Stepping Back to Center Stage

Where do humans belong in the universe?  

The Copernican revolution de-centered humanity in the universe for the purpose of doing away with the increasing bizarre abstractions of the Ptolemaic system. The revolution we need now will bring us back to the center and rescue us from the alienating abstractions of a theology (or cosmology) that seeks to transcend its human origins and represent the mind of God.

Matthew Crawford in The World Outside Your Head and Adam Frank in  About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the End of the Big Bang come to remarkably similar conclusions even though one is a philosopher asking about human self-understanding and the other is a physicist trying to understand the beginnings of the universe. Simply stated: they both understand that the Copernican revolution and the Enlightenment project of objective knowledge have led us into vast new realms of knowledge and mis-led us in our understanding of ourselves. 

Both Crawford and Frank rightly note that the combination of de-centering humanity in the universe and adopting a idea that knowledge consists of mathematical representations of reality has placed humans as humans in an isolated and isolating position. Frank Tippler’s The Physics of Immortality compliments nicely Isaac Asimov’s  short story “The Last Question” in positing what AI fans seem to long for, the ultimate objectification of humanity into machines that busily calculate away until they become what we call God. 

These latter books represent a real insight; God has become identified as the objectification of the human mind in its purest and most comprehensive knowledge of reality.  So the physicist, as Stephen Hawking says in his Brief History of TIme, seeks to “know the mind of God.” And in this is little different from the post-Enlightenment theologian unleashing a full range of logical tools on philosophical problems while simultaneously operating on revelation with the compliment of historical critical analysis of Biblical texts. Theist or atheist, both seek an internally coherent, precisely formulated, and logically complete description of reality. Which is, at least theologically, the mind of God.

Now Hawking was almost certainly speaking metaphorically, and I won’t make him out to be a crypto-theist. But there is a real problem for Christians when our theologies become increasingly abstract representations of God, and God’s will, based on models created in the mind and articulated for our fellow humans in that great Enlightenment goal: Systematic Theology. Such a theology, at least as I learned it, was to tie together the sum of human knowledge of Humanity, Nature, and God into a dogmatic whole. In it the human mind and the Mind of God have become one and the same and who can say which has been elevated and which diminished.

Liberation theology was supposed to deliver us from all this by focusing theological attention on God’s subjectivity in the form of God’s “preferential option for the poor.” Orthopraxi would at least compliment, if not replace orthodoxy. Yet it seems to me that orthodoxy and orthopraxi have for the most part simply bi-furcated. Self-identified orthodox theology nerds continue their quest to know "that which was believed, everywhere, always;” surely the summa bonum of Enlightenment even if it is attributed to the church fathers. 

Activists in the meantime, build models of an activist God. The coherence of those models is ideological and their credibility is enacted rather than observed. Yet once created in the mind and articulated on a rally poster these models give us a God can trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored with oppressive zeal. Because humans, whether victims or oppressors, are central only in being at the bull’s eye in the site of God’s subjective concern, while it is the quality of justice that is at center of God’s heart. And thus it turns out that this most subjective God is understood in abstract terms of justice relating to a humanity understood statistically in terms of income inequality, homelessness rates, distribution of goods and services, educational opportunity, teen suicide, and so on. The Bible and the latest census data or UNHCR report become two sides of the same theological coin. 

Now the point of my caricatures above is show the extent to which humans as the makers of theology, the seekers of knowledge, remain de-centered in contemporary theology. In the new orthodoxy we continue to create of models of God in our heads using the classical tools of philosophy and theology while the new activists create such models out of ideology and statistics. Either way we remain where the Enlightenment put us, out of the center looking down on at the universe and formulating our models of God based on what we can see. We may test our models against the Bible and the church fathers, or against the Bible and latest social science data. Either way the pre-enlightenment world in which humans were both at the center where God was incarnate and in the heavens where the elect live in God’s eternal presence has been lost.

If you aren't grounded its likely that you're lost in space. 

So perhaps we should find the center again. Not in the naive physical sense. We can’t go back there. Nor in the naive metaphysical sense. We can’t go back their either. Rather we might consider, as Crawford and Frank suggest, recognizing that we are inevitably the center of our models and the experiences by which we test them. That old map was a poor representation of reality, but an excellent representation of the only way we can really see reality. 

With regard to the physical universe this is exactly what Stephen Hawking helped articulate with the concept of the “light cone” representing that portion of the universe which is available to us for observation. That cone spreads out, representing the distance light travels in different periods of time, from the human observer. Inevitably we are in its center, and there is nothing we can know for sure about what is outside it (most of the universe) without the questionable supposition (but fundamental to all science) that what is outside must look like what is inside. The problem for science is, as Frank details, that the cutting edge undercuts the supposition of uniformity in the universe.

The Christian analogue to the light cone is the effect of revelation. All we can know of God is what comes to us when God deigns to reveal God’s self within the world of human senses. When God revealed God’s self in Jesus our knowledge of God was both made possible and limited by that revelation and its subsequent record in the Bible. The writer of the gospel of John is well aware of the limits of what he can know even of Jesus. And we must be aware that as much as we know about what God was doing in Judea and Samaria in Jesus Christ, we know nothing of what God was doing a few hundred miles south in the Arabian peninsula. The light of revelation has its own cone and its own shadows beyond. To go beyond revelation (natural and special) requires assuming that God’s nature and activity is fully disclosed in a revelation limited by its human receptors: a theological absurdity. Better to acknowledge our own centrality and recognize the limits it imposes on all our statements about God including those that claim to be most inclusive. 

Ultimately I think the point of Frank's and Crawford’s works is to remind us that our task as humans isn’t to know the mind of God, which inevitably dis-engages us from reality, but to engage in an ongoing dialogue with reality and both realize and revel in the meaning that gives our lives. And that means, at least in part, that we realize and reject futile efforts to complete that dialogue with increasingly abstract characterizations of reality no longer in touch with any imaginable human experience. 

The Copernican revolution de-centered humanity in the universe for the purpose of doing away with the increasing bizarre abstractions of the Ptolemaic system. The revolution we need now will bring us back to the center and rescue us from the alienating abstractions of a theology (or cosmology) that seeks to transcend its human origins and represent the mind of God. It is, after all, ourselves that we must most urgently know and understand if we are to survive. 

About a Book

Before you ask what scripture means you must first ask why we should care. And that is a political question.

The meaning of a text is important only in the context that describes what type of meaning it should have. Put another way, ecclesiology is the source of hermeneutical standards for the Bible, because the context in which the Bible has meaning for Christians is the church. 

Let’s take a simple example from outside the church: the United States Constitution. In the context of US Supreme Court deliberations the meaning of this text are extremely consequential. It is the primary authority around which deliberations of law take place. And so Americans concerned with Supreme Court decisions get pretty excited about hermeneutical arguments related to judicial restraint and judicial activism.

But what about my home for seven years, Austria? Well our American arguments about restraint and activism as hermeneutical principles don’t mean much to Austrians, because the US Constitution has no meaning in their context. Indeed in their political context the principles of “restraint” and “activism” don’t occur. 

Now we’ll find the same thing if we look at, say, the novels of Jane Austin. Arguments about the characters, author’s intent, and meaning rage in college English classes, literary solons, among TV producers, and elsewhere in the world that holds Jane Austin in esteem. Not, notably, down at the White Rock Boat Club. Get a bunch of guys together on the dock having a beer and you’ll find that bringing up whether Jane Austen was a proto-feminist empowering women through her characters is pretty much a buzz-kill. In that context hermeneutic disputes in relation to Jane Austin mean nothing. 

And that gets us to a second reality: the rules of interpretation, or disputes over the rules, are fixed by the social context in which the book is read. The US constitution is read in the particular political context of the United States, and it is through the political process of selecting judges that the hermeneutical debate between restraint and activism was shaped into its current form. 

It isn’t hard to imagine that a debate about the meaning of Jane Austen will be somewhat different in a college classroom than in a neighborhood reading circle. One might focus on the intent of the author, or how the books reflect and shape social standards, in the the other one might find personal responses to the characters quite divorced from the intent of the author. 

Again, methods of interpretation are determined by the social context within which the book is read. 

You see where I’m going with this. The Bible is a book that has authority only in the context of the Christian community, and disputes about interpretation are meaningful only in the context of that community. The Bible as a book worth reading and attending to really doesn’t even exist outside the Christian community. Beyond our boundaries its just a book of historical interest (if that), and possibly just a collection of words that people can take or leave as they will. And they do leave it. My own research on the distribution of scripture portions in late 19th century Malaya showed that almost all were used to line boxes, fill cracks, or start fires. Apparently its numinous, sacred quality wasn't recognized so easily. 

We, the church, are the context in which all disputes and decisions about interpretation of the Bible must be made. There is no outside authority to whom any side can appeal, no meta-standard of interpretation of texts against which our hermeneutics can be judged. The Bible doesn’t belong to literary critics, or post-colonial theorists, or anthropologists, or political scientists. Of course they can read it, analyze it, determine their own rules of interpretation, and offer what it means to them. But not to us.

Unless we choose to invite them into our conversation about hermeneutics. We can even choose to give them a relatively authoritative role in those discussions. But that is entirely our choice, based on our own internal understanding of the Bible and our own internal needs as a community that looks to it for authority. We should not appeal to them over and against ourselves. 

But we do! Perhaps the biggest problem with contemporary United Methodism is that in our effort to present the results of our hermeneutical inquiries as credible outside the church, primarily in the academy, we’ve granted that outside context not merely an authoritative voice, but a determinative voice in our internal Christian discussions over hermeneutics and meaning. 

Does a scholar of comparative religions and ancient texts categorize the gospel accounts of the resurrection as myths? Then many of us willingly abandon belief in the resurrection, or virgin birth, or miracles of Christ. We give up the witness of the church through the ages that Christ has risen in order to satisfy the ever-shifting demands of post-enlightenment rationality. We place our own experience and authority beneath that of a culture which has itself come almost to a place of collapse as the pretensions of the so-called Copernican Revolution are finally exposed.

In particularly United Methodist debate this willing surrender to the Enlightenment, trading the rich broth of Christian tradition and Christian experience for the thin gruel of Cartesian rationality, comes by an appeal to the so-called Wesleyan quadrilateral. No assertion of belief can pass muster in current UM debate unless the gatekeepers of epistemic authenticity in the secular academy give it the once over and declare it in accordance with “reason.” 

What makes this richly ironic is that the academy itself is recognizing (post-modern debate about meta narratives quite aside) that the so-called Copernican revolution that took humanity out of the center of the universe has led us to an epistemic shallows that is impossible to navigate. In cosmology we’ve seen the rise and return of the “anthropic” principle that wonders why it is that the universe happens to be so finely tuned that it allows for the kind of life that eventually discovers just how finally tuned it is, and how immensely improbable such a universe is. 

Outside the world of physics we find the near complete entanglement of subjectivity and objectivity in everything from sociological research to ethics. So while UM debaters appeal to “reason” and the results of scientific research to bolster their claims about the meaning of scripture we find increasing recognition among scientists that their descriptions of reality are inconclusive, particularly with regard to moral issues, outside a specifically human context of inquiry. There is no dis-engaged, objective, standpoint which represents “reason.” Descarte started in the graveyard of knowledge, not its womb. 

Not that this solves our hermeneutical problems. What it does, see my next blog, is properly locate them within ecclesiology, and particularly the politics of authority within the church. 

Trapped in a Secular Age

United Methodist discourse and disagreement is trapped in secularity. Indeed it is proof of Charles Taylor’s thesis that our secular age is one in which the conditions of belief have perceptibly and irrevocably changed. This does not mean that United Methodists don’t constantly refer to God. But all of those references are mediated by scripture, and scripture as it lies entirely within what Taylor calls the immanent frame. Once we deploy scripture to prove our point it is no longer God’s word but a human tool; a tool shaped by our immediate needs, whether rational or polemical. 

A good example of this are arguments related to the ordination of. . . . women. There are few United Methodists, none I know of, that oppose the ordination of women. But there are plenty of Evangelicals, Catholic, and Orthodox who do. We’ll let John Piper represent the first if you are interested. https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/is-there-a-place-for-female-professors-at-seminary. Noteworthy here is Piper's literalism. It is essentially a post-enlightenment form of rational interpretation of scripture based on certain assumptions about the mechanisms by which human authors serve a divine intent. Like all enlightenment rationality, it insures authority through adherence to a particular rational procedure.

So how do you argue against a well-known scholar who deploys Biblical arguments against the ordination of women and having women teach future ordinands? 

Well, a well know evangelical/conservative voice in United Methodism is Ben Witherington of Asbury Seminary. You’ll find his arguments here: http://thebiblicalworld.blogspot.com/2012/04/ben-witherington-on-women-in-ministry.html

Dr. Witherington is no literalist. His arguments depend on the set of procedures typically called critical hermeneutics. These are based on an expert knowledge of cultural locations within and beyond the text, appropriate translation in relation to original cultural context, historical situation, and etc. His arguments would have been unimaginable prior to the Enlightenment.

What Piper and Witherington have in common is bringing scripture down to earth, as a human book that can be interpreted with the tools of the immanent frame, to reach a conclusion. For Witherington the authority of scripture comes from God, but its meaning is clearly mediated through the earthly tools. And it is deployed here with those tools fully in view. 

For an official commentary on United Methodist ordination of women you can go here: http://www.umc.org/what-we-believe/commentary-the-ordination-of-women. I think you’ll find that its deploying of critical tools is non-different from that of Ben Witherington. Indeed, I was hard pressed to find any UM voice, or indeed any voice in support of the ordination of women, that didn’t deploy some form of critical exegesis along these lines. (It is interesting, probably telling, that of the official UM articles on this only one is written by a woman.) 

So, to repeat my initial point, it seems that we United Methodists are stuck in the immanent frame, unable to refer to our most basic source of authority without bringing it within the realm of culturally determined procedures for interpretation and deploying it as a human tool. 

Now if this seems natural, and the word itself as we use it is a product of modernity, then consider that it wasn’t always so. In pre-modern Western culture the scripture had a plenitude of meanings, none of which was discovered by rational operations on actual words and sentences to discover authorial intent. For the pre-modern Church the methods of allegory, typology, tropology, and anagogy were equally legitimate paths to both understanding and thus exposition and potentially argument. And they all depended on the assumption that scripture was bound together not by historicity, culture and cultural change, and authorial intention, but by the same gold chain, the eternal chain of Being, that bound all things on earth to heaven. 

The door back to those days is closed to us now. The Wardrobe in Lewis’s novels does not allow grown-ups a path to Narnia, and neither can we, by any act of will, recover our naiveté. On this Charles Taylor is correct.

Still, we might consider looking for another way forward that isn’t trapped in secularity and (as it happens) endless, irresolvable, and utterly fruitless disputes of the meaning of God’s Word dragged to earth by the all-too-base-metal chains of human reason. 

I will suggest, and perhaps explore further in future posts, that the path forward will be to recover God’s Word as the primary resource in a shared spiritual quest to hear God’s intent for our common life. To do this we will not instrumentalize scripture by deploying rational arguments in this or that dispute over church discipline. 

Instead we will read aloud to each other its words, all its words, and then dwell and listen in silence for God’s voice. And when we think we have heard, we will share what we have heard. And listen to what others have heard. And then we will dwell in those voices, possibly asking for clarification but never disputing or denying what others have heard. 

It may be that we will eventually come to a common mind, hearing synchronously what God is saying through scripture. It has happened before in the UMC, with regard to the ordination of women for example, or the ending of slavery. 

It may also be that we will have no common mind, that the fruit of the spirit called unity will not yet be ripe in our hearts. And we’ll either carve out space for disagreement in our common polity or decide we must for a time separate. 

Either way we will have returned to the respect for God’s Word that was lost when it became imprisoned in a secular age. And the sword of God’s word will not be deployed by us to make our enemies bleed, but by God to open up our own hearts.