Caleb Stegall

Allow me to echo Darryl and Bill’s sentiments that we had hoped to hear from FV folks that their movement was intended, as DG put it, “to be a substantial critique of modernity in favor of ecclesiology and real (though spiritual) church power.” Instead, it has apparently succumbed to the very forces of modernity and become yet another version of self-fashioning protestant identity formation—“an affinity group,” as DG says.

I want to explore how this happens, and see what the various conversants might have to add. And in doing so, I hope it will be clear that I see the same sickness as polluting both sides of this particular coin, the “movement” and the “status quo.” So, just to be clear, I hope it will become apparent that I am sympathetic to many of the critiques made by the FV folks against their interlocutors in the denominational power base. At the same time, I find Darryl’s charges of Biblicism against the FV and my own earlier charges of anti-traditionalism to be amply borne out in this discussion.

I hope I can be forgiven for essentially repeating some things that have been written elsewhere, in slightly different form. (the discussion of the exchange between Mark Noll and Darryl Hart re: tradition later on in this link may likewise be instructive)

There are two minds: one which loves wisdom (philosopher) and one which loves opinion (philodoxer). Philodoxie is not bad, per se. It serves a useful function. Aristotle classified the various philodoxies as topoi, or categories of thought that are not real things, but exist only on the level of existential rhetoric. The topoi are “values systems” which create a consensus of belief within a group of people bounded by ethnicity or geography or religious myth or statehood or what have you. But they do not penetrate to reality, or to the true experiences that engender the various values systematized. During periods of relative historical stability, the topoi tend to rigidify and the group enters what Aristotle called stasis, or dogmatomachy—the “rule of opinions.”

Dogmatomachy fosters a degraded human spirit that is closed to the real problems of human existence because those problems have been concealed by wide agreement (or disagreement) over the topoi. According to Eric Voegelin, those who enter the foray are limited to a discussion of existing institutions and an apology for their principles, which quickly devolves into a mere defense of the powers that be. This should ring a bell for anyone following the various FV debates and debacles.

This is because the rulers of a dogmatomachy know that if ever a subject should be opened up for discussion under their rule, it will be, in the words of Walter Baghot, “a clear admission that that subject is in no degree settled by established rule, and that men are free to choose it. It is an admission too that there is no sacred authority—no one transcendent and divinely appointed man whom in that matter the community is bound to obey. … Once effectually submit a subject to that ordeal and you can never withdraw it again; you can never again clothe it with mystery, or fence it by consecration; it remains for ever open to free choice, and exposed to profane deliberation.”

Voegelin also classified Weltanschauungen (or “worldview”) as one of Aristotle’s topoi. I tend to agree with him. “Worldview,” or any movement that coheres around a protected set of ideas, exists on the level of existential rhetoric rather than penetrating to reality. And that is the problem. Having a “Christian worldview” or a “Federal Vision” gives parochial-and-anxious-about-it Evangelicals and various attenuated Protestants an ersatz catholicity and depth which they need for a variety of reasons—both to meet their honest and well-placed desires for membership and proper beginnings; and to keep the Times from lumping them in with Pat Robertson or Jim Dobson. Christians of all sorts are urged by their intellectual bettors to “articulat[e] a Christian worldview [of] … ‘comprehensive and far-reaching power.’” (That is Nancy Pearcey quoting Abraham Kuyper.)

Worldview-esque movements, like all the topoi, are an identity tool. Their talk is all about the group and its characteristics and principles—a classic dogmatomachy. It is a game of self-fashioning. Here stands F. Vision Prufrock before the mirror. Do I dare approve the worldview that challenges the PCA? Do I dare admit the worldview that challenges the Confession? Do I dare, do I dare?

I am being mean now, but it need not be taken so. Every group does this in one way or another. But it is necessary to health and good order to be able to recognize the pathetic Prufrock.

These kinds of studies and movements suffer from being both a child of, and a reaction against, the Enlightenment and especially its dominant epistemology of positivism. Worldview and movement underpinnings are thoroughly corrupted with subject-object language. Worldview is both something “out there” which can be “possessed” by exposure to the right sources (witness the proliferation of Worldview studies programs at CCCU institutions or FV conferences, literature, etc.) as well as something “in here” that can only be had by a personalist and subjective experience of conversion which brings a new “capacity” with it (witness chapter nine of David Naugle’s book which details the necessity of this kind of conversion for a proper worldview). Naugle exemplifies how a worldview theorist, especially a Christian worldview theorist, becomes quickly boxed in, when he writes, “Therefore, what a person understands a worldview to be is, interestingly enough, dependent upon that person’s worldview! For this reason, I … unpack the implications of biblical faith on the concept of worldview.” Here one can detect the quick downward spiral as the opposite magnetic poles of a need for an overarching story/authority on the one hand and a need for an individualist hermeneutic on the other hand alternatively attract and repel, attract and repel.

This modernist tale of conversion which entails the adoption of a certain opinion and requires none of the rigor and hard-to-swallow classical marks such as submission to an institutional order and denial of self is an inherently schismatic and liberalizing force which devolves into mere choice (of dogma), as noted by Baghot above. (It can also result in a strange form on collonization whereby the upstart identity group largely propelled by various intellectual elites seeks to glom onto or takeover existing institutions which have a measure of earned virtue, skill, and competence–but only because they were the particular, peculiar communities that bred the qualities that made them come into being and flourish and look like attractive candidates for collonization.)

This is hopeless! It is this kind of circular, rationalist literal hermeneutic which creates the very crises of philodoxa which, as Mark Noll puts it, “only bullets, not arguments” can resolve. Setting an inherently liberalizing, rationalist view of scripture—fortified by a mechanical understanding of conversion as the only timber against criticisms that the dominant interpretation is relativistic—necessitates, in turn, the “arms race of opinion” which escalates as philodoxers of differing stripes create ever rigidifying dogmatomachies to act as herbicide against the “postmodern” and liberalizing weed. Witness, the PCA study committee and report.

The whole house is of cards. Either get out the rubber cement, or watch it all blow away.

Let me end this overly long post with a recitation from C.S. Lewis:

[BOQ]Scripture doesn’t take the slightest pain to guard the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. We are constantly represented as exciting the Divine wrath or pity—even as “grieving” God. I know this language is analogical. But when we say that, we must not smuggle in the idea that we can throw the analogy away and, as it were, get in behind it to a purely literal truth. All we can really substitute for the analogical expression is some theological abstraction. And the abstraction’s value is almost entirely negative. It warns us against drawing absurd consequences from the analogical expression by prosaic extrapolations. By itself, the abstraction “impassible” can get us nowhere. It might even suggest something far more misleading than the most naive Old Testament picture of a stormily emotional Jehovah. Either something inert, or something which was “Pure Act” in such a sense that it could take no account of events within the universe it had created. … For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal, or chemical, or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture—light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag heaps.[EOQ]

Here Lewis warns against the dangers of philodoxa; against the degraded and closed spirit which conceals, by substituting an abstract consensus of opinion, the engendering experience that is awakened by the immediate language. In contrast, he describes what the philosophers (such as Michael Polanyi) mean by the classic experience of reason: the experience of openness to the mystery of transcendence which flowers when the soul participates with existence as it becomes luminous for a truth which if possessed would be lost. That is the adventure of faith.

Date: Sep 26th, 2007 · Comments RSS · Tags: Federal Vision