Cutting the Gordian knot of
Anecdotal Thought
Developing a systematic
method of historical thought reading the major works of history and forming an
innate composite historical paradigm can accompany reading in translation all
of the major works of western philosophy and of world religion. One can read
Toynbee’s Study of History, Treadgold’s works on Byzantium kingdom of God kingdom of God
The danger for the users of
specialized literary tools for analysis I suppose is that they may restrict
their own theory of knowledge to a particular methodology such as regarding the
Bible from a purely literary perspective, from a deconstructionist viewpoint,
solely as a work of history etc. It seems that one should have that archetypal
left-right brain integration firing on all cylinders to understand all of the
individual viewpoints on the Bible and regard the literary methods as special
reading analysis tools instead of as ends-in-themselves.
I think perhaps one of the
main lessons to draw from reading about particular theological methods of
interpretation of and for drawing out the meaning of the Bible accurately is
that human beings just don’t know it all, and that it takes an incredible
amount of time and work to learn of what was provided in the Bible. Even so the
brilliantly interesting concepts ontologically of ideas such as the Kingdom of
God and the live presence of the Lord surrounding the temporal steady-state
Universe make the reading of an historical text much more than reading say, The Civil War by Julius Caesar.
Elements
of interpretation of different historical cultures show how people had
different customs and meanings than today, or of one’s own if an author was
writing in the past. The assumptions and operative beliefs of people in various
historical periods differ. I would use the flood story of Genesis as an
illustration. After the discovery that the world is round people interpreted
Genesis to mean that the entire round world was flooded. Yet in the age of the
proximal assembly of the book of Genesis in the court of Solomon or Rehoboam no
one thought of the world as round. In Abraham’s time the whole world was probably
just the region where the people lived, and earlier, in the flood era perhaps
on the Persian Gulf shore thousands of years earlier, the reference term of the
world that made it through oral tradition and later cuneiform to Abraham/AVRM
was probably the first civilization-something a reader today naturally assumes
if not putting a retro-cultural interpolated meaning of Urth/Earth world in to
the book.
Scholars found the Donation
of Constantine
I think many people
misunderstand Kant though. Kant was developing reason formally-like Descartes
and that is fine-people don’t need to be stupid or have muddled thinking
especially about the Bible. David Hume earlier recognized there was a lot of
verbiage in pseudo-scientific publications of little merit. There was also
philosophy that didn’t have much merit, so Hume besides being a friend of Adam
Smith wrote on philosophy clarifying causality and other topics so far as he
could. Readers of the Bible ought not be troubled by reason for they are not at
all in conflict. There are categories of thought useful for classifying
knowledge, yet not all knowledge is given equal importance to individual
obviously.
Hume was said by Kant to
have awoke him from a dogmatic slumber. Kant was for intelligent thought and
reason for-oneself rather than reliance upon social programming from
authorities. Protestants especially should be untroubled by that approach since
Martin Luther was not unwilling to use his own reason for interpreting
scripture himself rather than to rely on the Catholic Church authorities on
matters such as the sale of indulgences.
It is not a matter of refuting all knowledge
and reinventing the wheel though Descartes sought to think from ‘first
principles’ of thought while taking solitary saunas as a mercenary in Bavaria
composing in mind content such as cogito
ergo sum. Instead it is about personal intellectual liberty to consider
for-oneself knowledge, scripture and the manifest Universe and experience in
order to decide what one believes instead of reliance upon authorities
historically upon pain of torture or death for dissent.
Kant in a sense was the
second Aristotle bringing logic to a new level on the border of epistemology.
Leibnitz of course wrote the first mathematical symbolic logic treatise yet
never published it. I think that especially in light of the interpretation
fallacy it is useful to have a formal understanding of the philosophical
problems of empiricism and subjectivity. Quine transcended the criterion of
empiricism in The Two Dogmas of
Empiricism and later in Word and
Object delineated the relationship between knower and known, and word and
object in a sharp technical epistemology. P.F. Strawson-a contemporary of
Quine, wrote a similar book titled ‘Individuals’.
Kant in writing his Critique of Pure Reason, a book that is
summarized in a smaller, useful text named
A Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, developed the knower-known
epistemology. It is not a simple subjectivity and more than that of Tillich or
Barth. The basic difference is that some things are phenomenal and others
noumenal. Like Socrates one tries to
know what it is one knows and what one doesn’t. These are occupational concerns
with real applications at a certain point. If the Universe has a holographic
component it would be helpful to learn that, or if time can be reconstructed
like points in a pointillist painting placed wherever the artist wishes it
might be useful to find that out.
As technology and knowledge
increase it is worth knowing what is as brief and meaningless later as a dead
computer language and what things are of value. Finding eternal values in the
kingdom of God amidst a world with a dangerous level of social subjectivity
neurotic about Wall Street investments, networking, globalism and foreign
investments, a world that disregards the objective ecospheric health and the
transcendent values of the kingdom of God that is a light in the darkness of
temporal materiality (solid-state waveform or string-membrane entanglement) is
challenging for some. I believe reason can lead one to the revealed word of
God-if the Holy Spirit wills it so.
Some things are knowable and
some things are unknowable. That is,
of the world and of knowledge we see through a glass darkly and only know it
part. I believe that one of the fallacies of science is that everything can be
known directly, and there are too many reasons to state here why that is
unlikely. It is reasonable however to pursue knowledge so far as possible so
long as one keeps that occupation in perspective as a temporal, contingent pursuit useful while waiting upon
the Lord.
Scholars have reviewed ‘the quest for the historical Jesus’, Ferdinand
Christian Baur and The Tubingen School. Baur wrote ‘Orthodoxy and Heresy’.
The idea of Orthodoxy and Heresy is apparently that
over the history of the church there were both and of course winners write
history and there values won, yet even so the losers were good people to with
good Christian theology. Maybe the gnostic heresies weren’t really off, or the
Arian heresy either? The approach of Baur seems to be presented as one of the
rising tide of post-renaissance humanism and subjectivism. I tend to view that
as a result of the printing press and opportunities for everyone to write
continuing today. With so many opinions
the politically harmonious thing to say may be that each opinion is as
important as another. A purely
democratic opinion about religious equal opportunity and tolerance may prevent
conflict socially yet be implicitly accurate. Consider if aircraft designs were
all considered to be equal and subjective-things would crash a lot more.
Karl Barth and others have
felt that except for revelation humanity could no nothing of God. In Jeremiah
God did say that everyone knows him and they just forget who He is-an example
of what Sartre called false consciousness. Yet God probably intended the
knowledge to exist and revealed it. Unlike aircraft designs that can be
empirically verified, revealed religious truths are self-standing and
transcendent yet not subject to temporal verification. Thus arises a paradox
that though religious truth is subjective it is founded on an objective
revelation of the word of God and the Lord Jesus Christ. The subjective
perception of revealed truth of God is
heterodox and objective. It is somewhat like a subjective way to transcendence
of the temporal steady-state Universe in a relationship to the operating system
administrator-creator who issued a Universe/Multiverse and Earth.
Perhaps there is
counter-networking social phenomenon that conforms individual analytical
methods, convenient use-truths and represses creative independent scholarly
expression existing in unionized academia to while an ad hoc neo-monopoly has arisen in finance and trade with people
buying mutual funds and owning shares in rival corporations stifling
competition. History bumps along with ecosphere and the revealed word of God in
the Bible as externalities to be unconcerned about. The Anthropocene era of
mass extinction of life may include the loss of much human spiritual life from
entry in to the kingdom of God
