A beliefless, but creative, Spirit-christianity. 14 SOF Magazine 7, Autumn 1991 QUESTIONING POSTMODERN THEOLOGY (1) WHEELS ROTATE John MacDonald Smith I once had a friend who sold antiquarian books in rather a narrowly defined field and I used to tease her because she was forever buying from and selling to other booksellers. None of her stock ever appeared to leak out to the general public, who to my mind were the whole point of the exercise. Of course it did leak out but booksellers, and antique dealers too, do give the impression that they shunt their stock around from one dealer to another and never let the poor desperate collector get a look in.
The same impression is given by some postmodernist theology. Words get defined by other words, and so on ; and eventually you end up with the word you first thought of and nobody is any wiser. You play with all those words in a kind of 'language game' and if you think they amount to anything objectively true, you are deluding yourself. Hence, all religion and presumably politics and physics too, isn't about anything but itself. There is no 'out there' for it to be about because it's all, a/4 'in here' and self-created. Theologically, this makes us into God and what we create is the creation - and out of nothing.
Absolute Subjectivity? ABSOLUTE SUBJECTIVITY ?
I don't think this is entirely true. Sorry, I should say I feel uncomfortable with it. No doubt I have offered an extreme caricature of what in reality is a very carefully worked out and subtle thesis which I haven't properly understood (am I intended to ? Does it matter if I Ir don't ?). But as I understand it, it doesn't make sense.
Some of the words, like bookseller's stock at last reaching the public, do escape the circularity of language, and that's the downfall of absolute subjectivity.
There isn't anybody but us against whom to measure our truth, for the truth we possess is the only truth there is. This invites the reply that if there's no objective truth then the truth we develop is truly ours and therefore wholly subjective and that what we create is after all the creation. But I never said a word about 'objective' or 'subjective' for that matter, for if there's only the truth we have then these are meaningless words. Or, our truth is both subjective and objective - and what do you add to anything by saying that ? Or, is there any reason to add a "and therefore wholly subjective ..." to the statement that our truth is the only truth there is ? There is not unless, somewhere lurking about the place, there is just the tiniest hint of residual Platonism which suspects that perhaps after all there just might be a realm in which things are 'truer' than we have them ?
Truth and Consistency Does it help, perhaps, to invoke the mathematical notion of consistency ? Mathematics is the language game ,oarexcellence in which the consequences of a set of assumptions are explored using generalised language. It is not 'true' that the marks '2' and '+' and '2' are the equivalent of '=' and '4' ; it is consistent within the system. Interestingly, the self-consistency of the system itself - i.e. that it does not at some place contradict itself - cannot be proved. It is extremely unlikely, but there might just be a number N in the system of arithmetic such that N + 1 = N + 2 ; in which case any number would be the equal of any other number - a nice thought when paying your bills.
I'm not saying that the thesis "Language is a// we have" isn't very attractive, and it is very tempting to use mathematics as a pattern on which to base an analysis of all language. But I can't help thinking that there's also the question of what you do with the language you have and if I do without the implied "and therefore wholly subjective ..." after "Our truth is the only truth there is" I can begin to see that some language does have a referent external to itself.
Everything Is Connected The one thing that is true of all language whether mathematics or not, is also true of everything else and is that it is a natural phenomenon like us or the stars or electrons. One important insight of the ecological movement is that everything in the universe is attached to everything else, and language is no exception. Some of the language which is a natural phenomenon refers to itself in the first instance and is constituted as a language only by virtue of the consistency of the relationships between the symbols which it employs. That's mathematics ; but even pure mathematics can be applied and so drawn into relationships with other language which does relate directly to natural phenomena and which provides the symbolism for use in managing, explaining and understanding these.
There is a world 'out there', but not in the Platonist sense because we and everything else are connected to it and part of each other. It is the world, the only one there is, in which we develop the only truth SOF Magazine 7, Autumn 1991 15 there is using the only means there is to do this, which is language. I don't think the idea that there could be 'another' world, 'another' truth, or 'another' language has much meaning.
Facts and Falsifiability Instead of the implied "and therefore ..." after "Our truth is the only truth there is" I say, "So you'd better be quite sure you know what you're saying before you open your big mouth.". But I admit this is easier said than done. Half a century ago Karl Popper developed the idea of experimental falsification as a criterion of demarcation between factual statements about reality on the one hand, and on the other - poetry, art, literature, philosophy and theology.
If you can do an experimental test to show that a statement is wrong then that statement is about the nearest you can get to a fact about reality. But wheels do go round and I'm sure my last motorway journey wasn't a dream so although we seem to be moving in a circular argument of our own construction this isn't quite the case. Just as some of my friend's books reached the public, so there is an objective reality but we have to explore it in a rather indirect way. But there is no suggestion that humankind is moving inexorably nearer to some goal of absolute knowledge : as Popper says, acquiring knowledge is a bit like pushing piles into a swamp : you go down as far as you need to. It's a fair bet that there never won't be falsifiable statements.
Nevertheless, it is true that you don't need quantum mechanics to service a lawnmower or relativity theory to deal with motorway traffic. So I believe that the fact that we can (or think we can) make approximations of various kinds and get them right says something in support of my thesis that there is an objective reality, which we are part of, but also which we explore and do not construct.
Religion, Science and Reality The fact that we construct our religion - and even that is an oversimplification, for who knows what cultural factors are symbiotic with the religious and social to force all three into certain evolutionary paths ? But let that pass - the fact that we construct our religion does not mean we construct everything. We do not construct the data on which we base our science : we choose them - again, no doubt, in accordance with cultural pressures, for science is not immune from these - and having chosen them we build up a structure of theory which can be referred back to different data by the falsification procedure. The point of falsification being that it prevents us from getting smug about our theories and thinking that at last we have the final truth.
Religion as an account of reality has long been empirically falsified. It lies on the other side of falsifiability from science and therefore isn't about anything. Its myths, symbols and legends express the self-understanding of a culture, and its scriptures reveal how the tradition once saw itself, much as cutting across a tree will reveal what kind of winter it was years ago.
So far as I understand it a god who creates by means of a fat is about as hopeless as humanity which does this - nothing but arbitrary kingship writ large in the interests of its own survival, a kind of spiritual Thatcher. A male, celibate god who creates all on his own is but a reflection of Israelite misogyny and contempt for women. The virgin conception is a genetic impossibility like making the Moon into green cheese, which not even a god can accomplish ; and the resurrection, whatever else it was, was certainly an early Christian keeping-up-with-the-Jones in other religions. We need new symbols for a culture become radically discontinuous with its past during the past half century in consequence of the rapid growth of science and the impact of technology.
The Symbol of Jesus Restated One important symbol is Jesus. The theory used to be that he was the unique example of 'God-ness' come 'down' to earth on a rescue mission - the central doctrine of traditional belief, around which clustered a number of dependent and subsidiary doctrines about the church, the sacraments, creation, the fall of man so on. But this central or core-doctrine can no longer be sustained because it is no longer congruent with our cultural assumptions - in particular we no longer think in Platonist terms of another world 'up there' from which Jesus could have 'come down'.
We must therefore restate the importance of Jesus in terms of human and natural symbols in a singledecker cosmos : for example, that his `God-ness' is the unique paradigm of the 'God-ness' of all things.
This change of perspective carries with it a selfgenerated ethic of responsibility towards the cosmos and substitutes this for the older ethic of obedience to externally imposed law. Where the tradition made God in the image of man, this is to make man in the image of God as God becomes man the creator in love.
The Religion That We Need Now The plight of the poor and the travail of the Planet together with the threat of nuclear war remind us that our power for good or ill is very great, and also that the greatest threats to the earth and its peoples are now no longer natural disasters or 'Acts of God' but the things which human beings do and have done to them. That is why we need a human-centred theology. But this is a total reversal of the situation as seen even a century ago.
This is the reason why, even though religion is not factual, it isn't a game either. Or, if so, it is played for very high stakes for politics allied to pious hopes won't change anything and what is needed is a symbolism which gives us a clue to an understanding of ourselves and what we are doing to the Planet, and motivates us to do something about it. 16 SOF Magazine 7, Autumn 1991 QUESTIONING POSTMODERN THEOLOGY (2) MATTERS OF FACT Roy Birch It would be of interest to know how those who based some part of their religious belief on the authenticity of the Turin Shroud have adapted to its new status.
JOHN MACDONALD SMITH lives near Evesham and is Hon. Secretary of Clergy against Nuclear Arms.