John MacMurray & the Personal Structure of Freedom

"Until we recover our sense of proportion, until we recognize our creaturliness and our dependence, we shall continue to frustrate our freedom by desiring what cannot attain, and by using our resources for our own destruction. Humility is the handmaid of freedom. It is the meek who inherit the earth."--John MacMurray

Moral philosopher John MacMurray was particularly concerned with how the intersubjective nature of personhood shaped the conditions of freedom. For MacMurray, the personal and the community are tied together. The personal does not exist without the life of the community. How can this be the case?

1. MacMurray starts by stressing the action of a person. A person intends to act in a certain way; this requires a motive. Persons have free will which allow them to choose to act for certain reasons before they act.
2. But free will defined this way is only the beginning of freedom. The conditions of true freedom are achievable only by having a moral end which governs our techniques. Thus, we absolutely need self-control, and one is not truly free without it.
3. Action is inevitably interaction. MacMurray insisted that the arena of human action is for the most part that of persons-in-relation not that of individuals as a simple aggregate. Persons are still individuals but they are are truly persons only in their nexus of relations.
4. The highest relationships are that of persons in interaction together exhibiting true love, not that of unequal master-slave relations based on fear and desire for power. Persons cannot be reduced to relations of power.
5. "Community," for MacMurray is closer to friendship than society. True freedom is found in community, not society.
   
6. "Society," as he defines the term, is an impersonal interaction of persons based on mutual cooperation but motivated by fear and a concern with a justice of the distribution of goods, duties, and burdens.
7. "Community," on the other hand, has a common life based around a common purpose. Its end is itself. It pursues the living of its friendship. It is motivated by love, not self-interest and fear, and according to MacMurray is always universal in its potential scope--all are invited.
8. The common purpose and end that creates this community is genuine religion. God as the Wholly Personal Other is the ground of a community's love and friendship. Religion both creates and celebrates community. It is what gives rise to the tradition that offers some continuity of the community over space and time.
   
9. Without true community, society-whatever its democratic claims--can only offer a limited freedom of negotiation and fear. Society's justice is a thin project of mediating competing claims.

"Friendship reveals the positive nature of freedom. It provides the only conditions which release the whole of the self into activity and so enable a man to be himself totally, without constraint. It is in this sense, in particular, that freedom is a constitutive principle of friendship. "

Ratio et Fidei -- part 3

Stephen K. Moroney has attempted to offer a more complete model of the ways in which sin and rationality impact the Christian:

1. Our minds engage knowledge in both subjective and objective ways, though perhaps the two are finally intermingled.
2. God, humanity, and creation can all be treated as both subjects and objects.
3. The regenerate mind or new nature, the communities which shape our knowledge, and individual traits of our personalities all have a part in this rational engagement.

This question of personal capacity and personal caprice is joined to covenant community, a community formed by God's Spirit and expressed in the Church. Rationality and ecclesiology are deeply joined for Christian conviction and teaching, and as such, must develop and use wisely the vocabulary of Christian insight into the world.

Rationality begins with the disciple's trust that the master has something to offer, and this trust is absolutely necessary to develop the skills intrinsic to ever understanding the truth in practice. Critical thinking that never trusts in authorities is incapable of anything like critical realism. There is no engaging the reality that is there until the capacity to embrace both theory and practice is in place. Not even this committed involvement suggests a uniform pedagogy for all learners. As Paul Griffiths points out, a teacher cannot adopt "identical argumentative strategies" for differing persons with different stages of "catechetical preparation" (152). This is especially a disturbing question when we deal with resistant learners, ones who have a "volitional depravity" that robs them continually of the humility necessary to undertake the discipline in question. The psychikos are not neutral but rebellious, even when willfully blind to that interior antagonism.

Nonetheless, as Reinhold Hütter has reasoned, our mental judgments can be redeemed. This restoration comes about alongside a "metaphysics of creation: "[a] knowledge of creatures that is not directed to its dutiful end, namely, the knowledge of God, is a distorted, sinful knowledge. . . . sinful knowledge by its lack of reference to and reverence for the One who grants being in the first place."

Curiosity is not always a virtue; it sometimes kills the cat when he takes to sniffing poison. A reorientation of our desire to answer questions must be directed to the contemplation of God and God's good creation, including the creaturely component called humanism. A metaphysics of creation and an ordering of our loves centers upon the contemplation of God and the signs of his goodness.

When Christian education does this it resists the critical distance so prized by the modern university; instead, it enters into a divine dance of desire, partaking of the proximity and distance of the lover, ever drawing into delight, not curious, but committed and ecstatic. The offering of God's presence and the offering of his perceived absence are both acts of one who would seduce us with his own divine, The triune community of love, and approaches to God and his truth are both intertwined as freedom and obedience are always mixed in love.

In such a vision of education, nihilism is replaced with laughter.

Ratio et Fidei -- part 2

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.

Ratio et Fidei--part 1

Nonetheless, despite what I've written in previous posts, the question can still be asked: what specific relationship do reason and faith have? Or perhaps better said, how does faith, as itself a species of reason, inform cognition and the larger patterns of tacit rationality that include intuition, emotion, context, and bodily sensorium?

Truth has a deep connection to being prophet, priest, and steward. The Christian begins with the knowledge that Jesus is the Logos incarnate. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. . . . The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:1-4, 14). When John (under the Holy Spirit's inspiration) applied logos to Christ, he was making a radical claim, though it is a matter of debate how Greek or Hebrew his understanding was. Logos in Greek philosophy is an impersonal rational order that directs and controls the universe. Thus, John can claim that through the Word "all things were made." But he can also state that "The Word became flesh." That impersonal force, he tells us, is actually a personal Being who entered history. Jesus came to show us what God is like.

Rationality I have argued in various ways so far is incarnate, kenotic, and revelatory. If John is also invoking the ancient Hebrew notion of wisdom, then to be "full of grace and truth" is to express all that Jewish tradition claimed for sophia. Hebrew truth is lived truth, never offered in the abstract alone. This is not the same as American pragmatism. Truth is always experiential, active, and enacted.

Educationally we are called to teach students to unpack the Christ-centered pattern of the universe. The concept of a logos suggests that reality is inherently linguistic in structure, that we need words to relate to, understand, and exist with the world. It equally implies that an order and harmony exists in creation that is uncoverable, and for this too, we need words. Wisdom is found in abiding by this structure and harmony, and in Christ alone is this experienced in any coherent fashion. Furthermore, it is Christ the Logos who shows us the pattern by which we relate to the cosmos and more importantly to the cosmos' Creator. Language only has meaning in the end because God has ordered the creation.

Christian History and General Contracts (Part 2)

Puritan covenant theology gave rise to several changes in contract law: 1) a reconception of contracts as covenantal relationships with a deep structure of order, sin, and salvation; 2) a move from contracts as moral considerations to considerations of contractual bargaining; and 3) a stricter enforcement of these in terms of the breach of bargains.

While by the 17th century, contract law had been somewhat simplified in England, "assumpsit was essentially an action for breach of (a unilateral) promise, not breach of (a bilateral) contract in the modern sense, and the required consideration was conceived in terms of the moral justification and purpose of the promise." The Puritans in general were distrustful of the criteria of equity used by canon law courts, for they felt it was too inconsistent and left too much power in the hands of judges. Under their influence, contract law shifted:

1. from breach of promise to breach of a bargain as the basis for (a more interdependent)liability;
2. from the cause of the motive and purpose of a contract to "the price paid by the promisee for the promise of the promisor;"
3. and from questions of moral fault to those of absolute obligation.

(Berman points out that under Puritan law a person could be forced to pay rent on land even if the property were not fit for habitation!)

Yet we cannot forget that for the Puritans, contacts were no mere secular promises; they were binding covenants of a personal nature, conceived in closely-tied communities, and executed before a God of order. Likewise, they were made by sinful people subject to corruption who needed objective, consistent laws to hold them to account, and they were part of a larger vision of covenants within every order of society that bound the people into a commonwealth of grace and salvation.

Thus, though the Puritan conception of contract law introduced parties into the conception of obligations, they did not make the move that later Enlightenment theories would make:

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these older theories of contract law were secularized, in the sense that their religious foundations were replaced by a conception based not on faith in a transcendent reason and a transcendent will, from which human reason and will are derived and to which they are responsible, but rather on the inherent freedom of each individual to exercise his own autonomous reason and will, subject only to considerations of social utility.

I am not at all convinced that this shift was a beneficial one, and from a Christian perspective, might even be considered modern idolatry. What have we lost in these transitions, especially in the way we conceive of the rationality, equity, and covenantal nature of our contracts and obligations?

The End of Debate

Debate is an essential part of the academic experience at a Christian university. But, I would contend, that we should not debate for debate's sake. A Christian academic practice that employs disputation must do so within a certain moral practice and with a particular intent to develop key habits of reasoning. We debate with certain short and long-term goals in mind. The Aristotelian concept of phronesis, or practical reasoning, has formed the nucleus of some significant twentieth-century reflection on the nature of moral reasoning and virtue, and it provides a good model of what we should be trying to achieve.

Phronesis is concrete; it is not theoretical generalization; instead, it works itself out anew in each new practical set of circumstances. Phronesis operates on a case-by-case basis not in the pure realm of theory but with a sense of this is what the situation calls for. However, it is not just an internalized set of thinking skills. It is more like a habit of interpretation based on a long formed practice. It is a virtue, which as Augustine pointed out, "is a good habit consonant with our nature."

We form phronesis through practice, and this requires a concrete pattern within which to do so. Thomas Aquinas further defines a virtue as,

An operative habit essentially good, as distinguished from vice, an operative habit essentially evil. Now a habit is a quality in itself difficult of change, disposing well or ill the subject in which it resides, either directly in itself or in relation to its operation. An operative habit is a quality residing in a power or faculty in itself indifferent to this or that line of action, but determined by the habit to this rather than to that kind of acts. Virtue then has this in common with vice, that it disposes a potency to a certain determined activity; but it differs specifically from it in that it disposes it to good acts, i.e. acts in consonance with right reason (Summa 2.55.2).

In other words, virtues are a) good habits that predispose us to good actions and b) represent a certain mature good quality made resident in a person. For Aquinas the cardinal virtue of prudentia is the habitual judgment of how best to respond in ever new circumstances. Education is about cultural, intellectual, and moral prudentia. An education that fails to translate into life's new circumstances is a failure of ultimate phronesis. So we debate in order to learn how to size up situations and circumstances in our pursuit of truth, not to simply win debates.

What, then, is the structure of reasoning and faith? Do we reason our way into faith per se? John Henry Newman argued in The Grammar of Ascent that we begin not by reasoning but by apprehending the object, which then gains our assent. We only later begin to unpack the implied details of what we have given our assent to. We often believe what we cannot understand and what we cannot exhaustively comprehend or prove. Conviction is something we all grow into over time.

This says much about Christian education. We do not reason our way to faith; we begin with its assumptions (ala' Anselm's fides quaerens intellectum--faith seeking understanding). Concrete reasonings are not ultimate tests, but they are sufficient tests in practical reasoning. In other words, we often begin with certain convictions that we have received through revelation, church tradition, ecclesiastical authority, and so on. These are worked out through disputation. They are sized up within classic and new scenarios alike.

Newman divides forms of assent into two types: notional assent, which includes profession, credence, opinion, presumption, and speculation; and real assent, which is imaginative certainty given to what we experience in the real world. Beliefs in what the Church teaches are forms of assent both notional and real. Thus, we gain certitude--a state of mind--all the time by directing ourselves and giving ourselves towards particular truths, and this lived involvement with the object of our assent gives our certitude a quality of irreversibility.

Christian education operates as a way of reinforcing the Christian faith, not by an unquestioning repetition of only certain denominational dogmas, but by a debated, thick ecumenism practiced in true covenant community. We all have an illative sense, a faculty of theoretical reasoning that judges the validity of inferences in much that same way that our prudence (prudentia, phronesis) judges life practically. This theoretical faculty includes a sense of judging what authorities we can give our trust to.

All good reason, if you will, is based on some measure of faith, and all true faith has some measure of rationality in it. Christian education understands this truth. Our warranted presuppositions frame and proceed from our faith; they are also applied and strengthened in the course of debate.