The following is a paper I delivered at the 2013 International Society of Christian Apologetics conference. Please note that the paper is a critique of the claims that objective knowledge of the biblical text is impossible. Please do not be confused, due to the multi part nature of the posts, and think that I agree with the notion of the sociology of knowledge or that objective understanding is impossible. The critique will come in due time.
“That’s just your interpretation!” No doubt, virtually any Christian who has discussed the Bible with very many people today has encountered such a reply. The mere idea that anyone could have an accurate understanding of the Bible that is true for everyone seems to be at odds with much of modern thinking. We are told, “You have one of many different perspectives! You should broaden your horizons!” It reminds me of something I have always remembered from my childhood. I recall being so excited when Revenge of the Creature, the first sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon, was going to be shown on broadcast television in 3-D, a first for that time. My family and I went to the local Pizza Hut and bought our promotional pizza that included our very own 3-D glasses with which to watch the historic event. Considering it was 1982, the 3-D glasses were the retro type that had one red and one cyan cellophane lens. The movie was actually black and white though it utilized the old anaglyph 3-D effect of overlaying red and cyan offset images on each frame of the film so that one’s eyes saw only the particular colored image that corresponded to the colored lenses of the 3-D glasses. Needless to say, the effect was nothing like modern day 3-D, but to a four-year-old it was still quite exciting!
What does that have to do with interpreting the Bible? Quite a lot actually, as will be made clear in due course. We are all aware that whether one is talking about a Bible verse or a current politician’s speech, different people are bound to interpret and understand in different ways what is being communicated. If you have been married for any length of time, there is little doubt that you have experienced this phenomenon firsthand. A current popular notion that reports to account for such interpretation differences is known as sociology of knowledge (SOK).
Evangelical hermeneutical scholar Grant Osborne explains it this way,
The sociology of knowledge recognizes the influence of societal values on all perceptions of reality. This is a critical factor in coming to grips with the place of preunderstanding in the interpretive process. Basically, sociology of knowledge states that no act of coming to understanding can escape the formative power of the background and the paradigm community to which an interpreter belongs.1
In other words, everyone approaches the interpretive or understanding process, regardless of what is being interpreted, with a certain preunderstanding or world view–defined here as one’s comprehensive view of reality–that contains certain presuppositions which essentially serve as a filter or grid by which communication is interpreted or understood.
Evangelical theologian Kevin VanHoozer agrees when he says, “No reading is objective; all reading is theory-laden. There is no innocent eye; there is no innocent ‘I.’...The claim to see texts as they are is illusory. Every reader sees what one can see from one’s position in society, space, and time....Like it or not, what we find in texts is a function of who, and where, we are.”2 In a similar, though more theological vain, Cornelius Van Til, the father of modern presuppositional apologetic methodology, says man has “cemented colored glasses to his eyes which he cannot remove. And all is yellow to the jaundiced eye.”3 Thus, much like the retro 3-D glasses from my childhood colored the world around me, one’s preunderstanding or world view is said to color the way one views reality and understands communication. In fact, Ken Ham, president of the apologetics organization Answers in Genesis, says, “...there are only two kinds of glasses in an ultimate sense. We either wear God’s glasses or man’s glasses....there are only two starting points for our world views...one is based on God’s Word (the Bible), and the other is based on man’s word.”4
How exactly does the SOK idea affect the hermeneutical enterprise? If we are all wearing “rose-colored glasses,” as it were, is it possible for anyone to come to an objective understanding of communication, whether it be from God or from man, or are we trapped within our own world view?5 There are many principles and factors involved in the hermeneutic endeavor that are beyond the scope of this current project. For our purposes, however, we will examine the above questions, while specifically focusing on how they relate to the presuppositional apologetic system, and demonstrate how both modern philosophy and presuppositionalism ultimately rely on a bankrupt epistemology resulting in false conclusions.6
Sociology of Knowledge in Context
Given the moderate realist tradition of Thomas Aquinas which will soon be laid forth, I find the following staircase illustration of the thinking enterprise, or philosophy in general, quite helpful. The foundation of this thinking staircase is reality. Reality is that which is (i.e. God, the Bible, you, me, trees, etc.). Going one step up we reach metaphysics which is the study of that which is, or examining being as being. Epistemology is next. It asks the question “How do we know that which is?” Continuing up we come to linguistics which is how we communicate what we know about that which is. Finally, at the top of the staircase is hermeneutics, or the study of how we understand what is communicated about that which is.7 Each stair is related, and one builds on the next while all being built upon reality. As biblical scholar Thomas Howe notes, “Since one’s view on the nature of meaning is a foundational element in hermeneutics, the relation of one’s view of meaning to epistemology and metaphysics indicates that, ultimately, hermeneutics itself is based on one’s view of the nature of reality.”8
Space nor time permit an exhaustive exploration of the history of philosophy and hermeneutics in order to put the SOK concept in its entire historical context. Suffice it to say that since the time of seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, and his foundational ideas of modern philosophy, contra the philosophy of Aquinas, the hermeneutic enterprise, and philosophy as a whole, have not been the same. As Thomistic philosopher Etienne Gilson explains, “The first consequence of Cartesian mathematicism, and the one from which all the others flow, was the obligation it imposed on the philosopher of always going from thought to being, and even of always defining being in terms of ideas or thought [emphasis mine].”9 In a rejection of scholastic metaphysics, Descartes separated all of reality into thought and extension, which led to the so-called mind/body problem, or how non-extended substances, as he classified the mind, can interact with extended substances. The majority of modern philosophy has been built on attempting to bridge that separation.
Based on the epistemological foundations laid by Descartes, David Hume concluded that we are ultimately left in a state of skepticism. Hume says that “as we are totally ignorant of the power, on which depends the mutual operation of bodies, we are no less ignorant of that power, on which depends the operation of mind on body, or of body on mind; nor are we able, either from our senses or consciousness, to assign the ultimate principle in one case, more than in the other.”10 He carries this thinking further to conclude that positing God as the bridge to this knowledge gap does not help since we are just as ignorant of how a divine mind would interact with us as we are about our own minds’ interactions with extension.
Writing in the eighteenth century, philosopher Immanuel Kant attempted to bridge the gap by positing the existence of a priori synthetic judgements (synthetic judgements being those based on sense experience). Philosopher Mortimer Adler says, “Kant endowed the human mind with transcendental forms of sense-apprehension or intuition (the forms of space and time), and also with the transcendental categories of the understanding [i.e. a priori synthetic judgements].”11 According to Adler, this means “the mind brings these transcendental forms and categories to experience, thereby constituting the shape and character of the experience we have.”12 Thus, Kant rejected the notion that the mind is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, awaiting to be written on via sense experience. Adler summarizes Kant’s philosophy this way,
The transcendental forms of sense-apprehension and the transcendental categories of the understanding are inherent in the mind and constitute its structure prior to any sense experience. The common experience that all of us share has the character it does have be- cause it has been given that character by the transcendental structure of the human mind. It has been formed and constituted by it.13
Gilson concludes, “After Hume, the only course left to Kant, in order to save a causality no longer possible to find in things, was to conclude that it is prescribed for things by thought. Thus the Cartesian cycle reached completion with the purity of a perfect curve...having started from the mind, philosophy, after several fruitless attempts to escape from it, declared its final resolve to remain there.”14
Hence, we see that, according to modern philosophy, our minds are essentially our retro 3-D glasses that color our worlds of sense experience so that we see reality only as our minds present it to us because we know only our thoughts rather than the real world “out there.” Therefore, our minds essentially construct representations of reality. Adler aptly notes one of the key points in this debate, to which we will return, when he says that, according to modern philosophy, our “ideas are that which we apprehend when we are conscious of anything. For the opposing view, some ideas (our cognitive ideas) are that by which we apprehend the objects of which we are conscious [emphasis in original].”15
At this juncture, however, it should be apparent that the notion of SOK easily follows from modern philosophy’s teaching that we know only our ideas and that our minds construct representations of reality rather than know reality itself. If modern philosophy is correct, and we are incapable of knowing reality in itself, then it would certainly seem that the various influences upon our thinking, whether it be a priori synthetic judgements, upbringing, education, faith communities, etc., have a tremendous impact on how we view the world and interpret communication about the world. By implication, since we all have different societal backgrounds, no matter how similar they may be, it would seem that an objective interpretation or understanding of communication about reality is an impossible goal. Osborne summarizes the situation this way,
A close reading of the text cannot be done without a perspective provided by one’s pre- understanding as identified by a “sociology of knowledge” perspective. Reflection itself demands mental categories, and these are built on one’s presupposed world view and by the faith or reading community to which one belongs. Since neutral exegesis is impossible, no necessarily “true” or final interpretation is possible [emphasis mine].16
VanHoozer puts it like this, “When it comes to interpreting texts, honesty forbids certainty. Human knowing, of books and of the Book of Nature, is mediate and approximate. Here Christians can agree with chastened postmoderns [emphasis mine].”17
Read Part 2 HERE.
END NOTES
1 Grant R. Osborne (2006-11-30). The Hermeneutical Spiral: A Comprehensive Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Kindle Locations 11528-11531). Intervarsity Press - A. Kindle Edition.
2 Kevin J. Vanhoozer (2009-08-30). Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Landmarks in Christian Scholarship) (Kindle Locations 4008-4016). Zondervan. Kin- dle Edition.
3 Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Philadelphia, 1955). Logos version.
4 Ken Ham, “Wearing Biblical Glasses,” Around the World with Ken Ham blog, entry posted March 16, 2011, http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2011/03/16/wearing-biblical-glasses/ (accessed Aug. 2, 2012).
5 It should be noted that “objective,” as it is used here, simply means something that is universally valid or true whether one believes it or not.
6 Many thanks to Blake Anderson, Dr. J.T. Bridges, Eric Gustafson, and Dr. B.J. Mauser for their helpful comments and suggestions regarding this paper.
7 Thomas Howe, Objectivity in Biblical Interpretation (Advantage Books, 2004), 309.
8 Ibid., 308.
9 Etienne Gilson (2011-10-12). Methodical Realism (Kindle Locations 687-690). Ignatius Press. Kindle Edition.
10 David Hume; Peter Millican (2007-06-14). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford World's Classics) (Kindle Locations 2075-2077). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
11 Mortimer J. Adler (1997-04-01). Ten Philosophical Mistakes (Simon & Schuster, Inc.), 90-91, Kindle Edition.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Gilson, Methodical Realism, Kindle Locations 748-751.
15 Adler, Ten Philosophical Mistakes, 10.
16 Osborne, The Hermeneutical Spiral, Kindle Locations 11803-11806.
17 Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?, Kindle Locations 5661-5663.