This sounds like classic postmodernism, nicely repackaged.
The strawman used against the doctrine of Sola Scriptura is the idea that the Christian is not able to use their senses, only verses. This is theologically and historically easy to debunk. The doctrine properly understood requires that the scriptures be first presupposed (accepted in advance) and then also used as the final authority (trumping science, experience, etc. when there is a disagreement).
The argument of "scripture does not support violence" is kinda silly. Christianity, leveraging the scripture, has presented the world with things like "Just War Theory", jurisprudence foundations for violence (largely shaping western law surrounding murder, manslaughter, etc.). These contributions and more are drawn from scripture and applied to the world.
Hey, Red-Beard - I've been intrigued by the presuppositionalist quotes you've been posting lately. I left behind presuppositionalism shortly before starting at WTS Philly; great timing on my part, right! Through three more years of presuppositionalist teaching, and then seven years of philosophy since then, I've come to a different perspective on Christian philosophy/apologetics.
I have come to think that presuppositionalism is "classic postmodernism, nicely repackaged." No offense meant, of course, I mean that it suggests that Christians have distinctively Christian categories, and we impose a biblical worldview on the data of the senses. We have no common ground with unbelievers, from sense experience, that we can appeal to together.
By contrast, I have come to think that the Christian approach should be realist and empiricist - through our God-given faculties, we can know the real world. And that knowledge points to God and prepares us for supernatural revelation - Christ and the Gospel.
I think you would hear postmodernism in my speaking of "experience" and also the idea that we all bring beliefs from experience to the text. First of all, I mean objective experience, not purely subjective. That is, I can look at the world and say, "Looks like the human race has two sexes." It doesn't take a Christian worldview or the Bible to arrive at that. The Bible testifies to it and explains where it came from, etc., but it is knowable in principle apart from Scripture.
On the second point, I think that biblical revelation assumes that we all have common sense, beliefs from ordinary human experience, not to mention categories. An example I've used is that the Bible does not define the word "donkey." Nor does it provide us with a "distinctively Christian concept of a donkey!" God speaks about donkeys assuming we have already encountered them. That is the striking thing, though. It is *those* beasts of burdens, the dumb ones I've seen with my own eyes, one of whom *spoke* to Balaam. Whoa! The Bible is talking about the very world I and non-Christians have all experienced.
I don't mean to take the postmodernist line that we all are *interpreting* the Bible and can't get to its meaning. I'm trying to go *more* realist than the presuppositionalist. Even the senses of fallen men discover truth. And they are incriminated by that very fact. Hope that helps explain my perspective!
I've always liked the Doctrine of Double Effect ever since I was first exposed to it, and I use it as a rubric for myself. But I suppose I don't really have any words to defend it. Other than to say it doesn't seem to contradict Scripture and might well align with it.
I'm not sure to what degree we agree and disagree here. Because I think that moral philosophy can only get so far away from Scripture before it's essentially useless. The best it can do is provide us with hypotheses -- frameworks, rubrics, systems, etc. -- which we can then test against Scripture. A purely secular moral philosophy is basically useless, except as a tool of psychological self-management, a practical guide for how to manage your own conscience. This is rather unlike domains like science and engineering -- or just plain observing and noticing the world around us, the human experience. This can actually teach us, as Christians, truths about the world.
The problem with so many ideas like Christian pacifism is that when you take the Bible as a whole, and the acts and words of Jesus as a whole, it REALLY doesn't seem like this is what he's getting at. Which you do point out here. An idea that I keep coming back to is that nearly every Christian error and heresy, from the 1st century onwards, has been derived from placing too much emphasis on one particular teaching or story from Scripture without considering it in the context of the whole.
The greatest single strength of the Reformed tradition is that it takes the idea of "the whole" very, very seriously, and demonstrates that you actually can turn it into something coherent and profound. And I think if we keep sticking to it, we can avoid a lot of errors.
Thomas, always love your contributions. Let's talk about "moral philosophy can only get so far away from Scripture before it's essentially useless." I want to distinguish from moral philosophy our moral intuitions and pre-philosophical ways of reasoning.
For example, what C.S. Lewis talks about on page 1 of Mere Christianity is the fact that people are blaming and praising each other for things all the time. Philosopher Peter Strawson wrote about how, even if we all became determinists, we would go on praising and blaming because that's our natural, human moral perspective. In both cases here, we're talking about the pre-philosophical moral reasoning of human beings.
Jonathan Haidt codifies this stuff in his moral foundations theory. People have different views, but we have in-built moral reasoning.
Something I take from Strawson and a stream of moral philosophers from him is that our pre-philosophical morality has an internal logic, grammar, and principles. For instance, to the extent that we view something as part of someone's nature rather than chosen, we cease to be able to blame them. The doctrine of double effect is like this, I think. Under circumstances like those of self-defense, we say things like, "If I could have I wouldn't have killed him!" Or even stronger, "I didn't intend to kill him! I guess I knew it might/probably would kill him, but I didn't intend it nonetheless." These are not fabrications of moral philosophers but elements of the instinctive human moral view.
I actually think utilitarianism is quite revisionary with respect to this view. I aspire to a moral philosophy, by contrast, that takes up our ordinary moral perspective and codifies it rationally, and drives it to its logical conclusions. Admittedly, people struggle to do this - in my critique of Hanania I was talking about how hard it is once we get past the clear black and white. But even in the grey areas, I argue, with care we can distinguish the black and white pixels.
Totally agree with you about pacifism so nothing more to say there. :)
That's helpful. I agree with the basic point, I re-read "Mere Christianity" recently for the first time in 10+ years, and I still think his way of going about the Argument from Morality is very persuasive.
My only pushback would be to say, I wonder to what degree we assume that certain moral intuitions of ours are human universals when they are actually genetically and culturally conditioned and peculiar to ourselves and our in-group. When I see secular moral philosophy happening, it often seems highly primed to conflate the two.
Let's talk about killing and self-defense, because you bring that up a few times. I think attitudes towards killing are something that vary a LOT across time and space, and sometimes even between men and women in the same family. For one, partaking in killing makes one more open to further killing. I even think killing animals by your own hand probably lowers the inhibition to killing a man.
The median modern man surely does a lot less killing by his own hand than the median Bronze Age man. The Old Testament reflects a culture that is more open to killing, because clearly a lot more men had hands-on experience with killing. On one hand, we could say that our intuitions about killing are better, more refined, closer to the Edenic state. But conversely, we could say that we're squeamish, sanitized and insulated from reality.
I'm not sure how attitudes are among conservative Christians where you live, but I live in the South, and a few months ago, somehow the discussion with a group of men at my church turned to self-defense. This is a well-educated group, but naturally, this being a group of traditionalist men in the South, almost everyone is heavily armed and views death as the natural and fully appropriate punishment for breaking into a man's home. And while I've lived other places and am not ancestrally Southern, this is my first instinct as well. I've never killed a man, but my first, instinctive thought is to say that a man's home is his castle, any man who breaks into a home fully deserves to die, it is not any sort of tragedy if he dies at that point, death in this case is actually a desirable outcome and a service to society, to make sure the perp never does that again.
But nonetheless I needed to think through this rationally and say, well, the Pentateuch -- which isn't exactly reluctant to deal out death in judgement -- indicates at least some reluctance to deal out death in this case. If you kill a burglar during daylight hours, you'll be held accountable. And the New Testament, if anything, might soften our view further. Nonetheless, I encountered a lot of pushback from the group over expressing this thought -- which I myself am reluctant to believe!
Maybe that was too long a diatribe, but genuinely curious about your reaction.
I want to bring up what John Rawls called reflective equilibrium. He argued that there was an interplay between moral intuitions and moral philosophy, each feeding into the other and refining each other. Likewise, I don't believe that human moral intuitions perfectly encode the natural law of God. However, I do believe they are a proper starting point to which we can appeal to morally reason closer to the truth.
For instance, I might reason with your Southern guy-friends that killing for breaking-and-entering is disproportionate. Bad as breaking into someone's home is, the burglar may be there to steal something worth $100 from one of your drawers. Not really appropriate to kill the guy. Here, I am appealing to different moral intuitions about proportionality.
The Pentateuchal passages can bolster this. But the "daylight hours" thing is not some arbitrary divine command; it makes sense in light of the possibility of using violence in self-defense more discriminately during the daytime.
I think that tribespeople who are introduced to Christianity, for instance, or Western thought, are able to come around to not killing members of the tribe being extended beyond. Christian, and even liberal morality are arguably extensions of universal moral intuitions. There may be limits to that - but I think we need to give it credit. That's how I believe the moral law of God is written on man's heart.
Would "experience" in your sense be roughly synonymous with, er, "catholicity?" (Full disclosure: I'm a member of a religion called by a form of that same "c"-word.)
Hm, well, it's not synonymous with "tradition," for example. That can include the experience and judgment of the church which is important to include.
Experience is supposed to be the human sense faculties, looking at the world with our eyes, observing things, conducting studies, reflecting on human experience, etc. It's universally human, "catholic" in a sense broader than "Christian."
It's why Biggar's book is not just an entry into Christian ethics, but into the ethics of war itself. Any philosopher or ethicist needs to give his perspective a listen.
I appreciate this article and agree on the whole. Thanks for writing! But as an Anabaptist, I do want to gently question the assumption the “cold, dispassionate” violence is somehow better than violence done in anger. After all, the violence perpetrated in the 20th century gulags was often coldly dispassionate (and also often done in support of higher ideals like love of nation, family, comrades, etc!). And note that even our Western legal code distinguishes between premeditated cold blooded murder versus a killing that happens in the heat of the moment. I would argue that Jesus’ command to love one’s enemy still applies in any situation, regardless of how one feels about him/her.
Now, is it loving to stop someone from committing an act that would end up hurting them? Sure. But the way we does that matters.
Lots more that could be said, and perhaps this ground is already covered in Hays’ or Biggar’s book. But did want to mention that. Thanks,
Thanks for the detailed explanation, I found that helpful.
I was attempting to use the need for presupposition of scripture in terms of holding it as truth over and above natural theology. So for instance, if God says He made them male and female, then we are positioned to reject claims of other genders. If God says He made the heavens and the earth in six days, then we simply assume it’s true as a priori.
Presuppositional approaches to apologetics has its weaknesses for many of the reasons you articulated. I would generally distinguish between apologetics and epistemology. The article was discussing how to interpret the scriptures and in this sense, as Christians were are not at liberty to disregard the scripture in favor of natural revelation. If God lied about making the world in six days, then what’s to say He did not lie about being God or that Jesus rose? The issue is the nature of truth and our relationship to it.
This. When we use experience to deny Scripture, we're in trouble. They should mesh.
With respect to Joel, there appears to be a straw man here: that things are either biblical or unbiblical. This is a false dichotomy, and we shouldn't pretend that defeating a false dichotomy settles the issue.
That it's Wednesday isn't biblical, nor is it 'nonbiblical.' It's extrabiblical. Because "unbiblical" tends to be used pejoratively, it seems here to be used in a woodenly literal fashion: "the Bible doesn't TELL us that it's Wednesday, so it's definitely not Wednesday." This isn't a good argument, nor a good target for building theology. When we're able to show that it's Wednesday without appealing to Scriptural authority, it's easy to pretend that our experience has trumped Scripture.
So: the opening statement - "Scripture is the only source of theology that evangelical Christians all accept" - seems also a straw man. Evangelical Christians all have Romans 1, and almost universally accept and promote it. Appealing to experience is fine, but experience is subjective. The texts of Scripture are not subjective, which is why evangelicals (and others) depend so heavily on them: they're an unchanging standard. Experience is personal while Scripture is universal.
With due respect, Joel appears to be saying - to some extent - that experience trumps Scripture. What I read here is that experience may trump bad arguments about Scripture.
Thanks, Tony! "Extrabiblical" is perfect - merely "non-biblical" was the phrase Biggar used in the book. I'm arguing that we all come to the Bible with prior extra-biblical knowledge and beliefs. Also, there are sources of knowledge outside the Bible, even after our familiarity with the Bible, including empirical science.
I don't believe in a trump card in this arena - that would be an inaccurate rendering of my position. I believe that *objective* experience is a source of knowledge and can lead us to take a second look at Scripture and change our interpretation. This is not trumping Scripture; it's realizing we got Scripture wrong.
"Scripture is the only source of theology...we all accept" - *all* is the operative word. Evangelical theological arguments almost always come back to biblical exegesis even when, for example, an argument is clearly driven by an extra-biblical motive: I think mayn evangelical egalitarian arguments are clearly driven by feminist philosophical/moral thinking. Still, they always make their arguments from Scripture, however implausibly.
Presuppositionalists talk about Romans 1, but they refuse to let us make arguments from nature and from objective experience of the world. It's completely corrupted by the noetic effects of sin. I believe that experience - sense-experience - is not subjective, but objective. It reveals the objects of the world to us, though fallibly. But, our readings of Scripture are also fallible because we are the ones doing them. There is no place to retreat to for infallible knowledge-downloading. =)
Yep... we all come with prior knowledge, and there's tons outside the Bible to learn. I'm a science guy, for example.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'objective experience.' Do you mean things that are well-established by many, many people over a long period of time, like daylight followed by darkness? If so, yes. Of course, every such idea must also be examined for assumptions and bias... but some things can be considered established fact. I'm all for testing our assumptions about Scripture, too.
I don't want to get sidetracked into a single topic... but as for egalitarianism, this is the kind of dichotomy I was talking about. I'm sure YOU know that some egalitarian arguments stem from feminism, and that some do not. When someone argues that egalitarianism is unbiblical because it's based in feminism, they're beating the crap out of a straw man and not addressing any sort of Scripture-based assessment of the topic. That's really where my comment is based: we should actually address actual arguments, especially those from Scripture... regardless of whether someone else, with a bad argument, comes to the same conclusions.
Another example: some like to say that an old-earth position is based in man's wisdom and an atheistic worldview... without actually addressing arguments that are based solely in Scripture. It is unfortunately shallow, and leaves the uninformed wondering whether some people are nuts because their arguments don't quite make sense.
As for sense experience, I know too many exceptions to consider it objective. I'd recategorize sense experiences as common or uncommon (without bias), rather than objective or subjective. Those with synesthesia, for example, are having uncommon experiences. Some are based in neurological differences, some are based in physical defects... so it's hard to quantify whether something is objectve or subjective when experiences may vary greatly.
This sounds like classic postmodernism, nicely repackaged.
The strawman used against the doctrine of Sola Scriptura is the idea that the Christian is not able to use their senses, only verses. This is theologically and historically easy to debunk. The doctrine properly understood requires that the scriptures be first presupposed (accepted in advance) and then also used as the final authority (trumping science, experience, etc. when there is a disagreement).
The argument of "scripture does not support violence" is kinda silly. Christianity, leveraging the scripture, has presented the world with things like "Just War Theory", jurisprudence foundations for violence (largely shaping western law surrounding murder, manslaughter, etc.). These contributions and more are drawn from scripture and applied to the world.
Hey, Red-Beard - I've been intrigued by the presuppositionalist quotes you've been posting lately. I left behind presuppositionalism shortly before starting at WTS Philly; great timing on my part, right! Through three more years of presuppositionalist teaching, and then seven years of philosophy since then, I've come to a different perspective on Christian philosophy/apologetics.
However, I retain my critique of postmodernism - I believe that we can seek and know objective truth. We are not all imposing our categories on the world; Christianity is not just a subjective perspective, etc. I had encountered that at Wheaton College - I document my story in this regard in Based Belief: The Possibility of Christian Empiricism: https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcarini/p/based-belief-on-the-possibility-of?r=k9yk0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.
I have come to think that presuppositionalism is "classic postmodernism, nicely repackaged." No offense meant, of course, I mean that it suggests that Christians have distinctively Christian categories, and we impose a biblical worldview on the data of the senses. We have no common ground with unbelievers, from sense experience, that we can appeal to together.
By contrast, I have come to think that the Christian approach should be realist and empiricist - through our God-given faculties, we can know the real world. And that knowledge points to God and prepares us for supernatural revelation - Christ and the Gospel.
I think you would hear postmodernism in my speaking of "experience" and also the idea that we all bring beliefs from experience to the text. First of all, I mean objective experience, not purely subjective. That is, I can look at the world and say, "Looks like the human race has two sexes." It doesn't take a Christian worldview or the Bible to arrive at that. The Bible testifies to it and explains where it came from, etc., but it is knowable in principle apart from Scripture.
On the second point, I think that biblical revelation assumes that we all have common sense, beliefs from ordinary human experience, not to mention categories. An example I've used is that the Bible does not define the word "donkey." Nor does it provide us with a "distinctively Christian concept of a donkey!" God speaks about donkeys assuming we have already encountered them. That is the striking thing, though. It is *those* beasts of burdens, the dumb ones I've seen with my own eyes, one of whom *spoke* to Balaam. Whoa! The Bible is talking about the very world I and non-Christians have all experienced.
I don't mean to take the postmodernist line that we all are *interpreting* the Bible and can't get to its meaning. I'm trying to go *more* realist than the presuppositionalist. Even the senses of fallen men discover truth. And they are incriminated by that very fact. Hope that helps explain my perspective!
I've always liked the Doctrine of Double Effect ever since I was first exposed to it, and I use it as a rubric for myself. But I suppose I don't really have any words to defend it. Other than to say it doesn't seem to contradict Scripture and might well align with it.
I'm not sure to what degree we agree and disagree here. Because I think that moral philosophy can only get so far away from Scripture before it's essentially useless. The best it can do is provide us with hypotheses -- frameworks, rubrics, systems, etc. -- which we can then test against Scripture. A purely secular moral philosophy is basically useless, except as a tool of psychological self-management, a practical guide for how to manage your own conscience. This is rather unlike domains like science and engineering -- or just plain observing and noticing the world around us, the human experience. This can actually teach us, as Christians, truths about the world.
The problem with so many ideas like Christian pacifism is that when you take the Bible as a whole, and the acts and words of Jesus as a whole, it REALLY doesn't seem like this is what he's getting at. Which you do point out here. An idea that I keep coming back to is that nearly every Christian error and heresy, from the 1st century onwards, has been derived from placing too much emphasis on one particular teaching or story from Scripture without considering it in the context of the whole.
The greatest single strength of the Reformed tradition is that it takes the idea of "the whole" very, very seriously, and demonstrates that you actually can turn it into something coherent and profound. And I think if we keep sticking to it, we can avoid a lot of errors.
Thomas, always love your contributions. Let's talk about "moral philosophy can only get so far away from Scripture before it's essentially useless." I want to distinguish from moral philosophy our moral intuitions and pre-philosophical ways of reasoning.
For example, what C.S. Lewis talks about on page 1 of Mere Christianity is the fact that people are blaming and praising each other for things all the time. Philosopher Peter Strawson wrote about how, even if we all became determinists, we would go on praising and blaming because that's our natural, human moral perspective. In both cases here, we're talking about the pre-philosophical moral reasoning of human beings.
Jonathan Haidt codifies this stuff in his moral foundations theory. People have different views, but we have in-built moral reasoning.
Something I take from Strawson and a stream of moral philosophers from him is that our pre-philosophical morality has an internal logic, grammar, and principles. For instance, to the extent that we view something as part of someone's nature rather than chosen, we cease to be able to blame them. The doctrine of double effect is like this, I think. Under circumstances like those of self-defense, we say things like, "If I could have I wouldn't have killed him!" Or even stronger, "I didn't intend to kill him! I guess I knew it might/probably would kill him, but I didn't intend it nonetheless." These are not fabrications of moral philosophers but elements of the instinctive human moral view.
I actually think utilitarianism is quite revisionary with respect to this view. I aspire to a moral philosophy, by contrast, that takes up our ordinary moral perspective and codifies it rationally, and drives it to its logical conclusions. Admittedly, people struggle to do this - in my critique of Hanania I was talking about how hard it is once we get past the clear black and white. But even in the grey areas, I argue, with care we can distinguish the black and white pixels.
Totally agree with you about pacifism so nothing more to say there. :)
That's helpful. I agree with the basic point, I re-read "Mere Christianity" recently for the first time in 10+ years, and I still think his way of going about the Argument from Morality is very persuasive.
My only pushback would be to say, I wonder to what degree we assume that certain moral intuitions of ours are human universals when they are actually genetically and culturally conditioned and peculiar to ourselves and our in-group. When I see secular moral philosophy happening, it often seems highly primed to conflate the two.
Let's talk about killing and self-defense, because you bring that up a few times. I think attitudes towards killing are something that vary a LOT across time and space, and sometimes even between men and women in the same family. For one, partaking in killing makes one more open to further killing. I even think killing animals by your own hand probably lowers the inhibition to killing a man.
The median modern man surely does a lot less killing by his own hand than the median Bronze Age man. The Old Testament reflects a culture that is more open to killing, because clearly a lot more men had hands-on experience with killing. On one hand, we could say that our intuitions about killing are better, more refined, closer to the Edenic state. But conversely, we could say that we're squeamish, sanitized and insulated from reality.
I'm not sure how attitudes are among conservative Christians where you live, but I live in the South, and a few months ago, somehow the discussion with a group of men at my church turned to self-defense. This is a well-educated group, but naturally, this being a group of traditionalist men in the South, almost everyone is heavily armed and views death as the natural and fully appropriate punishment for breaking into a man's home. And while I've lived other places and am not ancestrally Southern, this is my first instinct as well. I've never killed a man, but my first, instinctive thought is to say that a man's home is his castle, any man who breaks into a home fully deserves to die, it is not any sort of tragedy if he dies at that point, death in this case is actually a desirable outcome and a service to society, to make sure the perp never does that again.
But nonetheless I needed to think through this rationally and say, well, the Pentateuch -- which isn't exactly reluctant to deal out death in judgement -- indicates at least some reluctance to deal out death in this case. If you kill a burglar during daylight hours, you'll be held accountable. And the New Testament, if anything, might soften our view further. Nonetheless, I encountered a lot of pushback from the group over expressing this thought -- which I myself am reluctant to believe!
Maybe that was too long a diatribe, but genuinely curious about your reaction.
I want to bring up what John Rawls called reflective equilibrium. He argued that there was an interplay between moral intuitions and moral philosophy, each feeding into the other and refining each other. Likewise, I don't believe that human moral intuitions perfectly encode the natural law of God. However, I do believe they are a proper starting point to which we can appeal to morally reason closer to the truth.
For instance, I might reason with your Southern guy-friends that killing for breaking-and-entering is disproportionate. Bad as breaking into someone's home is, the burglar may be there to steal something worth $100 from one of your drawers. Not really appropriate to kill the guy. Here, I am appealing to different moral intuitions about proportionality.
The Pentateuchal passages can bolster this. But the "daylight hours" thing is not some arbitrary divine command; it makes sense in light of the possibility of using violence in self-defense more discriminately during the daytime.
I think that tribespeople who are introduced to Christianity, for instance, or Western thought, are able to come around to not killing members of the tribe being extended beyond. Christian, and even liberal morality are arguably extensions of universal moral intuitions. There may be limits to that - but I think we need to give it credit. That's how I believe the moral law of God is written on man's heart.
Would "experience" in your sense be roughly synonymous with, er, "catholicity?" (Full disclosure: I'm a member of a religion called by a form of that same "c"-word.)
Hm, well, it's not synonymous with "tradition," for example. That can include the experience and judgment of the church which is important to include.
Experience is supposed to be the human sense faculties, looking at the world with our eyes, observing things, conducting studies, reflecting on human experience, etc. It's universally human, "catholic" in a sense broader than "Christian."
It's why Biggar's book is not just an entry into Christian ethics, but into the ethics of war itself. Any philosopher or ethicist needs to give his perspective a listen.
I appreciate this article and agree on the whole. Thanks for writing! But as an Anabaptist, I do want to gently question the assumption the “cold, dispassionate” violence is somehow better than violence done in anger. After all, the violence perpetrated in the 20th century gulags was often coldly dispassionate (and also often done in support of higher ideals like love of nation, family, comrades, etc!). And note that even our Western legal code distinguishes between premeditated cold blooded murder versus a killing that happens in the heat of the moment. I would argue that Jesus’ command to love one’s enemy still applies in any situation, regardless of how one feels about him/her.
Now, is it loving to stop someone from committing an act that would end up hurting them? Sure. But the way we does that matters.
Lots more that could be said, and perhaps this ground is already covered in Hays’ or Biggar’s book. But did want to mention that. Thanks,
Andrew
Thanks for the detailed explanation, I found that helpful.
I was attempting to use the need for presupposition of scripture in terms of holding it as truth over and above natural theology. So for instance, if God says He made them male and female, then we are positioned to reject claims of other genders. If God says He made the heavens and the earth in six days, then we simply assume it’s true as a priori.
Presuppositional approaches to apologetics has its weaknesses for many of the reasons you articulated. I would generally distinguish between apologetics and epistemology. The article was discussing how to interpret the scriptures and in this sense, as Christians were are not at liberty to disregard the scripture in favor of natural revelation. If God lied about making the world in six days, then what’s to say He did not lie about being God or that Jesus rose? The issue is the nature of truth and our relationship to it.
Thanks again for your reply and clarity.
This. When we use experience to deny Scripture, we're in trouble. They should mesh.
With respect to Joel, there appears to be a straw man here: that things are either biblical or unbiblical. This is a false dichotomy, and we shouldn't pretend that defeating a false dichotomy settles the issue.
That it's Wednesday isn't biblical, nor is it 'nonbiblical.' It's extrabiblical. Because "unbiblical" tends to be used pejoratively, it seems here to be used in a woodenly literal fashion: "the Bible doesn't TELL us that it's Wednesday, so it's definitely not Wednesday." This isn't a good argument, nor a good target for building theology. When we're able to show that it's Wednesday without appealing to Scriptural authority, it's easy to pretend that our experience has trumped Scripture.
So: the opening statement - "Scripture is the only source of theology that evangelical Christians all accept" - seems also a straw man. Evangelical Christians all have Romans 1, and almost universally accept and promote it. Appealing to experience is fine, but experience is subjective. The texts of Scripture are not subjective, which is why evangelicals (and others) depend so heavily on them: they're an unchanging standard. Experience is personal while Scripture is universal.
With due respect, Joel appears to be saying - to some extent - that experience trumps Scripture. What I read here is that experience may trump bad arguments about Scripture.
$0.02 =)
Thanks, Tony! "Extrabiblical" is perfect - merely "non-biblical" was the phrase Biggar used in the book. I'm arguing that we all come to the Bible with prior extra-biblical knowledge and beliefs. Also, there are sources of knowledge outside the Bible, even after our familiarity with the Bible, including empirical science.
I don't believe in a trump card in this arena - that would be an inaccurate rendering of my position. I believe that *objective* experience is a source of knowledge and can lead us to take a second look at Scripture and change our interpretation. This is not trumping Scripture; it's realizing we got Scripture wrong.
"Scripture is the only source of theology...we all accept" - *all* is the operative word. Evangelical theological arguments almost always come back to biblical exegesis even when, for example, an argument is clearly driven by an extra-biblical motive: I think mayn evangelical egalitarian arguments are clearly driven by feminist philosophical/moral thinking. Still, they always make their arguments from Scripture, however implausibly.
Presuppositionalists talk about Romans 1, but they refuse to let us make arguments from nature and from objective experience of the world. It's completely corrupted by the noetic effects of sin. I believe that experience - sense-experience - is not subjective, but objective. It reveals the objects of the world to us, though fallibly. But, our readings of Scripture are also fallible because we are the ones doing them. There is no place to retreat to for infallible knowledge-downloading. =)
Yep... we all come with prior knowledge, and there's tons outside the Bible to learn. I'm a science guy, for example.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'objective experience.' Do you mean things that are well-established by many, many people over a long period of time, like daylight followed by darkness? If so, yes. Of course, every such idea must also be examined for assumptions and bias... but some things can be considered established fact. I'm all for testing our assumptions about Scripture, too.
I don't want to get sidetracked into a single topic... but as for egalitarianism, this is the kind of dichotomy I was talking about. I'm sure YOU know that some egalitarian arguments stem from feminism, and that some do not. When someone argues that egalitarianism is unbiblical because it's based in feminism, they're beating the crap out of a straw man and not addressing any sort of Scripture-based assessment of the topic. That's really where my comment is based: we should actually address actual arguments, especially those from Scripture... regardless of whether someone else, with a bad argument, comes to the same conclusions.
Another example: some like to say that an old-earth position is based in man's wisdom and an atheistic worldview... without actually addressing arguments that are based solely in Scripture. It is unfortunately shallow, and leaves the uninformed wondering whether some people are nuts because their arguments don't quite make sense.
As for sense experience, I know too many exceptions to consider it objective. I'd recategorize sense experiences as common or uncommon (without bias), rather than objective or subjective. Those with synesthesia, for example, are having uncommon experiences. Some are based in neurological differences, some are based in physical defects... so it's hard to quantify whether something is objectve or subjective when experiences may vary greatly.