Time Immortal

Mr. Bum put up an interesting post which attempts to paint the picture of his view of the purpose of epistemic systems. To give credit where it is due, it does that well — it paints his picture of what the purpose of epistemic systems ought to do (that is, to arrive us at principled consensus).

While I don’t specifically reject that principled consensus is a good outcome of applied epistemology, I also don’t think it’s the primary purpose of epistemology — what good is principled consensus if the thing about which consensus is reached is, ultimately, false? To offer a rather contrived, but illustrative example: it is well and good that people could, perhaps, reach a principled consensus about the ‘fact’ that two plus two equals five. That doesn’t mean that two plus two actually yields five in any applicational sense, however (not if we maintain the normative quantities implied by our use of the words ‘two’ and ‘five’, and employ the usual meaning of the arithmetic operation called ‘plus’ or, more formally, ‘addition’*).

The problem with what Mr. Bum has lately written is, ultimately, in the subjectivism that the above disclaimer implies is at work here. Mr Bum’s post is interesting, although there’s only a tiny part of it I care to reply to formally — but before that begins, there’s just one remark I want to make here.

He begins, essentially, by making the classic postmodern statement: “there is no The Truth”. All well and good, of course, except that it’s also self-nullifying, unless that statement is, in and of itself, The Truth (i.e. absolutely true in all places at all times). Absent the absolute ‘The Truthness’ of that statement, it’s just one more subjective statement that is neither true in all places, nor at all times, nor for all people — in other words, by its being only limitedly true, it mandates in turn that at some point a real The Truth does, in fact exist.

I happen to believe in certain absolute truths, nor do I tend to agree with postmodernist principle. Since much of the arguments that follow are primarily presupposed on postmodernist principle and the subjectivity of truth, which I reject, most of what is said is a bit…how did you put it?…’beside the point’.

But a brief, if interesting discussion of epistemic principle as applied to Scripture and exegesis follows, which is worth at least remarking on in brief. Following a discussion of the scientific method, Mr. Bum speaks thusly:

Contrast this epistemic method [the scientific method] with the theistic pseudo-epistemology of scripture and revelation. It’s the case that, if you accept a scripture and some extremely elaborate and rococo interpretive system, you can generate principled agreement, but the obvious flaw in this method is the choice of scripture and interpretive schema (exegesis). There’s simply no way to generate principled agreement on which scripture to accept: The Catholic Bible? The Protestant Bible? The Greek or Russian Orthodox Bible? The Book of Mormon? The writings of Mary Baker Eddy? The Koran (and which hadith)? The Upanishads? The Buddhist scriptures?

There’s a few different problems here, although much of it centers around a conflation typical of atheistic ‘understanding’ of religion. There are, unfortunately, a variety of different translations and canons of Scripture, and there are a variety of different sets of scriptures as well…but the interpretive system that is employed is not so much ‘rococo’ as it is multi-layered. That is to say, good theological epistemology does not apply one universal theological method, but several ’sub’-methods in a more or less sequential order.

Let’s first address the most direct conflation in Mr. Bum’s statement — the mashing together of several different religions. The first step, then, in religious epistemology is to isolate and consider only one religion at a time, at least at first. Ecumenism seeks to find common interpretations and principles between religions, and this is all well and good. But for the purpose of serious scholarship, it is best to begin by considering each in isolation. Which one is considered is not so important at this point, although it will become more relevant in a while.

So let’s briefly re-state, at this early point: the wide range of choices of scriptures is not so much a flaw as it is a first layer of analysis. We choose one set of scriptures — Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, whatever — and work from within that framework as we continue in our scholarship. It’s a first doorway, not a brick wall we impact against at high speed.

Let us suppose that we select the Christian scriptures. Now we see the emergence of an actual first hurdle in our study — which canon (Protestant, Catholic, or some flavour of Orthodox) do we employ? The first answer to determining whether a particular canon is valid is to look at its origins. A limited Old Testament canon, as the Protestants employ, is easily rejected as a valid source for serious scholarship because its limitedness is not a decision born out of religious fervor so much as it is born out of politics; Protestantism rejected the accepted Old Testament canon of the Church in the days of the Reformation ostensibly because the ‘original source texts’ were unknown — only the Greek translations in the Septuagint were readily available.

Why this constituted a problem for the early Protestants was purely political in nature — the validity of the Septuagint texts is verified by the fact that Christ repeatedly quotes from the Septuagint versions of the Old Testament in Scripture, and in the way several passages in the Gospels cite those books which are in the Septuagint but not in the Protestant Old Testament canon (i.e. the Apocryphal books). Moreover, aspects of Catholic theology that the Protestants explicitly rejected were, conveniently, sourced and justified according to the texts of said Apocryphal books — the rejection of the concept of Purgatory was easier for the Protestants in the absence of the Books of Maccabees, for example. We see this even more clearly illustrated in Luther’s attempted rejection of the Epistle of James (in the New Testament) as an ‘epistle of straw’. That James essentially refutes the Lutheran doctrine (based on a mis-reading of Paul) of sola fide is sometimes forgotten, but nevertheless true.

Moreover, Protestant canon is based on the Masoretic text, a Hebrew-language version of the Old Testament. Both the Masoretic text and the Septuagint were in common use in the time of Christ — the Septuagint, written in Greek, was the scripture of choice for those Jewish communities outside of Israel, as it was written in the most common language of the region. The Masoretic text was predominantly used within Israel, and was regarded as the “true” scriptural source by the Jewish religious authorities, because it had not been ‘tainted’ by an external language and people. It was the Septuagint, because of its being written in a more widely accessible language, and because of Christ’s repeated use of it when citing from Scripture, that was selected as the primary scriptural source by the early Christian communities.

With the dissolution of the state of Israel a few decades after the death of Christ, the surviving Jewish religious authorities, rattled by the destruction of their nation and seeking to curb the Christian heresy in their midst, began to elevate the Masoretic text as the sole valid scriptural source in the Jewish religion. Their articulated reasons were not dissimilar from those of Luther — not only was the Septuagint a translated version of Scripture written in an ‘unclean’ language, but some of its texts did not have a Hebrew source text that was readily known (nor would such source texts be known until the 20th century and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls).

It is interesting, then, that the Protestant reformers selected the Masoretic text as their Old Testament source — in their desire to reject aspects of Catholic theology, they turned to a scriptural source that had been promulgated as authentic for a purpose that was, in part, anti-Christian. But then, historical precedent has never been the strong point of Protestants, in my experience — show me the Protestant who considers Catholics to be ‘Mary worshippers’, and I will show you the Protestant who has no clue at all that Luther’s tomb is adorned with the image of the Assumption of Mary.

Anyhow, all of the above is primarily to say that we can reject the Protestant canon on a primarily historical basis — the Masoretic text was never a serious scriptural source for the early Christian community, and the acceptance and embrace of it by the Reformers was a political decision and motivated by an explicit rejection of certain doctrines, not for any particularly holy or divinely inspired reason.

In a sense, the variations in the Orthodox canons can be viewed as having a similar basis — the additional or omitted texts are included (or not) precisely to justify variances in doctrine between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. These differences emerged not out of divine inspiration of any particular sort, but out of historical strife. Fortunately, the variances between Catholicism and Orthodoxy are relatively minor, so minor in fact that adherents of the Orthodox churches are, for the most part, permitted to take communion on a Catholic church (and vice versa) — and in that understanding, we can also say essentially that the additional books of some Orthodox canons do not add anything significant to Christian theology. The earliest, essentially common canon is the canon that is employed today by Catholicism, and this is the canon that most serious Biblical scholars will work from.

So, a first hurdle, dealt with not by some rococo interpretive method, but by a more reasoned, analytical method — a second epistemic system, one could even call it. Are there people in the world that reject this methodology? Unfortunately, there are…but does their rejection of it mean that the method itself is not valid? Or does it mean that there are people in the world who still have a stake other than discovering what is true in the issue of which text source is used (i.e. does it mean that people are, essentially, approaching this issue in error)?

And that’s to name simply a few, and completely ignore the minor and more-or-less heretical “prophets” () and non-canonical scriptures. And once you’ve chosen a scripture, how do you interpret it? Few people take Dueteronomy 21:18-21 literally, but once you abandon the literal meaning, how do you decide in a principled, deterministic way which metaphor to employ?

Once we’ve come to this stage, there is of course the issue — which Mr. Bum identifies above — of precisely how we carry out exegesis, and in what light we view each part of Scripture in turn. Do we approach it with strict literalism? Strict non-literalism? Or some combination of both. The flaws inherent in the first two choices are reasonably obvious, and need not be stated (I don’t think). Indeed, even as early on as Paul, Christianity acknowledged that extra-Scriptural sources could nevertheless describe the truth. Paul’s address to the Greek assembly is instructive, because he puts it very succinctly: Christianity does not come to supplant the truths that other philosophies have revealed, but to complete them. He simultaneously acknowledged that the Greeks, in their theological and philosophical efforts, had grasped many aspects of the metaphysical truths that underpin our reality, and sought not to wipe these away but to find their compliment in Christian teaching. The Church has employed this attitude repeatedly over the centuries.

Indeed, even Augustine noted the importance of extra-Biblical sources, and cautioned in severe terms those Christians who would speak foolishly from Scripture about those things which other, non-Christian people may in fact be quite knowledgeable about. Augustine understood that non-Christians could be and were very learned about many things in the natural world, and understood that if Scripture were true then in its interpretation it would not, could not, contradict these things. His fear, such as it was, was that by speaking foolishly from Scripture about things which they were not themselves independently wise, those eager evangelists would come to view all Christians as fools, and thus not come to find salvation in Christ.

Young Earth Creationists would do well to remember this when speaking with evolutionary biologists.

Has the Church always remember this warning of one of its theological greats? Unfortunately, no — the Galileo affair is the easiest example to make here. Galileo himself, in his letter to the Countess Christina, understood quite well the relationship that Augustine was getting at (his pithy slogan, a favourite of mine, translates roughly as: “Scripture teaches one how to go to heaven, not how heaven goes”) many centuries earlier. The Church officials of the day did not apply good hermeneutics to their interpretation of Scripture, and that is very unfortunate — a bit of a black mark on the Church’s record.

To be perfectly fair, though, Galileo was not known for being the most…ah…mild-mannered person. One must remember that Galileo was not the first heliocentrist, and that earlier theorists — Copernicus being the easiest example — had published their theories with no repercussions. Galileo, at first, operated under the same parameters, receiving no real opposition from Church officials. The Church did screw up in its own understanding of the issue (their interpretation of Scripture being too literal, and too strongly in violation of the aforementioned Augustinian principle)…but ultimately, what landed Galileo in hot water were a series of intemperate remarks he made about the Pope’s astronomer (and, by extension — or so it was taken — the Pope himself). As mentioned, Galileo was not particularly mild-mannered, as his letter to Christina confirms; he is quite flippant about certain individuals and groups in it.

The Church has reversed course on the Galileo mistake, and rightly so — indeed, the Vatican Observatory is now one of the foremost scientific and academic institutions in the world as a result of the shift. Moreover, the Church has formally apologized for its mistake. And notably, with the next big things in science after heliocentrism, the Church took the discoveries in stride (I am speaking here, in particular, about geology and evolution). Indeed, regarding evolution specifically, the encyclical of Pius XII, Humani Generis teaches explicitly that evolution need not be viewed as incompatible with the core doctrines of the Catholic faith.

Pope John Paul II expanded upon this fine start with many different writings on the relationship between faith and science, building up a profound understanding in Catholic learning that truth cannot contradict truth — that is, that both Scripture and science can be fully reconciled to each other in all important matters. How we separate these issues begins, primarily, with whether we interpret a text literally or in some other manner, and the hermeneutics one would employ to achieve that understanding begin with such well-established tools as Sir Francis Bacon’s “Two Books” philosophy and the concept called the “Message-Incident Principle” — separate the message of a body of Scripture from the incidents described within the raw text; if the message is such that the events in the text are required to be literal (for example: Christ’s death and resurrection) in order that both be true, then the text should be interpreted as such until a fundamental conflict between sources occurs. If, on the other hand, the message can be true even if the events in the text, if interpreted as literal, cannot be reconciled to other evidence at hand (for example: the order and duration of Creation in Genesis), then the text should be interpreted as metaphorical (i.e. as a way the Spirit communicates to humanity that God is the Creator without the need for complex explanations of stellar physics and biological processes).

And again, these are not rococo methods at all, but widely accepted techniques of theological epistemology that most serious Biblical scholars employ in their analysis. Now, are these methodologies as rigorous as those of the scientific method? No, of course not. But that lack of rigor is not, in and of itself, something that invalidates theological epistemology, anymore than the wide body of perspectives in interpretation of art or music invalidates art and music as intellectual and creative pursuits. A lack of rigor is to be expected when what is being discussed is not quite so concrete as a sum, velocity, or mass.

These are… nontrivial… issues, as the history of religion has made blatantly obvious. The “metaphysical buy-in” to any religion is enormous, everyone seems to buy in at least a little bit differently, and there are many ways to buy in that are enormously different.

There is a larger “buy-in” in theology, this is true. And I have not addressed all issues in this posting — the issue, for example, of which religion (if any) is more correct than any other has not been addressed herein (although the careful reader of the site will know that I have attempted, in the past, to discuss this issue, and that aspects of that discussion appear in other articles on the site here).

But again, the larger “buy-in” is not, in and of itself, sufficient grounds for rejection of the epistemic methodology employed in theology, because a similarly large “buy-in” is required when one desires to study something like art or music. There are a range of artistic and musical styles, and within those styles there are often many variants on the style. There are a range of things artists and musicians attempt to communicate in, or achieve with, their chosen mode of expression…and the techniques we use to evaluate and critique those modes of expression have to be wide and varied.

The methodologies we employ, then, do not arrive us at the most rigorous consensus, but in a sense that’s a part of the mystery of music and art, and a part of the appeal that they hold for us. It’s precisely in the defiance of determinism that music, especially, can become very interesting, and art very engaging. And theology is not particularly different in that. Religion is also presupposed on an element of mystery — indeed, the formal articulation of the mystery of faith in Christ’s death and resurrection is a key component of the Catholic Mass and the consecration of the bread and wine.

There are several key methodologies that can be, should be, and are used regularly by serious theologians, and there are several poor methodologies as well (see my above concerning Young Earth Creationism)…much like there are good and bad ways of looking at art and music, and much as there are good and bad artists and musicians. But again, this does not invalidate art criticism, or art itself, or music criticism, or music itself. In a sense, it affirms these things. And in a similar sense, theology is likewise affirmed precisely because it arrives at a somewhat less rigorous consensus about some things, and at a very rigorous consensus about other things.

Now, we can reject art and music and the critiques thereof on the same basis as we reject theological epistemology — there are many methodologies, applied to many and various styles of art and music, with no concrete consensus (in favour, instead, of multiple localized instances of consensus) and no rigorous standards or outcomes. But how boring would that be? Art and music are, necessarily, imbued with a certain element of mystery, and the Almighty has seen fit to imbue religion with the same sort of mystery.

I guess it comes down to what one expects, what outcomes one demands. With the scientific method, we are right to demand that it deliver a very concrete outcome (and a truthful one, at that). But to apply that demand for rigor across a broad spectrum of fields and disciplines, and the various modes of analysis, epistemology, and criticism that we employ in those fields, gets back to the crypto-positivism I’ve discussed previously — the unnecessary application of over-rigorous limitation on what can and cannot describe knowledge and truth. Remember that God is not the only thing that is not falsifiable…truth is as well. And whether we’re subjective or absolute in our view of what truth is, and what is and is not true, either way we are ultimately relying on something which does not fit the category and criteria of falsifiability when we speak of something being “true”.

This is as true of theology as it is of art, music, or science. And it ought to come as no surprise that while ultimately, the common goal of all our efforts is what is true, the toolsets we use to arrive at the truth are not the same between disciplines.