The Evolution of Epistemology

Before describing our new Christian worldview, we thought we should talk about the tools and strategies we used to get there.

Our goal, over the next few weeks, is to have two world renowned Christian theologians — one very conservative and the other very liberal — give us feedback on our now very liberal Christian theology. But before we do that, we thought it would be fair to our listeners to lay out that liberal theology.  We’ll do that next week, but this week we feel we need to explain how we arrived at our new liberal Christian worldview. How does one create and revise a theology.

So today, we start off with asking: “how do we know what we know” …. aka, “epistemology.”  The Socratic method: learning by asking questions.  We also get into what the term “deconstruction” really means: it’s not simply breaking apart, smashing, and leaving a pile of scattered rubble.  It’s more like dissection than demolition: carefully taking something apart in order to learn how it works.

We also take a walk through history, looking at how humans in different periods went about finding truth: the Hellenic Greek period … the Age of Reason, or Enlightenment  … the Reformation …. Modernism.  Then a period in which we saw  the erosion of certainty (Wittgenstein and Gödel destroy the idea that everything can be fully explained purely through mathematics; Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; Einstein’s theory of relativity: different frameworks produce different realities), which crystalized into Postmodernism, which says there is no absolute truth.

Then we see how these ideas apply to constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing a Christian worldview, which typically involves an appeal to authorities.  This is true not just for the evolution of Christianity in general over the past two thousand years, but also Christianity in each one of us over the course of our lifetime.

It’s easy to say that God would be the ultimate authority.  But few of us get to hear from God himself … directly.  So we then defer to hearing from God’s spokespeople:

• prophets who begin their proclamations with: “Thus sayeth the Lord …..”  Not just the prophets from many millennia ago: I’ve been in many church settings in which “prophets” or people who “have the gift of prophecy” will cloak themselves in this level of authority.
• the Biblical authors, which then puts the idea of Divine Inspiration under the microscope.
• the Fathers of the Church (in the first few centuries after Christ, who proceed to hammer out entirely new elements of Christian theology, and formulate these into church tradition and creedal statements such as the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed.
• parents, pastors, Sunday school workers and youth pastors

In the course of this exploration through Church history and Christian epistemology, we learn about a useful interpretational tool or exercise: the Wesleyan quadrilateral … shaping and refining ideas through a lens or prism or filter that has four corners or pillars: scripture, church tradition, reason (science; philosophy), and experience (culture; historical events and crises).  Many Christians would prioritize two of those poles: scripture and church tradition.  We advocate for having more flexibility between the four, even allowing science to question scripture (which we now see as a very human document).  “Discovered truth” (science and philosophy) versus “Revealed truth” (theology).

Finally, we add one other feature or strategy to that Wesleyan quadrilateral: running the ramp of reason before making a leap of faith.

Next week, Luke’s going to use this modified Wesleyan quadrilateral — with full flexibility in all four corners, and a built-in ramp of reason —  to present his revised Christian worldview, one which was very Fundamentalist Evangelical but is now quite liberal.  And then we’ll get those two world-renowned Christian theologians (one ultra-conservative, the other very liberal) commenting on that.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like previous ones in which we’ve done a deep-dive into the human fingerprints all over the Old Testament (#57) and New Testament (#81), Divine Inspiration (#101), and an egregious example of people using God and scripture to justify crazy ideas (#98).

Episode image by Andrew. Thanks Andrew!

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