Societas Christiana

Last Sunday I got word that my dad had gone into the hospital with an assortment of very serious problems including kidney failure, congestive heart failure, diabetes, and liver blockage. I flew back to Dallas the next day, and have been here all week and have only just now gotten computer access so as to be able to post. My dad is doing better now than he was when I got here, but it has been a very trying week and he’s not out of the woods yet. Right now he’s on dialysis and the hope is that his kidneys will “restart” themselves, but that is not certain. The doctors are doing a delicate balancing act with medications for pain and the other problems, and there are some additional family troubles which I will not go into here making things even more complicated. Your prayers would be appreciated.

I don’t know how long I’ll be staying in Dallas, or when I’ll have further computer access, but suffice it to say that for now I won’t be talking about Cicero or Postman or Asimov or anything else I usually talk about here.

Neil Postman proposes three categories of human culture to tools (technology): a “tool-using culture,” a “technocracy,” and a “technopoly.”

First is the tool-using culture. This is a culture in which

tools were invented largely to do two things: to solve specific and urgent problems of physical life, such as in the use of waterpower, windmills, and the heavy-wheeled plow; or to serve the symbolic world of art, politics, myth, ritual, and religion, as in the construction of castles, cathedrals and the development of the mechanical clock. In either case, tools did not attack (or, more precisely, were not intended to attack) the dignity and integrity of the culture into which they were introduced. With some exceptions, tools did not prevent people from believing in their traditions, in their God, in their politics, in their methods of education, or in the legitimacy of their social organization. These beliefs, in fact, directed the invention of tools and limited the uses to which they were put. (pg. 23).

A major example of a tool-using culture is, of course, the Roman Empire, which developed and depended on roads, bridges, aqueducts, tunnels, and sewers. Another is Medieval Christendom, which saw such inventions as windmills, eyeglasses, padded collars for horses pulling plows, horseshoes, and cathedral spires as tall as modern 40-story buildings (pg. 24).
Postman is aware, however, that despite their own wishes not even “tool-using cultures” are immune to being changed by their tools. A major example here is the introduction of the stirrup in the ninth century. Prior to the stirrup, horses had been used in battle mostly just to transport warriors to the battlefield, where they would then dismount and attack on foot. But the stirrup made it possible to fight on horseback, thus inventing the mounted cavalry and changing the very nature of warfare. This in turn magnified the power of the landed feudal lords (who could, unlike the average man, afford horses and their associated equipment), and had significant effects on relations between the Church and the temporal lords (pg. 26). Though the product of a tool-using culture, the stirrup moved that culture significantly toward a technocracy.

What is a technocracy? Postman writes, “…In a technocracy tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give way, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.” (pg. 28).

A prime example of this is the introduction of the telescope in the early 17th century, which radically assaulted the dominant Christianized Aristotelian view of the cosmos with its belief that the earth was the center of the universe. The telescope, although invented by Medieval Christians who desired, in Kepler’s famous words, to “think God’s thoughts after Him,” showed men that earth was not the center of the universe, and in consequence almost immediately began to undermine the belief that man had a special place in the universe and that he was cared for by God (pg. 29). Postman’s discussion of Kepler in particular highlights one major feature of a technocracy: Kepler dispensed with the opinions of the saints about physical reality, and proposed instead that “Reason alone” was valid in such matters. Says Postman, “We have here a clear call for the separation of moral and intellectual values, a separation that is one of the pillars of a technocracy…” (pg. 31).

Another example is the mechanical clock, which was invented by Medieval Benedictine monks to help regularize the seven canonical hours of devotion. But the clock soon outrun its fundamentally religious purpose, and began to underwrite a “secularization” (my term, not Postman’s) of the human concept of time. The clock outside of the monastery, and thus, outside of overt religious assumptions about its nature and purpose, standardized the process of production, the understanding of the very concept of “working hours,” and the products of the work day (pp. 14-15).

A third example is the Gutenberg printing press, which Gutenbert, a loyal Catholic, would never have envisioned would be used to spread the “heretic” Luther’s reforming ideas all over Europe. Thus did a seemingly “neutral” tool designed for non-revolutionary purposes help to ignite a firestorm of religious and cultural controversy that resulted in the overthrow of Medieval Catholicism (pg. 15).^[1]

In a technocracy, technology becomes for the first time the underwriter of a whole vast program of “progress” and the power to manipulate the world to make it conform to our desires. In Postman’s view, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was “the first man of the technocratic age” in contrast to Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, who were all “men of tool-using cultures” only playing with the ideas that would later underwrite technocracy. Bacon saw an identity between “the improvement of man’s mind and the improvement of his lot.” Indeed, Bacon “brought science down from the heavens, including mathematics, which he conceived of as a humble handmaiden to invention. In this utilitarian view of knowledge, Bacon was the chief architect of a new edifice of thought in which resignation was cast out and God assigned to a special room. The name of the building was Progress and Power.” (ibid., pp. 35-36). Still, Bacon was only an early herald of technocracy. An argument could be made that the first true technocracy only appeared after James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1765, which started a process of inevitable transformation of the category “manufacturing” (literally, “made by hand”) to a culture based on “large-scale, impersonal, mechanized production” (pp. 40-41), a society in which skilled workers were replaced with mere mechanical operators (pg. 42).

Postman highlights the profound cultural impact of the Industrial Revolution, which was a result of technocracy:

Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition - whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the world. We could get places faster, do things faster, accomplish more in a shorter time. Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost. (pg. 45)

For all this, however, elements of the tool-using society hung on through the Industrial Revolution, largely because the results of the Revolution were still too new, and in many ways too radical, to conquer all of the traditional ideas. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Thoreau, Emerso, Hawthorne, Melville, and de Tocqueville stood as influential voices for the traditional as over against the technological.

Enter Postman’s third category of technological culture, the technopolis. Defined as “totalitarian technocracy,” a technopolis is a society in which the traditional is not destroyed but instead just disappeared. A technopoly does not make the traditional illegal, immoral, or even unpopular. A technopoly instead makes the traditional “invisible and therefore irrelevant.” A technopoly does this by “redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements” (pg. 48).

Postman says he is tempted to mark the beginning of technopoly in America with the Scopes Trial in 1925. There two worldviews, traditional religious and technological scientific, clashed and, thanks to William Jennings Bryan, who tried to be clever by claiming he was more interested in the Rock of Ages than in the age of rocks, the religious lost. However, Postman thinks the Scopes Trial “had more to do with science and faith than technology as faith” (pg. 50). He prefers to hang the advent of technopolis in America on the adoption in 1911 of Frederick W. Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management. In this book was advocated for the first time such ideas as that the main goal of human work is efficiency, that calculations are superior to human judgment, that things which cannot be measured do not exist or are of no value, and that the lives of ordinary men are best guided by technologically-proficient “experts” (pg. 51). In other words, human life was subsumed into the radical notion that “technique of any kind can do our thinking for us” (pg. 52). Whereas the cultural consequences of tools are just byproducts of a technocracy, they are the main thing in a technopoly. In a technopoly, technology is the philosophy of culture, and every aspect of culture is brought under the rulership of a “mechanical” ideal.

From Darwin to Marx to Nietzsche to Freud to Taylor to Einstein, says Postman,

The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in our belief systems and therefore in ourselves. Amid the conceptual debris, there remained one sure thing to believe in - technology. Whatever else be denied or compromised, it is clear that airplanes do fly, antibiotics do cure, radios do speak, and, as we know now, computers do calculate and never make mistakes - only faulty humans do (which is what Frederick Taylor was trying to tell us all along). (pg. 55)

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Being something of a perfectionist, I’ve always had to varying degrees “grade anxiety” about my schoolwork. Insofar as mere numbers are concerned, I did “OK” at New St. Andrews College in my B.A. work and I’m doing “Very Well” at the University of Dallas in my M.A. work. Still, I was very much heartened when my Medieval philosophy professor this past term said before our mid-term exam that we shouldn’t worry too much about our grades because there’s not necessarily a correlation between grades and understanding. I’ve thought about this particularly in connection with my B.A. work. One of my co-workers at that time, who had something like a 2.7 in his own studies, told me that he would kill to have a 3.4. And yet, being the kind of person I am, graduating with a 3.4 strikes me as borderline mediocre.

But then there’s this to consider. I learned so much at NSA and had the whole world opened up to me in ways that have enriched my life beyond the ability of words to convey. Accordingly, I have asked myself several times since I left NSA what exactly the numbers “3.4″ convey about my intellectual abilities or my understanding of the materials I studied. How can a quantity capture the quality of the education I received, or of the materials I today produce as a result of that education? I’m not railing against the idea of standards, of course, and surely it has to be admitted that grades are a rather convenient way to measure how well one meets a certain pre-determined criterion, and also a rather convenient way to transmit that information to, say, other schools. Still, what do they really show about me? Is anything really important being said about my person by the numbers “3.4″? To be sure, those numbers have disqualified me from certain scholarships which require, say, a “3.7″ or higher, but again, what of any real importance do numbers say about me? Ok, now to the point of this post.

Neil Postman (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, pg. 13) points out that the idea of attaching numeric value (grades) to the academic work of students was unheard of until one William Farish introduced it at Cambridge University in 1792. Postman says that the “idea that a quantitative value should be assigned to human thoughts was a major step toward constructing a mathematical concept of reality” (ibid.). He continues

To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that man’s is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. It makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. (ibid.).

This is but one of many examples Postman gives of how technology - the tools we create to manage and control our lives - carry with them implicit assumptions about human nature, about the world, and about our relationship with the world. The mechanical clock created an entirely different concept of time than had existed before its invention, and profoundly changed the world by making it possible to cut up the day, package it into neat little bundles, and standardize work itself. Without the clock, it’s doubtful whether capitalism could ever have been born. Similarly, the printing press radically changed the idea of what books were, what reading was, and what the role of the individual reader to the rest of the world should be. Television and computers have changed our understanding information, of freedom, of learning, and of communal speech. Grades, on Postman’s reading, have performed the same sort of transformation of our ideas of knowledge, intellectual achievement, and cultural heritage: “To a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number” (ibid., pg. 14).

When I first started thinking about what, if anything, “3.4″ (or even my current “almost 3.8″) says about me as a person, I immediately also began to wonder how intellectual work had been evaluated before the rise of the technology of grading. Now that Postman has informed me that there was no such thing as grades until 1792, my curiosity about pre-grade standards of evaluation has heightened all the more.

Craig D. Allert’s article “What Are We Trying to Conserve?: Evangelicalism and Sola Scriptura” is a very interesting read especially for its discussion of the inherent diversity of both the Reformation and its contemporary Evangelical descendant. This is the sort of self-examination that Internet apologists regularly fail to do, and I think that that failure goes a long way toward accounting for the near-total breakdown of their communication abilities relative to those with whom they disagree.

The following is just an interesting thought experiment, not a discussion-ender. Feedback is welcomed.

Everybody knows that the Reformation had two causes, the formal and the material. This is Aristotelian language - it comes from Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics. According to Markus Barth, the notion of the Reformation having a “formal” principle and a “material” principle originated with A. Twesten, the successor of Schleiermacher, in the nineteenth century.^[1] The formal cause of the Reformation is sola Scriptura, the doctrine that all the material of Christian revelation is found in Scripture, and Scripture alone is infallible), and the material cause of the Reformation is sola fide, the doctrine that we are justified by faith alone, not by any works of righteousness which we can do.

It has occurred to me today that while everybody wants to talk about formal and material causes in connection with the Reformation, people rarely talk about the other two of Aristotle’s causes, the efficient (the agent who does the action) and the final (the ultimate goal for which the action is done). I suppose it’s obvious enough what the efficient cause of the Reformation was: the Reformers themselves. But what about the final cause? Why was the Reformation begun and pursued?

It’s easy enough to say that the final cause of the Reformation was “To restore the pure Gospel,” but a moment’s thought will show a problem with thinking that this is the final, or ultimate cause of the Reformation. If “restoring the pure Gospel” was the final cause of the Reformation, then once the pure Gospel was restored the Reformation should have ended. Having reached its telos, no further growth or development should have been possible or expected. If the Gospel was justificationby faith alone, then having re-established justification by faith alone things should have stopped with Luther. But they didn’t. Calvin came along afterwards to “continue” the reform, Zwingli did the same, and the various Anabaptist groups all had their own understandings of both reform simpliciter and the Reformation itself.

Subsequent history continued the trend. The separatist variety of Puritans came along about a century later and figured the original Reformation had failed to purge out all of the Romanism, so more radical measures were necessary. Ditto for the Reformed Baptists. Later came the Pietists and the secularizing ideas of men such as Locke and Spinoza, which, even if not explicitly religious or explicitly tied to the Reformation, were attempts to “continue” what the Reformers had started. Of course, by this time the mythology of “semper reformanda” - always reforming - had been created, implying that the Reformation could never end. Liberals like Schleiermacher also thought that they were “continuing” the Reformation, and the fantastic proliferation of Protestant, sub-Protestant, and even non-Christian sects in the 19th century operated on the same “never ending reform” assumption. Finally, many people today who claim to be children of the Reformation think that the duty of all who love the Reformation is to continually repristinate its program, keeping all the formulas and polemical constructions used to defend them pretty much exactly the way they were in the 16th century.

So then, if “restoring the pure Gospel” is the final cause of the Reformation, it would seem that the Reformation will never reach its goal. The pure Gospel will never be restored, because there will always be someone who thinks his predecessor or his neighbor in the next “True Reformation” church has not done the job well enough. Now, since we’re talking Aristotelian terms, since we’re moving in Aristotle’s world, it’s interesting that a thing that never reaches its goal is a thing which is subject to chance and randomness,^[2] a thing which, by its unending nature reveals its fundamental imperfection and thus its irrationality,^[3] and a thing whose originating seed has been corrupted so that it only produces monstrosities.^[4] One of the best lines from the Philosopher is this one: “But the essence, also, cannot be reduced to another definition which is fuller in expression. For the original definition is always more of a definition, and not the later one; and in a series in which the first term has not the required character, the next has not it either.”^[5] So much for the Reformed Baptists “continuing” the Reformation’s “principles.”

It would seem then, that if “restoring the pure Gospel” is the final end of the Reformation, the Reformation is an irrational monstrosity. While I am sure that Roman Catholic controversialists will enthusiastically acclaim this conclusion, and in their acclaim they will be supported by the actual behavior of many Protestants today, I am not sure that we should rest consideration of the final cause of the Reformation on “restoring the pure Gospel.” Although there is much of this sort of talk in the pages of the Reformers, one must try to consider their whole situation and balance the rhetoric of (seemingly) radical reform with other factors. Elsewhere I have argued that a major provocation of the Reformation was the lack of sound pastoral presence in the churches - the people were not being spiritually cared for by competent, learned, godly ministers.^[6] One should consider Calvin’s claim near the end of his Reply to Sadoleto that the Reformers desired “nothing worse than that religion being revived, the Churches, which discord had scattered and dispersed, might be gathered together into true unity,” and his claim to Cranmer (I think) that he would “cross ten seas” for the sake of Christian unity. In the Sadoleto letter, along with calling the Roman Church a “faction” within the one Church, Calvin says to his Roman Catholic opponent:

I admit that pious and truly religious minds do not always attain to all the mysteries of God, but am sometimes blind in the clearest matters—the Lord, doubtless, so providing, in order to accustom them to modesty and submission. Again, I admit that they have such a respect for all good men, not to say the Church, that they do not easily allow themselves to be separated from any man in whom they have discovered a true knowledge of Christ; so that sometimes they choose rather to suspend their judgment than to rush, on slight grounds, into dissent.

This does not sound like an ethic of eternal reform based on an idea of a “pure” Gospel that is always falling and so always needs to be restored. This doesn’t sound like the spirit that animates TULIP-fanatics to rest “the Gospel” on destroying Arminianism or Amyraldianism, or any of a hundred other blustery squabbles over which people impale their brothers on “Truth,” and all “for the sake of the Gospel.” Toward the end of his “The Necessity of Reforming the Church,” Calvin also says that the Reformers have been laboring “to this present day” for the cause of reform. Does the phrase “to this present day” imply that there was to be no terminating point for the reform? In the next century, Francis Turretin remarks that the new and separate outward structures which the Reformers created were emergency measures. What justification is there for acting today as if the 16th century emergency never ended?

At any rate, I think there is much food for thought here. What, indeed, was the final cause of the Reformation? For what purpose was it undertaken, has that purpose been reached, and if so, where does that leave us as Protestants today?

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Abraham Kuyper^[1] helpfully points out that the word “Calvinism” has several different meanings. First is a sectarian definition, denoting a stigma “which does not refer to the faith or confession of the stigmatized person, but is simply put upon every member of the Reformed Churches, even though he be an atheist.”^[2] Second is the confessional definition, which denotes “the out-spoken subscriber to the dogma of fore-ordination.”^[3] Third is the use of the term as a denominational title, which refers to certain types of Baptists (e.g., Spurgeon) and Methodists (e.g., Whitfield). Kuyper says, “Without doubt this practice would have been most severely criticized by Calvin himself,” who never wanted his name to be given to the Church of Christ.^[4] Fourth, the term has a scientific meaning, which is subdivided into historical, philosophical and political sub-meanings. Historically, Calvinism is “the channel in which the Reformation moved in so far as it was neither Lutheran, nor Anabaptist nor Socinian.” Philosophically, it is “that system of conceptions which, under the influence of the master-mind of Calvin, raised itself to dominance in the several spheres of life.” Politically, it is “that political movement which has guaranteed the liberty of nations in a constitutional statesmanship.”^[5]

For Kuyper, the historical understanding of Calvinism shows that it was a complete “life system,” not merely a doctrinal confession. Calvinists developed “a peculiar theology, then a special church-order, and then a given form for political and social life, for the interpretation of the moral world-order, for the relation between nature and grace, between Christianity and the world, between church and state, and finally for art and science.” All of these developments sprang, says Kuyper, from Calvinism’s “deepest life principle.”^[6]

He goes on to argue that Calvinism, examined in its fullness, satisfies three conditions for a “general system of life.” The first condition is that it addresses our relation to God. The second is that it addresses our relation to man. The third is that it addresses our relaiton to the world. Other entities fulfill these requirements for “general systems of life,” and among them Kuyper lists Paganism, Islam, and Catholicism. For Kuyper, Calvinism stands equal with these entities as a complete understanding of man’s existence and life in the world: it is “an all-embracing system of principles, as, rooted in the past, is able to strengthen us in the present and to fill us with confidence for the future.”^[7]

This understanding of Calvinism as a complete “life system” is, Kuyper thinks, actually the foundation of the fundamental Calvinist maxim that all of life is to be lived coram Deo - “before the face of God.”^[8] Holding that “there is a particular grace which works Salvation, and also a common grace by which God, maintaining the life of the world, relaxes the curse which rests upon it, arrests its process of corruption, and thus allows the untrammelled development of our life in which to glorify Himself as Creator.”^[9] The historical result of this principle was astonishing as set over against certain Medieval catholic distortions:

…domestic life regained its independence, trade and commerce realized their strength in liberty, art and science were set free from every ecclesiastical bond and restored to their own inspirations, and man began to understand the subjection of all nature with its hidden forces and treasures to himself as a holy duty, imposed upon him by the original ordinances of Paradise: “Have dominion over them.” Henceforth the curse should no longer rest upon the world itself, but upon that which is sinful in it, and instead of monastic flight from the world, the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every position in life…Calvinism gave the impulse to that new development which dared to face the world with the Roman thought: nil humanum a me alienum puto [”I hold nothing that is human to be alienated from me”], although never allowing itself to be intoxicated by its poison cup.^[10]

As a comprehensive “life system,” Kuyper thinks that Calvinism has had an inestimable positive effect on human culture since the 16th century, and he urges upon present day Calvinists the need to see an as yet open future for even more positive effects. The critical point, however, is precisely to see Calvinism as a comprehensive program. Whole “world systems” are clashing in our day, he says, and it will not do to try to oppose a world system with merely sectarian or confessional or denominational reductionisms. In light of his having pointed out the struggle with the Modern “life system,” I leave you with this provocative remark from Kuyper:

In this struggle Apologetics have advanced us not one single step. Apologists have invariably begun by abandoning the assailed breastwork, in order to entrench themselves cowardly in a ravelin behind it.^[11]

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Over on Beggar’s All Reformation, I made a post about misusing scholarly citations in apologetics battles. As an example, in the comments thread I referred obliquely to the Introduction to David T. King’s volume Holy Scripture: The Ground and Pillar of Our Faith. Given that Pastor King and I once had a serious falling out and had a few bitter scraps in ensuing years, I thought my comment was pretty restrained and stuck to the facts.

Well, the next thing I knew, the owner of Beggar’s All, James Swan, had deleted my post, claiming it was a “personal attack” on David King. The next day (today) David King himself responded to me. By the time I wrote my follow-up to David, new comments on the post had been disabled by the owner. Well, isn’t that convenient. Below is the exchange in its full, as of the time the comments were disabled, and I have added to the end my response to King.

Those of you who follow these Protestant controversialists around should be pretty interested in how this all turned out. (I’ve numbered the comments for ease of following the flow).

—————————————————————————

1. DH (DumbHusband) said…

Yeah! I’m glad you’re back. I like your quotes!

9:54 PM, June 24, 2008

2. BJ Buracker said…

Carrie,

Thanks for the explanation, and I too am glad you’re back. I hope you find that the break was more worthwhile than you think right now.

I know I’ve complained about the lack of explanation, but that is more because I don’t always understand the why. I think even just a highlighted sentence might be helpful to me. Thus, I really appreciate you trying to help us out by giving a brief explanation. Don’t strain yourself too much, but I know that I for one would find it worthwhile.

Blessings in Christ,

BJ
Stupid Scholar
Daily Bible Reflections

4:12 AM, June 25, 2008

3. Rhology said…

I like the bare quotes b/c then the lame “that’s just your private interp!” waste-of-time objection can’t come up.

But I’m glad you’re back too. My well of inspiration has been dry of late.

9:48 AM, June 25, 2008

4. [My comment that was subsequently deleted]

Well, as an example of why providing some sort of explanation of why one is using a particular quote, try this one. A man writes a book attacking Catholic apologetics’ attacks on sola Scriptura. In the introduction to his book he quotes a book on 16th century skepticism by a well-known scholar in that field. Unfortunately, the man doing the quoting only quotes one particular part of what the skepticism scholar said. That is, he cites the scholar as saying that 16th century Catholic polemicists used philosophical Pyrrhonism against Protestants in order to reduce their trust in Scripture to self-referential absurdity. The man then goes on to charge contemporary Catholic apologists with being impious skeptics because they are constantly asking skeptical questions about the Protestant criterion of authority, trying to undermine people’s trust in Scripture.

It’s a nice, tight little argument,w hich is then spiced up with zingers from John Owen about Romanists hate truth and want to hide it under bushels so that their deeds of darkness will not be exposed to the light of truth. The overall impression given by the citations that are produced without any context or explanation is that Protestants love truth and Catholics don’t, and whereas Protestants are not afraid to examine themselves Catholics are.
However, what the man neglects to tell his readers is that the skepticism scholar also demonstrates that 16th century Calvinists used Pyrrhonism against the Catholics, resulting in a situation of intellectual deadlock where all sides continually tried to reduce the other’s criterion of authority to self-referential absurdity. This demonstration in turn is part of a larger argument about the revival of ancient Greek philosophical skepticism prior to the Reformation, and how in the wake of the disastrous wars of the Reformation everyone was floundering around looking for “certainty,” and one of the major views that arose to provide “certainty” was Cartesian foundationalism.

This raises all kinds of interesting questions, but by quoting only a part of the skepticism scholar’s point about 16th century Pyrrhonism, the man who wrote the sola Scriptura book prevents those questions from being asked, distorts the scholar’s point, and gives his untutored audience a false impression about what the scholar said. Moreover, the man fails to consider the fact that the skepticism scholar’s point about Calvinist uses of Pyrrhonism against Catholics brings up a host of interesting points about contemporary Protestant apologetics, especially the variety of apologetics practiced by the man himself. That is, because the man himself frequently attempts to reduce the Catholic criterion of authority to self-absurdity, he himself turns out to be a user of Pyrrhonism against Catholics. Thus, the man himself is on the terms of his own argument structure indicted as an impious skeptic.

But as you say, Carrie, one has to do research of one’s own on isolated quotes to find out the whole story. Unfortunately, Protestant apologists are often little better at doing this than Catholic apologists.

5. Carrie said…

I love the high caliber of my commenters: “dumbhusband” & “stupid scholar”.

Tim,

Could you translate your comment into simple English for us lower hominids?

From what I could follow in your comment and assuming it was addressed to what I do here, there are a few major differences: 1) I am not writing a book, this is just simply a blog, 2) many of my quotes are from online sources from which a context can be mined, 3) my quotes are not meant to stand on their own to support some big argument but are just an “interesting tidbit” and 4)I believe people need to take responsibility for themselves and learn to do a bit of research before forming a solid opinion. For those reasons, I have no qualms with supplying bare quotes.

But your example, Tim, does bring up an important point about dealing with some of the historical facts that we discuss around here, specifically when it comes to the Reformation conflict - with the polemics coming from both sides, it can be difficult to figure out where reality lies. And that is just with the sources we do have access to since accurate history relies on accurate documentation. But that is why I enjoy blogging in general, b/c through discussion, with various people sharing sources, we can at least get a better handle on things.

Anyway, thanks for your thoughts.

5:25 PM, June 25, 2008

6. Carrie said…

My well of inspiration has been dry of late.

I never understood why you don’t tackle some of the atheist material over here? You do good work in that area.

I will be posting the “atheists are saved” from CA soon, perhaps that will inspire you.

6:04 PM, June 25, 2008

7. Kepha said…

Why has Tim’s comment been deleted? For goodness’ sakes, people. Debate, don’t delete!

3:16 AM, June 26, 2008

8. James Swan said…

I have very few guidlines for commenting on this blog, and those guidlelines can be found on the side under the title, “Information About Commenting on This Blog.”

I interpreted the comment as more of a personal attack against a friend of mine because I don’t think anyone except that particular friend could have any idea what what was being said in that comment. It took me about a half hour to actually decode the comment and do the needed research to actually understand what was being said.

Kepha states, “Debate don’t delete!” Everyone can debate whether or not Carrie should post quotes without contexts, and further, whether it is possible to quote something accurately without providing a context. I would argue it is possible to quote in such way, as long as when asked for a context, one can be provided.

6:32 AM, June 26, 2008

9. Tim Enloe said…

Well, James, you’re going to have to explain to me the difference between pointing out a serious flaw in citation and how it boomerangs on the individual making the argment and (2) a “personal attack on a friend of yours.” I was talking about David’s argument, not his person.

It’s simply a fact, provable by anyone who reads enough of the proper material that his use of Richard Popkin’s material in his book is demonstrably one-sided and distortive of both Popkin’s point and the larger epistemological issues at work in Catholic-Protestant debates. It therefore provides a good example of what Carrie was talking about in terms of using quotes without providing context.

3:33 PM, June 26, 2008

10. dtking said…

Mr. Enloe said: “It’s simply a fact, provable by anyone who reads enough of the proper material that his use of Richard Popkin’s material in his book is demonstrably one-sided and distortive of both Popkin’s point and the larger epistemological issues at work in Catholic-Protestant debates. It therefore provides a good example of what Carrie was talking about in terms of using quotes without providing context.”

1) No Protestant ever used skepticism to substantiate biblical authority. Romanists employed that argument in their attacks on biblical authority.

2) No, it is not a fact provable by anyone who reads enough of Popkin’s material. Dr. Woodbridge from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School made the same passing remark that I did as drawn from Popkin. The fact is that Protestants only employed the argument of skepticism (as Popkin pointed out) to demonstrate the fact that if the same argument can be leveled against the one wielding it, it is not a sound argument.

As Popkin noted: “The Protestants, however, saw that the same sceptical approach could be used on its inventor, with the same effective results. The ‘new machine of war’ appeared to have a peculiar recoil mechanism which had the odd effect of engulfing the target and the gunner in a common catastrophe. If the Reformers could not determine infallibly true articles of faith from the text of Scripture by rational means, neither could the Catholics discover any religious truths, since they would be confronted with the same difficulties with regard to ascertaining the meaning and truth of what Popes, Councils, and Church Fathers had said. As far as the Reformers could see, Veron had developed a complete scepticism to defeat them, but was just as defeated as they were by this argument.” See Richard H. Popkin The History of Scepticism From Erasmus to Descartes, revised edition (Assen:Van Corcum & Comp. N.V., 1964), p. 79.

In other words, the Protestants pointed out the double-edged nature of skepticism to demonstrate that the same tactic can be used to undermine Roman claims. This is why I reject Mr. Enloe’s criticism. Mr. Enloe needs to understand that not everyone looks at the facts of the world and/or scholarship according to him.

3) The third point to make is this – whether he is willing to admit it or not, Mr. Enloe does have a personal axe to grind with me stemming from disagreements in the past. His complaint about my book here ***came out of the blue*** precipitated by nothing but the overflow of his own heart, for out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. He’s made this point before, and I’ve ignored it because 1) I do not believe it carries any substance, and 2) it was a point I made in passing in my book, which was not my major thesis. It’s just an attempt to poison the well. Now, I am certain that Mr. Enloe thinks he’s found some great critique, because he has a very high view of himself, but I am unimpressed.

Now, Mr. Enloe swore off the web some time back, but this is yet another demonstration that he desires to remain a controversialist. If he’s concerned about conveying the wrong impression, for which he complained about this point in my book, he needs to look no further than to himself and begin his critique there.

DTK

4:24 PM, June 26, 2008

11. [My response that I could not post due to comments being disabled]

Well, at last an answer. Thank you, David. As to your points:

(1) I didn’t say Protestants used skepticism to substantiate the authority of Holy Scripture. I said that Popkin demonstrates that Calvinists used Pyrrhonist skepticism to reduce the authority claims of Catholics to absurdity in the same way that the Catholics were using Pyrrhonist skepticism to reduce the authority claims of Protestants to absurdity. The point here is that you used Popkin’s point about Catholics using Pyrrhonism to rhetorically slam contemporary Catholics as impious, but you failed to note that the exact same argument would mean that 17th century Calvinists were impious.

Moreover, you seem to fail to see that by yourself trying to reduce Catholic authority claims to absurdity (even by way of simply responding to their attacks), you yourself use Pyrrhonist skepticism. And since the Catholic believes that the Church is a divine authority, to the Catholic you are every bit as impious as he is to you. Thus the rhetorical point you were trying to make in the Introduction to your book boomerangs. This nicely dovetails into your next point:

(2) The fact that Pyrrhonism could be used against its own wielders was exactly what I said in the comment that James deleted. Now that you’ve explained via the additional Popkin citation what you were intending to show, it’s even more clear that if you yourself use Pyrrhonist tactics against Catholics who are using Pyrrhonist tactics, neither one of you is doing anything constructive but both of you are stuck in the “Cartesian egocentric predicament” and its highly debatable solution of epistemological foundationalism. You may be simply countering bad Catholic apologetics, but you’re doing it with bad Protestant apologetics. That’s the point.

This has nothing to do with my alleged requirement that people see scholarship like I do. There’s an argument to be made here quite apart from your personal speculations about my character. Van Tillian quasi-fideism about Scripture isn’t the only rational option for a Reformed person to hold regarding Scriptural authority, nor is Cartesian foundationalism the only rational epistemological option for a Reformed person to hold. These are issues of live debate in the Reformed world, not issues that were settled long ago such that now if anyone questions them he is to be written off as a self-important fool blabbering mere “rhetoric” and nonsense.

(3) No, it’s not personal. You are a person who has gained a following among Protestants interested in countering the claims of Catholic apologetics, and as such, you are in the public eye making public claims that can be publically discussed by reasonable people. It has nothing to do with the overflow of my heart, except insofar as my heart loves the good things that came out of the Reformation, but happens to interpret the nature and meaning of the Reformation differently from yours. Again, it’s a matter of reasonable debate, not settled dogmatism.

As for attempts to “poison the well,” well, you and White and Svendsen decided long ago that the best way to deal with me was to do everything you could to paint me as an unreasonable, ranting, unstable, immature little twit who fears Holy Scripture, repudiates sola Scriptura, compromises sola fide, makes eyes at Romanists, and rarely ever says anything of substance that isn’t hopelessly couched in “hate.” I can’t help but wonder whether such talk fits James’ definition of “personal attack,” but I won’t expect James to police his friend. I never policed you when you were my friend.

(4) No, I didn’t “swear off” the web, David. You can’t answer anything I’m saying by treating me like you do Armstrong, simply pasting into a box all the times he’s said he was done dealing with anti-Catholics and so forth. As I have done several times over the last few years, I decided to take my website down for various reasons, and then later revoked my decision. This last time I took it down was mostly because I felt I didn’t have time to keep up with it and it wasn’t doing anyone much good anyway. I was wrong, and so I restored it. Big deal.

Nor is it true that I desire to remain a controversialist. It’s true that I occasionally descend to the level that controversialists operate on, but whenever I do so it is in an attempt to bring some clarity to what I consider to be problematic claims.

The fact of the matter is that you folks (those of you in the leadership of this controversialist group) rarely make known the existence of reasonable alternatives to the views you propound, but instead present your views as if they are the very essence of rationality and fidelity to biblical truth and anyone who disagrees with you is simply an unspiritual, unstable, immature, ranting little twit.

This is a curious situation, and can’t help but make many people wonder what is going on. I, for one, don’t understand why people who are so profoundly convinced that they have “the Truth” and that they “get the Gospel right” are so averse to the reasonable give and take of intra-Reformed debate. What, is Kuyper not Reformed? Is Plantinga not Reformed? What about Horton? How about Sproul? All these guys and many more hold various positions that don’t ever appear on the radar scope of those of you doing apologetics, and it’s just curious that when someone like myself argues in line with men like this the only response is to delete my posts and assassinate my character. What’s up with that?

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And so there you have it. Interesting, no?

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[Tim has again welcomed some of my attempts to understand philosophy, this time in its modern cast, for which I thank him.]

Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics presents a helpful precìse of his “critical” philosophy, without which no one today would have any idea what Kant meant by the billowing swells of the Critique of Pure Reason. In the Prolegomena Kant is primarily concerned with the epistemological conditions for “pure philosophical cognition” (reine philosophische Erkenntnis) or Metaphysics. What is the noetic framework whereby we “judge” metaphysical concepts?
Straightaway it is necessary to point out that Kant has a very different conception of knowledge and metaphysics than classical or scholastic philosophy. Following the pathway of Descartes’ “turn to the subject,” Kant does not take the epistemological veracity of human knowledge for granted, does not assume that the mind accurately represents things as they are. For the moderns, I do not “receive” the form or logos of the sensible, a form which transcendends the “subject-object” distinction (see Aristotle’s De Anima, II). Rather, I “produce” the sensible insofar as I represent or construct it for myself based on impressions or motions it causes within me and to which it bears no formal likeness. Kant’s mind lacks access to things-in-themselves (noumena); it is restricted to things as they appear (phenomena), insofar as it constructs these appearances through its own categories. Hume had impugned the metaphysical category of causality on the grounds that it was a fiction of the mind imposed on (an untrustworthy) “reality.” For the Scotch philosopher, experience was the only source of knowledge, uncertain because not necessary. Against Aristotle and the medievals, Kant agrees with Hume that the mind constructs reality insofar as it is known by us. But Kant thinks that the structure of human epistemology can be deduced with complete certainty through the basic principles of reason (like the law of non-contradiction). The Kantian or “Copernican” revolution consists in understanding metaphysical truth/reality as fiction, starting from the mind that measures or fabricates this fiction—rather than as (ontological) truth in itself, starting from perception.

Sixteenth and seventeenth century Protestant doctors often described Holy Scripture as the norma normans non normata, or “the norming norm that is not itself normed.” This means that Scripture, being the Word of God, is the standard which regulates all things, but it itself is not regulated by anything. While reading some things on Aquinas today, I ran across the article Veritas Sequitur Esse (”Truth Follows Being”). In it appears this provocative description of Thomas’ view of truth:

Thomas tells us to look at each concrete thing, as “inter duos intellectus constituta” - set between two intellects. One is the Intellect of the Creator, the other is the intellect of man. The Intellect of the Creator is the measurer (mensurans) in relation to things; and so it defines and establishes truth. The divine Intellect is not measured in itself (non mensuratum), nor is it determined by anything else. It is the source of the existence of each and every things and thus also the source of every truth. The Creator is He who define and assigns truth to things, somewhat like an artist to his works. Thus, each and every thing that is called to existence realizes in itself a particular truth that expresses the idea of the Creator.

In turn, the natural thing is both “measured and giving measure”: it is defined with respect to its truth, but it also defines truth. This means that in things that an idea has been composed together with their existence, that each existing thing realizes an idea or thought within itself. The second intellect, the intellect of man, is merely that which is “measured”, but does not itself provide the measure in relation to natural things. The human intellect is mensuratus non mensurans, and truth is found in the human intellect in a secondary or derivative way.

There seems to me to be a connection between describing truth as the mensura non mensuratum (”the measure not itself measured”) and describing Holy Scripture as the norma normans non normata (”the norming norm not itself normed”). Likewise surely there is a connection between describing the mind of God as the mensurans (”the measuring thing”) and the mind of man as the mensuratus non mensurans (”the measured thing not itself measuring things”). I’m not sure how to flesh it out at present, but it’s fascinating nevertheless. Consider the statement toward the end of the article that “Thus the truth that is given to man is not merely derived from cognition or thought, as is commonly accepted today, but together with things it is given to man.” Heresy on Cartesian rationalist terms, but perhaps on more Christian terms a view which frees not only truth but the Scriptures as well from slavery to the autonomous human consciousness self-isolated by its morbid fascination with what it self-referentially defines as “clear and distinct things.”

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Joel Garver’s essay “Inventing the Bible” is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the Church’s encounters with Holy Scripture. And since I won’t discipline myself to stop paying attention to the Internet flame wars between Catholic apologists and Protestant apologists, I just have to say that Garver’s discussion brings out some concepts and issues consideration of which is desperately lacking in those wars.

Parenthetically, I think some of the concepts and issues in Garver’s discussion have implications Van Tilian presuppositionalism, in which, in my understanding of the topic, Scripture is treated like what Garver calls a “superadded deposit of information,” a “propositional object of revelation” which itself “comes more and more to be conceived as extrinsic to nature, a set of revealed facts that ordinarily lie outside the field of vision of rational perception, now laid bare with clarity and offered to the human mind as worthy of belief.”

By contrast to the Medieval view of Scripture, which sees the subject matter of revelation and the world being essentially the same but approached under a different light, the “propositional object of revelation” view of Scripture seems to inherently make Scripture an external object which falls under the control of a rational, scientific process of critical exegesis which itself results in epistemological “certainty.” I can’t help but wonder if this way of thinking about Scripture and the truth it reveals doesn’t tie into the historically demonstrable influence of Cartesian philosophy on 17th century Reformed theology - and perhaps, by way of anti-intellectual dumbing-down processes of American Fundamentalism, into the self-stultifying “Bible Only” mentality of so many Protestants today.

Garver’s discussion of hermeneutical transformations accompanying the Modern “technological” view of “the Bible” (not “the Scriptures”) is very interesting, and echoes many themes I have been blogging about here for several years (albeit on a much less cogent level than Garver). I can’t help but feel vindicated against certain of my more militant Evangelical critics.

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