I would strongly recommend Ken Archer’s review of Don Carson’s critique of the emerging church movement, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, if you haven’t already come across it. In addition to some very interesting comments on the role that pastors like McLaren play both in stimulating and limiting the development of an emerging theology, he articulates very sharply the need to move beyond the familiar epistemological antithesis between objectivism and subjectivism:
For the struggle to achieve a new synthesis beyond the thesis of modern absolutism and the antithesis of postmodern relativism is one towards which few are seriously working.
Partly in response to this I want to revisit an argument that I made in an old post: A conviction-based model of biblical authority? It seems to me that a more or less postmodern church does not need to claim that the story we tell is absolutely true in the sense that it ought in principle to be accepted by all people as true. All we need to assert is that it is for us, as a community among other communities, in effect ‘absolutely’ true - not in any rationalist-foundational sense but - existentially - because we have accepted its claim on our lives. We have been called to give currency and credibility to a particular narrative about God, and to do so we must speak and act as though the story about God were absolutely true - or at least true enough to give our lives for. I wonder if perhaps this sort of understanding does not allow us to retain both the force of the truth claim and the particularity of the community that makes the claim.The postmodern unbeliever, who, as we know, is incredulous towards metanarratives, is not going to be asking whether this account of reality is absolutely true. His or her interest will be in whether it is a lived narrative worth engaging with.
The
‘as though’ a few lines back is worth examining. In the first place, it
suggests that our grasp of truth is somewhat indirect, in the way that
a metaphor is an indirect stab at meaning. More importantly, it may
carry the idea that as a community we are only a sign of
the truthfulness of the revelation of God in Christ - and as a sign we
do not have to claim absoluteness in any respect, we do not have to
force our clumsy language to perform philosophical gymnastics.
This line of thought also perhaps suggests that we have an opportunity here to ground our epistemology in election -
in a sense of being called by God to be a people for his own possession
amongst the various other peoples of the world, who have their own
truths, their own worldviews, their own narratives, their own gods.
This seems to me a more realistic - and dare I say biblical - basis for
our confidence in what we believe than modern objectivism, while
recognizing how limited and imperfect our shared perspective on things
is. Because the emerging church no longer takes itself for granted, it
is crucial that we gain for ourselves a sense of being part of a
community chosen by our God for a purpose.
Another take on election
Andrew, this is a wise and helpful post! I find your reading of election in this context intriguing and enormously suggestive. Let me add another perspective on - or aspect to - election which seems to me to take your argument further.
Election serves not so much to grant privileges to the chosen community as it does to shape the lives and character of that community. It insists that the story by which the community lives is incarnated in its life and structures. In other words, the “truth” about election is not a proposition but a praxis.
If we take this seriously, we can lose our anxiety about the objective truth claims of our faith. They ought to be “objective” to us as a community in the sense that they give a distinctive christological shape to our coummunity and its view of and action in the world. Whether its “truth” extends beyond that community is ultimately irrelevant, in two senses: if we fail to live it out, we make a lie of it anyway; and it is the evangelical power (the sign character) of its incarnation that commends itself to people outside the community and draws them in.
This seems to me to draw us to the heart of the nature of Christian truth: it is truth-to-live-by rather than a set of propositions. It refuses a gap between theology and ethics, and demands that that which we profess become visible - incarnate- in the life of the believing community. In other words, it’s story-shaped existence - existence shaped by the Jesus Story.
Knowing and truth - a post-script
I just wanted to add to this that on the ‘news aggregator’ function which Andrew has added to the site, I came across another critique of Don Carson’s lectures on postmodernism, which in itself I found to contain helpful insights into postmodernism and the emergent church. It’s by Dr David M.Mills (an academic at the institution where Carson gave the lectures) http//people.cedarville.edu/employee/millsd/mills_staley_response.pdf
Carson apparently made the statement which heads this post (‘Damn all false anitheses to hell’) as a criticism of ECM (which he regards as tending to make ‘false antitheses’). Mills points out, amongst much that is insightful, that Carson himself is guilty of precisely the same tendencies - in his crtiticisms of ECM, and that ECM, and MacLaren in particular, cannot be all be tarred with the same brush. (Mills is not an apologist for ECM, and shares some of Carson’s own concerns about tendencies in the ECM and its theology).
The article also has a bearing on Andrew’s comments in this post. I personally found myself thinking: is this another way of saying that communities create meanings in texts (such as biblical texts)? That texts don’t have ‘independent’ meanings? That authors/editors cannot convey ‘intended’ meanings?
But Mills has, what are to me, some highly potent things to say about the difference between ‘certainty’ in knowing (which was Modernism’s quest), and ‘knowing truly’, despite our partial, finite and fallible knowledge, which he argues for.
Narratives can convey truth as much as propositions; Mills shows how MacLaren seeks not to set one kind of ‘truth’ against another, but to reinstate both alongside each other.