On Saturday, I left a substantial comment in a substantial conversation on John Totten's blog. As I was writing this comment, certain things were clicking for me in my thinking. For this reason, (and because I am lazy), I offer a revised edition of that comment for your perusal.
I believe that there is a tension inherent in fallen human existence. Namely, this: I don't think that we can have complete, total, absolute knowledge on anything. If you sit down and think about it, this is a valid statement (although it will raise certain hackles).
A common response to this statement is something along the lines of "Baloney. I can know that I am sitting on this chair." OK, perhaps you can. But is that knowledge complete, total, and absolute? Do you know, for instance, what the chair is made of? If it is wooden, what kind of wood? If oak, what type of oak? If white oak, what is its grain pattern? What caused that pattern? What is its cellular makeup? What is the location of its subatomic particles at this very moment? (They will be somewhere else as soon as you say it.) What is the nature of those particles? And that's just talking about the chair.
Here's my point. Every truth claim that we make is the product of belief and doubt -- we offer statements because we believe a certain explanation and doubt another. Obviously, by this definition I am not talking about blind belief; we have experience, memory, and that nebulous yet very real faculty, rational thought to inform our beliefs and doubts. Consequently, we can have severly compelling reasons to make certain truth claims, extremely sophisticated beliefs, but we cannot move very far past that.
So, have I just cleared the way for relativism (such a naughty word)? Not at all. Because there is an object outside of the believing subject (this is one of the sophisticated beliefs that I and many others hold tenaciously). Consequently, I am not saying that complete, total, and absolute knowledge is impossible. That knowledge simply requires a different kind of Knower, namely, God.
We receive the benefit of having communication with that Knower (by using the capital "K," I am not refering to some sort of Berklianism, in case anyone wonders), both in the form of a written text and through the Holy Spirit. And that gives us a way to negotiate our existence in the world, in relationship with each other, and in relationship with God.
But that negotiation is not complete, total. Because we are still stuck with the problem of having incomplete, limited, not entirely coherent knowledge -- and this includes knowledge of the Knower and his message to us. We still have to struggle to come up with an understanding of the message that comes from God. We still have to deal with belief and doubt. I'm not saying the Gospel is unclear, or that we need theologians and philologists to understand it. But I am saying that theologian and middle-school student alike; all face the struggle of knowledge, the fight for existence, ethics, metaphysics that we cannot completely win but we also cannot abandon.
I believe (!) that formal logic and systematic theologies are often useful ways to assist us in that struggle. But they are not complete, they are not infallible, and they are not absolute. The Law of Non-contradiction is not inherent in the universe nor is it spelled out in the Bible as such. By taking it too far in our hermeneutic, we may be forcing, for instance, something that really is paradoxical in human terms into a human non-paradoxical mold, and thus fashioning the Bible after our image.
This is the place of come to in all of this. I think about it WAY too much, but I also can't help thinking about it. And I know there's someone out there who wants to challenge me on this. I'd sincerely enjoy it.
Posted by pjaussen at October 25, 2004 12:07 PM