In a recent edition of Scientific American, Dec, 2018, there is an article on “how to fix science.” An important component of that article, which follows up on the work of Adam Frank and others, is the idea that knowledge in the broadest sense must be public. Descriptions of reality that are un-communicated and therefore untested by those outside the scientific community can hardly be taken seriously as knowledge. The scientific method, which demands results that can be reproduced by more than one investigator, must be expanded to include communicating to and testing those results with those outside the guild. Scientific American itself is part of this process as its authors seek to explain current scientific knowledge to the general public.
But it is only part, and that is what the article recognized. The real test of scientific knowledge isn’t that it can be communicated by professionals for comprehension by amateurs. The real test is that it can be communicated to those entirely outside the guild and its methodologies and tested against the human experience of nature unshaped by scientific ways of knowing. Only then is there a pragmatic political result for the good. A scientific claim to know something that cannot be known publicly, however grounded in one’s well tested methodologies, is simply esotericism.
In many fields of knowing this idea that knowledge of reality is public is profoundly unsettling to communities that have taken for granted a cultural consensus around their core beliefs and practices. In the academic realm whole careers have been dedicated to mastery of a field of study confirmed by the guild of fellow researchers. To have an academic title and position in the modern university is essentially a claim to know things that the public doesn’t know and cannot know without reproducing the skills learned within the guild, whether it be the guild of natural science and its sub disciplines, or the guild of the arts, or humanities, or the social sciences. Or Christian theology.
The real test [of scientific knowledge] is that it can be communicated to those entirely outside the guild and its methodologies and tested against the human experience of nature unshaped by scientific ways of knowing. Only then is there a pragmatic political result for the good.
Christian theologians, like all of those engaged in the academic disciplines, typically pursue knowledge of the Christian faith in a framework dictated by the traditions of their guild for use in a wider Christian community that accepts that framework as both normative and authoritative. And if that is the limit of their knowing then I fear they don't know anything. There has been a breakdown in the process of communicating theological knowledge to the public and then testing it with what the public knows.
Indeed there is more than a breakdown. In some theological circles there appears a denial that theological knowing need be public knowing at all. In the previous blog I critiqued David Watson's apparent ignoring of natural revelation. Yet he does take up the possibility that God is speaking in a variety of ways, so long as "God's speaking is tested against what God has spoken in the past – and spoken through authoritative interpretation." And where is access to that authority for Watson? It is only through the Church which "interprets Scripture in dialogue with the church through the ages."
No knowing with the public
In short for Watson, and for those who self-identify as "orthodox" or "traditionalist" there really isn't any need to know with the public. If it is true "about God, human beings, and the world we live in," then the final authority is the Church's tradition of interpretation of scripture. The problem here is that Watson is essentially telling people what traditional Christianity has always told people: "our special revelation and tradition gives us a better knowledge of who you are than you have yourself or yourselves."
Now this might make sense to people if Christians restrict their pre-emptory knowledge to knowledge of what it means to be human to the human relationship with God. However, traditionalists aren't willing to be so limited. Their presumption extends to knowledge inward to the biological and psychological origins of human sexuality and outward to the nature of the human family.
The exclusive claim to speak authoritatively about the human person seems to be a view borne out across a much wider range of theologians who clearly communicate only for and within the guild and the larger church. And who teach only to create the next generation of acolytes on their way to guild altars.
I suspect that this has happened because there has arisen a Christian tradition that entering into the realm of knowing God, humanity, and God’s relationship to the world requires a special, esoteric quality called Christian faith. In short it demands that one know the world as the Christian community knows it before one can know it at all. In this view there simply is no natural revelation worth speaking of.
Evangelistic disaster
It is fairly obvious that in the United States this insistence that Christian faith precedes knowledge of reality has been an evangelistic disaster. Even those raised in Christian communities are falling away, and those attracted to them are often naively attracted by simple human fellowship, or are more dangerously seeking the mindless comfort of a sect or cult.
Too many pastors, who with the rise of modern seminary education were on the frontlines of engaging in the dialogue between theology and public knowing, are now called by both their congregations and their bishops to be carnival barkers whose livelihood depends on bringing crowds inside a big tent with narrow views. They must grow churches of people obedient (like themselves) to the cult rules, and not to engage in an ongoing dialogue between Christian and public knowing.
I would suggest that the most important task of contemporary Christian theology is, if not to reiterate the liberal project then to reiterate its aim: to know God in public by engaging the God-knowing public in dialogue.
But more importantly the insistence that orthodox Christian faith precedes genuine knowing is potentially a disaster for academic theology itself; and enterprise which too easily becomes the manipulation of relationships between increasingly esoteric symbols drawn from Christian tradition into structures of knowledge impenetrable by all but the experts in the theological guilds. And when this happens the guild no longer produces any knowledge at all, because Christians cannot know it alone. It is ludicrous to claim knowledge of the God of all reality while claiming that the test of true knowledge is the particular preserve of the Christian community in conversation with itself.
This may sound like an invitation to reiterate the failure of the liberal theology that traces its roots to Schleiermacher’s Speeches on Religion to its Cultured Despisers. But the liberal project didn’t diminish because it sought to make theological knowing a form of public knowing. It has diminished because public knowing has changed. The public no longer knows reality according to Enlightenment principles (and in terms of the broadest public probably never did.) But public knowing (except within diminishing cultural redoubts) isn’t pre-modern either. We cannot go back to the “good old days” when the cultural consensus had already been shaped to, and had shaped, Christian knowing. The contemporary public is diverse and complex and has not as yet been effectively engaged by Christian theology – witness its waning interest in what we Christians have to say.
I would suggest that the most important task of contemporary Christian theology is, if not to reiterate the liberal project then to reiterate its aim: to know God in public by engaging the God-knowing public in dialogue. And I will go further and assert that doing this is simply taking on the task Christ gave the Church to bear witness to him to the ends of the earth.The apostles of Christ thought with their audience as they bore witness to him. They didn’t demand Christian faith prior to understanding. Like Jesus they engaged the faith they found with their witness of what they knew.
Just as scientists need to engage not merely in the public defense of knowledge, but the public production of knowledge so Christian theologians need to cease making claims and begin learning with those outside the faith but within God’s providential self-disclosing. Only then will theology actually know something about the God who disclosed God’s self in Jesus Christ.
Robert A. Hunt
Dr. Robert A. Hunt (Perkins School of Theology Photo)
Dr. Robert Hunt serves as Director of Global Theological Education, Professor of Christian Mission and Interreligious Relations, and Director, Center for Evangelism and Missional Church Studies at Perkins School of Theology. This post is republished with permission from his blog, Culture and Christian Encounters.