The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion [1st ed.] 9783030559151, 9783030559168

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The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion

Edited by Thomas John Hastings Knut-Willy Sæther

The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion

Thomas John Hastings  •  Knut-Willy Sæther Editors

The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion

Editors Thomas John Hastings Overseas Ministries Studies Center Princeton Theological Seminary Princeton, NJ, USA

Knut-Willy Sæther Department of Religious Studies Volda University College Volda, Norway

ISBN 978-3-030-55915-1    ISBN 978-3-030-55916-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface and Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume came about from several conversations in Princeton between the co-editors, Knut-Willy Sæther of Volda University College in Volda, Norway, and Thomas John Hastings of Overseas Ministries Studies Center (OMSC), then located in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, when Knut-Willy was a visiting scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary and Tom was a senior research fellow in science and religion at the Japan International Christian University Foundation in New York City. Following Tom’s move to OMSC, in November 2017 he and Knut-Willy invited a small group of European, Asian, and American scholars in philosophy, theology, and religion to explore the themes of fallibilism and dualism. The meeting culminated with an initial discussion of our chapters for the current volume. We wish to express our thanks to Volda University College for supporting this project with a grant that covered the costs of travel, lodging, and proofreading and to OMSC for hosting the meeting. Princeton, NJ, USA Volda, Norway

Thomas John Hastings Knut-Willy Sæther

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Contents

1 A Fallibilist Approach in the Age of COVID-­19 and Climate Change  1 Thomas John Hastings and Knut-Willy Sæther 2 The Many Faces of Fallibilism: Exploring Fallibilism in Science, Philosophy, and Theology 13 Knut-Willy Sæther 3 Fallibilism, Problematization, and the History of Thought 35 Jonas Gamborg Lillebø 4 Fallibilism: A Philosophical-Pneumatological Apologetic 51 Amos Yong 5 “Unworthy of the Earth”: Fallibilism, Place, Terra Nullius, and Christian Mission 67 Lisa E. Dahill 6 Apologetics and the Provisionality of the Living Jesus: Hans Frei’s Contribution 89 Drew Collins

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7 God’s Pneumatic Word and Faith, Hope and Love in a Fallible World111 Paul Louis Metzger 8 A Pluralistic Pluralism: With Some Remarks on Fallibilism125 Seung Chul Kim 9 Restoring the Pro Nobis > Pro Me: A Translated Religion, Polycentric Ecumenism, and Moderate Fallibilism141 Thomas John Hastings Index159

Contributors

Drew Collins  Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT, USA Lisa E. Dahill  California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA Thomas  John  Hastings  Overseas Ministries Studies Center, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA Seung  Chul  Kim  Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan Jonas  Gamborg  Lillebø Department of Religious Studies, Volda University College, Volda, Norway Paul  Louis  Metzger  Multnomah Portland, OR, USA

University

and

Seminary,

Knut-Willy Sæther  Department of Religious Studies, Volda University College, Volda, Norway Amos Yong  Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, USA

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CHAPTER 1

A Fallibilist Approach in the Age of COVID-­19 and Climate Change Thomas John Hastings and Knut-Willy Sæther

A man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false. —Benjamin Franklin, A Defense of Religious Tolerance In knowing good and evil he knows what only the origin, God Himself, can know and ought to know. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

Why is fallibilism, an epistemological position with consequences for moral action, a viable topic for Christian thought and cultural engagement today?

T. J. Hastings (*) Overseas Ministries Studies Center, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] K.-W. Sæther Department of Religious Studies, Volda University College, Volda, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_1

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Though this collection was written before we were aware of the existence of COVID-19, it appears in the midst of a global pandemic that has laid bare severe inequalities and weaknesses in the medical, economic, and political systems that have been considered foundational or even sacrosanct in modern societies. The pandemic also has imposed unique challenges on the more intimate institutions of family, school, religious community, and nonprofit organization. If modern life is an equation with several variables, which under “normal” circumstances seem manageable even if not always solvable, this global pandemic has introduced many new and, as yet, unsolvable variables to that equation. In the interim, the pandemic has demanded crisis management, and, in the longer run, made the entire human family dependent on a deliverance to come in some uncertain eschaton—that is, when effective treatments and vaccines are discovered, manufactured, and available to be safely and justly distributed worldwide. Engendering apocalyptic levels of anxiety and uncertainty, the COVID-19 pandemic has led many into a time of lament, doubt, and yearning. In such a troubled moment, when the modern systems and institutions we have taken for granted have been stretched to the breaking point, the perspective of fallibilism and its attendant intellectual and moral dispositions may be worthy of consideration. For the sake of clarification, our volume is not an exhaustive examination of fallibilism as an epistemological position, but it does explore how a fallibilist orientation to truth claims might help to fund more spacious approaches in philosophy, theology, and religion in our increasingly pluralistic world and, hence, the title, The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion. Another important caveat: Fallibilism is not another name for relativism. Fallibilism neither eschews quests for truth nor claims that “all truths are equal.” Having said that, we should acknowledge that fallibilism has been marshaled to cast doubt on scientific findings, such as the links between tobacco use and cancer or between certain human behaviors and climate change. In our view, such approaches make the mistake of equating fallibilism with relativism and are often a smoke screen for commercial, political, or ideological motivations. Instead, while acknowledging that we mere mortals will never be in possession of absolute truth, fallibilism supports searches for “verisimilitude” in both the sciences and the humanities. “Verisimilitude” means approaching the truth, reality, or actual in discrete fields of inquiry while

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admitting that we will never totally grasp the whole truth.1 We take the term “verisimilitude” from John Polkinghorne who argues for a “critical realism” in science and theology that is very similar to the fallibilist position advocated here. Within the context of the science-religion dialogue, Polkinghorne emphasizes that our approach to knowledge is always via “verisimilitudes,” not absolute truths. Broadly speaking, Polkinghorne searches for a trajectory by means of a kind of naïve realism and constructivism, or a via media between absolutism and relativism. We are aware, of course, that critical realism covers a wide range of nuanced differences.2 Thus, it may be more appropriate to speak of a variety of “critical realisms” specific to the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities such as theology. Variations such as absolutism, relativism, foundationalism, and constructivism are also present in epistemological approaches.3 We will not examine these important differences here, but just gesture at a possible relation between fallibilism and some basic aspects of critical realism as an epistemological position. According to Polkinghorne, the motivation for claiming critical realism is that “our minds are so constituted, and we live in a world itself so constituted, that intellectual daring in the pursuit of a strategy of cautious circularity proves capable of yielding reliable knowledge.”4 In short, critical realism involves an ontological claim as well as an epistemological one. The ontological claim says that science actually tells us how the physical world is, albeit never finally and exhaustively. The epistemological claim emphasizes that our way of insight is always subtle and complex. In other words, critical realism is situated between naïve realism and constructivism which, according to Polkinghorne, are nothing less than self-supporting houses of cards.5 Polkinghorne concedes: “Of course, … knowledge is to a degree partial and corrigible. Our attainment is verisimilitude, not

1  See John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 104. 2  See Niels Henrik Gregersen. “Critical Realism and Other Realisms,” in Fifty Years in Science and Religion: Ian G. Barbour and his Legacy, ed. Robert John Russell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 77–96. 3  See Robert Audi. Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003). 4  John Polkinghorne, Scientists as Theologians (London: SPCK, 1996), 16. 5  Polkinghorne, Scientists as Theologians, 15.

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absolute truth. Our method is the creative interpretation of experience, not rigorous deduction from it. Thus, I am a critical realist.”6 We see Polkinghorne’s approach as a useful first step that needs further problematization and development. One reason for this is that Polkinghorne seems to rely too heavily on the natural sciences in his epistemology, even though he claims that critical realism supports a multifaceted approach to reality. We are seeking a stronger interdisciplinary consciousness and a more careful navigation that includes the humanities (including religious studies, theology, and philosophy), as well as other fields. One interesting trajectory for doing this is Andreas Losch’s “constructive-­critical realism.”7 According to Losch, the “constructive” modifier emphasizes that there are different rationalities in play in our search for knowledge about reality, “the rationalities of natural, social, human science and of course theology are different ones.”8 Losch’s point is that a verisimilitude-based search for knowledge is interwoven with nuanced cultural and social constructs and conditions, as well as ethical decisions. Constructive-critical realism enforces “the consciousness of diversity on an epistemological level, realizing that if we extend epistemology to human sciences, the recognition of its ethical implications cannot be avoided.”9 Thus, a constructive-critical realism is closely related to fallibilism in its verisimilitude-based approach to knowledge, openness for correction, and its ethical implications. In our attempt to understand the world, constructive-critical realism opens up an awareness of the need for cautious navigation across different academic fields. By emphasizing the moral and ethical dimensions in the search for knowledge, it gestures at something really urgent in our current multicultural context. Here ethical judgments are brought to the center, and this move exposes deep lacunae in our current multicultural context.  Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science, 104.  See Andreas Losch, “Our World is more than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate,” Theology and Science vol. 3, no. 3 (2005): 275–290, and Knut-Willy Sæther, “Rationality in Play? A Philosophical Journey in the Current Landscape of Facts and Truth,” in Navigating Post-Truth and Alternative Facts: Religion and Science as Political Theology, ed. Jennifer Baldwin (Lanham/Boulder/New York: Lexington Books, 2018), 71ff. 8  Losch, “Our World is more than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate,” 281. 9  Losch, “Our World is more than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate,” 287. 6 7

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Further, we see constructive-critical realism as a self-critical approach that stresses fallibilism in our search for knowledge. By touching on religion, science, philosophy, and theology, this book embraces an interdisciplinary approach. In the past two decades, academics have often invoked “interdisciplinary,” sometimes to legitimize a particular approach or research agenda and sometimes with political or ideological motivations. Joe Moran says that “‘Interdisciplinarity’ has become a buzzword across many different academic subjects in recent years.”10 In this time of interdisciplinary studies, we find phrases like dialogue, interaction, and mutual enrichment claiming that our particular academic field has to be understood as open and not isolated from other academic fields. This book embraces interdisciplinarity, both to give voice to different academic traditions, represented by scholars in philosophy, theology, and religious studies, and as an interdisciplinary consciousness embraced by our authors. However, when we approach a specific topic—in this case fallibilism—as individual scholars, we do so on the basis of our own scholarly fields. Hence, an “interdisciplinarity approach” is inevitably colored by our particular points of departure. To return again to the pandemic, COVID-19 has exposed the provisional nature of our current knowledge and skill, but it has also strengthened the blessed truth that some knowledge claims are more reliable than others. As we write, medical scientists have not yet found a treatment or vaccine, yet in their social-distancing prescriptions and painstaking, methodical research, they have proven themselves far more trustworthy guides than certain public figures who have reacted to the pandemic out of political survival instincts. As a glaring but not unique example, while the pandemic crisis was playing out in the United States, an infectious disease doctor proved a far more reliable guide than certain politicians. As one example, the stark contrast between the public performances of the doctor and the president in the daily COVID Task Force briefings illustrated perfectly the binary of fallibilism and its opposite, infallibilism. In response to questions, the confident yet humble doctor readily admitted when he did not have an answer. He was honest, showing compassion while advising continuation of preventative measures. By contrast, the insecure president waffled again and again, saying that he agreed with the doctor’s advice while boasting about his own “perfect” response to the  Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 1.

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pandemic, refusing to take responsibility, suggesting lethal remedies, pushing the economy to reopen, and blaming his predecessors, the news media, and state governors. The doctor’s attention was fixed on finding a treatment and a vaccine, while the president’s attention was fixed on his reelection campaign. So there was the doctor, humbly admitting his fallibility as a scientist, and there was the president, adamantly refusing to admit making a single mistake. Since his supporters included significant majorities of religiously conservative groups who still push back on evolution,11 it seemed obvious that the president’s equivocations on the medical science were a political calculation, not an ideological conviction. With all of the marks of tragicomedy and theater of the absurd, the life and death consequences of these contradictory approaches to the global pandemic were too grave to ignore. And, especially in the United States, an even more important debate that will be with us long after this president is gone is the stalemate about the truth or falsity of the anthropogenesis of climate change. This is another life and death issue where religious conservatives often question the overwhelming scientific consensus.12 Taking a step back from these conflicting approaches to the pandemic and climate change, on a deeper level, it is clear that certain modern societies like the United States are still learning how to harmonize ancient religious traditions with the much more recent advent of modern science. While much nuanced academic work has been done on the dialogue between religion (or theology) and science, it is clear that public discourse has not kept pace with these discussions. In the media business, drama and narrative conflict increases the number of viewing customers, thus the U.S. news and entertainment business have tended to feature portrayals of religious and ideological fundamentalists, on the one hand, and scientific positivists, on the other hand, who deal with reality in terms of knockdown, “either-or” arguments. These binary public approaches to religion 11  “How highly religious Americans view evolution depends on how they’re asked about it,” Pew Research Center, February 6, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2019/02/06/how-highly-religious-americans-view-evolution-depends-on-howtheyre-asked-about-it/, accessed April 29, 2020. 12  “Religion and Views on Climate and Energy Issues,” Pew Research Center, October 22, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2015/10/22/religion-and-views-on-climate-and-energy-issues/, accessed April 29, 2020. After signing the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the United States had the dubious distinction of being the only major nation to withdraw in 2017 under the current president’s direction.

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and science have contributed to the increasingly acrimonious discourses of cable news and the social media niche. Against the background of the culture wars, for those who want to take the contributions of both science and religion seriously, epistemic fallibilism offers a moderating stance that neither claims too much or too little for either endeavor nor forces a decision for one side over and against the other. Of course, the criteria for what counts as “truth” or “error” within religious and scientific communities differ, but to maintain a dynamic position, innovators in both fields have exhibited a willingness to exercise imagination by remaining open to new insights while acknowledging the provisional nature of current understanding. By claiming that no belief or theory may ever be considered final, epistemic fallibilism also avoids the relativist-absolutist polarity. This approach suggests instead a family resemblance between patterns or modes of knowing in religion and science. To wit, theologians and philosophers have long reflected on the differentiated relationship between what may be called “first-order” experience and “second-order” reflection, and work in cognitive science on the theory of mind suggests, in an analogous way, that we cannot neatly separate “perception” from “cognition” in our immediate experience of and subsequent reflection on objects in the world, other people, or ultimacy. As for the world’s great religious traditions, the fact of their historical development, cultural embeddedness, translatability, and endurance is evidence that embodied experiences of wonder continue to create in some people feelings of awe, being a part of a larger whole, a sense of limitedness in a seemingly limitless cosmos, or other indications of ultimate meaning, purpose, intelligibility, or transcendence. The “truth” or “falsity” of claims of such experiences are adjudicated by means of particular religious traditions, wherein such experiences have, over time, been tested and transmitted across generations and locations via practices, rituals, and teachings, and guided and interpreted within particular historical contexts and sociocultural milieux. As for the much shorter history of the sciences, their astoundingly rapid development evinces a similar pattern of knowing, wherein embodied experiences of wonder and intellectual awe vis-à-vis the natural world have given birth, over time, to established bodies of field-specific theories, which, based on the standard of experimental reproducibility—in the natural sciences—and phenomenological stability, variability, and generalizability—in the social sciences—adjudicates the relative “truth” or “falsity”

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of any new hypothesis, experiment, or theoretical proposal. As an example of “progress” in science, while Newton may be surprised to know that his description of gravity as a force could not account for all phenomena, he would surely thank Einstein for being sufficiently bold and imaginative to pose new questions and follow the evidence for the uneven distribution of mass and for proposing the curvature of spacetime as a corrective to Newton’s law. And yet, in spite of the massive breakthroughs of Newton, Einstein, and many others, physics today is still seeking a “Theory of Everything.” In modernity, there has been a tendency to see religion as treating private or subjective realities and science as treating public or objective realities. Yet, the presence of dynamism, adaptability, self-correction, and transformation in both epistemic realms points to the pivotal role of curious and fallible human knowers. This suggests that religious beliefs and scientific theories are never, in a final sense, universal, but are forever in need of new light. While evidence for the dynamics of change and development in religious knowledge may not be as easy to trace and theorize as, say, physical evidence for natural selection, the long perdurance of certain religious traditions over time and across cultural boundaries suggests new religious insights or spiritual information. For scientists and religionists, epistemic fallibilism may offer one way of restoring humility to public discourse on vital issues that are impacting all peoples, that is, global warming, nuclear proliferation, economic inequality, artificial intelligence, and so on. So we return to our title, The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, but of what might this grace consist? Given our ability to acknowledge—at least in part—the limitations of our embodied perceptions and reflections, we could argue that the grace for being fallible is an endowment of nature. Yet, as all religious traditions point out, in the course of our lives we are tempted over and over again to make faulty judgments about ourselves and other people, deciding, for example, that we are good or right while others are evil or wrong. Thus, while natural selection has gifted us with some awareness of our epistemic limitations, we obscure and sometimes obliterate this “innate” grace by thinking, speaking, and acting as if we personally or our particular group of belonging possesses special, better, or even unlimited knowledge. In Bonhoeffer’s terms, humans sometimes display a tendency to “become like God, but against God.” Thus, we find ourselves in need of grace beyond the shared

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endowment of nature, grace in a radically different register, or what Christian theologians call gratia extra nos. To reiterate, the present volume is not a comprehensive exploration of fallibilism per se nor does it provide an exhaustive fallibilist perspective for philosophers, theologians, or scholars of religion. It is rather an interdisciplinary and international exploration of how a fallibilist disposition may be helpful within and across several fields and cultural locations. Each chapter could stand alone, but there are connections, which we will leave readers to construct out of their own locations. The ordering of our chapters reflects an ad hoc trajectory from philosophy to theology and religion. Situating fallibilism’s roots with C. S. Peirce in the philosophy of science, co-editor Knut-Willy Sæther in Chap. 2 traces the move from logical positivism to Karl Popper and subsequent thinkers, and to the current picture of fallibilism in certain sciences. Drawing again on Peirce, he continues by mapping the broader philosophical picture and contrasts fallibilism with skepticism. He then explores three areas in theology—dogmatism, the nature of faith, and virtue—and shows how fallibilism sheds light on these subjects. He concludes by considering some of fallibilism’s implications for ontology. Jonas Gamborg Lillebø in Chap. 3 takes a philosophical look at the reception of fallibilist ideas and suggests a move from epistemology to the history of thought via the philosophy of science. He touches on differences between “contexts of justification” and “contexts of discovery” and says that fallibilism opens up new possibilities beyond these traditional contexts. With reference to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, he asserts that “problematization” is Foucault’s way of moving beyond traditional epistemology by bringing in the “history of thought” as the focus of philosophical reflection. Amos Yong in Chap. 4 makes a connection between fallibilist “philosophical” views of the partial, perspectival, and finite character of knowledge and a theological perspective grounded in a strong pneumatology. Rather than engendering absolute certainty, Yong argues that the Spirit sponsors an embodied moral certainty that guides faithful discipleship, which is content to live with finitude that awaits future light. Chapter 5 by Lisa Dahill deals with historical, political, and religious developments around conceptions of mission and European conquest. Dahill shows how the lack of a fallibilist stance and disposition underwrote extreme and erroneous convictions about cultural hegemony. She

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critiques a specific historical development of the horrific “Doctrine of Discovery” and the cognate category of terra nullius, by means of which European political and religious forces devastated the indigenous peoples of North and South America and beyond. As a way out of the fallacies of Euro-Christian domination, she proposes three positive guidelines for action. Rejecting conservative and liberal apologetics for Christian faith and biblical interpretation as reductionistic, Drew Collins in Chap. 6 draws on the work of Hans Frei and others who stress the provisional “fallible” character of Christian theology and the need for a figural reading of Scripture that takes the texts very seriously in their narrative shape and approaches apologetics in an ad hoc fashion. Collins is pushing for a way of reading Scripture and doing theology that transcends rationalist and experiential epistemologies. In conversation with Karl Barth and Scripture, Paul Louis Metzger in Chap. 7 outlines a fallibilist approach to theology and Christian life characterized by humble faith, earnest hope, and resilient love. These dispositions are, in turn, founded on the Reformed conviction that God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ is sufficient, albeit not exhaustive, and therefore should lead not “to arrogance or ambivalence, but to awe and wonder.” Taking Barth’s view that Christ himself is the unity of the churches, Metzger offers some positive ecumenical connections for our time. Speaking as an Asian Christian theologian, Seung Chul Kim in Chap. 8 proposes a “pluralistic pluralism” as a corrective to a western-centric bias in interreligious dialogue and notions of religious pluralism, which Kim sees as presupposing “the all-embracing One.” Kim’s point is that Asian Christians embody various religious traditions as an “inner other,” meaning that religious pluralism for them is not just a new social reality but an existential reality. Kim draws on J. R. Hustwit’s “fallibilist hermeneutics” as a way of deconstructing the western-centric bias and making room for a more egalitarian basis for interreligious dialogue. Drawing on the contributions of Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls, co-­ editor Thomas John Hastings in Chap. 9 argues that the relatively new awareness of Christianity as a translated religion and its demographic and cultural expansion should have by now subverted the enduring pretentions of western-centric theological normativity and given way to a more fallibilist disposition that encourages two-way traffic between Christians from different cultures and church traditions. Drawing on Karl Barth’s apologia for a variety of faith perspectives within a “polycentric

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ecumenism,” he suggests that these new insights are consonant with fallibilism, emergence, and eschatology. Finally, he offers a reevaluation of the pro me and pro nobis dimensions of Christian faith as a way of fostering serious intercultural theological engagements in the future.

Bibliography Audi, Robert. 2003. Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. Abingdon: Routledge. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. 1955. Ethics. New York: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster. Gregersen, Niels Henrik. 2004. Critical Realism and Other Realisms. In Fifty Years in Science and Religion: Ian G. Barbour and his Legacy, ed. Robert John Russell, 77–96. Aldershot: Ashgate. Isaacson, Walter. 2003. A Ben Franklin Reader. New York: Simon & Schuster. Losch, Andreas. 2005. Our World is more than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate. Theology and Science 3 (3): 275–290. Moran, Joe. 2002. Interdisciplinarity. Abingdon: Routledge. Polkinghorne, John. 1996. Scientists as Theologians. London: SPCK. ———. 1998. Belief in God in an Age of Science. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sæther, Knut-Willy. 2018. Rationality in Play? A Philosophical Journey in the Current Landscape of Facts and Truth. In Navigating Post-Truth and Alternative Facts: Religion and Science as Political Theology, ed. Jennifer Baldwin, 63–79. Lanham/Boulder/New York: Lexington Books.

CHAPTER 2

The Many Faces of Fallibilism: Exploring Fallibilism in Science, Philosophy, and Theology Knut-Willy Sæther

Introduction: To Be Fallible in a Fallibilistic World Quite often, there is an elephant in the room. In the room of our search for knowledge one elephant is fallibilism. We try to ignore him, or even tend to think he is non-existent, by speaking what we consider facts and inevitable truth. We claim to “have the truth” and present facts with “knock-down arguments”. In our daily lives we use language expressions to say something with certainty, such as the phrase “It’s science!” This is an expression of what we understand as fact—as true. On the other hand, we are—at least sometimes—aware of the elephant as we obviously recognize our limits of knowledge. We realize over and over again that our search for truth takes shape as verisimilitude knowledge or that we need to revise our understanding: In short, we are fallible. It requires quite a lot of courage to claim that we get some things wrong.

K.-W. Sæther (*) Department of Religious Studies, Volda University College, Volda, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_2

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Despite the obvious fact that our knowledge is fallible, we need to problematize how to understand this ambiguous term. We might speak of fallibilism in different ways and in various contexts. What does it mean to be fallible? What are we fallible of? In general, fallibilism is the idea that any of our opinions about the world or about anything else might turn out to be false.1 Thus, fallibilism typically denies the notion that knowledge requires absolute certainty. In other words, fallibilism is the claim that it is possible to know that something is the case even though you could be wrong. Taking this as a general starting point, to be fallible seems to be nothing extraordinary: It just develops naturally from how all search for knowledge takes place. Hence, to be fallible is in one sense a natural part of being human. However, in this context, being fallible is not a phenomenon existing at a meta-level as a general concept. As the general definition above expresses, we might be fallible in relation to knowledge whether it is content, statement, or proposition. I will explore three strands of fallibilism: scientific, philosophical, and theological fallibilism. I start by unpacking fallibilism in science, as this in many ways is the initial context for fallibilism. I argue that our reflection on fallibilism in science is a topic belonging to the field of philosophy of science. Hence, fallibilism in the context of science is intertwined with philosophy and can be described as epistemic fallibilism. However, the second strand—the philosophical one—is more than just about fallibilism in the framework of philosophy of science. I will explore the broader philosophical concept by drawing on resources from C.  S. Peirce. Third, I unpack what fallibilism might be in the context of theology. I argue that fallibilism in theology is heavily dependent on how we understand theology and the nature of faith. Within the contexts of these three large areas—science, philosophy, and theology—my underlying concern is to shed light on how we in these fields are inevitably stuck to fallibilism, as well as to shed light on the relationship between these fields concerning fallibilism. Finally, from these three areas, I explore how fallibilism might have some implications for how we reflect upon ontology. And in good fallibilistic spirit, I attempt in this chapter to be more explorative than concluding with knock-down argument.

1  Anthony O’Hear, “Fallibilism,” in A Companion to Epistemology, eds. Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa (Oxford/Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1993), 138.

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Fallibilism in Science According to Nicolas Rescher, fallibilism is a philosophical doctrine regarding natural science, which “maintains that our scientific knowledge claims are invariably vulnerable and may turn out to be false”.2 Rescher refers to both the initial context of fallibilism, that is, natural science, and the locus of “where” we reflect upon fallibilism, that is, philosophy. In other words, the topic of fallibilism belongs in one sense to the domain of philosophy; however, the concrete context for initiating this philosophical reflection on fallibilism is science. Thus, we are in the field of the philosophy of science, mainly dealing with epistemology. From Logical Positivism to Karl Popper In science, traditionally we seek for some sort of secure knowledge. The advantage of science and the scientific method is its ability to describe the natural world, as well as its potential for problem-solving with a technical outcome. However, such an understanding of the scientific process is not a vote for “secure scientific knowledge”, but the scientific method at least gives us a verisimilitude approach to reality. Such an epistemological position is quite common among scientists, a position that might be described as a sort of critical realism.3 On the other hand, it seems we frequently are tempted to claim certainty of knowledge within the sciences, and even within broader philosophical systems, as done by the logical positivists. Logical positivism criticized the ability of philosophy to gain a priori knowledge of reality through reason alone. On the contrary, they emphasized that we, based on our senses, are only able to formulate sentences about reality through the process of verification. According to logical positivists, traditional philosophy had engaged with pseudo-problems, such as moral philosophy and ethics. However, the days of logical positivism—at least in its earliest version— are gone, which we do not need to regret. We do not claim any longer some sort of verification of our knowledge. Since the early years of logical positivism in the 1920s, it was modified and developed in different

2   Nicolas Rescher, “Fallibilism,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998), 545. 3  See such as John Polkinghorne, Scientists as Theologians (London: SPCK, 1996), 11ff.

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directions. However, one philosopher has in particular problematized the positivistic picture of how we gain knowledge: Karl Popper. For Popper, our scientific search for knowledge takes shape through the process of the falsification of hypotheses. At best, our scientific knowledge can be approximate since our hypotheses never can be verified, only falsified.4 Popper, and later critics of logical positivism, argues for fallibilism based on several problems related to the particular view of scientific method in logical positivism. The two main points relate to verification and to data as theory-laden. First, we have the problem of the verification of hypotheses which is intertwined with induction. Popper argues that we do not have any method in which scientific hypotheses can be verified based on observations. To verify means to prove that something is undoubtedly true. For Popper, even observation statements as such are fallible. Hypotheses, Popper continues, cannot be verified since induction, that is, inference from observations of particularities to universal generalizations, is impossible. Particularities, or data, are finite in number, discrete, and episodic. By contrast, theories are general, non-finite, and transcend data. Second, we have the problem that data are theory-laden. This is articulated most clearly by Pierre Duhem, in addition to Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. Data is always affected by some theoretical presuppositions held by the investigator. We find different aspects of theory-ladenness; one is the fact that the questions we can pose are limited by our conceptual horizons.5 Science in Popper’s view is not a quest for certain knowledge, but an evolutionary process in which hypotheses or conjectures are imaginatively proposed and tested in order to explain facts or to solve problems. Popper insists that we must acknowledge an inability to attain the final and definitive truth in the theoretical concerns of science. This is the reason why we claim our knowledge of the world is vulnerable and hence adopt a fallibilist position in the context of justification.6 Even if Popper criticizes logical positivism, he still shares its common concept of knowledge and science: Search for scientific knowledge is a process within the context of scientific method. For Popper this is about testing of hypotheses or theories. However, this type of fallibilism is within a context where we do not discover anything new. By excluding a  See Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).  Rescher, “Fallibilism”, 547. 6  Rescher, “Fallibilism”, 546. 4 5

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hypothesis, we do not gain new insight in such a way that we develop new concepts or descriptions.7 In Popper’s fallibilism, what we consider as wrong is excluded, but the process does not develop novelty for the scientist. What we might lack in the Popperian view of fallibilism is the notion of fallibilism as a resource for deeper insight, which could lead us in new directions, yet unknown.8 New Atheism and the Current Picture of Fallibilism and Science One observation which is related to fallibilism in science, and problematizes the picture of leaving positivism behind, is the so-called new atheism. Their view of scientific knowledge is in deep contrast to Popper and other critics of logical positivism. Advocates for new atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, leave out philosophical consideration in their understanding of how to gain knowledge through scientific method. Dawkins puts God on the scientific table, testing the hypothesis of God’s existence empirically. Even though he is not an old-fashion logical positivist, by dealing with verification and inductive inference, he nevertheless puts God on the wrong table. In short, while Dawkins seems to walk in the landscape of science, he does not. He actually claims a specific worldview. If we advocate a worldview where science is the only deliverer of knowledge about reality, we will not find God. In Dawkins’ terms, the God hypothesis can be rejected. This is naturalism or scientism—not science. However, God does not belong on the scientific table. This is not to limit science but to take seriously what science is all about. Thus, the problems with Dawkins’ new atheism are threefold. First, it is bad science and philosophy, as his journey in the landscape of science and worldviews is blurred. In particular, he shows a lack of philosophical and epistemological reflection. Second, he has a narrow view of science and how methods in science actually work. Third, he does not embrace an understanding of reality as multilayered, which could open for varieties of methods in our search for knowledge of this reality.  Arild Utaker, Tenker hjernen? Språk, menneske, teknikk (Oslo: Vidarforlaget, 2018), 242.  McLeish touches on a similar careful understanding of knowledge in science. He describes our development of ideas and the scientific process in a nuanced way: “No scientific theory is born antelope fashion, fully formed in limb and energy, able to run for itself and keep out of harm’s way. Our ideas emerge far more frequently as a marsupial birth—inadequate, vulnerable and almost powerless.” See Tom McLeish, Faith and Wisdom in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 200. 7 8

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My point by bringing up new atheism is that some elements of positivism—well communicated in the public sphere—are still alive and represent a clearly non-fallibilistic understanding of knowledge. Dawkins and his advocators argue for science as delivering facts about what reality is all about. The way of doing this is far removed from a humble approach concerning the limits of science and the question of being fallible about knowledge in general. However, the current picture of science is even a little bit more complicated in the public sphere. We recognize a paradox in our late modernity. We look to science for secure knowledge, in terms of what is really the case and as a source for gaining knowledge of the natural world. Most of us trust science. Most of us trust the insight from applied science when we are going to a hospital for surgery or driving our car. In one sense, our trust in science is a heritage from modernity. On the other hand, a parallel increasing mistrust of science takes place in the blurred context of “post-­ truth society”. This situation has given room for “alternative facts” and even questioning scientific results. It seems to be the case that “anything goes” in the public sphere concerning facts and truth. The reactions against this tendency are made visible as the marches for science. The picture of the current situation of the status of science, facts, and truth in the public sphere is a mix of different perspectives and agendas, which I will not analyze further here. Surely, mistrust in science is not the same as fallibilism. Mistrust in this context seems to create some sort of “skeptical populism”, and I will later draw a line between fallibilism and skepticism. In any case, the current situation presents a more complex situation on the status of science and knowledge and how fallibilism fits into this picture.9 To sum up, fallibilism in the context of science is about how we understand the scientific method and what insight we can make out of this process. It does not hold that knowledge is unavailable, but rather that it is always provisional.10 This tentativeness is not necessarily limited to the area of science as we shall explore in the next section.

9  See also Knut-Willy Sæther, “Rationality in Play? A Philosophical Journey in the Current Landscape of Facts and Truth,” Navigating Post-Truth and Alternative Facts: Religion and Science as Political Theology, ed. Jennifer Baldwin, (Lanham/Boulder/New York: Lexington Books, 2018), 63–79. 10  Rescher, “Fallibilism”, 545.

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Fallibilism: A Broader Philosophical Picture Fallibilism as described above covers one aspect of fallibilism. However, we might also open up another picture of fallibilism which is somewhat broader philosophically. It is described by Jonas Gamborg Lillebø in this volume as the “context of problematization”. I will not follow his specific trajectory on fallibilism but explore a picture of fallibilism which is more philosophically comprehensive than the context of scientific method as done by Popper. This picture can be traced back to Charles S. Peirce, the philosopher who more than anyone developed fallibilism at the core of the scientific and philosophical endeavor. Fallibilism and Peirce Peirce brings different aspects of fallibilism together in one philosophical body and he is probably the first who coined the term fallibilism in our search for knowledge. Although, mostly known as a philosopher, Peirce’s context for discussing epistemology is also primarily within the context of science, but he differs from Popper by developing fallibilism into a broader philosophical perspective. Peirce’s fallibilism has mainly its starting point in his critique of Descartes’ “intuitive knowledge” (I think, therefore I am). According to Peirce, we cannot claim any knowledge for sure by only referring to our cognition. Thus, he criticizes Descartes’ rationalism as the entrance for secure knowledge. However, Peirce is not arguing for empiricism as the way for gaining secure knowledge. He criticizes empiricism and its claim of sense data or sense impressions as the starting point or foundation for knowledge of reality. The point for Peirce in his critique of both rationalism and empiricism is to claim that we do not have any sources for secure knowledge. In “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism”, Peirce argues for a fallibilistic approach in science. His approach is not so much regarding knowledge in itself, but about the process of inquiry.11 Thus, science is not knowing, but love of learning, he says.12 For Peirce, we recognize at least four “shapes” or concepts of knowledge that need to be corrected: (1) 11  Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 42ff. 12  Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” 42.

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The shape of absolute assertion. Peirce says it is an ancient truth that we— scientifically understood—cannot be sure of anything. The problem is that science has been “infested with overconfident assertion”.13 (2) The concept of claiming that something will not be known in the future: “It is easy enough to mention a question the answer to which is not known to me today. But to aver that that answer will not be known tomorrow is somewhat risky; for oftentimes it is precisely the least expected truth which is turned up under the ploughshare of research.”14 (3) The shape of knowledge where we claim some sort of scientific foundation of a particular knowledge, in the sense that something we know is basic, ultimate, and independent of something else. (4) The concept to claim a given scientific law or truth as being finally formulated and not subject to revision. For Peirce, these points are not only the case for science and the scientific endeavor but apply to all sort of knowledge and thinking, including philosophical inquiry as well: “On the whole, then, we cannot in any way reach perfect certitude nor exactitude.”15 For Peirce, neither revelation, a priori knowledge, nor direct experience is infallible (of different reasons). Some fundamental questions in philosophy—and in particular epistemology—are as follows: What does it mean to know something about reality? What do we mean by claiming something to be true? How can we prove or justify something we claim to be true? Hence, fallibilism is at the very core of what philosophy is all about. This is expressed in different ways throughout the philosophical endeavor and, as shown above, clearly articulated by Peirce by his four concepts of knowledge. To acknowledge fallibilism in such a broader philosophical context might be a challenge for many people to accept since it strikes a wide range of areas in life; Peirce says: “The doctrine of fallibilism will also be denied by those who fear its consequences for science, for religion, and for morality.”16 Are we then lost in the deep sea of relativism, according to Peirce? He clarifies that fallibilism is about how to deal with what we consider as fact: “it is not my purpose to doubt that people can usually count with accuracy. Nor does fallibilism say that men cannot attain a sure knowledge of creations of their own minds. It neither affirms nor denies

 Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” 55.  Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” 55. 15  Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” 55. 16  Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” 58. 13 14

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that. It only says that people cannot attain absolute certainty concerning questions of fact.”17 Peirce continues by developing his fallibilism within a larger picture of symbols and signs. All knowledge is both inferential and semiotic. I will not follow that road here. What is relevant for my discussion is to point out how fallibilism in Peirce’s thinking is related to a wider context than merely scientific justification. Even though his starting point for discussing fallibilism is science, Peirce paints a picture where fallibilism covers a larger area (the aforementioned four points). The context is about thinking in general and includes all kinds of search for knowledge. His fallibilism involves us in an open-ended, experimental, explorative, and playful search for knowledge. In Alejandro García-Rivera’s terms, Peirce’s way of searching for knowledge is “interpretive musement—thinking at ‘treetop’ level”.18 Fallibilism is a natural part of our thinking and an inevitable human quality. Such a broader notion of fallibilism echoes in contemporary philosophical writings, such as those of Robert Audi. He finds three main important kinds of grounding of beliefs: Causal, justificational, and epistemic.19 For Audi these three mostly coincide in our process of thinking. I will not discuss these as such but point out that our well-grounded beliefs can be mistaken and there are several sources of failure: “We are fallible in perceptual matters as in our memories, in our reasoning, and in other respects.”20 This might open the door to a number of fundamental questions: How can I be justified in believing […] such as that my home is secure against the elements, my car safe to drive, and my food free of poison? And how can I know the many things I need to know in life, such as that my family and friends are trustworthy, that I can control my behavior and can thus partly determine my future, and that the world we live in at least approximates the structured reality portrayed by common sense and science?21

 Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” 59.  See Alejandro García-Rivera, The Community of the Beautiful. A Theological Aesthetics (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 8. 19  Robert Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (Abingdon: Routledge, 2003), 7. 20  Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, 8. 21  Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, 9. 17 18

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However, if we are fundamentally unsure about anything, this might lead to an understanding of knowledge where we give up the potential for gaining any knowledge. This is neither the case for Peirce nor the case for contemporary understanding of fallibilism in a larger philosophical picture: “Fallibilism does not insists on the falsity of our scientific claims but rather on their tentativeness as inevitable estimates: it does not hold that knowledge is unavailable here, but rather that it is always provisional.”22 In short, fallibilism is neither only about falsity of scientific claims, as in the Popperian way, nor about giving up our search for knowledge in general. The point is that knowledge is, at its core, provisional. Fallibilism and Skepticism At this stage, bringing together the discussions above on fallibilism in science and in philosophy, we can clarify fallibilism in light of skepticism. Fallibilism ought to steer a middle course between positivism and skepticism. I have already described some of the core elements in positivism and recent the new atheism, such as the role of empirical observation as the main and only entrance to knowledge. I will not develop this further here. One can argue that by advocating fallibilism we incline toward the realm of skepticism. Skepticism expresses a fundamental doubt concerning all elements in our search for knowledge. Such a position will accept neither the primacy of mind, as in rationalism, nor the primacy of senses, as in empiricism. Thus, skepticism doubts the possibility for objective knowledge at all. A strict skepticism is rare and has had a limited influence in history. However, it takes shape in moderate forms. Fallibilism differs from skepticism, as the latter stresses that true knowledge by definition is uncertain. In Rescher’s words: “The point is not that our pursuit of truth in science is futile, but rather that the information we obtain is to be seen as no more (but also no less) than the best available estimate of truth that is available to us in the circumstances. Fallibilism is something very different from nihilistic skepticism.”23 Fallibilism does not imply the need to abandon our knowledge. This is an important difference between these two positions. Thus, skepticism goes much further than fallibilism in doubting all aspects of the process of gaining knowledge. By claiming a fallibilistic  Rescher, “Fallibilism,” 545.  Rescher, “Fallibilism,” 548.

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position, we do not devaluate the rational and empirical processes in how we gain knowledge. In other words, fallibilism is not a fundamental mistrust of either cognition or perception as such, as in skepticism, but emphasizes that the knowledge we gain might be wrong. In addition, skepticism restricts our curiosity and our “forward drive” for further knowledge. On the contrary, fallibilism opens up for an explorative approach and further insight. Such an explorative approach is at the core of the philosophical endeavor. Philosophy is about critical thinking and about problematizing what we know and what we take for granted. By asking “philosophical questions”, we are open to the possibility that our current knowledge is fallible. What we hopefully have learned from history is that our knowledge at a given time is not only limited but also might be fallible. Further, we know that we will gain new knowledge in the future, which reminds us that our current knowledge might be fallible as well, as pointed out by Rescher: “The prospect of present knowledge about the future discoveries is deeply problematic since the future of knowledge is fundamentally unpredictable. The details of the cognitive future are hidden in an impenetrable fog.”24 Hence, philosophically speaking, we cannot be sure about the actual status of our present knowledge and claims. Our present situation, between the past and future, is the only place from where we can explore reality. Thus, knowing history and awareness of future insights should make us humble about the status of our current knowledge. The Peircean view of our search for knowledge has this twofold component: Being humble in regard to the status of current knowledge, but still having an explorative approach to future knowledge. This broader philosophical picture of fallibilism as a natural part of our thinking and thus an inevitable human quality is an interesting step toward a further analysis of what fallibilism might be within the context of theology.

Fallibilism and Theology Faith can take us to holy realms certainty can never reach. For centuries Christians have gathered to stand and confess the Nicene Creed, which begins with the words, “We believe.” It’s significant that it doesn’t begin

24  Nicolas Rescher, Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 64.

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with, “I’m certain that …”. We’ve never been certain. Too much is at stake for that.25

As the quotation above expresses, faith and uncertainty are at the core of what Christianity is all about. An interesting starting point for exploring fallibilism in theology is Peirce, who is by some people considered as non-­ believer and criticizer of theology: “All inspired matter has been subject to human distortion or colouring. Besides we cannot penetrate the counsels of the most High, or lay down anything as a principle that would govern his conduct. We do not know his inscrutable purpose, nor can we comprehend his plans.”26 If fallibilism is at work both in a narrow sense in theory of science and in a larger philosophical picture as developed by Peirce, how do these approaches apply for theology? In short, we can argue that theology as an academic field, broadly spoken, follows along the same lines of fallibilism in philosophy as elaborated in this chapter. Theology as an academic field is about thinking and—in this sense—finds its place among the humanities, dealing with various, yet distinctive, content and methods. Thus, to be fallible in doing theology as an academic field is “nothing more” than to recognize the same aspects as pointed out concerning the philosophical endeavor. However, there is more to say about theology and fallibilism, because our understanding of what theology is all about differs. Hence, to discuss fallibilism in the context(s) of theology might take various forms. In the following, I explore three areas of theology which in different ways involve discussions of fallibilism. The first is related to dogmatism, foundationalism, and relativism. The second concerns the nature of faith. The third is about fallibilism as a virtue. Fallibilism and Dogmatism Theology can be thought of as an endeavor where dogmatic expressions traditionally are dominant. “Dogmatic” is then associated with specific claims or givens which define something as true and something else as false. Truth about the world (i.e. God’s reality) is revealed in Scripture, 25  Craig M.  Barnes, “Having faith in God is better than being certain about God,” at: https://www.christiancentury.org/article/faith-matters/having-faith-god-better-beingcertain-about-god, July 13, 2018, accessed February 21, 2019. 26  Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” 57.

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tradition, and experience, and we have some sort of conviction that this truth is available and possible for us to explore. Dogmatism in this view, as “propositions which we cannot fail to believe, and which are such that it follows from our believing them that they are true”,27 is closely related to both foundationalism and fideism.28 We can approach the domain of fallibilism by differentiating it from a position which claims there is a truth and it is universal. Such a position can be described as some sort of foundationalism.29 The similarity between foundationalism and dogmatism is that certain basic beliefs make up the foundation from which other beliefs can be derived. Such beliefs are considered to be either self-evident, evident empirically, or regarded as objective truth statements. The kinship between dogmatism and fideism is that they both advocate as true without appeal to reason or even, eventually, as contrary to reason.30 However, this picture of theology as merely dogmatism is inadequate, but illustrates one challenge with relevance to fallibilism: “On the one hand, if fallibilism is true, it seems we cannot have certainty. On the other hand, the dominant tradition in Christian theology teaches that faith comes with certainty. Christian fallibilists must then either give up one side of this dilemma or find a way to unite what seems incompatible.”31 The challenge seems clear: How can we claim fallibilism in light of different truth statements which are crucial in Christian faith? On the opposite side, we find epistemological relativism. According to this position, nothing can be claimed as truth. More moderately understood, relativism claims that no beliefs concerning values or metaphysical 27   Andy Sanders, at: https://www.kfki.hu/~cheminfo/polanyi/9912/sanders.html, accessed February 21, 2019. 28  Dogmatism is not synonymous with foundationalism as the first (as for relativism) can be considered more as an assumed position, while foundationalism “belongs” to the context of justification of beliefs. The discussion on dogmatism/foundationalism and relativism is not only related to theology but also relevant in a larger philosophical framework. Here, I narrow it to theology for making my theological point clear. 29  The topic of foundationalism is unquestionably more complex than described here. For my purpose, I have in mind what can be described as strong foundationalism. See Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, 184–216. 30  Andy F. Sanders, “Dogmatism, Fallibilism and Truth: A Polanyian Puzzle,” Polanyiana, at: https://www.kfki.hu/~cheminfo/polanyi/9912/sanders.html, accessed February 21, 2019. 31  Brandon Dahm, “The Certainty of Faith: A Problem for Christian Fallibilists,” Journal of Analytic Theology, vol. 3 (May 2015): 130.

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questions can be considered as true.32 However, fallibilism does not lead us to the strand that “anything goes”. This slogan, well known from Feyerabend, expresses an understanding of knowledge as a social construction. Very few scholars follow such a relativistic view of knowledge. On the other hand, we need to pay attention to the social and cultural context of gaining knowledge and what can be described as the social forces of science (cf. Kuhn).33 However, this is not the same as arguing for anything goes. Andy F. Sanders says traditional fallibilism is a middle way between relativism and foundationalism. It avoids self-defeat, as in foundationalism and relativism, because fallibilism is aware that the position itself can be fallible.34 Thus, fallibilism in theology is a via media between dogmatism/foundationalism and relativism. One way of exploring such via media is as critical realism, to which I will return to in the last part of the chapter. Fallibilism and the Nature of Faith In addition to discussing fallibilism in light of dogmatism, we need to explore another crucial dimension in theology: the nature of faith. This opens up for some slightly different perspectives on fallibilism. The nature of faith, fallibilism, and the question of certainty/uncertainty are intertwined. We see a tension here also, but it is somewhat different than the tension we find in the context of dogmatism and relativism above. On the one hand, if fallibilism is true, we cannot claim some sort of certainty in

32  To steer clear of both foundationalism and relativism, we find different solutions. One is J. Wentzel van Huyssteen’s postfoundationalism. Postfoundationalist rationality is “a model of rationality (…) where a fusion of epistemological and hermeneutical concerns will enable a focused (though fallibilist) quest for intelligibility through the epistemic skills of responsible, critical judgement and discernment”. See J.  Wentzel van Huyssteen, The Shaping of Rationality (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 33. This gives room for decision-making, however open for revisions: “When at any point in time we make a strong and particular decision for something in the light of the best reasons available to us, there need to be no incompatibility between accepting that set of fallible claims for a substantial period of time, and also being prepared to reconsider them when we have good reasons for doing so.” See van Huyssteen, The Shaping of Rationality, 144. 33  McLeish, Faith and Wisdom in Science, 200. 34  Andy F. Sanders, “Dogmatism, Fallibilism and Truth: A Polanyian Puzzle,” at: https:// www.kfki.hu/~cheminfo/polanyi/9912/sanders.html, accessed February 21, 2019.

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Christian faith. On the other hand, theology actually speaks of faith as certainty.35 This span goes deep into what theology and the nature of faith is all about. We deal with a rationale, as faith seeking understanding, accompanied by the deeper mystery of the object of theology. A humble approach to what we can claim as certain in theology, should be more or less self-­ evident since the nature of the object of theology is the “rich mystery of God which permanently eludes adequate understanding.”36 According to Brandon Dahm, with reference to John Henry Newman, faith in this context has (at least) two peculiarities: “it is most certain, decided, positive, immovable in its assent, and it gives this assent not because it sees with eye, or sees with reason, but because it receives the tidings from one who comes from God.”37 By discussing fallibilism and the nature of faith, Dahm, drawing on Audi, points out two different concepts of faith relevant for our context: Faith as “propositional faith” and “creedal faith”. According to Dahm, Christianity teaches that the propositional attitude of faith includes certainty. He finds support for this through the whole history of Christianity. An example is Thomas Aquinas who distinguishes faith from knowledge and opinion by arguing that the certainty of faith is greater than the certainty natural reason gives. This understanding is echoed in John Calvin’s writings: “Faith is a firm and sure knowledge of the divine favour toward us.”38 Dahm labels this tradition as “certainty-of-faith” tradition, and Dahm argues that Christian fallibilists should see compatibility with the certainty-of-faith tradition as a desideratum of their views. Hence, certainty of faith is something else than certainty of knowledge.39 It is also something other than dogmatism. In one sense certainty of faith goes deeper, as Murray has pointed out with reference to Søren Kierkegaard: “Kierkegaard could describe faith as an ‘objective uncertainty’ which, nevertheless, ‘held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing  Dahm, “The Certainty of Faith: A Problem for Christian Fallibilists,” 130.   Paul D.  Murray, “Fallibilism, Faith and Theology: Putting Nicholas Rescher to Theological Work,” Modern Theology 20:3 (July 2004), 344. 37  Dahm, “The Certainty of Faith: A Problem for Christian Fallibilists,” 138. 38  See Dahm, “The Certainty of Faith: A Problem for Christian Fallibilists,” 132. 39  See Brandon Dahm who presents and discusses three types of certainty relevant for theology: Epistemic, moral, and psychological. Dahm, “The Certainty of Faith: A Problem for Christina Fallibilists,” 130. 35 36

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person’”.40 As John Henry Newman recognized, echoing Bonaventure, the supposedly watertight certainties of strict logic need to be distinguished from the personal character of the “certitude of faith”. This is an element which we can observe in Pascal’s wager. Murray says: “This is most notably the case in Pascal’s Wager where he defends the worth of an axiological (value-based) as distinct from a doxastic (belief-based) approach to the justification of faith.”41 In company with Murray, I observe two aspects of faith, fallibilism and certainty: “neither the character of faithful commitment nor that of its accompanying certitude are properly regarded as being incompatible with an openness to risk and a preparedness to venture out into the unknown. Christian faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, and the conviction of things not seen’.”42 The nature of faith is pointing forward, having what I would describe as a “forward reaching” dimension. Murray says faith is not arrived at as the logical end-point of a reasoning process with certainty: “As in love and ethical awakening, so faith certitude is best thought of as the conviction of being grasped by a reality that evokes one’s trust while itself in turn eluding one’s own grasp and the giving of cast-iron guarantees.”43 This also echoes the Anselmian phrase fides quaerens intellectum, which is not about faith seeking understanding for secure knowledge but about an explorative search for deeper insight and knowledge about reality. Such an explorative search is pointing forward, a revealed knowledge—yet hidden—as expressed in mystical terms in the writings of Paul: “we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”44 Paul paints a picture of an eschatological knowing. Our epistemological hunger will not be fully satisfied as I will now only know in part. There is always more. We see through a glass, darkly, and what we actually can know is that there is more to 40  Murray, “Fallibilism, Faith and Theology: Putting Nicholas Rescher to Theological Work,” 344. 41  Murray, “Fallibilism, Faith and Theology: Putting Nicholas Rescher to Theological Work,” 345. Quoting Pascal, Murray states: “what we can establish by reasoning is not the direct conclusion that there is a God, but only that oblique result that belief in God is warranted”. 42  Heb 11:1. See Murray, “Fallibilism, Faith and Theology: Putting Nicholas Rescher to Theological Work,” 343. 43  Murray, “Fallibilism, Faith and Theology: Putting Nicholas Rescher to Theological Work,” 343. 44  1 Cor 13,12 KJV.

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explore. Theologically understood, knowledge, faith, certainty, and uncertainty are intertwined in a mysterious way, as the true object of theology is mystery—revealed, yet hidden. As Wentzel van Huyssteen points out, with reference to Rescher: A fallibilist epistemology necessarily implies that our knowledge—including our scientific knowledge—can never be complete or perfect. For Nicholas Rescher this fait accompli invites a description of the cognitive situation of the natural sciences in theological terms: expelled from the Garden of Eden, we are deprived of access to the God’s-eye point of view. We yearn for absolutes but have to settle for plausibilities; we desire what is definitely correct but have to settle for conjectures and estimates.45

Fallibilism as Virtue My third point on fallibilism and theology is related to fallibilism as virtue. By bringing this dimension here, I am not saying that fallibilism as a virtue is only relevant for theology. However, my context here emphasizes fallibilism as a Christian virtue for how we cope with the process of knowing as well as our actions. For Alessandra Tanesini, fallibilism is understood as the ever-present possibility of error, and she discusses fallibilism as virtue. She argues that “fallibilism is primarily a feature of epistemic agents, and only derivatively of their states and of their methods of inquiry”.46 For Tanesini, fallibilism is related to several conditions. First, we have the idea of the possibility of mistakes, which is quite uncontroversial: “A fallible knower is an agent that is liable to making errors.”47 Second, we have a wider claim and thus more controversial: The whole of human knowledge is fallible. Third, to claim fallibilism must not preclude the possibility of knowledge (in contrast to skepticism). Fourth, in contrast to dogmatism, it is an “unwillingness to entertain the possibility that one might have made a mistake or that one’s view might be false”.48 Fifth, the fallibilist is an agent open to the possibility that her position might be revised.  van Huyssteen, The Shaping of Rationality, 161.  Alessandra Tanesini, “Virtues, Emotions and Fallibilism,” in Epistemology and the Emotions, eds. Georg Brun, Ulvi Doğuoğlu and Dominique Kuenzle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 67. 47  Tanesini, “Virtues, Emotions and Fallibilism,” 70. 48  Tanesini, “Virtues, Emotions and Fallibilism,” 70, 45 46

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So far, we have been discussing several of these aspects of fallibilism. However, underlying what Tanesini writes we find an attitude to knowledge where to be fallible is a virtue. Is fallibilism about ethics? For Peirce it is, in the sense that fallibilism at least has ethical implications and he develops an ethics of belief, according to which we have no right to claim definitive truth for our current scientific claims.49 Thus, fallibilism is an invitation to do the very best we can and strive for definitive systematization of knowledge. However, fallibilism is not only limited to theoretical knowledge, as knowledge (and I will add convictions and faith) is disposition for action, and thus about ethics. The relevance for Christian theology seems clear, as Murray puts it: “a fallibilist self-regard and openness to the need for continual conversation are as essential to the practice of good Christian theology as they are to the practice of good Christian living”.50 Hence, fallibilism is a virtue, however not existing on its own. Theological fallibilism as a virtue is intertwined with the earlier perspectives on certainty of faith and conviction as well.

Fallibilism: From Epistemology to Ontology In my last section, I will cautiously explore a possible relationship between epistemology and ontology in light of fallibilism, which also has theological implications. If our knowledge of reality is limited, fallible, what might the implication be for our ontological claim of reality? This question might have deeply philosophical and theological consequences, which I will not fully unpack here. We find perspectives on how epistemology and ontology are related in Peirce’s philosophy in how he develops his tychism. Tychism, that is, a thesis that holds that absolute chance is an ontological real factor in the world, is a fundamental doctrinal part of Peirce’s thinking. Robert Burch puts it this way: “Reference to his tychism provides an added reason for Peirce’s insisting on the irreducible fallibilism of inquiry.”51 The point is that nature is not a static world of unswerving law but a dynamic and dicey world. Reality is an unfolding and evolving indeterministic reality. We find  Rescher, “Fallibilism”, 548.  Murray, “Fallibilism, Faith and Theology: Putting Nicholas Rescher to Theological Work”, 351. 51  Robert Burch, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at: https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/peirce/, accessed February 21, 2019. 49 50

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other positions, both within philosophy and theology which claim an indeterministic understanding of reality, without following the lines of thoughts from Peirce.52 More closely related to current scholarly discussions, I will comment briefly on two positions of fallibilism, which connect epistemology and ontology: those of Amos Yong and John Polkinghorne. Amos Yong touches upon fallibilism and ontology in one of his earlier discussions on the nature of Whitehead’s cosmology. Yong says we no longer think in the static categories of Hellenistic philosophy.53 We rather have a shift to an ontology of becoming, where “the fluid nature of thought and language is assumed to reflect the dynamic nature of reality itself”. This means that knowledge is partial not only because of the mental processes, says Yong, but also because the very nature of what is known is partial. Yong argues for a non-static world, which is an evolving world of true becoming. Christopher Stephenson discusses Yong’s approach to Pentecostal epistemology. He points out that Yong argues for a “pneumatological imagination” which is committed to epistemic fallibilism. This fallibilism opens up for three aspects: First, knowledge is partial inasmuch as it is both indirect and semiotic. Second, knowledge is perspectival— always situated in time and place. Third, knowledge is finite. This is the case as we are limited creatures, as well as, theological spoken, we are embedded in a sinful world.54 John Polkinghorne argues slightly differently. At the heart of Polkinghorne’s critical realism is the conviction that epistemology is a reliable guide to ontology.55 John Polkinghorne coined the phrase “epistemology models ontology”. This can be understood in different ways. For Polkinghorne it expresses that the totality of what we can know is a reliable guide to what is the case. This expression fits into his larger 52  By exploring fallibilism and indeterminism, we need to be aware of other trajectories in fallibilism and related ontological claims. If the best current understanding of reality is deterministic it is not the case that we would give up fallibilism concerning human knowledge and its claims. My point in this context is to explore one possible trajectory between epistemological fallibilism and ontology. 53   See Amos Yong, “Personal Selfhood(?) and Human Experience in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism,” Paideia Project: Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy (1998), at: http://www.bu.edu/wcp/MainPPer.htm., accessed February 21, 2019. 54  Christopher A. Stephenson, Types of Pentecostal Theology. Method, System, Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 89. 55  John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 156.

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epistemological understanding where critical realism plays a crucial role in his thinking where fallibilism finds its place. Realism has two constituents, one existential/ontological and one cognitive/epistemic. The former expresses that there is a real world, which in Rescher’s terms is a realm of thought-transcendent objective physical reality.56 The latter maintains that we are able to gain some adequate information or knowledge about this realm. How we gain this knowledge, and to what degree, can be described as the critical aspect of realism, such as in critical realism. Andreas Losch coins the term constructive-critical realism to moderate the “old fashion” critical realism (such as Polkinghorne) and, in particular, emphasizes the cultural and social dimension in our search for knowledge. He says: “I conclude from here, that the rationalities of natural, social, human science and of course theology are different ones, and I go on (…) to say that the verification taking place in human science and art would better be called validation.”57 Such a moderate version stresses the limitations of our search for knowledge: “Our access to truth is limited; each person can know directly very little of truth and must trust others for the rest.”58 Losch continues: “Nevertheless, this limited access to truth represents the ground on which we can claim freedom and respect. It provides the spiritual foundation of a free society, the achievement of which Polanyi called ‘man’s cosmic calling’.”59 My reason for giving these final examples is to point out that they display various forms of how to think of the relationship between epistemology and ontology. Thus, fallibilism is not only about epistemology, as it might have ontological implications.

Summary My journey into fallibilism has explored three strands. First, we have fallibilism in science, that is, theory of science. This fallibilism is underlying all sorts of search for knowledge (not only science) where we require a strict  Rescher, Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective, 106.  Andreas Losch, “Our World is more than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on  the Current Science and Theology Debate,” Theology and Science, vol. 3, no. 3 (2005): 281. 58  Losch, “Our World is more than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate,” 283. 59  Losch, “Our World is more than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate,” 283. 56 57

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methodology in the context of justification. Second, we find fallibilism within a larger philosophical framework, exemplified with Peirce. For him, the starting point for dealing with fallibilism is science, but he expands it to apply to thinking as a whole. An overall perspective on fallibilism embracing both of these two strands is that all search of knowledge is about verisimilitude knowledge. Third, fallibilism in theology actualizes several topics. Theology as an academic field needs to take into consideration the narrowed fallibilism in the context of justification as well as the larger philosophical context. However, theology deals with other aspects of fallibilism, such as the tension between dogmatism and relativism, the nature of faith, and fallibilism as Christian virtue. Finally, fallibilism might point in a direction with relevance for ontology, which opens the door for further explorations of fallibilism.

Bibliography Audi, Robert. 2003. Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge. Abingdon: Routledge. Barnes, Craig M. 13 July 2018. Having Faith in God Is Better Than Being Certain About God. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/faith-matters/havingfaith-god-better-being-certain-about-god. Accessed 21 Feb 2019. Buchler, Justus, ed. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. New York: Dover. Burch, Robert. 2014. Charles Sanders Peirce. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/ Dahm, Brandon. May 2015. The Certainty of Faith: A Problem for Christian Fallibilists? Journal of Analytic Theology 3: 130–146. García-Rivera, Alejandro. 1999. The Community of the Beautiful. A Theological Aesthetics. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press. Losch, Andreas. 2005. Our World Is More Than Physics: A Constructive-Critical Comment on the Current Science and Theology Debate. Theology and Science 3 (3): 275–290. McLeish, Tom. 2014. Faith and Wisdom in Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murray, Paul D. 2004. Fallibilism, Faith and Theology: Putting Nicholas Rescher to Theological Work. Modern Theology 20 (3): 339–362. O’Hear, Anthony. 1993. Fallibilism. In A Companion to Epistemology, ed. Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa, vol. 138. Oxford/Malden: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism. In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover. Polkinghorne, John. 1994. The Faith of a Physicist. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1996. Scientists as Theologians. London: SPCK.

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Popper, Karl. 1965. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. New York: Harper & Row. Rescher, Nicolas. 1998. Fallibilism. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 545–548. London: Routledge. Also available at: https://www.rep.routledge. com/articles/thematic/fallibilism/v-1/sections/the-fallibilist-perspective ———. 2001. Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Sæther, Knut-Willy. 2018. Rationality in Play? A Philosophical Journey in the Current Landscape of Facts and Truth. In Navigating Post-Truth and Alternative Facts: Religion and Science as Political Theology, ed. Jennifer Baldwin, 63–79. Lanham/Boulder/New York: Lexington Books. Sanders, Andy F. 1999. Dogmatism, Fallibilism and Truth: A Polanyian Puzzle. Polanyiana 1–2. https://www.kfki.hu/~cheminfo/polanyi/9912/sanders.html Stephenson, Christopher A. 2013. Types of Pentecostal Theology. Method, System, Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tanesini, Alessandra. 2008. Virtues, Emotions and Fallibilism. In Epistemology and the Emotions, ed. Georg Brun, Ulvi Doğuoğlu, and Dominique Kuenzle, 67–82. Aldershot: Ashgate. Utaker, Arild. 2018. Tenker hjernen? Språk, menneske, teknikk. Oslo: Vidarforlaget. van Huyssteen, J.Wentzel. 1999. The Shaping of Rationality. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Yong, Amos. 1998. Personal Selfhood(?) and Human Experience in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism. Paideia Project: Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy. http://www.bu.edu/wcp/MainPPer.htm

CHAPTER 3

Fallibilism, Problematization, and the History of Thought Jonas Gamborg Lillebø

Introduction The experience that both human reason and science can be erroneous and/or lack justification has led some philosophers to adopt an epistemological position, or general theory of knowledge, called fallibilism. Fallibilism is “the epistemological thesis that no belief (theory, view, thesis, and so on) can ever be rationally supported or justified in a conclusive way. Always, there remains a possible doubt as to the truth of the belief”.1 Furthermore, fallibilism stands in relation or contrast to other epistemological positions such as skepticism, realism, relativism, social constructivism, and so on as to whether beliefs can be justified. “Position

I would like to thank Thomas Hastings, Knut-Willy Sæther, and Anders Nilsen for giving me valuable input on the article. 1   Hetherington, Stephen. “Fallibilism“, in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Downloaded at: https://www.iep.utm.edu/fallibil/, accessed, August 26, 2020.

J. G. Lillebø (*) Department of Religious Studies, Volda University College, Volda, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_3

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driven” thinking is, however, not confined to epistemology, but also extends to ethics. Among philosophers of ethics, we can also find similar positions that also discuss justification in ethics. It is interesting here is to see the close link between an (epistemological) position like fallibilism and justification (the justification of belief). However, this also presents an obstacle or limitation for those who are interested in thinking. Is it possible to be interested in epistemology and ethics without going into justification or without seeing it as the only important question? This is where the French tradition of philosophy of science presents itself as an alternative “style”2 in philosophy, one to which Michel Foucault adheres. In the landscape of epistemological positions and in the French tradition for philosophy of science “fallibility” and errors have quite different meanings and status.3 What I would like to call a “position driven” approach to philosophy is often at play in the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. In his late work the philosopher turns to Greek and Roman sources to investigate the history of sexuality and the ethics with which sexuality was related. The contrast between modern and/or Christian thought, on the one hand, and the different Greek schools of thought, on the other, is often reiterated throughout the second and third volumes of History of Sexuality.4 But the differences he reveals between these two “systems of thought” are neither the ideas of sexuality nor are they subject to an ethical or epistemological evaluation of the different justifications, with the Greeks being right and the Christians wrong or vice versa. The aim is rather to articulate the different problematizations to which they relate and thereby highlight what thinking and thought is. The history of sexuality and the Greek ethics is in this article first and foremost a case which says something about one way of being a philosopher. 2   I have borrowed the term “style” from Jean-François Braunstein, “Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault,” in Les philosophes et la science, edited by Pierre Wagner. Paris: Gallimard Folio, 2002. 3  Arild Utaker, Tenker hjernen? Språk, menneske, teknikk (Oslo: Vidarforlaget, 2018). 4  The reason why I have omitted the first volume is because it is part of a different field of problems. Whereas the first volume is more directly linked with his discussion of governmentality and biopolitics, the second and third take on ancient Greek and Roman ethics. There are connections between the political and ethical themes, but this cannot be included here. It is also important to mention that recently a fourth volume has been published posthumously, called Les aveux de la chaire (which translates to something like “confessions of the flesh”), which discusses the Christian practice of confession.

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In doing so Foucault opens to an intellectual activity, which goes beyond the scope of academic philosophy (with all its different positions) to communicate with other disciplines, which are also part of the history of thought. This approach is thus highly relevant for other disciplines that aim to become scientific (religious studies, theology, literature, social anthropology, etc.) but which in terms of reasoning are closer to thinking and thought rather than to justification through empirical evidence. I would suggest that the humanities have much to gain by switching from the natural sciences as a paradigm for justification and instead focusing on what thinking and thought might comprise. Even though I want to show that epistemological positions in general are an obstacle for interpreting and practicing thinking, as Foucault does, and even though fallibilism as a strand in epistemology also is concerned with justification, I believe that there are some ideas in “fallibilist philosophy” which make way for thinkers like Foucault. Charles Sanders Peirce shows how problematization is a part of scientific activity by breaking down the distinction between “the context of discovery” and the “context of justification”. He thus creates room for thinking and not just for testing of hypotheses in the process of science. This is what takes fallibilism one step closer to the French tradition of philosophy of science and, eventually, Michel Foucault.

From Epistemology, Through Philosophy of Science5 to History of Thought In their book Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory, Jason Glynos and David Howarth reinvoke retroduction as an alternative to inductive and deductive inferences.6 Aristotle has often been credited as the creator of this idea, but it has been developed in modern philosophy of science by Charles Sanders Peirce (as abduction) and others. According to Glynos and Howarth the compelling aspect of retroduction is that it breaks with Hans Reichenbach’s distinction between the “context of discovery” and “context of justification”. Scientific theories, according to 5  What is called epistemology (theory of knowledge) in the Anglo-American tradition is called gnoseology (gnoseologie) in  France. What is called epistemology (épistémologie) in France is called philosophy of science in the Anglo-American tradition. 6  Jason Glynos and David Howarth, Logics of critical explanation in political and social theory (London: Routledge, 2007).

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Reichenbach, are developed from observations to hypotheses (context of discovery). Researchers then leave the context of discovery and enter the context of justification where the hypothesis made in the context of discovery can be tested. Glynos and Howarth’s point is that such a clear-cut distinction between the two contexts must be dissolved in order to appreciate the dynamic nature and creation of hypotheses. A retroductive hypothesis is always adjustable in the sense that we never leave the context of discovery entirely. We continue to alter the hypothesis at the same time as we attempt to justify it. By reintroducing retroduction Peirce claims that the process of adopting scientific hypotheses is provisional. In other words, the test (in the so-called hypothetic deductive method) which falsifies a hypothesis separates the process of adopting a hypothesis and the process of testing a hypothesis. With reference to Peirce and Norwood Hanson, Glynos and Howarth write: Retroduction is at one with induction in suggesting that the vector of reasoning points from the data to the laws. However, as Hanson insists, inductive and deductive reasoning cannot originate any theories and laws whatever. … While deductive reasoning purports to prove what is the case, and inductive reasoning purports to approximate what is the case, retroductive reasoning conjectures what is the case (Peirce in Hanson 1961: 85). As Peirce puts it, retroduction is a “logical inference, asserting its conclusion only problematically, or conjecturally, it is true, but nevertheless having a perfectly logical form”.7

As far as I see it, this aspect of fallibilism opens to a dynamic and fruitful approach to science beyond merely focusing on justification. First of all, it introduces a temporal aspect to both scientific work and “fallibilism” in philosophy of science (the context of discovery is never left). Secondly, it gives “problematics” a role to play. Consequently the fallible and errors are to a larger extent, than in for instance Karl Popper’s use of falsification, integrated as part of the research process. In Popper’s philosophy of science the fallible is only part of science as a means to eliminate false hypotheses. But the fallible itself does not have a role to play in making new

 Jason Glynos and David Howarth, Logics of critical explanation in political and social theory, 25–26. 7

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scientific discoveries.8 The Peircean trail, however, takes us one step further in admitting a larger epistemological role to the problematic and fallible. Having said that, in order to give the fallible an even more integrated role in research we must go beyond mere epistemological and methodological considerations regarding the question of justification and include history of science and history of thought. In order to approach problematization and the history of thought in Foucault’s thinking we need to consider the French tradition of philosophy of science. This tradition could be characterized as hostile to epistemology (theory of knowledge). This goes back to the break with Cartesian thinking where the philosopher’s role is to lay the premisses, and method, and thus the foundation for science. According to the proponents of French philosophy of science, science is not an object that can be studied by philosophy (making “philosophy of science” a “fundamental science” for the sciences). Against the Cartesian tradition of articulating a theory of “knowledge in general”, Auguste Comte already said that it is not possible to know directly the laws of the human spirit. These laws, according to him, could only be known through the study of the human spirit in practice, that is through science and its history.9 Even though highly critical of positivist thinking, the French tradition commences with the “father” of positivism, August Comte.10 Furthermore, the French philosophy of science does not rest on the premisses of distinction between context of discovery and context of justification.11 This made way for a historical element in its reasoning and was even present in the positivism of Comte. Later, French philosophy of science was in the works of Georges Canguilhem concentrated on studying how the relation between science and non-science (religion, politics, ideology) unfolded historically and how concepts, problems, metaphors, and

 Utaker, Tenker hjernen? Språk, menneske, teknikk, 242.  Braunstein, “Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault,” 929. 10  The French philosopher Dominique Lecourt explains this in his book La philosophie des sciences where he writes: “The French positivism is by no means presented as an empiricism. It does not explain the genesis of knowledge (genèse de la connaissance) from what is perceived through the senses. What is primordial is according to him [Comte], ‘speculation’. […] In order to obtain knowledge it is of course necessary to observe, but in order to observe one has to be put in motion by ‘some theory or another’.” Dominique Lecourt, Que sais je? La philosophie des sciences (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 2001), 93. 11  Braunstein, “Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault,” 933. 8 9

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models could be borrowed or travel from one domain to the other.12 Even though the French epistemological tradition is occupied with how science unfolds historically, it does not, however, mean it is the same as history of science. Epistemology also involves a critical evaluation of science. Canguilhem’s point, in his dissertation Le normal et le pathologique, was to show how (historically) and why (epistemologically) positivist thinking failed to account for a concept of normality in medicine and the life sciences. There simply is no original state of normality for a living organism to return to when it recovers from a pathological state.13 Normativity in the life sciences must be sought and understood differently than by means of statistical accounts of normality. Moreover, Canguilhem’s thinking was more concerned with concepts and problems in the history of philosophy rather than with scientific solutions and theories. The “true” history of the sciences was not the successful history of scientific theories and solutions. Science must be studied from its problems and failures and not from its successes.14 This not only indicates that the process of scientific discovery and justification cannot be separated but also shows that the object and concern for philosophy of science might not be justification at all, but rather its problems, obstacles, and failures. As Arild Utaker highlights it was to a large extent Bachelard’s and Canguilhem’s merit to integrate the contingent aspect in errors into the history of truth.15 The works of Michel Foucault can be characterized within this aforementioned “context of problematization” and his study of the “history of thought” develops and advances some of these themes. In this chapter I seek to emphasize two manners in which Foucault depicts this. The first is found in the second volume of History of Sexuality where he reflects on the philosopher’s relation to truth: There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of

 Georges Canguilhem, Idéologie et rationalité (Paris: Vrin, 2000).  Georges Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique (Paris: PUF, 2003). 14  Pierre Macherey, De Canguilhem à Foucault. La force des normes (Paris: La fabrique éditions, 2009). 15  Utaker, Tenker hjernen? Språk, menneske, teknikk. 12 13

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naïve positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it.16

Foucault thus breaks with a long tradition of philosophy (of science), which attempts to establish the framework for truth. The role of the philosopher is thus not to dictate on behalf of an entire science or a field of thought what is truth or what is error. Rather, it is the role of the philosopher to find material that makes it possible to reevaluate and change how we think. Put differently, according to Foucault it is not the task of philosophy to find the basis for the “context of justification”, but to alter how we think. And the “knowledge that is foreign” (un savoire qui lui est étranger) for the philosopher and which has the capacity to change how he or she thinks is the problems to which this strange knowledge relates. The philosopher’s role is thus not to show how or why we err, but rather to ask if the question we seek an answer to is the only one we could or should ask. The second point is problematization. However, in order to better understand this point it is important to examine themes and examples in Foucault’s writing that demonstrate his views on the history of thought and problematization.

The Ethics of Sexuality and Ethics in Sexuality In these books, Foucault expressly and repeatedly distinguishes between the aims and methods in the Greek ethics of pleasure and the Christian hermeneutics of desire. Contrary to what one might think, the important difference between pre/non-Christian Greek ethics and Christian moral thinking is not between the liberal, tolerant, open Greek ethics of sexuality on the one hand and the severe, Christian sexual ethics sanctioned through prohibitions and condemnations on the other. As Foucault shows, Greek ethics have a long tradition of sexual sanctioning that preceded that of Christian sexual prohibition. Indeed, Greek ethics were at times more austere than Christian and prescripts for regulating the sexual life of married couples, similar to the Christian, existed prior to it. Christianity did not invent sexual prohibition. However, the reasons for the ethical austerity (Foucault returns to this notion throughout the work) found in the different schools of Greek thought and ethics were completely different from 16  Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality. The use of pleasure (Penguin books, 1992), 9; l’Histoire de la sexualité. L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 16.

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the reasons for Christian severity. He mentions four basic ways to practice this moral austerity (together they form a “field of problematization:”):17 1. Determination of the ethical substance (Afrodisia): The subject had to determine what would be at the center of ethical concern. For instance, in being faithful to one’s wife (this was predominantly a masculine ethics), a man had to determine what was most important in honoring this fidelity: intensity, continuity, reciprocity, and quality are all different dimensions of the same relation. A person had to decide which dimensions were most significant for ethical reflection. 2. Subordination of the subject (Chresis): The way the subject regulates his own (sexual) conduct. Foucault describes a triple strategy for evaluation: (a) finding a balance in desire that does not transgress a natural need, (b) determine the right point in time for seeking pleasure and fulfillment of pleasure, and (c) one’s social status was important for the evaluation of pleasure. 3. The ethical transformation of the subject (Enkrateia): Enkrateia has to do with self-control and continence. The subject must be able to resist desires and temptations in himself. In the Socratic tradition, the first condition for becoming wise is to be continent. The opposite of enkrateia is akrasia, which designates a situation where the subject has not sufficient force to resist or has not sufficiently reflected. Even though enkrateia is not a virtue in itself, it is the condition for the virtue of temperance (sophrosyne).18 4. Finally, the aim or end of the transformation of the subject as temperance (sophrosyne): The telos of the ethical subject is linked to freedom and truth. The ideal for temperance is, contrary to Christian ethics, not a condition of purity and powerlessness. A true temperate man is whoever masters temperance at the height of his power. When he can restrain himself from excess, he has transformed himself according to the virtue. The opposite of sophrosyne is akolasia, which is reflected in choices with bad consequences. Foucault’s work in these two volumes has led to the misconception that he finds a ground for his own ethical stand. And as Foucault scholars such 17  Foucault, The history of sexuality. The use of pleasure, 33–95; l’Histoire de la sexualité. L’usage des plaisirs, 47–127. 18  Pierre Pellegrin, Dictionnaire Aristote (Paris: Éd.Ellipses, 2007), 63–64.

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as Fréderic Gros and Espen Schaanning have argued, he does not attempt to use the Greeks as a way of justifying a modern ethics.19 Nor does he try to show that Christian sexual ethic was mistaken. We see here the same challenge in a work on ethics that we have discussed in epistemology and philosophy of science. My point here is that this misconception stems from “position-driven” thinking, which depends on justification as a main concern for philosophy. But this is not what Foucault does as a philosopher. By describing this “moral problematization of desire”, Foucault tries to articulate a set of ethical problems allowing us to compare them to our own. So, is he then a relativist? Such a question is at the same time misleading and indicates the problem. What is interesting to observe is how difficult it seems to approach the question of truth without claiming a justified position toward truth. These positions we find in textbooks on ontology, epistemology, or ethics like “realism”, “social constructivism”, “relativism”, and indeed “fallibilism”. They all differ on the question of truth which depends on the question of justification. But can we evaluate knowledge, ethics, and justification in general without examining the “context of problematization” they stem from? If we think in terms of philosophical positions and justification, it seems difficult to understand Foucault’s project. The distinction between the two contexts reenters here. Jean-François Braunstein writes that, until Thomas Kuhn and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,20 the Anglo-Saxon tradition of philosophy of science “chose to neglect studying the ‘context of discovery’, only investigating the ‘context of justification’”.21 Rather than interpreting Kuhn as taking an epistemological stand on the truth content and justification of science (from different perspectives Kuhn could perhaps be called a realist, relativist, or fallibilist), Kuhn instead discusses what surrounds science and the processes to which science is related. In a similar vein, Foucault is occupied with the questions and problems which spur ethical reflection in a specific period and in a specific culture and compares this with his own. 19  Espen Schaanning, Fortiden i våre hender, vol. 2 (Oslo: Unipubforlag, 2001), 666–676; Fréderic Gros, “Le gouvernement de soi,” Science Humaines. Hors-série special no. 19 (2014). 20  Thomas Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 21  Braunstein, “Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault,” 933.

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This is what I call the “context of problematization”. What does problematization mean?

Problematization and Thought In his books, Foucault seems to see all Greek ethics as identical. So what should we make of the fact that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the stoics, the epicureans, the cynics, and so on all had very different notions of the cosmos and of the place and role of the individual in the cosmos?22 Foucault was aware of this and gave the differences some attention. He also gave room in the third volume to discuss the changes in sexual relations and ethics that took place in Greek thought from the classic to the Hellenic period. But by and large Foucault views all Greek ethics as essentially being centered on “care of self” (souci de soi—in Greek epimeleia heautou).23 I would say that what allows Foucault to omit significant differences24 between the Greek schools of thought is his emphasis on “problematization” (problématication). Rather than focusing on the different answers and solutions the Greek philosophers gave to various questions, Foucault focuses on the problems they all shared. This takes us into a very significant relation that Foucault develops between his discipline and the theme he discusses. Foucault was from 1970 professor at the Collège de France in History of systems of thought. This has a very specific meaning. The history of thought (histoire de la pensée) is different from various kinds of history (history of ideas, of mentalities, etc.) on the one hand and various kinds of philosophy (normative ethics, philosophy of science) on the other. Instead of discussing philosophy, Foucault is occupied with thinking and thought:

 Pierre Hadot, “Spiritual exercises,” in Philosophy as a way of life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).  Michel Foucault, l’Histoire de la sexualité. Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 53–95. 24  Foucault refers explicitly to the work of Pierre Hadot who in Philosophy as a Way of Life writes about how the different cosmological views in the various Greek and Hellenic schools of thought led to the development of different techniques for conducting one’s life (Hadot, “Spiritual exercises”). Though to a large extent sympathetic to Foucault’s interpretations, Hadot wrote two critical articles on Foucault: “Reflections on the Idea of the ‘Cultivation of the Self’” (Hadot, “Spiritual exercises”) and “Un dialogue interrompu avec Michel Foucault. Convergences et divergences” (Pierre Hadot, “Exercices spirituelles”), in Exercices spirituelles et philosophie antique (Paris: Albin Michel, 2002). 22 23

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It seemed to me there was one element that was capable of describing the history of thought—this was what one could call the element of problems or, more exactly, problematizations. […] Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct that gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting; to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning; its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.25

The task of the philosopher is thus to re-excavate “lost” problems. It is, however, unclear whether problematization is something that Foucault does or something that is at play in the historical documents and texts he analyzes. As far as I see it, they are one and the same. The Greek philosophers think about their sexual conduct and thus “step back from this way of acting or reacting”. But it is Foucault who reconstructs the underlying problematization common to all the Greek philosophers, allowing him to designate it as a “culture of self” (culture de soi). Furthermore, it is by contrasting the Greek ethics of sexuality to both Christian and secular ethics of sexuality that Foucault manages to problematize his own culture’s notion of sexuality. So we are engaged in multilayered problematics here. In order to determine problematization further, he states that they stem from difficulties defined by a situation or context: To one single set of difficulties, several responses can be made. And most of the time different responses actually are proposed. But what must be understood is what makes them simultaneously possible: it is the point in which their simultaneity is rooted; it is the soil that can nourish them all in their diversity and sometimes in spite of their contradictions … to take a very remote example, the diverse schools of philosophy of the Hellenic period proposed different solutions to the difficulties of traditional sexual ethics.26

So, prior to problematization, there exist “preexisting” difficulties. And the latter are through the former being developed into “conditions in which possible responses can be given”: 25  Michel Foucault in Paul Rabinow, “Polemics, politics, and problematizations: an interview with Michel Foucault” in Ethics: Subjectivity and truth (New York: The New Press, 1997), 117. 26   Foucault, “Polemics, politics, and problematizations: an interview with Michel Foucault,” 117.

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This development of a given into a question, this transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response, this is what constitutes the point of problematization and the specific work of thought.27

If we understand this correctly, then problematization is the point between difficulties and obstacles, on the one hand, and the various responses and solutions, on the other. Or, put differently, in order to present an answer, a problem must first be articulated to which the answer is an answer. The Foucault scholar Judith Revel writes this about the concept of problématisation: “[T]he history of thought is interested in the way problems are constituted for thought and for what strategies are developed in answering them.”28 It thus seems that thought emerges in the tension between the articulation of problems and the choice of answers. But I would also like to add that thought also emerges through the tension between one set of problems and another set of problems. In Foucault’s case the contrast between the Greek pre-Christian ethics of sexuality, on the one hand, and Christian thinking and secular ethics, on the other, is what creates the obstacle for understanding Foucault. The challenges with understanding the Greek ethics of sexuality (and perhaps thinking in general?) is not that we do not understand their ideas (on the level of ideas and practices they appear liberal compared to the later regulation through prohibitions), but that we do not understand that their problems were different than our own.

Fallibilism and Ethics When it comes to fallibilism, in relation to the domain of ethics of the sexuality and the history of thought, is it meaningful to determine whether the Greeks were correct or mistaken in their view of sexuality in comparison to the Christian and secular version of sexuality? Whereas the latter versions are focused on the sexual act itself, prohibitions of certain sexual relations and the liberation from such prohibitions, and the importance of sexuality for identity, the former is focused on transforming the subject into an ethical subject through reflecting upon a number of factors. If such 27   Foucault, “Polemics, politics, and problematizations: an interview with Michel Foucault,” 117. 28  Judith Revel, Dictionnaire Foucault (Paris: Éd.Ellipses, 2008), 109–111.

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a comparison were to lead us to conclude that the Greeks understood what sexuality really was or that the modern secular view of sexuality is closer to the Greeks, then we would be mistaken, for the Greeks did not think like us, regardless of whether we have a Christian or secular worldview. Therefore, in discussing who was right, it is not only difficult but impossible to answer. By focusing on the problematization of sexuality and not the ideas about sexual acts, identity, and preferences, Foucault underlines how the Greek answers and “our” answers do not respond to the same problems. In laying emphasis on austerity—not prohibition—the problematization of pleasure and ethical conduct Foucault stresses, as far as I see it, how different the Greeks thought from both Christian and secular thought. They did not have a notion such as sin as a cause for understanding ill conduct. Neither did they have a conception of abnormality as a factor for explaining such conduct. Following the philosopher’s narrative, it does not seem like the Greeks laid emphasis either on the authentic reasons for unethical behavior or on the consequences of the acts for others. What lies at the core is rather the relation to oneself, which makes this a culture of the self (culture de soi).29 Thus, all moral action [i]nvolves a relationship with the reality in which it is carried out, and a relationship with the self. The latter is not simply “self-awareness” but self-­ formation as an “ethical subject”, a process in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice.30

This can be seen in the tension between continence (enkrateia) and incontinence (akrasia) and between sophrosyne and akolasia.31 The negative elements, which lead to ethical errors and are obstacles to obtaining enkrateia (continence), do not have a different source but are part of oneself. They are forces in oneself that must be mastered but not erased. If we accept that it is misleading to attach Foucault’s books to one position or another, and that even such an open and “sympathetic” position such as “fallibilism” would miss the mark, then what is the root cause of such a misinterpretation? I have already indicated how the French tradition in philosophy of science as an alternative “style” in thinking is  Foucault, l’Histoire de la sexualité. Le souci de soi.  Foucault, l’Histoire de la sexualité. L’usage des plaisirs, 40; The history of sexuality. The use of pleasure, 28. 31  Foucault, l’Histoire de la sexualité. L’usage des plaisirs; Pellegrin, Dictionnaire Aristote. 29 30

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important for Foucault. But when it comes to this particular theme of ancient Greek thought, some of the main ideas in Foucault’s work are explicitly inspired by Pierre Hadot, the contemporary French scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.32 In his books Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, Philosophy as a Way of Life, and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? Hadot writes that the ancient conception of philosophy was almost the opposite of what it became. When the Greek traditions of philosophy were systematized in the middle ages, the theoretical aspect was underlined and the practical side of philosophy lost. According to Hadot, this image of philosophy as a world of conflicting theoretical systems opposing one another is the modern view of philosophy. The present notion of philosophy is that all philosophers try to invent a new systematic and abstract theory and explication of the universe, language, and so on and that they deduce doctrines and consequences from these theories which “thus invites to make a certain life choice, to adopt a certain way of conduct”.33 This is relevant to the question of fallibilism, since the role of philosophy is to find ways to justify claims before making choices. Put differently, the role of such a philosophy is to solve problems and to find new and better solutions to already posed questions, rather than formulating new questions. An ethical choice must be deliberated theoretically first, right? The elaboration of method (prior to scientific studies) thus becomes the most important philosophical task in order to eliminate errors. Hadot’s point is not to say that the ancient Greek philosophy was not theoretical, nor that they were not concerned with justification. Instead, he claims that theoretical elaborations were secondary to a primary life choice, rendering practice and choice simultaneous to theory: The choice of life mode [mode de vie] is not situated at the end of the philosophical activity … but on the contrary at the origin, in a complex interaction between critical reaction to other existential attitudes, the global vision of a certain way of life and view the world, and the voluntary decision itself.34

From such a perspective even fallibilism seems to come short of reaching the “context of problematization” which legitimizes how Hadot and Foucault question how we think. For the issue at hand is not that our 32  Pierre Hadot, “Avant-propos,” in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (Paris: Gallimard, 1995); Hadot, “Spiritual exercises”; Hadot, “Exercices spirituelles.” 33  Hadot, “Spiritual exercises,” 17. 34  Hadot, “Avant-propos,” 18.

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answers might be mistaken, but rather that the problems we try to answer are not the only ones. Foucault’s emphasis on thought and problematization and the history of thought helps us in articulating more positively what thinking might consist of. He gives the outline of an approach to the humanities in general and to philosophy in particular: Firstly, thought and the history of thought are not limited to philosophy alone but extend to all the humanist disciplines. Secondly, problematization does not force the humanist disciplines to copy and adopt a natural scientific demand for justification.

Bibliography Braunstein, Jean-François. 2002. Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault. In Les philosophes et la science, ed. Pierre Wagner. Paris: Gallimard Folio. Canguilhem, Georges. 2000. Idéologie et rationalité. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin. ———. 2003. Le normal et le pathologique. Paris: PUF. Foucault, Michel. 1984a. l’Histoire de la sexualité. L’usage des plaisirs. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1984b. l’Histoire de la sexualité. Le souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1990. The History of Sexuality. The Care of the Self. London: Penguin Books. ———. 1992. The History of Sexuality. The Use of Pleasure. London: Penguin Books. Glynos, Jason, and David Howarth. 2007. Logics of Critical Explanation in Political and Social Theory. London: Routledge. Gros, Fréderic. 2014. Le gouvernement de soi. Science Humaines. Hors-série special no. 19. Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Avant-propos. In Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1999. Spiritual Exercises. In Philosophy as a Way of Life. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2002. Exercices Spirituelles. In Exercices spirituelles et philosophie antique. Paris: Albin Michel. Hetherington, Stephen. Fallibilism. In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Downloaded at: https://www.iep.utm.edu/fallibil/. Accessed, August 26, 2020. Kuhn, Thomas. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lecourt, Dominique. 2001. Que sais je? La philosophie des Sciences. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France. Macherey, Pierre. 2009. De Canguilhem à Foucault. La force des normes. Paris: La fabrique éditions. Pellegrin, Pierre. 2007. Dictionnaire Aristote. Paris: Éd.Ellipses.

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Popper, Karl. 2002. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London/New York: Routledge. Rabinow, Paul, and Michel Foucault. 1997. Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault. In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: The New Press. Revel, Judith. 2008. Dictionnaire Foucault. Paris: Éd.Ellipses. Schaanning, Espen. 2000. Fortiden i våre hender. Vol. 2. Oslo: Unipubforlag. Utaker, Arild. 2018. Tenker hjernen? Språk, menneske, teknikk. Oslo: Vidarforlaget.

CHAPTER 4

Fallibilism: A Philosophical-Pneumatological Apologetic Amos Yong

Introduction The quest for truth implies, and often involves, trial and error. To affirm that the mind aspires to discern the pragmatic import, referential connections, and the systematic coherence of beliefs requires that one affirms the fallibility and corrigibility of those same beliefs,1 meaning that one can proceed tentatively from one’s beliefs even if one cannot with certainty justify or guarantee the truth of those beliefs. Experience has taught us that we have been mistaken before and will continue to gain in knowledge if we are open to correction. Now, beliefs can be wrong and misguided for  I argue for truth as correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic in the fifth chapter of my Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective, New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies Series (Burlington, Vt., and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2002); this chapter adapts and lightly expands on section 5.3 at the end of my alethiological argument. 1

A. Yong (*) Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_4

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many reasons.2 In what follows, I want to explore the sources of epistemic fallibility along three fronts: the partiality of knowledge, the perspectival character of knowledge, and the finitude of knowledge. More precisely, since our question involves not only knowing in general but also theological knowing more particularly, I wish to provide a pneumatological assist for our philosophical and theological considerations of fallibilism. I have been working for over the last two decades on what I call the pneumatological imagination, a Christian way of knowing and engaging the world given our en-spirited nature, animated by the divine breath of life generally and, for those attempting to follow in the footsteps of Jesus the Messiah, also drawing from and participating in the same spirit that moved him and that he has also since poured out upon the world.3 St. Paul did say that all theological knowing is pneumatically mediated: “these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:10–11).4 A segment of my argument here, however, is that if theological knowing is pneumatic in nature, then so also is the fallibility of such knowledge pneumatologically accounted for. One caveat, however, before proceeding. Some might argue that if fallibilism is true, then any defense of fallibilism is itself fallible and thereby unreliable. Such a skeptical stance, however, operates at a theoretical level of abstraction rather than at the lived level where ideas or beliefs are never merely speculative but always engaging with reality. It is at this level of theology as lived knowledge that I wish to engage,5 and hence, the apologetic argument developed here is less that at the analytic level and more that of the phenomenological and pragmatic sort encountered in daily

2  Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: The Free Press, 1991). 3  See my “The Pneumatological Imagination; The Logic of Pentecostal Theology,” in Routledge Handbook of Pentecostal Theology, ed. Wolfgang Vondey (New York and London: Routledge, 2020), ch. 14. 4  Unless otherwise indicated, all scriptural quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. 5  See also the linking of beliefs and practices in my Learning Theology: Tracking the Spirit of Christian Faith (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018).

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experience.6 In other words, my argument for fallibilism is open to correction precisely in and through the process of dialogical engagement with others (you the reader included). Further, the same apostle who urged that even theological knowing is pneumatologically mediated also said, in the same letter, that “now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). This chapter thus considers the provisionality of knowledge from philosophical (pragmatically and performatively, predominantly) and theological (pneumatological, more marginally) perspectives.

The Partiality of Knowledge That human knowledge is partial should go without saying: only God knows all things, and since human beings are not divine, their knowledge is thus not exhaustive—hence partial. However, an examination of what partiality entails and its role in the epistemic process will contribute to our understanding of both truth and error. To begin with, the partiality and limited nature of knowledge undergirds also the notion that knowledge can accumulate or increase. How does this happen? For the knower, both over space and time, that is, experientially mediated. Things are not known directly or immediately. Rather, all knowledge is inferential and semiotic. As inferential, knowledge is reliant on memory (perceptual facts) drawn from sense perceptions (perceptual judgments). Knowers are always already one step removed from the things known. This applies also to knowledge of ourselves. Is it the case that self-­ knowledge is immediate? Although the Cartesian cogito at one point counted as evidence for non-mediated knowledge of the self, it no longer carries much authority. Is it not rather the case that self-awareness is itself a cognitive construct that is entirely mediated? The Buddhists understood such mediation to occur through the five aggregates: form, feelings or sensations, perception or experience, discrimination or will, and 6  I am otherwise disinclined to apologetics as classically construed in the tradition of analytic philosophy and theology; hence it is with a certain degree of irony that I am deploying this word in the subtitle of this chapter. For more of the dialogical form of apologetic interaction that I would embrace and engage, see Yong, “Toward a Relational Apologetics in Global Context: A Review Essay on Benno van den Toren’s Christian Apologetics as Cross-Cultural Dialogue,” Philosophia Christi 14:2 (2012): 437–45.

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consciousness.7 The underlying question, of course, is whether or not there are any direct, immediate intuitions which count as knowledge. Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, as we know, answered in the negative.8 At the level of perceptual facts, knowledge is intuitively and affectively felt. But, brought to full consciousness and articulation, all knowledge proceeds inferentially through signs. Another way to make this point is to observe that knowledge is predicated on the absence—that is, “distance”—of the known object from the knowing subject. The distances between knower and known cover a wide range. In some cases, knowledge is mediated through a teacher, an elder, tradition, or some other kind of authority. In the case of religious knowledge, perhaps the known is mediated by faith. In the case of knowing ourselves, we read our own bodies and discern our own feelings. In the case of the knowledge of God, the distance is, in one respect, infinite. As the Psalmist said long ago, “There is none like you” (Ps. 86:8; Is. 45–47, passim), and therefore God is the one without analogy. Methodist theologian W. Stephen Gunter’s response is that such authentic theological and religious knowledge therefore arises precisely through our participating in the reality of God.9 Put in other words, the knowledge of God indwells us even as we indwell the divine reality, and both mutually precisely through the Spirit who has been given to and poured out upon us. Theological knowledge is pneumatologically mediated if it is to be knowledge at all.

7  See also my “Buddhist-Christian Dialogue on Human Becoming: Next Steps for Pneumatological Anthropology,” in A Visionary Approach: Lynn A. de Silva and the Prospects of Buddhist-Christian Encounter, eds. Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Elizabeth J.  Harris (St. Ottilien, Germany: EOS, 2021), EOS, forthcoming. 8  Peirce was a leading pragmatist philosopher whose ideas, mediated to me through my doktorvater philosopher Robert Cummings Neville and Jesuit charismatic theologian Donald L. Gelpi, I have found helpful for thinking pneumatologically and trinitarianly; see my essay “The Demise of Foundationalism and the Retention of Truth: What Evangelicals Can Learn from C. S. Peirce” Christian Scholar’s Review 29:3 (Spring 2000): 563–88, reprinted in The Dialogical Spirit: Christian Reason and Theological Method for the Third Millennium (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2014), ch. 1. 9  W.  Stephen Gunter, Resurrection Knowledge: Recovering the Gospel for a Postmodern Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999), 87. Gunter draws primarily from Polanyi’s notion of “tacit knowing” and applies it to the knowledge of religious faith. Alternative conceptualizations of this aspect of the pneumatological imagination might include Kierkegaard’s notion of knowledge and truth as subjectivity, William Lynch’s knowledge as grounded in faith, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s argument for faith and truth as personal.

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Knowledge is also partial since it is semiotic. As mediated by signs, knowledge is fundamentally conveyed by ideas. Now ideas are generals. They are universals abstracted—in Peirce’s terms, abduced, inferred, or hypothesized—from the reality that is experientially perceived. Thus, all knowledge is general and universal even if the objects of knowledge are determinate particulars. If the preceding account of movement from experience through perceptual judgments through perceptual facts provided by Peirce is correct, then knowledge (perceptual facts) is one step removed from basic, inarticulate beliefs (perceptual judgments) and two steps removed from the richness of the world and of our experience of the world. Process thinkers make similar claims using an alternative vocabulary. Ronald Farmer, for example, writes: [B]ecause process thought conceives of reality as a fluid environment composed of myriads of internally related momentary events (actual entities) rather than a world of discrete substantial objects, words can never be understood in a univocal sense. The application of a name to a group of entities—such as those entities comprising this “page” at this moment— requires that some aspects of that actuality be lifted out of the complex and dynamic set of relationships within which it occurs (its concrete connectedness) and that other aspects of the actuality be ignored—such as its relationship to the tree from which it came and the hand which now holds it. Consequently, language is always abstract—an imprecise, incomplete, and indeterminate representation of concrete actuality. The plurisignificant nature of language so conceived is obvious. Due to the “elliptical” character of language, each word is potentially capable of designating a whole host of meanings; no word can indicate precisely one singular and individual meaning.10

Whatever else one may think about the details of Whitehead’s cosmology, that we no longer think in the static categories of Hellenistic philosophy scarcely needs to be argued.11 Given this shift to an ontology of 10  Ronald L. Farmer, Beyond the Impasse: The Promise of a Process Hermeneutic. Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 13 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 104, emphasis orig.; see also Stephen T.  Franklin, Speaking from the Depths: Alfred North Whitehead’s Hermeneutical Metaphysics of Propositions, Experience, Symbolism, Language, and Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 266. 11   See Amos Yong, “Personal Selfhood(?) and Human Experience in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism,” Paideia Project: Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy (1998), available at http://www.bu.edu/wcp/MainPPer.htm

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becoming, the fluid nature of thought and language is assumed to reflect the dynamic nature of reality itself. This means, however, that knowledge is partial not only because of the mental processes—inference, universals semiosis, and so on—involved, but also because the very nature of what is known is, in this respect, partial or incomplete. The world is not static but evolving or becoming. Things are incomplete in this sense. Sure, they are what they are from moment to moment and, in each moment, constitute themselves as some value or other. This axiological aspect (to which we will return later) does not, however, mean that no further developments of the thing will occur. Rather, the dynamic character of our experience of the world depends on its evolving and becoming nature. As the biblical author writes, “what we will be has not yet been revealed” (1 Jn. 3:2). The dynamism of reality means knowledge is itself dynamic and partial, not only since the future is vaguely knowable but also because the richness of the spacious present is gone before it can be fully delineated, and only fragments of the past remain—memories, archaeological sites, geological strata, and so on—to be interpreted. Knowledge is therefore always in via, partial, and obscure, as through a glass darkly. Theological knowledge is especially so since God is “able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20b). It is eschatological in that it increases as inquiry progresses across space-time toward the eschaton. This eschatological orientation of theology is critical and should not be overlooked.12 In fact, precisely because knowledge is eschatological, it is also pneumatological. Thus is St. Paul’s claim about the dimness of knowing growing in eschatological light (1 Cor. 13) situated within a broader discussion of charismatic ecclesiology and epistemology: not just that we need prophetic gifts and gifts of tongues and interpretation of tongues (1 Cor. 14), but also that the Spirit enables recognition of Jesus’ lordship; that the Spirit gives many and diverse gifts including epistemic gifts of wisdom, knowledge, and discernment; and that the Spirit animates many members of the body of Christ, each of whom is needed precisely for what they bring, in and through the Spirit, for the edification of the whole (1 Cor. 12  See Stanley J.  Grenz, “Articulating the Christian Belief-Mosaic: Theological Method after the Demise of Foundationalism,” in Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method, ed. John G. Stackhouse, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 107–38; cf. also my eschatologically structured Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global Christianity, images and commentary by Jonathan A.  Anderson (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2014).

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12).13 My point is this: the apostle’s account of pneumatic knowing presumes the partiality of knowledge relative to each of us: precisely because our knowledge is limited, we not only gain from but need the contributions of others, exactly what the Spirit provides. The partiality of knowledge means not only that knowledge is incomplete but that error is possible. Errors occur because we fail to be discerning or discriminating about our experiences, because we misjudge inferentially, because our memory fails us. Error occurs when our teachers are wrong, when our authorities are undependable, when our traditions fail. Error occurs when we presume to have overcome the distance between ourselves as knowing subjects and what is known. Error occurs when we confound the partiality of our ideas with reality as it is in its exhaustiveness. Error happens when we ignore the knowledge of others or minimize their relevance for our own gain and correction. Error occurs when we mistakenly assume yesterday’s knowledge holds for today or that today’s will hold for tomorrow. Sure, it might, but we’d need to check from day to day to ensure that it does.

The Perspectival Character of Knowledge Even eternity is insufficient for a community of inquirers to exhaust all inductive experiments regarding a certain item of knowledge.14 This is, at least in part, because all experimentation proceeds perspectivally. Human investigators and entire communities of researchers are specifically located and particularly situated its various respects. No one has the God’s eye view on reality. Knowledge thus arises out of our being “located” in particular “places” and is (to put it one way) relative to those locations and places, or (to put it another way) inflected with the biases which accrue from those contexts. Things are “observed” or “experienced” by human beings from particular perspectives. Inferences and interpretations of those inferences (signs) therefore need to be qualified with respect to our understanding of the contexts within which those 13  See also my discussion of Pauline charismatic ecclesiology in The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), ch. 4. 14  I argue this point also in another context, relative to the capacity of the resurrection body to eternally grow in relationship and knowledge; see Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007), ch. 9.

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experiences and interpretations emerge. Three such respects stand out: the biological, the cultural-linguistic, and the intentional/purposive.15 The biological aspects that impinge upon knowledge are complex. To begin with, biological embodiment means we are confined to being at one place at one time. Here, biology connects with geography. Growing up in Taiwan results in certain habits of thinking that growing up in Pretoria does not inculcate. Second, are we male or female, right-brain or left-brain dominant, blessed with a high IQ or ordinarily equipped, and so on? Answers to these and other like questions are important in mapping out various cognitive tendencies. Third, are our bodily organs healthy? Are they functioning as they should? All too often, we take for granted the role that our organs of sense play in what we know. Fourth, what about the physiological and psychological aspects of ourselves? We are often unconcerned about these until we experience depression, mental fatigue, stress, and the like, and our normal functionality is impaired. Yet since our bodies need to be sustained—by food, rest, physical exercise, interpersonal interaction, and so on—we have, generally speaking, cultivated the appropriate habits by which such sustenance is ensured. Biological, physiological, and psychological considerations all determine, at least in part, our ability and to infer, discern, and interpret fairly clearly about some things (those that have direct impact on our well-being) and less clearly about others. In short, knowledge is that which emerges from what philosopher Alvin Plantinga calls properly functioning cognitive equipment operating in congenial cognitive environments according to a process that has been successfully designed—whether by evolution or by God (Plantinga favors the latter hypothesis)—to produce true beliefs.16 Our interests and attention spans, of course, follow this trajectory set out by our epistemic equipment. The cultural-linguistic dimension refers to the environmental—physical and social—context of inquiry. This includes, first, the geographical, topographical, and social features of the landscape—that is, deserts versus coastal regions, rural versus urban, a country home versus an assisted-­ living situation, and so on. Certain skills required for success in some 15  Robert Cummings Neville, Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), ch. 4. 16  See Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 10; cf. also the other two volumes of Plantinga’s trilogy: Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Warranted Christian Belief (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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situations are not at all helpful in others. Second, the cultural dimension involves the narratives, myths, and traditions with which one is raised. These are deeply rooted not only in the actual stories that are told but in the ways in which the entire culture is itself organized, from its architecture to its rituals of interpersonal interaction. As such, certain values are highlighted as crucial to cultural awareness and survival, while others are neglected or ignored. Third, and interconnected with the previous two, the language(s) available present(s) ways of imagining and talking that get at some things better than it does others. A culture’s language encodes semiotically its values and provides it with the means of engaging those values. Further, a culture’s language reflects its landscape. Urban cultures have complex semiotic systems which order traffic or predict weather patterns, and so on; rural cultures have equally complex, but much less technologically sophisticated, semiotic systems to do the same. One’s cultural-­linguistic locatedness therefore shapes the perspectives that drive engagement and thinking. Pneumatologically, at this point, I must of course call attention to the Pentecost narrative in Acts 2, which confirms that the divine spirit speaks to us through many languages, each with its own specific and particular capacities of communication. Multi-culturality here is presented as good: the many tongues from those gathered from every (then) known nation (Acts 2:6) around the Mediterranean Sea as far as the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8) are redeemed for divine purposes. Knowledge of the infinite God thus resounded in and through the many voices and perspectives.17 Nevertheless, although biologically, geographically, and socio-­culturally mediated, the intentional/purposive dimension cannot be overlooked in any discussion of epistemic perspectivalism. Habits are the result of long processes of interpretations directed toward successful living. Thinking is itself a process of habituated activity. But why pursue the development of some habits and not others? This is the teleological aspect of interpretation, even if such is intrinsically connected to one’s biological constitution and cultural-linguistic conditioning. All knowledge is teleological to the extent that it seeks to provide some sort of order and significance, whether that be of thought, of self, of self-in-society, and so on. To go back to 17  For more perspective on Acts 2  in this regard, see my The Hermeneutical Spirit: Theological Interpretation and the Scriptural Imagination for the 21st Century (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2017).

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habituated activity, these arise so as to enable efficiency in our engagement with the world. Practical exigencies drive other kinds of thoughtful activity. In more theoretical activities such as philosophizing or theologizing, the purposes are intrinsically connected to the unresolved or problematic aspects bequeathed by the cultural-linguistic tradition(s), as well as to practical issues related to biological and/or cultural situations. The point is that all thinking is conditioned by the biological, cultural-­ linguistic, and purposive contexts of inquiry. These contexts determine, in some ways, what is considered to be valuable or important. Truthful knowledge therefore requires multiple—perhaps an infinite number of— perspectives, each approaching the object of knowledge with various motivations for inquiry from a particular angle and asking distinct questions. The more perspectives are available, the better our overall understanding of any particular phenomenon. In this regard, four Gospels are better than one, and better to have Pauline, Lukan, and Johannine, among others, schools of early Christian thought rather than just any one. In our contemporary context, emphasis is therefore placed on multi- and inter-­ disciplinary investigation since diverse starting points, habits, languages, and motivations provide differing, albeit complementary, lenses on the object of inquiry.18 Now as we can hold together two (or more) perspectives or facts without compromising them, so is it the case that there is and is not a “distance” between the knowing subject and the known object. Yes, given metaphysical realism, the one is not the other. However, our situatedness amidst the buzzing developments of the world means that human knowers are not only transcendent to what is known but also thoroughly immersed in the knowing process. Human knowers are not subjects completely detached from known objects. Ironically, then, while there is certainly partiality of knowledge which arises from the “distance” between knower and known, there is also distortion that arises out of the coinherence of the knower and known whereby both participate and indwell, albeit in different ways, the same world, location, or “space.” Hence the

18  For example, Amos Yong, “The Science, Sighs, and Signs of Interpretation: An Asian American Post-Pentecostal Hermeneutics in a Multi-, Inter-, and Trans-cultural World,” in Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity, eds. L.  William Oliverio Jr. and Kenneth J. Archer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 177–95.

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self’s situatedness vis-à-vis the objects of knowledge does not enable truly objective epistemic engagement.19 But if human knowledge is always perspectivally emergent and therefore can never exhaust the object(s) of knowledge, how then can true knowledge be attained? Can the limitations of perspective be overcome? To be honest means to admit, No, at least theoretically. Practically, however, successful engagement with the world is the product of more rather than less valid knowledge. Thus, charismatic theologian Evan Howard, following Jonathan Edwards (see his discussion of the twelfth sign in the classic Religious Affections), speaks of moral but not absolute certainty.20 We can know in our hearts, bodies, and habits enough to act responsibly, and these can be modified as needed and so long as we remain open to such rectification. As such, error could be the result of illusions generated from the standpoint of inquiry. Error could also derive in part from not discerning the proper respects or contexts of any particular interpretation or claim to truth—that is, not understanding how one’s biological constitution, cultural-­linguistic formation, or purposive intentions produce, develop, and follow out certain inferences rather than others. Further, error will result when we either ignore or dismiss the voices and perspectives of others, both those speaking in our own languages and those speaking in other tongues. Finally, error may just be the presence of bias developed from one’s locatedness. Bias itself is unavoidable since it means nothing less than having a specific perspective, which we all do. However, not realizing one’s particular perspective means we remain ignorant that other perspectives exist. At worst, bias develops into prejudice which minimizes the value of other perspectives or arrogantly asserts one’s own perspective regardless of the merits or demerits of that perspective vis-à-vis others.

19  For more on the subjectivity of knowledge, see also my essay “Observation-ParticipationSubjunctivation: Methodological Play and Meaning-Making in the Study of Religion and Theological Studies,” Religious Studies and Theology 31:1 (2012): 17–40. 20  See Evan B.  Howard, Affirming the Touch of God: A Psychological and Philosophical Investigation of Christian Discernment (Lanham, New York, and Oxford: University Press of America, 2000), 123, 270–275, 286.

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The Finitude of Knowledge Finally, knowledge is fallible because it is affected (or infected, as the case may be) by finitude. Now finitude in and of itself simply points to the fact of creaturehood. Human beings are creatures and, as such, subject to the conditions of contingency, ontological dependence, and relativity. Such is the human situation. In this sense, insofar as epistemic fallibilism is a trait of human finitude, it characterizes what it means to be truly human rather than divine, creatures rather than Creator. Adam and Eve in the garden (however they are to be understood) were epistemically fallible as finite created beings. It is this fact which explains (in part) the fall from grace, rather than arguing the reverse, that the fall explains epistemic fallibility.21 Even in the case of Jesus, insofar as he is understood to be truly human, his personal, social, and religious life should be understood in developmental rather than static terms, with all of the attendant ambiguities which characterize human growth and social development.22 As such, error may be the result of under-developing or not cultivating properly one’s habits of engagement. Yet there is more to be said about finitude since it characterizes not only creaturehood but fallen creatureliness. Here, the human condition is not just one of innocent participation of knowing subjects and known objects in the common field of creation. Rather, our mutual indwelling is fallen creation: subjects and objects are enmeshed in, entangled by, and thoroughly caught up with the world of sin. In theological terms, human beings are not only potentially but effectively fallible and fallen. Kierkegaard thus recognized the human situation to be enveloped by despair, fear, anxiety, and melancholy. As such, humankind’s existence is, as Heidegger remarked, a “being-toward-death.”23 Mortality and death is not only possible but inevitable, uniquely individualized, non-relative, indefinite, and cannot be outstripped.

21  James K. A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012). 22  See Donald L. Gelpi, The Firstborn of Many: A Christology for Converting Christians, 3 vols., Marquette Studies in Theology 20–22 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001), vol. 1, chs. 6–8. 23  See discussion of this Heideggerian notion in Calvin Schrag, Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), esp. 67–118.

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Given the finitude that is endemic to fallen human existence, human knowledge is thus radically marked by sin, understood here both in the biblical sense as falling short of the mark (perhaps hampered by finitude) and in the existential sense of the willful resistance against and rejection of God and the divine intentions for creation.24 Here, it would be less appropriate to speak of error since there are connotations to the making of errors which do not imply a thoroughgoing culpability. But epistemic fallibilism in this case should be understood in moral terms. It is, as philosopher Paul Ricoeur puts it, the “fault” which not only makes error possible, but the tear or the rift which signals weakness and thereby entertains temptation, and the flaw which has already given into that temptation.25 Fallibility is thus willful activity, whether that be willful negligence to the facts of experience, willful disengagement with the world, willful misrepresentation of such engagement, willful and irresponsible exercise of epistemic judgment, or, also, the willful denial that one’s knowledge is partial, perspectival, finite, and fallible, this last normally called idolatry. Moreover, each of these cases could be compounded by extraneous factors. The emergent knowledge claims in each instance could also be misused or abused by the self-centered or egocentric will to power of personal agents, could be intentionally directed toward deceptive and sinful ends, or could be the means by which destructive habits of thought and activity are fostered, this last perhaps characterized as the work of the demonic. In each case, there is a determination on the part of personal agents to conspire against the work of the Holy Spirit. The result is deception, isolation, segregation, suffering, tragedy, evil, and, perhaps most importantly, injustice.26 Because of the fallenness and finitude of creation, “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:22–23). St. Paul in this chapter reminds us that the Spirit enables hope that our alienation and estrangement (Rom. 6–7) can be overcome and gives us the yearning and orientation toward such reconciliation with others, the 24  Here I am connecting in some ways with the classical arguments of human knowing being impacted by sin and the fall; see Stephen K. Moroney, The Noetic Effects of Sin: An Historical and Contemporary Exploration of How Sin Affects Our Thinking (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1999). 25  Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, and trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1965), esp. 203–215. 26  See also Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, ch. 7.

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world, and God. If the Spirit enables human intercession (Rom. 8:26–27), such prayers accompany if not propel living in ways appropriate “for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (8:28b). Such entails not infallibilism of belief but trust that our fallible judgments can nevertheless, by and through the divine Spirit, guide faithful discipleship.27 For these and other reasons, human knowledge is inevitably fallible. It is always in process, partial, perspectival, and infected with finitude. It is never infallible, absolute, and exhaustive. While any statement or assertion about reality or fact is either true or false, determining its truth or falsity is a triadic affair of interpretation. The conclusion might be the declaration of the statement’s truth or error. Alternatively, it also could be determined to be “undecided”—what philosopher and theologian Philip Clayton calls “three-valued logic,” akin to Peirce’s notion of vagueness that is subject to the law of non-contradiction but not to the law of the excluded middle28—thus awaiting further investigation. Certainly, the world does not stop for us because we may be undecided at any particular moment. Inquiry continues with the previous conclusions held not incorrigibly but made vulnerable to correction by the community of interpreters. Theological knowing hence chastened pneumatologically is therefore aware of the tendency to prematurely and inappropriately discern any phenomenon, hence the provisionality and fallibility of human knowing, even when mediated by the divine Spirit.29

Bibliography Clayton, Philip. 1999. Missiology Between Monologue and Cacophony. In To Stake a Claim: Mission and the Western Crisis of Knowledge, ed. J. Andrew Kirk and Kevin Vanhoozer. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. 27  See also my discussion of the pneumatology of Romans 8 in Spirit of Love: A Trinitarian Theology of Grace (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2012), ch. 7. 28  See Philip Clayton, “Missiology between Monologue and Cacophony,” in To Stake a Claim: Mission and the Western Crisis of Knowledge, eds. J. Andrew Kirk and Kevin Vanhoozer (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999), 78–95; for more on Peirce and vagueness, see my SpiritWord-Community, esp. 153–54. 29  Thanks to Thomas Hastings and Knut-Willy Sæther for invitation to participate in this project and book. Fallibilism is presumed if human beings are to remain humble before God. My colleagues embody this humility coram Deo and I am honored to be associated with them in this work.

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Farmer, Ronald L. 1997. Beyond the Impasse: The Promise of a Process Hermeneutic. In Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 13. Macon: Mercer University Press. Franklin, Stephen T. 1990. Speaking from the Depths: Alfred North Whitehead’s Hermeneutical Metaphysics of Propositions, Experience, Symbolism, Language, and Religion. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Gelpi, Donald L. 2001. The Firstborn of Many: A Christology for Converting Christians, 3 vols., Marquette Studies in Theology. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Gilovich, Thomas. 1991. How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press. Grenz, Stanley J. 2000. Articulating the Christian Belief-Mosaic: Theological Method After the Demise of Foundationalism. In Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method, ed. John G.  Stackhouse Jr. Grand Rapids: Baker. Gunter, W.  Stephen. 1999. Resurrection Knowledge: Recovering the Gospel for a Postmodern Church. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Howard, Evan B. 2000. Affirming the Touch of God: A Psychological and Philosophical Investigation of Christian Discernment. Lanham/New York/ Oxford: University Press of America. Moroney, Stephen K. 1999. The Noetic Effects of Sin: An Historical and Contemporary Exploration of How Sin Affects Our Thinking. Lanham: Lexington Books. Neville, Robert Cummings. 1989. Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature. Albany: SUNY Press. Plantinga, Alvin. 1993a. Warrant: The Current Debate. New  York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1993b. Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Warranted Christian Belief. New  York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schrag, Calvin. 1961. Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Smith, James K.A. 2012. The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic. 2nd ed. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press. Yong, Amos. 1998. Personal Selfhood(?) and Human Experience in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism. In Paideia Project: Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy. Available at http://www.bu.edu/wcp/MainPPer.htm ———. 2000. The Demise of Foundationalism and the Retention of Truth: What Evangelicals Can Learn from C.  S. Peirce. Christian Scholar’s Review 29 (3): 563–588.

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———. 2002. Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective, New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies Series. Burlington/Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2007. Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity. Waco: Baylor University Press. ———. 2011. The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God. Grand Rapids/Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. ———. 2012a. Spirit of Love: A Trinitarian Theology of Grace. Waco: Baylor University Press. ———. 2012b. Observation-Participation-Subjunctivation: Methodological Play and Meaning-Making in the Study of Religion and Theological Studies. Religious Studies and Theology 31 (1): 17–40. ———. 2012c. Toward a Relational Apologetics in Global Context: A Review Essay on Benno van den Toren’s Christian Apologetics as Cross-Cultural Dialogue. Philosophia Christi 14 (2): 437–445. ———. 2014. Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global Christianity, images and commentary by Jonathan A.  Anderson. Waco: Baylor University Press. ———. 2016. The Science, Sighs, and Signs of Interpretation: An Asian American Post-Pentecostal Hermeneutics in a Multi-, Inter-, and Trans-cultural World. In Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity, ed. L. William Oliverio Jr. and Kenneth J. Archer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. The Hermeneutical Spirit: Theological Interpretation and the Scriptural Imagination for the 21st Century. Eugene: Cascade Books. ———. 2018. Learning Theology: Tracking the Spirit of Christian Faith. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. ———. 2020. The Pneumatological Imagination; The Logic of Pentecostal Theology. In Routledge Handbook of Pentecostal Theology, ed. Wolfgang Vondey. New York/London: Routledge, ch. 14. ———. Forthcoming. Buddhist-Christian Dialogue on Human Becoming: Next Steps for Pneumatological Anthropology. In A Visionary Approach: Lynn A. de Silva and the Prospects of Buddhist-Christian Encounter, ed. Perry SchmidtLeukel and Elizabeth J. Harris. St. Ottilien: EOS.

CHAPTER 5

“Unworthy of the Earth”: Fallibilism, Place, Terra Nullius, and Christian Mission Lisa E. Dahill In 1813, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stated that Indians could not own real property since “not being Christians, but mere heathens [they are] unworthy of the earth.” —cited in Yong and Zikmund We must obey the deeper laws of this place. —Thomas Berry, “The Wild and the Sacred”

North of Ojai, CA, the Sespe Wilderness is a piece of the Los Padres National Forest, one of the most bio-diverse places on Earth. In October 2016 I encountered it for the first time, hiking with friends up the North Fork of Matilija Creek, a wild, remote, and lush canyon. The hike begins through a small ranch and moves through half a mile or so of sage scrubland before veering off along the creek. Upon entering the canyon, the trail becomes shaded with enormous oaks and an abundance of other riparian species: willows, sycamores, various alders, buckeye. Climbing over rocks along the creek’s edge, I

L. E. Dahill (*) California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_5

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noticed ferns and mosses, California lilacs, even a grove of birch trees, all accompanied by the sound of rushing, cascading water. At one point, the diversity of plants above and in the water was so great, the water itself so abundant, that I felt the weight of drought, heat, and pavement—the more typical markers of my twenty-first-century southern California suburban habitat—fall away. We climbed through stands of sugar bush, toyon, and manzanita 15 feet tall on either side of the trail, lilac shrubs buzzing and flapping with bees and butterflies, songbirds in abundance amidst the autumn seeds and berries of native plants, and finished our hike at a clearing of enormous ancient live oaks, a beautiful picnic spot. On the way back later in the day I realized that, despite having been born and raised in this bioregion, I had never before experienced a fully intact chaparral landscape, far enough from the city to have a more or less undisturbed year-round hydrology, and the astonishing abundance of life this place—what should have been the world I grew up in—is meant to contain. “Jesus Christ is the life of the world.” This central Christian faith assertion draws from key insights of the Gospel of John (John 1:4, 10:10, 11:25) and can stand for my own core theology. I have been Christian all my life, raised and baptized American Baptist, confirmed Lutheran in college, ordained to the clergy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) at age 27, a scholar of Christian spirituality through my doctoral program at the Graduate Theological Union. Fourteen years a monastic oblate, ten years a seminary professor, and five-plus years an ELCA university religion professor, I am in every sense a professional Christian. I have experienced ongoing conversions through my life, from baptism and adolescent ecstasies to a fullness of mystical connection to Jesus as an adult. I lived in Jesus for many years: studying, teaching, preaching, praying. But the conversions didn’t stop: eight years ago I experienced a new opening out of the church, out of doors; I sensed “Jesus dissolv[ing] into the natural world” and since then have been finding my primary spiritual connections not within but beyond the walls of the church. Indeed, “the chancel walls gave way, and I stepped through and realized it’s all chancel, this sacramental world, the real world.”1 Jesus Christ is still the life of the world, the life of me—but I understand this life now also in fully literal terms: prior to being the object of Christian faith, Jesus Christ in my grasp 1  Lisa E. Dahill, “Rewilding Christian Spirituality,” in Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, ed. Lisa E. Dahill and James B. Martin-Schramm (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2016), 181–82.

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of this Johannine vision is the biological life of the planet itself, accessible to every creature that breathes and inseparable from the electrons, rocks, and water interwoven with that life. From living in Ohio, where this move spiritually outdoors took place, I learned the thickness of life in a well-rained watershed: the creek, its salamanders, its mayflies and trout lilies in the spring. In southern California where I now live, on the traditional land of the Chumash People northwest of Los Angeles, the watershed is much different, its creatures more leathery, its colors more muted and soils drier. Thus, the life of each place is also very different: the life of the world visible in Ohio is not the same as that life in Thousand Oaks. I do not know the life of the world if I stay indoors reading books, even the Gospel of John; I get to know it only outdoors, spending time, looking closely, listening, touching. As a Christian, I want to foster this life in all its fullness, to enact the mission of Jesus himself (John 10:10), to live as the imago of the dei whose living Word Jesus is, creating more and more and more abundance, more and more life from each day to the next (Genesis 1:1–26). I have come to experience Christian mission as the fostering of this biological and psychic life in all abundance, in every place I live. Yet this vision of Christian mission is idiosyncratic at best, I realize.2 I may be wrong. I approach this volume’s topic of Christian mission in relation to fallibilism with a sense of my own history within this fallibility. Born in Orange County, CA, in the historic territory of the Tongva Indians, I am a direct descendant of William Bradford of the Mayflower, along with his progeny among the Puritans and later colonists whose settlements would eventually become the United States. I am thus a beneficiary of the displacement, demonization, and killing of the Native inhabitants of this continent undertaken with a Christian mandate and clear conscience by my ancestors. I live and work now on land stolen analogously—though through a different process and by different means— from its Chumash inhabitants by the soldiers and Franciscan missionaries 2  I find resonance with missiological thinking in the work of Marion Grau, Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society and Subversion (London: T&T Clark, 2011), and Joerg Rieger, especially “Theology and Mission Between Neocolonialism and Postcolonialism,” Mission Studies 21:2 (2004): 201–27. The single volume most helpful for this chapter is Remembering Jamestown: Hard Questions about Christian Mission, ed. Amos Yong and Barbara Brown Zikmund (Eugene: Pickwick, 2010), the fruit of an extraordinary 2007 conference bringing together Native American and Christian theological/missiological voices, several of whose essays I cite here.

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of the Spanish conquest of California and the Southwest U.S. Knowing this history creates a complex relationship with my Christian faith, passed down to me by those same ancestors, and with the enterprise of Christian mission itself, given its centuries of enmeshment with European and American colonial interests.3 More and more, I find myself thinking the Wampanoag who welcomed my ancestors on the Mayflower and the Chumash who greeted the Spanish here in what is now Ventura County, CA, are the ones whose ways of life we ought to be learning today. Thus I approach this project and volume grateful for its fallibilist lens, the chance to reflect critically on the Christian missionary project in specific ways and contexts.4 The focus of my chapter is a particular form of fallibilism that characterized the global colonial enterprise, including its missionary arm, namely the belief that (North and South) American, 3  These connections are not only ancestral. Members of my family on my mother’s (Chapman) side have been engaged in American Baptist mission efforts in Congo since 1957. Their primary emphases were and are education (theological education and, more recently, the founding of a university) and agricultural development. In the past eight years, those presently serving have been working on ecological questions, conservation, and integration of ecology into the vision of the Gospel being proclaimed and embodied. 4  This seems a good place to give background on how I approach this volume’s broad topic of fallibilism and its attendant intellectual and moral dispositions in relation to Christian mission. As will become clear, I am positing that a key foundation of European missionary efforts in North America (and beyond), namely the Doctrine of Discovery, rests on a series of fallacies having to do with European denial of the full humanity of the indigenous people they encountered in the “New World.” I examine the Doctrine of Discovery as a horrific case of what can happen when missionaries and those who send them, out of prejudice or a sense of cultural superiority, make fallacious claims to know more than they may possibly know, and then act on those claims as if they were infallible. By way of that negative example, I am arguing that Christian mission requires a fallibilist stance vis-à-vis knowledge of the Other in order to embody more adequately the life of the world in a given place. Thus, my chapter focuses on fallacious reasoning on the part of the European powers, the effect of which is false convictions with regard to those indigenous humans and wrong action toward them. This fallacious reasoning is central to what Charles W. Mills calls “the epistemology of ignorance”: practices of knowing that willfully misread the world in order to support the knower’s position of power. The title of Mills’ book, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), refers to pre-modern and modern European/white construction of this ignorance with the “assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular” (18). For broader immersion in post-colonial epistemologies, see, for example, Walter D.  Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000/2012), and Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006).

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African, and Australian lands being invaded were available for European conquest because they were empty of human subjects whose sovereignty needed to be respected; it was, that is, terra nullius, “empty land.” This belief and assertion is central to the Doctrine of Discovery, a piece of canon law later incorporated into international and U.S. law outlining the principles that gave title of lands “discovered” for the first time by a European explorer to the claimant’s ruler. In this chapter I will (1) first examine the Doctrine of Discovery as it impacts the Christian mission undertaken by European settlers in the present United States, (2) explore the effacing of key aspects of reality implicit in the foundational category of terra nullius, and (3) give an example of how that history took shape in my present context, in the historic Chumash lands of southern California. Finally, I will explore (4) a constructive vision of Christian mission centered in renunciation of the Doctrine and the naturalizing or indigenizing of Christian mission within a Johannine Christology of life in all its fullness. I will argue that a Christian mission of the abundance of life—orienting itself to the literal flourishing of the distinctive biotic and human life of each particular place—must be local to each place, whose contours and beauty, mystery and magic are known best by its indigenous inhabitants. Such a mission to the flourishing of the life of particular places both requires and makes possible collaboration with native people of those places, rather than their conquest, and it gives rise to forms of indigenizing Christianity distinctively different in each place, as each generates its own metaphors and rituals of the Christian life in encounter with the waters and land, plants and animals, human cultures and symbols indigenous to that place.5 Rather than therefore conceiving of Christian mission as one catholic faith being promulgated as a single good essentially the same in each place or a tradition contextualized solely in anthropocentric ways, in terms of human language, arts, and cultural/theological categories, truly respecting place will give rise to more radical forms of contextualization, into language and theological symbols and imagery redolent of each diverse 5  This chapter builds on earlier work emphasizing the importance of developing distinctively local place-based forms of faith and practice. See “Rewilding Christian Spirituality,” cited earlier, as well as two essays exploring place-based interreligious encounter: “Water, Climate, Stars, and Place: Toward an Interspecies Interfaith Belonging,” in Interreligious/ Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field, eds. Eboo Patel, Jennifer Howe Peace, and Noah Silverman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 158–168; and “Lent, Lament, and the River: Interfaith Ritual in the Ashes of the Thomas Fire,” Liturgy vol. 34:4 (2019): 4–14.

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place and in fact even into new forms of interspecies community and ritual essential for our ecological age. As strange or even shocking as such a proposal might initially appear, I intend it as a faithful extension of the Johannine vision of Jesus Christ as the life of the world (John 1:4, 10:10), to include also the literal life of each place surely encompassed within that incarnational vision (John 1:1–14) and under unprecedented threat today—and to re-envision Christian mission as thus an active commitment to all that supports, defends, and contributes to that life in all its fullness. What would Christian mission mean to the oaks and manzanita, the scrub jays and lizards of my home—or do we need to consider instead their converting mission to us, the ones who are actively destroying the life of the world today?

Christian Fallibilism: The Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius The Doctrine of Discovery is the linchpin of the European Christian establishment of legal international sovereignty over much of the rest of the world, the formal justification by which European powers “discovering” lands not held by other Christian rulers gave themselves claim to these lands as their own possession.6 A series of fifteenth-century papal bulls established the legal foundation for global imperialism and conquest by Christian powers (originally Portugal and Spain). In 1455, Pope Nicolas V empowered King Alfonso V of Portugal

6  Several works trace the history and continuing impact of this doctrine. For a grounding in how Christian assertions of legal superiority over non-Christian peoples and lands shaped Western legal frameworks, see Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Books, 2008). For the means by which these claims came to permeate the legal systems of British (former) colonies—specifically Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States—see Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). For shorter summaries, see Tony Castanha, “The Doctrine of Discovery: The Legacy and Continuing Impact of Christian ‘Discovery’ on American Indian Populations,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39:3 (2015): 41–64; and Robert J.  Miller, “Christianity, American Indians, and the Doctrine of Discovery,” 51–67.

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to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed … to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, and to apply and appropriate to himself and his successors their kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit.7

In 1493, based on Christopher Columbus’ successful return from the Caribbean, Pope Alexander VI issued the bull Inter Caetera which gave the kingdom of Castile “the exclusive right to acquire territorial possessions and to trade in all the lands west of [the line of demarcation dividing Spanish from Portuguese sovereignty] which at Christmas 1492 were not in the possession of any Christian prince.”8 These two bulls, supported by others, provide the primary theological and legal foundation for the European colonial enterprise of conquest, enslavement, and theft of land and resources, an enterprise whose missionary arm contributed to the blurring of Christian and imperial aims. The heart of the doctrine’s logic was the claim that the land being “discovered” by these European powers was available for conquest because no one lived there yet: it was terra nullius, “empty land.” Yet every boat arriving in the Americas discovered numerous human inhabitants in the land. How could they assert that the land was “empty” of humans and available? [Not only Spain but] England and France also developed a cultural justification for Discovery claims over Native peoples. They developed the principle of terra nullius that lands that were not possessed by anyone, or which were occupied by non-Europeans but not being used in a fashion that European legal systems approved, were waste or vacant. France, England, and the American colonies and the United States often used this argument because they claimed American Indians used land only for hunting and left it as wilderness.9 7  Romanus Pontifex (January 8, 1455), in Frances Gardiner Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917), 12, 23; cited by Castanha, 45. 8  Inter Caetera (May 4, 1493), in European Treaties, 71; cited by Castanha, 45. 9  Miller, “Christianity,” 58. Note 36 appears after the word “vacant” in this quote, reading: “Terra Nullius essentially ignored the title of original inhabitants based on subjective assessments of their level of civilization; cf. Alex C. Castles, An Australian Legal History (Sydney: Law, 1982), 63, reprinted in Heather McRae, Garth Nettheim, and Laura Beacroft, eds., Aboriginal Legal Issues: Commentary and Materials (North Ryde, NSW, Australia: Law, and

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Thus, the fact that the people already present were not using the land in the way Europeans did—chopping down forests for farms, building cities, and otherwise intensively managing the land—grounded the European claim that their arrival gave them the right to take ownership of it.10 Shawnee legal scholar Robert J. Miller has traced the process by which these pieces of canon law guided European encounters with the indigenous peoples of North America and eventually became part of U.S. law itself. The primary place the Doctrine entered U.S. law was through the 1823 decision of the U.S.  Supreme Court in the case of Johnson v. M’Intosh. In the unanimous ruling of the court, Chief Justice John Marshall centers the decision on the principles underlying that Doctrine, grounding it in terms of explicit Christian sovereignty: On the discovery of this immense continent, the great nations of Europe were eager to appropriate to themselves so much of it as they could respectively acquire. Its vast extent offered an ample field to the ambition and enterprise of all, and the character and religion of its inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendency.11

Holmes Beach, FL: Gaunt, 1991), 10. The term has two meanings: ‘country without a sovereign recognized by European authorities and a territory where nobody owns any land at all’; see Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (NY: Viking Penguin, 1987), 173.” As this note indicates, the language of terra nullius originated in nineteenth-century Australia in reference to its Aboriginal populations. Miller and many others use it in reference to the logic of earlier Christian conquest of the Americas, Africa, and parts of Asia and Oceania as well, since it encapsulates the Doctrine of Discovery’s view that indigenous peoples were subhuman and thus not sovereign over their land and that all places not governed by European Christian powers were therefore “vacant” and available for conquest. See Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius,” Australian Historical Studies 38:129 (2007): 1–15. 10  Tony Castanha cites an eighteenth-century treatise on international law that notes that “the ‘voyages of discovery’ commissioned by sovereigns justified the taking of ‘uninhabited lands.’ … [The American indigenous population’s] ‘occupancy of these vast regions can not be held as a real and lawful taking of possession; and when the Nations of Europe … come upon lands which the savages have no special need of and are making no present and continuous use of, they may lawfully take possession of them.’” Castanha, “The Doctrine of Discovery,” 47, citing Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law: Applied to the Conduct and to the Affairs of Nations and of Sovereigns [1758], vol. 3, trans. Charles G.  Fenwick (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916), 84, 85. 11  Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S., 572–73. Italics added. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/21/543/ (accessed December 28, 2018).

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Marshall notes the explicitly religious logic by which this doctrine viewed Indians’ conversion to Christianity as the gift compensating them for the loss of their freedom and land: “The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity in exchange for unlimited independence.”12 In fact, the first epigraph to this chapter, picked up in its title, shows that this assumption of the superiority of Christian ways and the legal justification it provided for theft of Indian land was the basis for court decisions prior to the 1823 Supreme Court case as well: “In 1813, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stated that Indians could not own real property since, ‘not being Christians, but mere heathens [they are] unworthy of the earth.’”13 This chapter asserts the primary fallacy underlying European Christian missionary efforts in the Americas to be their participation in this logic of Discovery, a system of thought that distorted the Gospel into an intellectual and theological framework espousing Christian superiority, European imperial domination, Native and/or non-Christian sub-humanity, and a Christo-European universalism that effaced the distinctive life-ways, truth, languages, and beauty of both particular indigenous cultures and particular places. The fallacious nature of these interlocking sets of assumptions can be seen in each of their aspects, of course, but becomes shockingly clear in statements like that of the 1813 Pennsylvania court. To assert that the Indians of that region who had lived well on their land for millennia were “unworthy of the earth”—such worthiness reserved instead for Christians whose practices with regard to Native people and land would result in the near annihilation of the former and eventual global poisoning and degradation of the latter—is ironic to say the least. Certainly, it bespeaks a vision of Christianity far removed from the John 10 orientation to the fullest possible flourishing of life, specific to each particular place, that I propose here.

 Johnson v. M’Intosh, 573.  Miller, “Christianity,” 62, citing Thompson v. Johnston, 6 Binn. 68, 1813 WL 1243 (Pa. Sup.Ct. 1813), 2, 5. 12 13

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Effacing, Domesticating, Civilizing, Colonizing: The Shape of Christianity? In attempting to grasp the particular shape of that fallibility underlying Christian mission in the Americas, I note here one final piece: how the effacement of Native humanity mirrored the simultaneous effacement of the land and creatures. The land itself, with its complex forms of plant and animal life, ceased to be home, as it was for Native people, and took on the character of a threatening “wilderness.” In a classic treatment of differing European and Native American conceptions of how to relate to the larger natural world around them, Vine Deloria notes that wilderness is not so much a physical state but a concept of the mind. Societies from the Fertile Crescent to Europe developed a belief system that understood the natural world to be malevolent or at best an arena for the struggle to survive. They therefore treated lands and animals as things to be conquered and subdued. … [T]heir belief system … marched from the Mediterranean to San Francisco Bay. … In its wake, trees, animals, rivers, and mountains became a wilderness to be feared, a wilderness to be controlled and tamed.14

For most of the Europeans arriving in the Americas, both Native people and the land itself blur into threat, abstraction, visible only in their divergence from the European ideal, invisible in their distinctiveness and beauty, the fullness of their own life. In American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, David Stannard notes the cognitive process by which the imperial Western gaze effaces both indigenous humans and the local plants and animals of a place: Employing what Edward W. Said has called the “the moral epistemology of imperialism,” the approved histories of [imperial] societies—the United States, Israel, South Africa, and Australia among them—commonly commence with what Said refers to as a “blotting out of knowledge” of the indigenous people. Adds another observer, native peoples in most general histories are treated in the same way that the fauna and flora of the region are: “consigned to the category of miscellaneous information. … They

14  Vine Deloria Jr., “American Indians and the Wilderness,” in Bohannon, Religions and Environments, 92.

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inhabit the realm of the ‘etc.’.”15 Once the natives have been banished from collective memory, at least as people of numerical and cultural consequence, the settler group’s moral and intellectual right to conquest is claimed to be established without question.16

The terra interpreted as nullius is empty both of “persons” and of meaningfully experienced creatures of all kinds, seen and encountered in their distinctive reality. This process is complex, with roots long preceding 1492, of course, and a full treatment of these topics is beyond the scope of this chapter. One additional connection is particularly resonant with my project here, however. Whitney Bauman has traced the connections between terra nullius and the longer process of intensifying God-world dualism visible in the development of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, building on Catherine Keller’s eco-feminist work showing parallels between the rise of male-­ gendered monotheism, patriarchy, and suppression of pagan traditions.17 Bauman argues that the effacing of female-inflected matter (tehom, from the ancient goddess Tiamat) participates in the larger construction of a solo-male-dominated spiritual cosmos. Ex nihilo annihilates the spiritual agency of the female and material portions of reality rejected in monotheism, eventually not seeing it at all: nullius, nihilo. If European ways are by definition not only superior but meant—like codified doctrinal formulations of the Gospel—to be universally applied without regard to local context or culture, then there is no Gospel apart from the forms of European “civilization” being forcibly imposed around the world. Yet a fallacy lurks at the heart of this assumption. That the Gospel of Jesus Christ challenges every form of cultural, economic, or military imperialism was a reality invisible to those early settlers; the “Gospel” preached in its place, of violent suppression of Native lifeways 15  Edward W.  Said, The Question of Palestine (NY: Times Books, 1979), 18–23; Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 335. “Carter’s reference here is to writings about Australia’s native peoples, but it is equally applicable throughout the colonized regions of the globe.” 16  David E.  Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 14. 17  Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), and Whitney Bauman, Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics: From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius (New York: Routledge, 2009). On connections between missionary monotheism and the suppression of gender-balanced Native worldviews, see Barbara Alice Mann, “A Failure to Communicate,” in Remembering Jamestown, 29–48.

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and the land itself, salvation via participation on Earth in a colonial and eventual Euro-American globalized economy,18 and heaven after death for those who adhere to a safely individualized Christianity, is the opposite of life in all its fullness.

In a Given Place: Southern California and Indigenous Encounter Where I live in southern California the details of the process differed from those in the British colonies, but the effect was similar. The arriving Franciscan missionaries viewed the Native residents of this place as potential converts to, supporters of, and indeed the enslaved labor force for their colonial Christian enterprise. The catastrophic impact of the mission system—supported militarily at every stage by the presidio soldiers—on California Indians and their land has been amply documented.19 Again, the result was the opposite of the flourishing of life that should be the criterion for successful Christian mission: the Spanish missions brought widespread epidemic and venereal disease, cultural collapse, population collapse, and ecological devastation to a land and peoples that had been thriving prior to the Christians’ arrival.20

18  Expansion of this economy was the purpose of the slaughter and uprooting of Native Americans as well as the kidnapping, terrorizing, and importing of millions of Africans over hundreds of years. The face of this false Gospel is land theft, state-enforced boarding schools for Indian children, African and Native slave-fueled plantation agriculture, later fossil-fueled production of all kinds, and present-day extractive globalized capitalism. For the full sweep of this process, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), and on the New England context in particular, see Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), a Pulitzer Prize finalist. 19  Steven W.  Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); James J.  Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984); James A.  Sandos, “Christianization Among the Chumash: An Ethnohistorical Perspective,” American Indian Quarterly 15:1 (1991): 65–89; and journalist Elias Castillo’s A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions (Fresno: Craven Street Books, 2015). 20  See, for example, the horrifying statistics and accounts of causes and patterns of mission Indian deaths—including so much maternal/infant death that the population was unable to sustain itself—documented via exhaustive research in Hackel’s chapter, “Dual Revolutions and the Missions: Ecological Change and Demographic Collapse,” 65–123.

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Some of that destruction might have resulted from even the most open-­ hearted cross-cultural encounter, given the lack of Native resistance to European germs and the effects of unwitting introduction of alien seeds. But what if the Franciscans arriving to those abundant coastal estuaries, that magnificent spring-fed chaparral, in the late eighteenth century had brought a different Gospel? What would it mean to have preached Jesus Christ in ways the Chumash of that time and place might have experienced as a real gift? Or what Gospel did they actually need in order to live a more abundantly human or biological life? And, equally important, how can Christian mission today repent of its ongoing fallibility in contextualizing only (at best) to human contexts and grow into the fully ecological, interspecies, indigenizing, place-based variety of Gospel expressions we need in order to contribute positively—for the first time on this continent—to the literal and profoundly endangered life of the world? I don’t know how the spirit of St. Francis might have more effectively animated the missionaries traveling in the late 1700s in his name to the coast of what is now California. But I do sense that the forms a truly life-­ giving Christian encounter with the local Chumash might have taken would necessarily have been different here from those other missionaries created with the Yurok of the northern California redwoods, the Gwich’in of the British Columbian islands, the Inuit of the far north, or Mayans of Guatemala’s mountains. Might the Yakama and other tribal people’s reverence for the salmon and the vision of that keystone species’ river spawning journey in present-day coastal and inland Oregon and Washington have inspired paschal metaphors of Jesus’ similarly costly self-offering? Might those Christian salmon/riparian paschal metaphors have cross-­ pollinated with indigenous legends and rites? And might the creative religious reverence being cultivated in each place have contributed over time not only to the flourishing of Native communities and Christians but to the thriving ongoing life of each bioregion and its species as well, precisely as symbolic loci of each community’s rich spiritual engagement with God or the spirits in that place?

Indigenizing Mission: Naturalizing Christian Faith I think so. Therefore, I will propose three strategies for Christians who wish to exit the fallacies of Euro-Christian imperialism, toward this vision of a place-based symbolic engagement with Christian and other traditions (especially indigenous ones) of every location.

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Renounce the Doctrine of Discovery Several Protestant church bodies in the United States, following the lead of the World Council of Churches, have formally renounced the Doctrine of Discovery.21 Given its place within the Anglican Communion, the church whose royal leaders sponsored and colonized what became the United States, it is powerful that the Episcopal Church USA, at its 76th General Convention in 2009, adopted a resolution titled “Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery.” As Miller writes, The resolution states that Discovery creates “destructive policies … that led to the colonizing dispossession of the lands of indigenous peoples and the disruption of their way of life ….” The Church calls on the United States to review its “historical and contemporary policies that contribute to the continuing colonization of Indigenous Peoples” and for Queen Elizabeth II to “disavow, and repudiate publicly, the claimed validity of the Christian Doctrine of Discovery.”22

Tony Castanha makes a convincing case that the impact of the Doctrine of Discovery continues today into the very fabric of U.S. property law, treatment of indigenous people and religious concerns, and commodification of every aspect of biological or spiritual life.23 Thus, pressing for its formal renunciation by church bodies—including the Roman Catholic Church, the religious body that has profited most by its global enactment—is not the only necessary step in dismantling its legacy. The recognition and defense of indigenous rights to land, cultural artifacts, autonomy, and language are equally pressing concerns, along with honoring of treaties, respecting of tribes’ sovereignty, and restoration of land. Reworking one’s theology to excavate and repent of  assumptions of European or white Christian superiority is essential as well.

21  The World Council of Churches vote took place on February 17, 2012: see https://www. oikoumene.org/en/resources/documents/executive-committee/2012-02/statement-onthe-doctrine-of-discovery-and-its-enduring-impact-on-indigenous-peoples (accessed April 15, 2019). For a list of other church bodies that have repudiated the Doctrine, along with links to their respective formal statements, see http://spinterfaith.org/healing-minnesota-stories/ doctrine-discovery/denominational-statements/ (accessed April 15, 2019). 22  Miller, “Christianity,” 66–67. See https://episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/acts/acts_resolution-complete.pl?resolution=2009-d035 23  Castanha, “The Doctrine of Discovery,” 48–54.

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As a central piece of this latter element, one might begin by getting to know the Native people and history of the place one lives. Who lived here when the Europeans showed up? Are they still here? What can you learn about these people’s relation to the land, water, climate, and forces of creation, the ways this place shaped their stories and legends, their rituals, their food and medical practices, their forms of life? What happened when Europeans arrived: were treaties made? Broken? Are any still in effect? What stories can you learn of survival, mutual learning, hostility, cultural sustenance or suppression, political or legal developments? Who are the current leaders of this community, how are its children and adolescents doing, what gifts and struggles are present, what initiatives or laws is the community advocating? How, if at all, can your voice or presence help? Surely a central piece of stepping away from the Doctrine of Discovery and its fiction that the land you now live in was empty when Europeans arrived is to get to know the people still present if you can, and that history, so as to be able to contest the ongoing effacement of Native peoples relationally and politically, and join advocacy efforts in support of indigenous rights, land restoration, languages, and sovereignty. Get to Know One’s Place An equally essential piece of shedding the fallacious view of terra nullius is to get to know the place itself: to learn to recognize it as not just a generic “outdoors,” the scenic or boring backdrop to the real drama of our lives— the human world—but a world of its own, unique to your place and essential both to your life and, from the more fully Christian perspective I develop in this chapter, to your faith. Many scholars, activists, poets, and healers are similarly urging us to return to what children already know: the endless joy, fascination, and aliveness found in up-close immersive connection to one’s place and its creatures. I make the point here in terms of missiology, to assert that the language of a “mission field” needs to be understood literally as well: to sense and experience redemptive divine energy encompassing not just the humans in a place but all of its larger wild and domesticated life, the “more-than-human world” we are invited to notice and rejoin.24 Psychoanalyst Shierry Weber Nicholsen writes of 24  The language of the “more than human world” comes from David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).

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the reciprocity the perception of a “field” makes possible, beyond our human-centered blinders: Reciprocity is not a matter of an external exchange in which one completely separate object encounters and acts on another. Rather, the reciprocity arises within a shared field in which both—indeed, all—parties are participating. In a field, things emerge into our awareness and become focal points. The animal surges up for us. The sound enters our hearing. The breeze blows to and beyond us. Perception—the use of our senses—has this emergent quality. The crucial understanding of perception as experiences emerging within a shared field requires that we see the field as something that palpably contains us, something we are in and part of.25

The mission field is nothing other than the place that surrounds us, filled with impossibly complex forms of life beckoning us into that reciprocity of relationship in every moment of our biological and perceptual existence. The field that is our life is always here; it is our place—to which, as to nearly all of this ongoing interspecies presence and personal interrelationship, we busy, distracted, buffered humans of the overdeveloped United States are far too often completely oblivious. Thus, with other bioregional theologians I frame the experiential participation in one’s place and its life as a Christian imperative, as well as a human and ecological one.26 This immersion in place can feel as strange to some as learning one’s local history through a Native lens will to others—in both cases challenging that effacement of people and place. In a recent article, I use the language of “indoor captivity” to describe the ways Christian faith, worship, and prayer take place largely within walls and under roofs, cutting people off symbolically as well as physically from the larger life of their place.27 In 25  Shierry Weber Nicholsen, The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 64. She continues, “Thus we think too narrowly by far if we imagine reciprocity with the natural world as an ‘interspecies communication’ in which one being expresses itself in its way and then the other expresses itself in another way. … Reciprocity in this sense is intimacy. What emerges into our field awareness emerges into intimacy with us.” 26  The primary theologian pioneering this approach is Ched Myers; others are picking up this initiative as well. See Myers, ed., Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2016). 27  “Lent, Lament, and the River.” I echo Martin Luther’s metaphor of the “Babylonian Captivity” of the church of his day, but I do not intend with this language to suggest that

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the process, we cut them off also from the life of the world, the John 1 Word of God whose divine imagination continues to give spirit-breath to all that is, the entire cosmos alive with this Word. I use the language of the wild Logos to describe this Johannine word, the wisdom animating all things, in order to make clear from a Christian perspective why such outdoor immersion is not mere paganism but an essential spiritual practice for those who claim to follow and worship the one confessed as Word made flesh. Our indoor captivity is similarly not just a matter of convenience, an essentially unimportant detail of where we happen to gather, but—as it both grounds and reinforces our larger cultural alienation from the more-­ than-­human world our fossil-fueled economy is destroying—is itself a form of sin. Imprisoning our worship and prayer and thinking indoors contributes to our own alienation and cuts us off from taking in the world’s suffering as well as its beauty and the sheer joy of being alive (i.e., the experience of the life of the world known through being fully alive, John 10:10). How then does your local Christian community participate in your own mission “field,” that literal field next to your sanctuary, the larger field-­ encompassing world that buzzes and calls and poops and seeds, storms and beckons, graces and is us? Can you name the songbirds that migrate through your neighborhood—or notice the absence of those no longer present? Can you identify the local wildflowers and distinguish them from invasive or more benign species? Do you know what plants the native bees and other insects in your areas need for survival, or what the rainfall patterns in your area mean for local stream health?28 The fact that so many Christians experience no particular connection between such questions and their faith is a measure of the problem we still inhabit of seeing our place and the larger biosphere as religiously inert, the backdrop at best to the great divine/human drama: indeed, still terra nullius. A powerful means of addressing this ongoing and literally deadening alienation of indoor worship is always a problem. Prayer indoors has many good and necessary functions in the Christian spiritual life and community, not least the capacity to hold profoundly beautiful instances of human symbol and art. See my “Indoors, Outdoors: Praying with the Earth,” in Shauna Hannan and Karla Bohmbach, eds. Eco-Lutheranism: Lutheran Perspectives on Ecology (Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2013), 113–124. The problem is confinement of worship solely indoors. 28  An example of bioregional quizzes testing knowledge like this is Kevin Kelly, “The Big Here Quiz,” in Cool Tools (https://kk.org/cooltools/the-big-here-qu/), accessed December 22, 2018.

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Christian faith from the incarnate world itself is my proposal, published in various places since 2016, of returning to the ancient Christian practice of baptism into local (living, flowing) waters. While I recognize the difficulties of such a move, I continue to believe that we will not be able to fully experience the larger world as our spiritual home apart from some form of such radical change in practice: here, also returning to the experience of Jesus and the earliest church.29 Listen for the Gospel Six weeks after my first hike up Matilija Canyon, I returned—this time with members of the Church of the Wild, a worshiping community in Ojai, whose pastor, Victoria Loorz, also founded the Wild Church Network, a national and international community of people dedicated to moving their worship and spiritual lives outdoors.30 We began with Scripture, poetry, and prayer at a pool near the canyon’s entry and then moved slowly along the creek, taking solo time in encounter with the beauty and sounds of the place, its creatures and rocks, before gathering to create an Advent wreath from small pieces of creation we had gathered, telling stories of our encounters. This time I was able to rest in the grace I had first experienced on the longer hike, letting the lush biodiversity of this place embrace me as I sat on a large mossy rock in the December sun near a small cascade in the creek. Sycamores overhead created dappled shade on the water, in whose depths I could see small fish and on whose surface red dragonflies skated. The creek’s flow would eventually merge into the Ventura River and then the Pacific Ocean, contributing to more and more life as it went, and I sensed my own life held within that larger hydrology of mercy and abundance. Imagine if that pool had been the place of my baptism, how much more grace it would have held for me—and in fact it became that as I experienced myself being baptized into reality, the fullest life of my place, right there. In other writings I have been encouraging Christians to learn the practice of lectio divina or sacred reading not only with Scripture but with this 29  “Rewilding Christian Spirituality,” 181–187; see also “Living, Local, Wild Waters: Into Baptismal Reality,” in Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-than-Human World, ed. Trevor George Hunsberger Bechtel, Matthew Eaton, and Timothy Harvie (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), 151–165. 30  The Wild Church Network is found at https://www.wildchurchnetwork.com/ (accessed December 22, 2018). The leader of the Ojai, CA, Church of the Wild community now is Julie Tumamait, a Chumash elder.

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wild Logos: to begin to deepen one’s contemplative practice out into that broader “conversation” (logos) going on between one’s heart and the living Word breathing through all that is.31 And surely we need to listen for a very long time in order to begin to heal from the alienation our nullius version of Christianity has imposed on us all for so many centuries. But in this chapter I want to add an insight having to do with mission. Recent missiologists have begun to recognize, along with Christians in the global South, that the primary direction of mission today is surely back into alienated Western society—the West and its churches no longer viewing ourselves as the “sending” bodies but the recipients of missional energy. I have come to realize that the same is true in relation to the more-than-­ human world. This world is not only the needy recipient of our contemplative and activist energy, toward conservation and eco-remediation—and it is not even simply a passive or otherwise inert means by which we experience the wild Logos. Rather, the natural world itself and the particular plants, animals, rocks, creeks, soil, storms, light, and shadows of each place are for its alienated indoor-captive human companions in fact the missionaries of divine life, beckoning with quiet and urgent divine energy for our attention, conversion, and restored life in the much wilder fuller image of the life of the world. The overcoming of terra nullius will mean that, at last, Christians too get to be reincorporated back into the larger beauty and love—the life—of the world, to be home again at last in a world that is not empty at all but full of divine life and love.

Conclusion: Terra Plena I have asserted that the intellectual fiction of terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery grounding European Christian encounters with and eventual missionary efforts among Native Americans represented a distortion of both reality and the Gospel, since they obliged believers to yoke Christianity to a vision of European superiority that blinded missionaries and other settlers to the humanity of those already present and to the need for ecological as well as cultural contextualization of the Gospel. My thesis is that 31   “Rewilding Christian Spirituality,” 189–90; see also “Bio-Theoacoustics: Prayer Outdoors and the Reality of the Natural World.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 52/4 (Winter 2013): 292–302. I am indebted to Victoria Loorz for the metaphor of “conversation” as a better translation for Logos than “word,” and to Kristen Daley-Mosier for the proposal of salmon-based paschal metaphors available to those in watersheds where salmon still run, earlier in the essay.

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repenting of the Doctrine and terra nullius requires and makes possible the development of an indigenizing Christianity distinctively different in each place. Such forms of mission—for which we have perhaps only recently become ready—might respond to a new question, “How can the Life of the world best flourish here?” And for those newly arriving in a given context, “What can we learn about Jesus Christ and the fullness of life from the people and other species already living here?” To shift our gaze to the life of the world already flourishing in the species and peoples of a given place gives Christian mission a fundamentally contemplative stance, rooted in humility toward forms of divine reality already alive in each place. Instead of seeing terra nullius upon arrival, therefore, we become able to confess over and over anew a terra plena: heaven and Earth filled with divine glory, each place already holy ground.

Bibliography Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-­ Than-­Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Bauman, Whitney. 2009. Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics: From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius. New York: Routledge. Berry, Thomas. 2014. The Wild and the Sacred. In Religions and Environments: A Reader in Religion, Nature, and Ecology, ed. Richard Bohannon, 73–78. London: Bloomsbury. Bohannon, Richard, ed. 2014. Religions and Environments: A Reader in Religion, Nature, and Ecology. London: Bloomsbury. Carter, Paul. 1988. The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Castanha, Tony. 2015. The Doctrine of Discovery: The Legacy and Continuing Impact of Christian ‘Discovery’ on American Indian Populations. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 39 (3): 41–64. Castillo, Elias. 2015. A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions. Fresno: Craven Street Books. Dahill, Lisa E. 2013a. Bio-Theoacoustics: Prayer Outdoors and the Reality of the Natural World. Dialog: A Journal of Theology 52/4: 292–302. ———. 2013b. Indoors, Outdoors: Praying with the Earth. In Eco-Lutheranism: Lutheran Perspectives on Ecology, ed. Shauna Hannan and Karla Bohmbach, 113–124. Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press. ———. 2016. Rewilding Christian Spirituality. In Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, ed. Lisa E. Dahill and James B. Martin-Schramm, 177–196. Eugene: Cascade Books.

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———. 2018a. Living, Local, Wild Waters: Into Baptismal Reality. In Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-than-Human World, ed. Trevor George Hunsberger Bechtel, Matthew Eaton, and Timothy Harvie, 151–165. Eugene: Wipf & Stock. ———. 2018b. Water, Climate, Stars, and Place: Toward an Interspecies Interfaith Belonging. In Interreligious/Interfaith Studies: Defining a New Field, ed. Eboo Patel, Jennifer Howe Peace, and Noah Silverman, 158–168. Boston: Beacon Press. ———. 2019. Lent, Lament, and the River: Interfaith Ritual in the Ashes of the Thomas Fire. Liturgy 34 (4): 4–14. Davenport, Frances Gardiner, ed. 1917. European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington. Deloria, Vine Jr. 2014. American Indians and the Wilderness. In Religions and Environments: A Reader in Religion, Nature, and Ecology, ed. Richard Bohannon, 85–92. London: Bloomsbury. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2014. An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press. Fitzmaurice, Andrew. 2007. The Genealogy of Terra Nullius. Australian Historical Studies 38 (129): 1–15. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press. Grau, Marion. 2011. Rethinking Mission in the Postcolony: Salvation, Society and Subversion. London: T&T Clark. Hackel, Steven W. 2005. Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-­ Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Keller, Catherine. 2003. The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. New York: Routledge. Kelly, Kevin. 2018. The Big Here Quiz. Cool Tools. https://kk.org/cooltools/ the-big-here-qu/. Accessed 22 Dec 2018. Mann, Barbara Alice. 2010. A Failure to Communicate. In Remembering Jamestown: Hard Questions About Christian Mission, ed. Amos Yong and Barbara Brown Zikmund, 29–48. Eugene: Pickwick. Mignolo, Walter D. 2000/2012. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Miller, Robert J. 2010. Christianity, American Indians, and the Doctrine of Discovery. In Remembering Jamestown: Hard Questions About Christian Mission, ed. Amos Yong and Barbara Brown Zikmund, 51–67. Eugene: Pickwick.

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Miller, Robert J., Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg. 2010. Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies. London/New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, Charles W. 1999. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Myers, Ched, ed. 2016. Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice. Eugene: Cascade Books. Newcomb, Steven T. 2008. Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Discovery. Golden: Fulcrum Books. Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. 2002. The Love of Nature and the End of the World: The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pope Alexander VI. 1917. Inter Caetera [May 4, 1493]. In European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648, ed. Frances Gardiner Davenport, 71–78. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington. Pope Nicholas V. 1917. Romanus Pontifex [January 8, 1455]. In European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and Its Dependencies to 1648, ed. Frances Gardiner Davenport, 9–26. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington. Rawls, James J. 1984. Indians of California: The Changing Image. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Rieger, Joerg. 2004. Theology and Mission Between Neocolonialism and Postcolonialism. Mission Studies 21 (2): 201–227. Said, Edward W. 1979. The Question of Palestine. New York: Times Books. Sandos, James A. 1991. Christianization Among the Chumash: An Ethnohistorical Perspective. American Indian Quarterly 15 (1): 65–89. Stannard, David E. 1992. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford University Press. Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana, eds. 2006. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: SUNY Press. Warren, Wendy. 2015. New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. New York: W.W. Norton. Williams, Robert A., Jr. 1990. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. New York: Oxford University Press. World Council of Churches Executive Committee. 2012. Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery and Its Continuing Impact on Indigenous Peoples. World Council of Churches, February 17. https://www.oikoumene.org/en/ resources/documents/executive-committee/2012-02/statement-on-thedoctrine-of-discover y-and-its-enduring-impact-on-indigenous-peoples. Accessed 15 Apr 2019. Yong, Amos, and Barbara Brown Zikmund, eds. 2010. Remembering Jamestown: Hard Questions About Christian Mission. Eugene: Pickwick.

CHAPTER 6

Apologetics and the Provisionality of the Living Jesus: Hans Frei’s Contribution Drew Collins

We were stuck in rush-hour traffic in a rental car on one of Sarasota’s many bridges when Gus rear-ended us. “Totally my fault! I was looking at my phone,” Gus explained while exiting his silver Sebring, the tight, shiny curls of his neck-length hair bouncing along with his surprisingly nonchalant head-nodding. As it appeared there was no damage to either vehicle, the tension dissipated and Gus, wearing one of those piano keyboard ties, explained that he was on his way home from teaching an acting class. “You in the business?” he asked. “You look like you’re a writer.” I was about to ask what writer looks like, but realizing this might reveal the question to be something other than a compliment, I told Gus that I was a theologian. “You’re a Christian?!” Gus replied, with unmistakable surprise. Pointing to a slew of pamphlets on baptism and confirmation that had managed to escape through his car’s open door and were being carried off by the wind, he explained that he was extensively involved in his local Greek Orthodox Church. We were scrambling to collect as many pamphlets as we could

D. Collins (*) Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_6

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when Gus turned to me and said, “So, I’ve got to ask: have you read The Reason for God by Tim Keller? It proves that faith in God is rational!” “I … I haven’t Gus,” I stammered. I asked Gus some questions about his church and the conversation eventually moved on to local stone crab spots before we parted ways. But for the rest of the trip, I thought about Gus’s question. Why would a Christian, upon meeting another Christian, steer the conversation toward a book intended to persuade the unpersuaded? Why would the first topic Gus hit on be apologetics? Why, in the terms of Yale theologian Hans Frei, would the order of belief and the order of coming to believe, be so intertwined in his mind?1 Is the prioritization of apologetics a necessary approach to faith in the modern world or a symptom of the influence of modernity itself? And how does this apologetic prioritization shape Christian theology in general, and our understanding of who Jesus Christ is and the nature of his presence in history, in particular? In what follows, and in dialogue with Frei, I will argue that Gus’ question—and his evident concern for the plausibility of Christian faith in the modern world—discloses an entirely understandable, yet lamentable perspective on Christian faith. This prioritization of apologetics, it will be suggested, cuts across the apparently ever-widening conservative/liberal divide, motivated in both camps by shared concerns that are assuaged in different, but related, ways. Yet, whether conservative or liberal, it will be suggested that this consensus on the precedence of apologetics and the necessity of systematically arguing for the reasonableness of Christian faith obscures the identity of Jesus Christ itself as narrated in the Gospels and, therein, the ways in which we might encounter, or be encountered by, Jesus, through the presence of the Holy Spirit, in the midst of our historical existence. The search for certainty, in other words, conceals the very thing (or person) we are trying to be certain of, obliterating the generative and capacious dialectic between Jesus as given in the Gospels and as found in creation for Christian faith.2 Instead, it will be suggested that an affirmation of Jesus’ identity as the resurrected Son of God that is not premised 1  Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1997) 58; cf. Hans Frei, “Remarks in Connection With a Theological Proposal,” Theology & Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 30. All subsequent citations to these two books will be abbreviated as Identity and T&N, respectively. 2  Ben Quash, Found Theology (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 5ff.

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upon a systematic apologetic provides us with the possibility of acknowledging the provisionality of our discernment of his pneumatological and providential presence in history. Simply put, to affirm the resurrection of Jesus is to affirm that he lives today. And to affirm that Jesus is alive is to acknowledge that our understanding of him is always contingent and subject to revision and extension. Moreover, to lose sight of the whole story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is to lose sight of God’s providential reign over history and of history itself as both secular and sacred, united in God’s promise of future consummation and therefore ambiguous in their unification until then. The remedy, and perhaps unexpectedly, the key to affirming the inherently contingent or provisional nature of Christian faith and theology, involves eschewing the prioritization of apologetics, taking seriously the plain sense of the Gospel story itself without a preceding explanatory (i.e. apologetic) prolegomenon, affirming that because Jesus is alive and present in and to creation, our knowledge of who he is always remains unfinished.

The Prioritization of Apologetics Of course, Gus is not alone. In a world in which the irrationality or implausibility of Christian faith appears to be implied, or even assumed, by the same scientific and social-scientific disciplines and endeavors that are most significantly shaping the world in which we live and our perspectives on it, the necessity of providing the tenets of Christian faith with a degree of rational firmness might appear to be a matter of survival. If the only beliefs permissible in the modern world are certainties—claims that are demonstrable and universally true such that individuals might arrive at and assent to their veracity independent of any particular context or tradition— Christian liberals and conservatives have taken this as a challenge that they can, indeed must, meet.3 What is it about modernity that has raised such anxiety about Christian faith? How has this anxiety encouraged approaches to apologetics in which the continuation of Christian faith is directly tied to its capacity for 3  This appeal to certainty might be deemed a dated artifact of Enlightenment thinking, but it appears to apply also to the more recent trend of individualistic focus on the overriding influence of context and biography that undergirds the claims of irrefutability behind notions of “my truth.” Assertions of “my truth,” in other words, might be understood as reflecting the same underlying commitment to certitude, simply construed subjectively rather than objectively.

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systematic compliance with, or repudiation of, “external discourses” like epistemology, psychology, historicism, and evolutionary biology? How have these postures of repudiation and compliance projected an account of Christian faith and the comprehension of Jesus as certain and secure, always capable of rejecting or accommodating criticisms while remaining meaningful? And what, if anything, is wrong with such an account? The apologetic approaches to Christian faith and theology are primarily concerned with the “how?” or “why?” of Christian faith. As Nicholas Wolterstorff writes, “ever since Kant, the anxious questions, ‘Can we? How can we?’ have haunted theologians, insisting on being addressed before any others.”4 In Hans Frei’s telling, this epistemological hand-­ wringing, spurred on by the spread of empiricism and deism, came to a head with the rise of historicism and was most sharply focused on the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. From the eighteenth century onward, Christian theologians have had to “argue constantly concerning the notion of revelation (a) that it is a notion that makes sense—a supernatural revelation by which God communicates his truth in an historical series of events or an historical story, namely those told in the Bible; and (b) that it is conceivably true, or that there is evidence for its factual truth.”5 Growing metaphysical and epistemological concerns about the nature of history, the possibility of divine intervention, and the scope of human knowledge within history pushed theologians toward two basic responses. For liberals, these philosophical and scientific (wissenschaftlich) discourses indicated that Christian doctrines of revelation, and their accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, needed to be profoundly reshaped. The concept of revelation in general, and of the resurrection in particular, could remain conceivably true by being brought closer in line with current metaphysical and epistemological theories, even if rendering Jesus’ resurrection as objectively conceivable meant abandoning any claim to its historical or factual truth. For conservatives, the response was rather to vigorously defend the doctrines by employing (purportedly) the same methodologies as those discourses such that both the resurrection’s logical conceivability 4  Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Is it Possible and Desirable for Theologians to Recover from Kant?” Modern Theology, 14:1 (January 1998): 15. 5  Hans Frei, “On Interpreting the Christian Story,” Reading Faithfully: vol. 1 (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2015) 74; Reading Faithfully will hereafter be cited as RF. See also Hans Frei, “David Friedrich Strauss,” Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, vol. 1, ed. Ninian Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 215–260.

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could be defended and, moreover, that evidence could indeed be provided for the factual truth of the historical series of events in which God’s truth is supernaturally revealed. This increased concern about the reliability of the Bible’s historical narrative, accompanying an enduring commitment to the meaningfulness of Scripture, created a hermeneutical crisis. Frei explains how worries about the apparently tenuous status of the historical reference of Scripture led both liberals and conservatives to adopt a hermeneutical theory of “meaning-­as-reference,” in which the meaning of Scripture was entirely bound up with either the “space-time occurrences” it depicts (conservatives) or the ahistorical ideals underlying the narrative (liberals).6 By framing the meaning of Scripture in terms of its external reference, and not its syntactical sense or narratival coherence, theologians ended up viewing the truth of the Bible as something inherently external to it, in such a way that it was rationally defensible and verifiable—a move with obvious apologetic implications, if not objectives. Conservatives have turned toward a firm insistence on the historical reliability of the biblical accounts, collapsing the Bible’s syntactical sense into its historical reference. For them, the Bible’s meaning is equated with the historical occurrence of the events depicted in it. The Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection “are an absolutely accurate record of the things that actually happened when Jesus was raised from the dead. … Jesus’ resurrection [on this view] … has the straightforward character of a fact to which historical evidence is pertinent.”7 This means that apologetics must attend, with systematic precision, to the very metaphysical basis on which the miraculous events narrated in Scripture can be accounted for, to the epistemological foundation of our belief in the occurrence of such events, and even to the physical evidence for such events. Christian faith is therefore dependent on the rational arguments for the metaphysical possibility of such historical revelation, the epistemological warrant for belief in miraculous events in history, and, perhaps inevitably, on the empirical evidence for them, such that “God’s interaction with the world … [is] a legitimate domain for scientific investigation.”8 On this view, we could, for instance, 6  Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974) 101; hereafter, Eclipse. 7  Hans Frei, “Of the Resurrection of Christ,” RF, 187. 8  William A. Dembski, “What Every Theologian Should Know About Creation, Evolution & Design,” in Unapologetic Apologetics: Meeting the Challenges of Theological Studies, eds.

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determine whether Jesus’ “resurrected body was or else was not subject to the laws of gravity.”9 Liberals, on the other hand, embracing the wissenschaftlich criticisms in hopes of defending the conceivability of revelation apart from any traditional accounts of it, have entirely separated the meaning of the biblical narrative from the matter of historical occurrence, appealing instead to myth or allegory in their accounts the Bible’s import. The reference or meaning of Scripture, including the Gospels’ passion narratives, is tied to interior states or conditions they evoke or describe in humans, such that “the logical and real subject of resurrection statements is the faith of the disciples, that statements about the resurrection do not describe events but the significance of other events, that the resurrection was spiritual, that it isn’t crucial to Christianity, etc.”10 Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s argument for the primacy of “faith”—an interior response to the transcendent—over tradition and any form of articulation (“beliefs”) is a good example of this. “One’s faith is given by God,” Smith writes, “one’s beliefs by one’s century.”11 Undermine the historical possibility of the resurrection all you want—its meaning is spiritual, outside of history, and cannot be debunked. For conservatives, Christian faith is tied to efforts at defending the rationality of faith and, relatedly, at proving the existence of God, drawing on philosophy and even science in an attempt at turning the bases of criticism back on the critics.12 This is apologetics as confrontation. For liberals, apologetics takes a different form, what we might call apologetics as accommodation, seeking to adopt the very criticisms of Christian faith and then reconfiguring faith in response. Although conservatives and liberals responded differently to this situation, Frei points out that underlying both is the disjunction between the William A.  Dembski and Jay Wesley Richards (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2001) 222f; hereafter, “Creation, Evolution & Design”. 9  Hans Frei, “Historical Reference and the Gospels,” RF, 95. 10  Frei, “Historical Reference and the Gospels,” RF, 95. 11  Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979): 96; cf. Philip C. Almond, “W.C. Smith as Theologian of Religions,” Harvard Theological Review, 76:3 (July 1983): 337f. It is important to note that even for an approach in which the beliefs of particular religious traditions are dismissed (where beliefs are viewed as attached to the idiosyncratic historical claims of miraculous events and divine interventions connected to religious traditions), an empirical component remains in Smith’s phenomenological method, construed as a survey of religious experience that purportedly shows the underlying unity of human faith amidst the deceptive cacophony of historically conditioned beliefs. 12  Cf. Dembski, “Creation, Evolution & Design,” Unapologetic Apologetics, 221–238.

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plain sense, or sensus literalis, of Scripture, and its meaning—such that whatever meaning a passage from Scripture has is determined entirely by its external reference—for example, a verifiable historical event or a psychological state or experience—apart even from its place in the scriptural narrative itself. This being the case, it became accepted that an essential component of faith and theology involved justifying the nature of this reference, according to the methodological dictates of the very areas of thought that initially raised the alarm (e.g. metaphysics, epistemology, and historicism). The viability of Christian faith therefore came to be seen as dependent on Christians’ ability to provide an account of faith that is informed by, and on equal footing with, those areas of thought and research that have heretofore threatened its plausibility. Christian faith could be, must be, protected by showing the world that it too can play by the rules that generally apply to non-theological areas of thought.

Apologetics and the Inoculation of Christian Faith While conservatives tend to see the criticisms of Christian faith as false and liberals tend to see them as true, both attempt to inoculate Christian faith from such external threats. William Dembski describes this instinct as follows: Inoculation exposes a person to a disease, but in measured doses so that the destructive effects of the disease are mitigated. … Similarly, the student who has been inoculated against false ideas is far less likely to succumb to them … inoculated students become convincing critics of falsehood and defenders of truth. For this reason, Christian apologetics needs to stress inoculation.13

Conservatives like Dembski view the “disease” as secular discourses, which lead them to pursue the plausibility of Christian faith in precisely those terms, turning science and philosophy from antagonists into essential theological allies. The survival of Christian faith depends on showing it to be philosophically sound and scientifically supported. Responding to, and seeking to appease, the same threats, liberals view the malady as the literal interpretation of miraculous claims that have taken hold in religious

13   William A.  Dembski and Jay Wesley Richards, “Introduction,” Unapologetic Apologetics, 22.

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beliefs or traditions (in Cantwell Smith’s terms), claims which can have true spiritual meaning only if their historical occurrence is denied. Though opposite in their orientation, both liberal and conservative apologetics are rooted in a shared anxiety concerning the status of scriptural reference and are searching for a systematic way of protecting faith from external criticism. Even if, as in the case of liberals, the apologetic program appears primarily focused on why and how Christians should dispense with dated and untenable beliefs, underlying this approach is the goal of shielding faith, re-casting it in response to philosophical and scientific criticisms such that those discourses no longer pose a threat. Having adopted hermeneutical approaches in which the meaning of Scripture is essentially a question of its external reference, both liberals and conservatives steer readings of Scripture’s “plain sense” according to the challenges posed by wissenschaftlich disciplines.

The Plain Sense and the Identity of Jesus Christ The apologetic theology of conservatives and liberals is called into question, however, if we consider that the Gospels are and have been celebrated by the majority of Christians throughout history as, history-like narratives, in which the plain sense of the narrative is appropriately construed as a description of the particular identity of Jesus Christ—the one who was crucified and resurrected.14 For if this is the case, and if the identity of Jesus as resurrected implies, however mysteriously, his universal presence, displacing the priority of the plain sense for the meaning of the Gospels means hobbling attempts at describing who Jesus is and, ipso facto, the nature of Jesus’ presence in and to creation across history. Frei explains: The whole gospel pushes in the direction of that claim. The climax of the Gospel story is the full unity of the unsubstitutable individuality of Jesus with the presence of God. That same climax, the passion-crucifixion-­ resurrection sequence, involves also the supersession of Jesus’ intention and action by that of God. In short, to speak of the identity of Jesus, in which he is affirmed by the believer to be present, is also to speak of the presence of God.15

 Frei, Identity, 132–144.  Frei, Identity, 186.

14 15

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In the pursuit of inoculation—of rendering the meaningfulness of Jesus in essentially historical or experiential terms—the passion-crucifixion-­ resurrection sequence ceases to be read as a sequence in which the identity of Jesus is climactically depicted and instead becomes a sequence referring to empirical facts or states of being in the world. In either case, they appear to have little to do with the narrative sense of the texts and the matter of Jesus’ identity. Whatever Jesus “means,” it is not so much about who Jesus is but about how or why “he” (i.e. the miraculous events in which he was involved or his transcendent experience faith) is possible and even necessary. Jesus’ meaningfulness is therefore something we can, in essence, prove. In either case, a view of the complex incarnational unity of Jesus’ historical particularity and universal significance as the saving presence of God, poured out to the world in the work of the Holy Spirit (and relatedly, a view of secular history both as distinct from sacred history and as teleologically ordered and Christoformly patterned under the aegis of divine providence), becomes hidden.16 Yet it is precisely in affirming this complex unity, the pneumatological claim at the heart of this unity, and the unfinished, providential unity of sacred and secular history, that Christian faith is provided its hopeful and capacious provisionality.17 Such faith in Jesus as “the man from Nazareth” who was “raised from the dead and manifested to be the redeemer” clearly involves an affirmation of the Gospels’ historical or external reference, especially concerning the sequences narrating Jesus’ death and resurrection.18 But instead of pursuing a systematic account of this reference, Frei suggests the overlap between the Bible’s plain sense and historical reference is best characterized as “miraculous.” He points out that the plain sense of the Gospel accounts is inextricably tied to accounts of miraculous events, most importantly in relation to the resurrection of Jesus. The Gospels are about Jesus and his identity as the resurrected Son of God the Father, present to creation through the grace of the Holy Spirit. To accept this as the sense of the texts is an entirely different matter from accepting the text as an accurate historical account. “The issue of reference,” he writes, “is hermeneutically, though probably not 16  Cf. David Fergusson, “The Theology of Providence,” Theology Today, 67 (2010): 275; see also Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018) 81ff. 17  Quash, Found Theology, 15. 18  Frei, Identity, 182.

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theologically, irrelevant.”19 So for Christians, Frei believes something like this acceptance of actual reference is inevitable and even (following Anselm) logically intertwined with grasping the identity of Jesus. To understand his identity is to understand that “he cannot not live, and to conceive of him as not living is to misunderstand who he is.”20 Of course, while claims concerning miraculous events cannot be confirmed through historical study, they can certainly be disconfirmed by it. If archaeologists were to discover a tomb with the unresurrected body of Jesus of Nazareth, or a credible epistle from one of the 12 disciples outlining an attempt at misleading people into believing in an event like the resurrection, Christian faith would likely become untenable. But in the absence of such disconfirmation, Christians can only place their faith in the historical occurrence of Jesus’ resurrection as “the mysterious gift” of God.21 Belief in the resurrection of Jesus is certainly a bit awkward for many of us today. But in attempting to protect ourselves from various threats to it, we risk adopting a view of faith that surreptitiously situates itself as immune to challenge. More importantly, obscuring the centrality of Jesus’ being alive for Christian faith is also to secure it against being enriched and expanded by the living Jesus. Apologetic attempts at inoculation of Christian faith domesticate God and history, obscuring the identity (and, therein, the meaningfulness) of Jesus Christ and therefore the providentially grounded possibility of secular history as theologically meaningful, bearing the presence, or figures of the identity, of the resurrected Jesus Christ.22

 Frei, “The Specificity of Reference,” RF, 105.  Frei, Identity, 182. 21  Hans Frei, “Of the Resurrection of Christ,” RF, 188. Fallibilism is not a term Frei used, or one that fits in well with his account of Christian theology. But to the extent that Frei provides an account of the “fallibilism” of Christian faith, it is perhaps best conceived as within the domain of archaeology and/or other physical historical research. Given the impossibility of theoretically confirming/disconfirming an event like the resurrection, its fallibility falls to physical evidence to the contrary, which beyond an un-resurrected corpse, could perhaps include verifiable letters between the disciples or apostles outlining a conscious attempt at misrepresenting Jesus’ resurrection. But for the same reasons that Frei’s implicit account of faith’s fallibility is so narrowly constrained, his account of the provisionality of faith is expansive. 22   Frei, “History, Salvation-History and Typology,” RF, 153 (hereafter, “Salvation-History”). 19 20

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History, Providence, and Figural Interpretation Perhaps one of Frei’s most important, if implicit, contributions to twentieth-­century conversations about the nature of Christian theology is the idea that whatever provisionality applies to Christian faith and theology, it is not primarily epistemological but historical—and therefore, pneumatological. The claims that orient the assortment of Christian traditions are, for all their variety, unavoidably historical. How could it be otherwise, given the purportedly historical individual from whom they are inspired and around whom they coalesce—Jesus of Nazareth? At the same time, the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection cannot be viewed straightforwardly as historical, but as “history-like.” Behind the differentiation of history and history-like lies a distinction between the “historical Jesus”—accessible to historical inquiry operating with the methods of modern historians—and the “earthly Jesus”—who, though no less real, is, by the very nature of who he was (or, more accurately, is), neither describable nor detectable by historical methods alone or even primarily.23 Viewing the Gospels as “history-like,” including their identification of Jesus as alive, also allows us to see the possibility and fitness of figural reading, a way of interpreting the Bible’s different narratives in relation to one another under an appeal to God’s providential plan while affirming the historical particularity of the different events or persons. The irreducibly particular events narrated in the Bible, most importantly the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, thereby also serve as figures through which contemporary happenings can be theologically construed—providing for the possibility that contemporary happenings themselves might encourage us to reconstrue our theology. The literary critic Erich Auerbach portrays figural interpretation as a natural extension of the realism of Judeo-Christian scripture itself and as a basic ingredient in Hebrew and Christian scripture and its interpretation.24 He highlights figural interpretation as a feature of the realism of much of the Old and New Testament narrative, used within the early church and applied in relation to both the Old Testament and the New, as well as  Thanks to Miroslav Volf for suggesting these analogous pairings.  Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Manchester: Manchester University, 1984), 28–60; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 7–23. For a very helpful account of figural interpretation and Frei’s take on it, see John David Dawson, Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 23 24

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between the New Testament, the present, and the future Kingdom of God. In both cases, the same dynamic applies: Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfils the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life. Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events whether past, present, or future, and not with concepts or abstractions; these are quite secondary, since promise and fulfilment are real historical events, which have either happened in the incarnation of the Word, or will happen in the second coming.25

The figural connection is neither primarily historical, linking the events in terms of causation, nor ideological, connecting the events only in relation to what they represent ideally. Rather, “figura is something real and historical which announces something else that is also real and historical. The relation between the two events is revealed by an accord or similarity.”26 In light of the realism underlying figural interpretation, Auerbach explains that “only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act.”27 This claim is made not in the diminishment of the realism of the Gospels or, relatedly, of the broad Christian consensus that the passion-­ crucifixion-­resurrection sequence does refer, somehow, historically, but in deference to it. Figural accounts of Christ’s presence, particularly in light of the Trinitarian account of the Holy Spirit as the medium of individual and communal encounter and participation in Christ, have a strong existential—rather than empirical or ontological—thrust. They disavow rigorous distinctions between the “historical Jesus” and the “Christ of faith,” turning our attention instead to the “earthly Jesus” and to quotidian, contextual and particular historical life as a realm of God’s providential

25  Auerbach, “Figura,” 53; Cf. Auerbach, Mimesis, 73; Frei, Eclipse, 28f; Hans Frei, “Karl Barth: Theologian,” T&N, 168–169; Hans Frei, “Theological Reflections on the Accounts of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection,” T&N, 51, 91 n.1; Hans Frei, “Theology and the Interpretation of Narrative,” T&N, 111. 26  Auerbach, “Figura,” 29. 27  Auerbach, “Figura,” 43; cf. Frei, “Salvation-History,” RF, 159; Frei, Eclipse, 28; Frei, “Karl Barth,” T&N, 168–169; Hans Frei, “Is Religious Sensibility Accessible to Study?” RF, 147.

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order and, therefore, as bearing the patterned presence of Jesus in the work of the Holy Spirit.28 In this way, we can see that losing sight of Jesus’ identity is bound up with the losing sight of ongoing history as a “one of the realms of God’s providential rule”29 and, relatedly, of history itself as “a gift of the Holy Spirit, to relate us to God in Christ.”30 Once the particular identity of Jesus is reduced to a conglomeration of historical facts or to an interior experience or psychological state (whether his or his disciples’), figural interpretation becomes defunct and the simultaneously hopeful and humbling logic of the doctrine of providence is blocked out. In other words, in the obscuring of Jesus’ identity for apologetic purposes, history—or the relationship between sacred and secular history—is also obscured. For conservatives, secular history is neatly subsumed, without remainder, under sacred history such that empirical arguments for Christian faith are fair game. The theological significance of history is simply a matter of delineating a causal chain of events, the significance of which speaks for itself. For liberals, sacred history is subsumed under secular history, such that “Christianity stands as an eschatological synecdoche for humanity” not interfering with historical existence qua historical, but persisting behind history in some idealist fashion.31 Frei describes providence as the belief that “God sustains his creatures, non-human as well as human, whom he has called into being, one creation in two realms, cosmos and history, the revealed unity of their administration being not the collapse of either into the other but Jesus Christ as the all-governing providence of God.”32 The doctrine of providence calls for figural interpretation as a central practice of Christian life, insisting that all things are ordered in Jesus Christ. The doctrine of providence also constrains the conclusiveness of our theology, disallowing any cumulative or definitive assessments of this ordered relationship between Christ and particular historical events or individuals.33 To affirming God’s providential rule over history is to affirm that figural interpretation is an appropriate, perhaps even inevitable, mode of interpreting the world in the light of 28  Quash, Found Theology, 27; cf. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 140–141. 29  Hans Frei, “History, Salvation History, and Typology,” RF, 153. 30  Quash, Found Theology, 1. 31  Frei, “Salvation-History,” RF, 151. 32  Frei, “Salvation-History,” RF, 153. 33  Frei, Identity, 193. Cf. Hans Frei, “Saint, Sinner, and Pilgrim,” RF, 122–140.

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Christian faith in Jesus being alive and present, and for this reason, a practice that must also be carried out with the utmost caution.34 For, again, as Rowan Williams glosses Austin Farrer, “the reconciliation of the world to God cannot be described as an episode in history among others; it is a change in what historical agents may hope for, think about and pray about.”35 In other words, figural interpretation posits connections between events in Scripture and those historical events outside of Scripture in which the teleological connection is “expressed by the temporal lapse or transition, perhaps even by the risk of being wrong in the juxtaposition.”36 Affirming the particularity of Jesus’ unique identity and, relatedly, history as a gift of the Holy Spirit and realm of God’s providence, both fortify and temper figural interpretation, yielding an acknowledgment that “the design is cumulative,” and therefore beyond our ken, while at the same time upholding that between Gospel and world, “at least proleptically, the unity of its pattern is also manifest.”37 Reading figurally, the significance or meaning of both Jesus and history—persons, events, and so on—cannot be reductively rendered through the liberal theological preference for idealist allegorizing or the conservative theological emphasis on narrow historicism and empirical proof. Rather, figural reading maintains appreciation of history’s particularity and secularity (i.e. differentiated from sacred history) governed by a faith in its positive and providential relation to God—a faith grounded not just in the act of creation and the promise of eschatological consummation but also in the incarnation of Jesus itself. The shape or pattern of this plan, though universal in scope, is disclosed in Gospels’ narration, and the church’s continual celebration, of the particular life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As resurrected, and therefore alive and present to creation in history in some way, the Christoform pattern of providence is also therefore discernible in the analogical or figural interpretation of the present in relation to the history-like narrative of the Gospels, a relation that persists throughout the course of history’s unfolding.38

 Cf. Mike Higton, Christ, Providence and History (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 86.  Williams, Christ The Heart of Creation, 5. 36  Frei, “Salvation-History,” RF, 159. 37  Frei, “Salvation-History,” RF, 159. 38  Cf. Higton, Christ, Providence and History, 59. 34 35

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Jesus’ identity and significance therefore can neither be confined to a simple constellation of historical events in isolation from the present, nor can it be reduced to a kind of model perspective or attitude of faith, construed ahistorically as pointing toward a basic feature of human existence in connection with the transcendent realm. Again, the Gospel narrative is not “history” but it is “history-like—in its language as well as its depiction of a common public world (no matter whether it is the one we all think we inhabit), in the close interaction of character and incident, and in the non-­ symbolic quality of the relation between the story and what the story is about.”39 It is this “history-likeness” of the Gospels, and the identity of the “earthly Jesus” around whom these narratives cohere, that points to the significance and fitness of figural interpretation in discerning, however dimly and provisionally, the providential relation between contemporary historical life and the Gospel narrative.

Facts, Faith, Praise, and Provisionality If the apologetic approach of both liberals and conservatives has imposed a false kind of certainty on Christian faith, what kind of confidence should Christians have in Jesus’ resurrection? Frei’s aversion to the description of the resurrection as a “fact” has struck some as a form of fideism, in which attempts at making sense of Jesus’ resurrection in light of advancing knowledge, scientific and otherwise, are simply regarded as irrelevant. Indeed, Frei discounts from the start any “argument from factual evidence or rational possibility” as capable of properly supporting belief in Jesus’ resurrection.40 For the language of factuality is not “theory-neutral, trans-cultural, [and] an ingredient in the structure of the human mind and of reality always and everywhere.” This being the case, can we “really say that the eternal Word made flesh, that is, made fact indeed, is a fact like any other?”41 Upholding hope for the proleptic unity of sacred and secular history in the coming of God’s Kingdom, without naively asserting a contemporary clarity concerning the nature of their future consummation, depends on our affirming this distinction. Christians must not confuse 39  Frei, Identity, 59; cf. Hans Frei, “Conflicts in Interpretation,” T&N, 162; Hans Frei, “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition,” T&N, 128f, 139f. 40  Frei, Identity, 183. 41  Frei, “Response to ‘Narrative Theology’,” T&N, 211.

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language or methodologies appropriate in a discipline like historicism as appropriate for theology.42 Hermeneutically speaking, prioritizing a literal reading of the Gospel narratives, especially the crucifixion and resurrection sequence, means the miraculous claims made within the Bible can be taken as constitutive of the meaning of its narratives, even if their actual occurrence is denied. For believing Christians, this literal sense does indeed imply historical reference. Theologically speaking, then, how it refers or “what ‘actually took place’” is beyond the ken of Christian faith. Yet belief in Jesus’ resurrection is reliable for Christians precisely because “the resurrection is a matter of faith and not of arguments from possibility or evidence.” Frei continues: Why some believe and others do not is impossible for the Christian to explain. Like many a pilgrim, he may find himself strangely on both sides at the same time. All he can do then is to recall that the logic of his faith makes it rationally impossible for him not to believe … the unique unity of Jesus Christ’s identity and presence calls forth a … unique response. It is a response, the unity of which is rendered only by the effective gift to us of the unity of Christ’s identity and presence. Reference to the Spirit or to the gift of the Spirit means that, concerning Jesus Christ and him alone, factual affirmation is completely one with faith and trust of the heart, with love of him, and love of neighbors for whom he gave himself completely.43

To say that faith is a gift of the Spirit is to affirm the priority of God in the revelatory communication of God’s self. Before we know God, in other words, God knows us. The reliability of our knowledge of God, therefore, is tied to the act of praising God—“with faith and trust of the heart, with love of him, and love of neighbors for whom he gave himself completely.” As David Ford and Daniel Hardy write: We are known by this God. That is a basic statement of faith. The first cognitive content of faith is the knowledge that we are known, and that this knowledge of us by God is not abstract or that of an omniscient spy, but passionately concerned to the point of identification with us … to know 42  At the same time, this divide is hardly absolute. For instance, the history-likeness of the Gospels means that “historical evidence against the resurrection would be decisive” (Frei, Identity, 183). Again, should the un-resurrected body of Jesus be discovered by archaeologists, Christian faith would become untenable. 43  Frei, Identity, 183, 188.

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God is to let God have the initiative as to the form of our knowledge of God, and therefore is first of all a matter of recognizing the divine initiative. If the object of our knowing is one who already knows us, then the main emphasis in our knowing will be on preparing for and receiving God’s communication with us. The disproportion between us and God is covered by God’s way of knowing us through Jesus Christ, through God’s respectful and vulnerable self-communication that allows our response really to matter … knowing this God is to know a glory and love that evokes all our astonishment, thanks and praise; praising this God is a matter of affirming truth as well as expressing adoration and love. Neither is instantaneous; praising and knowing develop together over time, a process which embraces the whole of life and is its true ecology.44

The eschewing of apologetics as the prolegomenon to theology is essential if Christian faith is to be simultaneously reliable, generative, and capacious. Affirming God’s priority in the giving of Godself to creation—a self-communication through Jesus Christ, the particular person who, as resurrected, remains present to creation—we can affirm the possibility of alteration and amendment of our accounts of Jesus’ identity and presence in the world. Such provisionality in our figural accounts of Jesus’ identity is possible not in spite of but because of who the Gospels depict him to be. The provisionality of Christian faith is therefore not primarily conceived in relation to possible defeaters of specific Christian beliefs, but in relation to the universal significance and mysterious, patterned presence in history of the particular identity of Jesus Christ, the unity of God’s providential plan for creation. Praising this God—thankfully affirming who we understand God to be in light of Jesus Christ—gives rise to our acknowledgment of the provisionality of what, or who, we understand ourselves to be affirming. Supported by figural interpretation, by the affirmation of history as the ongoing gift of the Holy Spirit, and guided by faith in God’s providential plan for the world, Frei suggests that the strange amalgamation of the particular identity and universal presence of Jesus Christ leads Christians into an engagement with the world in which they are both re-enacting and encountering afresh the public patterns of Christ’s saving presence. Under the auspices of God’s providence, the figural discerning of the presence of Jesus Christ in the world, including in the lives of non-Christians, is akin

44  David F. Ford and Daniel W. Hardy, Living in Praise (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 136f.

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to discerning “a public pattern in which humankind is seen as united in destiny”: The theologian would be wise, I think, to state the issue and its penultimate seriousness, and lay out the positions—on the one hand a God who endows all his human creatures with freedom and preserves his full creation from ultimate loss or absurdity; who, on the other, in the fulfillment of that creation as well as its radical redress in the face of evil has focused his providence in the person of Jesus Christ in whom the reign of God has come near, a reign foreshadowed, not embodied, in the precarious existence of Christian community. Beyond that the theologian would do well to commend the dialectic of the two sides to the encompassing mercy of God. A commitment to universalism concerning human destiny and a commitment to the specificity of sacred or salvation history within it are not in ultimate conflict, even if the manner of their cohesion is hidden.45

To praise God is therefore also to affirm the providential unity of sacred and secular history—a unity which, though the nature of cohesion is hidden, is yet proleptically disclosed in the identity of Jesus Christ. To praise God, then, is to gratefully affirm the provisionality of Christian faith as we experience and understand it; a provisionality that arises not because of what we don’t know about God, but because of what we do know about Him, in light of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ.

Conclusion: Provisionality and the Reconfiguration of Apologetics Figural interpretation, which Frei, following Auerbach, pointed out had been the enduring partner of the prioritization of Scripture’s plain sense, fell into disuse with the rising obsession with external reference, the hand-­ wringing over the relationship between Christian faith and history, and the systematic apologetics that accompanied it. Ironically, though obscured by concerns over the relationship between history and faith, it is precisely figural interpretation that offers the most help in understanding that relationship (in which the push and pull of provisionality is perhaps most strongly felt). Rooted in an acknowledgment of the particular limitations imposed by the sensus literalis, most particularly the characterization of Jesus as living, figural interpretation points to the providentially oriented  Frei, “Salvation-History,” RF, 151f.

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and pneumatologically inspired provisionality of Christian faith. Reading the Gospels as descriptions not of the how or why Christian faith, but of in whom our faith rests, simultaneously points toward the unimaginably vast horizons within which we are invited by the Spirit to explore and encounter the identity of Jesus in Scripture and in the world, in sacred and secular history. In this way, the provisionality of Christian faith, while remaining daunting in both its affirmation of the possibility (however limited) of disconfirmation and reconfiguration, might be viewed not as a threat of dis-figuration but of re-figuration—that is, of growing in discernment of and embodied response to Jesus Christ, the resurrected Son of God. The instinct to defend Christian faith against its detractors is entirely understandable. But the struggle to survive, to be accepted by a skeptical or hostile society, can be its own form of exclusion—what Miroslav Volf, in a different context, calls the “exclusion of assimilation,” in which it is accepted that “you can survive, even thrive, among us, if you become like us; you can keep your life, if you give up your identity.”46 Show us how your particular religious beliefs rest on reasonable foundations, stand the test of reasonable scrutiny—are certainties—and we’ll respect you too. Yet the wholehearted pursuit of an unassailable account of the “rationality” of faith is an endeavor that inevitably crams both God and history inside the strict confines of human epistemology, which can only impoverish our understanding of who God is and who we are as well. Moving down very different paths, the apologetic aspiration is yet the same for liberal and conservative theology. And having similarly prioritized an assimilatory or apologetic objective, liberals and conservatives have yielded to a subtle but pernicious form of theological exclusion, displacing the identity of the one around whom our faith hangs, to whom we belong, and in whom our identity is enmeshed as members of His body (1 Cor 12:27). The prioritization of apologetics alienates Jesus from Christian faith, therein alienating Christians from themselves. In the apologetical pursuit of assimilation (for what else could we call claims that Christian belief can be proven scientifically or that the logical impossibility of Jesus’ resurrection compels us to view his significance in strictly ethical or psychological terms?) the salt loses its saltiness. The order or logic of coming to belief—“how?” or “why?”—becomes prioritized over, even to the point of obscuring, the logic of belief—“who?” And in obscuring the identity of the one in whom it is that we believe, in adopting  Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), 75; emphasis added.

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a static hermeneutic centered on immutable referential criteria, the identity of creation, who we and our neighbors are, is also obscured. The price of a prioritization of apologetics is that we lose sight of the implications that arise from believing that Jesus is alive. Focusing on apologetics, we obscure the inexhaustibly rich, universally and mysteriously present, yet scandalously particular identity of the person around whom our faith is focused, and of creation itself as the context in which we encounter, and are encountered by, his Spirit. We become blind to the prospect that in “the central events of Christian revelation, in the specific shape of the life of Jesus, we come to grasp a new set of possibilities in talking about God … that ‘in God there is an act of begotten and responsive love, that is reciprocated, and that is cemented by a Spirit mutually indwelling … that our human destiny is ultimately defined by incorporation into the eternal act through the fellowship of Christ’s Church … [and] that certain events may be rightly seen as examples of providential leading by God.”47 But this is also to say that, having rejected the prioritization of apologetics, it appears as if some kind of apologetic engagement is unavoidable for Christians. In rejecting the pursuit of inoculation, Christian faith necessarily becomes responsive to the world. Crucially, however, it is ad hoc, affirming the hope of correlation and ultimate unity between salvation and secular history, or theology and wissenschaftlich disciplines, without imposing a program for confirming this correlation. The ad hoc apologetics of Christian faith affirms the teleological unity of salvation history and secular history in Jesus, without imposing a theory of the nature of their cohesion. Interpreting figurally, we take the particular “givens” or past events narrated in Scripture and orient them toward contemporary “findings.”48 Eschewing a systematic apologetic grounded in the methodology of external discourses like epistemology, phenomenology, and evolutionary biology, we are provided with the possibility of being surprised by the overlap between faith and history, of encountering a pattern of Jesus’ presence in the most unlikely of places. In other words, only once we have deprioritized systematic apologetics will the particular and ad hoc apologetic capaciousness, or provisionality, of Christian faith become apparent. 47  Williams, Christ The Heart of Creation, 3; cf. Robert MacSwain, ed., Scripture, Metaphysics and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 34. 48  Quash, Found Theology, 6ff.

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Reconfiguring apologetics such that they take seriously the particular and unique identity of Jesus Christ, we discover that Jesus’ identity as the resurrected Son of God makes sense “not first as an explanation of things but as a credible environment for action and imagination, a credible means of connecting narratives, practices, codes of behavior; they offer a world to live in.”49 It is the task of apologetics not to explain Jesus or the world, but to explore them.

Bibliography Almond, Philip C. 1983. W.C.  Smith as Theologian of Religions. Harvard Theological Review 76 (3). Auerbach, Erich. 1984. Figura. In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 28–60. Manchester: Manchester University. ———. 2003. Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dawson, John David. 2001. Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dembski, William A. 2001a. What Every Theologian Should Know About Creation, Evolution & Design. In Unapologetic Apologetics: Meeting the Challenges of Theological Studies, ed. William A.  Dembski and Jay Wesley Richards. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press. ———. 2001b. Creation, Evolution & Design. In Unapologetic Apologetics: Meeting the Challenges of Theological Studies, ed. William A. Dembski and Jay Wesley Richards, 221–238. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press. Fergusson, David. 2010. The Theology of Providence. Theology Today 67. Ford, David F., and Daniel W.  Hardy. 2005. Living in Praise. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Frei, Hans. 1974. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1985. David Friedrich Strauss. In Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, Vol. 1, ed. Ninian Smart, 215–260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1993. Remarks in Connection with a Theological Proposal. In Theology & Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1997. The Identity of Jesus Christ. Eugene: Wipf and Stock. ———. 2015. Reading Faithfully: Vol. 1. Eugene: Cascade Books. Higton, Mike. 2004. Christ, Providence and History. London: T&T Clark. MacSwain, Robert, ed. 2013. Scripture, Metaphysics and Poetry: Austin Farrer’s The Glass of Vision with Critical Commentary. Farnham: Ashgate.  Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, xi.

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Quash, Ben. 2013. Found Theology. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. 1979. Faith and Belief. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Volf, Miroslav. 1996. Exclusion and Embrace. Nashville: Abingdon. Williams, Rowan. 2018. Christ The Heart of Creation. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1998. Is It Possible and Desirable for Theologians to Recover from Kant? Modern Theology 14 (1): 1–18.

CHAPTER 7

God’s Pneumatic Word and Faith, Hope and Love in a Fallible World Paul Louis Metzger

Introduction The increasing problem of confirmation bias predisposes us increasingly to discount anything with which we disagree as “fake news.” The charge of “fake news” bombards the airwaves in politics and society at large. This orientation is not limited to one side or another politically but may be the only common denominator in an increasingly partisan and polarized culture. If we are not careful, the same mindset can influence biblical and theological discourse in the Christian community. We need to be aware of this tendency, remain open to being challenged, and recognize that apart from the Spirit of God, we are not able to discern truth from error and make spiritual judgments in submission to God’s Word. Drawing from Karl Barth’s Trinitarian doctrine of revelation involving God revealing God by God, as well as other sources, this chapter will argue that the human knower is always dependent upon God’s initiative to reveal God’s self through Jesus who is hidden in revelation and revealed in hiddenness

P. L. Metzger (*) Multnomah University and Seminary, Portland, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_7

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by the Spirit. We can never master divinity but must always remain open to divinity mastering and re-mastering our theological and philosophical constructs through the Spirit of revelation. We must account for the fact that love which is the ultimate gift of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:31) is never proud (1 Corinthians 13:4). Moreover, love always hopes and perseveres (1 Corinthians 13:7). This mindset or heart-set will entail three accompanying practices. First, this mindset requires humble faith as we create theological systems in service to the church of the triune God. We are fallible and frail creatures in need of God’s Spirit energizing, illumining, and reforming our spirits and our systems at every turn. Second, this mindset requires earnest hope as we pursue the truth, knowing that the Spirit never leads us away from the Word, but to the Living Word (1 Corinthians 12:3) through the written Word in the life of the church. Third, this mindset requires resilient love so that we do not write one another off but rather are desirous of learning from others in the community of faith as they seek the Living Word through the written Word in reliance on the Spirit. After all, we all look through a glass dimly. Only when the veil is lifted in eternity will we see face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12). In these three ways, we can guard against resorting to charges of fake news and reinforcing confirmation bias in the community of the one true faith.

The Practice of Humble Faith Humble faith realizes that we are debtors to God’s grace and dependent on God’s Spirit for all knowledge of God. Humble faith realizes that faith is an empty hand—we do not even bring faith to the table. It realizes that the knowledge of God, not to be confused with mere opinion, is never the result of our intellectual prowess, but God’s intervention. As the Lord Jesus says to Peter when he confesses Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the living God (Matthew 16:16), “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Matthew 16:17; NRSV). Unfortunately, Peter does not seem to realize that he is dependent at every turn on God’s grace to understand the divine mystery. Peter learned the hard way, as Matthew’s Gospel moves immediately from Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah to his rebuke of Jesus in predicting his impending death and resurrection. Peter’s rebuke suggests that he presumed to know more of God’s purposes than Jesus and had an idolatrous handle on

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him, even to the point of telling Jesus that God forbids his death (Matthew 16:21–22). Peter’s confirmation bias meets with the Lord’s strong resistance: “But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’” (Matthew 16:23; NRSV). Idolatry does not simply convey the idea that we have faulty notions of God. It also entails the erroneous mindset that we have a handle on God. Perhaps such presumption is on display even in seminary degrees on offer today, including “Master of Divinity.” There are no masters of divinity, only those who are mastered by divinity. This brings us to Karl Barth. Barth’s Römerbrief and early response to classic theological liberalism in Protestant circles was a sustained attempt to destroy such lofty assumptions of mastering divinity. Our religious aspirations are often attempts at divinization, which must give way to God’s humanizing revelation in Jesus through the Spirit. One of the ways in which this presumption or idolatry manifested itself for Barth was in the historicization of Christianity. Following what he took to be Franz Overbeck’s lead, Barth criticized the move that made Christianity a predicate of history.1 One need not agree with Barth’s early separation of revelation from history to affirm his point about the need to safeguard against the presumed human mastery of revelation. Later, Barth would draw from the Reformed treatment of anhypostatsis and enhypostasis in consideration of the communicatio idiomatum to strike at a more balanced approach. Through his employment of these Christological categories from a Reformed model in an actualist, dynamic manner in which the divine Word takes the human nature to himself moment by moment,2 he was later able to affirm revelation’s relation to history in integral terms without undermining the important distinction between the divine and human: the divine is capable of becoming human, but the human is not capable of the divine (finitum non capax infiniti).3 Another way of putting this is to say that revelation occurs “in history without becoming a predicate of history.”4 1  See Karl Barth, “Unsettled Questions for Theology Today,” in Theology and Church, with an introduction by T. F. Torrance, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962). 2  Bruce L. McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 365. 3  McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 366. 4  McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 21.

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We must not isolate this discussion to the realm of Christology only since revelation is ultimately a Trinitarian event. Pneumatology must also come into play. God reveals God by God, as Barth asserted, not by us. The Father reveals the Son by the Spirit. Again, revelation is a Trinitarian event: the Father (revealer) makes known the Son (revelation) through the Spirit (revealedness) in their divine oneness and threeness, threeness and oneness.5 We are never in control of the revelation dynamic. God in Jesus through the power of the Spirit is. We can never grasp hold of God and make the deity our property. We live by humble faith at every turn, moment by moment. Thus, we can never simply speak of the need to reform theology. We are in need of being reformed daily6 by the Word of God in the doing of theology as debtors to God’s grace. The cynical charge of “fake news” in our society today often if not always assumes that we alone have access to the truth, that we protect it, and that we properly present it. At best, we are witnesses to the truth, never gatekeepers or possessors. We do not own the gospel. Thomas John Hastings addressed this point in a meditation at the Overseas Ministries Study Center when he asked, “Who owns the gospel?” The history of global missions provides various answers to this question— from those who thought that the missionaries and their sending agencies owned the gospel to missionaries and sending agencies who understood that God alone owns the gospel. No church owns the gospel, not the church in Jerusalem, Rome, Wittenberg, Basel, or anywhere else in the West or East for that matter. Revelation never becomes a predicate of history, a particular culture, or tradition. While there is a place for personalizing the gospel, as was true of the Apostle Paul when he speaks of “my gospel” (Romans 2:16, 16:25; 1 Timothy 1:11; 2 Timothy 2:8), such personalizing must never give way to monopolizing the gospel. After all, God alone owns the gospel. The apostolic community came to terms early on with the realization that God alone owns the gospel. In the call to preach the good news to the Roman centurion Cornelius recorded in Acts chapter 10, we find that Peter comes to terms with the fact that the gospel does not belong to him and his people, but God. God invites people everywhere to receive Jesus’ kingdom invitation and experience the Spirit: “Then Peter began to speak 5  See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2, The Doctrine of the Word of God (ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance: Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), 203. 6  Barth, Church Dogmatics, 682.

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to them: ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all’” (Acts 10:34–36; NRSV). Several verses later, the point comes home in even more dramatic fashion: While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days. (Acts 10:44–48; NRSV)

The missional movement of God’s Spirit in the life of the church loses traction whenever we fail to account for Peter’s realization that we are recipients and respondents to the good news, not those who orchestrate God’s operations. Christian mission entails depending on the Spirit every step of the way, not just at the outset of the church’s life (see Acts 1:4, 8). It should not be difficult to remember how reliant we really are on the Spirit. Consider this: what would lead a Roman centurion like Cornelius to accept a crucified Nazarene as Lord? After all, it was under Roman rule that Jesus was crucified as a defeated rebel and foe. As with Peter, it was only God’s Spirit who could remove the veil from the centurion’s eyes to see God revealed through the hiddenness of cruciform flesh (see Matthew 16:17; Acts 10:34–36, 44–48). Barth claimed that the revelation of Jesus Christ is always veiled or hidden in creaturely flesh.7 For Barth, there is no logos asarkos. Moreover, we only know the logos enfleshed in a cruciform manner. God is always hidden in revelation through the veil of Jesus’ crucified body. Humanity only ever has indirect access to revelation, but access to revelation is assured. God is hidden in revelation and is revealed in hiddenness.8 The next  McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 362.  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. II/1, The Doctrine of God, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T.  F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T.  Clark, 1957), 199, 343; Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: William B.  Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), 136–141; McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology, 362. 7 8

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s­ection will entertain these claims more fully, building on the claim that faith calls to mind the hiddenness of revelation whereas hope points to the revelation disclosed in hiddenness.

The Practice of Earnest Hope To reiterate, God is hidden in revelation through the veil of cruciform flesh. And yet, God is also revealed in hiddenness. The two elements must be kept together at every turn. If we were only to account for the theme of hiddenness and accompanying fallibility of faith, we could easily move in the direction of cynicism and agnosticism. Certainly, there is an apophatic dimension to the faith, but there is a cataphatic element as well.9 In fact, they occur simultaneously. The two dynamics reflect a critical realist position that maintains there is a real referent to our worship and theological reflection and that we struggle to understand the nature and ways of the triune God we adore. In this light, there is no room for ambivalence whereby we refuse to pursue the truth and revel in ambiguity. Of course, as accounted for in the last section, there is no room for arrogance either whereby we proclaim the superiority of our theological claims over other attempts to come to terms with revelation. Thus, faith (a safeguard to intellectual arrogance) and hope (a safeguard to intellectual ambivalence) require one another. The following reflection from Barth addresses the concerns noted to this point in the chapter. We should not rest content in a multiplicity that ultimately separates and tears apart Christian communities, only the multiplicity within the one church: If Christ is indeed … the unity of the Church, then the only multiplicity which can be normal is that within the Church, namely that of the local communities, of the gifts of the Spirit, of the believers of each sex, language, and race, and there can be no multiplicity of churches. It is then unthinkable that to those multiplicities which are rooted in unity we should have to add that which tears it in pieces; unthinkable that great entire groups of communities should stand over against each other in such a way that their 9  McCormack seeks to counter those approaches to Barth’s dialectical model of revelation that would lean in either direction. See for example his two-part article “Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth: Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology,” Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie, vol. 13/numbers 1–2 (1997): 67–95, 170–194.

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­ octrines and confessions of faith are mutually contradictory; that which is d called revelation in one place should be called error elsewhere, that what is here revered as dogma should there be regarded as heresy; that the ordinances of one group should be stigmatized by another as alien, unacceptable, or even intolerable: that the adherents of the one should be at one with those of another in every conceivable point except that they are unable to pray together, to preach and hear God’s word together, and to join together in Holy Communion.

Barth goes on to say it is “unthinkable” when one hears: “You have a different Spirit from ours.”10 Later in his treatment of church disunity Barth writes that the multiplicity of churches reflects our helplessness in Jesus’ sight. However, he also encourages us in claiming that Jesus is our hope. We are in desperate need of the triune God’s unifying grace,11 and so must proceed in humble faith as well as confident hope in the Lord who ultimately is our unity. There is certainly a place for multiplicity. As Barth claims, there is a form of multiplicity that is appropriate “within the Church, … namely that of the local communities, of the gifts of the Spirit, of the believers of each sex, language, and race.” In what follows, we will focus on the pursuit of unity within the matrix of linguistic multiplicity. In the last section, consideration was given to Acts chapter 10, which accounts for Peter’s realization that the Jewish Christian community does not own the gospel. God does. God’s Spirit falls upon Gentiles such as the centurion Cornelius and his household just as the Spirit descends on Peter and the Jewish Christians. Faith in Jesus is the great equalizer. In Acts 2, the Spirit falls on the Jewish apostolic community among Jewish pilgrims who have journeyed from across the Roman Empire to Jerusalem for the Feast of Harvest. The good news of Jesus Christ is proclaimed in the native tongues of the places where they live. Often, Pentecost is taken to refer to the reversal of Babel’s curse. New Testament scholar Joel Green disagrees: “Genesis 11 does not present the confusion of languages on the plain of Shinar simply as a punitive action on God’s part. Instead, God’s purpose from the beginning was for the human family to scatter across and to fill the whole earth, and this is the consequence of Babel” (see Gen 1:28; 9:1; 10:32; 11:8). Green goes on 10  Karl Barth, The Church and the Churches, with a foreword by William G. Rusch (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1936, 2005), 23–25. 11  Barth, The Church and the Churches, 30.

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to argue that it was not just humanity’s attempt to make a name for themselves recorded in Genesis 11 that “frustrated God’s purpose.” The “one language” reference signifies “linguistic domination” by imperial rule in the Ancient Near East. Luke’s audience in Acts would have been very familiar with such imperialistic tactics, as they were “beneficiaries” of Alexander the Great’s imposition of Greek as the common tongue throughout the known world. Thus, Pentecost, like the confusion of tongues at Babel, was a sign of God’s grace in undoing imperial oppression: Pentecost does not reverse Babel but parodies it. With the outpouring of the Spirit, koinonia is realized, not as the consequence of a single, repressive language, nor by the dissolution of multiple languages, nor by the dissolution of social and regional distinctives in the formation of cultural homogeneity. Rather, koinonia results from the generative activity of the Spirit who is poured out by Jesus (v 33) and the location of a new rallying point of identity among those “who call on the name of the Lord,” those baptized “in the name of Jesus Christ.” (vv 21, 38)12

In keeping with Green’s reflections, the hope of the apostolic community is not uniformity of language or monoculturalism, but rather multiplicity centered in the risen Jesus and outpoured Spirit. Going further, we find that Pentecost fosters linguistic and cultural diversity. The apostolic community was speaking in the people’s native tongues (Acts 2:7–8). The missional church resists colonial and imperial rule linguistically, as Jesus’ kingdom moves forward to bless people from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, as Jesus declared (Acts 1:8). Moreover, Pentecost releases human agency and promotes equity. The missional church resists hegemonic hierarchies, as the Spirit is poured out on all people in the last days, including sons and daughters, young men and old, “slaves, both men and women.” God’s people will prophecy, see visions, and dream dreams (Acts 2:17–18). Pentecost resists sophistication and sophistry and promotes simplicity, vulnerability, authenticity, and sincerity. The gospel was proclaimed and written down in the common language for the common people by the common people such as Peter and the apostolic community. It is for all people, not simply for those close by, but also for those far off—whoever the Lord Jesus calls (Acts 2:38–39). 12  Joel B. Green, “Commentary for Pentecost, Acts 2:1–21,” Ministry Matters, January 2, 2011. Accessed on 9/1/2018. https://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/545/ commentary-for-pentecost-acts-21-21

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The conflict with linguistic imperialism is not isolated to the Greco-­ Roman past. It is also a modern phenomenon. Lamin Sanneh points out that in Africa, the end of colonialism so indelibly associated with Christendom led to a dramatic upsurge of indigenous Christianity. Whereas Islam, with its adamancy over the linguistic superiority of Arabic for worship and devotion, benefited from imperial European conquest with the suffocation of tribal cultures, religions, and their indigenous names for deity, indigenous Christianity blossomed with the European imperialists’ demise.13 The religion of the apostolic community was written down first in Koine, common Greek, not in an elitist or esoteric tongue. It was also communicated orally in the languages of various people groups around the known world, and not just Koine. We must guard against elitist and esoteric emphases today as well if we are to keep in step with the Spirit in bearing witness to Jesus of Nazareth in common tongues.14 Lesslie Newbigin also compares Christianity and Islam on the subject of language and translation. Unlike the Quran, which can only be interpreted, not translated, according to strict Islamic teaching, Newbigin writes that “Pentecost is our biblical warrant for saying that God accepts languages.”15 This is no small thing since language is “the most fundamental element in culture.” When one’s native language is suppressed and forbidden, people “feel that the very foundations of their common life have been destroyed.”16 Christianity does not have a revealed language, but a revealed person. It is not Hebrew or Aramaic (Jesus’ spoken language) in which the New Testament is penned. It is Koine, and not simply Koine, but all tongues present at Pentecost. Jewish culture is not destined to be the world culture in Christianity. Unlike Athens, Rome, or Mecca, where Greek, Latin, or Arabic was perceived as the universal language to which all must conform their speech, the crucified and risen Jesus and outpoured Spirit at Pentecost signifies that a new world order has emerged. Jesus died on a cross, contrary to the claims of many Muslims. And so, as Newbigin argues, the Christian epoch is “not simply a prolongation of the life of Jesus,” but is entrusted to the community of the risen, embodied Jesus, made up of 13  Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 18–19, 99–100. 14  Refer also to Sanneh’s discussion in Whose Religion Is Christianity? 98, 100–101. 15  Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 187. 16  Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 187.

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circumcised and uncircumcised believers of many tongues on whom the Spirit falls, just as we see in Acts 2 and 10.17 It requires grace and courage to be fallible and celebrate such multiplicity in the church. Grace and courage are grounded not in ourselves but in the Christian hope of the crucified and risen Jesus. Hope in the crucified and risen Jesus who is the basis for the church’s unity does not extinguish linguistic and cultural multiplicity, as noted by Barth, Green, Sanneh, and Newbigin. Jesus gives rise to authentic multiplicity in the Spirit in the life of his community. So, where does such humble faith and expectant hope lead us? Certainly not forward in arrogance or ambivalence, but in awe and wonder. So, how do we proceed in the midst of tension involving diverse language and culture? What posture must we take? Our posture must reflect the Spirit’s loving quality of humility (1 Corinthians 13:4). And so, we must be inquisitive, not inquisitional, always remembering that we now look through a glass dimly. We must always lovingly trust, hope, and persevere in the confident assurance that someday we will know fully just as we are now fully known (1 Corinthians 13:7, 12). Ecstatic tongues will be stilled (1 Corinthians 13:8), but not those of the nations which will proclaim praises before the throne of the triune God with the downfall of the Roman pantheon of the gods and Caesar worship (Revelation 7:9).

The Practice of Resilient Love Jesus does not destroy his enemies but loves them. His disciples are to do the same. Those who were responsible for crucifying Jesus (Acts 2:23) are not rejected. Rather, when cut to the heart at Peter’s proclamation of the good news, Peter invites them to repent and receive the promised salvation through faith in Jesus’ name and the accompanying gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38; see also Acts 4:12). Such long-suffering love is on display not simply in reaching out to Jesus’ enemies at Pentecost (Acts 2) but also in bringing together Jesus’ community of disciples at the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15). Here we find Jews and Gentiles who have believed in Jesus and received the gift of the Holy Spirit. Tensions arise as many in the Jewish community expect the Gentiles to be circumcised and become Jews. Peter, Paul, and Barnabas ardently disagree. An allusion is made to Cornelius and his household receiving the Spirit in the same way as the Jewish disciples. There is no  Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 147.

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salvific distinction made between those of Jewish descent and Gentiles who are cleansed by faith (Acts 15:9). The outcome of the Jerusalem Council is that Gentiles are welcomed into the church by faith alone apart from circumcision. The decision made at the Council did not remove all tensions. The New Testament accounts for the struggle Paul and others experienced in contending with the Judaizers (see, e.g., Galatians 5:12 and Philippians 3:2). Moreover, James and company determine to make a pastoral compromise out of concern for unity and regard for Jewish believers: “For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well” (Acts 15:28–29; NRSV). No doubt, tensions would surface repeatedly in congregations made up of Jewish and Gentile believers. It would be easy for one group to look down on the other bound up with various customs, practices, and freedoms. The instructions given to Gentiles in the letter accompanying the Council’s emissaries (Acts 15:25–27) were intended to minimize such strains. Adding to the difficulty was the eventual separation of Paul and Barnabas over John Mark who had previously abandoned them. While the narrator appears to minimize the negative import of their separation out of loyalty to Paul, no doubt, their separation had some negative impact on the unity of the church (Acts 15:36–41). Those who have a share in the Spirit of Jesus must make every effort to get along and pursue the bond of unity in the midst of different opinions. In a day when accusations over fake news and confirmation bias abound, when those who are of the same opinion are considered righteous and those who differ are objects of disgust, we must pursue empathy in the Spirit.18 Resilient love is the ultimate gift of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Such love is humble (1 Corinthians 13:4), hopeful, and perseverant (1 Corinthians 13:7). 18  See Jonathan Haidt’s discussion of the moral foundation of sanctity: its “triggers” are “extraordinarily variable and expandable across cultures and eras.” Those who transgress what is deemed holy meet with a swift and strong reaction. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 173–174. This would certainly include ideological impurity. More recently, Haidt has called on people of various moral groupings to cultivate empathy in combating overreactions concerning the emotion of disgust. Jonathan Haidt, “Can a Divided America Heal?” Ted Talks. Accessed on 9/1/2018. https://www.ted.com/talks/ jonathan_haidt_can_a_divided_america_heal?language=en

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Conclusion Barth’s principled posture of returning to God’s Word to be reformed daily is one that all Christians would do well to imitate. No doubt, this principle which accounts for God’s otherness and our fallibility fostered in Barth a “capacity for friendship” with those who were his “ideological opponents.”19 This principled posture involves the realization that our basis for hope is not our own theological systems but Jesus Christ who alone is the truth and the one who in love unites his church through God’s Spirit. The Spirit of God whom Jesus sends at Pentecost will lead us into all truth. We must constantly wait patiently in prayer for the Spirit’s descent. We must depend on the Spirit of Jesus Christ rather than on our own cognitive faculties or in-group affinities, which give rise to fake news accusations and confirmation bias—manifestations of the spirit of the age. Barth’s maxim of being reformed daily by the Word is not unique to Barth’s Reformed theological heritage. We find a similar emphasis in Pope John XXIII’s encyclical on the subject of “Truth, Unity and Peace, in a Spirit of Charity.” On the subject of “religious controversy,” John XXIII writes, The Catholic Church, of course, leaves many questions open to the discussion of theologians. She does this to the extent that matters are not absolutely certain. Far from jeopardizing the Church’s unity, controversies, as a noted English author, John Henry Cardinal Newman, has remarked, can actually pave the way for its attainment. For discussion can lead to fuller and deeper understanding of religious truths; when one idea strikes against another, there may be a spark.20

John XXIII goes on to affirm the saying often attributed to Augustine: “in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.”21

19  John Updike rightly reasons that Barth’s emphasis on “the otherness of God seemed to free him to be exceptionally (for a theologian) appreciative and indulgent of this world, the world at hand.” John Updike, “Foreword” to Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with a new Foreword by Paul Louis Metzger (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 7. 20  Pope John XXIII, Ad Petri Cathedram (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1959), number 71. Accessed on 9/1/2018. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/ documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_29061959_ad-petri.html 21  Pope John XXIII, Ad Petri Cathedram, number 72.

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Barth conceived of God’s freedom and love or charity serving as the principal lenses for viewing all the divine perfections.22 Such freedom and love liberates us from having to play God who alone serves as the final authority on truth. Knowing that God alone reveals God by God’s Spirit, we can look with the eye of faith at the church’s controversies not as causes for despair or disgust. Rather, to build on Cardinal Newman’s aforementioned point, we can view such controversies as amazing and astonishing sparks ignited by the Spirit as “divided tongues, as of fire” (Acts 2:3; NRSV) that will lead us to bear witness to the good news of Jesus Christ: “Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?’” (Acts 2:7–8; NRSV).

Bibliography Barth, Karl. 1936, 2005. The Church and the Churches, with a foreword by William G. Rusch. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. ———. 1962. Unsettled Questions for Theology Today. In Theology and Church, with an introduction by T.F.  Torrance, Trans. Louise Pettibone Smith. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. ———. 1975. Church Dogmatics, 14 vols. Ed. and Trans. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. ———. 1990. The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion. Vol. 1. Trans. Geoffrey W.  Bromiley. Grand Rapids: William B.  Eerdmans Publishing Company. ———. 2003. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with a foreword by John Updike and a new foreword by Paul Louis Metzger. Eugene: Wipf and Stock. ———. 2010. Church Dogmatics, 14 vols. Ed. and Trans. G.W.  Bromiley and T.F. Torrance. Cambridge: Hendrickson Publishing. Green, Joel B. 2011. Commentary for Pentecost, Acts 2:1–21. Ministry Matters, January 2. https://www.ministrymatters.com/all/entry/545/commentaryfor-pentecost-acts-21-21 Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2016. Can a Divided America Heal? Ted Talks, November. https://www. ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_can_a_divided_america_heal?language=en McCormack, Bruce L. 1995. Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 22  Refer to Barth’s treatment of the divine perfections in Church Dogmatics, vol. II/1, Chapter VI, “The Reality of God.”

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———. 1997. Beyond Nonfoundational and Postmodern Readings of Barth: Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology. Zeitschrift für Dialektische Theologie 13 (1–2): 67–95, 170–194. Newbigin, Lesslie. 1989. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Pope John XXIII. 1959. Ad Petri Cathedram 71. Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana. http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jxxiii_enc_29061959_ad-petri.html Sanneh, Lamin. 2003. Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

CHAPTER 8

A Pluralistic Pluralism: With Some Remarks on Fallibilism Seung Chul Kim

Das Du ist so sehr und so wenig Du wie das Ich Ich ist. —Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Wer bin ich und wer bist Du?”

About This Chapter In an essay about the theological discourses on the interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism so far, I suggested a “pluralistic pluralism” as a possible way for overcoming the Christianity-centered discussions and evaluation of the other religious traditions in the world.1 With the concept of “pluralistic pluralism” I tried to get over even the limit of “the Reality-­centered pluralism” (John Hick) or “the unitive pluralism” (Paul

 Some parts of this chapter are taken from my previous article with a necessary alteration. See Seung Chul Kim, “How could we get over the monotheistic paradigm for the interreligious dialogue?” Journal of Inter-religious Studies 13(2014): 20–33. The original edition of the essay was presented at the annual conference of American Academy of Religion in 2013 in Baltimore. 1

S. C. Kim (*) Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture, Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan © The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_8

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Knitter) that are, in my opinion, still stuck to the all-embracing One, no matter what it is called. In this chapter, I will refer to my previous essay with the intention of making a dialogue with fallibilism and to investigate whether fallibilist thought could shed light on the development of the interreligious dialogue from an Asian perspective. But it must be said clearly that this chapter does not aim at a dialogue with fallibilism itself, but with a possible fallibilist standpoint vis-à-vis the interreligious dialogue. I will give attention to the theological reception of fallibilism in terms of interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism. I think the fallibilist approach to interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism repays careful reading in that it could render us with the possibility that might help us to go beyond the paradigm for religious pluralism, which is thought to be attached still to the all-embracing ultimate One. And further, I will review the theological opinion of Stephen Kaplan, who in a creative way tried to suggest a way to go beyond the fallibilist approach to the interreligious dialogue.

Three Steps Toward “A Theology of Pluralistic Pluralism” and Some Fallibilist Remarks The essential question in the interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism2 could not be stated as a question of whether or not there is one and only one ultimate religious truth.3 From the point of view of Asian Christians, this is merely an abstract question that neither is to be answered ultimately nor has any concrete and ultimate meaning for their faith. The reason for that is to be found in the fact that Asian Christians have been living in the history of effects (Wirkungsgeschichte) (Hans-Georg Gadamer) of the various religious traditions of Asia and that those religious traditions already have been “assimilated somatically”4 into the Christian faith of Asians. To put the same thing differently, the religious traditions of Asia with which Asian Christians try to enter a dialogue are already to be found in no other place than in their Christian faith itself. Asian religious traditions were the hermeneutical horizon, which is indispensable for the 2  Kim, “How could we  get over the  monotheistic paradigm for  the  interreligious dialogue?” 29–32. 3  Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Gott ohne Grenzen. Eine christliche und pluralistische Theologie der Religionen (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2005), 177. 4  Thomas Kasulis, Intimacy and Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference (University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 79.

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understanding of the Christian faith. In this sense, various religious traditions of Asia are an “inner other” for Asian Christians. They are the condition for the possibility of the Christian faith of Asians. Although the concept of pluralism is to be defined as “the metaphysical doctrine that all existence is ultimately reducible to a multiplicity of distinct and independent beings or elements,”5 the “multiplicity of distinct and independent beings or elements” is assimilated in one and the same faith of Asian Christians. In this sense, the question of whether or not there is one ultimate truth must transcend its epistemological character, which could not be asked and answered without objectifying Asian Christian faith. The dichotomy between the One and the Many, no matter how it is assumed, is no longer valid for the reality of Asian Christian faith. Or, to state the same thing more positively, the one faith consists of many religions, and many religions are assimilated in one faith. In order to be honest toward the experience of Asian Christian faith, I think we must pass through a three-step theological process. First, we must overcome the exclusive attitude toward other religious traditions. Hick’s “Pluralistic Hypothesis” could contribute to a deconstruction of the egocentric self into the Reality-centered view of the religions. Hick says: The great world faiths embody different perceptions and conceptions of, and correspondingly different responses to, the Real from within the major variant ways of being human. … One then sees the great world religions as different human responses to the one divine Reality, embodying different perceptions which have been formed in different historical and cultural circumstances. […] Within each of them the transformation of human existence from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness is taking place. These traditions are accordingly to be regarded as alternative soteriological “spaces” within which, or “ways” along which, men and women can find salvation/liberation/ultimate fulfillment.6

Hick’s idea of a “Pluralist Hypothesis” that concentrates on the transcendent One as an overall historical and cultural-religious phenomenon

5  Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, “Pluralism,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics vol. X, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1918), 66. 6  John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 240.

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could provide us, although temporarily, “skillful means” (upāya)7 to overcome the exclusivist attitude toward other religions. In this sense, J.  R. Hustwit’s critique of the “Pluralist Hypothesis” attracts our attention. He reads Hick’s thesis from the perspective of Lyotard’s criticism of meta-narrative and insists that a “fallibilist hermeneutics” could be an alternative for genuine interreligious dialogue. His following statement seems similar to what I have called “pluralistic pluralism.” John Hick’s identist affirmation of religions seems like it would be a prime example of a totalizing meta-narrative because it explains all religious traditions as cultural mythologies that have been mysteriously inspired by an ineffable Real. Hick’s Procrustean scheme is not congenial with what persons in those traditions would say about their own beliefs. Religious persons may disagree that their beliefs and practices are not meaningfully related to the being of the Real. They may believe that their own doctrines are symbolic but not in the Kantian way that Hick imagines. … Hick’s theory requires that all religious persons revise their own beliefs and dispositions to conform to his Kantian epistemology.8

In terms of the purpose of this chapter, we should note that Hustwit’s “fallibilist hermeneutics” tries to deconstruct “the Real,” which according to Hick embraces all the cultural, social, and historical differences among the various religious traditions. The fallibilist insight by Peirce that “people cannot attain absolute certainty concerning questions of fact”9 could lead, according to Hustwit, to the Gadamerian metaphor of the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) that stands against the “Hegelian progressive totalization of meaning.”10 As is well known, fallibilism begins first of all with the awareness that “we can never be absolutely sure of anything.”11 We can cite the phrase of Peirce from the 7  Upāya is a Buddhist terminology to indicate the useful guidance or assistance to the right Buddhist paths to the liberation. 8  J. R. Hustwit, Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth (Lexington Books, 2014), 101–102. 9  Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism,” Justus Buchler ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover, 1955), 59. 10  Hustwit, Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth, 103. 11  Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 147

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perspective that we have been speaking of the problem of religious pluralism. The principle of continuity is the idea of fallibilism objectified. For fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy. Now the doctrine of continuity is that all things so swim in continua.12

When Hustwit applies his “fallibilist hermeneutics” to the interreligious dialogue as in the following quote, however, I detect a gap between his standpoint on the interreligious encounter and the Asian way of interreligious dialogue. Such a gap leads us to a critical attitude toward his concept of “fallibilist hermeneutics,” if not of fallibilism itself. As a Christian in conversation with some unfamiliar religious movement, I would admittedly struggle to understand their beliefs and practices by comparing them to my own, and I would largely use my own conceptual scheme to make sense of their unfamiliar ideas. … Hermeneutics has shown that I can do nothing else. … The value of fallibilist hermeneutics is that once it comes to consciousness and the individual becomes aware of her own finitude and situatedness, the perspective of the interpreter does not result in the oppressive clash of conflicting dogmas, but the transformative phenomenon of genuine conversation.13

Hustwit’s “fallibilist hermeneutics” leads us to an epoché in terms of the question of the truth, because such an epoché already presupposes that there is one and only one truth (= all-embracing One) and that nobody is allowed to get that truth. Even though the “fallibilist hermeneutics” shows us a way to be liberated from the monopoly of the all-embracing One, it still stands under the shadow of the all-embracing One. Further, for Hustwit, the other religions with which he wants to enter into dialogue are still an other exterior to his own Christian faith, in as much as he wants to “compare” them to his own Christian faith. This is a critical point where his open-minded “fallibilist hermeneutics” could not be applied as it is to the situation of Asian Christians. The reason for this is rather simple. For Asian Christians, the other religions are not an other

 Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 171.  Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 103–104.

12 13

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exterior to her/his Christian faith, rather they are an other interior to their Christian faith. Still, the “fallibilist hermeneutics” could contribute to the development of an Asian way of interreligious dialogue in that it asks us to cut off the attachment to the all-embracing One. To get over the “meta-narrative” paradigm for religious pluralism, we should cut the thread of the oneness that is assumed to tie all the various religious traditions of the world together to the transcendent One. That would also mean getting over the “Pluralistic Hypothesis” of John Hick. The following Zen mondo could be cited as an indicator of a way to cut the One: A monk asked Jō shū, ‘All the dharmas are reduced to oneness, but what is oneness reduced to?’ Jō shū said, ‘When I was in Seishū I made a hempen shirt. It weighed seven pounds.’14

By concentrating on this mondo, we could delete the shadow of the One that remains in the “Pluralistic Hypothesis” of John Hick. Third, by cutting the thread of the transcendent One, we enter into the realm (dhatu) of faith, which I have described with the help of the Hua-­ yen Buddhist understanding of reality. In this realm, the religious pluralism “outside” is “somatically” assimilated into the religious pluralism “inside”’ in reference to the existence of Asian Christians. The theology of “pluralistic pluralism” is a way of expressing a reality in which we experience the free-floating and mutual penetration of the religious traditions, not only in the world “out there,” but also in the inner world of one’s faith. This reality, as experienced by Asian Christians, is not totally and adequately expressed by the “Pluralistic Hypothesis,” although it helps us to overcome the unnecessary conditions of being a Christian in Asia: The exclusivist self-righteous attitude of the faith. In the theology of pluralistic pluralism, the Many appears as much the Many as it is liberated from the coercive One. One’s own faith occurs here, to put it better, by the mutual penetration of the many faiths, unconsciously and even consciously. 14  Two Zen Classics. Mumonkan & Hekiganroku Translated with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida; edited and introduced by A. V. Grimstone (New York: Weatherhill, 1977), 271 (case 45). Mondo means literally “question and answer” and is used in Zen Buddhism to provoke a great question and to test the awakening status of the practicing monk.

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Different Paths, Different Summits and Hua-Yen Buddhist Philosophy What could then be the next possible step for overcoming Hick’s attachment to the all-embracing One, if we must distance ourselves from Hustwit’s fallibilist approach toward interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism? According to the concise analysis of Reinhold Bernhardt, any theologian who supports the theology of religious pluralism is thought to be either “a unitive (or monistic) pluralist” or “a consequent pluralist.”15 The former, according to Bernhardt, tries to universalize and globalize Christian theology, while the latter wants to represent a “theology which is open to the other religious traditions and [is] always ready to make a dialogue with them, but does not attempt to go back behind the Christian confession of faith that is tied firmly with the Christian contexts.” In other words, the “unitive monistic pluralist” acknowledges the transcendental common ground of world religions, upon which he believes a “global theology” could be constructed. By contrast, the “consequent pluralist” adheres to the incommensurable particularity of a specific religious tradition, because such thinkers deny the possibility of circumventing one’s own religious tradition as it is transmitted historically and culturally up to the present. The “consequent pluralist” concentrates on dialogue in the belief that it could broaden the scope of a specific religious tradition. The differences between these two theological opinions, Bernhardt maintains, should be viewed not as mutually exclusive oppositions but as theological attitudes with different points of emphasis. Michael Hüttenhoff rearranges Bernhardt’s classification by coining the terms “monocentric pluralism” (monozentrischer Pluralismus) and “polycentric pluralism” (polyzentrischer Pluralismus).16 15   Reinhold Bernhardt, “Einleitung,” in Horizontüberschreitung. Die Pluralistische Theologie der Religionen, ed. Reinhold Bernhardt (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1991), 22. Cf. Schmidt-Leukel, Gott ohne Grenzen. Eine christliche und pluralistische Theologie der Religionen, 176ff. 16  “Für den monozentrischen Pluralismus ist die Beziehung auf dasselbe Voraussetzung dafür, dass die Geltungsansprüche verschiedener Religionen trotz ihrer Verschiedenheit gleichberechtigt sein können. Dagen vertritt der polyzentrische Pluralismus die Auffassung, wenn man die tieffreifenden Unterschiede zwischen einzelnen Religionen (z.B. zwischen Christentum und Buddhismus) ernst nehmen, könnten deren Geltungsansprüche nur unter der Voraussetzung, dass sie sich nicht auf dasselbe, sondern auf Verschiedenes beziehen, gliechberechtigt sein. Damit ist selbstverständlich nicht ausgeschlossen, dass sich einige Religionen

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The typologies of Bernhardt and Hüttenhoff represent the main directions of arguments regarding religious pluralism up to the present. That is to say, the theologies of religious pluralism, whatever they may be, have focused on the question of the oneness of truth, as was seen above in relation with the fallibilist understanding of interreligious dialogue. The theology of religious pluralism so far has no choice but to take up an already prescribed question and attempt to answer “how different religions can point to truth,”17 and to reflect on whether ultimate religious truth is one or many. In fact, Hustwit’s conception of “fallibilist hermeneutics” comes from his standpoint that the interreligious dialogue is concerned mainly with questions of religious truth. In this sense, it is worth considering Stephen Kaplan’s view that Hick and Knitter, two representative theologians for religious pluralism, still adhere to the “oneness” of religious truths, raising suspicions that they are at best apologists for “crypto-exclusivism” and “crypto-inclusivism.”18 Such thinking leads to the “Pluralistic Hypothesis” of John Hick, which affirms a common religiously ultimate reality that is ontologically real, but which remains epistemologically unknown to us. This common ultimate reality brings all the real religions into the same soteriological frame. Instead of a theological scheme that gathers many religious traditions under one ultimate unity of the truth, epitomized as “Different Paths, One Summit,” Kaplan himself tries to develop a theological position that could be summarized as “Different Paths, Different Summits.” In his (z.B. Judentum, Christentum und Islam) auf dieselbe transcendente Wirklichkeit beziehen. Wenn das Dreierschema eine vollständige Klassifikation religionstheologischer Entwürf sein soll, dann muss der Begriff des Pluralismus sowohl die monozentrischen als die polyzentrischen Varianten umfassen.” Michael Hüttenhoff, Der Religiöse Pluralismus als Orientierungsproblem: Religionstheologische Studien (Evangelischer Verlangsanstalt, 2001), 45; Schmidt-Leukel, Gott ohne Grenzen. Eine christliche und pluralistische Theologie der Religionen, 176. 17  Martin Rötting, “Interreligious Learning: The Shape of Interreligious Identity in Pluralistic Europe,” in Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe Between Texts and People, ed. David Cheetham et al. (Editions Rodopi B.V., 2011), 328. Instead of that Rötting proposes “a shift towards a reference- and a process-oriented theology of religions” in which the religious truth is thought to be in process. 18  Stephen Kaplan, Different Paths, Different Summits. A Model for Religious Pluralism (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 1–2. For the critical comment on the “theology of unitive pluralism” from the perspective of the theological thought of Raimon Panikkar, see Seung Chul Kim, “Rethinking religious pluralism from an Asian perspective,” Toronto Journal of Theology vol. 2 issue 2 (2008): 197–208.

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groundbreaking work, Kaplan tries to overcome the implicit problem of theological concentration on the oneness of religious truth by proposing “an ontological and soteriological pluralism.” According to Kaplan, the existence of different religions does not deny that there is “only one metaphysical universe,” but it does imply that there are different ontological natures, each of which can “provide different individuals with the opportunity to achieve different soteriological ends—different forms of liberation or salvation.” For Kaplan, to affirm that there are different religions is equivalent to saying that such diversity leads people to “different soteriological conclusions.” There could be, Kaplan suggests, three different ontological natures within one ultimate reality, and each nature provides a different form of salvation: “a theistic salvation, a monistic non-dualistic liberation, and a process non-dualistic liberation.” Kaplan’s thesis deserves merit in the sense that the debate over religious pluralism could not even arise without the following presuppositions: Even though the ultimate reality to which others are devoted seems to be different from mine, and even though the religious language by which others expresses their faith is not the same as mine, others get in their world of faith what it promises to them, and they find the meaning of life and the world in their world of faith.19 In this sense many people could agree with Kaplan’s views on the possibility of “how all experiences could be simultaneously ultimate, not penultimate, liberating and yet radically different.”20 Kaplan attempts to resolve this apparent paradox with a holographic model by which he believes “we can envision a plurality of ultimate realities and soteriological possibilities.”21 A holographic image is produced by a monochromatic laser beam, a semitransparent mirror, and a film. The laser beam is split into two separate light waves. One of the waves (“referent beam”) is directed toward the film, and the other (“object beam”) is directed toward the object and then reflected by the object. Two beams of light then converge on the film and create interference patterns which spread across the film. On the film, we can see only the trace of the interference patterns. But when the laser beam of the same frequency is directed at the holographic film, we come to reconstruct the image of the original 19  Seung Chul Kim, Haechejok Gulssugi wa Dawonjui ro Sinhakhagi [The Theology of Deconstruction and Religious Pluralism] (Shigonsa, 1998), 260. 20  Kaplan, Different Paths, Different Summits. A Model for Religious Pluralism, 5–6. 21  Kaplan, Different Paths, Different Summits. A Model for Religious Pluralism, 9.

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object, even of a three-dimensional image in the space. It is characteristic of holograms that any part of the film can reproduce the whole image of the original object, even though the smaller the fragment of the film is, the obscurer the image becomes. Using the terminology of the ingenious physicist David Bohm (1917–1992), Kaplan sees the hologram as divided into two parts: The explicate domain and the implicate domain. The former refers to the object or objects filmed and to the holographic images that are produced, and the latter refers to the film. While the explicate domain is the spatial-­ temporal world to which we are normally accustomed, the implicate domain refers to the film with its unusual characteristics which comes from the fact that it is without any images and that “it does not exhibit the subject-object dichotomies found in our spatial-temporal world.”22 In this peculiar domain “in which each part is enfolded into all other parts, one does not talk about subjects or objects, discrete parts, or the relations between parts. The nonduality of subject and object, and of part and whole, is the appropriate language for the implicate domain.”23 Kaplan proposes “three presuppositions concerning the relationship between the implicate and explicate domains” in order to utilize holography as a model for religious pluralism. The first presupposition is “that the implicate and explicate domains logically demand each other.” That is, “neither domain is ontologically prior or more important, in any way.” And the second one is that two domains exist simultaneously: Neither one domain precedes the other nor exists independently from the other. And finally, “these two domains are mutually interpenetrating.” Just as in holography, an explicate holographic image is simultaneously enfolded in the implicate domain of the film as interference patterns, so also this model presupposes that all objects in our spacial-temporal world are somehow simultaneously enfolded in the implicate domain of this metaphysical model. In other words, in this model what manifests as explicate entities in our spatial-temporal world is simultaneously enfolded in the implicate world. […] In this model there is no spatial separation between the implicate and explicate domains. The assumption here is that the implicate domain is coextensive with the totality of existence—whether that be Being, Emptiness or both Being and Emptiness. Therefore, the explicate

 Kaplan, Different Paths, Different Summits. A Model for Religious Pluralism, 9.  Kaplan, Different Paths, Different Summits. A Model for Religious Pluralism, 10.

22 23

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domains could not be unfolded someplace separate from the implicate domain since there is no place separate from the implicate domain.24

The object is projected on the film that has no image at all, and the image produced on the film as an interference pattern of laser beam could be reproduced three-dimensionally in space. In this sense, the explicate domain, that is, the object of the world or the image of the object reproduced “out there,” and the implicate domain, that is, the film on which all of the objects is projected, exist simultaneously and interdependently. Kaplan utilizes the implicate domain as the focus for understanding the two non-dualistic positions—“a monistic non-dualistic position” and “a process non-dualistic position”—to illustrate his view that “the nature of explicate domain and their relationship to the implicate domain allows us to envision the theistic position.”25 It may seem somewhat arbitrary that Kaplan presents his model with three distinct ultimate realities mentioned above, but it is outside the purpose of this chapter to criticize the validity of Kaplan’s use of his model. It is sufficient here to observe that Kaplan’s holographic model of religious pluralism recalls the Hua-yen Buddhist understanding of ultimate reality: In any small part of the holographic film, we could find the Whole; the film with no image could reproduce the three-dimensional images of the objects; the implicate and explicate domains exist interdependently and simultaneously. Even Kaplan himself admits that “there are a number of places in this work that one may be tempted to draw a comparison to Hua-­ yen Buddhism.” But in his work, the thought of East Asian Buddhism has been left untouched, and Kaplan went no further than to show his “future interest.”26 It is not difficult to imagine that Kaplan, an outstanding Indologist, felt an intimate harmony between the holographic phenomenon and the Hua-yen Buddhist understanding of reality,27 if we read, for example, the following phrases in the Avataṃ saka Sūtra: Just as the mind-king jewel Appears in different colors to different minds, When beings’ minds are pure They can see pure lands. […]  Kaplan, Different Paths, Different Summits. A Model for Religious Pluralism, 11.  Kaplan, Different Paths, Different Summits. A Model for Religious Pluralism, 11. 26  Kaplan, Different Paths, Different Summits. A Model for Religious Pluralism, 26 (fn.17). 27  Cf. Stephen Kaplan, “Mind, Maya, and Holography: A Phenomenology of Projection,” Philosophy East and West 33 (1983): 367–378. 24 25

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Just as the magicians’ art Can make various things appear, Due to the force of beings’ acts The number of realms is inconceivable. Just like pictures Drawn by an artist, So are all worlds Made by the painter-mind. […] The borders of all the worlds Are draped with lotus nets; Their various features different, Their adornments are all pure. In those lotus nets Rest networks of lands With various adornments, Inhabited by various beings.28

The theology of religious pluralism begins with an awareness of the existence of multiple religions. But that awareness ought to include an acknowledgment that multiple religions are already vitally expressing their understanding of ultimate reality to people of Christian faith and that Christian theology should accept the influences of other religions positively so that Christian theology might undergo a reformation. To put it another way, the theology of religious pluralism, if there is to be any such possibility at all, should arise from a reciprocal dialogue between a Christian apprehension of religious plurality and an understanding of the ultimate reality of other religions. The theology of religious pluralism emerges from this hermeneutical process. In other words, the Christian theology of religious pluralism remains only half the truth, until it meets, complementarily, “Buddhist religious pluralism.”29 If we may use the title of Paul Knitter’s work, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (2009), we 28  The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra by Thomas Cleary (Shambhala Publications, 1984), 244. 29  Cf. Kenneth K. Tanaka, “Buddhist Pluralism: Can Buddhism Accept Other Religions?” in Buddhist Attitudes to Other Religions, ed. Perry Schmidt-Leukel (EOS editions of St. Ottilien, 2008), 69ff.

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also must say that without Buddhist religious pluralism the Christian theology of religious pluralism remains at best half the truth. Without listening carefully to Buddhist views on religious pluralism, the theology of religious pluralism that seems to flourish nowadays might prove to be little more than ventriloquism that is, in fact, nothing but a monologue.

For Further Discussion The Hua-yen Buddhist understanding of the (ultimate) reality is that everything reflects everything. In other words, one interpretation reflects another interpretation, and in this way, there is an unlimited flow of interpretations. Even in a faith that we are apt to think is singular and particular, an unlimited complex process of syncretization is already included. Put directly, the Christian faith of an Asian who has been living in the history of effects of various religious traditions of Asia is composed of various religious traditions of Asia: Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and so on. With Knitter we could maintain that the Asian way of being Christian is realized as a “multi-­religious belonging” to the various religious traditions at the same time. Our religious self, like our cultural and social, is at its core and in its conduct a hybrid. That means that our religious identity is not purebred, it’s hybrid. It’s not singular, it’s plural. It takes shape through an ongoing process of standing in one place and stepping into other places, of forming a sense of self and then expanding or correcting that sense as we meet other selves. There is no such thing as a neatly defined, once-and-for-all identity. Buddhists, indeed, are right: there is no isolated, permanent self. We’re constantly changing and we’re changing through hybridizing process of interacting with others who often are very different from us.30

If we are aware that our own faith, for example, Christian faith, is already composed of various religious traditions of Asia, what kind of selfunderstanding could be made from such a fact? Could the fallibilist insight shed light on interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism for Asian Christians who are aware of the fact that there are ceaseless flows between 30  Paul Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oneworld Publications, 2009), 214.

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their faith and various religious traditions of Asia and that such flows don’t exist outside their faith but precisely in the midst of their faith? In this sense, a fallibilist understanding of interreligious dialogue and religious pluralism should be studied further in order to know whether it could provide Asian Christian faith with a way of explanation for faith as dialogue and dialogue as faith.

Bibliography Bernhardt, Reinhold. 1991. Einleitung. In Horizontüberschreitung. Die Pluralistische Theologie der Religionen, ed. Reinhold Bernhardt, 9–29. Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Hick, John. 1989. An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent. Yale University Press. Hustwit, J.R. 2014. Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth. Lanham: Lexington Books. Hüttenhoff, Michael. 2001. Der Religiöse Pluralismus als Orientierungsproblem: Religionstheologische Studien. Berlin: Evangelischer Verlangsanstalt. Kaplan, Stephen. 1983. Mind, Maya, and Holography: A Phenomenology of Projection. Philosophy East and West 33: 367–378. ———. 2002. Different Paths, Different Summits. A Model for Religious Pluralism. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kasulis, Thomas. 2002. Intimacy and Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kim, Seung Chul. 1998. Haechejok Gulssugi wa Dawonjui ro Sinhakhagi [The Theology of Deconstruction and Religious Pluralism] Shigonsa. ———. 2008. Rethinking Religious Pluralism from an Asian Perspective. Toronto Journal of Theology 2 (2): 197–208. ———. 2014. How Could We Get Over the Monotheistic Paradigm for the Interreligious Dialogue? Journal of Inter-religious Studies 13: 20–33. Knitter, Paul. 2009. Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1955. The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism. In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover. ———. 1965. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol. 1. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rötting, Martin. 2011. Interreligious Learning: The Shape of Interreligious Identity in Pluralistic Europe. In Interreligious Hermeneutics in Pluralistic Europe Between Texts and People, ed. David Cheetham et  al., 317–332. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V.

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Schmidt-Leukel, Perry. 2005. Gott ohne Grenzen. Eine christliche und pluralistische Theologie der Religionen. Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Tanaka, Kenneth K. 2008. Buddhist Pluralism: Can Buddhism Accept Other Religions? In Buddhist Attitudes to Other Religions, ed. Perry Schmidt-Leukel, 69–84. St. Ottilien: EOS. The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra by Thomas Cleary. 1984. Shambhala Publications. Two Zen Classics. Mumonkan & Hekiganroku. 1977. Translated with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida; edited and introduced by A.V.  Grimstone. New  York: Weatherhill. Woodbridge, Frederick J.E. 1918. Pluralism. In Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, vol. X, 66–70. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

CHAPTER 9

Restoring the Pro Nobis > Pro Me: A Translated Religion, Polycentric Ecumenism, and Moderate Fallibilism Thomas John Hastings

The Striking Fact and Potential Consequences of a Translated Religion A Christian convert from cradle Islam in the Gambia, the late Lamin Sanneh (1942–2019) never tired of driving home the seldom-noticed yet striking fact that Christianity, in contrast to Islam and many other major religious traditions, lacks a sacred language. With only rare exception, the New Testament (NT) provides a foreign language rendering of the words of and about its founder. In Whose Religion Is Christianity?1 Sanneh points out, “The New Testament gospels are a translated version of the message 1  This taunting rhetorical question from an African Christian who spent most of his teaching career in the West is reminiscent of the work of Kosuke Koyama, an Asian Christian who also spent most of his teaching career in the West. Koyama criticized the hubris of every

T. J. Hastings (*) Overseas Ministries Studies Center, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_9

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of Jesus, and that means Christianity is a translated religion without a revealed language. The issue is not whether Christians translated their Scripture well or willingly, but that without translation there would be no Christianity or Christians.”2 Barring the future discovery of some early Aramaic text, Jesus Christ will continue to be known (acknowledged, recognized, worshiped, confessed, and followed) solely in translation. In consideration of the remarkable resiliency and spread of Christianity and in contrast to a popular contemporary meme, we may say Jesus is found rather than lost in translation. One consequence of this striking fact is that the Christian faith may never be claimed as the sole possession of any particular people. Indeed, the Christian Bible itself (Old and New Testaments) has shown itself to be translatable into the myriad languages and cultures of the world. With more 683 translations of the entire Bible, 1534 translations of the New Testament, and 1133 biblical selections and stories in existence today,3 Sanneh often commented that the missionaries’ greatest gift to the world has been Bible translation. However, defying both liberal guilt4 and conservative triumphalism vis-à-vis the relative impact of the missionary movement, Sanneh contended that it was not so much that Western missionaries transmitted the gospel to the world but that the peoples of the world discovered the gospel for themselves, often in ways that confounded the missionaries, as they heard or read the Bible in their mother tongues.5 This emphasis upon local reception and agency is supported, for example, by the unanticipated, explosive growth of Christianity in the post-colonial era in China and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. So, rather than the elevation of a single sacred language, all languages, cultures, and peoples are now, according to this vernacular principle, sanctified as potential bearers of the gospel message. Andrew Walls muses on the consequences of this striking fact for Christians today, saying, “We human attempt to control or manipulate the cross of Christ in No Handle on the Cross: An Asian Meditation on the Crucified Mind (Orbis, 1977). 2  Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 97. 3  Wycliffe Global Alliance website, http://www.wycliffe.net/statistics, accessed February 15, 2019. 4  Lamin Sanneh, “Christian Missions and the Western Guilt Complex,” in The Christian Century, April 8, 1987, 331–334. 5  Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001).

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now live at a time when the Church is multicultural. I think that the fullness of the stature of Christ will emerge only when Christians from all these cultures come together. If I understand what Paul says in Ephesians correctly, it is as though Christ himself is growing as the different cultures are brought together in him.”6 In light of the potential for a new, polycentric ecumenism, Walls makes a practical suggestion, saying, “Perhaps there is now an obligation of Christians to ‘use means’ better fitted for two-way traffic, fellowship, for receiving, than have yet been perfected.”7 One would think that the questions raised by Sanneh, Walls, and their colleagues and students, coupled with the demographic shift in the composition of the World Christian movement,8 might have attracted serious concern and self-reflection across the Western theological academy, but for the most part this has not been the case.9 In this so-called post-colonial age, it seems highly ironic that we observe in some elite theological institutions the insistence that the West is still the center of Christianity and intellectual custodian of theological inquiry.10 In addition to the obvious fact that institutional wealth and resources remain concentrated in the 6  “The Expansion of Christianity: An Interview with Andrew Walls,” Christian Century 117, no. 22 (August 2–9, 2000): 795. The biblical reference is to Eph. 4:1–16, especially verses 11–13: “The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (NRSV). 7  Andrew F.  Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (New York: Orbis, 1996), 260. 8  Gina A.  Zurlo, Todd M.  Johnson, and Peter F.  Crossing. “Christianity 2019: What’s Missing? A Call for Further Research,” International Bulletin of Mission Research, January 2019. 9  On the one hand, the phenomenon of globalization attracted significant attention during the 1990s. Using the key words “theological education” and “globalization,” I located 140 articles, published between 1986 and 2002, on the ATLA Religion index. In this literature, the efforts of the Association of Theological Schools were particularly noteworthy. See Judith A.  Berling, ed., “Incarnating Globalization in ATS Schools: Issues, Experiences, Understandings, Challenges,” Theological Education 35 (Spring 1999): i–vii, 1–189. On the other hand, the insights of Sanneh, Walls, and their colleagues have been overlooked until the recent trend in World Christianity studies. 10  And this at a time when so many Western theologians themselves are captivated by “post-colonial” modes of discourse, which so far as I can tell is almost exclusively a Western trend, not unrelated to the guilt complex mentioned above. One often hears lip service paid to abstract notions of the Global South but seldom sees proactive efforts to engage church leaders and theologians from new Christian centers in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.

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Global North, this chauvinism is bolstered by a theological canon and curriculum written and studied in English, German, Italian, French, Dutch, or Spanish—that is, the languages of the West. Elsewhere I have described how Western-centric academic systems, wittingly and unwittingly, continue to marginalize majority world scholars.11 In contrast to this cool reception in the theological academy as a whole, the insights of Sanneh, Walls, and company have been warmly received by Christians who have lived and worked across cultural and religious boundaries. Though the older terms “mission” and “evangelism” are still treated by many with ambivalence, skepticism, or hostility, there are signs that the striking fact and the potential for a new, polycentric ecumenism are beginning to gather the critical scholarly attention they deserve. For evidence of this trend one can point to the birth, growth, and popularity of the fields of World Christianity, Mission or Missional Theology, Comparative Theology, and Intercultural Theology.12 Of course, these disciplines are not sui generis since scholars working in these fields are aware of their need to build on while critiquing the work of their predecessors in Missiology, Ecumenism, and the History of Religions.

Apologia for Polycentric Ecumenism from an Unlikely Source While working for twenty-three years with Japanese theologians and pastors who have been strongly influenced by the theology of Karl Barth—in some cases to the point of becoming Barthian Scholastics!—I was delighted to find in Barth himself a robust, contemporary-sounding apologia for a rich diversity of faith perspectives in the community of Jesus Christ, which Barth calls “the earthly-historical form of his existence.” Before considering Barth’s apologia, we need to touch briefly on the historical background of his views. Even before World War II, Barth’s dialectical theology had become a global phenomenon that was attracting students from all over 11  Thomas John Hastings, “Extending the Global Academic Table: An Introduction,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 51 (1) (March 2016). 12  As a few examples of this development, we may point to the rapid growth of graduate programs in World Christianity, the annual meeting of Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and World Christianity (1992–Present, founded by Sanneh and Walls), and Princeton Theological Seminary’s World Christianity Conference, which began in 2018.

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the world,13 a trend that only increased after the war when the Swiss theologian achieved heroic status in some circles for taking a stand against the Third Reich in the 1934 Barmen Declaration and refusing to swear an oath of loyalty to Hitler in 1935. Through personal interactions with his international students and more formal ecumenical engagements, such as delivering the keynote address at the first meeting of the World Council of Churches in 1948, Barth was aware of general developments in the “younger,” “missionary,” or “non-Western” churches. With this background in mind, we now turn to Barth’s strong apologia for a diversity of faith perspectives within the one body of Christ. Church Dogmatics (CD) IV, Volume I, which was published in German in 1953, ends with a section entitled “The Act of Faith.” Here he describes ways of knowing specific to Christian faith under the following three terms: acknowledgment (Anerkennen), recognition (Erkennen), and confession (Bekennen). After first acknowledging Jesus Christ as Lord, Barth says the believer must continually recognize Christ with “right knowledge” (recta cognitio), by which he means knowledge grounded in the “definite sphere” of Christ’s self-disclosure, that is, as “attested in Holy Scripture and proclaimed by the community.” In this apologia, which appears under the second term, “recognition,” Barth sounds like a contemporary, polycentric ecumenist in his insistence on a rich diversity of faithful ways of seeing and understanding Jesus Christ. Here is the key passage: The recognition of Christian faith can and should be varied. The reason for this is as follows. Although its object, the Jesus Christ attested in Scripture and proclaimed by the community, is single, consistent and free from contradiction, yet for all His singularity and unity His form is inexhaustibly rich, so that it is not merely legitimate but obligatory that believers should continually see and understand it in new lights and aspects. For He Himself does not present Himself to them in one form but in many—indeed, He is not in Himself uniform but multiform. How can it be otherwise when He is the true Son of God who is eternally rich? Of course, all knowledge of Jesus Christ will have not merely its basis but its limit and standard in the witness of Scripture and the proclamation of the Church. It is possible only within this definite sphere.14

13  For example, see Alle Hoekema, “Barth and Asia: No Boring Theology,” Exchange 33 (2004): 102–131. 14  Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.1, 762–763 (italics mine).

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Here we find not only a recognition of a rich diversity of faith perspectives, which according to Barth have existed in the Christian community from the outset, but a contention that seeing and understanding Jesus Christ in “new lights and aspects” is an ongoing obligation for believers of all times and places. This passage implicitly anticipates the claims of Sanneh, Walls, and others about the ways Christ himself appears to be growing as the gospel is translated into new languages and cultures and as people come together in Christ. In the same spirit of this apologia, three weeks before his death Barth wrote what is likely his last pastoral letter, to “South East Asian Christians.”15 He knew from his international students that his theology had become all the rage in certain Asian churches and schools of theology, a fact that both puzzled and troubled him. He wanted to pass on the theological baton to his Asian disciples by encouraging them to proclaim the gospel in ways appropriate to their own contexts. He pleads, In my long life I have spoken many words. But now they are spoken. Now it is your turn. Now it is your task to be Christians in your new, different and special situation with heart and head, with mouth and hands. Say that which you have to say as Christians for God’s sake, responsibly and concretely with your own words and thoughts, concepts and ways! The more responsibly and concretely, the better, the more Christian! You truly do not need to become “European,” “Western” men, not to mention “Barthians,” in order to be good Christians and theologians. You may feel free to be South East Asian Christians. Be it! Be it, neither arrogantly nor faintheartedly with regard to the religions around you and the dominant ideologies and “realities” in your lands!16

While the cross-cultural or ecumenical dimension is implicit in the selection from CD IV.i, it is explicit in this pastoral exhortation for Asian theologians to generate new and different theological perspectives in their “own words and thoughts, concepts and ways.” In effect, Barth relativizes or demythologizes his own theological contribution. The profound 15  We should note that he addressed the letter to the South East Asian Christians because it was published in The South East Asian Journal of Theology. But clearly he also had in mind the Japanese “Barthians” with whom he had direct or indirect personal contact, such as Kan Enkichi, Ashida Keiji, Takizawa Katsumi, Kuwada Hidenobu, Ō saki Setsurō , Yamamoto Kanō , and Inoue Yoshio. 16  Karl Barth, “No Boring Theology! A Letter from Karl Barth,” South East Asia Journal of Theology 11 (1969): 3–5.

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implication is that the ecclesial and academic discipline of theology, in contrast to Scripture, can never be simply a matter of translation. Again, from engagement with his students, he knew enough about the local context of the Asian Christian movement to know that the “religions, dominant ideologies, and realities” there were very different from those with which Barth had contended in Germany and Switzerland between and after the two world wars. Notably, in Church Dogmatics he refers to Shinran (1173–1263), the founder of Japan’s Pure Land School of Buddhism.17 To put it another way for the purposes of the present argument, while Scripture is infinitely translatable into new languages and cultures, theology always requires local, hands-on, contextual, contemporary, religious, social, and political engagements! Unlike Jesus Christ, who is to be found only in translation, Christian theology, as reflection on God in Christ and on local “religions, dominant ideologies, and realities” in relation to God in Christ, easily gets lost in translation. As an example of theology getting lost in translation, elsewhere I have observed how the Japanese church’s preoccupation with the translation of “Western” academic theology has weakened its mission by reinforcing the public perception of Christianity as a foreign, “un-Japanese” religion.18 I believe it was Aloysius Pieris, the Sri Lankan Jesuit theologian, who said we will know that the striking fact of the new ecumenism has finally hit home when we see courses called North American Theology, German Theology, or Scottish Theology listed side by side with courses on Nigerian Theology, Japanese Theology, or Brazilian Theology. One still holds out hope that the striking fact of Scripture’s translatability and genuine embrace of the rich diversity of faith perspectives in the one body of Christ will give way to a new, polycentric ecumenism, based not on Western-centric, centralized bureaucratic structures but on the Pauline proclamation that “we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another [and] we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us” (Romans 12:5–6a). At the same time, for those of us who live in the West, we must resist replacing our former sin of infantilizing the Christians, churches, and theologies of the Global South with the temptation to romanticize them. What is called for instead is repentance and confession of our personal and corporate sins and  Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2: 340–344.   Thomas John Hastings, “Japanese Protestantism’s Perduring Preoccupation with Western Theological Texts,” Theology Today, (April 2005). 17 18

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injustices, recognition of our radical equality before God, and commitment to learn from and support one another in faith, hope, and love. This challenge is captured well by Anibal Quijano’s phrase “epistemological decolonization.”19

Fallibilism, Emergence, Eschatology, and Fractal Next I want to consider briefly how what we have said thus far might find resonance with a fallibilist epistemology. If we concede Sanneh’s point that (1) “Christianity is a translated religion without a revealed language,” Walls’s point that (2) Christ himself seems to be growing as disparate or even alienated cultures come together in him, and Barth’s point that (3) Christians are obligated to “continually see and understand [Jesus Christ] in new lights and aspects,” it is easy to see how these views of Christian faith, as a dynamic and provisional way of knowing, resonate with a moderate fallibilism, the philosophical position we are exploring in the present volume. Fallibilism is the claim that no belief, including knowledge and theories in the humanities and sciences, is ever justifiable in a final sense, yet a moderate fallibilism leaves room for holding rationally justified beliefs, with conviction and humility, along the way. In simplest terms, while fallibilism may not exclude a conviction about ultimate Truth with a “capital T,” it acknowledges that human beings only have access to “small t” or proximate truths. Of course, philosophers of science often have stressed this epistemic limitation, but many modern Christians, perhaps still burdened by the Enlightenment’s fixation with certainty, have tended to be strong on conviction and weak on humility. As a Christian, I may confess Jesus Christ as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6), while, as a member of the richly diverse body of Christ, acknowledge my need to engage the “small t” truths of other members as a means of obtaining a fuller, broader, and richer vision of the “ultimate” Truth of God in Jesus Christ. If we take the insights of Sanneh, Walls, and Barth seriously, we may joyfully acknowledge that the Truth of God in Christ is a living, growing, dynamic reality, or to borrow a famous phrase from Barth, “comparable to 19  Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 168–178. I wish to thank Daniel P. Horan, OFM, for this reference (see “The Synod on Young People, Missionary Discipleship, and the Decolonial Option,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 43 (3) (July 2019)).

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a bird in flight, in contrast to a caged bird.”20 Given the fact that Christian faith has been and will continue to be instantiated historically and culturally in a wide variety of ways, we may say that the Truth of God in Christ is evolving or emergent, in the sense that this Truth is always greater than the sum of all the “small t” truths held by the individual members of the infinitely complex system called the church, body of Christ, “the earthly-­ historical form of his existence,” or World Christian movement. Rather than as a single bird, today we may more appropriately picture the theologies of the world’s churches as a flock of birds. In terms of a moving picture that suggests how such incredible diversity may be preserved without any loss of unity, click on the link below to Jan van IJken’s beautiful film that captures the fractal-like murmuration of huge flocks of starlings traversing space and time as a single body.21 Though of course they had no knowledge of fallibilism, emergence, or fractals, the NT writers humbly acknowledged that they lived this side of the eschaton and therefore freely conceded the provisional, fragmentary, and proximate nature of their own truths vis-à-vis the “ultimate” Truth of Christ yet to be fully revealed. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:12) So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. (Colossians 3:1–4) Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)

Asserting the provisional nature of all ways of knowing, fallibilism opens up a middle way between radical skepticism, which so easily morphs into relativism, and radical certainty, which so easily morphs into absolutism. Resisting these polarities, fallibilism offers a middle way in harmony 20  Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963), 10. 21  https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/short-film-showcase/00000158457d-d0be-a1dc-4f7f8e650000

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with the wisdom traditions of Israel and other ancient cultures, the tentative ethical advice (paraenesis) given to communities of faith in front of the New Testament writers, the via negativa of mystical and apophatic traditions, and the universal quotidian experience and testimony of creatures with demonstrably fallible perceptual and cognitive faculties, or what Hans Urs von Balthasar calls our sense of “the fragmentariness in time.”22 This view also places all biblical translations within the much larger, emerging framework of an unfinished story. With apologies to lovers of the LXX, Latin Vulgate, King James Version, Nestle-Alund, New International Version (NIV), New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), and any other version, if “Christianity is a translated religion without a revealed language,” and if the recognition of faith in Jesus Christ is “inexhaustibly rich” and an ever-emergent reality as Christian faith takes root in new cultural settings, then we find ourselves in good company with moderate fallibilists. Christians may confess Jesus Christ as Alpha and Omega, but on this side of the eschaton, our knowledge is always seriously limited thanks to both our biology and the logic of our faith. I propose that the acknowledgment of epistemic fallibilism should be an expansive, liberating move for believers, a subject to which we will now turn.

The Criterion for Christian Epistemology and the Pro Nobis > Pro Me The next point we want to make is regarding the crucial but not-so-­ obvious question of “who” is the primary subject of knowing when it comes to Christian faith. What is the proper starting point, basis, or criterion in a Christian epistemology? Do we begin with (1) the discrete individual (the “I”), such as many Christians in the West have presumed at least since the Enlightenment and evangelical awakenings, or with (2) the collectivity (the “We”), such as biblical writers presume by the use of such designations as “people of Israel,” “kingdom of God,” “ecclesia,” “body of Christ,” and so on. I will begin with some brief anthropological and biblical observations. Since the countries of West account for fewer than 10 percent of the world’s population today, it is easy to forget that most of the world’s 22  Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theological Anthropology (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1967), viii. Von Balthasar poignantly adds that “neither the conservatives nor the progressives can bear” this fact of existence.

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peoples have neither experienced the Enlightenment’s “turn to the self” as an internal historical development nor pursued it as a cultural ideal. Many “extra-Enlightenment” societies share a corporate view of the person similar to what we see in the biblical writings. While living and working with Christians in Japan, it took me several years to realize that my colleagues’ and students’ presumptive view of the person, defined first and foremost as part of a transgenerational collectivity, is closer to that of the biblical writers than my atomistic American view. While Japan is a nation that has completely modernized, in terms of science and technology, in its reflexive historical encounter with the West it has strenuously resisted the Enlightenment axiology centered on the autonomous individual determined to live by its own freely chosen set of values.23 Though I probably never would have noticed this fact had I stayed home, in Japan I also discovered that the Bible knows nothing of the person as an autonomous agent. As one obvious example of this fact, the use of “you” in its plural forms in the Greek New Testament is so pervasive that it would be no exaggeration to say that the writers had no conception of the individual, defined as someone who is free to make their own choices with no regard for the traditions or will of their group of belonging. Among Christians in the United States today, this fact is lost, not only because of our individualism, which is reinforced constantly by the consumer-­centric logic of free market capitalism, but also because of the more mundane absence of a distinction between the singular and plural forms of “you” in modern English. This incongruence between sacred text and local culture can lead American preachers to take their hearers on some hilarious eisegetical flights of fancy. To mention just one example, when Paul exhorts the church in Corinthian, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Corinthians 6:19), he uses the plural forms of “you” (ὑμῶν and ὑμῖν) throughout in addressing the ecclesia, the collectivity. It is the community of faith—and not any particular individual—whom he calls “a temple of the Holy Spirit.” Rather than warning autonomous individuals to exercise greater care about their personal purity or morality, Paul is calling his hearers to pay closer attention to the whole community. 23  See Thomas John Hastings, “Negotiating Identity in a Global Age: The Situation of Japanese Youth,” in Youth, Religion and Globalization: New Research in Practical Theology, eds. Richard R. Osmer and Kenda Creasy-Dean (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2007).

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The apostle’s ethical concern is focused on the public witness of the community. It goes without saying that Paul’s admonition says nothing about proper diet and exercise!24 Responding to Allen Verhey on how the New Testament speaks of Christian ethical action, Richard Hays says, “The NT does certainly offer moral exhortation and guidance for individuals. Nonetheless, I stand by the statement that the corporate obedience of the community is the primary concern of the NT writers. This concern differs so markedly from the usual individualistic assumptions of Western liberal culture that strongly worded guidelines are necessary in order to recall to us the NT’s ecclesially oriented perspective.”25 While not neglecting the “I” dimension, the NT witnesses give priority to the “We” dimension of faith, a point theologians make by stressing that within the economy of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ as Emanuel (“God is with us,” Matthew 1:22) and in the ensuing outpouring of the Holy Spirit ἐπὶ πᾶσαν σάρκα (“upon all flesh,” Acts 2:17), the pro me (“for me”) dimension of faith finds its proper ground in the pro nobis (“for us”) and not vice versa.26 Because of this Christological and Pneumatological grounding, the circle of the pro nobis is drawn as broadly as possible to include all humanity and indeed all things (cosmos). In response to Gregory of Nyssa’s statement, “The Word, in taking flesh, was mingled with humanity, and took our nature within himself, so that the human should be deified by this mingling with God,” Orthodox theologian Olivier Clément comments, “The whole of humanity ‘forms, so to speak, a single living being.’ In Christ we form a single body, we are all ‘members of one another.’”27 Similarly, Barth gestures eschatologically at this 24  Readers may do a Google search for the key words “temple of the Holy Spirit” and “health” to see how the meaning is so easily twisted to say things it does not say, because of our individualistic culture and the conflation of the singular and plural. 25  Richard B.  Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: Harper, 1996), 204, n. 11 (italics mine). 26  The pro me or existential dimension of faith is important, but since the mission of God in Jesus Christ always begins with the pro nobis, the pro me is always being decentered, relativized, or demythologized across a lifetime of Christian discipleship, in the sense of Galatians 2: 19–20. “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” 27  Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (2nd Edition): Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary (Hyde Park: New City Press of the Focolare, 1993), 46.

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ultimate unity by describing the Christian community as “the provisional representation of the whole world of humanity as justified in Him [Jesus Christ].”28 The very existence of Christian community is predicated on God’s radical solidarity with “the whole world of humanity.” Because the pattern of the mission of God in Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit is irreversibly pro nobis > pro me, the Christian community will reflect and embody this pattern, however imperfectly, as a participant in God’s mission. Since God in Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit has embraced the whole of humanity and the cosmos in self-­ forgetful love, grace, and hope, idolatry will result whenever and wherever any community begins with the pro me and redraws the boundaries of the pro nobis based on their particular instantiation of the pro me. Walls will be erected and distinctions drawn between insiders and outsiders, pure and impure, educated and simple, civilized and uncivilized, godly and ungodly, saved and damned, good and evil, and so on. Regardless of where a pro me obsession falls on the ideological spectrum, such a community’s witness to the Christological-Pneumatological event will be weakened or lost. We observe the tragic consequences of this pro me > pro nobis reversal in every form of elitism, factionalism, and sectarianism that undermines the mission of God in Jesus Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit pro nobis > pro me. To return to an earlier point, is it not this reversal that is behind the imprudence of certain elite theological institutions in the West who still see themselves as the true guardians of Christian faith while spurning the kind of “two-way traffic and fellowship” Walls suggests? If we are to make genuine progress toward the new polycentric ecumenism we are advocating, I believe that “strongly worded guidelines” from biblical scholars will be insufficient to break down our deeply entrenched individualistic presuppositions. Instead, undergirded by a moderate fallibilism that embraces conviction and humility, what is called for in our “post-colonial” moment is renewed commitment to the kind of “two-way traffic and fellowship” that Walls suggests, that is, sustained personal engagement with other members of the one body of Christ who see Jesus Christ in different “lights and aspects” and whose views may challenge our own, thereby expanding our vision of Christ himself, who seems “to be growing as the different cultures are brought together in him.”

28  Barth, Church Dogmatics, “The Holy Spirit and the Gathering of the Christian Community,” IV.1, 63.

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Postscript: A Witness to the Priority of the Pro Nobis In closing I want to share a story of a forgotten figure from Japanese Christian history who exemplifies a pro nobis perspective. Experiencing a succession of personal traumas in his childhood and youth, Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960), the Japanese Christian evangelist, polymath, social reformer, and prolific author, was baptized in 1904 at the age of fifteen by Charles Logan, a missionary of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (Southern Presbyterian).29 With the support of Logan and other missionaries, he went on to attend the Kobe Theological School and, after living for four years in Kobe’s worst slum while engaging in education, evangelism, and social reform, Princeton Theological Seminary. While he loved and respected Logan and some other missionaries as mentors, he found himself at odds with the rationalist, propositional, and confrontational approach to Christian theology he encountered in Kobe and Princeton. Coming from a cultural background that integrated Shinto, Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian religious traditions, philosophies, and ethics, he was at pains to square the Jesus he read of in the Gospels with the Jesus proclaimed by many of the Presbyterians he met in Japan and the United States. He also worried that Japanese youth were turning away from “a Christianity which deals only in doctrine.”30 To his mind, while the Jesus of the Gospels seemed the truest and highest expression of God’s redemptive love, many Presbyterians seemed obsessed with convincing potential converts of the truth of their seventeenth-century British confession and catechisms (Westminster Standards). Calling to mind our earlier discussion of the individual and the collectivity, Kagawa told the following story to illustrate why he thought Christianity had received such a cool reception in Japan. Christianity introduced from the West, because of its individualism, fails to understand the group life of the Japanese. This failure has greatly retarded Christian progress in this land. The parents of an eminent actress were murdered by burglars. A Christian pastor called after hearing about this tragedy. He entered very formally by the front entrance and endeavored to comfort her with the tenets of his faith. A Shinto believer also called. She entered by 29  Thomas John Hastings, Seeing All Things Whole: The Scientific Mysticism and Art of Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) (Eugene: Pickwick, 2015). 30  Toyohiko Kagawa, Christ and Japan (New York: Friendship, 1934), 120–121.

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the back door, cleaned up the kitchen and brought order out of the chaos caused by the incident. The outcome was that this actress espoused the Shinto faith. Her reason is interesting. She declared, “Christian teaching is sublime but too difficult for me to grasp. The Shinto believer was kind, not over dignified, and friendly, so I accepted her faith.” The Protestantism introduced into Japan from Europe was strongly intellectualized and over-­ emphasized its theology. This left a gap between Christianity and the uneducated masses. There is danger therefore of it becoming merely the religion of the intelligentsia, a minority group.31

In a reassessment of Kagawa’s theology, the late theologian Kuribayashi Teruo reflected on the tensions between Kagawa and established leaders and theologians in Japanese churches. If we think of the boast of Uemura Masahisa, the leader of the Japanese church in the Meiji and Taisho Eras, who said, “My churches don’t need the likes of rickshaw drivers or factory workers,” Kagawa proclaimed, “The poorest of the poor are the heart of the church. The most obscure must become the treasure of the church,” it is no surprise that pastors did not welcome him. When Kagawa said, “Faith is not about intellectually swallowing the creeds,” it is no surprise he was not viewed favorably by Japan’s systematic theologians.32

Acting on their faith in Jesus in a way they thought appropriate to Japan, Kagawa, his wife, Haru, and a small band of co-workers spared no effort in trying to put Christ’s redemptive love into practice by means of an ambitious campaign for the spiritual and social reform of Japan. Taking their cue from Luke’s depiction of the beginning of Jesus’s Galilean ministry and his rejection at Nazareth (Luke 4:16–30), this comprehensive spiritual and social reform embraced “economic emancipation (preaching to the poor), psychological emancipation (healing the broken-hearted), 31  Kagawa, Christ and Japan, 95–96. Kagawa’s comments were prescient if not prophetic. After 160 years since the first missionaries arrived, Christians still represent only 1 percent of the population, and Protestantism, which accounts for roughly half of the Christians, is viewed as an individualistic religious preference of an educated, urban middle class. Christianity still seems foreign to most Japanese. Approximately 80 percent of Japanese Christians reside in one of the port cities where the early missionaries settled. Religion Yearbook (Tokyo: Gyosei, 2004), 45. 32  Kuribayashi Teruo, “Rereading Kagawa’s Theology in the Midst of a Recession” [in Japanese], Quarterly AT (Tokyo: Altertrade Japan, 2009): 55.

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social emancipation (preaching deliverance to the captives), physical emancipation (recovery of sight to the blind), and political emancipation (setting at liberty them that are bruised).”33 By 1940, the Kagawas had responsibility for “4 settlement houses, 6 cooperatives, 6 slum kitchens, 3 hospitals, 17 kindergartens, 3 tuberculosis sanitaria, 3 gospel schools, 1 domestic science school, 2 magazines, a farm, and 19 churches.”34 Publishing over 300 books in his lifetime, Toyohiko was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature twice and the Nobel Peace Prize four times. Commenting on the results of these efforts, Sumiya Mikio wrote, “This religious movement was a progressive reform movement against the churches who restricted faith to the spiritual world and enshrined the gospel in the church alone.”35 One can only wonder what might have happened had the Japanese churches, pastors, and theologians been more generous to the Kagawas and their co-workers.

Bibliography Barth, Karl. 1955. Church Dogmatics. Ed. and Trans. Geoffrey Bromiley. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. ———. 1963. Evangelical Theology: An Introduction. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. ———. 1969. No Boring Theology! A Letter from Karl Barth. South East Asia Journal of Theology 11: 3–5. Berling, Judith A., ed. 1999. Incarnating Globalization in ATS Schools: Issues, Experiences, Understandings, Challenges. Theological Education 35: i– vii, 1–189. Clément, Olivier. 1993. The Roots of Christian Mysticism (2nd Edition): Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary. Hyde Park: New City Press of the Focolare. Hastings, Thomas John. 2005. Japanese Protestantism’s Perduring Preoccupation with Western Theological Texts. Theology Today 62 (1): 49–57. ———. 2007. Negotiating Identity in a Global Age: The Situation of Japanese Youth. In Youth, Religion and Globalization: New Research in Practical Theology, ed. Richard R. Osmer and Kenda Creasy-Dean. Münster: Lit Verlag. ———. 2015. Seeing All Things Whole: The Scientific Mysticism and Art of Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960). Eugene: Pickwick.

 Toyohiko Kagawa, “Following in His Steps,” Friends of Jesus 4.1 (1931): 6.  Ō ta Yūzō , “Kagawa Toyohiko: A Pacifist?” in Pacifism in Japan: The Christian and Socialist Tradition (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1978), 172. 35  Sumiya Mikio, Kagawa Toyohiko [in Japanese] (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1995), 170. 33 34

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———. 2016. Extending the Global Academic Table: An Introduction. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 51 (1): 7–20. Hays, Richard B. 1996. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. San Francisco: Harper. Hoekema, Alle. 2004. Barth and Asia: No Boring Theology. Exchange 33: 102–131. Kagawa, Toyohiko. 1931. Following in His Steps. Friends of Jesus 4 (1): 6. ———. 1934. Christ and Japan. New York: Friendship. Koyama, Kosuke. 1977. No Handle on the Cross: An Asian Meditation on the Crucified Mind. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis. Kuribayashi, Teruo. 2009. Rereading Kagawa’s Theology in the Midst of a Recession [in Japanese]. Quarterly AT. Tokyo: Altertrade Japan. Religion Yearbook [in Japanese]. 2004. Tokyo: Gyosei. Sanneh, Lamin. 1987. Christian Missions and the Western Guilt Complex. The Christian Century 104 (11): 331–334. ———. 2001. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis. ———. 2003. Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Sumiya, Mikio. 1995. Kagawa Toyohiko [in Japanese]. Tokyo: Iwanami. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. 1967. A Theological Anthropology. New  York: Sheed and Ward. Walls, Andrew. 1996. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis. ———. 2000. The Expansion of Christianity: An Interview with Andrew Walls. Christian Century 117 (22): 792–795. Wycliffe Global Alliance website. http://www.wycliffe.net/statistics Yūzō , Ō ta. 1978. Kagawa Toyohiko: A Pacifist? In Pacifism in Japan: The Christian and Socialist Tradition. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Zurlo, Gina A., Todd M. Johnson, and Peter F. Crossing. 2019. Christianity 2019: What’s Missing? A Call for Further Research. International Bulletin of Mission Research 42 (1): 92–102.

Index1

A Abram, David, 81n24 Absolutism, 3, 149 Agnosticism, 116 Alexander the Great, 118 Alternative facts, 18 Anderson, Jonathan A., 56n12 Apologetics, 10, 51–64, 89–109 Apophatic, 116, 150 A priori, 15, 20 Aristotle, 37, 44 Artificial intelligence, 8 Ashida, Keiji, 146n15 Audi, Robert, 21, 27 Auerbach, Erich, 99, 100, 106 Augustine, 122 B Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 150, 150n22 Baptism, 68, 84, 89

Barnabas, 120, 121 Barth, Karl, 10, 111, 113–117, 116n9, 120, 122, 122n19, 123, 123n22, 144–148, 152 Bauman, Whitney, 77 Being, 6n12, 7, 8, 14, 18, 20, 23, 26, 28, 36, 42, 44, 45, 52, 53, 57, 58, 62, 63n24, 64n29, 68, 70n3, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 82n25, 83, 84, 89, 92, 95, 97, 98, 100–103, 108, 111, 114, 122, 127, 128, 130, 134–137, 148, 152, 152n26 Bernhardt, Reinhold, 131, 132 Bible, 92–94, 97, 99, 104, 142, 151 Biopolitics, 36n4 Bohm, David, 134 Bonaventure, 28 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 8 Bradford, William, 69 Braunstein, Jean François, 43

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s) 2021 T. J. Hastings, K.-W. Sæther (eds.), The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8

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INDEX

Buddhism, Buddhist, 135, 137 Burch, Robert, 30 C Calvin, Jean, 27 Canguilhem, Georges, 39, 40 Carter, Paul, 77n15 Castanha, Tony, 74n10, 80 Cataphatic, 116 Christ, 10, 56, 73, 100, 101, 142n1, 143, 143n6, 145–150, 152, 152n26, 153 Christian faith, 10, 11, 25, 27, 28, 68, 70, 79–86, 90–99, 98n21, 101–108, 104n42, 126, 127, 129, 130, 136, 137, 142, 145, 148–150, 153 Christianity, 10, 24, 27, 41, 71, 75–78, 85, 86, 94, 101, 113, 119, 141–143, 147, 148, 150, 154, 155, 155n31 Christian Mission, 67–86, 115 Christology, 114 Clayton, Philip, 64 Clément, Olivier, 152 Coinherence, 60 Collins, Drew, 10 Colonialism, colonizing, 76–78, 80, 119 Columbus, Christopher, 73 Comparative theology, 144 Comte, August, 39, 39n10 Confucianism, 137 Consciousness, 4, 5, 53, 54, 129 Conservative, 6, 10, 90–96, 101–103, 107, 142, 150n22 Constructive-critical realism, 4, 5, 32 Constructivism, 3, 35, 43 Cornelius, 114, 115, 117, 120

Cosmology, 31, 55 COVID-19, 1–11 Creatio ex nihilo, 77 Creation, 20, 38, 62, 63, 81, 84, 90, 91, 96, 97, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108 Critical realism, critical realist, 3, 4, 15, 26, 31, 32, 116 Crucifixion, 104 Cultural hegemony, 9 Cynicism, 116 D Dahill, Lisa E., 9 Dahm, Brandon, 27 Dawkins, Richard, 17, 18 Deduction, 4 Deloria, Vine Jr., 76 Dembski, William, 95 Descartes, René, 19 Dialectical theology, 144 Discipleship, 9, 64, 152n26 Divine, 27, 52–54, 59, 62–64, 81, 83, 85, 86, 92, 94n11, 97, 105, 112–114, 123, 123n22, 127 Doctrine of Discovery, 70n4, 71–75, 80–81, 85 Dogma, 117, 129 Dogmatism, 9, 24–27, 29, 33 Duhem, Pierre, 16 E Ecclesiology, 56 Ecology, 70n3, 105 Ecumenism, 11, 141–156 Edwards, Jonathan, 61 Einstein, Albert, 8 Emergence, 11, 148–150

 INDEX 

Empiricism, 19, 22, 39n10, 92 Emptiness, 134 Enkichi, Kan, 146n15 Enlightenment, 91n3, 148, 150, 151 En-spirited nature, 52 Epistemic fallibilism, 7, 8, 14, 31, 62, 63, 150 Epistemological decolonialization, 148 Epistemological relativism, 25 Epistemology, 4, 9, 15, 19, 20, 29–32, 36–41, 43, 56, 70n4, 76, 92, 95, 107, 108, 128, 148, 150–153 Eschatology, 11, 148–150 Ethics, 15, 30, 36, 36n4, 41–49, 154 Euro-Christian imperialism, 79 Evolutionary biology, 92, 108 Experience, 4, 7, 20, 25, 35, 51–53, 55–58, 63, 69, 81–85, 94n11, 95, 97, 101, 114, 127, 130, 133, 150 Experiment, 8, 57 F Factionalism, 153 Fake news, 111, 112, 114, 121, 122 Fallibilism, 1–5, 9, 11, 13–33, 35–49, 51–64, 67–86, 98n21, 125–138, 141–156 Fallibilist hermeneutics, 10, 128–130, 132 Farmer, Ronald, 55 Farrer, Austin, 102 Feyerabend, Paul, 16, 26 Fideism, 25, 103 Fides quaerens intellectum, 28 Finitum non capax infiniti, 113 Ford, David, 104 Foucault, Michel, 9, 36, 37, 39–49, 44n24

161

Foundationalism, 3, 24–26 Franciscan, 69, 78, 79 Frei, Hans, 10, 89–109 G Gadamer, Hans-George, 126 García-Rivera, Alejandro, 21 Gelpi, Donald L., 54n8 Global South, 85, 143n10, 147 Global warming, 8 Glynos, Jason, 37, 38 Gospels, 60, 68, 69, 70n3, 75, 77, 78n18, 79, 84–85, 90–94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102–105, 104n42, 107, 112, 114, 117, 118, 141, 142, 146, 154, 156 Governmentality, 36n4 Gratia extra nos, 9 Grau, Marion, 69n2 Greek ethics, 36, 41, 44–46 Green, Joel, 117, 118, 120 Gregory of Nyssa, 152 Grimstone, A. V., 130n14 Gunter, W. Stephen, 54, 54n9 H Hackel, Steven W., 78n20 Hadot, Pierre, 44n24, 48 Haidt, Jonathan, 121n18 Hanson, Norwood, 38 Hardy, Daniel, 104 Hastings, Thomas John, 10, 64n29, 114 Hays, Richard, 152 Heidegger, Martin, 62 Hermeneutics, 10, 41, 108, 128–130, 132 Hick, John, 125, 127, 128, 130–132

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INDEX

Historicism, 92, 95, 102, 104 History of Religions, 144 Holy Communion, 117 Holy Spirit, Spirit, 9, 52, 54, 56, 57, 63, 64, 90, 97, 100–102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111–123, 151–153, 152n24 Howarth, David, 61 Hua-yen buddhist philosophy, 130, 135, 137 Humanities, 2–4, 24, 37, 49, 70n4, 76, 85, 101, 115, 118, 148, 152, 153 Humility, 8, 64n29, 86, 120, 148, 153 Hustwit, J. R., 10, 128, 129, 131, 132 Hüttenhoff, Michael, 131, 132 Hypothesis, 8, 17, 38, 58 Hypothetic deductive method, 38 I Idolatry, 63, 113, 153 Imperialism, 72, 76, 77, 79, 119 Induction, 16, 38 Inference, 16, 17, 37, 38, 56, 57, 61 Injustice, 63, 148 Inoue, Yoshio, 146n15 Intercultural Theology, 144 Interdisciplinary, 4, 5, 9 Interreligious dialogue, 10, 125, 125n1, 126, 126n2, 128–132, 137, 138 Intuitive knowledge, 19 Islam, 119, 132n16, 141 J James, 121 Judeo-Christian, 99 Justification, 9, 16, 21, 25, 28, 33, 35–41, 43, 48, 49, 72, 73, 75

K Kagawa, Toyohiko, 154–156, 155n31 Kant, Immanuel, 92 Kaplan, Stephen, 126, 132–135 Keller, Catherine, 77 Keller, Tim, 90 Kelly, Kevin, 83n28 Kierkegaard, Søren, 27, 54n9, 62 Kim, Seung Chul, 10 King Alfonso V, 72 Knitter, Paul, 125, 132, 136, 137 Knowledge, 13, 35, 51, 70n4, 91, 112, 129, 143n6 Koyama, Kosuke, 141n1 Kuhn, Thomas, 16, 26, 43 Kuribayashi, Teruo, 155 Kuwada, Hidenobu, 146n15 L Language, 13, 31, 40, 48, 55, 56, 59–61, 71, 74n9, 75, 80–83, 81n24, 82n27, 103, 104, 116–120, 123, 133, 134, 141, 142, 144, 146–148, 150 Lecourt, Dominique, 39n10 Lectio divina, 84 Lillebø, Jonas Gamborg, 9, 19 Logan, Charles, 154 Logical positivism, 9, 15–17 Logos, 83, 85, 85n31, 115 Loorz, Victoria, 84, 85n31 Losch, Andreas, 4, 32 Luther, Martin, 82n27 Lynch, William, 54n9 Lyotard, Jean-François, 128 M Marshall, John, 74, 75 McCormack, Bruce, 116n9

 INDEX 

McLeish, Tom, 17 McRae, Heather, 73n9 Messiah, 52, 112 Meta-narrative, 128, 130 Metaphor, 39, 71, 79, 82n27, 85n31, 128 Metaphysical realism, 60 Metzger, Paul Louis, 10 Miller, Robert J., 74, 74n9, 80 Mills, Charles W., 70n4 Missiology, 81, 144 Missional theology, 144 Modernity, 8, 18, 90, 91 Monocentric pluralism, 131 Monotheism, 77, 77n17 Moran, Joe, 5 Murray, Paul D., 27, 28 Myers, Ched, 82n26 N Naïve realism, 3 Naturalism, 17 Natural science, 3, 4, 7, 15, 29, 37 Nature, 5, 7–9, 14, 24, 26–31, 33, 38, 52, 53, 55, 56, 75, 90–92, 95, 96, 99, 103, 106, 108, 113, 116, 133, 135, 149, 152 Nettheim, Garth, 73n9 Neville, Robert Cummings, 54n8 New atheism, 17–18, 22 Newbigin, Lesslie, 119, 120 Newman, John Henry, 27, 28 New Testament, 99, 100, 117, 119, 121, 141, 142, 149, 150, 152 Newton, Isaac, 8 Nicene Creed, 23 Nicholsen, Shierry Weber, 81 Non-dualism, non-dualistic, 133, 135

163

O Observation, 16, 17, 22, 38, 150 Old Testament, 99 Ontology, 9, 14, 30–33, 43, 55 Ō saki, Setsurō , 146n15 Overbeck, Franz, 113 P Pagan, 73, 77 Paganism, 83 Pandemic, 2, 5, 6 Panikkar, Raimon, 132n18 Paris Climate Agreement, 6n12 Pascal, Blaise, 28 Patriarchy, 77 Peirce, Charles S., 9, 14, 19–24, 30, 31, 33, 38, 54, 54n8, 55, 64, 64n28, 128 Pellauer, David, 63n25 Pentecost, 59, 117–120, 122 Peter, 112–115, 117, 118, 120 Phenomenology, 108 Philosophy, 2, 4, 5, 9, 13–33, 36–41, 43–45, 47–49, 53n6, 55, 94, 95 Philosophy of science, 9, 14, 15, 36–41, 43, 44, 47 Pieris, Aloysius, 147 Plantinga, Alvin, 58, 58n16 Plato, 44 Pluralism, 10, 125–138 Pneumatological imagination, 31, 52, 54n9 Pneumatology, 9, 114 Polanyi, Michael, 32, 54n9 Polkinghorne, John, 3, 4, 31, 32 Polycentric ecumenism, 10, 141–156 Polycentric pluralism, 131 Pope Alexander VI, 73

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INDEX

Pope John XXIII, 122 Popper, Karl, 9, 15–17, 19, 38 Post-colonial, 70n4, 142, 143, 143n10, 153 Post-truth society, 18 Presbyterian Church, 154 Providence, 97, 99–103, 105, 106 Psychology, 92 Puritans, 69 Q Queen Elizabeth II, 80 Quijano, Anibal, 148 Quran, 119 R Rabinow, Paul, 45n25 Rationalism, 19, 22 Realism, 32, 35, 43, 60, 99, 100 Reconciliation, 63, 102 Relativism, 2, 3, 20, 24–26, 33, 35, 43, 149 Religion, 2, 5–10, 20, 39, 68, 74, 119, 127, 129, 131–133, 136, 141–156 Religious pluralism, 10, 125, 126, 129–138 Religious studies, 4, 5, 37 Rescher, Nicolas, 15, 22, 29, 32 Resurrection, 57n14, 91–94, 97–99, 98n21, 102–104, 104n42, 107, 112 Retroduction, 37, 38 Revel, Judith, 46 Revelation, 20, 92–94, 108, 111–117, 116n9 Ricoeur, Paul, 63 Rötting, Martin, 132n17

S Sæther, Knut-Willy, 9, 64n29 Said, Edward W., 76 St. Francis of Assisi, 79 Salvation, 78, 106, 108, 120, 127, 133 Sanders, Andy, 26 Sanneh, Lamin, 10, 119, 120, 141–144, 143n9, 144n12, 146, 148 Schaanning, Espen, 43 Science-religion dialogue, 3 Scientism, 17 Scripture, 10, 24, 84, 93–96, 99, 102, 106–108, 142, 145, 147 Sectarianism, 153 Sekida, Katsuki, 130n14 Semiosis, semiotic, 21, 31, 53, 55, 56, 59 Sensus literalis, 95, 106 Sexuality, 36, 41–47 Shinran, 147 Shinto, 154, 155 Sign, 21, 54, 55, 57, 61, 118, 144 Skepticism, 9, 18, 22–23, 29, 35, 144, 149 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 54n9, 94, 94n11, 96 Social science, 3, 7 Stannard, David, 76 Stephenson, Christopher, 31 St. Paul, 52, 56, 63 Sumiya, Mikio, 156 Syncretization, 137 T Takizawa, Katsumi, 146n15 Tanesini, Allesandra, 29, 30 Taoism, 137

 INDEX 

Terra nullius, 10, 85–86 Terra plena, 85–86 Theological fallibilism, 14, 30 Theology, 2, 14, 37, 52, 68, 90, 114, 130, 144 Theory-laden, 16 Theory of Everything, 8 Trans-cultural, 103 Trinitarian, 100, 111, 114 Tumamait, Julie, 84n29 Tychism, 30 U Uemura, Masahisa, 155 Universals, 8, 16, 25, 55, 56, 96, 97, 102, 105, 119, 150 Updike, John, 122n19 Utaker, Arild, 40 V van Huyssteen, Wentzel, 26, 29 van Ijken, Jan, 149 Verhey, Allen, 152 Verification, 15–17, 32

165

Verification ethics, 15 Verisimilitude, 2, 3, 13, 15, 33 Virtue, 9, 24, 29–30, 33, 42 Volf, Miroslav, 99n23, 107 W Walls, Andrew, 10, 142–144, 143n9, 144n12, 146, 148, 153 Western-centric, 10, 144, 147 Whitehead, Alfred N., 31, 55 Williams, Rowan, 102 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 92 Wonder, 7, 10, 120, 156 World Christianity, 143n9, 144, 144n12 Y Yamamoto, Kanō , 146n15 Yong, Amos, 9, 31, 69n2 Z Zen, 130 Zikmund, Barbara Brown, 69n2