As presuppositionalists, we should constantly seek to expose autonomous reasoning and argumentation. I recently listened to an interesting unveiling of autonomous thought on a Mars Hill audio journal. The speaker was talking about the various pro-life arguments and demonstrated how pro-life apologists typically appeal to autonomy. Often, the pro-life argument is presented as such:

We need to stand up for the unborn child because they don’t have a voice of their own. We must protect them because no one asked them about taking their life.

This reasoning fails within a proper Christian epistemology. Consider the context of euthanasia, in which the “patient” desires to be killed (assisted suicide). The patient has a voice and is saying they want to die. The common pro-life apologetic must permit it. The sanctity of life has therefore not been maintained.

As Christians, we must always seek to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. This includes not only what we think, but how we think. If we employ autonomous reasoning as opposed to a proper analogical epistemology founded on the knowledge of God that has been revealed to us, we have already failed. It behooves us to seek to sanctify our reasoning in order to provide a God-honoring apologetic.

Current discussion on the nature and substance of covenant theology has centered around biblico-theological as well as systematico-theological questions. While these discussions will have some bearing upon the subject of this paper, I want to focus mainly on the philosophical and apologetical ramifications of the concept of covenant. More narrowly, I want to investigate into the relationship between the concept of the covenant and epistemology. I will argue that the theological concept of the covenant can provide some needed solutions to epistemological impasses in philosophy. If man is in everything everywhere and always “coram deo” and epistemology is at bottom covenantally construed, this will have consequences for our apologetics. The results of the best of Reformed covenant theology, both biblico-theologically and systematico-theologically, will then feed into a uniquely biblical epistemology which will, in turn, ground a powerful apologetic for our times and issue a covenantal call to repentance. (Continue Reading…)

With this eighth installment of our series we begin a general outline of a postmodern concept of truth.

The concept of truth in Postmodernism

At the outset of this series, I mentioned the inherent difficulty of analyzing postmodernism because it is such a many-headed beast. Correspondingly, it is difficult or nearly impossible to define the concept of truth in postmodernism.¹ What I would like to offer in the following is a patchwork of several features of the concept of truth in a postmodern context.² Rather than trying to be comprehensive, I will list several (partly overlapping, partly differing or even opposing) concepts of truth and a list of –isms that are postmodern ways of finding truth, or creating truth, or disposing of truth.

Vanhoozer puts the postmodern canon of truth in memorable apodictic form: “Thou shalt not believe in absolutes.”³ This expresses well the absolute insistence of postmoderns on the abolition of absolutes. Even though postmodernism is life “in the ruins of cast down –isms”⁴, it nevertheless has bred a host of new –isms itself. Some of them are supported by valid concerns, some of them must be rejected off-hand. Several must be mentioned here, with some obvious overlap, and no claim to exhaustiveness:

1. Pluralism/Parochialis

In his book The Gagging of God, D.A. Carson identifies three kinds of pluralism: empirical pluralism (which is neither intrinsically good nor bad), cherished pluralism (i.e., valuing plurality for plurality’s sake), and philosophical or hermeneutical pluralism.⁵ The latter is what we are concerned with here. Carson calls it “by far, the most serious development” in so far that it seeks to do only one thing, through different means: to abolish the belief “that any notion that a particular ideological or religious claim is intrinsically superior to another is necessarily wrong.”⁶ Superiority of one truth over another is a thorn in the postmodern flesh because it brings with it not only an exclusivism, but also a power struggle. But superiority of truth is not all that has been abdicated.

The “postmodern condition” has been defined by one of the early spokesmen of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, as an “incredulity towards metanarratives.”⁷ These metanarratives were what gave modernity her coherence and the “Enlightenment project” its legitimation. Of course, in so far as Christianity (i.e. the truth of the bible) was not considered to be the metanarrative, there was never just one grand metanarrative. There were always many. But they all generally came with a claim to universal validity. Lyotard saw the abandonment of such metanarratives as the defining factor of postmodernism. However, it would be too quick to say that a dissolution of the notion of truth altogether is a result of this trend. On the contrary, truth may still be found not on a grand, universal scheme, but rather (and much more humbly) on a local level, within a particular community of “believers” in this particular truth. The development was “from the muffled majesty of grand narratives to the splintering autonomy of micronarratives.”⁸ This has lead to a parochialization of truth. What is true for you must not of necessity be true for anyone else. What is true here must not be true elsewhere. What is true today must not be true tomorrow. “Postmodernists reject unifying, totalizing, and universal schemes in favor of new emphases on difference, plurality, fragmentation, and complexity.”⁹ The “unifying theory” of everything which modernism so optimistically sought after is dismantled as a myth.¹⁰

It is only the concept of a universal truth which leads to a claim of superiority of one “truth” over another. Where the idea of a universal (or “true truth”, as Francis Schaeffer called it) is given up, there arises a plurality and eventually a pluralism of “truths” where one truth can coexist peacefully with the other without claim for superiority, even if they might contradict each other.

1. Even my uttering this last sentence can count as a characterization of postmodernism. After all, is not the fact that one finds many concepts of truth in postmodernism, also a distinctive and definitive theory of truth?↩
2. This patchwork fashion actually suits the purpose of this paper rather well, because one will not find anyone today actually holding all of the –isms or subscribing to the views of any of the spokesmen of postmodernism in pure form. Rather, the features I describe are part of the makeup of postmodernism that will influence people living within it and in it to differing degrees.↩
3. Vanhoozer, Postmodern Theology, 15.↩
4. Ibid.↩
5. Donald Carson, The Gagging of God. Christianity Confronts Pluralism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1996), 13-22.↩
6. Ibid., 19.↩
7. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), xxiv.↩
8. Stephen Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 32.↩
9. Vanhoozer, Postmodern Theology, 11.↩
10. Cf. Ibid.↩

This seventh installment of our “Postmodern epistemology series” will quickly summarize the main features the so-called transitional period between modernity and postmodernity.

Summary of Transition Period

In summary, even in the transitional figures we have chosen to survey we can see how highly indebted and concessive they are to Kant’s basic epistemological framework. Either in appropriating it or in trying to overcome it they show themselves to be his disciples, willingly or unwillingly. But in contradistinction to the modern figures we surveyed, we also recognize new developments in the transitional period eventually leading to postmodernism.

For example, there is a renewed interest in Hegelian dialectic and Hegelian historicism seems to have been a commonly shared philosophy of history. According to Hegel (1770-1831), there is no objective way to determine which of many theories and views of truth on any given question is right. What we have is not absolute truth but in any discipline we may find the facts about who has held what “truth” when and why. For Hegel, philosophy is the history of philosophy. This view of truth as historically determined has of course been willingly appropriated by postmodern thinkers. It mainly surfaces in the so-called “New Historicism.”
Kierkegaard’s turn to the subject (subjectivism or existentialism), Nietzsche’s nihilism, aestheticism and relativism (or perspectivism), and Heidegger’s existentialist Dasein (which marked the opposition to abstract being and a renewed antimetaphysical philosophy) are all motifs that we will meet again and again in postmodern thought.

The Historical Context of Jonathan Edwards’ Discussion of the Intellect and Will

The Great Awakening & Factions

In order to properly understand Edwards at this point, it is essential that we understand his own historical context for it is here that we will clearly see the contours of his views as they are compared and contrasted with those of his theological opponents.

The social context into which Edwards spoke was, of course, the age of the Great Awakening. But what is it about the Great Awakening that could be of interest here? It is the fact that the nature of the human soul and its various powers was at the heart of many of the debates of that era.

The basic question was whether the Great Awakening in its day was a legitimate work of God or the work of excited passions or (worse still), the work of the Devil. Jonathan Edwards, in endeavoring to defend the awakenings that occurred in his parish in Northampton and across the colonies, endeavored to plow a middle row between the two extremes (the “two great armies”) of rationalism on the one hand and unbridled enthusiasm on the other.

What this meant was that he challenged the regnant faculty psychology of his day in order to pioneer a path toward a better understanding of the human personality or soul or mind. In other words, Edwards was not conducting an abstract examination of the human soul. He was endeavoring to deal with the two extremes in the awakening that he deemed problematic.
(Continue Reading…)

Various Ways of Understanding the Relationship between the Intellect and Will

Before I endeavor to answer the question of whether Plantinga has properly understood Edwards, it might be helpful to consider various ways in which the intellect and will are understood to relate to one another in the literature on the subject.¹ What I discuss here is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather it is suggestive only.

Putting the matter as simply as possible, there are two general ways to understand the relationship between the intellect & the will, along with some significant variation within these two broad perspectives. These two categories are intellectualism and voluntarism.
(Continue Reading…)

Plantinga’s Own Assessment of the Relationship between the Intellect and Will

Alvin Plantinga discusses the relationship between the intellect and will in chapters eight and nine of WCB where he deals with that relationship with regard to the occurrence of faith that he outlines in the extended A/C model. According to Plantinga, faith involves both cognitive and affective aspects.

What does this mean?

Plantinga is endeavoring to make the point that faith is more than strictly an intellectual entity (i.e., that faith is more than just knowledge that God exists and assent to that knowledge). If sin has both cognitive and affective elements, so, then, does faith.”¹

It is not necessary to reproduce Plantinga’s discussion of the relationship between the intellect and the will here except to note that he explores various “dependency relations” in which either the intellect or the will has priority and he concludes that he cannot determine which entity has priority.²

In light of this I would label Plantinga a “concurrentist” with regard to the relationship between the intellect and the will. Neither intellect or will has priority.
(Continue Reading…)

Introduction

A few years ago Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga offered an account of how Christian belief acquires warrant (if, in fact, Christian belief is true) in the culmination of his series on warrant, Warranted Christian Belief.¹ Key to his discussion of warranted Christian belief is the presentation and explanation of what Plantinga calls the Aquinas/Calvin model (hereafter A/C model) and the extended A/C model.²

The A/C model is initially comprised of Plantinga’s version of the sensus divinitatis,³ which is then extended to include explicitly Christian belief with three elements: the Bible, the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit and faith.⁴
(Continue Reading…)

This sixth installment of our Postmodern epistemology series will provide a quick (and all too superficial) survey of the last of the so-called transitional figures who have been influential in the development of “Postmodern Epistemology” - Martin Heidegger.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (who in his own words attempts to take Nietzsche especially seriously as a thinker) is deeply concerned with overcoming the subject/object-dichotomy which (although extant even in ancient Greek philosophy) has been brought to particular prominence in the philosophy of Enlightenment figures such as Descartes and later Kant.

In order to surmount this dichotomy, Heidegger brushes aside any abstract notion of being and replaces it with Dasein (Being-there). Over and against the Cartesian-Kantian understanding of the self which stands squarely opposite external objects, Heidegger wants to know of the self only in terms of a Dasein.
(Continue Reading…)

Our fifth installment in the “Postmodern Epistemology” series will briefly survey a few features in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche that have helped shape postmodern thinking.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (himself a proponent of modernity) refers to Nietzsche’s thought as the “entry into postmodernity.” According to Habermas, Nietzsche refuses to furnish a new definition of reason in his writing and work of philosophy and rather he “bids farewell to the dialectic of enlightenment”¹ altogether, and he consequently introduces a kind of irrationalism instead.

Nietzsche has been labeled a nihilist, an aestheticist and a relativist/perspectivist. In point of fact, his thought probably contains elements of all of these.
(Continue Reading…)

1. Habermas in Erickson, Truth, 85.↩