As Colin Gunton and Robert Jenson observed, to know that the Logos, the divine structure of rationality, has become incarnate is to recognize that nothing that can be said of reason itself that can violate the revelation of God in Christ. We have beheld rationality himself. Jesus is the Torah, the Reality, and the Energeia, that is the Way, the Truth, and the Life of all existence.
Rationality does not begin in a preconceived pattern by which we then put God in the dock for judgment. Instead, the revelation of God's self is the beginning place for our measure of epistemology. This claim does not mean that we can insist on an imperialist set of claims that are closed off to examination by others, but it does imply that rationality itself does not operate in a neutral space. Any set of warranted beliefs will contain the logical assumption that they are the beginning point of evaluation. Alan J. Torrance puts it this way:
[I]t is also the case that one may not be able to demonstrate one's reason's to be valid or properly basic to people operating on the basis of other incompatible basic beliefs. To expect this to be possible would itself be a contradiction of the perception that God's self-disclosure includes his self-identification. It would be to deny that not only the propriety but also the perception of that propriety derive from and are carried by the divine self-communication itself. In other words, the very nature of our "properly basic" beliefs is that they do not acknowledge the assumption that other suppositions constitute a more basic Archimedean point from which we can assess the proper basicality of the beliefs communicated in and through God's self-communication. To insist that any "information" communicated must be ratifiable, confirmable, and hence discernible with recourse to basic beliefs quite independent of the divine address constitutes, of course, a return to the Socratic! (45)
Torrance's radical point is that rationality is not an uncommitted, context-free matter. It is not a Socratic midwivery in which we uncover what is already present and suppressed in the student. Rationality occurs within what Wittgenstein called a Bild, a way and form of life. The critical immmanentism of Socrates is the notion that reason's evidentialisms arise from within us, that is, from within a supposed self-evident criteria. But Christian teaching would seem to show that rationality is a capacity that has been damaged by the fall. Instead, rationality must begin within a practice, but that practice--an offering of participative grace in Christ's church--must cultivate and reform the damaged psyche. For the Christian, the way to the redemption of our rationality is to recognize that our rational abilities must "be interpreted as the gift of participating by the Spirit in the incarnate Son's epistemic, noetic, and semantic communion with the Father" (Torrance), that is with Jesus' full connection with the Father in all matters involving understanding, rational and verbal.
This line of reasoning is not meant to imply that non-Christians are capable of true reason. Just the opposite! But, nonetheless, it is to reason that Christians should know who the source of rational ability is. Likewise, it is also not to deny that Christians are capable of great irrationality. History is full of such testimonies. Nevertheless, we must ask if "the mind of Christ" implies a differing order of thinking--a cruciform or baptismal epistemology:
[A]mong the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. . . .we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual (pneumatikos).--Those who are unspiritual (psychikos)-- do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are discerned spiritually (I Cor 2:6-7, 12-14).
Lois Malcolm has observed in this passage that the psychikos, those dependent on the self-serving practical mind, and the pneumatikos, those who transcend the practical mind for the mind with access to the Spirit's understanding, are two differing ways of understanding the world. To have the mind of Christ is to be given a new Triune perspective on the nature of reality.
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