NOTES ON LOVING TO
KNOW- ESTHER LIGHTCAP MEEK.
Loving to Know-
Covenant Epistemology, by Esther Lightcap Meek
Hardcover: 540 pages
Publisher: Wipf and Stock (June 1, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1498213243
ISBN-13: 978-1498213240
NOTES:
[VJ
Comments: Esther Lightcap Meek points out that most of our
thinking around knowledge, how we know what we know, and the process of coming
to know, is based on a flawed and destructive premise set in motion by
Cartesian thinking. She points out how this has permeated our lives, adversely
affected relationships, communities, science, the arts and education. Her
extensive study of scholars, mystics, scientists, psychologists, theologians,
philosophers, classical writers, and not least the Bible, has led to the
development of Covenant Epistemology. The book is heavy with concepts, excerpts
and explanations, but is accessible and ultimately rewarding and personally
satisfying. At 540 pages it is a daunting read, and one can get lost in the
woods. My condensation of the book to 24 pages is an attempt to systematize the
narrative but has the distinct disadvantage of depriving the work of its grand
scale and progressively revealed, luminous clarity. But this is as much my way
of processing through the book, taking several months to read, in between
flights at airports, as it has to do with creating a framework to arrange her
concepts in a systemic manner.]
INTRODUCTION
·
“Knowing
begins with longing”- Esther Lightcap Meek.
·
“Truth is
revealed to the knower and the knower opens up to truth. It must take its time.
The knower cannot understand truth as if it were an object to uncover.”- Annie
Dillard (my paraphrase)
·
“Truth is
personal - it doesn't reject objectivity but rejects objectivism in knowing. It
doesn't reduce truth to knowing facts. Personal knowing, by contrast, is the
kind of knowing that is knowing by one person of another.”- Lesslie
Newbiggin (my paraphrase)
·
“Truth is relational- to know something is
to have a living relationship with it influencing and being influenced by it.
Truth descends from Troth (Pledge). It is covenantal. To know is enter into a
troth with the other, and to be vulnerable (to be known as well as to know),
and therefore enter into a bond not of logic alone but of friendship. This
doesn't negate reasoned justification or data collection, but is an essential
to prevent their quasi-successful but damaging divorce from personal context.”-
Parker Palmer (my paraphrase)
COVENANT EPISTEMOLOGY,
POLANYIAN EPISTEMOLOGY AND CONTRASTING VIEWS
Covenant Epistemology is based on Michael Polanyi's "subsidiary-focal" paradigm.
It resolves many long-standing dilemmas in epistemology: between correspondence and coherence approaches to truth;
between realism vs antirealism debates; between foundationalist and non-foundationalist
epistemologies. Polanyi is not a foundationalist, but is an unfliching realist-
an unheard of combination, because his work is not familiar to professional
practitioners.
Correspondence
theory of truth says the truthfulness of a claim must correspond to reality. Coherence theory says we cannot
determine this correspondence, so the truthfulness of a claim must be
consistent with other truth claims we consider to be true.
Foundationalism
is a proposal about the nature of knowledge- that we must have knowledge of 2
kinds- 1, of an all-important foundation of self-evidently certain claims; and
2, of other claims that can be derived from thus foundation.
Generally, foundationalists are also correspondence
theorists. They also generally argue that one must both to be epistemic
realists. Epistemic realism says that knowledge is knowledge of objective
reality, rather than a mental or social construct or convention.
Subsidiary-Focal
Integration: All knowing is the profoundly human struggle to rely on
clues to focus on a pattern that we then submit to as a token of reality.
Polanyi called this act of finding such clues to find a pattern to take as a
token of reality 'integration'. When we identify the pattern, it becomes focal:
we focus on it. The clues become subsidiary to the focal pattern.
All acts of coming to know are integrative and
transformative, rather than deductive and linear.
A key to understanding a person is knowing what he or she
longs for.
Foundationalism, by pointing to the false ideal of explicit
knowledge, privileges the focal, and blinds us to the ever-present, ever
palpable, ever unspecified subsidiary awareness which alone allows us to
sustain knowledge. This is why knowledge is not deductive or linear. If we have
connected the dots to form a pattern, any clues which come up later serve to
enhance the pattern, not overturn it completely unless there is a real reason
to believe that the pattern was entirely false- this is extremely unlikely. If
knowledge were merely linear, or explicit, one could argue for such dramatic
overturning, but if it forms a pattern then our process of subsidiary-focal
integration only serves to clarify the pattern.
Our very sense of the truth of a
claim draws both on unspecifiable clues and also on unspecifiable hints of
future possibilities.
SUBSIDIARIES
Tracing the truth based on clues is not foolproof, but we
have the skill to navigate using them. Our lives are a tapestry of coming to
know. These once-disparate clues are of three sorts: (1) the world; (2) the lived body; and (3) the directions, or normative word.
This is just the "perspectival
triad" which was proposed by John Frame.
At Point A, the particulars of the body, world and word make
no sense. The Known seems exterior, alien and opaque to the Knower. But at
Point B, the opacity shifts to transparency, and exteriority shifts to a sense
of connection with me, like an internalized familiarity, like second nature.
WORLD:
World clues comprise our situation or circumstances that we need to make sense
of. The shift from Point A to Point B impact the world clues. I get a sense of
the world when I make that shift. I also find myself rooted deeply in the world
I come to understand. I also get a sense of future manifestations and new
directions in the world. I was reminded of Jesus' disciples in the boat during
the storm calling for Jesus to calm it. Jesus does, and their categories get
messed up, and they as 'Who can this be, that even the wind and the waves obey
him?" Changed circumstances could open up new lines of thought that lead
to knowledge.
LIVED BODY:
These clues comprise our experiences is using our bodies in some task, like
typing on a keyboard. The body is not merely an object (as the Cartesian
approach of divorcing the mind from the body says), but we are aware of it is a
subject- we know of it subsidiarily than focally. The lived experience is
typically not known like a doctor examining it, but by coursding through myriad
bodily experiences. At Point A, we feel some extreriority to our bodies, like
when we start to learn how to ride a bike, or when we say "I'm all
thumbs" when attempting to play the guitar. At Point B, we don't focus on
the body- we are in our body knowingly, and our body is knowingly in the world.
DIRECTIONS (THE
NORMATIVE WORD): Includes the words of people who guide us, or our
historically or societally shaped worldview, or coach who instructs us, or the
methodology which we apply to the task at hand, or ideals and goals which
inspire us. The novice only half understands directions when she hears them
first. Somehow she must indwell them- climb into them, and then having learned
the meaning, can use them knowingly, 'normatively', shapingly. Without the
normative, no knowing can occur. To "notice" means to apply our gaze
on some clues, but not others, such as on the foreground and not the
background, for instance. Authoritative guides don't fabricate what is real,
and don't teach us to fabricate what is real. They teach us to see what is
there.
Normative clues form the dimension in which Covenantal
Epistemology is developed. Covenant is by nature interpersonal. Normativity
presupposes a context of two or more persons relating interpersonally. Therefore,
the Normative Dimension implies a fundamental context: Interpersonhood.
TRIANGULATING:
An act of coming to know can originate in any of the above 3 dimensions of
body, world or the normative. I could intuit that something is out of place
(body), or I may be forced to adapt to a new set of circumstances (world), or I
may be faced with unknown concepts (normative). I, as the vector, eventually
moves among these dimensions freely in the course of coming to know, in an
unfolding, recurring way. This is the act of "triangulating". Our defective default mode of 'objectivism' doesn't let us see
this interdimensional movement.
Thus ordinary acts of knowing display the dynamics of
subsidiary-focal integration, three interlocking sets of clues, and the
knower's unfolding triangulation among them.
Where does knowing start? Empiricists say you start with
sense perception. Rationalists say you start with reason. Theologians say you
start with God. Subjectivists say you start (and end) with the self. But in
reality, knowing could begin in any of the three dimensions, and the act of
coming to know requires their plurality and occurs at their intersection.
The Western tradition, which is our defective default,
approaches knowing as if knowledge is wholly focal, and therefore restricted to
lucid, articulated statements, and as Marjorie Grene puts it, "pieces of information immediately present to
the mind, and impersonally transferable from one mind to another".
[VJ Comments- Something
that comes to my own mind is from a recent presentation from Marvel Comics in
which the character Tony Stark uploads his entire consciousness into a
computer, so even after his body dies, his intellect, passions and pursuits
continue through this disembodied consciousness. Clearly a product of the
Western epistemic tradition, which believes that knowing is simply holding up a
mirror to an extant and fully comprehensible reality.]
Polanyian epistemology understands that tacit clues- the
subsidiaries- are epistemically foundational. These may include values,
virtues, pre-theoretical commitments (often derided as preconceived notions),
traditions, communities, emotions, etc., which in the defective default, would
be considered as being detrimental to knowledge, but Polanyi shows us is
integral to knowledge. Therefore, to Polanyi, knowing is anticipative through
the subsidiaries, not just a still-life reflection of reality.
DICHOTOMIES:
The Defective Default presumes that knowing has a dichotomy like a daisy, which
has pairs of petals around the center, with one of the pairs over the other.
This tradition holds that one is dominant over the other, such as reason being
dominant over emotion, in which emotion may be considered to be detrimental to
knowledge and reason being supportive of knowledge, or its practitioners think
they have to settle for a less than ideal compromise between these two. Polanyi
shows us that this is a false dichotomy. The realization that we indwell clues
subsidiarily creatively reconnects the pairs that the default divorced-
knowledge, fact, science, theory, etc. are contexted and rooted in and outrun
by what we took to be extraneous petals like adventure, passion, emotion, art
and religion. Responsible belief is the epistemic act.
INTERPERSONAL
KNOWING: Something about knowing a person, like a close family member,
seems to help us transcend the dichotomy. There is an indeterminacy in truly
knowing a person, but still such knowing is palpable. So knowing is not an
individualistic activity, rather it is relational. Covenantal Epistemology is
built on this idea as well as the Polanyian subsidiary-focal integration as its
two loci.
CONFLICTS RESOLVED BY
COVENANT EPISTEMOLOGY:
(a) Epistemic
Naturalism: This is the proposal that reduces all knowing to physical
behavior or brain activity. Cognitive science deals with the idea that 'mental
events' are simply brain activity. Pragmatic behaviorism is the idea that mind
and knowledge are determined from human behavior, and therefore knowledge can
be reduced to it. Both Cognitive Science and Pragmatic Behaviorism reject the
Cartesian dualism which dichotomizes mind and body. It does so by rejecting the mind and replacing it with the
body. The best brain studies only deal with the organ, and views it as an
object. Polanyi sidesteps the dichotomy by honoring 'personhood' (from the idea
of body knowledge as a subsidiary) while benefiting from scientific discoveries
about the brain.
(b) Modernism and
Postmodernism: Modernism emphasizes reason, logic and objectivity. Postmodernism
emphasizes relativism, subjectivism or skepticism. In the metaphor of the
daisy, postmodernism rejects the center of the daisy as impossible.
Subsidiary-focal integration acknowledges the active contribution of the
knower, without rejecting the active contribution of the known. It understands
(like the postmodernist) that all knowledge is interpretation, but also that
the interpretation is subsidiary and knowledge is focal. Of course,
interpretation could be skewed or biased, but good interpretation engages the
world, it is an indwelt beachhead in the world.
(c) Realism vs
Antirealism: Is our cognitive effort the knowledge of an extramental
world or is it just our outlook? This is the summary of the realism vs
antirealism debate. Example: Are Copernicus' proposals merely a summary of
data, or are they real? In the Cartesian ideal of certainty, 19th century
thinkers concluded that it is just a summary of data- this position was called
Positivism. For Polanyi, the scientist, this was unacceptable, something which
reduced scientific discovery to convenient summaries of data. For Polanyi, even
partial knowedge, being a subsidiary, is justified by its transformative and
allusive qualities for a future focal to be discovered. It isn't confirmation,
says Marjorie Grene, but an intimation of confirmation that testifies to the
reality of our findings.
(d) Foundationalism
vs Coherentism: Foundationalism posits certain truths as infallible and
self-evident, and any other truth claim must be derived from it. Its weakness
is identifying any truths which qualify universally as foundational. The
Coherentist view is that truth claims are understood to be true if they are
mutually consistent, not from any foundational infallibility. Its weakness is
being unable to tell if any set of internally coherent statements is inherently
true or false. For Polanyi, our beliefs are indeed foundational and rooted, but
the foundation itself is a subsidiary. The clue base of any act of knowing is
unspecifiable and tacit, not articulated or explicit. It is not certain, it is
lived. Polanyi’s alternative to certainty is neither skepticism nor
probability. It is lived confidence that roots us in a world and inspires us to
responsible risk and profession of truth. It exposes the weakness of
Coherentism in that while we do test the relative merit of truth claims by
consistency with other such claims, coherentism does not recognize the fact
that we do so working tacitly from subsidiary (foundational) awareness behind
the explicit claims we are considering.
(e) Religion and Science: For Polanyi, commitment is "a
manner of disposing ourselves" toward the as-yet unknown reality. The
question of knowing God becomes an accessible question once we realize that
knowing anything, including science, becomes a matter of subsidiary-focal
integration, not of absolute certainty.
INTERPERSONAL
RECIPROCITY:
The Knowing event seems to involve a reciprocity between the
Knower and the Known. Based on the Polanyian construal, Covenant Epistemology
sees the contours of a person in the Knower, the contours of a person in the
Known, and the contours of an interpersoned relationship in the Knowing:
Knower:
While in general all animals possess sophisticated awareness, only humans
pursue and embrace truth responsibly with universal intent, in submission to
self-set accreditation and standards; and also encourages further inquiry into
the known, along with a "society of explorers" in community.
Polanyian epistemology reinstates the person into the process of knowing. But this
is because only a person (as opposed to an automaton) has a reality rich enough
to combine in a full blend all these aspects of knowing.
Known:
Polanyi said of reality as "that which may manifest itself indeterminately
in the future." When a person makes any discovery (or makes any kind of
focal integrations), the achievement possesses an "ontological
aspect," i.e. the knower possesses an an accompanying sense of the
possibility of 'Indeterminate Future Manifestations." (the IFM Effect, an
acronym coined by Meek). It points us to a sense of hidden dimensions that we
can sense, but not name. This confirms to us as knowers that we have made
contact with reality, connected with the real. It can feel as if the knower's
questions are exploded, not explained. The knower can feel as if he/she is the
one being known, that we are being drawn into a relationship we can't govern or
control, and we can feel the grace of the reality's self-disclosure, that it
was not my wizardry, but the entity's generous choice to grant insight. Along
with my questions, I too am changed. When we keep inquiring, we keep knowing-
there is reciprocity in knowing when there is somebody at both ends of the
exchange.
Knowing:
Knowing is like a dance: overture, response, overture, response- a rhythmic
reciprocity of growing understanding and movement. Our participating in it
involves our subsidiarily sensing our own personhood and in some sense that of
the other, and comporting ourselves in such a way as to enhance these in
tandem.
THE KNOWING EVENT AS
TRANSFORMATION
Meek draws on the work of James Loder, who wrote the book ‘The Transforming Moment’ about
convictional knowing, existential experiences which the Christian has of God.
He builds on Polanyi’s subsidiary-focal integration, and says we have this
integrative dynamism because (1) it taps into our humanness, (2) it is rooted
in human development, and (3) human knowing prototypes,
anticipates and actually is an instance of being graciously
accepted by God.
Loder says knowing is a transformative event, and involves a
five-step sequence, which he attributes to all knowing, including scientific,
aesthetic and therapeutic knowing:
(1)
It begins with conflict in context, which is a rupture in our knowing
context. Before it happens we experienced an equilibrium of coherence and were
amiably making sense of things, but when it happens (through the body, world or
normative dimensions), we experience conflict, prompting us to urgently seek a
deeper coherence to restore equilibrium. We cannot know what we don’t care
about- as Meek said in the beginning, knowing begins with longing.
(2)
The next step is an interlude for scanning, in which we start to indwell the
conflicted situation with empathy for the problem, to search methodically for
clues to resolve the problem. Polanyi described this as using creative
imagination with intuition which gives a sense of increasing proximity to the
solution (a longing for the face of the Other).
(3)
Stage 3 is an insight felt with intuitive force, a constructive resolution
which reconstitutes the elements of incoherence (moving parts) and creates a
new, more comprehensive context of meaning.
(4)
Stage 4 is a release
of energy and repatterning, an aha moment, which releases the energy
bound up in sustaining the conflict. This is the knower’s response of opening
up herself or himself to the resolution. The knower now contemplates, as
Polanyi would say, “indeterminate future manifestations.” Loder says the
generative human spirit is the “uninvited guest in every meaningful knowing
event” and the dynamic that shapes them all.
(5)
Stage 5 is interpretation,
in which the knower relates her/his new vision back to the original conflict
and to gain its acceptance with the general public. Because the knowing event
has been transformative, the knower is passionately compelled to do this.
Loder argues that the “eikonic
eclipse”, our defective default that exalts rationalism to the status
of a ‘focal’ rather than relegating it to a ‘subsidiary’, is counter-productive
to true knowing and humanness.
On Mutuality and Reciprocity: Loder says that true
objectivity lies in mutual indwelling of both the subject and the object, not
being separate. The knowing event has a dyadic (an I and a You) as well as a
cooperative aspect, in which the reciprocity is not heavy-handed or
controlling. The knower comes to know himself or herself in the fact of the
other. The prevailing paradigm of knowledge as being impersonal leads us to
overlook these personal and interpersonal dimensions.
Abraham Joshua Heschel suggested that unlike the Greeks who learn
in order to comprehend, the Hebrews learn in order to be apprehended- because
what transforms us is not a what, but a who. Teachers don’t teach information,
they teach themselves.
JOHN FRAME’S TRIAD OF
KNOWING
Covenant Epistemology builds from the above premises and is
based on the work of Reformed theologian, John Frame. His Calvinist antidote to
modernism serves to build its foundations. Three essential Christian tenets to
understand prior to delving into this:
1.
Creator-creature
distinction and its implications: God is ontologically independent,
needing no point of reference beyond himself, transcendent and is self-contained (in three persons, united,
co-eternal and equally ultimate); and the creation is ontologically dependent
on God. Because creation is dependent on him, every molecule or atom is his
creation, and speaks of him. This is termed general
revelation. This tenant about act of creation is not referring to the
question of origins in the scientific sense. The latter is a question (Let there be) is prescriptive, not
descriptive. It follows that every second of creation’s existence constitutes
God’s ongoing ‘let there be’-ing, i.e.
by virtue of a covenant relationship with him. Created entities have
distinctive characters, the “way they are supposed to be”. This is what I
understand as normative, a rule
standard or pattern.
2.
God as
Covenant Lord: From our understanding of ancient Near Eastern
covenants, the language of Scripture is covenant language, and the Covenant
head (the covenant partner who definitively shapes the covenant) is God
himself. God as Covenant Lord is both transcendent
and immanent -intimately present with
his creation in what Frame calls covenant solidarity. The heart of this is
knowing God as Lord and being in covenant with him. The goal of knowing God is friendship. Because God as the covenant
head shapes the covenant, the creation’s very existence is its covenant
response, even unintentionally as when the creation doesn’t believe in him. All
human action and knowing is covenant response. The relationship of the creation
to God is unmediated and intimate. Sin
is Scripture’s word for covenant rebellion. All of life is about knowing God.
Intimacy, praise, trust and obedience are intentional covenant responses to
him.
3.
Humans
as two-way representatives: Humans represent God to creation as agents
(imago dei) and also represent
creation to God. As imagebearers, we
are stewards reflecting God in a derivative way by caring for and nurturing
creation (called the cultural mandate).
Human knowing is stewardly, covenant response. Therefore, all human knowing is
profession or confession, something that integrally requires a stance of
belief. This is because our knowing is derivative, and distinct from God’s
divine knowing. It is not appropriate to say that God has the truth, but that
God is truth. Our job as knowers is not to get it right, but to know God
intimately as the truth or ‘in troth’,
as Parker Palmer would say.
Frame frames knowing God as
covenant Lord a triad: (1) knowing his authority,
expressed in his law (or in the Meekian
contrual, the normative word), (2)
his control in his works (the world),
and (3) in his presence in ourselves as knowers (the body). This triad evocatively aligns with other triads in
Scripture- prophet (authority), priest (presence) and king (control); the
persons in the Trinity- the Father (as the Law giver, representing authority),
the Son (his incarnation bringing him into the world among us, representing
control) and the Holy Spirit (his ministry as God with us, representing
presence). God’s ongoing creative act involves him in all 3 ways: he words
interpretively the world into existence; he thus controls all of it; and he is
present with it in sustaining it. Our every epistemic act involves all three of
these dimensions, distinguishable but never separable.
All this has 3 correlativities:
(1) Knowing the world is correlative with
knowing God (since God is covenant Lord, there is nothing in the world we
cannot now without knowing God- the world reveals God as authoritatively as
Scripture does); (2) Knowing the world is
correlative with knowing the self, as well as with knowing a standard
(since knowing involves indwelling the subject and the object according to
standard criterion, we covenantally interpret, whether using good or bad
interpretative frameworks); (3) Knowing
God is correlative to knowing oneself (as ontologically dependent beings).
MELDING FRAME AND POLANYI
Polanyi’s proposals help us
understand religious terms like faith and commitment. Martin Luther said at the
Diet of Worms, “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise.” Polanyi cites this as
expressing the act of upholding a truth claim by exercising great personal
responsibility, yet being simultaneously compelled by submission to reality. Commitment here is a “manner of disposing
ourselves”, our personal assimilation whereby we press an existing framework
into subsidiary service, indwelling it to extend ourselves in pursuit of the
yet-to-be-known. Commitment refers to the clues we indwell subsidiarily in
pursuit of a focal pattern. Faith is just what we do in knowing, an epistemic act
engendered by commitment.
Polanyi paints the picture of a
scientist in pursuit of an as-yet-undiscovered reality. He raises Plato’s
awkward Meno Dilemma, which the
western tradition has not yet satisfactorily answered. How do you come to know?
We either know something or we don’t. if we do, we don’t need to move toward
knowing it. If we don’t, we cannot move toward knowing it. To Meek, the dilemma
only confirms that there is more to knowing than we are able to articulate-
there must be anticipative knowledge.”
Polanyi concludes that the paradigmatic case of the scientific knowledge is the
knowledge of an approaching discovery, where a discoverer is filled with a
compelling sense of responsibility for the pursuit of a hidden truth, which
demands his services for revealing it- in other words, it demands his
commitment to a half-understood, but already revealing reality.
This makes
sense of how one can look back on how she may have known God even before coming
to know God. When she does come to now God, she may experience surprising
recognition and find herself the one having been known. Catholic mystic Simone
Weil said in her essay, ‘Forms of the
Implicit Love of God’, that there must be some kind of love of God going on
in people before they come to realize they are loving God, including in their
love of beauty, true friendship and care of neighbor.
Polanyi said all knowing is perspectival. In the Framean triad, one
may view truth from the normative
(directions), situational (world) or existential (body) perspectives. We may
position ourselves at the situational and view the normative from there, or
view the existential from the situational. If we retain a sense of what we are
viewing from where, we can hold the two together in subsidiary-focal
integration. We can speak of revelation of God from nature, of nature from God,
of God from man, of man from nature, etc. Orienting ourselves in the from-to
delineation is the main thing. Christians often hold to the doctrine of antithesis, which says that humans can’t
be indifferent to God, but are either in submission to or in rebellion against
God, so an unbeliever’s stance is antithetical to a believer’s, and therefore
each side considers the other’s opinion as biased. Another, more optimistic
principle held by Christians is that of Common
Grace, the implication of which is that because God is Lord of all, it is
impossible for any human in rebellion to fully succeed at rebelling, lest we should
cease to exist (assuming God sustains every atom of reality)! To bring these
two together, God is like a magnetic true north. A compass pointing northward
may get pulled in wrong directions, in rebellion. Part of us points to God (common
grace), and part of us doesn’t.
COVENANT
Theologian Mike Williams offers
believers a coherent grasp of Scripture in his idea of the covenant as
unfolding relationship, such as the covenant of friendship or marriage (not a
mere economic contract). The Scriptures use this word (berith = covenant) 286 times, where the context is one of
friendship and God’s self-disclosure. These are the components of God’s
covenant:
Mutuality: Initiative and Purpose: God initiates it- this
initiative is sovereign and gracious (not earned), and we respond to it. This
interplay is the mutuality present in the covenant.
Historical: Yahweh works covenantally through history- the
covenant is historical but the past is retained as the relationship develops.
Promises and Obligations: Promises of loyalty and love, and
fulfilment of mutual obligations. God binds himself in covenant. In the
Biblical covenant, love and loyalty precede law and obligation. The obligatory
serves the relational. Covenant relationship is not conditional on the
obligation. Obligation proceeds from and in response to God’s sovereign initiative
(grace). The Law doesn’t create, but nourishes the relationship. A father’s
love for a son may be unconditional, but a son’s flagrant disobedience damages,
not nurtures, that relationship. The term Torah means fatherly instruction, in
compliance with which is found security and blessing and shalom. Relationship
is the context of the normative, not vice versa. What motivates God is not
desire for law-keeping, but desire for relationship. The law nurtures this
relationship.
Covenant Parties and Mediator: Why should the covenant characterize
our dealings with God? Because, God as triune is already 3 persons in
relationship. God’s character is relational. He created humans uniquely for
relationship and to image him in relationship. But he also created all creation
to be bound covenantally to him- the creation account in Genesis (‘Let there be’) shows they are covenanted
into existence. But a feature of covenants is that there is a mediator,
responsible to embody and bring covenantal promises and obligations to
fruition. Humans are designated as agents of God (imagebearers) to care for his creation and to reveal God to
creation, to cultivate and voice its praise of him. As humans rebelled, God
himself provided a perfect mediator in Jesus, fully God, fully in perfect
submission to him, not in rebellion, but fully human, the “second Adam”. Since
creation and culture, including human knowing, have been radically bent by
rebellion (sin), Jesus’ atonement therefore is central to the renewal of all things (Jesus’ term for
it). A human caring for a rose bush is also responding covenantally to God, and
mediating his covenant of creation in preserving and developing it.
Not Ascent but Descent: The motion or trajectory of Biblical
covenant (unlike what most religions say and many Christians think) is not the
first motion of the knower/worshipper ascending
to God. It is God descending to us. He descends to covenant creation into
existence, to sustain every atom in every moment, to dwell among his people, in
the Incarnation, and in the eschaton,
the last state- the renewal of all things. The pattern of redemption and the
initiative of covenantal relationship is the descent of God.
Tacit but Palpable: Covenantal bonds are often tacit, but
palpable. If something looks amiss at my neighbor’s house when she is out of
town, I check it out. We trade services, care for each other’s kids. We bind
ourselves to faithfulness of a different sort or level, not mediated by law.
Friendship is one of the richest covenants, and rare. Deep friendship is
intimate covenant love. Intimacy is a mutual self-disclosing, resembling the
reciprocity of a dance. It is most palpable when a covenant is broken. Unlike a
contract it is difficult to tell when this happens, and can be disputed by one
of the partners. The violation may be subtle but is palpably felt. The
relationship, not prescriptive actions, makes it covenantal.
Covenant Blessing and Covenant Curse: Scripture indicates
that construing human-divine dealings covenantally leads us to expect that
keeping the covenant brings shalom, and violating it brings curse as a
consequence. Similarly, human knowing could either bless or curse. Knowing responsibly brings blessing. Knowing
irresponsibly brings a curse. In our interactions with the world too, we can
bless or curse according to how we know.
INTERPERSONHOOD
This section delves into the
concept of interpersonhood, a
term coined by Meek, based on John MacMurray’s works. What makes a person? Substantivalism reduces the
description of any reality, including humans, into a substance-attribute
statement, like ‘a human is a rational animal’. This is an impoverished
perspective of persons. Just as all knowing is interpersonal, personhood itself
is interpersonal. Even knowledge understood under an impersonal paradigm
requires communication so to be verbally articulated, needing more than one
person. To transfer the task of logic from the analysis of thought to the
analysis of language requires recognizing the mutuality of the personal and its
implication, the primacy of action. If language is fundamental to human
existence, then the personal cannot be understood in simply organic categories,
i.e. that human is an organism. Rather, the self is an agent.
Macmurray wrote that we cannot
have an egocentric starting point, construing the Self as the ‘Self-as-Thinker’, of which
Descartes’ cogito is typical. From
this, no account of the personal is possible. He argues we should be construing
the Self as ‘Self-as-Agent’,
or replace ‘I think, therefore I am’, with ‘I do, therefore I am’- in other
words, move the center of gravity from thought to action. Action by definition
is modifying the world with the rational intent to do so. Action is relational
and needs an agent to perform. The agent is necessarily in relation with the
Other. The Other in this relation must be personal. Therefore persons are
constituted by their mutual relations to each other. ‘I’ is only one component
of this relationship of mutual interpersonal ‘You and I’.
Interpersonal communication
precedes language, as in the case of a newborn needing care and attention, and
is comforted by the presence of a caregiver. The child’s first knowledge is the
recognition of the Other as “the person
or agent of the Person in whom we live and move and have our being.” We are
born not fundamentally to an organic existence, but a humanly personal one, as
in the case of a mother and child relationship. We never grow out of being
persons in relation. We don’t go off to live among trees when we grow up, but
we join churches, we have families and friends. The human experience is shared
experience, human life is a common life, human behavior is always in reference
to a personal Other. The knowledge of the personal Other is the starting point
of all knowledge, presupposed at every stage of subsequent development, and the
absolute presupposition of all knowledge.
The human child’s first cognition
of the Other, not of herself or himself, which comes secondarily, as
foundationally connected to the Other, correlated in mutuality, both
subordinated to and constitutive of
the Other. Macmurray links action (both moving
and thinking are part of this) to the
baby’s knowledge of the personal Other. To move
is to modify the Other, and to know/think
is to apprehend the Other. But he says the thinking is constitutive and subordinated to the doing. The theoretical
standpoint is constitutive of the
practical. In other words, what we think of as knowledge relates as a negative
and constitutive aspect to a larger, positive, personal and interpersoned
reality. The reason why he considers thinking to be negative is that in
thinking we retreat from the apprehension of the Other. This is not negative in
the sense that it is bad- but that even though it is needed and vital, because it
constitutes a withdrawal to our own thoughts, it is less real. What is real is
activity in contact with the Other- touch over imagined vision. In other words,
to move from the personal to the impersonal is depreciative, negative, not
positive, it is de-personalization.
We should not start with the impersonal, and then personalizing or
personifying. The impersonal presupposes the personal, and never the other way
around. Even so, in thinking, the ‘I’ can never depersonalize itself. The
science itself cannot account for the scientist. Therefore, the theoretical
standpoint should never be taken to be the original, it should be understood as
being constituted within the personal.
[VJ
Comments: My own question at this point: Is thinking truly one-dimensional in a
Christian view? Isn’t the Other an active participant? I think I understand
what Macmurray is driving at here, but will keep this thought warm until it is
answered.]
Macmurray says whether God exists
is not the question we should be asking, rather it is ‘Is what exists
personal?’ The answer is yes, based on 3 axioms: (1) We live in and belong in
the world, and we ourselves are personal, and the world that contains us must
be construed to be personal. An impersonal world cannot contain the personal.
(2) In an impersonal conception of the world, everything “happens”, they are
never “done”. There is no meaning to action in such a world- a scientific place
has no place for the scientist, and would be an unreal imaginary world, in
which we ourselves would cease to exist. A world without persons is not the
real world. (3) “I” and “You” are correlative. In action the existence of the
self and the Other in practical relation are given. The rule governing the
process with which I seek to determine the character of the Other is this: I
must see to determine myself and the Other reciprocally by means of the same
categories. Thus, the Other is agent as well, and so personal. The world is one
action, and its impersonal aspect is the negative, subordinated aspect. To
conceive the world in this way is to conceive it as the act of God, and
ourselves as created agents.
[VJ
Comments: These axioms seem to me to be the
same- we ascribe meaning to actions. A geologist looking at a piece of rock is
not just recording data. The recording is subordinated to a meaningful act,
that of creative and anticipative discovery which has meaning only in a
personal world]
Polanyi (a scientist), says Meek,
may agree with Macmurray on all but one point- that scientific practice- even
the theoretical exercise- involves the personal as much as the baby’s awareness
of the Other. For Macmurray, action cannot be fact because action involves
intention, and what is intended is always future. Polanyi says that which
confirms we have made contact with reality is the intimation of unspecifiable
future prospects. This means that knowing on the Polanyian account has the same
open-endedness to the future as action does for Murray.
Overlaying Polanyi and Macmurray with
the Framean triad, one may say that what humans do is only what servants
(creatures, imagebearers, stewards) “do”. In other words, “knowing”, as
stewardship, doesn’t simply “happen”, but is “done” coram Deo (in God’s presence). Knowing intimates the presence of
God.
MARTIN BUBER’S “I AND THOU” AND “THE PRESENT”
Meek introduces early 20th
Century intellectual, Martin Buber, whose influential book, “I and Thou”
discussed similar concepts to Macmurray. He said a human orients to the world
in 1 of 2 ways at a time, “I-It” and “I-You”. In the “I-It” way, we relate to
the world objectively, as to “something”. In “I-It”, the subject “I” is the
ego, which “experiences” the world. An experience
is something that the subject “I” has internally, subjectively. It distances
the object “It” from “I”. In the “I-You” mode of existence, “I” don’t experience “You”, but encounter it. In the encounter, I
behold, confront and commune with it. In the encounter, “You” and “I” are
present to one another in an enduring
present; and each acts on the other. The action is self-giving. Each says
“You” to the other. All actual life, says Buber, is encounter. In “I-It”, “I” says “this is how I am”. In “I-You”, “I”
says, “I am”. For Jewish (as Buber was) or Christian believers, the resonance
of “I-You” with God’s name “Yahweh” (I am)
cannot be missed. Mike Williams says when God reveals his name to his people he
was not making a dispassionate metaphysical statement, but is saying, “I am the
One who is present to you, and there for you.” Buber’s translator and student,
Walter Kauffman, said, “The only possible relationship with God is to address
him and be addressed by him, here and now (or Buber says, in the present). For [Buber], the Hebrew name of God… means he is
present… he is there… he is here.” Buber asserts that in calling God Father,
Jesus teaches his disciples to do the same, evoking “I-You”.
Buber links the experience of the present,
and of being present, together in the “I-You” encounter. He says the actual and
fulfilled present exists only in encounter. Only as You becomes present,
presence comes into being. By contrast, “I-It” only has a past. Buber says in
the “I-You”, “You” fills not only time, but also space. He fills the firmament.
There is a timelessness and a transcendence. So the “I-You” involves, being
there, or being “at home”. Also, he says, “The
You encounters me by grace- it cannot be found by seeking. But that I speak the
basic word to it is a deed of my whole being, it is my essential deed.”
In addition to this, Buber
concludes like Macmurray does, that to be human is to stand in relation to a
You. This suggests that we are both persons and also in need of full-fledged
personhood. It takes a You to bring us into full personhood. Buber says this
occurs over time through relationships.
Buber says that the I-You
encounter can occur in any involvement with the world, such as with nature.
There is nothing I “must not see” in order to see. I do not turn away from the
ordinary to see the extraordinary. How mistaken to think we must turn away from
the world to encounter God, he says. But he says it is not that the world
merely is God, only that we encounter the You where and when we are, in this
space and time. It is just a different manner of relating to what is there, and
is neither mystical nor beyond our reach.in fact it centers our being, the
orientation closes to where we are. The I-You encounter brings existential
change, transformation. In this the “I” has come to a maturity of
self-awareness, at home with itself, and can confront the world, stand its
ground in the encounter, while consenting to the being of the Other.
Meek emphasizes that this
framework for covenant epistemology, combining insights from Polanyi, Frame,
Macmurray, Williams and Buber so far, is not meant to uphold a pantheistic
view. She says one cannot espouse a pantheism to affirm the creative richness
and mystery of reality created by an infinitely rich God, a reality so rich
that its richness reveals God.
Buber adds a helpful insight- The
I-You encounter is not expected to last, rather it advances a developing
relationship of overture and response (I-It, I-You, I-It, I-You…). But we are
expected to bring the I of I-You into all our I-Its, so when we encounter the
You, we say with the newness of anticipation, “So it’s You”.
[VJ
Comments: This section reminds me of Annie
Dillard’s comments on Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s book on Dr.
Paul Farmer: “[It] unfolds with the force of gathering revelation”. Something
about truth, revealed in fiction or a life narrative has this sense.]
Meek adds that all this has
implications for how we learn. We
learn in community, so serious study should not be an insular, solitary
practice, but instead like that of the Rabbinic tradition. “Make thee a master,
get thee a companion and a judge,” says Pirke
Aboth, the sayings of the fathers. Both a master guide as well as companion
learners are needed- these are our ‘covenant
friends’.
RETURN TO LODER
Meek returns to James Loder. She
had previously discussed several of his insights, including the 5 stages of
knowing (Conflict in Context; Scanning; Insight Felt with Intuitive Force; Release;
Interpretation). Loder adds another (higher level) layer of 4 items which he
designates as existential experiences that a person has of the Holy Spirit: the
Knowing Event, Four Dimensions of Humanness; Convictional Knowing; and Human
Development. The first 5 categories (stages of knowing) detailed the Knowing
Event, the first item of this higher layer. The other 3 items are below:
Four Dimensions of Humanness: These exist prototypically in
us from birth, but full-fledged four-dimensionality is something to be
developed, therefore it is possible to be human and not-yet-fully-human. Also,
remarkably, Loder says to be fully human, one needs both an experience of the
void, as well as an experience of the Holy. Dimension 1 is embodiment in a
composed environment (Loder calls this the world, but it includes our
situatedness in it- the lived world). Dimension 2 is the Self. Loder says it is
common for humans to live in these first 2 dimensions. This two-dimensionality
reflects our common everyday activities, school, job, family, fun, career
success and so. These are weak in comparison to the third dimension. Dimension
3 is the possibility of annihilation, the potential and inevitable absence of
one’s being- “the void”, the threat
of non-being, the implicit aim of conflict, absence, loneliness, death,
near-death experiences, crises of faith, mid-life crises and many other factors
beyond our control. The void is implicit the moment the lived world is ruptured
and the process of transformational knowing begins. It initiates the struggle
to know, and not necessarily evil in itself, but that which evil, in our bentness, is sometimes the only possible
way to bring us to understand. Dimension 4 is the Holy. The earlier 5 stages of
the Knowing Event can be juxtaposed against these 4 dimensions (‘Conflict in Context’ takes place in the
lived world and self-as-ego; ‘Scanning’
in the void; Insight and Release and Interpretation in the Holy). The Holy is
the reason why we don’t give up living in the face of the void. On the verge of the chasm of the void, we experience the
gracious reversal of its undertow. The Holy is the manifest Presence of being-itself transformed and restoring
human being as it recomposes the world in the course of transformational
knowing, like the self, anchored on the
Rock. This includes the conversion experience but is not limited to it- every act of coming to know is a grappling
with the void and embracing the Holy.
Convictional Knowing: The Holy Spirit, in gracious
complementarity with the human spirit, often takes knowing events (they are his
medium) and transforms the transforming
into convictional knowing events.
This is only possible through the redeeming knowledge of Christ, but other
transforming events are proximate forms and participate sacramentally insofar
as they are visible forms of that invisible and infinite truth. Loder says that
at the central of a knowing event is a nonrational intrusion of a convincing
insight. The knowing event is a prototype of knowing God. This transformative
knowledge of Christ is experienced repeated in the Eucharist, which may take
the following corresponding steps to the stages of knowing: (1) I am in the
world (conflict in context), (2) I need rescue from sin and death (scanning),
(3) Jesus plunges in and undoes the Void with his fullness (insight), and (4) I
respond and enjoy communion with him (release and interpretation). Loder adds
that this convictional knowing is not what is envisioned in Eastern religions-
for one, the end result is the communion of two persons, not one- the
consummate Christian experience is God with
us, not God is us. Second, Loder
shows how Jesus’ walk with his unnamed disciples on the Emmaus Road and
breaking the bread illustrates the convictional knowing event on all four
dimensions of humanness, and centers it firmly on the Eucharist.
Human Development (or, The Face of the Other): Loder
challenges typical accounts of human development, in which only the first two dimensions
of humanness (the lived world and the self) are considered, which he says is
damagingly false, and needs to consider the void and the Holy. Without these,
it suffers from a loss of Face, and
hence its denial of person-centeredness. Loder’s account showcases the face of
the Other. He typifies this in the example of a child, in which (1) the infant
responds to the presence of a Face with a smile (context), then senses the absence of the Face (conflict), throughout life, experiences the primal longing for the
Face that will not go away (scanning),
recenters the personality in the Face of the Other (insight and release), and the ego is miraculously transformed into
a self that gives love (interpretation).
Loder also says that in the process of human development, there is danger on
every side- on one side, abandonment, or a lecherous or some other sort of gaze
that induces shame, and on the other side, development into idolatry, in which
the person tries to make the other person into the missing face of God. In our
bentness, anything can go wrong and it takes time to recover and heal. Some may
become unbelievers. But when healing comes, it takes the form that Loder
describes. The Aaronic benediction reflects this: “The Lord bless you and keep you; The Lord make his face to shine upon
you and give you peace; The Lord lift his countenance upon and be gracious to
you.”
THE TRANSFORMATIONAL LOGIC OF THE COVENANT DRAMA OF REDEMPTION
Loder says that he would like to
see someone explore transformational logic as the key to Biblical narrative,
not just in the cases of individual or communal transformation, as with the men
on Emmaus Road, or Paul on his way to
Damascus, or Thomas, but the way we tell the whole story as Yahweh’s redemptive
relationship with his people. In Reformed circles, this takes the narrative of
Creation (context), Fall (conflict and scanning), Redemption (insight and
release), Restoration or consummation (interpretation) and
Mission (my addition- this may be part of interpretation). This
pattern is evident throughout the Bible, typified in the Exodus narrative as
the Israelites cross the Red Sea and the
Egyptians face the void in terror, and Yahweh frees his people in such a way
that they actually have a choice to respond to him in love- giving a prototype
of what central redemptive act in Christ would look like. Again, Christians
speak of the time between Christ’s first and second as the “already and not
yet”, that is, the void, longing, and beginning of transformation. People have
said in jest, “It’s turtles all the way
down” of cosmogony. What Meeks says here is, “It’s relationship all the way down- and all the way along.”
A SENSE OF PERSONAL BEAUTY AND THE I-YOU ENCOUNTER
A sense of personal beauty
is a kind of self-knowledge, arising from a successful knowing event, available
to all human beings- both as humans in relationship and especially for those
who have been redemptively known by God. It comes in the generous, self-giving
gaze of another person. Loder explicitly links beauty with the experience of
convictional knowing. This is God’s gift, a quality of completeness, a sense of
no lack. Knowing brings beauty out of chaos. Also, as the person is constituted
in the gaze of the other, the person takes on “the character of being”. This must be what the woman at well in
Samaria experienced, in the face of Jesus. It was the noticing regard, not the
naming of her sins, which caught her attention. [VJ
Comments: And, I think, for Martha’s sister, Mary, the tax collector Levi,
Zacchaeus, Peter and others who were called by Jesus.]
John and Staci Eldredge argue that
every little girl asks a haunting question, “Am I lovely?”. From her father in particular, for the sake of her
lifetime wholeness, she needs an affirmative response. But this sense of
personal beauty is needed by all humans, and it is never too late to re-center
a life through an I-You encounter. Simone Weil asserts that in our human acts
of creative attention we image God the Creator.
SCHNARCH’S DIFFERENTIATION AND RIESMAN’S AUTONOMOUS PERSON
Psychologist David Schnarch talks
about ‘differentiation’, a process of
maintaining ourselves in close interpersonal relationship. It involves grinding
off our rough edges through the normal abrasions of long-term intimate
relationships. The well-differentiated person has the ability to stay in
connection without being consumed by the other person, allowing each to
function more independently and interdependently. It means going forward with
one’s own self-development while being concerned about the other’s well-being.
It moves forward through holding on to one’s self of self in intense, emotional
relationships. Schnarch alludes to a mysterious spiritual element in this,
asking, “What is this trial by fire is
the integrity-building path of differentiation?” People whose identity is
inappropriately dependent upon their relationship don’t facilitate the
development of those they love.
Sociologist David Riesman
described the distinguishable social characters he termed “inner-directed“ and “other-directed”.
Inner-directed societies tend to acquire early in life an internalized set of
goals, to which they conform. This happens in transitional (not traditional)
societies. In Other-directed societies, people tend to be sensitized to the
expectations and preferences of others, to which they conform (typically in
societies of incipient population decline). Riesman says that though
Other-directed personalities may seem less desirable than Inner-directed ones,
they are both flawed. The former may have internalized something as much as the
latter, who may really be other-directed. Independence is really
“in-dependence”. In place of these categories, Riesman advocates the autonomous person, for whom autonomy is a heightened
self-consciousness which enables her/him to orient with respect to the
connectedness while transcending it (similar to Schnarch’s idea of
differentiation), or in other words, to operate in a social order without being
part of it.
PERICHORESIS
Paradoxes: Trinitarian theologians, especially John
Zizioulas and Colin Gunton, link ‘interpersonal
personhood’ with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. They say that the
Trinity is best understood as persons on relation, and if we profess the
Trinity as the ultimate reality, then humans as beings-in-communion reflect
this original. Gunton aspires to bring cultural and societal healing with his
proposed cosmic dynamism of perichoresis
(relationship of the three persons of the Trinity). To that end he attempts to
diagnose and address the paradoxes of modernity. He is concerned about how the
human and non-human worlds are alienated from each other, resulting in crises
like environmental damage. Other paradoxes involve how modernity can be
committed to freedom, but ends in totalitarianism, how we could have so much
leisure and yet live at a frantic pace, and how at the end of a tradition
committed to truth and meaning can come to lose both. In his book ‘The One, The Three and The Many’, he
asks, what is reality fundamentally?
Ancient Greeks considered three alternatives. Is it fundamentally a monism (as
Parmenides said) - everything reduces to one immaterial, rational thing? Or is
it ultimately a pluralism (as Heraclitus said)- nothing reduces to anything, so
you have a plurality of ultimate things? Or is reality dual (Plato said), with
one part being one (immaterial and unchanging), and the other many (material
and changing)?
Platonic Thought: Some (not all) early Christian theologians
(such as Augustine) allowed Plato to shape their Christianity, rather than the
other way around. As a result, the God of Scripture was aligned with Plato’s
one, and material creation was deemed to be the many (plural) and accorded
little intrinsic value. The problem of the one and the many is that if you
overdo one the other disappears. In the modern era, people rejected the one.
Because of the early (and defective) Christian alignment of the one with the transcendent
God, they rejected him as the one. Gunton says much modern social and political
thought can be understood as the revolt of the many against the one, or
humanity against divinity, leading to the Enlightenment ascendancy of human
reason as the uniter of all. But this meant the human mind was now the immanent
one, set against the materiality of many, both bodies and the world.
Post-modern thought then inevitably rejected all forms of the one, immanent and
transcendent, in order to recover the many, in the process presuming to
celebrate the individual but reducing all individuals to relatively valueless
similitude. The ideal of the human mind has both endured and self-destructed,
leading to paradoxes- the ideal of certainty in objective knowledge devolving
into suspicion, freedom disappearing into collectivism and bondage.
Trinitarian Perichoresis: Gunton makes a distinction between
individualism and particularity. The former is non-relational,
self-centered and mistaken today for freedom. The latter calls for a
fundamental understanding of reality, in which particulars receive their
fullest expression only in a freeing space accorded in their relation to one
another. Without the relationship, there is no freeing space, and no
opportunity for the particulars to be expressed. Gunton contends that this dynamic
is what we have in the Trinity. In creation God the Father spoke creation into
existence, but creation is also Christological
(involving Christ) and pneumatological
(involving the Holy Spirit). The Trinity is characterized by relation without
absorption. Their uniqueness is a function of their relatedness. Since creation
comes about and is sustained by the Son and Spirit, with the Father, creation
can be expected to bear the mark of this relational being. The concept that
evocatively captures this mutually constitutive being and diverse working is
the Greek word perichoresis (dancing
around). In this dance, Christ is the Logos
(word) spoken into time from eternity, and the immanent dynamic of meaning holding time and space together. The
Spirit enables boundary-crossing, the openness of one to the other, to be
shaped by the other. The Spirit also works to maintain, strengthen and develop
particularity, giving freedom in community (not in a collective), as the source
of autonomy, not homogeneity. We live in a perichoretic universe, sustained by
gift-giving. The unity of this dance showcases the particularity of each partner
in the dance, distinct and unique yet each inseparably bound with other (and
ultimately all) particulars, whether they are human or non-human. If the notion
of particularity seems strange to us, it is likely due to the exigencies of the
translation of Green into Latin. The Greek Christian Fathers used the word hypostasis to refer to particularity in
the Trinity. The Latin rendered this as substance,
misleading us to favor homogeneity over particularity. Knowledge was taken to
be universal in its oneness.
PERICHORETIC KNOWLEDGE
Following Gunton, for knowing to
be healthy, it should display this perichoretic dynamism.
Gunton associates foundationalism with modern monism, which devalues the particular
and lauds a homogenous universal certainty. He associates non-foundationalism with postmodern
pluralism, which in seeking to honor
particular perspectives, often reduces knowledge to fideism (or that knowledge depends on faith or revelation only).
Both approaches share the same presupposition of the false dichotomy between
the one and the many, and ignoring the relationality between them. He says we
need an account of knowledge that is both universal and objective, while
acknowledged to be the work of fallible human minds. Gunton agrees with Polanyi
and confirms the Framean mission of construing human knowing as a creaturely
endeavor. To say p is to say I
believe p. A truth claim is a truth claimed. However, this does not mean
privatizing truth. Polanyi develops a helpful approach- he speaks of holding
our beliefs responsibly, with universal intent. We must accept responsibility
for our claims, while at the same time we are also committing ourselves to
their truth, and to the conviction that anyone else in our position would be
able to see that they are true. This is a perichoretic and healing dynamic,
allowing for errors to be held as shaping our position rather than overturning
it.
CONTOURS OF COVENENTAL EPISTEMOLOGY
Summing up our understanding so
far, Meek offers the following:
1.
We in the West have a defective epistemic
default that needs reorientation.
2.
Knowing is subsidiary-focal integration, and
transformative. As such it can be seen to be fraught with the personed.
3.
Knowing has a normative dimension, which is
covenantal.
4.
Covenant metonymously references an interpersonal
relationship, which unfolds dynamically and is profoundly akin to
subsidiary-focal integration.
5.
Interpersonhood involves persons as
beings-in-communion, I-You encounters, the void-Holy dynamic, the face of the
Other, and perichoresis.
6.
The real is metonymously personal. As such it is
especially suited to being known by a knowing that is fraught with the
interpersoned.
Meek proceeds to outline Covenant
Epistemology in the standard manner in which epistemological proposals are
presented- involving the objects, source, nature and justification
of knowledge, even as such terms betray the defective default in such
proposals.
THE OBJECTS OF KNOWLEDGE: COVENANT REALISM, COVENANT ONTOLOGY
Meek says one of the most
important questions regarding knowing is whether in our knowing we access the
real. If the answer is no, then what we are doing is not knowing, and not worth
the effort. Answering yes is epistemic realism, and answering no is epistemic
anti-realism. Covenent Epistemology (CE) is a fresh way to espouse realism.
Anti-realists say that our epistemic efforts do not access an independently
existing objective world because our epistemic efforts are always shaped by our
interpretation. Meek says this is a non-sequitur, as simply because our knowing
is an interpretive, embodied, situated, traditioned viewpoint does not mean it
does not engage the world, but that it is precisely due to our
view-point-beachhead that we do access the world. Some anti-realists go even
further, arguing for extreme subjectivism
(I know only my subjective
viewpoint), relativism (What I take
to be true is only relative to my situation), or skepticism (What I “know” isn’t really knowledge, just opinion).
Critical realism, on the other hand, names the active contributions of the
human mind to knowing (following Immanuel Kant’s Critiques), the knower’s hermeneutic bent, social setting and other
qualifications concerning what we can’t really know of what reality in itself
is.
Covenant Realism: CE offers a fresh way to be a realist,
having reoriented the dichotomous default that opposes mind and body, emotion
and reason, knowledge and belief, etc.- and therefore, it is possible to take a
stand which doesn’t share the negative outlook of anti-realists or critical
realists. Meek proposes the term ‘Covenant
Realism’ (CR), which has the following theses: In our knowing, we access
the real- in fact, the real has transformative primacy in our knowing. Our
knowing relationship with the real displays covenantal features, which by
definition pertain in interpersoned relationship. Thus good knowing practices
involve covenantally interpersonal excellence, and is about mutual
transformation than about exclusively information-collecting. The goal if human
exchange with the world is not exhaustive certainty, but dynamic, mutually
healing communion. And finally, reality itself responds favorably to
covenantally appropriate overtures (not to criticism, but to covenant
faithfulness). The real is metonymously personal. Meek adds here that great
lovers make great knowers, because CE and CR see the real as one seeks a person.
Covenant Ontology: Everything that exists is covenantally
charactered- it has defining features that we must uncover and live
covenantally on the terms of in order to know it and bless it and us in the
process. This is the distinctive implication of a biblical vision of creation.
In this we are fundamentally engaged in love, care, friendship and fidelity.
Everything is thus covenantally constituted, in covenant relationship to its
Creator. Yet every real thing is itself and not another thing- it has its own
integral particularity, thanks to the asymmetric perichoresis that reflects the
Holy Trinity. The Real wants to be known, so we discover to our surprise that
far from being the ones coming to know, we are coming to be known. Someone Else
besides us is home in the universe. There is no corner where a recalcitrant
knower may hide from this possibility. [VJ Comment: I
recently saw a quote from Bertrand Russell, himself an objectivist: “Mathematics,
rightly viewed, possess not only truth but supreme beauty”. The truth that we
may not hide from the possibility of an encounter with the interpersoned Real
is brought home quite clearly]. Goethe’s hailing the rosebush – “So!
It’s You!”- indicates this penchant of the real to gracious self-disclosure. On
a biblical schema, that transcendent Other, the Somebody Else is Yahweh, the
triune God, who when we have sought him, we find he has been seeking us.
THE NATURE OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
(a)
All knowing is fraught with the interpersoned; (b)
Knowing is varyingly personal- it comes in 2 forms: one is explicitly
interpersonal (I-You), and the other is metonymously personal (I-It)- and by
calling knowing ‘varyingly personal’, Meek voices her creative synthesis of the
2 forms within an unfolding personal relationship studded with I-You
transformative moments over a knowing trajectory constituted by faithful
covenant over time; (c) All knowing is coming to know, a being on its way to
truth; and along the way, knowing may be anticipative and implicit, hinting
unspecifiably of more, surprising and deeper dimensions; (d) Knowing is
covenantally constituted, with active and shaping overtures that invite
reciprocally shaping self-disclosure of the real in response; (e) Knowing is
perichoretically rhythmical- more than one pair is perichoretically balanced:
relationality and particularity, love and covenant, knower and known, overture
and response; (f) Knowing is Subsidiary-Focal transformative integration; (g)
Knowing transforms both the knower and known.
(b)
In addition to the above characteristics of
knowing, this understanding of knowledge has some corollaries: (a) Knowing is
knowing God, knowing the world and knowing the Self; (b) All knowing is
‘knowing with’; (c) Human knowing is creaturely knowing (not divine knowing)-
it involves no ultimate or absolute anchor of certainty, but nevertheless
(actually not nevertheless, but because of this) is capable of responsible
stewardship of the real.
(c)
CE challenges the default epistemic challenges
raised in the beginning of the book which deals in false dichotomies between:
(a) Knowledge and Belief (Belief just
is the epistemic act, the risky, responsible, inspired act of coming to know);
(b) Knowledge and Opinion (To the
extend that a distinction between responsible and irresponsible knowing is
envisioned, we are called to stewardly, wholistically expert, knowing for
shalom; (c) Fact and Value (Apart
from value, the responsible, interpretive commitments of the knower, and the
knower’s noticing which assigns value to certain clues, there are no facts; (d)
Fact and Interpretation
(interpretation unlocks the real, and is the same as facts); (e) Reason and Faith (CE recasts reason to
involve integrally responsible submission to the not-yet-fully-known, i.e.
faith); (f) Reason and Emotion: Not
all emotion is discussed, but implied emption like longing and desire
constitutively drive effort to know, and is intertwined in CE with reason; (g) Science and Art (Where the knowing event
is recognized to be transformative, scientific acts of discovery and artistic
acts of creativity are in substance the same). Meek similarly reconciles other
seeming opposites- such as Male and
Female (while insisting on their particularity and complementing natures); Objective and Subjective; Theory and Practice; Appearance and Reality; Mind and Body, and many others.
THE
SOURCE OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
Typical introductions to epistemology list
the sources to knowledge as being reason (rationalism),
sense perception (empiricism), and
sometimes utility (pragmatism). Testimony is often dismissed (following
Kant’s Sapere Aude!- Dare to be wise)
as being a source in childhood, meant to be superseded in adulthood. CE
redefines both the rational and the empirical in a manner profoundly consonant
with testimony.
Proximate
Sources: CE acknowledges a rough correspondence among the 3 dimensions
of sources- the world, the lived body and the normative (also corresponding to rationalism, empiricism and testimony).
But CE integrates and transforms each of these to be a different sort of
collaborative enterprise. CE understands these dimensions to be not ultimate or surefire sources, but only proximate sources, sources only as we
relate to them subsidiarily. They are not sufficient
conditions or efficient causes, for knowing
is never linear or guaranteed. We steward what we have, humbly groping in
the direction of the longed-for integration. But when it comes, it comes from the
“outside”. Meek says this leads her to suggest there are 2 different sort of
sources, which she terms Candidacy
and the Intrusion of the Other.
Candidacy:
Knowledge is not to be derived from sources, so much as graciously disclosed in
response to covenantal candidacy, the
effort to put ourselves “in the way of
knowing”, by creatively indwelling clues. Meek says that we may “invite the
real” through covenantal behavior, which she expounds on later. The question is
not, where do I get knowledge, but how do I comport myself to invite it? Source is an ill-fitted word to express
transformative knowing.
The
Intrusion of the Other: There is something in the dynamism of knowing
to which the word source applies
radically, but it isn’t the knower. The transformative aspect of knowing leaves
us with the palpable sense that the we did not instigate the knowing event
except in a stewardly way, and the source was the Other. Loder says of this, ”the
self is caught in the act of knowing.” He further aphorizes, “the truth always exceeds the proof.”
Meek says we need not despair that we cannot define a source the way we do for
other epistemological proposals. There is something we can do- it takes the
form of covenantal self-binding, i.e. we can invite the real. When we do, the
Real discloses itself lavishly.
THE
JUSTIFICATION OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
Justification of knowledge concerns the
ways it is appropriate that we accredit a claim as knowledge. In the
contemporary analytic tradition, this area has been the all-encompassing
pursuit of epistemologists, and reflects the contexting of knowledge as
explanation (rather than as discovery), complete with statements and proofs,
and implies that personal allegiance to truth claims be withheld pending
thorough justification. CE challenges these assumptions by reconstruing what
knowledge is. Philosophers explore correspondence, coherence and pragmatic
responses. Respectively, justification requires evidential support, coherence
with other knowledge claims and workability. Other approaches also broach
factors such as internal conviction, virtue and social support. CE doesn’t
reject these, but qualifies them. CE, following Polanyian epistemology, and
consonant with the Christian profession that human knowers are creatures, is fallibilist. Fallibilism affirms that
what we at one point consider true may be possibly false or in need of a
revision- for CE, this is nota shameful label, but courage enacted. This
doesn’t leave us in a void of skepticism either, but we are unleashed
responsibly to engage the world.
Allegiance
and Obligation are Prior to and Throughout Justification: Rather than
knowing in order to love, we love in order to know. Obedience, especially in
the anticipative dark before the dawn, precedes understanding, not vice versa.
Allegiance is sacrosanct and incorrigible (even if it is to be revised
continually in our apprehension of the real). Where knowledge is credo prior to
commitment, there is no knowledge to be had. This makes CE not simply a viable
alternative, but the only alternative.
Discovery
is Prior to Justification: The transformative moment of insight is the
thing without which prefatory clues not only do not make sense but cannot even
be designated as clues. Discovery must in some respect be prior to
justification. Justification is what Polanyi called destructive analysis- a reflective return (from communion) to focus
on that which, only when we rely on it, prompts the integrative transformation.
[VJ Comments: Meek comments on this throughout the
book, but I brought it in only here- while Polanyi considers knowing to take
place along the 3 dimensions he mentioned, he talks about a temporary inward
focus to take stock, which justifies knowing after it has taken place.]
Destructive Analysis, in bike riding, would me memorizing the physics formula
that describes how we keep balance on the bike.
Contact
with Reality: With the onset of a transformative apprehension of a
pattern, there are 2 indicators that affirm we have made contact with reality:
(1) the first is retrospective- we sense the profundity of the pattern, and our
collection of clues are shown to be superseded in depth by this pattern, so the
insight reshapes our questions; (2) the second is anticipative or prospective-
discovery is accompanies by and attested to by the intimation of the
possibility of a wide range of as yet unspecifiable prospects. Both the above 2
criteria (retrospective and prospective) are informally gauged. At its root,
justification is informal.
INVITING
THE REAL (OR, AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL ETIQUETTE)
Meek savors this last chapter of the book
and says this is the one she has longed to write, and is at once a meditation
and a catechesis to form aspiring covenantal knowers. [VJ
Comment: I’m reminded of what the songwriter Sandra McCracken once said, “All
relationships begin with an invitation.” Whether it is the moment of conversion,
or the birth (and adoption by parents, whether biological or not) of a new
child, a covenant of marriage, or friendship, I think this is true. An
invitation seeks a response]. Meek’s inference that drives inviting
the real is as follows: the real behaves as a person, treat it personally and
hospitably, it will respond personally. She arranges the practices of
invitation into five loci: Desire, Composure, Comportment,
Strategy and Culmination.
Desire:
This encompasses the practices of longing and love. Longing (the passive component of desire) calls for the other to
give. Love (the active component) gives
oneself for the sake of the other. Christianity affirms that love is prior to
knowing, as Jesus showed the apostle Thomas. [VJ
Comments: This has long been my interpretation of 1 Corinthians, from chapter 8
(knowledge puffs up, but love builds up) through chapter 13-14 (then we shall
know even as we are fully known).] On longing, Simone Weil says, “…the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know
whether anything real answers its love… The soul knows for certain only that it
is hungry. The most important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying…
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but
lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.” Passive
longing is nevertheless anticipative and invites the real. Weil goes on to
argue that the right use of studies is to develop the kind of attention that
invites God, as the psalmist says in Psalm 63, “O God, you are my God, earnestly I see you; my soul thirsts for you; my
body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” This
is no mere longing for information, but for communion and transformation. On
loving, Meek says Love presumes that the real is lovely, or loveable or worth
loving. Love invites the real because the opposite, indifference, invites
falsehood.
Composure:
A key inviter of the real is ourselves- more specifically our selves having
become most fully ourselves, composed
as ourselves [VJ Comment: As CS Lewis talked about in
‘Till We Have Faces’]. This takes the following forms: (a) Before God: to be fully ourselves we
must have been composed, re-centered radically in the loving gaze of the Other.
For those who have been known by God, we know the Other is in fact God. Many
church fathers have said this, but there are a few things that suggest that
knowing God invites the real- the first is obvious and important: to know God
is to invite him. Humbly, with the realization that I have gotten it wrong
about him, I yet receive his assurance that I may feel confident about his
continual advent- or in other words, repentance and forgiveness. Second, he
self-discloses. Mike Williams says we only have to get a few Christian doctrines
right, not very many to be a Christian. It is not about our ascent, but God’s
descent. Third, the biblical drama of redemption will inexorably lead to the
renewal of all things, for which we receive a down payment- the Holy Spirit
leads us to be better knowers as better lovers- love of neighbor and love of
God stand together. Meek also broaches other points which I have not included
here, partly as they are repeated elsewhere. (b) Being at Home (Presence): This is a kind of self-awareness or
self-knowledge, a subsidiary composure as when one sits at the feet of a
teacher, a embodied and lived. (c) Differentiation,
as Schnarch defined it; (d) Personal
Beauty: Also, as mentioned earlier, this is a kind of self-knowing which
forms in the loving gaze of the Other; (e) Embodiment,
as mentioned earlier; (f) Openness (a
willingness, in the knowing, to be known in turn); Embracing Pain: Affliction is a given, especially for those who
desire to live authentically, and is closely linked to openness. Pain enables
us to better discover ourselves and can involve a shift from Cartesian
disembodiment to being in the body.
Comportment:
Similar to virtue, comportment identifies qualities of relating to the yet to
be known. This locus of practices includes: (a) Pledge, Covenant: Covenant includes keeping one’s promises, making
a pledge is covenanting- an
illocutionary act. Both making and sustaining the pledge is comportment that is
central to love. (b) Trust: We both
long for the Other and feel threatened by the Other. George Steiner describes
us as monads haunted by communion. Inviting the real requires a fundamental act
of trust, of risk and our openness to it- or as the medievals said, “Credo ut Intelligam- I believe in order to
understand”; (c) Obedience: To
know the truth we must follow it with our lives; (d) Humility: David Dark links humility with genuine readiness to know,
and involves acknowledging our fears and weaknesses; (e) Patience: Where knowing is an unfolding trajectory, and our
epistemic task is construed as inviting the real, the knower must sustain the
pledge over a lengthy period of time; (f) Saying
“You” and Listening: Meek talks at length about this- one of her
illustrations is about working at a mission in a small town, where she listened
as people told stories of their brokenness, and the Spirit opened their eyes to
find Christ.
Strategy:
Includes: (a) Being in the Way of Knowing:
Meek talks about the fact that before she had read Parker Palmer’s ‘The Courage
to Teach’, she knew to expect great reward. Being in the way of knowing is
planting oneself where you expect something to show up and expect joyous
insight; (b) Noticing Regard: Meek
talked earlier about how Jesus had noticing regard for the woman at the well.
She says one of the most provocative sentences in Scripture is when Jesus asks
her, “Will you give me a drink?” By asking this he puts himself and her on the
same level, inviting her initiative in response to his own need. Simone Weil
calls this ‘creative attention’, that which gives our attention to what does
not exist, or what is invisible. Noticing regard confers dignity. (c) Active Listening: Listening well, and
asking well-placed and well-attuned questions; (d) Listening beyond the categories: [VJ Comment: I’m not sure I understand
this well, but it involves listening to what we are not seeing, to a world of
unrealized possibility]. In David Dark’s words, “it serves to invest the
details of the everyday with cosmic significance while awakening its audience
to the presence of marginalizing forces otherwise unnamed and unchallenged.”;
(e) Indwelling: The culminating strategy to invite the real,
it refers to the way the lived body extends itself through the skilled use of
tools- the tool user both indwells and interiorizes the tools. It also refers
to the inherent unspecifiability of tacit knowledge, such that apprentice or
student must indwell master or teacher to come away with knowledge that is more
than the teacher (or the student) is able to specify. Loder says, “Knowing
anything is to indwell it and reconstruct it in one’s own terms without losing
the essence of what is being indwelt.” (f) Connected
Knowing: Blythe Clinchy, a developmental psychologist, says separate
knowing is a doubting procedure, while connected knowing is a believing one,
which looks to understand, not challenge. It looks for what is “right” even in
positions that seem initially wrong. It uses the self to understand the other.
(g) Seeing vs Looking: Looking is
disembodied and passive, across a space, non-interactive, objective scrutiny.
Seeing is active, interactive and interpretive. It is embodied, a phenomenon of
love, reveling. Meek asks, “Do you think that God looks at us, or sees us?
Would you rather be seen by him or looked at by him?” She suggests another line
of thought, about how humans mistreat each other, for instance the way in which
some men have treated women, or when Jesus described it as a “looking at a woman
to lust after her.” When we understand intimacy as seeing rather than looking,
this would mean some physical and sexual acts are the opposite of intimacy, the
perpetrators of alienation. To see is to delight and to co-delight with God.
David Bentley Hart writes, “Only in loving creation’s beauty- only in seeing
that creation is beauty- does one apprehend what creation is.”
Consummation:
Meeks asks how the consummation of knowledge could invite the real. She answers
this question by saying that it can, if
knowing is cast as a relationship. Friendship
and Communion thus count as
strategies to invite the real. Friendship is the consummation of knowing; or we
may describe the culmination of relational knowing as communion. It is, we may
say, more than “the logic” of gift and reception- it is the gift and reception, over an open-ended period of time. It is
the ongoing freshness of the Other. It is knowing and being known, the fully
actualized self-differentiated, perichoretic reflection of the Trinity. Meek gives
one last practice to invite the real: the
Eucharist. Meek says it is both the concrete paradigm of knowing as
described by CE, and the most strategic
primer of the pump of human knowing. For the Eucharist enacts a microcosm
of the creation-fall-redemption-restoration drama of biblical redemption, and
of Christ the Holy entering the void to deliver us to the gracious possibility
of new being, re-centering us to self-giving love. He invites us to the table
to eat what he provides, and he gives us himself. To partake, we must eat and drink (embodied intimacy and
mutual indwelling). The appropriate posture is to kneel to eat and drink (signifying the honored role of the giver,
your need for his generosity, and your readiness for the gift). The celebratory
ritual forms us in the posture. It also shapes us for the communion of knowing.
KNOWING
FOR SHALOM
This section is Meek’s afterword. Among the
insights she notes here is the fact that her introduction to CE is simply a
beginning, and we should think of ourselves as being pilgrims on the way, or as
Newbiggin put it, we are in the middle of the story. To say that knowing is
‘being-on-the-way-to-knowing’ is to accredit the journey as itself epistemic.
In our journeying, we are already living life on terms of the yet-to-be-known.
Echoing with one of the cries of the Reformation, semper reformanda, Meek coins the maxim ‘semper transformanda’- always transforming.
Meek says knowing should bring healing to
both the knower and the known. It should bless, bring shalom, rather than curse.
There is something more important than
understanding CE and knowing well- it is to be known by God. She calls this the
descent of God- the real comes unbidden, with fecundity, unrequested,
unanticipated, unmerited, by grace.
Meek quotes from the Book of Common
Prayer’s Prayer of General Thanksgiving, to talk about being unfeignedly
thankful to God:
“… give us that due sense of all thy
mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly
thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in
our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in
holiness and righteousness all our days…”
Enacting thankfulness opens our eyes to see
what is going on under our nose. It is being in the way of knowing. This too is
the descent of God. The point of celebration of the Eucharist is that God
himself comes and gives himself. All worship is in response to this.