Friday, August 25, 2006

Processing...

I had a really great chat with Jude tonight sitting outside my house after my "birthday-related" girls' night out. Some thoughts about the searching and the processing became perhaps a little clearer, so I thought I'd write them down and see if they're any clearer to anyone else.

So... this post may have a few apparently disjointed thoughts, but really, there is relationship there. Hope you can find it! Oh, I colour-coded them so you could take them in smaller chunks.

First I want to talk about how we figure out what the "right" or "correct" answer to a question is. That is, the process. Sometimes you just can't outright prove that your theory is correct. Sometimes, I think, you just have to figure out the alternatives and work by process of elimination to figure out what makes sense. That is, what works and explains what "is". It has been suggested that while the details may be plentiful, there are really few basic answers to the big questions - such as the problem of existence dealt with in the last post. Sartre has said that "the basic philosophic question is that something is there rather than that nothing is there."*1 As illustrated, there were really only three basic answers - but only one of them explains what "is".

So... one of the questions we seem to be dealing with is: how do we know that the Bible is from God?

What are the possible answers?
1. It is in it's entirety.
2. It isn't at all.
3. Parts of it are, and parts of it aren't.

I'm not going to feed you any more (at least not right now), but examine the possibilities. Where do they lead you? It's certainly an important question if it's the primary source of information upon which you base your beliefs.

Alright. Second, I want to give you a little bit about Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

"Aquinas held that man had revolted against God and thus was fallen, but Aquinas had an incomplete view of the Fall. He thought that the Fall did not affect man as a whole but only in part. In his view the will was fallen or corrupted but the intellect was not affected. Thus people could rely on their own human wisdom, and this meant that people were free to mix the teachings of the Bible with the teachings of the non-Christian philosophers."

"As a result of this emphasis, philosophy was gradually separated from revelation - from the Bible - and philosophers began to act in an increasingly independent, autonomous manner."

"Among the Greek philosophers, Thomas Aquinas relied especially on one of the greatest, Aristotle (384-322 BC)."

"Thomas Aquinas brought this Aristotelian emphasis on individual things - the particulars - into the philosophy of the late Middle Ages, and this set the stage for the humanistic elements of the Renaissance and the basic problem they created."

"This problem is often spoken of as the nature-versus-grace problem. Beginning with man alone and only the individual things in the world (the particulars), the problem is how to find any ultimate and adequate meaning for the individual things. ... If one starts from individual acts rather than with an absolute, what gives any real certainty concerning what is right and what is wrong about an individual action?"*2

Nutshell? He suggested that you could ignore revelation and figure out all the answers from what you see around you just by observation. This presumes that man is now, apart from his will, intrinsically the way God made him. Definitely problems with that assumption. Know what they are?

Third. I sent this bit out to Jude in an e-mail and she found it a bit more understandable, so hopefully anyone else wading through this will too.

I referred on my blog to a divided field of knowledge. Schaeffer's diagram looks basically like this:

Non-rational (mystical, unverifiable - things such as meaning or beauty)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Rational (what can be seen, measured, discussed)


His premise is that the historic Christian view is that those things put into the non-rational category in fact belong in the rational category and there should be no "upper story". His reason: the revelation of God to man in scripture.

It was Kierkegaard who, in fact, divided the field of knowledge (though there were others who aided the process) by declaring that one could not find meaning by reason, therefore one is required to make a "leap" of faith, because one cannot live without hope of meaning. Essentially, he dismissed the idea of revelation - that is, input from outside of our own, seen experience. Hence it is referred to as existentialism.

Schaeffer would say that the revelation given in scripture is couched in space and time (history), and gives truth about both the world as we see it, and truth about meaning. Thus, there was no reason to divide knowledge. This was understood by the reformationists whose battle cry was "sola scriptura !" (Scripture only) as the authority, as opposed to "the church" being on equal or greater footing in terms of authority as was the case at the time.

Faith, then, in terms of historic Christianity is basically trusting that the revelation is true - which is able to be discussed because it is couched in both space and time - both about the seen things of this world, and hence about the character of God. Scripture is intended to be discussed and analyzed and verified, and faith is standing on the results of that.

Faith, from the existentialist side, is defined as a leap into the unknown. Belief against all reason, if you will. Can't remember the name of the philosopher who said that there was no god, but that people lived better if they believed that there was one. Irrational? That's the existentialist definition of faith, as I understand it. Unfortunately, this definition has not only crept into the general western society but into the church as well.


*1 Francis Schaeffer "He is There and He is not Silent"
*2 Francis Schaeffer "How Should We Then Live?"