Ever Reforming, Ever Loved

This semester has been a frustrating, amazing, blessing filled semester. I have been taking a class on Modern and Post-Modern Theology, and in my countless hours of trying to understand one word that I have been reading, one thing has become very clear to me. It seems as if, since the Enlightenment (which is the culmination of several currents of thought ranging from the Renaissance to the Reformation), the task of theology has been dominated by a man-centered view, but in a very strange, hopeless way. I know that we all can agree that Modernity has ushered in an age of anthropocentric idolatry, placing man as the central character of history. But it seems that this turn to self is subtly influencing the way even we do theology in the sense that it is forcing us to answer questions on Enlightenment-Modernity-Post-Modernity’s terms.

The fundamental question is this: What do we start with? Theology Proper? If we start with God, what is the basis of OUR knowledge? What about Bibliology? If we start with the Bible, we give a grounding to the basis of OUR knowledge, but how can WE justify OUR belief that the Scriptures are orienting our pursuits towards the true God? These questions seem like the right questions. If we are to have a right view of God, we do need to have a rational response to these questions. But my concern is that these questions have become the central focus of the task of theology, and the problem with that is it’s fundamentally man centered in its approach to our knowing God.

I have been thinking through the consequents of this, and I have just begun to roll around in the ol’ noggin an answer to the question of the proper jumping point for theology. This is just a thought, and I covet your responses in support of or correction of, but what about starting the task of theology with Pneumatology? There are several reasons I am leaning towards this, and here are some of ‘em:

It is the Holy Spirit that wrote, protected, and illuminates the Scriptures.

1. He wrote them through divine inspiration, guiding the authors’ pens.

2. He protected them by moving through the Fathers whom He indwelled to put together a canon and closing it.

3. He illuminates them today, moving in the hearts of the elect, guiding them into all truth and sanctifying them through an encounter with God.

Like I said, this is just the beginning of my working through this, but it seems like a good way of moving theology past the chaos that results from focusing on the limitations of humanity’s perspectival knowledge and into the beautiful confidence and rest that flows from the glorious truth that we can know God because He Himself is the basis of our knowledge of Him. It seems risky, as it takes us past the foundationalism that is the byproduct of Descarte’s thought, but perhaps faith that the omnipotent power of the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth and protect the sacred deposit of truth found in the Scriptures will elevate our theology from the mechanical connection of propositions to a sublime flow of the power and love of God as the Holy Spirit sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts. Just a thought.

P.S. I do think that the bible is made up of propositions that contain truth, and that these propositions can be known rationally. I hold to the Correspondence Theory of truth, that a thing is true if and only if it corresponds to reality, and a step further, that reality is what God says it is in Scripture- placing the Bible as the final authority of what is real. All I am saying is, it might be beneficial to begin our theology not from the starting point of the limitations of man, which is presupposed when beginning theology from the Theology Proper/Bibliology question, but from the study of the active agent in our knowing God, presupposing instead the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit in the elect for the task of knowing and proclaiming God in the world.

I had an interesting discussion with a good friend of ours who recently moved back to Texas about scientific advances and the effects they had on philosophy. When asked for an example of the phenomenon, he responded that the shift from a geocentric view of the solar system to a heliocentric view influenced the idea that the universe no longer quite literally revolved around us. This shift has placed humanity as just another part of creation, mere atoms and energy, pitifully insignificant in light of the vastness of space. I agree that the shift from geocentric to heliocentric had a huge impact on philosophy- however, I feel that the impact did not re-orient philosophy in the right direction, but rather pushed it further away from the nature of truth.

Logically, the idea that the universe no longer revolves around the earth should cause man to look outside himself to see what it is he is revolving around. But according to the thought of my friend, as well as the rest of the post-modern intelligentsia, the idea of a heliocentric universe has not shifted man’s focus from himself to something outside himself, but rather caused him to focus even more on himself and his finite, perspectival, subjective experience of the world. This is indicative of all philosophy since the Enlightenment- the focus of man is still man, albeit in a way that is infatuated with his limits and inability to gain an objective vantage point from which truth can be objectively known. The trajectory of this anthropocentrism has landed us in a deconstructivist’s playground, where the nature of words in texts do little more than point to signs that point to signs that point to signs ad infinitum, ad nauseam, with no real meaning out there, just more signs pointing to more signs. According to the pragmatic ethos of society, this anthropocentrism should have been jettisoned long ago, because it doesn’t work- no body lives like this, nor can they without creating an absence of meaning, a black hole in the experience of man that not even the light of life can escape from. It is this philosophy that has been the dialog partner of theology for years, and it has for the most part been on philosophy’s terms.

Perhaps the shift towards a heliocentric view of the solar system should have ushered in a theocentric view of existence instead. Sure, this is old hat for most of us, but perhaps we should flesh this idea out a little more. Perhaps the terms of the dialog should be from a theocentric point of view. But in order to do this, we must come up with the terms, and invite philosophy to enter into discussion with us on the basis of said terms. We need to shift our epistemology from the subject-object perspective to the Subject-communicates-object-to-subject perspective. But how to do this?! I don’t know, but we should try to figure this out. I don’t like the way philosophy is going, and we should probably do something about it