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“A Balanced Epistemology: Challenge: To Preserve the Idea of Truth”
I love the title of Chapter 6 of Litfin’s book, “Conceiving the Christian College”. Balanced is the best word to describe Duane Litfin’s epistemology.
“It seems to me,” he writes on p. 110, “that we Christians have our work cut out for us in the realm of epistemology.” And he is up to the task.
Litfin spends a good bit of time in this chapter explaining that Christian epistemology is that knowledge of Absolute Truth comes largely from revelation. Since he spends an entire chapter on it later, I will not dwell on that here.
Some imbalanced epistemologies
Litfin begins the chapter by lamenting that fact that the term “postmodern” does not have a meaning that everyone agrees on. “It is scarcely possible to speak of postmodernity as a single thing, as if it were monolithic… The term often appears hopelessly ambiguous, and as a result, may have already outlived its usefulness.” Hear! Hear! In my opinion, there is no use talking about something that is not monolithic. Litfin and I would prefer to use only unambiguous terms like “historic Christian world view” and “God”. But Litfin is a brave and persistent man and he is able to stand in the face of fierce chaos and tame it.
First, he exposes the fact that the Enlightenment thinkers didn’t come up with any new ideas that were not already in the Bible and the postmodernists didn’t come up with any new ideas that the Sophists hadn’t already tried (and failed) to hold as legitimate.
Don’t enter the postmodern conversation
But the fact that the postmodern ideas have all failed before doesn’t keep Litfin from grimly enjoying tearing them to shreds once again.
He begins this process by taking a definition of postmodernism from one of its experts, Alister McGrath who lays out the precepts of postmodernism in his book, A Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism. According to this definition, a major element of postmodernism is “radical perspectivism”.
Litfin quotes Dennis Sheridan: “If all views are considered equal in a postmodern world, then the Christian voice must be as welcomed as any other.” But Litfin strongly objects to this and the rest of the chapter (and even more in Chapter 12) shows the nonsense of this equality. Christianity must sit at the head of the table with the only microphone or we’re not coming to their party.
Yet as David Livingstone warns, “The very pluralism that gets Christian thinking to the talbe can too easily tend to extract the teeth of its cognitive claims.”
He spends the next few pages drawing out the problems with the postmodernists’ forum. While Litfin, for some reason, is hesitant to come out and make his point clearly in this and the next section of the book, his points seem to be the following.
- We Christians have unique access to universal truth. Our knowledge of absolute Truth is not complete, he admits.
- This absolute Truth is known only through presuppositions, revelation, and the Bible.
- The postmodern forum insists that when we use presuppositions, revelation, and the Bible we are only presenting one perspective. Their forum allows others who have different presuppositions, revelation, and foundational texts.
- Since we cannot come to absolute Truth without the claim that our epistemology, presuppositions, revelation, and text are absolutely authoritative, we must not enter into the postmodern forum.
The conservative evangelical’s monopoly on Truth
In the section “An Alluring Half-Truth”, he shows his deep understanding of the postmodern epistemology which he attacks by asking questions like,
If all we have is our own point of view, what happens to the ancient claims of the Bible, of the Gospel? What happens to the Church’s willingness (or ability) to say to the world, as it has from its inception, “Thus saith the Lord”? Is the good news of Jesus Christ really no more than “my point of view,” something that works for me? Have we no access whatever to the real, to the absolute, to that which transcends us all and is therefore as true for one as it is for the other?
These are rhetorical questions. But in case my reader has been completely brainwashed by postmodernism, I will answer them. The Church has the unique authority to say to reality, “Thus saith the Lord”. And reality must listen to us. Litfin writes that this pronouncement “inherently purports to be speaking for God, something a full-blown perspectivism not only renders impossible but deems reprehensible and worthy of censure.”
Such perspectivism renders us utterly unable to claim, on the basis of God’s Word, what Christ’s Church has always claimed: “Here is not merely what we say; here is what God says.”
This is why we cannot accept “radical perspectivism”. If we don’t have the exclusive right to say, “Thus saith the Lord” well, that’s just not fair.
By the way, Litfin explains later that none of this is coercive or arrogant on our part. Some people get confused about that at this point so I thought I would let you know.
It is absolutely crucial to understand that it is only we evangelical Christians who have the authority to make statements for God to which reality must conform. If any other cult could make such a statement, there would be chaos because their lies about God would conflict with our true statements about God. Think how confused reality would become if it had to conform to all those conflicting statements! This is unacceptable.
Litfin makes the point that if we evangelicals don’t have exclusive access to the Absolute then we would not be able to say that our point of view is more true than other points of view.
A Balanced Stance
In the sections “A Balanced Stance”, Litfin drops the bomb.
It seems to me that the Christian must stake out the territory somewhere near the midpoint between a strong epistemological realism and a strong epistemological idealism, bearing the full tension of the two while succumbing to neither side.
It is this explosive solution that allows Litfin to make statements like, “Christian higher education—Christ-centered education—does not merely arrive at truth claims; it begins with them, and the most staggering truth claims at that.” But he can also say, “There can be no room for forcing one’s scholarship into some preset mold so as to make it come out a particular way.” Without his balanced stance, he wouldn’t be able to say both.
Litfin is not satisfied to show the flaws in postmodernism, he also finds fault with the Enlightenment’s certainty: “The hubris of human claims for this sort of certainty, dispensing as it does with any need for God, deserves to be highlighted.”
The humanists’ certainty is based on reason and logic, a foundation whose holes Litfin clearly exposes by bravely throwing himself through them.
Presuppositions
In the section “The Task Ahead”, Litfin again brings up presuppositions. After admitting that “worldviews arise from epistemologies” he says that
what we require is… an epistemology that begins with God and his image within his creatures. Whether this will prove persuasive to a secularized academy is not the question. The academy’s reigning presuppositions may preclude it from even considering such a thing.
We must start with the right presuppositions: God and his image in me. Presuppositions are the important key. You cannot come to the Truth unless you assume the Truth.
Will this convince secularists? No. Because they have presuppositions. Presuppositions are bad for them because they are not Truth. Only our presuppositions are Truth. It’s so obvious to anyone who has been to Dallas Theological Seminary. Too bad the secularist academy is “blinded” by their presuppositions. “The academy appears to be perking along on a set of unwritten but ironclad presuppositions that leave little room for religious claims to truth.” (p. 123) In the Christian academy, our presuppositions are equally ironclad, but ours have two advantages over theirs: ours are written and ours are true. More on that in Chapter 10.
Humility
In “Proper Provisionality” Litfin discusses humility in knowledge.
Both Christianity and postmodernity call for humility in our claims of knowing. Yet they part company in the reasons for that humility. Radical perspectivism claims that all we can ever achieve is our own point of view, but this line of thought comes up short when measured against the Scriptures. What the Bible claims, by contrast, is that, though we can in fact know some dimensions of some things to some extent as they really are, we can never know even these things exhaustively — that is, as God knows them.
The postmodernists claim to be humble because they only have their point of view. The Christian has true humility because we say that we don’t know everything about everything, but what we do know is Absolute Truth. The postmodernists’ so-called humility “comes up short” by this measure.
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