Chapter 4 - The Epistemological Necessity, The Answer
There is a Christian answer to the epistemological problem. Let us begin by remembering that the High Renaissance had a problem of nature and grace: their rationalism and humanism had no way to bind nature and grace together. They never achieved an answer to the problem, and the dilemma of the twentieth century really springs from this. Rationalistic and humanistic men, brilliant as they were, could never find the way to bind nature and grace together. But, at about the same time, as 1 have emphasized in my earlier books, the Reformation was taking place, and the Reformation had no problem of nature and grace. This is really a tremendous distinction. Nature and grace arose as a problem out of the rationalistic, humanistic Renaissance and it has never been solved. It is not that Christianity had a tremendous problem at the Reformation, and that the reformers wrestled with all this and then came up with an answer. It was not this. There simply was no problem of nature and grace to the Reformation, because the Reformation had verbal, propositional revelation, and as such there was no dichotomy between nature and grace. The historic Christian position had no nature and grace problem because of propositional revelation, and revelation deals with language.
In our own generation, we have reached the core of the problem of language. We have already discussed the later Heidegger's use of language, and also Wittgenstein's use of language and linguistic analysis. But the difference is that Heidegger and Wittgenstein realized that there must be something spoken if we are going to know anything, but had no one there to speak. It is as simple and as profound as that. Is there anyone there to speak? Or do we, being finite, just gather enough facts, enough particulars, to try to make our own universals?
In the Reformation and the Judaeo-Christian position in general we find that there is some One there to speak, and that He has told us about two areas. He has spoken first in the area about himself, not exhaustively but truly; and secondly He has spoken about history and about the cosmos, not exhaustively but truly. This being the case, and as He has told us about both things on the basis of propositional, verbalized revelation, the Reformation had no nature and grace problem. They had a unity for the simple reason that revelation spoke to both areas, and revelation speaking to both levels, the problem simply did not exist. Rationalism could not find an answer, but God speaking gives the unity needed for the nature and grace dilemma.
This brings us to a very basic question. Is the biblical position intellectually
possible? Is it possible to have intellectual integrity while holding to
the position of verbalized, propositional revelation? I would say the answer
is this: It is not possible if you hold the presupposition of the uniformity
of natural causes in a closed system. If you do, any idea of revelation
becomes nonsense. It is not only that there are problems, in such a case,
but it becomes absolute nonsense if you really believe in the uniformity
of natural causes in a closed system, namely, that everything is a machine.
Whether you begin with a naturalistic view in philosophy or a naturalistic
view in theology makes no difference. For the liberal theologian, it is
quite impossible to think of real propositional revelation. Discussion
only about detail is not going to solve the problem. The big thing has
to be faced, the question of the presuppositions. If I am completely committed,
without question, to the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system,
then whether 1 express myself in philosophical or religious terms in the
area of modern liberal theology, propositional, verbalized revelation,
knowledge that man has from God, is a totally unthinkable concept. This
is because by definition everything is a machine, so naturally there is
no knowledge from outside from God.
If this is your world view, and you refuse to consider the possibility of any other, even though your naturalistic world view leads to the dehumanization of man and is against the facts that we know about man and things, you are at a dead end. You must remember you can only hold the uniformity of natural causes in the closed system, which is the monolithic consensus today, by denying what man knows about man. But if you insist upon holding the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, even though it dehumanizes man, and even though it is opposed to the evidence of what man knows about man, then you must understand there is no place for revelation. Not only that, but if you are going to hold to the uniformity of natural causes in the closed system against all the evidence - and I insist it is against the evidence - then you will never, never, be able to consider the other presupposition which began modern science in the first place: the uniformity of natural causes in a limited system, open to reordering by God and by man.
There is an interesting factor here, and that is that in modern, secular
anthropology (and I stress secular), the distinction of man against non
man is made in the area of language. It used not to be so. The distinction
used to be made in the area of man as the tool maker, so that wherever
you found the tool maker it was man as against non-
man. This is no longer true. It is now language. The secular anthropologists
agree that if we are to determine what is man in contrast to what is non
man it is not in the area of tool making, but in the area of verbaliser.
If it is a verbaliser, it is man. If it is a non-verbaliser, it is not
man.
We have now concluded that what marks man as man is verbalisation. We communicate propositional communication to each other in spoken or written form in language. Indeed, it is deeper than this because the way we think inside of our own heads is in language. We can have other things in our heads beside language but it is linked to language. A book, for example, can be written with much figure of speech, but the figure of speech must have a continuity with the normal use of syntax and a defined use of terms or nobody knows what the book is about. So whether we are talking about communication outside or whether we are talking about thinking in our heads, man is a verbaliser.
Now let us look at this argument from a non-Christian view, from the modem man's view of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. Here all concept of propositional revelation, and especially verbalized, propositional revelation, is totally nonsense. The question 1 have often tried to raise in connection with this presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system is whether it is viable in the light of what we know. I would insist it is not. It fails to explain man. It fails to explain the universe and its form. It fails to stand up in the area of epistemology.
It is obvious that propositional, verbalized revelation is not possible on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes. But the argument stands or falls upon the question: is the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes really acceptable? In my earlier books and in the previous chapters of this book we have considered whether this presupposition is in fact acceptable, or even reasonable, not upon the basis of Christian faith, but upon the basis of what we know concerning man and the universe as it is.
Christianity offers an entirely different set of presuppositions. The other presuppositions simply do not meet the need. Let us say in parentheses, that one must be careful of words. In Britain, for instance, presupposition is sometimes a difficult word. A presupposition is something you do not know you have. But that is not the way I use the word. I use presupposition as a base and we can choose it. Many people do get their presuppositions from their family or from society without knowing it, but it does not need to be this way. What 1 urge people to do is to consider the two great presuppositions - the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system and the uniformity of natural causes in an open system, in a limited time span, as I explained previously, and to consider which of these fits the facts of what is.
Christianity has a different set of presuppositions. It begins with a God who is there, who is the infinite personal God, who has made man in His image. He has made man to be the verbaliser in the area of propositions in his horizontal communication to other men. Even secular anthropologists say that somehow or other, they do not know why, man is the verbaliser. You have something different in man. The Bible says, and the Christian position says, I can tell you why: God is a personal infinite God. There has always been communication, before the creation of all else, in the Trinity. And God has made man in His own image, and a part of making man in His own image is that man is the verbaliser. That stands in the unity of the Christian structure.
Now let us ask ourselves the question: in the Christian structure, would it be unlikely that this personal God who is there and who made man in His own image as a verbaliser, in such a way that he can communicate horizontally with other men on the basis of propositions and language -is it unthinkable or even surprising that this personal God could or would communicate with man on the basis of propositions? Within the Christian system, is it unthinkable or is it surprising? The answer is, no. 1 have never met an atheist who thought that this would be regarded as surprising within the Christian structure. Indeed, it is what one would expect. If God has made us to be communicators on the basis of verbalisation, and given the possibility of propositional, factual communication with each other, why should we think He would not communicate to us on the basis of verbalisation and propositions? In the light of the total Christian structure, it is totally reasonable. Propositional revelation is not even surprising, let alone unthinkable, within the Christian framework.
The personal God has made us to speak to each other in language. So if a personal God has made us to be language communicators- and that is obviously what man is - why then should it be surprising to think of Him speaking to Paul in Hebrew on the Damascus Road? Why should it be a surprise? Do we think God does not know Hebrew? Equally, if the personal God is a good God, why should it be surprising, in communicating to man in a verbalized, propositional factual way, that He should tell us the true truth in all areas concerning which He cornmunicates? (1) It is only surprising if you have been infiltrated by the presuppositions of uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. Then, of course, it is impossible. But as 1 have said, it is a question of which of these two sets of presuppositions really and empirically meets the facts as we look about us in the world.
What we now find is that the answer rests upon language m revelation. Christianity has no nature and grace problem, and the reason for this rests upon language in revelation. The amazing thing is that Heidegger and Wittgenstein, two of the great names in the area of modern epistemology, both understand that the answer would be in the area of language, but they have no one there to speak.
Christianity has no problem of nature and grace. But let me add, very gently, Christianity has no problem of epistemology either. Remember Chapter 3 and the absolute agony of modern man in the area of knowing, in epistemology - the utter, utter blackness of what is involved. There is no problem in the area of epistemology to the Christian, just as there is no problem in the area of nature and grace. It is not that we happen to have an answer, but rather that there is no problem in the Christian structure.
Let us be clear as to why there is no problem of epistemology in the Christian structure. From the Christian viewpoint, we must return again and grasp really deeply what Oppenheimer and Whitehead have said about the birth of modern science.
May 1 remind you of a point 1 made in an earlier chapter. Whitehead and Oppenheimer said modern science could not have been born except in the milieu of Christianity. Why? In the area of biblical Christianity Galileo. Copernicus, Kepler, Francis Bacon, up to Newton and Faraday, all these men understood that there was a universe there because God had made it. And they believed, as Whitehead has so beautifully said, that because God was a reasonable God you could discover the truth of the universe by reason. So modem science was born. The Greeks had almost all the facts that the early scientists had, but it never turned into science as modern science is. This came, as Whitehead said, out of the fact that these men really were sure that the universe could be pursued in reason because it had been made by a reasonable God, therefore we could expect to find out the truth of the world by reason.
As I have stressed over and over again, 1 do not believe for a moment that if the men back at that point of history had the philosophy, the epistemology of modern man, there would ever have been modern science. I really do not I think science is going to die, too. I think its death is coming. I think it is going to be merely two things: it is going to be mere technology, and it is going to be another form of sociological manipulation.' I do not believe for a moment that science is going to be able to continue with its objectivity once the base that brought forth science has been totally destroyed, and now that the hope of positivism has also been destroyed. 1 do not think it is going to hold on. But one thing I am sure of, and that is that science never would have begun if men had had the uncertainty that modern man has in the area of epistemology. There would have been no way to take the first steps with certainty which these men were able to take.
Now notice that when we carry this over into epistemology the position is exactly the same. It was because the infinite personal God who exists -- not just an abstraction - made things together, that the early scientists had courage to expect to find out the explanation of the universe. The God who is there made the universe, with things together, in relationships. Indeed, the whole area of science turns upon the fact that He has made a world in which things are made to stand together, there are relationships between things. So God made the external universe, which makes true science possible, but He has also made man and made him to live in that universe. He has not made man to live somewhere else. So we have three things coming together: God, the infinite personal God, made the universe and man, whom He made to live in that universe; and the Bible, which He has given us to tell us about that universe. Are we surprised that there is a unity between them? Why should we be surprised?
So He made the universe, He made man to live in that universe, and He gives us the Bible, and verbalized, propositional factual revelation to tell us what we need to know. In the Bible He not only tells us about morals, which makes possible real morals instead of merely sociological averages, but He gives us comprehension to correlate our knowledge. The reason the Christian has no problem of epistemology is exactly the same as the reason why there is no problem of nature and grace. This is, the same reasonable God made both things, namely, the known and the knower, the subject and the object, and He put them together. So it is not surprising if there is a correlation between these things. Is that not what you would expect?
If modern science could be born on the basis of there being a reasonable God, which makes it possible to find out the order by reason, should we be taken by surprise that the knower who is to know, and the object which is to be known, should have a correlation. It is exactly what we would expect. Because we have a reasonable God who made them in the first place there is a reasonable correlation between the subject and the object.
In the previous chapter we saw that this is the really basic horror of great darkness for modern man, that he cannot have any certainty of the relationship of the subject and the object. But the Christian position starts from another set of presuppositions altogether, that there is a reason for a correlation between the subject and the object. Now, interestingly, this is not against human experience. This is the experience of all men. If it were some mystical, religious thing that somebody offers as a leap completely out of reality and with no way to test it objectively, it would indeed be just one more piece of pie in the sky. But, interestingly enough, it does not matter how theoretically unrelated a man in his philosophy is, in reality he lives as though there is correlation between the subject and the object. Remember Godard's film, where you go out through the windows perhaps, instead of the doors, but you do not go out through the solid walls.
The fact is that if we are going to live in this world at all, we must live in it acting on a correlation of myself and the thing that is there, even if one has a philosophy that there is no correlation. There is no other way to live in this world. That is true for everybody, even the most 'unrelated man' you have ever seen, the man who says there is no correlation. It does not matter a bit. He lives in this world on the basis of his experience that there is a correlation between the subject and the object. He not only lives that way, he has to live that way. There is no other way to live in this world. That is the way the world is made. So just exactly as all men love even if they say love does not exist, and all men have moral motions, even though they say moral motions do not exist, so all men act as though there is a correlation between the external and the internal world, even if they have no basis for that correlation.
What I am saying is that the Christian view is exactly in line with the experience of every man, but no other system except the Judaeo-Christian one'- that which is given in the Old and New Testaments together - tells us why there is a subject-object correlation that one does and must act on. Everybody does act on it, everybody must act on it, but no other system tells you why there is a correlation between the subject and the object. In other words, all men constantly and consistently act as though Christianity is true. Everybody in the world acts that way.
Let me draw the parallel again. Modern men say there is no love, there is only sex, but they fall in love. Men say there is no moral motions, everything is behaviouristic, but they all have moral motions. Even in the more profound area of epistemology, no matter what a man says, actually, every moment of his life, he is acting as though Christianity were true and it is only the Christian system that tells you why you can, must and do act the way you do, and there is no other way.
Though man is different from other things, in that man is made in the image of God and other things are not (he has personality, 'mannishness', in my own word) yet nevertheless he is as much a creature as the other things. They and he are equally created. At this level they are equal, on the level of creature hood. It follows, therefore, that though we are separated from other created things by personality, yet nevertheless we are fellow creatures in a common world because God made it that way.
If you read my application of this argument to the subject of ecology, Pollution and the Death of Man - The Christian View of ecology (3), you will remember how 1 developed it as this point. In the area of ecology, I argue that because we are fellow creatures, we are to treat the tree, the animal and the air properly. That, I believe, is the Christian basis of ecology. Now, in epistemology, do you not feel that it is just a step further? In epistemology, this fellow creature is the object and I am the subject. We are both made by the same reasonable God and hence I can know my fellow creature truly. In ecology, I am to treat it well, according to the way God made it. I am not to exploit it. But it is deeper than this, I am not only to treat it well, but I can know it truly as a fellow creature.
In epistemology we know the thing is there because God made it to be there. It is not an extension of His essence, it is not a dream of God as much Eastern thinking says things are. It is really there. It has a true objective reality, and we are not surprised to find that there is a correlation between the observer and the observed because God made them to go together. They are made by the same God in the same frame of reference. God made them together, the subject and the object, the knower and the known, and He made them in the same frame of reference. The Christian simply does not have a problem with epistemology. And every man lives as though it is true, regardless of what he says in his epistemological theories. The Christian is not surprised that the tree is there, and he is not surprised that he cannot walk through it, because he knows the tree is really there.
Now everybody has to face this truth, whether he is a very intellectual man who might hate the Christian view, or whether he is the very simple one who lives as though the Christian view is true simply because he acts that way without asking any questions. To both of these the Christian says, what do you expect? Naturally this is the way it is, because the reasonable God made both the subject and the object. He makes the subject and He makes the object, and He gives us the Bible to give us the needed knowledge.
When Michael Polanyi destroyed positivism so beautifully, as we pointed out in an earlier chapter, he was left only with cynicism. But the Christian is not left with cynicism in regard to the subject-object relationship because the same God made them both. Therefore, the correlation between them is not a surprise to the Christian.
However, there is a question raised that we must deal with at this point. That is, how we should consider the problem of the accuracy of knowledge. All these things relate to language, which introduces the modem subject of semantics and linguistic analysis not as a philosophy but as a tool. It can be at certain points a helpful tool if one consciously rejects it as a rationalistic philosophy. Indeed, the subject-object relationship and the problem Of language are related in a very real way.
Now, we must realise that there are three possible views of language. The first is that because we bring our own backgrounds to every word we ever use, every sentence we ever say, it means that we cannot communicate at all. Our own backgrounds so mark our words and our phrases that they just do not touch.
The opposite is that as soon as we use any term in a symbol system of language everybody has an exhaustive, absolute and common meaning of that term because we axe all using the same words. These are the two opposite views.
So here we have these two extreme views, neither adequate. Your terms are so marked by your past experience that they do not touch at all, or else every term automatically has an exhaustive meaning common to the speaker and hearer. But obviously neither of these two views, these extreme views, is an adequate explanation of what really happens in language. In reality, how do we find that language operates in the world? Surely we find it is like this: though we do bring our own backgrounds to language, which gives the word a special cast out of our own backgrounds, yet there is also, with reasonable care, enough overlapping on the basis of the external world and the human experience to ensure that we have a sufficient meaning in order to communicate even though we fall short of an exhaustive meaning of the same word. In other words, our words overlap, even while they do not fit completely. And that is the way we all operate in the area of language.
The illustration 1 like to use here concerns the word 'tea'. 'Tea' is a symbol in our English linguistic symbol system representing a real identifiable object. But my wife was born in China and her first experience of the thing which t-e-a represents, in our linguistic symbol system, was in Chinese homes. There the Chinese taught her something that she remembers to this day, that the way to drink tea is to drink it from a bowl with a mouthful of rice which you pack in one cheek. In fact, you learn to drink the tea around the rice without touching or disturbing it. To her that is all bound up in her word 'tea'.
But for me 'tea' begins with me and my mother in Germantown, Philadelphia, making tea in a way 1 would not make it today, with an aluminium 'tea-caddy' that you put into the water. These things mark the word 'tea' to both of us, but do you think for a moment that because we have these different connotations, these different shadows on the word 'tea', that 1 cannot say to my wife, 'Dear, will you please bring me a pot of tea?' and I do not get a pot of -tea? Do you understand what 1 have said? If you are ,wrestling with semantics and linguistic analysis, you had better understand this. Keep away from the two extremes, recognize that there are overlaps in our external world and in our common, human experience.
This is true with language, but we must also realise it is true with knowing. We do not have to choose between these two extremes, either in language or epistemology. We can know truly without knowing exhaustively. As long as the thing is there, and 1 am there in correlation with that other thing, I do not have to know it exhaustively. After all, this does not surprise us because we come down to the fact that nobody knows anything exhaustively except God; nobody. Nobody except God knows anything exhaustively about anything, not even the smallest thing.
So we notice that, just as in the area of language, there is enough overlap to enable us to communicate with each other. We do not need to say that we have to have exhaustive knowledge of the thing in order to know truly as long as it is there, 1 am there and we have a* sufficient correlation together. In the Christian background, we are all creatures of God and we live in His world. When we use words, we do not exhaust them, even words like house or dog. These are not exhausted between one person and another, and yet though they have personal overtones we can communicate in an accurate if not an exhaustive way.
We should not be surprised if the same thing is true in our knowing,
not in hearing a spoken word but in the subject-object relationship. We
are not surprised if we do riot know the object exhaustively, but we are
also not surprised if we find that we can know it truly. If the same reasonable
God made both the subject and the object, we
are not surprised that there is a correlation between them.
So we have seen why Christianity has no problem of epistemology at all. In past ages, when people were working on a Christian base, epistemology was never discussed with this awful tension it is today. Men studied many of these questions and the details of them, but there was none of this dilemma that is so common today. The reason for the modern dilemma is that men have moved from uniformity of natural causes in an open system that is open to reordering by God and man, into the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. With that, epistemology dies. But on a Christian basis, there is no problem.
What follows from this? Three things: first of all, me looking outward. Here am 1, and 1 am looking outward. Although that is a very simple way to put it, it nevertheless represents the basic problem of epistemology. How can 1 have any certain knowledge, or knowledge in general, or knowledge of knowledge in general; and secondly, how can 1 distinguish between knowledge of what is there objectively in contrast to hallucination and illusion?
Clearly there are borderline cases. Brain injury, schizophrenia and other forms of mental illness may blur the distinction between objective reality and fantasy. Of course, the taking of drugs can produce a similar condition. Whether it is a psychological illness or an artificially imposed mental schizophrenia caused by drugs, the Christian sees it as a symptom of the Fall. Things are not completely the way God made them in the first place. There are alienation's between man and God, between man and himself, and between man and nature. All this is a result of the Fall, so it is not surprising that there are borderline cases in the realm of true knowledge and fantasy.
Nevertheless, the Christian is in an entirely different situation from modern man, from, let us say, the thinking behind Antonioni's Blow-Up as we considered earlier. The Christian has a certainty right from the start that there is an external world that is there created by God as an objective reality. He is not like the man who has nowhere to begin, who is not sure there is anything there. The dilemma of positivism, as 1 have shown, is that within its own system, it must start without any knowledge that there is anything there. The Christian is not in this position. He knows it is going to be there because God has made it there. The reason why the East never produced a science on its own is that Eastern thinking has never had a certainty of the objective existence of reality, so the East never could have produced a science on its own. Without an external world there is no subject for scientific study, no basis for experiment or deduction. But the Christian, being sure of the reality of the external world, has a basis for true knowledge. So even though we must acknowledge that we live in a fallen world, and there are abnormalities and borderline cases, yet the Christian is not sucked by these into the dilemma with which Antonioni wrestles in Blow-Up.
Not only that, but the Christian can live in the world that God has made. This must be the test after all. That is the difference between science and science fiction. Science fiction is one thing; science is quite another. Science must fit into the world that is there; it cannot be isolated from it.
It is not surprising that if a reasonable God created the universe and put me in it, he should also give a correlation of the categories of my mind to fit that which is there, simply because 1 have to live in it. This is a logical extension of my previous points. If this world is made the way the Judeao-Christian system says it is made, we should not be surprised that man should have categories of the mind to fit the universe in which he lives.
There is a great deal of work being done today on the subject of uniform categories in the human mind, by men like Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, or Noam Chomsky in his idea of 'basic grammar'. These men are finding that somehow or other there are uniform categories of the human mind. But the Christian says, what do you expect? The personal infinite God who has made the world and has put me into it, is naturally going to make the categories of mind to fit the place where He put me.
Let us bring this over into the physical world. 1 have a lung system, and the lung system fits the world in which 1 live. It would not fit Venus or Mars and it does not fit the moon, but it fits this world. Why does it fit the world in which 1 live? It is not surprising that my lung system is in correlation to the world's atmosphere, for the same reasonable God made both my lung system and the atmosphere and He put me in this world. So we should expect a correlation between my lung system and the atmosphere in which 1 live. Going back to the area of epistemology, there is no surprise that God has given me a correlation between the categories of my mind and the world in which 1 live. Thus in the matter of knowledge, if a reasonable God made the world and has also made me, we are not to be surprised if He made the categories of the human mind to fit into the categories of the external world. Both are His creation. There are categories in the external world and there are categories of my mind. Should I be surprised if they fit?
This, of course, is very different from positivism, which has nothing in its system to explain why anything is there.
As I said previously positivism of all forms died because the word 'data' is a faith word to positivism. There is nothing in the system as a system to tell you why the data would be there. It is exactly opposite to the Christian position.
Then let us notice that there is something more in the biblical position in this matter of categories. When 1 read the Bible, it teaches me certain didactic things in words. The Bible always teaches in two different ways. First of all, it gives certain things in didactic statements, in verbalisations, in propositions. It teaches me what we have been dealing with in this book in didactic terms. But the Bible not only gives didactic statements. In it 1 see how God works into the world that He himself made. We should read the Bible for many reasons. Some of us read it mostly for facts, and we should read it for facts. Then it is to be read devotionally. But reading the Bible every day of your life does something else: it gives you a different mentality. In the modern world we are surrounded by the mentality of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, but as you read the Bible you have a different mentality. Do not minimise the fact that in reading the Bible you are living in a mentality which is the right one, over against the great wall of this other mentality which is forced upon us on every side, for example in our universities, in teaching, in the cinema, in poetry and in plays. When 1 read the Bible, 1 find that when the infinite personal God himself works in history and works in the cosmos, He works in a way that gives us complete confidence in what He has said about the external world. That is what 1 call the covenant of creation. He does not work against what He tells us. When God works into this world, He always works in it in exactly the way He says it is. He himself has not told us one thing and then done another. When I read what He has done in the flow of history in the Bible, what He does in the external world is exactly what He says the external world is. The universal working into the particulars defines and confirms what He says the particulars are, on the basis of the way that God himself deals with them.
So in the Bible we have two things, we have the didactic teaching of the Scripture, and then we look and we say, 'Yes, God works that way.' This is a very profound concept indeed. There are miracles in the Bible, but the great stretch of the Bible is not made up of miracles. The miracles are unusual happenings, and that is why we call them miracles. Usually we find God working into the world on the basis of the way He has made it. The Red Sea is pushed back, and He uses the cast wind. Jesus would cook a fish, and so there is a fire to cook the fish on. Here and there there are miracles, but in between for the most part God acts in the world in a way that confirms both my observations of the world, and also the way God says it is in the didactic portions of the Bible. The world is like this because God says so, but also because that is the way He works into it and I can observe the fact that it is this way for myself.
The Bible gives us two eyes to look through - there is the didactic eye, but there is also the eye of God working into history and in the cosmos, and the two agree perfectly. It is parallel, for example to that profound statement in the Westminster Confession of Faith that says that when God reveals His attributes to man they are true not only to man but to God. God is not just telling a story. God is really telling us what is true to himself. What He tells us is not exhaustive, because we are finite, and we know nothing in an exhaustive way. We cannot even explain to each other exhaustively because we axe finite. But He tells us truly, even the great truth about Himself. He is not just playing games with us.
At the same time, 1 on this basis we also find that science need not be a game. Science today is becoming a game; science is changing. As I have said, 1 do not believe for a moment that science, which has given up the thing which began it, and now has lost its positivism as well, can continue in a really objective way. Science becomes a game in two different ways. With many a scientist, science becomes a kind of gamesmanship. He is playing a complicated game within a very limited area so that he never has to think of the real problems or of meaning. There is many a scientist in his laboratory who has shut himself up to the reading on the dials, and the specimen all but disappears. This is no more than a different bourgeois gamesmanship to fill up the time like a rich playboy skiing downhill, for thirty years perhaps, watching only the second-hand on his watch. But for the Christian the world has meaning; it has objective reality. Science is no longer a game.
The second and more terrifying way, 1 think, is the headlong rush towards sociological science.' Because they have lost the basis of certainty of the objectivity of the knowledge of the things in which they are working, more and more 1 fear we are going to find men manipulating science according to their own sociological or political desires rather than standing upon concrete objectivity. 1 think we are going to find more and more what 1 would call sociological science, where we find men manipulating the scientific facts. The loss of the certainty of objectivity is a serious thing to the scientist just as it is for the hippie. We can see it in the hippie, he often has lost the distinction between reality and fantasy, the objectivity is gone, with or without drugs. You feel like crying for these people, and you should be crying. But the scientist often is in the same place. If he loses the epistemological base, he, too, is in a serious position. What does science mean any more - once you are no longer sure of the objectivity of the thing, or you are no longer on an epistemological base which gives the certainty of a correlation between the subject and the object?
But the Christian expects to touch the real, to find out about it, and distinguish the real from the non real, just as the early scientists did. This is where we stand. When the Christian does reach out without cynicism in the area of knowing, the external world really is there. Why? Because God made it to be there, and He made a correlation between the subject and the object. That is me looking outward.
The second result of the Christian view of epistemology concerns others looking at me: what I am, the inward reality of my thought world, in contrast to the outward appearances of what I seem to be from the viewpoint of others. This is a horrible problem for many modern young people. They are always trying to know each other, and all they find is a facade. How do you get behind this? How do you get behind to the real person who is there?
The Christian does not have to choose between knowing the external or inward worlds totally, or not knowing them at all. 1 must not expect to know this other man perfectly, because 1 am finite. But 1 may expect it all to fit together because after all the same One has made it all. The strength of the Christian system, the acid test of it, is that everything fits under the apex of the existent, infinite personal God, and it is the only system in the world where this is true. No other system has an apex under which everything fits. That is why 1 am a Christian and no longer an agnostic. In all the other systems something 'sticks out', something cannot be included. It has to be mutilated or ignored. But without losing your own integrity the Christian can see everything fitting into place beneath the Christian apex of the existence of the infinite personal God who is there.
This is true when I am looking out at the world, but it is also true looking inward to other people in this desperately important area that takes up so much of the thinking of young people. How can they know other people? How are they going to get beyond this wooden facade? How do you know there is anything back there? The contrast between what 1 may be inside, what I am inside, to what 1 appear outwardly. How can 1 know anyone else?
The biblical revelation, according to God's teachings, binds not only the outward man but the inward man as well. The norms of Scripture are not just for the outward man, but are also for the inward man. In the Old Testament, what is the last commandment? It is internal - you shall not covet. This concerns the inward man. Without this, all the rest falls to the ground. God's Ten Commandments bind not only the outward man, in regard to morals, but the inward man, too; and God's giving of knowledge where it touches history and the cosmos binds not only the outward man, but there is something for the inward man, and there is a unity.
So we find, therefore, that the Bible gives a propositional factual revelation of God in norms both for the inward and the outward man. The inward man, according to the Bible, is not autonomous, any more than the outward man is autonomous. Every time the inward man becomes autonomous, it is just as much a revolution as when the outward man becomes' autonomous. Every human problem, as I have stressed in an earlier book (5) arises from man's trying to make something autonomous from God, and as I have emphasized, as soon as anything is made autonomous then nature eats up grace.
We have the same thing in the area of knowing other people. Nothing is to be autonomous from God. The inward areas of knowledge, meaning and values, and the inward areas of morals, are bound by God as much as the outward world. As the Christian grows spiritually he should be a man who consciously more and more brings his thought world as well as his outward world under the norms of the Bible. But what about the non-Christian? As a Christian approaches the non-Christian, he still has a starting place to know the person in a way that the non Christian does not have because he knows who the person is. One of the most brilliant men 1 have ever worked with sat in my room in Switzerland crying, simply because he had been a real humanist and existentialist, he had gone from his home in a South American country to Paris because this was the centre of all this great humanistic thought, and he found it was so ugly. The professors cared nothing. It was inhuman in its humanism. He was ready to commit suicide as he came to us. He said, how do you love me, how do you start? 1 said 1 could start. I know who you are, 1 told him, because you are made in the image of God. We went on from there. Even with a non Christian, the Christian has some way to begin: to go from the facade of the outward to the reality of the inward, because no matter what a man says he is, we know what he really is. He is made in the image of God; that's who he is. And we know that down there somewhere, no matter how wooden he is on the outside, or how much he has died on the outside, no matter if he believes he is only a machine, we know that beyond that facade somewhere inside the non-Christian too there is the person who is a verbaliser and who loves and wants to be loved.
And no matter how often he says he is amoral, in reality he has moral motions. We know that because he has been made in the image of God. Hence, even with a non-Christian, the Christian has a way to start, from the outside to the inside, in a way that non-Christians simply do not have.
But among Christians there should be a more profound way to know each
other. Let us say we want to have communication, we are sick of this horrible
mechanical
inhumanity that we find around us. We are sick of being simply IBM
cards. How can the Christian boy and girl who want to be open with each
other, the Christian husband and wife, who want to be open with each other,
the pastor and the people who want to be open with each other -- how can
they really do it, moving from the outside inward? The problem of knowing
each other is the discrepancy between what a man seems to be and what he
is inside. That is always the problem with getting inside and getting to
know each other. So, how do you get through?
Can you see that to the extent to which people accept biblical teaching for the inward man as well as the outward man increasingly there is a bringing together of the inward and the outward man because they see both the inward and the outward man under the unity of the same norms in regard to both values and knowing? It is possible to move from the outward man to the inward man be cause there is an increasing alignment as both are bound by the same universal. We must allow the norms of God in values and knowing to bind the inward man as well as the outward man, so that there is less and less discrepancy between the inward man and the outward man.
It is not, unhappily, that we will perfectly keep God's norm more in the internal world of thought than we do externally, and even (in a fallen world) perhaps not as much. But with God's norms of truth, morals, values and knowing we have tracks (or, perhaps a better analogy, a north star) which give unity to the internal and external world. They not only give unity but give a bridge between them. This is both for ourselves, and then to get down inside each other. When we step from the external to the internal world of thought we are not a sea without a shore either in regard to ourselves or in regard to the woman or the man who stands before us. For those who are walking through the swamps of this present generation, this is beauty. Suddenly, as this is understood, the inward man is no longer autonomous and there is a bringing together of the particulars about the inward man and the outward man under the same universal, and with this unity, thank God we can really begin to get inside each other.
This, too, ought to be a part of salvation, of the continuing work of Christ in the Christian's life. It is the loss of this that has deprived this poor generation of any real human communication. Men and women who sleep together for years, over and over again, are shut off from each other, because there is no universal that binds the inward particulars and the outward particulars. But to the Christian there is. As I grow spiritually and bring the inward particulars of the thought world - meaning, values, knowledge and morals - under the norms of God to that extent gradually what I seem to be outwardly increasingly conforms to what I am inwardly, so that we can real know each other.
I have spoken of me looking outward and of other people looking at me. Now, the third result of the Christian view of epistemology: reality and imagination. In a way, this is the most important thing of the three. We have been thinking of having true knowledge of someone else, but it is also true for me as a person. There are a lot of people wrestling with this problem. We were considering in an earlier chapter the modern view of epistemology, where modern man has no distinction between reality and fantasy. Now 1 am talking about the reverse side of that for the Christian. I live in a thought world which is filled with creativity; inside my head there is creative imagination. Why? Because God who is the Creator has made me in His own image, 1 can go out in imagination beyond the stars. This is true not only for the Christian, but for every man. Every man is made in the image of God and, therefore, every man in his imagination is not confined to his own body. Going out in our imagination, we can change something of the form of the universe as a result of our thought world -in our painting, in our poetry, or as an engineer or a gardener. Moving from our thought world in our imaginations, we can change the form of the outward world. Is not that wonderful? It is not just a matter of photography, like Antonioni's BlowUp -click, click, click. 1 am there, and I am able to impose the results of my imagination on the external world.
But notice this. Being a Christian and knowing that God has made the external world, there is no confusion for me between that which is imaginary and that which is real. The Christian is free; free to fly, because he is not confused between his fantasy and the reality which God has made. So inwardly we are not confused. There is a base to give us a reason for saying, This is imagination. Is it not marvellous to be a painter and make things a little different from nature - not just a photographed nature, but to make things a little different? Is it not wonderful to be made in the image of God and be able to make things a little different? But although this is true, that I have the freedom in my imagination being made in the image of God to make things a little different, as a Christian I have the epistemology that enables me not to get confused between what I think and what is objectively real. The modern generation does not have this. When youngsters are all torn up in these areas, these are the reasons. But Christians should not be torn up here.
Thus the Christian may have fantasy and imagination without being threatened though the modem man cannot have day dreams and fantasy without being threatened. The Christian should be the person who is alive, whose imagination absolutely boils, which moves, which produces something a bit different from God's world because God made us to be creative. So, in conclusion, we see three inter-related results of the Christian's view of epistemology, not separate but interwoven: first of all, as 1 look out to the external world, to the world of relationships, in the subject-object relationship; secondly, as other people look to me and I look to other people, as I want to know and understand another person; and thirdly to the internal world of my thoughts, fantasies and imagination. I look outward and 1 understand why there is a subject object relationship; 1 look at another man, a non-Christian, and 1 know he is made in the image of God, and as Christians allow the norms of Scripture- more and more to bring together the inward and the outward man we can know each other in greater and greater beauty and greater and greater depth. And, thirdly, because he is not threatened by the difference between reality and fantasy, the Christian should be the man with the flaming imagination and the beauty of creativity. We axe to have all. The modern alienation in the area of epistemology can make each of these three areas literally into a thing of black horror. The loss of reality of the subject-object relationship; the impossibility of people getting to know each other; and the awful nightmare of the confusion between reality and fantasy: modern epistemology make! each of these three things into a terror, but under the unity of the apex of the infinite personal God in each of these three we can have meaning, we can have reality and we can have beauty.
1 want to end with the word beauty; truth, but beauty Because man revolted against God and tried to stand autonomous, the great alienation is. in the area of man'., separation from God. When that happened then every. thing else went. This autonomy era is carried over into the very basic area of epistemology, so that man is not only divided from other men in the area of knowing, he L, divided from himself. If there are no common categories between the internal fantasy and the external world, mar is divided and feels alienated from himself. He has no ,universals to cover the particulars in his own life. He is one thing inside and another thing outside. Then he begins to scream, 'Who am l?' Does that sound familiar to any of you who do Christian work today? At L'Abri we have youngsters come from the end of the earth and say, 'I have come to try to End out who 1 am'. It is not just some psychological thing, as we usually think of psychological. It is basically epistemological. Man's attempted autonomy has robbed him of any certain reality. He has nothing to be sure of when his imagination soars beyond the stars if there is nothing to make a distinction between reality and fantasy. But on the basis of the Christian epistemology, this confusion is ended, the alienation is healed. This is the heart of the problem of knowing, and it is not solved until our knowledge fits under the apex of the infinite personal, triune God, who is there, and who is not silent. When it does, and only when it does, there simply is no problem in the area of epistemology.
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Notes:
(1) For a more extended consideration of verbalized, propositional revelation see Appendix I: 'Is Propositional Revelation Nonsense?'
(2) I have developed this thought in The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (Norfolk Press, London, and I.V.C.F. in U.S.A.)
(3) Pollution and the Death of Man - The Christian View of Ecology (Hodder and Stoughton, London, and Tyndale House in U.S.A.)
(4) See The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century.
(5) Escape from Reason (Inter-Varsity Press, London, and I.V.C.F in U.S.A.)
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