God, Politics, and the Evangelical Dilemma

God, Politics, and the Evangelical Dilemma

(In Response)

Well…. we don’t want to spoil the surprise for you, but he will very, very probably speak on the effects of postmodernity upon the Church in recent history, leading to a failure to apprehend God as he really is, causing an inadequate evangelical practice applied to the political situation.

We are poor at politics, because we are starving in theology, because we are impoverished as a culture. There is always a presumption in this, that through natural law or something like it, there is common ground for communication about things ethical in nature. There is a common good to be apprehended.

(I had to write my blog anyway so I’ll just blather on a bit. Everything after this point is my own estimation, so you can take it with a grain of salt.)

The anti-intellectual Christians watch TBN ‘religiously’ or promote finding the Virgin Mary in a cinnamon roll as a spiritual answer to very complicated natural questions. The intellectual Christians embrace intellectualism as if it is an end in itself and try to find an older tradition in the newer thought of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Rorty, denying epistemology and metaphysics as legitimate disciplines, and going so far as to deny even the propositional nature of truth, conveniently forgetting that the Bible itself is a set of propositions about God and man in relation. (Really, Truth might be more than propositional, but it cannot be less.) This is the Postmodern turn as it thrives in the Church today, even as it withers in the broader culture as a whole.

The broader culture, as can be seen in “The New Atheism” is a return to a scientistic and materialistic humanism most adequately described as a revival of Modernism. Dogmatic naturalism as the antidote to a dogmatic spiritualism. If the only thing we accept as proof of the veracity of a fact is the consequences of two atoms bouncing off each other in the void, and “explanation” is taken to mean the reduction of all things to chemistry or physics and the laws of their behavior, they win by definition. Christian thought is moot, be it Thomistic or Augustinian, or other. (By Thomistic or Augustinian take Roman Catholic or Protestant)

In the book, Above All Earthly Powers, Wells says that the three vested conclusions of the Enlightenment, i.e., modernism, were, “The disappearance of God, the disappearance of human nature, and omnicompetence of the human being.” Ridding ourselves of superstition included ridding ourselves of a human nature so that we could create ourselves absent the insistent urgings of either Deity or Natural Law. Wells says, “It is rather ironic that these first two themes—the disappearance of God and of human nature—should accompany the third, which is the bloated sense of human capacity.” 1

You see this kind of thing all the time in Existentialism, that existence precedes essence, because if we have no essence prior to what we make ourselves, then we can make ourselves whatever we want to be, but if we have some prior kind of being, some thing that we are prior to any of our acts or apprehensions about ourselves, then we are trapped, in a sense. There are some things that are and are not true to our given ethical environment. There is a teleology. There is something that we should be, because there is something that we are.

And this is where the two meet. Postmodernism, more specifically the right wing postmodernism of the neo-Thomistic Alasdair Macintyre and such, stemming off from Wittgenstein, make truth something that exists within the subjective judgments of a given tradition or a moral community. We are limited by the language construct of our communal borders. They would like, of course, (the neo-Thomists) an infallible community, that cannot fail because truth is a communitarian judgment (both Roman Catholic philosophical thinkers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger and those more explicitly religious types that promote the teaching Magisterium of the Roman Church and the office of Pope are implied here). Truth exists only within the context of a given community, or tradition. Truth, is a story, or a narrative, within the context of a communal tradition. (Communitarianism, fascism, The context of Virtue ethics, Socialism, Rousseau, Aristotle’s social relativism).

Or, with the Moderns, truth is the choice of the individual deciding to perfect themselves; we all decide what we are and what we will be. Choice is the ultimate truth and the expression of Libertarian free will the only truth worthy of collective State expression. Government exists only to protect the free decisions of individuals. (Libertarianism, Egoism, individualism, Aristotle’s psychological relativism).

Really, there is nothing about numbers, or communities, or traditions, that have much to say about the truthfulness or falsity of a given fact, worldview, or good. We don’t get to vote on these things. Right wing postmodernism is a horrible waste of time for the Churches because at the end of the day, all it says is that truth is what most of the people, or those in power, or those with an “office”, say it is, which isn’t very helpful, because that doesn’t make it true. And an individual wanting something says nothing about why others, or the State, or whoever has the power, should respect such a desire. In fact, it almost cries out for someone to say “who cares”, unless there is some metaphysical basis for the actual existence of “rights” that transcends the desire of individuals. Libertarianism undoes itself. One would need to have an epistemology before one could have a metaphysic, because one needs to know what is true, and how one knows that they know what is true, before they can talk intelligibly about what exists, and what is good, and what should or should not be done, including respecting the rights of individuals or the traditions of communities. Even of Christians or Christianities.

So, for the Christian, having a source of truth sufficient to the task is crucial. The knowledge of God is not peripheral or secondary to matters of ethics and politics, but integral. To presume upon man as a bit of strange living dust spread across the face of an insignificant little planet arbitrarily floating through space is to presume that which makes an ethics quite impossible, and so leaves us without a language of common ethical discourse. Contrary to many, “God”, or something uncomfortably like god, is very much a part of the political equation. Man alone is insufficient, and man in community is insufficient, not because they were accidentally happened insufficiently, but because they are no longer functioning as they were designed to function, and without the special means that God provides in the realms of knowledge, ethics, and statecraft, does not do well, because he doesn’t know what he is. What he is, is something more wonderful, than mere experience can navigate. He is too small to see himself claerly and too great to ignore his godlike qualities. It can be very confusing and tends toward both an attitude of self divinization or pure material reductionism.

Modernism and Postmodernism are both failed systems that fail specifically because they try to do without God what cannot be done without God. And so they are different angles of approaching the problem that we do not know and we cannot know, and both equally valid expressions of ultimate skepticism and universally applied ignorance. When we decide before we begin that we are not anything in specific, we should not be surprised if we end up nothing of any great consequence.

Anyway, a few thoughts on these things.

Christopher Neiswonger

A recent lecture on modernism and postmodernism in the Church by Christopher Neiswonger

1 http://christiantheology.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/the-emergent-church-the-postmodern-view-of-truth-and-its-destructive-effects-on-orthodox-christianity/ Doug Eaton