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The website of good reasons for why you can be a Christian |
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Suppose that the proofs offered prove only that God exists. It would be a fact among other facts. If God does not act, is not involved in someway in the lives of selves, then God's existence is apparently inconsequential - as relevant to everyday life as say, the distance from earth to the star A2317654C. If God is a self, then objective observations will not help us to know God anymore than such observations would help us to truly know any other self. Participation in relationship is required to know someone at this level. The meaning of the incarnation as God
relating to us as selves is described in the story of the Prince and the
poor servant girl by Kierkegaard
Niebuhr traces the development of epistemology over time as follows. First Descartes narrowed knowledge of the world to reason because the senses could be deceived. Then Locke showed how even that knowledge was dependent on the senses and experience. Hume pointed out that we are capable of observing phenomena (collections of sensory data) not noumena – things as they are in them selves. Next Kant showed how even time and space are like colored sunglasses between us and what is so that we can never truly see things as they are in themselves. Given this ever narrowing constriction on what we can actually know, there is a tendency to either swing in one of two extremes. Some go to the extreme of eliminating anything that cannot be stated propositonally and tested empirically – which includes much of what it means to be a self. In the other extreme are those who dismiss reason as cold and unhelpful and use only their own subjective experience as a guide for truth. In which of these two spheres does religion belong ? Those in the one camp reduced it to what could be argued from common sense data (hence the development of natural religion and Deism). Others reduced it to purely subjective arena of personal religious experience, which because it is based on private experience cannot be critiqued for authenticity. What then is revelation ? Is it an observable physical phenomena, just one more piece of static data, or is it a personal religious experience which exists only within the mind of the one who encounters it ? Neither of these categories is large enough to account for the Christian God who is both the source of the order of the physical universe observed by science and the One who enters into personal relationships with selves. This already difficult situation is compounded by historical relativism. Historical relativism says we cannot even take the position of the removed observer looking through colored glasses – our view is bound to the vantage point of our particular historical and cultural location. "The point of view which a man occupies in regarding religious as well as any other sort of reality is of profound importance" This idea can be graphically illustrated by the Peterson projection of the world. White European map makers were interested in how to get from Europe to the New world so their maps observer the world from a point of view where Europe and North America are the closest points on the sphere to the observer. The view is true in that it is exactly how the world looks from that perspective, but it is bound because the effect is to make other land masses look much smaller (and thus less significant) than they actually are. The Peterson Projection is map which shows how the land masses would look if each was the closest point to the observer simultaneously (i.e. it takes into account all possible vantage points). The resulting map looks much different than we would expect. Niebuhr would say we have the same problem with history itself ( imagine a "map" of history wrapped around a sphere and then observed from one vantage point), and our experience of the world (imagine a "map" of an event wrapped around a sphere and then observed from one vantage point). Given this new dilemma, again, two opposite (and unhelpful) reactions are typical. One the one hand "skeptical historical relativism today proclaims the unreliability of all thought conditioned by historical and social background. On the other hand …national relativism proclaims that only thought & experience of a particular historical group is true and dependable" NIEBUHR’S SOLUTION Niebuhr offers a third way. He imagines the self as having two organs by which to gain knowledge – the mind and the heart – each of which has it’s own type of reason. The mind uses the categories of pure reason to process common or "External" history and experience from the vantage point of an observer, while the heart uses practical reason to process "Internal" history and experience from the vantage point of a participating self. In this paper I will label these two vantage points as "The Mind’s eye" and "The Heart’s eye". My understanding of Niebuhr's use of these two intellectual organs is shown Figure 1 below.
FIGURE 1: TWO INTELLECTUAL ORGANS OF KNOWING
My understanding of how Revelation is related to history and the use of the Mind’s eye and the Heart’s eye is shown on the diagram of Figure 2 below. Referring to the diagram, we see that in fact we are removed from things as they are in themselves. As finite, historical beings we observe them through the medium of experience and history. . The Mind’s eye compares common sense data with the categories and models of reality it already has – some of which are accurate and some of which are faulty. Without God, the Heart’s eye would generate Images from Internal experience alone - some of which are helpful and some of which are evil. Revelation is God’s self-disclosure - breaking in through history – to reveal God’s self to the self of the creature. Revelation both comes through historical events and illumines such events with meaning.
It is the gift of God, not something generated internally by the individual. God chooses to reveal God’s self through internal history because God is a tri-personal Being to be known, not a proposition to be observed. Ideally the combination of the heart’s images and the mind’s categories would produce a holistic, healthy view of the human experience. Ideally a person would be comparing these generated images and categories with personal experience and the experience of others from his own and other communities, and using this feedback to modify the imaginations and categories he/she holds. Problems arise when we attempt to use pure reason to analyze Internal history or practical reason to analyze External history. I would add that equally problematic consideration is the fact that this entire process is effected by the fallen, finite will of the person. The combination of the will and imaginations of the heart lead the self as a moral agent to either external actions or internal conversion. The new knowledge generated by pure reason working with experience and existing categories can yield new knowledge - if the will allows it. In fact, the will can impact all aspects of the diagram other than God THE SPECIAL OCCASION OF JESUS So far this model would apply to any monotheistic religion (If "God" is replaced with "The Divine" its application spreads even wider). In that sense it is not helpful in that there is no such thing a general faith, only particular faith. In the Niebuhr text cited for this midterm, he says that Jesus is the special revelation – the foundational even upon which all other revelation is built. Jesus is like the key that unlocks the box that holds all the other keys to the house. Niebuhr gives the example of a passage in the center of a book that can be applied by working forwards and backwards to unpack the entire text. In the same way, the incarnation is at the center of time because its implications roll not only backwards to interpret the past, but forward to illuminate the future. Scripture records that the Word of God came in a specific spatio-temproal location and involved an ordinary stall, an ordinary poor family in an ordinary culture, culturally bound human words spoken by a human mouth, and a human death that occurred in a political setting. A specific stone was rolled away on a specific day. These cornerstone components of the gospel story corroborate Niebuhr's contention that revelation is mediated through the narrative of history. The primary result of this special occasion is that the living God relationally engages and acts in behalf of human selves. The secondary result is that by reflecting upon this with the apparatus shown in Figure 2, humans are able to create images and categories that help them interpret other events.
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When the claims of Christ are truly understood, there are only two choices: To bend one's knee or take offence ... |