Speaking of the analytic philosophical tradition, here’s part of David Bentley Hart’s take(down):

I should probably note here that, in the analytic tradition of Anglo-American philosophy, the issue [of God as Being or Reality] tends to be complicated on the one hand by the methods and conceptual rules generally preferred by analytic thinkers, and on the other by the lack of historical perspective that those methods and rules often encourage. The analytic tradition is pervaded by the mythology of “pure” philosophical discourse, a propositional logic that somehow floats above the historical and cultural contingency of ideas and words, and that somehow can be applied to every epoch of philosophy without any proper attention to what the language and conceptual schemes of earlier thinkers meant in their own times and places. This is a pernicious error under the best of conditions, but it has worked arguably the greatest mischief in the realm of ontology, often as a result of principles that, truth be told, are almost entirely arbitrary.

The Experience of God, p. 123

Thoughts? Reactions?

I missed this back in May, but Kevin Vanhoozer has an insightful review of Charles Taylor’s latest book, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, over at the Gospel Coalition website. Vanhoozer explains that Taylor is a “post-analytic” philosopher in that he has come to reject the reductionism of the analytic philosophical tradition. Specifically, Taylor has come to believe that the “designative” theory of language associated with analytic philosophy–namely, that language merely designates or labels objects in the world–is an insufficient account of humanity’s use of language. Language does not merely map out the objective world; it also communicates “the significance that things have for us.”

Anyway, enough of this review of a review. What stood out to me in Vanhoozer’s post was his conclusion, where he applies Taylor’s insights to theological formulation and in particular to analytic theology:

Taylor thinks that contemporary analytic philosophy is still indebted in various ways to Cartesian philosophy and to the goal of using language to set forth an accurate description of the natural world and of seeing meaning as “something down-to-earth, and nonmysterious” (117). Is the task of Christian theology simply to designate the realities to which it refers in unambiguous propositions? Should we not follow the way the biblical words and themes and genres go, to trace them out and preserve them and penetrate them better? Put differently: to what extent is the canon a sine qua non of Christian consciousness, the mind of Christ?

Just when you thought it safe to go into the water of analytic theology, we must now ponder the value, and perhaps the necessity, of post-analytic theology.

I’ve expressed appreciation for analytic theology in the past, and I still think some interesting work is being done in this emerging field. But Vanhoozer, via Taylor, puts his finger on some questions I have been mulling about the movement for the past couple of years.

Part of what drew me to analytic theology several years back was Oliver Crisp’s use of it to explicate and defend classic Christology. I still think that work is incredibly helpful, but the pressing question I’ve been asking lately is, how is language functioning in these kinds of examinations and defenses of Christian doctrine? Does it signify what God is actually like in some kind of rigorous, precise, and objective way? Or does it simply give us the grammar to speak about and reflect upon God in ways that are faithful and fitting to the biblical economy?

The latter seems more likely to me now. This doesn’t mean doctrine is merely a function of the community or that it has no objective referent. But it does mean that we need a healthy dose of apophaticism in our theologizing. Theology should never have as its goal the desire to render its great Object non-mysterious.

Daniel Kirk has a post that has been making the rounds this week in which he connects the theological interpretation of Scripture (TIS) movement with something he calls the “problem of whiteness.” Leaving aside questions about whether or not we can speak of TIS as a singular coherent “movement,” let’s consider the thrust of Kirk’s argument. As I understand it, Kirk appears to be arguing that the TIS movement, unlike other “situated” readings (such as feminist, African American, and LGBT readings), has failed to own up to its own “revisionist” approach to Scripture and that this failure is owing to the general “whiteness” of the movement–presumably TIS advocates are mostly white males who are not accustomed to locating their scholarship within a particular perspective. As Kirk puts it:

White, western theology has sat at the center of biblical interpretation for so long that all of our debates can only be about what the text “really” says. And when we know that the text doesn’t say what it must we create a theological paradigm (reading in light of the rule of faith) that enables us to say that everyone has to agree with us even when we’re disagreeing with the text because the people who gave us the text used our paradigm to pick which books belong.

The problem of whiteness in theology and theological interpretation is that it has sat at the center for so long, it has been “the right answer” for so long, that it is dispositionally incapable of recognizing that it only says what it says because it is white, western, and hegemonic.

As I see it there are at least three false dichotomies apparent in Kirk’s argument.

1. Kirk falsely pits the New Testament against subsequent orthodoxy.

Kirk seems to be assuming that TIS advocates don’t know the difference between the fourth century and the first. He assumes that “ruled” readings must necessarily be anachronistic–that we must “make Paul or Matthew into a proto-Trinitarian.” But, of course, no one actually makes that mistake. No TIS scholar of which I am aware would argue that the NT authors were Trinitarian in the same way that, say, Athanasius was Trinitarian, homoousios and all.

But quite obviously Kirk is making the opposite mistake in driving a sharp wedge between the NT and the trinitarian doctrine that organically grew from it in the earliest centuries of the church. He is, to use David Yeago’s categories, conflating theological concepts with theological judgments: “the same judgement can be rendered in a variety of conceptual terms, all of which may be informative about a particular judgement’s force and implications.” So it is possible, and perfectly permissible as an academic argument, to suggest that Paul could be rendering the same judgment about the status of Jesus Christ that the Nicene Fathers did, even if he did not (for obvious historical reasons) utilize their precise conceptual language.

2. Kirk falsely pits the acknowledgement of our situatedness against the quest for truth.

Another problem with Kirk’s argument is that he seems to assume that TIS proponents are unaware or else unwilling to admit their own theological presuppositions. But I don’t see how any reading of the main texts of the TIS movement–including the evangelical ones–could be interpreted in this way. It seems to me that the TIS movement, in all of its various manifestations, is characterized by just the opposite: a broadly “postmodern” sensibility, a focus on the interpretive role of the community, a valuing of interpretive pluralism (within certain constraints), and an appreciation for premodern exegesis (with its more open-ended hermeneutic). Ironically, one of the main burdens of the TIS movement has been to show the limitations of the supposedly “objective” readings of the modernist historical-critical method.

But again, Kirk makes the opposite error. The real problem for Kirk seems to be the quest for “right” readings of the biblical text. This is where the “whiteness” charge comes in. TIS proponents, to the degree that they seek “the right answer,” are simply the product of a “white, western, and hegemonic” power play. But interpretive pluralism need not imply a kind of radical relativism: an anything-goes, wax-nose approach. There is truth to be had in interpretation, even if our access to it is always conditioned by our historical and cultural context. Acknowledging our theological presuppositions does not eliminate the possibility of better and worse readings of Scripture. However we want to conceptualize this dynamic (the hermeneutical circle, critical realism, etc.), there is a dialectic between the reader and the text that somehow does not leave the reader stuck in the mire of his own prejudices. Real advance toward the truth is possible.

3. Kirk falsely pits the rule of faith against listening to minority voices.

Kirk is right to call TIS opponents to consider their own prejudices and to embrace hermeneutical humility. Further, his piece serves as a helpful reminder that we should listen to minority voices in biblical and theological scholarship. White scholars of all theological stripes can be indicted on this front to one degree or another. Thankfully, recent decades have witnessed several attempts to remedy this error.

But Kirk makes an interesting and erroneous assumption in driving this point home. He argues that Western voices “create[d]” the theological paradigm of the rule of faith in order to exercise control over the marketplace of ideas. Apparently orthodoxy “only says what it says because it is white, western, and hegemonic.” As a friend pointed out on Twitter, another irony lies in the fact that the rule of faith was developed largely in non-Western contexts: places like northern Africa and modern-day Turkey. Further, the TIS movement has been eager to retrieve perspectives from Eastern Fathers such as Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, even Origen.

But in any event, it seems that one of the implications of Kirk’s argument is that the rule of faith, embodied in the Creeds of the church, is the unique creation and preserve of white western men. But what an insult this is to our trinitarian brothers and sisters in the majority world! The African bishops of the Anglican and Methodist churches, the evangelicals of China, and the Pentecostals of Latin America would surely be surprised to learn that they have embraced the trinitarian faith only because of white western colonialism. A true appreciation for our situatedness would acknowledge that only in a western liberal academic context could we make such a condescending assumption as to equate the ancient, trinitarian rule of faith with latter-day “whiteness.”