I am tired and have a lot to do, so I'll make this one a whew-shew, snappy one. But, though I need to be brief, I wanted to get something out about a concept that has been as important to me in sustaining my faith in Christ as any concept I have considered. And that is this: a duality of answers.
Thesis statement: As every religiously inclined worldview is by nature is a fused theological and anthropological entity, every worldview-level question answered from within that worldview has a duality of answers - one answer supernatural (theological) and one answer natural (anthropological).
Instead of belaboring the point, here are examples of worldview-level questions answered in a duality of answers:
Q: How were the books of the canon decided?
Theological answer:
The books of the canon were decided by God. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and all inspired Scripture is canonical. Therefore, God chose which books were canonical by choosing which books to inspire.
Anthropological answer:
The books of the canon were decided by men. All Scripture is recognized as inspired by God, and all Scripture declared to be inspired is canonical. Therefore, people chose which books were canonical by choosing which books were inspired.
Q: How do people come to be Christians?
Theological answer:
God causes people to become Christians by regenerating them by His Spirit. They are convinced by the gift of faith given to them. If God did not move to regenerate, no one would come to Him.
Anthropological answer:
People cause people to become Christians by convincing them through various means. They are convinced by a few particularly common influences: 1) Their family is Christian, and they want to get along with their family, 2) a powerful preacher makes them feel guilty and tells them they must be saved to avoid hell and know God, 3) an emotional or rational argument convinces them that Christianity is true. If no one talked or wrote about God, no one would come to Him.
Q: How do we know that God even exists?
Theological answer:
God has made Himself plain by planting in the hearts of people an innate knowledge of Him, and by planting humankind in a universe that declares His orderliness, goodness, power, and, thus, His existence.
Anthropological answer:
Humans invent various gods in order to fill an emotional desire for greater meaning, and to explain the order, goodness, and powerful things they see in the universe around them.
Q: Why does inanimate nature act the way it does?
Theological answer:
God moves in all things according to His plan. Nature responds to His command, and nothing that occurs in inanimate nature occurs apart from His divine decree. Snow falls when God tells it to; drought strikes at His word; earthquakes destroy at His slightest gesture; rain pours on His queue.
Anthropological answer:
Inanimate nature moves according to basic natural laws, and nothing occurs apart from those natural laws. Snow falls when atmospheric temperatures fall below 32 degrees Fahrenheit around precipitation and wind; drought strikes when winds shift in a manner as to direct moisture-heavy air away from a certain region; earthquakes happen because of shifting tectonic plates, which move according to various predictable laws; rain falls as a result of moisture-heavy air cooling, which slows the water molecules, makes them precipitate into drops, and thus causes them to become too heavy and they fall to earth.
Q: Why does God seem sometime to answer prayer and other times not?
Theological answer:
God chooses the outcome to every situation. If He gives you what you ask for, then He has decreed that you should have it, has moved you to pray for it, and has given it to you in His time. If you pray for a parking spot and then find one, God gave it to you. If He does not give you what you ask for, then He has decreed that you should not have it, has moved you to pray for it, but has chosen not to give it to you.
Anthropological answer:
Chance or man chooses the outcome to every situation. If you pray and get what you prayed for, then you either made the prayer come true yourself, or fate did. If you pray for a parking spot and then find one, you should thank your efforts and coincidence. If you prayed for rain and it rains, fate gave you rain. If you pray for success at a job and fail, your efforts and bad luck determined your failure.
Q: Where did we come from?
Theological answer:
God made us.
Anthropological answer:
Evolution made us.
Q: How is morality determined?
Theological answer:
God has determined an unequivocal morality, and has revealed it to us chiefly through His word. Every action, thought, or even intention is either right or wrong in God's eyes. Morality is objective.
Anthropological answer:
Culture has determined an equivocal morality, and imposes it on itself. Every action, thought, or even intention is weighed in relation to a given culture's accepted norms. Things considered wrong at one time may later come to be considered right. Morality is subjective.
Q: What is the purpose of life?
Theological answer:
To glorify God.
Anthropological answer:
To help this universe. This means acts of charity to one another, love, equality, good government, consideration for the environment, advances in technology, care for animal
species (especially endangered ones), and exploration of the universe beyond our world.
And I'm sure you can think of another dozen. If my thesis is correct, then any worldview-level questions answered from a religiously inclined worldview have both a theological answer and an anthropological answer. "Theological" and "anthropological" could be replaced (I think) with the terms "supranatural" and "natural." Typically, persons see these two answer sets as incompatibly opposed to one another, but I disagree. A religiously inclined worldview ought not reject the naturalistic realities in the world any more than an irreligiously inclined worldview ought to reject the supranaturalistic realities in the world.
The challenge is not in deciding which set of answers is true. They are both true. The challenge is in combining them correctly. Error in our decisions on these questions comes not from believing
the wrong answer; error in our decisions on these questions comes from believing or disbelieving one answer too strongly to the exclusion of the other.
I say that this concept has helped sustain my faith so much because it has kept me from having to choose one fact over another. When we must quarantine a fact we believe in because we believe another fact over against it, we are left in a dangerously self-manipulated condition.
So help me here. Do you agree or disagree with my thesis? Amend it. What are some worldview-level questions that may not fit my model? Which of the answers above to you agree
or disagree most strongly with? Does this all sound as unbelievably postmodern to you as it does me?
DB
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8 comments:
I think you're on the right track with this line of thinking.
A thought on canonicity.
I think I wouldn't say that men chose the books because the greatest evidence for their divinity would be that they are all coherent, unified, and unearthly in substance. Men can and will always try to argue that certain books are not authentic by various arguments. But if we are clueless about the author of a book like Hebrews if we examine its message and find it unifies with the rest of canonical books and screams of divinity as it does in the supremacy and deity of Jesus Christ then we as men don't "chose" it to be canonical we merely identify it as a thought from God or as a document far more divine than other documents claiming to be "from God". Does a book sound like the writings of any other human man? Or does its message defy our own conclusions at every turn? To me this would be the anthropological side of determining canonical books.
David could you clarify what you mean by evolution made us?
I agree...mostly. However, I think something needs to be said about the priority of the theological over the anthropological answer. Here's what I mean. In his book 'No One Like Him' Feinberg notes the trend in post-modernity to humanize God. Resultantly, our theologies have evolved (oh yeah, I can use that word too, David) markedly into predominantly man-centered systems--most notably seen in Open Theism and her more frightening philosophical sister Process Theology. What I'm challenging is your supposition (if you are, in fact, supposing this) that the two tracks (theological and anthropological) carry equal weight.
If we attempt to ground the theological on the anthropological, we're left with Pro. Theology or O. Th...and Piper's right to call both of those a 'redefinition of God'. All things are as they are chiefly because God decreed them to be so. That's the first 'layer' which needs to be exposited. I'm not discounting the 'man answer' (i.e. canonicity, evolution, etc.), only saying that that's not our starting block.
DJ -
I'm right with ya with what you said, although I'm very unsure of the certainty with which we can recognize as inspired a given text. We're talking about this in my OTI class, and I'm coming to this conclusion: we recognize objectively that the books contain a message ABOUT God, and we believe subjectively that they are FROM God on the basis of content (coherency, synergism with other scripture, etc.) and church tradition (believers historically accepting the books, continuing today with our personal acceptance of them and thus our establishing of church tradition for coming generations). I'm considering the apocrypha right now.
By "choose" I mean that people, whether by recognizing the divine nature of the document (as you noted) or other means, decided which books to consider canonical. In this way, people chose the books of the canon. My argument is that we should combine the descriptions of the formation of the canon in both ways: chosen by God first, then chosen by men. Whether we use the word "identify" (as you did), or "choose" (as I did), we mean that people made a decision, or decisions, at a point, or points, in time, based on criteria, that certain texts are the words of God and others aren't.
Does this bring us together in what we mean?
As for my reference to evolution, I have far less thought and information. I'm working on evolution a little right now (a very little; I just can't tackle all that I'd like to), but at this point I accept a measure of biological and psychological evolution in my description of the identity of humankind. I don't accept very much, as I have no reasons to before studying it, but I can see the effects of evolution in the world, and so want to acknowledge it in some way. I reject it fully as an explanation for the origin of life, but I do not reject it as an explanation for the origin of species. Some species. I don't know how many or to what degree.
Any thoughts? Have you studied evolution at all?
What
Maybe, then, we should excise 'canonicity from the list, heh?
Neanderthal
Wes -
That is an incredibly important observation you just made. Truly our newer theologies have spoken of God in increasingly human terms. Take the "Death of God" theology put forward during the middle of the last century, owing heavily to Nietzsche. It describes God as having actually died. When we regard no religion as from a real God (or even partially from a real God), we declare that religion, every religion, has been fully constructed by people. This necessarily humanizes the god of any religion, for all "gods" emerged from the uterus of humanity.
This model of thinking, by my conclusion, excludes the "theological" answer of my model in favor of the "anthropological" answer of my model. I say, yes, all gods have been created by people, and all religions include some purely human elements, but all those gods chase towards an explanation of the true God, and the Bible describes Him accurately.
I like what you said today, "our starting point determines our ending point." We can start like Strauss or the deists and choose only the anthropological answers to almost every question, while leaving a very select few theological answers, and end up discounting every miracle including the resurrection of Jesus. Or we can start like John Rice or Peter Ruckman and choose only the theological answers to almost every question, while leave a very select few anthropological answers, and end up denying error in translation.
I agree with you that the theological answer must take primacy, or else be abandoned altogether. I was reading on "Weak theology" last night and was confounded how the term "theology" applied at all to the school. It is stupid. It is sitting in a patch of black dandelions in left field shoving a phillip's head screwdriver in its crossed eyes. If we reduce the theological answer to a mere influence on par with ethnicity, we cease to speak about theology and begin to speak about anthropology. God, by nature, must either be primal or not exist; there is no medium.
So in that I affirm what you're saying. However, one of my ideas in my post is this: the correct answers to questions have differing emphases. The question of creation has a very high value of theological answer "God did this, we did not make ourselves" while a game of monopoly has a very high value of anthropological answer, "fate and your skill made you win."
One observation on that. Why don't we use lots anymore? Why don't churches roll dice to determine God's will between two equally qualified pastoral candidates? Israel does that in the OT, and the apostles do it in the NT. We may have a sophisticated answer, but I imagine the real reason is because people began seeing the anthropological answer of natural chance as more true than the theological answer of God's sovereignty over dice.
list?
Randall from Monsters Inc.
When you say evolution do you mean evolution as change or as the becoming of something better?
On the technical scientific side I pretty much know nothing about evolution. So I don't have a whole lot to say at this point.
I definitely believe that societies evolve in that they never stay the same and languages as well. But if evolution means that we are becoming better, then I have a hard time seeing that. While on the one hand mankind has greatly increased in knowledge numbers and power, she still is powerless to stop death, rape, and murder and so on. It's like we're forever progressing but never going anywhere. We learn more and more and yet never learn how to make people better.
DJ,
Yes, definitely society has evolved and has become better in many ways (civil rights in particular), but you're right in that we have not solved the basic problem of the human heart's propensity to disregard his neighbor's happiness (which ultimately is a disregard for God).
I'm talking societal and biological evolution. Society (language, custom, government, morality) evolve, and the human species evolves. Society evolves innumerably times more than the species does biologically.
But right now, I'm talking about 3 miles above my head, so I'll stop.
Can you talk a little more about what you said about canonicity? How do you define "unearthly"?
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