay" today. Yet he was married and had children. Foucault suggests that this was the norm prior to recent times.

Foucault thus suggests that homosexual acts were seen as something certain individuals might do on the side within a marriage in earlier times. The idea first of a diagnosis in the eighteen hundreds (a medical condition) and then as a fixed orientation that someone might have in the nineteen hundreds are both changes in paradigms.

Yet without insight into one's cultural glasses, one will inevitably project your current paradigm onto a book like the Bible. Homosexual acts are mentioned in the Bible, but it is not clear that homosexuals are. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about an attempted gang rape but not at all clearly about homosexuality. There are other cultural elements here that were equally or more significant in ancient times, such as the way one treats a visitor to your city.

I used to make fun of such interpretations because they seemed to miss the "obvious." It took some time to realize that in fact certain interpretations were obvious to me because of my cultural paradigms and that, in fact, I was ignorant of the cultural influences on me and my own inability to listen to the text on its own terms.

51. I might mention the work of Mary Douglas here, Purity and Danger. This book opened the book of Leviticus to me like never before. We have a tendency to interpret the food laws of Leviticus in terms of food safety because it makes sense to us in our paradigms. Douglas unfolds possible ways of processing purity and such things in more likely cultural categories.

I have come to call this aspect of the Levitical paradigm, "kind" theology. The ancient Israelite priestly worldview processed the world in terms of certain "kinds" of things. Certain characteristics went in the bird box. Others went in the sea creatures box. Surrounding peoples ate pig, but the Israelites were shepherds. To eat pig was thus to be a traitor to your people and to your God, Yahweh. While I will not say these interpretations are certain, they fit much better in the Ancient Near East than our weak attempts to make these laws fit within our modern paradigms of hygiene.

This period opened up a dimension to the biblical texts to me that I liken to seeing a third dimension to Scripture that I had never seen before in church. It made understanding the Scriptures a profound thing. I do not expect this third dimension from preaching. A sermon is good to me if it helps people on their journey with God through life.

[1] It is noteworthy that the Principal of St. John's prior to David Day was Tony Thiselton. Through knowledge of him and his work I was introduced to Gadamer (cf. The Two Horizons).