Kant philosophizes that philosophy is unknowable

Have you heard the one about the jelly jars and the mysterious cylindrical jelly? This has is one of my favorite parables so far in my class (History of Philosophy and Christian Thought, John Frame, RTS.) A group of philosophical minded jelly jars get together to find out why jelly takes a cylindrical shape when put inside them. They do scientific tests on the jelly but come up stumped. One day however the smartest jelly jar of them all postulates that it is not anything in the jelly itself that makes it cylindrical when put inside them, it is a quality they have as jelly jars – the jelly is conforming to them. As it turns out, this is a comparable illustration of Kant’s view of the world. All the universals that Plato wanted to say were the reality, of which our world is a mere shadow, Kant claims the mind itself creates and imposes on the world – substance, unity, plurality, causality, cylindricity are all made up so we don’t go crazy. The jelly of experience enters our mind and it conforms to the shape of our intuition to become objects in space and time. These qualities may really exist but we cannot say for certain. All we know is they exist in the noumenal realm, the counterpart of the now famous distinction from the phenomenal world. The noumenal realm is like the junk drawer of the universe. All metaphysical truth is relegated to this realm because its truth is unknowable. Included in that group is God, time, space, and basically anything Kant couldn’t figure out.

Among the many amazing aspects of his philosophy is the idea that metaphysical truths which suspend in the unknowable category play a dominant role in the rest of his system. Specifically, he recognizes that living as if God exists has benefits for life. Indeed, he brings Christ into his system as an icon of human morality. Dr. Frame’s response is simple but powerful. He asks if we should live as if God exists (for moral benefit, mental stability, etc.) should we not also believe he exists? In other words, by introducing the helpfulness of the God category we are also in a way admitting the need for a real God. This can be a backdoor approach to the moral argument for the existence of God.

Today’s secular philosophers have rationalizations for morality that, unlike Kant, don’t include God. Dr. Richard Dawkins, though he presents himself as more of a scientist than philosopher, wants to argue the exact opposite, that the God category (or religion) is responsible for more blood shed than any other category of thought. You see, Dawkins is a modern-day representative of the reaction people had to Kant’s noumenal realm – if it is unknowable then it is disposable, all we have is the world as our mind experiences it. For Dawkins then, the God experience is one of delusion. Nonetheless, this illustrates the important role that philosophy has for our understanding of God. If we set as our goal to believe as the Bible teaches us, we must be able to formulate that in a philosophically and theologically correct way, which is that biblical revelation is authoritative over human reason. Kant is an amazing synthesis thinker and master visionary. From the standpoint of faith, one wishes he could have used that amazing ability to expound a knowable God.

In His Hand – A Confession

Helmut Thielicke

After such a long time since my last posting, I thought I’d share a quote that expresses a theme our household has been wrestling with and also serves as an explanation for why I have not posted recently. I am greatly indebted to my pastor, Larry Kirk, for introducing me to the German pastor, theologian, and intellectual Helmut Thielicke. A cursory read proves his work to be a well of insight which I know from experience has been a source for Larry’s heart and teaching, both of which he holds close together.

In his work The Freedom of the Christian Man, Thielicke quotes John 6:26 where Christ says, “You seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves”. Thielicke then explains it this way,

“What he was saying was: You are not seeking me; you are seeking your own satisfaction. You are not seeking the gift that reveals the Giver; you are seking the gift as an end in itself. You are not seeking the Savior, but only salvation. You are not seeking my hand, but only the pennies in my hand–like one who flings a prayer to heaven when the bombs come screaming down and the next moment forgets it, because what he wanted was preservation and not the presence of the Preserver.”

He goes on to makes this glaring observation:

The eyes that leer and lust for bread can never wait. Only he who looks at the hand that gives the bread can say, “The eyes of all look to thee, and thou givest them thier food in due season” (ps. 145:15), which means at a time which is “in his hand” (ps. 31:15). He who sees the bread and not the hand loses the sense of the “due time”. He wrenches everything out of its due season and wants it this moment.

This certainly cuts to the core of an anxious heart. I spoke this last week on God’s motives–the mind behind God’s actions. One of my main points was that God’s mindset from all eternity has been one of  self-sacrifice. Even in the face of the cross it is still difficult to allow this truth to be a controlling reality in our core. What Thielicke’s quote shows is that God’s nature is the same no matter what our motives, his nature remains constant, everyone is watching for his provision and he give’s it in due season. Sadly, instead of his self-sacrificing nature leading us to embrace him, we “leer and lust” after his provision. Nevertheless, the hope is in the admonition. He does extend to us something more than bread. He does hear our prayer when the bombs are dropping. He does set himself before us. In Christ we are in his hand.

Resurrection and Nature

In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul exercises his great theological reasoning power in an interesting discussion about resurrection. After making his case for half a chapter, he picks up in verse 35, “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ You foolish person!” Calvin says that Paul is making use of an anthypophora, a Greek term meaning to bring something forward by way of an objection. In this case, Paul brings forth an objection to resurrection through the mouth of someone he considers a fool. Why does he consider them as such? I want to point out here that this is not the rant of a self-righteous Christian, the impression of which is all too familiar in today’s culture. The argument that he is making here is not against this hypothetical person’s materialist and depraved disbelief of all things spiritual, though that is a related issue. More specifically though he is making a case against their lack of right interpretation of natural phenomena. What!?

If we look at the text he is not directly critical of their lack of faith and does not go into an argument about it, rather he launches into farming imagery, wildlife imagery, space imagery, and eventually an appeal to Adam and Christ. Now, wouldn’t it follow that a discussion about resurrection would include a discussion on faith? Is this not how we believe in resurrection, through faith? What Paul is doing is remarkable. He uses a natural phenomenon to illustrate spiritual resurrection. As in the sowing of a seed, so it is with man; life emerges out of death. He is not calling the Corinthian Christians, or us, to believe in spite of what we see in the natural world, but rather to believe in resurrection in accordance with what we see in the natural world. This is a very important distinction for today as we are constantly asked to divide our lives into sacred and secular compartments. I remember reading a quote my Martin Luther once along these similar lines, where he said something like ‘I am convinced of the grace of God causing spiritual renewal everytime I see the barren tree of winter sprout new buds in the spring.’

If we follow Paul’s argument to the end of verse 49, we can see why natural phenomena illustrates the spiritual reality of resurrection. The entirety of Paul’s argument for resurrection is dependent not only on the view that God created this physical reality, but that the physical reality, including ourselves, needs resurrection from the dead, and that resurrection is possible only through the redemptive work of Christ, the Adam who conquered where the first failed. In Christ we are given the light of God to perceive the testimony of nature. We do believe in Christ through faith, but this not against our perception of nature, which declares both God’s glory and man’s need for renewal.

Resources by Doug Moo

I recently saw this on a post by Matt Harmon on his blog Biblical Theology. Apparently Doug Moo has recently added a bunch of his theological articles and resources to his website that was originally intended to sell his photography. I checked it out and there is a lot of great material there, most of which is in a handy pdf format. You also should check it out if you get a chance. This is a great wealth of information from one of the top Bible scholars around. Visit Doug’s site here: http://www.djmoophoto.com/index.html

Lewis and the Divine Life

Here is a quote by C.S. Lewis that I recently cited in a class I taught. The class was called Knowing Christ: Paul’s Conversion from Religion. I used this quote to illustrate that not only do our religious gains count as loss when it comes to our salvation, but they the real problem is that they don’t help us to gain Christ. Lewis says this in an essay titled Man or Rabbit? :

“The people who keep on asking if they can’t lead a descent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that ‘a descent life’ is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable; but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. We are to be re-made. All the rabbit in us is to disappear–the worried, conscientious, ethical rabbit as well as the cowardly and sensual rabbit. We shall bleed and squeal as the handfuls of fur come out; and then, surprisingly, we shall find underneath it all a thing we have never yet imagined: a real Man, and ageless god, a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy.”

The Don

Here is a fantastic paragraph I read recently in The Gagging of God by D. A. Carson. Talking about the early church, Carson says:

“The locus of the new covenant community was no longer a nation (as was the old covenant community) but a transnational fellowship seeking to live out the new life imparted by the Spirit in a world that could not be expected to share its values. Moreover, this world, politically speaking, was not a democracy in which ordinary citizens could fave much direct say in the organization and direction of the Empire. It is impossible to draw straight lines from their circumstances to ours. Nevertheless it is impossible not to recognize that in the current unravelling of Western culture our drift toward pluralism is casting up man parallels to the situation Christians faced in the first century… there is a sense in which the New Testament can be applied to us and our culture more directly than was possible fifty years ago. The fundamental difference, of course, is that the modern rush toward pluralism owes a great deal to the church’s weaknesses and compromises during the past cntury or two, while the church in the first century carried no such burden. Moreover, the earliest Christians confronted their world from the position of the underdog; we are inclined to confront our world from the position of the once favored mascot who has recently become or is in the process of becoming the neighborhood cur, and expend too much of our energy on howls of protesting outrage. Even so, we shall be less morbid and despairing if we read the Scriptures today and recognize that the challenges of pluralism are not entirely new.” (272)

A mouthful for sure but what an insight for us today as Christians. This is the reason why Acts 17 has become the prototypical example for evangelism in most of the Western World. Carson also rightly reminds us that there is a fundamental difference between our situation and that of the first century: today people have an aversion to Chrisianity because of what Tim Keller describes as a gospel inoculation; a distorted concept of true Christianity at the world-view level. Whether this is because of “the church’s weaknesses and compromises during the past cntury or two” as Carson notes should be discussed further. But his conclusion I think should be a profound help to Christians in the west who are struggling with issues related to pluralism such as communication, cultural values, inspiring unity, etc. God’s word is a sword that is uniquely capable of disecting cultural contexts similar to ours today, and as such we should be saturated in it’s life giving truth and be able to meet pluralism head on with the love of Christ.

Bearing God’s Image

In a philosophy class I took once, I think it was environmental ethics, we discussed at one point the Christian belief that people are made in God’s image, and how for Christians that was the reason why things like cannibalism are bad, but eating beef was acceptable. Or why abortion or eugenics from a Christian ethic are bad; they ultimately violate God because they violate natural man, who is made in God’s image. I agree that the outworking of “bearing God’s image” does mean that man has inherent value and there are ethical implications for this (no cannibalism, etc.). But I wanted to add a dimension to the “made in God’s image” doctrine that I heard recently and see what anybody thinks about it. In a lecture by N.T. Wright recorded some years ago, he talked about the historical dimension (one of his specialties) of what it meant to bear an image in ancient times. Conquering emperors he said (which I verified with my Humanities prof.) would literally set up monuments of themselves in the land that they subdued as a tactic to maintian control. These image bearers had an inherent political function. The Christian, Wright says, has this type of function as an image bearer; they are inherently a sign post to God’s governing authority over everthing, and is inherently a threat to governing authorities that try to conquer even people’s belief in God. Hence the persecution of Christians in the Roman world. I hasten to add that Wright did not say that this is all it meant to bear God’s image, but that the imperial practice of setting up image bearers can be applied to Christians. Now, this dimension seems in line with scripture (thinking of 2 Cor. 3:18; we as Christians reflect God’s glory) and I wondered what other people thought about this. Can we apply the concept of imperial image bearing to the Christian as a way of understanding more fully the doctrine of being made in God’s image, or do we lose something by directly applying this cultural parallel?

Is God…?

Is God a social construct?

This question is one that has surfaced in a class that I’ve recently started. I don’t like it because it is opaque and could be asking a couple of different questions in actuality. It could be rephrased like this, “Has a god who can be explained as being socially constructed actually been socially constructed in human history?” The answer to this question would have to be yes! In my view this is the god which most atheists reject and which many religious people are in danger of serving. It is a reduced view of God which makes him into something that is logically manageable in order to serve our own ends. This god in question is a weak version of a more consistently defined God. Along these lines, the original question is probably meant to ask something like this “Is it possible for the God who comes to us in various theological traditions actually to be a figure of our collective imaginations?” This deals with a slightly larger and more consistent view of God but not by much, because it still implies that a God, who is necessarily infinite in nature, can be understood and explained completely in finite terms. Even though sociology presents a fine view from which to study human phenomena, yes, it is still finite. It is difficult to explain this to people, I know, but when we ask questions about God, we must be consistent to his necessary nature, namely, that he is unable to be explained completely in finite terms. God implies infinitude in every possible way, something that neither I nor anyone else can lay claim to. The treatment of God from a reduced and inconsistent view is common. Another place it has shown up recently is in a cosmological argument against the existence of God in Dawkins’ God Delusion. He argues that if more complex things are less likely to come into being, then God would have to be least likely thing to exist that we can think of; way less likely than a person, or a clown, or a pony. Again though, this argument presupposes a reduced view of God. In this argument a spiritual and infinite God is bound by the physical laws which he would have necessarily created. So, I return to the original question: is God a social construct? It depends… What kind of God are you talking about?

The Meaning of Culture

As it relates to current discussions in the field of philosophy, I wanted to share a bit about my thoughts on the meaning of human culture. Human culture by definition does not exist without people. More importantly though we could say people do not exist without some form culture. There is a dynamic social aspect that is woven into our being, and this I believe should guide our understanding of knowledge and the way things have meaning, which would also contain this dynamic social thread. Knowledge and meaning that pertain to a culture have their being because of a force which precedes them; namely the social function of culture, which is to preserve and perpetuate that acquired knowledge and meaning in society. We could say then that the meaning of culture is it’s social function in society. One suitable way we can define the meaning of culture is by listing its function; to express, inform, socialize, and unify people.

Contrary to the privileged place they often have in society, knowledge & meaning themselves have no authority over the function that guides them just like the answer to an algebra problem has no influence over the equation which produced it. Drastically understated, correct knowledge, just like the right answer to the algebra problem, can be useful. The computers we are at would not exist with out it. And for that we often prize the capability of human intellect for producing such things. But to illustrate my point, a computer is often seen as an object which would somehow exist apart from the function of culture, produced in the cold, mechanical labs of HP. But they are a part of a cultural text just as much as Sumo Wrestling in Japan, or Stonehenge. They are the outcome of the meaning/function of culture. Knowledge and meaning point not to themselves alone but to people and I would argue a creator.

Should the meaning of human culture be defined by it’s function? Does this mean we are condemned to relativity. This question and others like it tend to surface in postmodern discourses. I think they are valuable because they inevitably point to us to what it means to be human. But just as the products of culture reflect a social reality, so to the meaning/function of culture itself can be explained as reflecting a reality beyond what is explained in mere scientific terms; namely a spiritual force which precedes the existence of all things related to human culture.

God the Father

GOD POWERFULLY SHAPES OUR IDENTITY WHEN WE RELATE TO HIM AS OUR FATHER. The Scriptures tell us in Gal. 3:26 “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.” This means that through Christ people are not only saved from condemnation, but they are also adopted into a new spiritual family that God is creating in human history. As family, God relates to us in a new and personal way. And when he saves people he equips them with his Holy Spirit, a living heart, and a new family. All of these elements produce in us a new identity that can powerfully work in our lives as we grow in relationship with our Heavenly father.

This new identity is powerful because it changes way we see God, ourselves, and our environment. Recently we had a new addition to our family. One night as I was up late working on a paper for school a kitten had found its way to our open front door. At first I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I’ve never owned a cat before and don’t know the first thing about them. I woke up my wife Michelle and we decided to keep it for the night because it was cold outside and we felt a level of compassion for it. In the morning we still were unsure about what to do with it and decided it would be unsafe to just release it into the neighborhood to wonder the streets. So we decided to keep it until we found someone to take it. Michelle bought food, toys, and all of the necessary supplies for a cat. And as the days passed we realized that having a new kitten around the house isn’t all that unpleasant. To my surprise I find myself thinking about names, about how to train it, and about how to take better care of it. Through a process of relationship my heart has become warm to it. And as I’ve reflected on this idea of adoption, I’ve become so grateful that God didn’t save me the way we saved this cat. Rather than people randomly showing up at God’s door step, Jesus comes to the door of our heart. And rather than tolerating us at first, testing us to see if this whole salvation thing will work out, his heart was warm and welcoming, and full of grace for us even before we were born. God is a perfect father. He’s knowledgeable and experienced with taking care of people. Just like our new pet, we are given a new name, a new home, a new family, and nourishment to explore God’s creation. And in the end we can sleep soundly in the presence of our father. As Christian’s we don’t just move from death to life, but from orphans, lost and helpless, to children loved and cared for by God.