The Gloves Come Off Against Western Theology
In his most recent Faith and Philosophy podcast "Theological Language, Ecumenical Dialogue, and Evangelism Part I," Eastern Orthodox philosopher Clark Carlton takes the gloves off against Western theology and punches us in our collective gut:
"Theology is not the manipulation of statements about God. In our tradition, no statement about God is considered to be absolutely and unequivocally true. Not even the statement ‘God exists.’ Words are created things, and can never adequately express the uncreated reality that is God. Therefore the idea that one can create a science of theology modeled after the use of geometric theorems is a delusional fantasy of the most demonic sort. Unfortunately, for the most part, this is what has passed for theology in the West since the middle ages. Revelation is understood to be the revelation of foundational axioms or theorems about God in propositional form. And theology is taken to be the systematic elucidation of those axioms. Are some men predestined to go to hell when they die? Study the text of the Bible exhaustively, arrive at the authentic revelation, and then apply the principles of deductive logic. Question answered. Now let’s contrast this with the Orthodox view. What does John the theologian have to tell us about the nature of theology? Well, he begins by telling us that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He did not say in the beginning was the proposition, but the Word."
This short treatise makes two important critiques, namely: the weighty struggle of the Western church against postmodernism as the undercutting of all theology and belief is not a recent phenomenon. This intellectual struggle has been going on for thousands of years, it is just now the Pipers and Carsons and Veiths of the world are vexed that what they thought they had finally killed off, humble spirituality and negative theology, are unfortunately still alive (and tragically for Piper, this is, I think, because of the providence of God). The "postmodern" theology argued against so severely by evangelical critics has been peacefully and quite successfully existing within the Eastern Church for two thousand years.
Postmodernism, in its approach to any academic study, including theology, is often lambasted as cutting out the foundation of Truth with a big huge capital T. More accurately, what postmodernism in the West or theology as usual in the East does is infuse humility into spiritual and theological conversations. What modernist theology does in it’s insistence that everything can be proven 100% true given enough propositions, logical arguments, and scientific reasoning is to refuse to be humble concerning the nature of humanity and language. For what its worth, there is great irony in the arguments of Piper or Carson who so adamantly insist on the depravity of humankind while at the same time putting forth that we can know all things absolutely. Those two ideas cannot exist together.
What the critics of postmodernism rightly ascertain is that in the imperfection of humanity and language we can choose to wallow in depression when faced with uncertainty. Many people do just this (see Satre, Camus, Nietzsche, etc. for "despair"). The Orthodox or Eastern definition of theology as not proposition but Word, not absolute but humility and admission of imperfection, should instead lead us to the right understanding of our place in the world and how we should practice theology with our lives instead of critique theology with the far fetched and ludicrous goal of obtaining theological perfection by ourselves. The only one who can perfect us is God, and that takes humility.
While I don’t know enough to speak to most of your comment, I did want to point out that the sentence you quoted wasn’t a “suicide statement” because it wasn’t itself a “statement about God.” It was a statement about statements about God. There’s a difference. And that difference means it doesn’t refute itself like you think it does.
“… there is great irony in the arguments of Piper or Carson who so adamently insist on the depravity of humankind while at the same time putting forth that we can know all things absolutely.”
I don’t think that Piper or Carson would say that we can know all things absolutely. They might say (I’m not sure) that we can have limited but absolutely true knowledge about some things, but not exhaustively true knowledge about any one thing and not that we can know all things absolutely. God, on the other hand, knows all truth exhaustively.
As you say, postmodernism is helpful to the extent that it confronts modernism’s false assumptions about the capacity of humans to understand all things absolutely, but God’s word is still clear enough that we can have true knowledge (but not exhaustive knowledge) even given the constraints of language and culture. Would you disagree with that proposition? It is one thing to assert we should be humble about what we know (I agree). It is quite different to assert that we cannot know any truth.
I would say that we do know truth, but it is in a mirror dimly. We must be humble enough to understand that the smartest, most knowledgeable person in the world is probably an idiot when it comes to knowing anything with tremendous certainty.
I think the grace and mercy of God play an important role here. We do not want to doubt our knowledge of God, but sometimes we should put our stock in the faith aspect of our faith a bit more. We believe things that truth doesn’t always stick to so easily.
In all honesty, I think the question of West vs. East, Postmoderns versus Moderns, becomes a glass half empty or glass half full question: you see language and culture as noble institutions that guide us upward into more and more truth. I see the glass as half empty, that we are never going to get close enough so lets temper our expectations and humbly submit to our inadequacies. Most likely, we fluctuate between both. Why else would I be such a student of literature and theology if I thought I could never learn truth? But at the same time I must always remember that the more I know doesn’t really add up to much in the grand scheme of things. Such is life, a life I incredibly and truthfully enjoy nonetheless.
“In our tradition, no statement about God is considered to be absolutely and unequivocally true.”
As a member of the Syrian Orthodox Marthoma Tradition, I have to ask: I’m sorry I’m a bit confused, but is that statement of his about God absolutely and unequivaocally true?
Apparently it seems that some statements about God are considered absolutely and unequivocally true by even the author of the phrase.
This by the way is considered a suicide statement. A self refuting statement proves itself to be false the minute it is stated.
You can see many other such suicide statements in this paper: http://www.NoBlindFaith.com/sermon/Suicide_Statements_MAIN_Text.pdf
(e.g. It’s wrong to force your moral values on others).
But here’s the kicker: If I maybe so bold, we must note: no one who has lived under or worshipped under any of the orthodox traditions (myself included) can be under any confusion about the absoluteness that that the Eastern churches have imposed on their members and dissenters in the last 2000 years. Not that it’s bad, I think it has value on occasion, but saying that they don’t have any sort of absolutist view is simply false and ironic when stated by one of their own.
This is revealed to be even more false when one looks at the way the Orthodox Eastern Bishops fought and insisted that various governments in Russia kick out and refuse Evangelical Churches to freely worship in these countries after the Soviet Union broke up. If not statement of God is considered absolute why did they think that these Evangelical Churches were false churches?
In the end this statement refutes itself completely. It commits suicide.
Neil, I am not a part of any Eastern Orthodox tradition, am thoroughly Protestant, and am merely taking a noted Eastern Orthodox philosopher at his word (er…proposition?). Clark Carlton’s podcast is on Ancient Faith radio, which has podcasts from other prominent Eastern Orthodox authors and theologians such as Michael Hyatt, Frederica Matthewes-Greene, and Joseph Huneycutt.
I think that concerning the historical and theological web you propose above, it would be best to email Dr. Carlton himself here. I don’t know enough about Russian and Eastern European Eastern Orthodox history to answer your question.
Christ and the Apostles were so sure of the knowability of truth that they suffered torture and death for it.
Contrarian…what a peculiar name?
I think that the better terminology, and the one used most often is that they died for their faith. They did not die for their philosophically and scientifically verified theorems concerning God. That’s just not in the Scriptures or traditions.
I do appreciate the need for humility as to our grasp of the truth. I think we should be humble because there will undoubtedly be areas where in the Age to Come we will see that we were badly wrong in our theology. And yet, the New Testament authors do make some strong statements about the ability to distinguish truth from error. (Eg Galatians 1:6-11 or Romans 10:2 or 1 John 4:16). So there is room for confidence that studying God’s word is not a waste of time, and also room for seeking to persuade others if we believe them to be in error in their understanding of God’s word.
Interestingly enough faith ceases to be faith when we have absolute established certainty.
Hi Thomas,
I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree, the key issue here is that it seems to me that Carlton’s statement basically says “You can’t make any absolute statements about God,” which at the end of the day appears to be a statement about God. We can remove ourselves a few generations from it, but at the end of the day it still becomes a communication in absolute terms about some truth about God. Each successive statement is still making a truth claim about God.
Thanks for Carlton’s email. I did not have that, I will indeed shoot him an email.
Thanks
Neil Mammen
From my understanding of the New Testament documents, they died for what they saw personally not for what they believed blindly.
I could be wrong, but I thought the first generation who saw Christ rise died for the claim that He was God as proven to them by his physical ressurection, not as a result of an emotional state. It seems to be that it maybe tragic to equate their faith after seeing Christ alive again, to a muslim sucide bomber’s faith in what their Mullah told them about killing infidels. Surely there is a huge difference, not just the fact that one accidently believed in the truth and the other poor fool accidently believed in a lie. I’m hoping that the basis of what the apostles died for and believed in was a bit more physically substantial. And we can’t say “love” is the difference, because the Muslim will tell you that he is indeed showing love by bringing justice to the infidels.
There was a significant battle as seen in John’s gospel and the early church fathers to make sure we did not become Gnostics i.e. presume that physical things and physical evidences are evil and only spiritual things and spiritual evidences are valid. Christ did numerous physical miracles to prove that he was God. Similarly in the OT where God punishes the Israelites saying: I brought you out of Egypt, I parted the Red Sea, I fed you in the wilderness etc etc (all physical events), proving that I am God, yet you go into the market, buy a piece of wood, cook with half of it, and make an idol out of the other half. Then you blindly believe with NO miracles that that idol is worthy of your faith. As a result I will send in the Assyrians etc to destroy you.
God is seems condenms their blind faith and contrasts it to physical and logical proofs. I wonder, why go through all this? Why then spend an entire day with the prophets of Baal to show that God acts physically vs. Baal who acts only emotionally, (actually Baal doesn’t act at all but there was enough emotions and bind faith in his prophets to go around). What was God’s response to this blind faith? Slaughter the lot of them. Not that that’s what we should do today but surely there’s a lesson we can learn from that.
Now again I could be wrong, but I’d be interested in seeing why I am wrong and how you’d differentiate between Jesus and Mohammed based on feelings only without physical facts.
As Paul says: If Christ had not risen then we are all fools and our faith is in vain. (Neil’s Mutilated Paraphased version).
The greatest members in the Hall of Faith were men like Moses & Abraham who had personally and physically encountered the almightly God. They had absolute established certainty that he existed.
Perhaps you mean they did not have an absolute established certainty that God was going to do XYZ in ABC manner (e.g. Abraham trusted God would make him the father of great nation, he just thought he needed to go the Ismael route instead.
It wasn’t until the 1800′s that the idea that the word faith was an emotional thing rather than a rational thing became prevelant (this also coincides with the rise of all the emotional and gnostic type religions like Theosophy, Mormonism, Christian Science and the New age.
Here’s the problem with any blind faith that separates it self from established facts and reason and rationality: How can you condemn the 9-11 hijackers. They had much more faith than you or I will EVER have. Yet their faith we hopefully agree was the result of deception. When we remove faith from facts we seem to forget the existance of the devil. What part of protection from deception should we consider?
I think you are misunderstanding what me and others are saying in the comments. There is no reason for faith not to be rational, and I don’t think anyone is characterizing faith as a feeling, yet faith is certainly not provable. Did not Christ himself say this?:
"Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."
Belief can and does come without any scientifically verifiable truth or personal eyewitness. Christ himself says this faith is blessed. I am happy to be a part of this blessed community of God.
Agreed. Similarly the other example “suicide statement” is not self-refuting. Referring to “It’s wrong to force your morals on others” as a suicide statement assumes that merely stating a moral belief is to force it on others. While arguments could be made for the power of language and its use, I think that it’s fair to say that forcing a moral belief on others is not necessarily the same as simply stating your own moral belief