Melissa
Melissa is the anti-Kelly Marie. For one thing she has a last name she is confident enough to share: Dougherty. For another she is a rational apologist. This seems to be a whole other genre of You Tube preaching. One might say it is ‘facts and logic’ for evangelical Christians. Turning from Kelly Marie to Melissa one senses immediate relief for HERE is a person with whom one COULD converse at least in principle. This is because Melissa has not grunts and growls and movements of the spirit but principles and arguments. For reasons I will get into below I do not think they are adequate principles or persuasive arguments but that is only a relative difference for she and I are in the sphere of discourse and she might think MY principles and arguments are just as flawed. Melissa though, has a theory of reason: reason is positivity (in the philosophical sense of that term). It is the same theory You Tube atheists have. By this I mean that for Melisa, as for Telltale (say), truth is ontic truth (if I may borrow a term from Heidegger- this may try the patience of certain readers but I believe the term is apt!). It is truth as given in what is direct and present to hand. The Bible is a court of appeal, a rational court of appeal, because its content is propositional and its assertions determinate. It allows her to say without hesitation of this or that that it is unbiblical. Nor does she do this in a haphazard way. She reads verses in context and the parts of the Bible in light of the whole. She has basic hermeneutic discipline such as I try to instill in my students. Further, once we have assembled the ontic facts from the Bible and made due adjustments for context and nuance we can then rationally defend them by means of a separate activity, apologetics. All of this is comprehended under a meta-principle: the total adequacy and sufficiency of scripture. All one needs is not only in the Bible but present to hand in the Bible. Nothing mediates the Bible but the Bible. One needs no other book and indeed one corrupts the Bible by bringing any other book to it. Moreover, the essentials of biblical revelation are not open to interpretation. The odd passage MIGHT involve some hermeneutic complexities but not the Bible as a whole. It is direct and magisterial in saying what it says independently of any human mediation. This why Melissa sometimes seems to sniff at interpretation even though she herself does a fair bit of it: (over) interpretation is human interference with the divine text which speaks loudly and clearly. Though sometimes necessary with a harsh or obscure passage it should be kept to a minimum or human self-interest will not explain the text but explain it away as Melissa thinks happens with ‘progressive Christians’.
I think this view is as illusory as
Richard Dawkins’ view that science is purely ontic and that nature speaks to us
immediately in the form of facts such as the sky is blue or Jupiter is a
planet. In fact, I think it is the SAME view. I should note one thing however. Though
this might shock a practical mind like Melissa’s when I say her position is
illusory I DO NOT mean it is wrong. There is a certain veil of necessary
illusion that allows things to stand forth as things. The Bible does not, of
its own, stand forth as ontic truth. It stands forth as ontic truth for a
community of readers. This community of readers has a set of practices,
paradigms and principles that when applied allow the Bible to stand forth as
ontic and revelation to stand forth as positive and propositional. These
paradigms are the product of historical agency and are thus historically
determined in this case, I suppose, by the historic Protestant confessions
though there is a certain irony here: one of the ‘progressive’ propositions
Melissa rejects, the idea that the Word is the locus of revelation not,
directly, the positive text of scripture, is, in fact, the position of Martin
Luther himself! This is as much as to say that the Bible is not a pure
signified (to borrow a term from another philosopher!). In another communion,
the Orthodox one, the Bible does not stand forth as ontic but as iconic: its
authority is founded in archetype and symbol. In another revelation, the
Islamic one, the Koran stands forth not as ontic or iconic but as linguistic:
the Koran is only the Koran in Arabic and cannot be translated. Melissa does
not have in the Bible an object that stands free of historical mediation and
determination. Nor does Dawkins have such an object in ‘science’ or ‘Darwin’ or
the ‘selfish gene’. As I ‘reject’ the one so must I ‘reject’ the other though
‘rejection’ is not really what I am about.
Of course you may think that by
rejecting the proposition that the Bible directly certifies its own truth and
its own meaning; that it stands directly before the reader as a pure object
signified, I am some sort of crazy relativist. How, if the Bible is shaped by
history, can it judge history? This is a serious enough question so let me say
a few things about it. I have good news and bad news for Melissa. The bad news
is that I think the Orthodox ‘iconic’ view to be superior to her own. The good news is that when I make an
assertion like that it is, by my own assertion of it, contestable and even
falsifiable. To claim x is an invitation for someone else to claim y; that is
the very structure of dialogue. It is also to invite a third position, like the
linguistic, to claim it is superior to the ontic or iconic. I think this is a
possible discussion because historical horizons CAN in fact communicate with
each other. They can even alter each other through debate and dialogue. I make
a move that is valid in Melissa’s world and, as in a tennis match, she can
respond freely to that move. I can assert x in such a manner as to evoke y.
Melissa herself tells us that she moved to evangelical Christianity out of
frustration with the vagueness and subjectivity of the new age movement. This is
a move that is valid in the game I play. The hard, determinate edges of a
doctrinal tradition do indeed give an order and structure to our living and
thinking. Compared to the frenzied subjectivism of Kelly Marie this is surely a
gain. Melissa has found something that suits her needs and temperament and I
have no issue with that.
That it does not suit me I have
already indicated: I do not think the Bible is the all sufficient
self-legitimating, self -interpreting totality she thinks it is. This has
nothing to do with inspiration either: I am happy to think it is as inspired as
you please yet, it is at the end of the day the trace of a trace of a trace.
There is the Bible, it is a trace or sign of the community that created and
used it. If I were a historical critic, I might stop there but I am not. That
community is a trace or sign of Jesus of Nazareth who is in turn a trace or
sign of the Word with God in eternity. The Word itself is a trace or sign of
the eternal hidden depths of the Father. Scripture is the end point of a chain
of translation and interpretation from one mode to another. It is the beginning
point of yet another chain for following upon it we have things like doctrine,
theology, creeds, liturgies and so on. We have bishops and church councils,
popes and reformers. We have, in other words, history. All the way forward and
all the way back this is interpretation and translation and any movement in
this chain can radically reconfigure what went before it which is to say that
the chain is not always composed of smooth gradations and orderly transitions.
If we take another chain that links the Christian New Testament to the religion
of the Hebrews we see that the first is a radical reconfiguration of the
second. It is a rupture or break. So great is the rupture or break that it
forms a hermeneutic challenge: we must convince both Jews and Gnostics that the
break is not absolute but relative and that the old is cancelled only to be
taken up and preserved in the new. That the rest of Christian history contains
other such ruptures I need only remind you. Yet this chain is like a chain of
magnets (an image from Plato- sorry, the ‘other books’ happen to be my
professional business). The same force or power links it: in this case the
magnetic power is the spirit: the divine Hermes if you don’t find that image
too offensive. Still, at one moment of this chain there was no firm written
relation to Jesus as there was once, in the chain of Jewish history, no Tenach. At one point in Christian
history, and make that point as brief as you please, we were about the phoneme
not the grapheme![1]
I would LOVE to be able to say that
there could be no rupture so great as to render a Christian community
post-textual. Unfortunately, I cannot say what ruptures are and are not
possible. In the future we may evolve beyond written text or sink below it.
Here though is where I failed as a theologian and moved on to other things. I
could not, though I racked my brains, state legitimacy conditions for ruptures
beyond a few broad generalities like excluding Nazi Christianity. I cannot do
this in other fields either and by a cruel irony the crisis of legitimation has
wandered from the churches to the secular world where it is an order of
magnitude worse! There is no place to hide in a meltdown. At any rate, we could
imagine a group of ‘spirit filled’ enthusiasts who moved outside, as in taking
a step beyond, the historical horizon of the first century scriptures. Would
that be a good idea? Probably not: such a group would instantly become a sect
and sects are never anything but nasty. Can I exclude this on principle
however? I’m afraid I cannot for it was by just such a radical rupture that
Christianity constituted itself. It stepped outside the interpretive horizon of
Judaism into a new one. Abraham himself stepped out of the interpretive horizon
of ‘Ur of the Chaldees’ into something new. Alas and alack, a ‘radical’
‘progressive’ spirit is internal to Christianity itself and I cannot say what
that spirit might produce next. I CAN say, thanks be to God and St. Augustine,
that this spirit MUST be one of charity and service. This is not the usual
spirit of sects and radical new breakaway movements, especially if they take
over, start drawing up proscription lists and writing winner’s history. Sects
invariably are BAD winners and that is why I don’t like them. Christians know
this to their own cost for revolutions establish themselves through savage
polemics that are never quite fair and our own scriptures have anti-Semitic
overtones currently embarrassing to us. That however is another matter.
This is why, with apologies to
Melissa, I cannot define ‘progressive Christianity’ as the problem to which the
‘ontic’ Bible is the answer.[2]
It is a valid move against new age heretical weirdness but there are other
challenges it cannot invalidate. It cannot, for instance, invalidate three of
Melissa’s progressive bugbears: religious pluralism, universal salvation, and
mysticism. I will take universal salvation to be the simplest case. Melissa
holds that the notion of universal salvation empties the cross of Christ of its
power. Here though she shows an unfortunate naiveté: if Barth and others (such as Julian of
Norwich) have countenanced universal salvation it is precisely because of the
all sufficient power of the cross. Whatever one thinks of this question she is
here guilty of an ignoratio elenchi.
The same goes for religious pluralism: if indeed, as she admits with perfect
orthodoxy, the Word exists in eternity there is no way to preclude the Word
being operative in other religious traditions. As Christ is the Word it is NO
violation of his absoluteness or uniqueness to say that he might operate in a
saving manner through the images of another tradition (that is my EXACT view of
the Sufis by the way). Finally, as she is no fan at all of ‘oneness’ and
‘unity’ she denies the mystical tradition as bland and unbiblical. She prefers
the sword of binary judgment as indeed does, on many occasions, Christ himself.
This is fine as far as it goes but even the most biblical of Christians must
confront the fact all things are established in the Word and to that extent are
very much ‘one’ and that ‘mystical’ experiences of the oneness of creation are
to that extent biblically valid.
I say this not as a progressive
Christian. As a person who suffers from acute historical consciousness the
shiny new Christians will not want me in their sect nor would I belong to any
club that would have me as a member. I guess I have to admit that I am a
historicist Christian of a sort though I know my own mind as poorly as anyone
can. I am not an American let alone an American evangelical and cannot be
either of those things either. From this marginal standpoint though I can comment on
trends and in spite of the reservations expressed here I think rational
apologetics are a darn sight better than irrational apologetics and a positive
doctrinal Bible a darn sight better than Kenneth Copeland transubstantiating
his own blood and I have no reservation recognizing a positive (in the other
sense of that word) thing when I see it.
[1] We
might put the problem this way. By some spirit immanent in the community the
early church gravitates to certain books and forms an implicit pre-canon to be
later ratified by stipulative authority (late in the day historically!). A
traditionalist Catholic of a certain stripe would want to emphasize the latter
and I suppose others would emphasize the former but either way the church
constitutes the scripture it is constituted by. It shapes it textually and
shapes that text by hermeneutic practices that produce it as an interpretive
object. Here and there it even ADDS to the text which traditionally we are
supposed to understand moralistically as fraud but which I think is absolutely
normal for such a context. The TEXT is not yet sacrosanct. What is
indisputable, it seems to me, is that the community is prior to the text and,
as criticism seems to reveal, different communities shape different texts. The
spirit as interpreter moves even prior to the canon as principle of the canon
and out of that sprit what else might emerge? Again, I must emphasize, I do not
entirely know and would be happy if someone told me.
[2]
Here are her thoughts on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6nvlHkLYUc&list=RDCMUCyKgD0DLtBN21gfThSalyUQ&index=11.
See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCDbO8Lc5NU&list=RDCMUCyKgD0DLtBN21gfThSalyUQ&index=2
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