The Dialogical Spirit

Christian Reason and Theological Method in the Third Millennium

Amos Yong

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625645647
  9781498222327
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630875992
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Contemporary proposals for Christian theology from postliberalism to Radical Orthodoxy and beyond have espoused their own methodological paradigms. Those who have ventured into this domain of theological method, however, have usually had to stake their claims vis-a-vis trends in what may be called the contemporary "post-al" age, whether of the postmodern, post-Christendom, post-Enlightenment, post-Western, or postcolonial varieties. This volume is unique among offerings in this arena in suggesting a way forward that engages on each of these fronts, and does so from a particularistic Christian perspective without giving up on Christian theology's traditional claims to universality. This is accomplished through the articulation of a distinctive dialogical methodology informed by both pentecostalism and evangelicalism, one rooted in the Christian salvation-history narrative of incarnation and Pentecost that is yet open to the world in its many and various cultural, ethnic, religious, and disciplinary discourses. Amos Yong here engages with twelve different interlocutors representing different ecumenical, religious, and disciplinary perspectives. The Dialogical Spirit thus not only proffers a model for Christian theological method suitable for the twenty-first-century global context but also exemplifies this methodological approach through its interactions across the contemporary scholarly, academic, and theological landscape.

PART I

The Postfoundationalist Turn

Epistemology and Theology after the Enlightenment

chapter 1

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The Demise of Foundationalism and the Retention of Truth

What Evangelicals Can Learn from C. S. Peirce

In a recent essay entitled “The Postpositivist Choice: Tracy or Lindbeck?,” Richard Lints suggests that there are basically two methodological options available to contemporary theology: either the postmodern approach that highlights the public or universal character of theological rationality or the postliberal emphasis on intertextuality, narrative, and the cultural-linguistic framework of all knowledge.27 Although Lints writes from within the evangelical tradition, a movement well known for taking a stand for the truth, he refrains from offering an answer to the question posed in the title, preferring instead to provide a descriptive survey of the two options.28 As part of his account, he discusses the two central issues that characterize the present situation, which postmoderns and postliberals deal with in their own ways. The first is the demise of what he calls “epistemic foundationalism”; the second and related issue is the nature of and criteria for truth. The problem is that the death of foundationalism appears to have relativized all truth claims, resulting in a debilitation—if not paralysis—of theological thinking.

Because of their insistence on the importance of truth, some evangelicals have continued to reject the validity of the anti-foundationalist critique. Those who have acknowledged its legitimacy have generally elected in turn what Lints has described as the postliberal option. I do not think that evangelicals can remain intellectually viable if the former strategy of resistance continues, nor do I think that the latter postliberalism by itself is an adequate methodological response since it in turn poses new dilemmas. At the same time, I do think that a variety of answers to Lints’s question are not only possible but also potentially workable for evangelical thinkers. One clue to a possible solution lies within the scope of Lints’s essay and conjoins the two issues he takes to be of central importance. I shall argue that the demise of foundationalism does not entail the rejection of truth. On the contrary, with the help of C. S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism, I hope to show that the evangelical insistence on truth in its strongest form can be retained even if knowledge is admitted to be foundationless.

My argument will proceed in three sections. First, I will briefly elaborate the contemporary evangelical theological situation with respect to foundationalism and truth. I will then look at how Peirce’s pragmatism allowed him to hold to a fallibilistic epistemology even while maintaining a correspondence or propositional theory of truth. Section three will consist of an attempt to defend Peirce’s method as compatible with, or at least not essentially opposed to, evangelical beliefs and sensibilities.

Evangelicals, Foundationalism, and Truth

Although it is widely agreed upon that foundationalism is dead, it is important to determine exactly what kind of creature it is that so many have laid to rest. In fact, if one is attentive to the various responses to the anti-foundationalist critique, one would have to agree with Timm Triplett that “work on foundationalism is flourishing.”29 In terms of the feasible options for evangelicals, however, it is important only that we distinguish between classical and minimal, or weak, foundationalism. The former is that which has been rightfully traced to the Cartesian quest for certainty: all knowledge consists either in immediately justified or self-evident beliefs, or is mediately based on such beliefs. The latter has a variety of formulations, including that proposed more recently by Reformed thinkers such as William Alston and Alvin Plantinga. They have insisted on a different sort of “foundation,” one that is “properly basic” and unjustifiable on evidentialist grounds but which emerges out of doxastic (belief forming) practices and is therefore warranted and not irrational.30 While the merits of minimal or weak foundationalism in all its variations are still being debated, classical foundationalism has, even among evangelicals, fallen on hard times.31

Evidence of this evangelical reaction against classical foundationalism can be seen in at least two forms. Some are protesting against foundationalism either by aligning their theory of knowledge with that of the Reformed epistemologists, or by providing a clear epistemological critique of respected conservative evangelical thinkers.32 Others have realized that an internal critique remains incomplete without a viable option. These protestors have been led to some form of what Lints has called postliberalism. This group embraces an assortment of evangelicals from a broad spectrum, including John Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, James William McClendon, Nancey Murphy, Clark Pinnock, Stanley Grenz, Gabriel Fackre, Henry Knight III, and others, all of whom have been attracted to the postliberal emphasis on the narrative structure of Christian faith.33 The essence of postliberalism as articulated by these thinkers is that Christian doctrine and theology has its own internal logic, which is sustained by the biblical textual tradition and which finds its meaning and purposes within the practices of the Christian community. While not all have consciously adopted the label postliberalism as their own, it suffices for the purposes of this chapter that many of these thinkers have in fact been attracted to narrative theology. To the extent that they have, they can be adequately classified according to Lints’s definition.

The problem which immediately surfaces is that of truth. Evangelicals have generally been staunch defenders of a propositional view of truth, wherein what is asserted corresponds to an objective reality or state of affairs.34 This correspondence theory of truth has ancient roots in Plato and Aristotle, and presupposes that there is an external world apart from the human knower. How, then, can the correspondence of our ideas to the outside world be measured? This was the question that vexed Descartes, among others. He attempted to bridge the dualism between the knower and the known by following a process of methodical doubt in search of that which could be known with certainty. Descartes concluded that his cogito was that on which he could erect a viable theory of knowledge: all knowledge is either inherently justified on self-evident or incorrigible beliefs (eminently rational) or else founded on such beliefs (i.e., the cogito ergo sum). Later Enlightenment thinkers who built on Descartes’s foundation assumed this as a universal rationality. The result of this was the enthronement of Reason. There were others, however, who were not so optimistic about these matters. Skeptics such as Hume questioned the connection between knower and known as well as the notion of the cogito itself, and others like Nietzsche objected to the idea of a universal rationality. This thoroughgoing critique of adequate epistemic grounds and universal first principles led in turn to the view of knowledge as subjective, contextual, and relative. In the contemporary scene, the “deconstructive” postmodernism of Derrida and Rorty is the “mature fruit” of this anti-foundationalism. In this framework, it is denied that reality in itself can be objectively and infallibly known; as such, the propositional understanding of truth as correspondence is no longer tenable.

Conservative evangelicals have attempted to ignore the demise of foundationalism in part because of the implications of such for truth. Their concern is that the doors to a complete relativism would be opened if propositional truth were dispensed with.35 Other evangelicals, however, have been sufficiently touched by the anti-foundationalist critique to be aware of “the inadequacies of propositionalism.”36 The human capacity for knowing is not only circumscribed by cultural context, but also limited by sin and the fall. As such, there is neither an Archimedean vantage point of knowledge, nor is there a sturdy foundation underneath. All knowledge is undeniably tradition dependent. This explains, in part, the popularity of postliberal theology. Its emphasis on the narrative character of knowledge has attracted many a thinker across the evangelical spectrum.

The elusiveness of truth within the postliberal framework has not, however, gone unnoticed. The question is that of truth as correspondence versus truth as coherence. In the postliberal view, truth is understood in terms of coherence in that Christian doctrine and theology are meaningful only within their own internal framework. But this raises some difficult questions about the nature and reach of Christian truth claims. What then becomes of its applicability to those lacking the Christian community? Would postliberal theologians be willing to admit that Christian truth thereby becomes no more than a function of or appendage to the Christian narrative? How are postliberals to defend the truth of their claims apart from this story when, according to the Magna Carta of postliberalism, George Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine, doctrinal or theological truth is primarily intrasystematic and performative rather than ontological or propositional?37 One of the surprising affinities that the postmodern approach of Tracy and others has with fundamentalism and conservative evangelicalism is that both have a much stronger view of truth as the correspondence (in Tracy’s terminology, correlation) between ideas such as doctrinal and theological propositions to reality. The difference is that in Tracy’s case, the external confirmation of truth has to run the gamut of human experience pluralistically considered. In the postliberal view, however, truth as correspondence has for all intents and purposes been vanquished in favor of truth as coherence. The result has been that truth can no longer be universally asserted, but is only meaningfully embedded within particular traditions. More specifically, truth as Christians consider it is relative to the Christian narrative. Conservative evangelicals see this as a step in the direction of the complete relativism of deconstructionism, and have been rightly concerned. But this difficulty has not been overlooked by proponents of evangelical postliberalism either.38

It is here that I wish to reintroduce the pragmatism of Peirce. Evangelicals for the most part have not paid serious attention to Peirce. When they have noticed him, they have been misled by identifying him with the form of pragmatism espoused by his more famous contemporary, William James.39 While there are undoubtedly other resource...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Postfoundationalist Turn
• Part 2: The Post-Christendom Era and the Pentecostal Retrieval
• Part 3: The Postsecular Milieu
• Part 4: The Postmodern Situation: Pluralism and Theology in Global Context
• Conclusion: Christian Theological Method
• Bibliography