Philosophical Autobiography II
Note: Here's another snapshot from my philosophical autobiography. If the first installment dovetailed with PHIL 202, this one will dovetail with PHIL 102.
-sdl
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One of the common themes in most autobiographies by Christian philosophers is the intertwining of issues of faith and of philosophy. The intersection is inevitable, as both our faith and our philosophical inquiry share so much. Minimally, we can say, first, that they share common objects. By that I mean, both faith and philosophy often focus on God, on worldview issues rooted in historic Christian theism. You don't need to be a Christian to be a theist, and being a theist does not ensure that you are a Christian, but their overlap does indicate the common space--or a common object--of both Christian faith and Christian philosophy.
But there is also a deeper reason, I suspect, for the intertwining. Philosophy calls us to seek truth and wisdom, and Christianity claims to have found ultimate truth and the source of all wisdom in the person of the God-man, Jesus Christ. It is the joint claim of truth and wisdom placed on the Christian philosopher--by both her faith and her philosophical commitments--that makes Christian philosophy a unique enterprise. At this point, some might want to exaggerate the difference between the supposed seeking of philosophy and the finding of faith. If you seek, they would say, it must be because you have not found. And so many a parent wonders (sometimes out loud, sometimes to me the professor!) why their son or daughter, raised in a good Christian home to be a good Christian, should, as it were, take a step back in faith and go back to seeking when they've already got the answer! (Full disclosure: I think I myself have had such a conversation with my own mother more than once!)
But I want to argue that seeking and faith are inextricably related. The metaphor of truth and knowledge being a 'destination' where you (eventually, and hopefully by design) end up is helpful but ultimately misleading. And to make matters worse, the philosopher's embrace of the image of seeking perhaps only exacerbates this problem, since it trades on the same logic. Rather, I believe that to be human, even as a follower of Christ, is to live in the tension between the now and the not yet. If you take destination as someplace fixed and final, then every Christian must by necessity admit that we are not there yet. We know there is a destination and place our every hope upon it. But do not mistake the knowledge of faith, birthed in hope, with our actual possession of it. In fact, the interesting thing about any destination is you never possess it; you are there, but the there possesses you. And so our hope is in God's final and ultimate possession of us in Christ.
More concretely, between our striving after the truth of God and the wisdom of God in Christ and our actually receiving it, actually inhabiting that truth and practicing such wisdom. The search goes on long after the believer knows, by faith, his/her eternal destination. We know where we are going, you might say (but be careful not to be led astray by the seeking metaphor), but we imperfectly know how to get there. Or better we know how: through the spiritual disciplines practiced within the body of Christ by the individual believer, working out our faiths with fear and trembling before the throne of grace. But what exactly does that involve? Where will that work take us? Sometimes it may go with great ease, other times only with great struggle (I think it is actually more of the latter than the former). But the life of faith is a life led seeking the things of God, bearing in mind that His ways are not my ways. Or my ways only become His as His grace works its way completely, fully throughout my life. Who can say the work of grace is yet done? Who, indeed!
In my experience, the Christian philosopher may know the dynamics of faith better than just about anyone else. Why? Because the Christian philosopher is uniquely positioned to appreciate the rigors of the spiritual disciplines, of bringing one's whole person to the knowledge of truth and the practice of wisdom in all areas of ones life. When we, for example, puzzle over a great question--how do we know God exists?--we are wrestling not just with logic and arguments, but with the motivations behind the question and the stakes of answering (or failing to answer) our question. And indeed, any Christian philosopher worth her salt will insist that part of the knowledge the believer (already!) possesses comes through the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit, the effectual work of sanctification going on in her life. But then again, we are thrown back on the questions: what does that mean? And with the question, we are led to Scripture and the witness of faithful seekers throughout the history of the Church. And so on.
Faith and philosophy are such mutually enriching callings, I believe, because they are, if you will, overlapping callings and commitments. While the two lives, the two callings have their own uniquenesses, it is a uniqueness as charted on an overlapping Venn diagram. The part of faith that lies outside of philosophy, for instance, is not in principle inaccessible to philosophy, for if it were the two circles would never overlap. They would be two separate, non-overlapping circles. And the converse holds true for philosophy with respect to faith. The curious thing about the Venn diagram modeling of the faith-philosophy encounter is that, I believe, the overlap shifts within the life and practice of various individuals and communities of faith. In some cases, there is strong overlap. I do not think there is ever perfect, one-to-one coincidence, but there may be more space at one time and place, more overlapping in one life or community than at another. Within one life, one's philosophy may fruitfully, healthily overlap with much if not all of one's faith. That was clearly what happened in my life as an undergraduate, a beginning philosophy student drinking deeply at the well of my new found calling. And that it eventually needed correction became the impetus for a period of separation. . .which also posed problems. . .and with which I, today, am struggling. I am at a period of reintegration. I am further along in that phase of my philosophical life now than I was 5 years ago (and it dates back at least to 2001, probably before), but I find I still have a ways to go.
Let me extend the Venn diagram model a step further. The focal point of the overlap--and again, its precise location in the overlap may shift about or even grow fuzzy and unclear!--is the person of Christ. Here I am always inspired by Johannine theology of Christ the incarnate logos. Bear with me for a moment, but as you probably know, logos is Greek for word, language, speech or reason, and in Scripture The Word, the Reason. Its Greek origin arose from the way that philosophers, lovers of wisdom, sought to give words to that which did not have a word--to name the unnamed nameable, for to speak and to give words to something is to be (on the way to) understanding it. From logos we get logic, and it does express in Greek the sense that there is a deeper order--a reason--at work in the cosmos, which our words and concepts may reveal. Etymology aside, frankly, this is as subversive a piece of metaphysics and epistemology as you can find! For in John's association of the logos of the Greeks--the Greek philosophers with their perfunctory civic polytheism and actual atheism or amorphous theism--to associate their logos with the incarnate Son of God, we have a reorienting of every use of reason or every logic, every word and every seeking after words to The Word, The Reason, who is no longer hidden in esoteric realms of mystical insight or philosophical inquiry. Whether they knew it or not, they were striving after Jesus Christ, straining to see Him revealed in His full glory. But thanks be to God, it is now made plain with the advent of the Christ. The epistemological and metaphysic assumptions of John's logos theology undercuts the pretenses of an autonomous reason with the deeper Christian conviction that wherever and whenever someone discovers truth, we have discovered part of Christ. Of His nature. Of His order and plan. Of Him simpliciter.
Now, that may be a bit too much of natural theology for some, but it is Christocentric. As the Creed says, "through Him all things were made," expressing John's high Christo-logic that as God spoke the Word, that breathing out, that expiring of the divine word brings whatever incarnate reality there is into existence. Jesus Christ is the order insinuated throughout all creation. All creation sings His praise because it is all, deeply and eternally, ordered unto Him.
This post has been less biographical than I had intended. Not much concrete detail here to hang my musings on. But I wanted to express something of the personal motivations for why I have always felt a deep confluence of my paths of faith and philosophy.
But there is also a deeper reason, I suspect, for the intertwining. Philosophy calls us to seek truth and wisdom, and Christianity claims to have found ultimate truth and the source of all wisdom in the person of the God-man, Jesus Christ. It is the joint claim of truth and wisdom placed on the Christian philosopher--by both her faith and her philosophical commitments--that makes Christian philosophy a unique enterprise. At this point, some might want to exaggerate the difference between the supposed seeking of philosophy and the finding of faith. If you seek, they would say, it must be because you have not found. And so many a parent wonders (sometimes out loud, sometimes to me the professor!) why their son or daughter, raised in a good Christian home to be a good Christian, should, as it were, take a step back in faith and go back to seeking when they've already got the answer! (Full disclosure: I think I myself have had such a conversation with my own mother more than once!)
But I want to argue that seeking and faith are inextricably related. The metaphor of truth and knowledge being a 'destination' where you (eventually, and hopefully by design) end up is helpful but ultimately misleading. And to make matters worse, the philosopher's embrace of the image of seeking perhaps only exacerbates this problem, since it trades on the same logic. Rather, I believe that to be human, even as a follower of Christ, is to live in the tension between the now and the not yet. If you take destination as someplace fixed and final, then every Christian must by necessity admit that we are not there yet. We know there is a destination and place our every hope upon it. But do not mistake the knowledge of faith, birthed in hope, with our actual possession of it. In fact, the interesting thing about any destination is you never possess it; you are there, but the there possesses you. And so our hope is in God's final and ultimate possession of us in Christ.
More concretely, between our striving after the truth of God and the wisdom of God in Christ and our actually receiving it, actually inhabiting that truth and practicing such wisdom. The search goes on long after the believer knows, by faith, his/her eternal destination. We know where we are going, you might say (but be careful not to be led astray by the seeking metaphor), but we imperfectly know how to get there. Or better we know how: through the spiritual disciplines practiced within the body of Christ by the individual believer, working out our faiths with fear and trembling before the throne of grace. But what exactly does that involve? Where will that work take us? Sometimes it may go with great ease, other times only with great struggle (I think it is actually more of the latter than the former). But the life of faith is a life led seeking the things of God, bearing in mind that His ways are not my ways. Or my ways only become His as His grace works its way completely, fully throughout my life. Who can say the work of grace is yet done? Who, indeed!
In my experience, the Christian philosopher may know the dynamics of faith better than just about anyone else. Why? Because the Christian philosopher is uniquely positioned to appreciate the rigors of the spiritual disciplines, of bringing one's whole person to the knowledge of truth and the practice of wisdom in all areas of ones life. When we, for example, puzzle over a great question--how do we know God exists?--we are wrestling not just with logic and arguments, but with the motivations behind the question and the stakes of answering (or failing to answer) our question. And indeed, any Christian philosopher worth her salt will insist that part of the knowledge the believer (already!) possesses comes through the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit, the effectual work of sanctification going on in her life. But then again, we are thrown back on the questions: what does that mean? And with the question, we are led to Scripture and the witness of faithful seekers throughout the history of the Church. And so on.
Faith and philosophy are such mutually enriching callings, I believe, because they are, if you will, overlapping callings and commitments. While the two lives, the two callings have their own uniquenesses, it is a uniqueness as charted on an overlapping Venn diagram. The part of faith that lies outside of philosophy, for instance, is not in principle inaccessible to philosophy, for if it were the two circles would never overlap. They would be two separate, non-overlapping circles. And the converse holds true for philosophy with respect to faith. The curious thing about the Venn diagram modeling of the faith-philosophy encounter is that, I believe, the overlap shifts within the life and practice of various individuals and communities of faith. In some cases, there is strong overlap. I do not think there is ever perfect, one-to-one coincidence, but there may be more space at one time and place, more overlapping in one life or community than at another. Within one life, one's philosophy may fruitfully, healthily overlap with much if not all of one's faith. That was clearly what happened in my life as an undergraduate, a beginning philosophy student drinking deeply at the well of my new found calling. And that it eventually needed correction became the impetus for a period of separation. . .which also posed problems. . .and with which I, today, am struggling. I am at a period of reintegration. I am further along in that phase of my philosophical life now than I was 5 years ago (and it dates back at least to 2001, probably before), but I find I still have a ways to go.
Let me extend the Venn diagram model a step further. The focal point of the overlap--and again, its precise location in the overlap may shift about or even grow fuzzy and unclear!--is the person of Christ. Here I am always inspired by Johannine theology of Christ the incarnate logos. Bear with me for a moment, but as you probably know, logos is Greek for word, language, speech or reason, and in Scripture The Word, the Reason. Its Greek origin arose from the way that philosophers, lovers of wisdom, sought to give words to that which did not have a word--to name the unnamed nameable, for to speak and to give words to something is to be (on the way to) understanding it. From logos we get logic, and it does express in Greek the sense that there is a deeper order--a reason--at work in the cosmos, which our words and concepts may reveal. Etymology aside, frankly, this is as subversive a piece of metaphysics and epistemology as you can find! For in John's association of the logos of the Greeks--the Greek philosophers with their perfunctory civic polytheism and actual atheism or amorphous theism--to associate their logos with the incarnate Son of God, we have a reorienting of every use of reason or every logic, every word and every seeking after words to The Word, The Reason, who is no longer hidden in esoteric realms of mystical insight or philosophical inquiry. Whether they knew it or not, they were striving after Jesus Christ, straining to see Him revealed in His full glory. But thanks be to God, it is now made plain with the advent of the Christ. The epistemological and metaphysic assumptions of John's logos theology undercuts the pretenses of an autonomous reason with the deeper Christian conviction that wherever and whenever someone discovers truth, we have discovered part of Christ. Of His nature. Of His order and plan. Of Him simpliciter.
Now, that may be a bit too much of natural theology for some, but it is Christocentric. As the Creed says, "through Him all things were made," expressing John's high Christo-logic that as God spoke the Word, that breathing out, that expiring of the divine word brings whatever incarnate reality there is into existence. Jesus Christ is the order insinuated throughout all creation. All creation sings His praise because it is all, deeply and eternally, ordered unto Him.
This post has been less biographical than I had intended. Not much concrete detail here to hang my musings on. But I wanted to express something of the personal motivations for why I have always felt a deep confluence of my paths of faith and philosophy.
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