The Fog of War

One of the more famous and controversial figures of the 20Th century passed away recently. I am referring of course to Robert Strange McNamara. You were thinking of someone else?

McNamara was famous because he was appointed president of Ford Motors and Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy Administration before his 45Th birthday. In fact, he was the first Ford president outside of the Ford family.

McNamara possessed a rigid and rational mind honed by statistical analysis. His belief in rational policy analysis transformed both the Ford Motor Company and America's military structure.

However, rational analysis does not work for every issue or challenge. War serves as a prime example. McNamara believed he could manage war like he managed an assembly line or a budget. He was wrong and the Vietnam War serves as a constant reminder.

Additionally, another issue with McNamara was his relationship with the truth. He has a way of remembering decisions that absolved him of failure and criticism.

Interesting person. Interesting life.

Complaint and Prayer

The Psalter models for us that the way of complaint is part of biblical fidelity and troth--at least a certain kind of complaint joined to an expectation of shalom. The psalmists complain to God, objecting that he could have and on the surface should have intervened in any number of horrific circumstances. The sheer weight of atrocity is often cited by them, speaking from a wounded position, an exhausted position. The believer says to God, "As best I can understand from my limited position you appear to have allowed horrible things to happen. Why? Should you do such a thing?"

Then, rather than walk away in disgust or disbelief, the believer waits on God. Believers protest from the ground of covenant—this is what God has promised us and who he is; therefore, should not God intervene? (i.e. Ps 44, 74, 88, 102, 142) This position at its best seeks to continue to affirm God’s mystery and goodness even amidst confusion and doubt. It has its own kind of eros, its own kind of ascending desire.

Likewise, this response holds it important to identify with the suffering of others, not to make light of their pain by seeking easily to explain it. This kind of sympathetic and confused covenantal response is loving, full of the charity of agape. The isms of the twentieth century remind us well of the failure and dangers of utopian visions. Our eschatological rationality should act in full awareness of the dangers of demagoguery, either in believing that we ourselves can change the world or in the furor of a people disappointed by that world. But this need not mean we do not reach out with the hands of love, offering the gospel of Christ.

With this in mind read (or pray) the following:

You have made us like sheep to be eaten and have scattered us among the nations.
You are selling your people for a trifle and are making no profit on the sale of them.
You have made us the scorn of our neighbors, a mockery and derision to those around us.
You have made us a byword among the nations, a laughing-stock among the peoples.
My humiliation is daily before me, and shame has covered my face;
Because of the taunts of the mockers and blasphemers, because of the enemy and avenger.
All this has come upon us; yet we have not forgotten you, nor have we betrayed your covenant.
Our heart never turned back, nor did our footsteps stray from your path;
Though you thrust us down into a place of misery, and covered us over with deep darkness.
If we have forgotten the Name of our God, or stretched out our hands to some strange god,
Will not God find it out? for he knows the secrets of the heart.
Indeed, for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.
Awake, O Lord! why are you sleeping? Arise! do not reject us for ever.
Why have you hidden your face and forgotten our affliction and oppression?
We sink down into the dust; our body cleaves to the ground.
Rise up, and help us, and save us, for the sake of your steadfast love.

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.

Wisdom and Phronesis

Much that can be said of phronesis can be said of wisdom. It, too, has a kind of concrete, specific pattern of reasoning. Walter Bruggemann has noted that “[w]isdom is found in the experience of the world . . . a more qualified experience of the community." Wisdom both embraces what can be known and what cannot be known.

God is both the giver and withholder of knowledge. Wisdom, in all its variations, invites us to find a fit between our behavior and the divine order of the world we live in. Christians believe that God constructed the world with Wisdom at his side and, therefore, that there is a continuum between our personal lives and that of creation. They also believe that sophia is perfectly revealed in Christ; thus, while certain behavior leads to success, and other behavior leads to failure, christocentric obedience is at the heart of wise living. However, it is not quite so simple to say that we easily understand what success and failure add up to. Wisdom also teaches us what our limits are--what we do not understand, how blind we may be to God's true wisdom for our lives. Wisdom is kenotic and apophatic to a point.

There is, thus, more than one kind of wisdom. The kind of wisdom praised by Proverbs is practical. It amounts to a skill in living, an insight into varying circumstances, and a certain shrewdness in dealing with a variety of personalities. In this sense, it is very much like phornesis. This method of wisdom at its best is discipleship. More than the technical mastery of a few key insights, practical wisdom cultivates an internalized habit, a way of living in the world. Wisdom grows into a cultivated good-sense that sizes up situations, but as we have indicated above, the practice of wisdom only makes sense if the ethical pursuit that undergirds it is present.

Job and Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, teach us that wisdom has a limited potential. It cannot solve everything. God may leave us with questions, or we may discover that what we thought was wisdom breaks apart before the circumstances. These aspects of wisdom, then, are more interrogative in nature. The nature of God as both self-giving and concealing is exhibited in the systematic study of the universe. Kenotic learning, communal learning--these are not separate streams for phronetic learning.

Because of wisdom's practical side, some have suggested that the wisdom tradition of Ancient Israel is essentially neutral. There is some truth to this suggestion because many of the proverbs of Israel share the same kinds of concerns that other ancient wisdom traditions share. Proverbs' God-inspired editor was quite willing to adapt several Egyptian proverbs (cf. Prov 22:17ff.) Like its other Near eastern counterparts, the later chapters of Proverbs mainly teach ethical maxims and day-to-day management of circumstances.

Take, for example, the biblical portrait of the foolish and the wise. The fool is one who refuses apt words, who is lazy, and who is always undercuting others. The wise are those who speak fitting words, who care for others in the community, and who know how to avoid misunderstandings. These are observations that can be found in almost any culture. However, it would be a mistake to understand this wisdom as finally translatable from one context to another without phronetic reviewing. Israel's wisdom ultimately begins in the fear of God and has its confirmation in the Torah. Even supposedly "secular" insights are recontextualized within the worship and service of God. This suggests a manner for us in approaching the limited wisdom of human texts.

Practical wisdom is both inductive and deductive. It works by observing specific cases in life and applying general maxims to those circumstances, yet it also begins with a sense of divine revelation, for Yahweh has spoken to what is good and evil. Other texts, as a source of wisdom, can be evaluated from two complementary directions: 1) we can take an inductive approach that seeks to gather together principles for living from these sources, and 2) we can take a deductive approach that tests these examples by scripture and tradition.

This practice by itself can become rather reductive if we do not keep in mind, however, that wisdom also has an interrogative side. It asks questions to bring us to the end of our easy answers. We run the risk of a kind of "wisdom" that treats literature as ethical material to evaluate but then dispose of, as if literature were simply content to master. The impulse to wisdom, if it is shorn from its foundation in God, can prize itself for technique, for the ability to manipulate situations and manage persons. The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us that such an approach is finally empty; it is but grasping wind. Our attempts at achieving success are vain, for the end of the matter is to fear God (12:13).

The New Testament also reminds us that human wisdom, conceived of in yet another way, with all its pretensions, may end up seeing God's wisdom as foolishness. Human wisdom has its noetic blindness, after all. Erasmus suggested as much when he observed that those of the world and those of God each believe the other to be insane:

For those who, despising all earthly things and even life itself, embrace the heavenly philosophy with all their heart, seem insane to those for whom nothing is pleasant but the earthly and perishable. He who pours out his inheritance for the poor is insane in the opinion of the man who places the defense of his life in riches. The man who, for the Gospel, willingly exposes himself to exile, poverty, imprisonment, torturing, and death, in hope of eternal blessedness, is a lunatic for the man who does not believe that, after this life, there is a more blessed one for the pious. He who spurns the honors of princes and of the people so as to obtain glory with God, is mad for those who really are mad.

To pour out your life on something other than the brightest, richest, and most powerful makes no sense to the person who does not believe in an eternal reward or the one who does not think bliss is possible with God. In some sense, then, human wisdom is also a matter of control beliefs, those essential assumptions that shape the rest of the way we see and understand existence. This is one reason that a Christian may evaluate a work of text in very different fashion from a person of another persuasion.

The practice of disputation, then, faces the question of commensurability, but as I suggested above, this occurs within a position, not from a supposedly, objective "positionless" space.