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Do you mind if I interrupt?
No, go ahead.
I'm glad to see we've finally come back to truth. You started the last chapter by rehearsing how Paul is preoccupied with truth and knowledge in this epistle, and you ended by talking about "proving the gospel to be true" through the historical and cultural life of the Christian community. But in the middle, as you were talking about Foucault's "regimes of truth," l am not so sure we didn't kind of abandon truth and slip into rhetoric.
You might be on to something there. Can you explain this a little more for us?
Well, it seems to me that once you concede Foucault's, point that truth is "produced only by virtue of multiple, forms of constraint," aren't you. saying that truth is simply a power game? If there is no more to truth than this kind of imposition of power, then the only argument for the truth of any particular position would be a rhetorical argument. The person or group with the best persuasive skills, and maybe the most social and economic power behind them, wins all contests for truth. Isn't this what you are left with?
If that is what we were left with, then Paul would certainly want to disown us.
What do you mean?
Think for a moment about Paul's social location and the location of the Christian community. If truth was simply a matter of rhetoric backed up by power, then it is Pretty clear that the "word of the truth" that Paul proclaims is going to be on the losing side in the battle over truth in the world. It is, after all, the empire that has the power, and just to prove it, Paul is writing this letter from an imperial prison cell. Empires tend to have a monopoly on truth. So Paul wants to appeal to a truth that is beyond rhetoric and not reducible to power-or at least power as the world understands it.
Why then did you walk down that Foucauldian path and subject both Paul and the "philosophy" to such a rhetorical analysis? You focused on the nature of their discourse-whether it was exclusionary, whether it engaged in power grabs, whether it sanctioned certain ways to ascertain truth and censored others-rather than on whether the content of their discourse was true or not.
In the first place, we walked the Foucauldian path because it seems to us that there is ample evidence in the history of the church, and in our own lives, that truth claims do often [unction as violently ideological regimes. There is something therapeutic about such a deconstructive exercise, because it forces us to take a good look at what is really going on in our discourse and in our lives. It forces us to ask difficult and potentially embarrassing questions of ourselves, our tradition, and even the biblical text and its authors.
I can see the usefulness of asking such questions of ourselves and even of our various Christian traditions, but isn't subjecting the text to such a hermeneutic of suspicion inherently problematic-even spiritually dangerous? And doesn't the very posing of such questions arrogantly place us over the text? Isn't this really a modernist kind of attitude?
On one level, we agree with you. Much suspicion of the biblical text is a modernist power game. And insofar as the kind of suspicion we investigated in the chapter was postmodern, we also attempted to say in what ways we think this kind of textual criticism can amount to little more than facile, cheap critique. But we have another, more compelling reason to walk down this Foucauldian path.
What is that?
Well, it's William. You see, folks like William ask these kinds of questions of this text. As we said, William and countless others duck when they hear worldview talk and experience little more than revulsion when they engage a text that speaks with the kind of authority of Colossians 2. That allergic reaction to Paul's kind of rhetoric needs to be taken seriously And it needs to be addressed if we are ever to hear Paul anew.
But when we hear Paul anew, we still need to address the question of whether what he is saying is true.
Sure we do.
Do you think your counter-ideological dimensions of the biblical metanarrative-even in the ways they are present in Colossians-prove the truth of Paul's gospel?
No, They don't "prove" anything at all. What we attempt to suggest by pointing out these counter-ideological dimensions is that the postmodern suspicion of all metanarratives as metanarratives is an overreaction. There is at least this metanarrative that contains the resources within itself to undermine its ideological distortion. Not all worldviews are regimes of truth, we are saying. The worldview on offer in Colossia is the kingdom of God's beloved Son.
But is it true?
Well, what do you mean by that?
Is the gospel that Paul proclaims true in and of itself? Is it an accurate reflection of Truth that stands outside of what he says about it, outside of his interpretation of it? Is truth 'out there," or is it, as Foucault puts it, something we produce?
Why is it important for you that the truth is "out there'7
Because if it isn't "out there," if truth isn't objectively verifiable in some way, then we end up with relativism. My worry here is that you are so concerned about the postmodern reaction against absolutes that you end up watering down the gospel and providing a text with no absolutes at all. In fact, if I read you rightly, you identified a belief in absolutes with the philosophv under attack, as if the message Paul is preaching isn't itself a presentation of absolute truth.
This is a very deep-rooted concern for you. isn't it?
I raised similar issues in our first dialogue. At that time you held off on talking further about the postmodern critique of objective truth. I'm putting the issue back on the table because the last chapter didn't resolve the issue for me.
Before we try to respond to your concerns, we have one question for you. In our first conversation we focused on various dimensions of the biblical understanding of truth as fidelity, as relational and covenantal. Does that approach to truth mitigate any of your concerns here?
Yes and no. I have to admit that was a new way of thinking about truth for me. And I have to admit that what you were saying certainly appeared to be biblical and struck all kinds of intuitive chords in me. But I am stiil uneasy. If truth is as relational as you are suggesting, then isn't that just one small step away from a thorough-going relativism? Isn't the conviction that the truth is "out there" absolutely essential to the claims of Christian faith?
This is very interesting. You recognize that this way of speaking about truth is biblical, and such an understanding of truth actually strikes intuitive chords, but still you are uneasy What we are talking about has both exegetical and experiential warrant. but still it makes you anxious. You identify the source of that anxiety as fear of relativism and a need for truth to be "out there." You know, there is a name for this kind anxiety- It is "Cartesian anxiety,"' and in response to it we want to offer you this word of pastoral advice: "Fear not"
Easy to say, not so easy to live, I think relativism and subjectivism should strike fear into our hearts. Surely Allan Bloom was right when he wrote, "There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative."
Well, the first question we need to ask here is, relative to what? If truth is relative, what is it relative to in the minds of these students who so offended Professor Bloom? Of course, the answers are legion- truth is relative to your gender, your social standing, your relative power in society, your time in history, your religious tradition, your race, et cetera, et cetera. All of this relativity spells the closing, not the opening, of the American mind, says Bloom. But there is an interesting twist to all of this.
You see, while Bloom's statement is offered as both an "objective statement" and a lament, the statement itself can actually be seen to prove the point of relativity-much to Bloom's chagrin.
Note, for example, that Bloom writes as a tenured professor who did not have a very good experience of teaching at Cornel in the 1960s. Indeed he is a white male professor who has no difficulty with using the male pronoun as generic for all students in his statement. It's as if he hasn't noticed that something called feminism has begun to reshape the face of American culture and scholarship. He is a professor with classical training and a classicist understanding of the world who is deeply disappointed that the discipline of reading the great books of the Western tradition has come into bad times during his career.
Our point is that Bloom's lament about relativistic students needs to he heard, understood and evaluated in terms that are relative to Professor Bloom himself. He makes his statement, indeed he writes his apologia, for a classicist understanding of the world and the academy, not as a neutral observation from nowhere but as a lament uttered from a particular social, intellectual, professional, historical, political, racial and gendered perspective. His statement about relativism is, if you will, is a relative statement.
I am not going to debate the details, of Bloom's book with you-it is actually a little before my time-but surely your critique doesn't totally eliminate the concern he has raised about relativism. Even if it could be established that his own views are rather biased, that doesn't mean bias is okay. Rather, if means we need to be even more diligent in our attempts to be objective.
How do you know when you are being objective?
When you are submitting your ideas, beliefs and truth claims to rational evaluation.
That is precisely Blooms position. He insists that reason has a "special claim" on us, that we need to submit to the "primacy of reason" because where the "rule of reason" holds sway the "voice of reason is not drowned out by the loud voices of . various 'commitments.'"3 But despite all this commitment to reason, it takes only a little scratching at the surface of the rhetoric to discern all kinds of special interests at work in Bloom's book.
So is Bloom Just inconsistent, or is the problem deeper?
The problem is much deeper. The problem has to do with commitment. Note that he says that the voice of reason must not be drowned out by the loud voices of various "commitments." Let us give you a postmodern translation of that: the hegemonic, absolute and finally authoritative commitment to reason trumps all other commitments.
Come again? How are you reconfiguring the relationship of reason and commitment?
It's really quite simple. All that we are saying is that the commitment to reason is just that--a commitment. And this commitment has no more rational foundation to it than any other commitment.
Are you saying that we shouldn't be committed to rationality?
That is exactly what we are saying. We shouldn't be "committed" to rationality for two reasons. First, we should be committed to Jesus, not to rationality And second, once we become commited to rationality we are engaging in idolatry, and promiscuous copulation with idols bears bad fruit in our lives.
Hold on for a second there. Surely the way we are "committed" to rationality is very different from what a commitment to Christ is like. And surely a commitment to being rational is not in itself any more idolatrous than being committed to being ecologically friendly in the ways I dispose of my waste.
Well, we think it is even possible to make an idol out of ecological concerns if they become the ultimate and final criteria by which all decisions in life are made. But this hasn't been the characteristic idolatry of Western culture, nor is it a very powerful temptation to most Christians. The commitment to reason, however, is the most insidious idolatry to capture the imagination of the church in its history What is so insidious and ingenious about this commitment is that it has for so long managed to disguise the fact that it is a commitment.
Think about it for a moment. Seldom is the commitment to rationality ever recognized to be a commitment.4 It is Just being rational! But the heart of the postmodern deconstruction of this tradition of rationality has been to uncover how this commitment to rationality is a commitment, how this tradition of rationality is a tradition. This has been a central feature of the modernist commitment to reason; it has attempted to eschew all tradition, all historically situated perspective, in favor of a universal stance that leaves the religious wars and conflict of traditions behind. But this has been achieved only at the cost of elevating one tradition-the particular, historically situated tradition of the Enlightenment itself-over all other traditions.5
We have not avoided tradition, we have not risen above historical particularity or the limitations of temporally and spatially bounded perspective; we have simply granted final and imperial hegemony to one tradition over all others.
And from a Christian perspective, the greatest tragedy is that the church has really bought into this lie.
I am still worried that this amounts to relativism- Is the truth "out there" or not? And can I know the truth objectively?
We understand your dilemma, and we recognize that there is a valid problem you are addressing. Truth cannot be reduced to "what your peers will let you peers will let you get away with." This rather famous, though flippant, remark by Richard Rorty may reflect much of what goes on in the academy but it's much too reductionistic to satisfy a reflective Christian.
More than that. Christians believe that the truth is the truth even if your peers won't let you get away with it. Jesus died at the hands of his peers in the contest over truth.
Great point. Truth is, in the end, not reduced to a matter of agreement. After all, oppressive regimes love to manipulate agreement. Truth is always contested. And if truth really does set us free, as Jesus said, then truth participates in a life-and-death conflict with oppression.
Then don't we need "objectivity" to avoid such oppressive paths?
Well, it hasn't worked so far; why should it start to work now?
What do you mean?
We mean that the twentieth century was the most violent century in historv and that the most oppressive regimes we have seen have all claimed to be basing their power on nothing less than an objectively and scientifically based ideology We need only think of the three holocausts of the 1940s and 1950s to see the point. Germany was at the pinnacle of Enlightenment civilization, and the gas chambers were seen as a scientifically sound and efficient way to bring a solution to the problem of the "genetically deficient" Jews. It was scientific objectivity and American know-how that produced and justified Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it was in the name of scientific dialectical materialism that Stalin sent all dissenters to the gulags.
Our point is that "objectivity" does not set us free. from oppressive regimes. In fact, 1 every modem ideology has hidden behind the facade of scientific objectivity To be postmodern is to say, enough! Enough of this kind of objectivity Indeed, to be post-modern is to not be able to "gel: over" these holocausts, but rather to allow these events of radical evil to bring into question the whole Enlightenment ideology of objectivity.
Let's say that I can "get over it." Let's say that I can write off these admittedly terrible events as aberrations. It wasn't objectivity that brought the holocausts, but the sinfulness of the human heart. If you will grant me that (even if we will still disagree), then again, whats the problem with objectivity?
The issue isn't objectivity as a particular kind of intellectual discipline used to pet" form certain kinds of intellectual exercises. In this sense, attempting to be "objective when sitting on a jury or performing a physics experiment or trying to understand complex argument is an important and necessary stance to take. Our problem is not with objectivity per se but with an objectivism that privileges a certain kind of objectivity in the quest for something called "truth.
"Objectivism" makes the truth into a passive entity "out there" that is best discovered hy means of the detached observation of knowing subjects who adopt a stance of neutrality. Objectivism posits that truth is achieved when we make propositional statements and reports about the objects "out there" in the world that accurately mirror the way things are. These propositions must conform to the "canons of reason" and be "reproducible by other knowers operating by the same rules." The rules, however, dictate that human subjectivity, historical context, religious beliefs and so on must not be allowed to influence the quest for truth. Objectivism, then, is an approach to knowledge that attempts to eschew all perspective rooted in particular times, places and traditions, in order to aspire to the "view from nowhere."
The problem is, there is no view from nowhere! There is no neutral standpoint. There is no detached objectivity. Knowing the world is not a matter of simply mirroring reality "as it really is," because we have no access to reality "as it really is" apart from the place in which we stand and the view or views of the world afforded to us from that place.
Rorty's remark about truth being what your peers will let you get away with is flippant, but we think he is right when he insists that we have no access to something called "reality" apart from the way we represent that reality in our language. Since we never encounter reality "except under a chosen description," we are denied the luxury or pretense of claiming any immediate access to the world.10
Note the problem here isn't whether there is a world that in some important respects is "out there," Postmodernists do not, as a rule, step out into moving traffic under the illusion that the world is just a matter of their perspective. The world may well be "out there"; the only question here is one of access. Do we have access to the world apart from perspective? The answer, we suggest, is no.
Are you saying that the whole modernist enterprise of objectivism is bankrupt?
That pretty much sums it up. And we are not alone in our judgment. We agree with Miroslav Volt when he writes: "The agenda of modernity has overreached itself…"
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• © 2005 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on March 16, 2005
