I rise in praise of propositions, but not the propositions of bad philosophers who try to reify everything they touch. Rather, I praise the propositions of the competent and godly English teacher, and, although this is not the point of our current discussion, I also praise clauses, imperatives, nouns, verbs, alphabets, jots and tittles.
A proposition is simply a statement of fact, and the fact that God allows us to see things in the world, and transfer what we see into the minds of others by this means, is simply a grand mystery and miracle, right up there with the loaves and fishes. Here I am, sitting with my laptop, listening to the blues, and depositing thoughts into your head. How does that work? This does not explain things fully, but one of the necessary instruments involved in all this is the lowly proposition. The green armadillo dances on our coffee table. See? Not only can propositions point to the real world, they are also the building blocks of the glorious world of fiction — and there, the relationship of the proposition to the world God made is far more glorious and subtle.
I have been attacking the arbitrary and idolatrous absolutism of the Enlightenment for years. But their problem is that they attributed absolutes to their Baal, and not that they attributed absolutes to anyone. And when Elijah opposed them, it was truth claim against truth claim, proposition against proposition. Baal is god. Yahweh is God. Which will it be? And Elijah did not simply oppose duddy truth claim to duddy truth claim; his truth claim was kind of on fire.
False absolutes are not a post-Enlightenment development. The Pharisees searched the Scriptures because they thought that in them they would find eternal life. But the words they were looking at bore actual testimony to Jesus, the one they were rejecting. This way of slipping off the point is as old as dirt, and though modernity and postmodernity are both guilty of it in different ways, the problem did not enter the world with post-Cartesian developments.
Propositions, received in simple faith, by simple people who don’t over-engineer things, are windows through which we see. They are not murals at which we stare. The modernist philosophers want to make propositions into murals. The postmodernists want to maintain (rightly, so far as it goes) that if all we are going to do is stare at the painted window as though it were a wall, we might as well paint over the mural with whatever colors are currently gripping us, or go off to look at some other part of the wall. But the point is to look through the propositions — at Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. I am not going to abandon my propositional window just because some other guy with a philosophical bent got paint all over his.
So there it is. I am not about to give up propositions, and the reason I will not is because Jesus meets me there. He meets me in the words, the sentences, the commands, the questions, and the propositions — provided I read and listen like a Christian. We can look at the Lord’s Supper to illustrate the point. Christ meets us there for blessing when we assemble in faith. But if we gather around His table to debate the flour, or the grapes, or the tablecloth, or the metaphysics, we are trying to meet the Lord by coming at the Table. We are trying to wrest control of it from Him, which is folly. We are rather called to come through the Table. It is a means of grace. The idolater who comes is stopped short. The one who comes in evangelical faith comes through.
It is the same with the words of God, and our words in response. Words are what they are because Jesus is the Word. This means that Jesus is the Poem, He is the Noun, He is the everlasting Verb. Jesus is the Metaphor; He is God and He is with God at the same time. Jesus is the Proposition of God. I am not going to abandon my propositions; they are a gift of God. How could I abandon them? I worship a Proposition. And I defy anyone to turn this into some truncated and dry propositionalism, because I worship a Story and a Poem also. I am a Christian. That means I am as logocentric as it gets.