McLaren goes on to explain in his next chapter why he is a liberal/conservative. In this chapter, his use of these terms is primarily in a theological context, as opposed to the political one. This chapter is an attempt to get beyond “the confining boxes of liberal and conservative” (p. 131). Of course, since conservatives like what McLaren would call “confining boxes” and liberals hate them, simply picking sides is not really going to accomplish his “beyond all that” agenda. If we are watching a football game between the Red team and the Blue team, and we suddenly see “old third way” McLaren down on the sidelines with some blue pom-poms, he cannot just say that he is trying to get beyond labels. We would want to press the point. “What’s with the blue pom-poms, man?”
Moving him from cheerleader to coach, this is the chapter where McLaren gets to the heart of the issue, and tries to run the old “demise of foundationalism” flea flicker. He tells us that “roughly between 1500 and 1700” a transition ushered in the modern world. “Philosophically, a profound shift was occurring, a shift in how we humans understand how we understand.” This is the old epistemological double reverse, a transparent attempt to freeze the linebackers of orthodoxy. But we are blitzing anyway.
McLaren says that medieval man believed in the eternal verities on the basis of authority, that authority being the Church. The Reformation, McLaren says, began to change all that. “The earlier Protestants didn’t lose a source of authority altogether, though. They transferred the fulcrum or center of authority from the church to the Bible . . . But the Bible requires human interpretation, which was a problem. Fortunately, the modern ‘I’ thought itself qualified (through reason, study, education, scholarship, methodology, technique) to interpret” (p. 133). Under this view, right after the Reformation, the Bible just became a “new pope” (p. 133). But actually, for the magisterial Protestants, the church still retained its teaching office. They differed with Rome, not on whether the church had the authority to teach, but on whether the teaching office of the church was to be considered infallible. But they still taught authoritatively, and expected the faithful to remain faithfully in the bosom of the church. Calvin said somewhere that no man has God for his Father who does not have the church for his mother. So Luther and Calvin, Bucer and Zwingli, were not handing individual Bibles out of the back of a truck, yelling “Every man for himself! Scatter, people!” That scattering movement did come, but it was not what the Reformers taught, or wanted. Nor is it what their heirs want.
McLaren goes on. “Conservatives couldn’t agree on what the infallible, inerrant Bible meant and constantly labeled the interpretations of their fellow Protestants grossly errant” (p. 134). But the fact that students in a math class argue about the “right answer” does not make the the concept of a “right answer” absurd. At most, it might make the students absurd. But McLaren, since his standard is fundamentally about the feelings of the students, thinks that such a math class argument actually makes the answer key absurd. And then all the feelings of the disputants are affirmed, group hug afterwards, and somebody agrees to write a book called Beyond the Square Root of Nine. “We are not affirming three, and we are not affirming 2. We have found a third way that moves beyond the dualism of threes and fours.”
And McLaren’s Starbucks leftism continues to shine through. “Not only that, but conservative biblical interpretations, it seemed, had been used to justify some ethically and scientifically dubious causes (slavery, male chauvinism, horrific treatment of aboriginal peoples, abuse of the environment, identifying the mentally ill as witches, explaining away fossils and other findings) and to oppose some credible investigations (paleontology, evolution, cosmology, psychology)” (p. 134). I have absolutely nothing to say about slavery at this time. But jeepers, what a list! This review is turning into a book already, but quotes like this provide material (and temptation) for many more volumes. Let me just point out that the conservative resistance to things like “paleontology, evolution, cosmology, and psychology” were fights against the findings of MODERNITY. But according to the book we have been reviewing here, isn’t MODERNITY and SCIENCE with their FOUNDATIONALISM and all a bad thing? For the rest of it, this is just a typical trendy litany of accusations against things like “male chauvinism.” McLaren must have a tub of the contemporary zeitgesit down in his basement. He must get his in volume amounts at CostCo.
But McLaren still strives for a third way, which consists of his efforts to say things like “faults on both sides,” “let the healing begin,” and let’s “move on.” Move on where? Why? Who says? On what basis? This is just mere hand wringing. “I think conservatives and liberals were both right and wrong and were each in their own way trying to do what they felt was right” (p. 137).
At the same time, McLaren can’t help tipping his hand, and it results in a hilarious reverse description of what actually happened. “Liberals were heroic for tackling tough issues often several decades before the conservatives. For example, in terms of science and learning, they tackled issues like evolution and the age of the earth long before their conservative counterparts” (p. 138). What McLaren calls liberals “tackling tough issues” was actually liberals getting tackled by tough issues. Note this well. Let me point it out. McLaren uses tackling as synonymous with “getting beaten by.” Imagine a fast, 220 fullback running full speed right over some pencil-neck defender, leaving cleat marks up the front of his jersey. The defender then weaves toward the coach on the sidelines, hungry for approval from somewhere anyway. “Boy, coach. I sure tackled him.”
Here are some more examples of liberals capitutackling. “Liberals took action on the issue of women in ministry decades before most conservatives began to rethink their position” (p. 138). That is to say, when the world demanded action, the liberals scurried off and “took action.” And of course, it takes a lot to make this kind of behavior look something like courage. Liberals are the courageous wing of the church because they always surrender first. If you didn’t follow that argument either, I don’t blame you. But liberals are the church’s surrender monkeys, and I suppose they have to rationalize it somehow. “And although the debate has been agonizing, liberals have blazed the trail in seeking to treat homosexual and transgender persons with compassion” (p. 138). Way to blaze that trail, Daniel Boone!
And all this capitulation as courage stuff is being done in the name of a new world that is aborning! “Now as we gradually leave modernity and enter the postmodern world, the trouble doesn’t end for either liberals or conservatives” (p. 139). When he points to this new state of affairs, he footnotes “Nancey Murphy’s helpful book Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism” along with “Stanley Grenz and John Frank’s Beyond Foundationalism.” When I write my book on this this whole thing, I am thinking of calling it Beyond Help or Beyond Sense. Beyond something. Beyond the Utter Frozen Limit. That’s it.
So this is as good a time to take a little Grenz and Franke detour. John Franke wrote the foreword to A Generous Orthodoxy, and these guys are definitely all singing off the same sheet of music. As noted in an earlier post, the central falsehood being peddled here as somehow self-evident is the falsehood that belief in the Bible as the infallible Word of God is somehow beholden to Enlightenment categories. The assertion is beyond bogus, which Grenz and Franke actually (albeit inadvertantly) admit.
They begin by actually acknowledging where conservative evangelicalism comes from, and it isn’t from modernity.
“But he (Pannenberg) criticizes the tendency of the scholastic tradition — especially its Protestant form — to reduce the role of reason to that of illuminating truth already presupposed from revelation disclosed through what was assumed to be an inspired Bible” (Beyond Foundationalism, p. 43, emphasis mine).
And earlier, speaking of Charles Hodge, they said, “Hodge’s own understanding of theology is generally derived from the scholasticism characteristic of post-Reformation Protestant orthodoxy and its emphasis on rationalism. Evangelicals in the twentieth century, buoyed by the assumptions of modernity, have continued, with some modifications, to follow the theological paradigm of scholasticism as exemplified in the work of Charles Hodge (as well as that of others from the ‘Old’ Princeton tradition such as B.B. Warfield and J. Gresham Machen)” (p. 14, emphasis mine). They had to stick that phrase “buoyed by the assumptions of modernity” to give semblance of something to their case.
Just a few dates might help out. The great Reformed scholastic Turretin died in 1687. He was in some significant ways carrying on the tradition of medieval scholasticism, with some of the gnat-strangling abuses removed. Descartes was born in 1596 and died in 1650. Turretin was born in 1623. What is more likely? A scholastic Reformer of the church carrying on the ancient tradition of believing the Bible, and reasoning in terms of that belief, or messengers hot-footing it from Turretin over to Descartes’ house to get the latest in a Catholic mathematician’s philosophical speculations, the profound ramifications of which would be working their way into culture many years later? Clearly, the Reformed scholastics were far more medieval than they were proto-modern. But Grenz and Franke acknowledge that the heritage goes like this: Protestant scholastics, Charles Hodge, Old Princeton, and contemporary evangelical conservatives. So where did the pervasive modernity come in again? When did conservatives quit believing the Bible the way Turretin did and start believing it the way some right-wing Enlightenment guy would?
But Grenz and Franke want to have it both ways. On page 23, they try to represent conservative evangelicals as being in bondage simpliciter to Enlightenment foundationalism. But they themselves have acknowledged that in its essentials, the evangelical position is actually pre-modern.
Neither does it help their case when they contradict themselves as they try to explain what they are trying to do. At first, they say some things which sound okay if you don’t look very closely.
“Although the essential commitment of the believing community to the God revealed in Jesus does not change, the context in which this confession and its implications are lived out is in constant flux” (p. 16, emphasis mine).
“These models should be faithful to the biblical narratives and teachings, informed by and in continuity with the historic position of the church, and relevant to the contemporary setting” (p. 18, emphasis mine).
And of course “the Spirit appropriates the biblical text in order to address the Christian community through the ages” (p. 24, emphasis mine).
And THEN, on the very NEXT PAGE, after all this historic-position-of-the-churching, and essential-commitments-not-changing, and in-continuity-withing, our authors then say, with no trace of self-awareness or embarrassment at all, “A non-foundationalist theological method leads to the conclusion that ultimately all theology is — as the ‘postmodern condition’ suggests — ‘local’ or ‘specific.’ (p. 25). There you go. Truth is zip-code dependent.
But then they veer back. Reading these guys is like following a double tractor trailer on an icy road, one that has just started to fishtail. “A theology that is truly Christian, we argue, is trinitarian in structure (or content), communitarian in focus, and eschatological in orientation” (p. 25). Of course because we learned just a few lines above this that all theology is local, this last observation is only the case in some blue states.
On page 54, they kind of realize what they kind of did, which was to admit that they can’t really affirm the truth of the Christian faith anymore (outside their zip code area) and so they just twist slowly in the wind for a few painful minutes, and then it is mercifully over. But then, with that painful part done they can dedicate the rest of their book to their theological conversation, that “perichoretic dance” they referred to (p. 24). Of course my vision of emergent theologians doing a perichoretic dance is kind of creepy, and so I bid these guys farewell.
All in the name of running away from what they call foundationalism. And for good measure they run away from an authoritative and infallible Bible because it reminds them of a Cartesian idol they saw once. They object to the metaphor of basic beliefs providing a “foundation” with lesser beliefs stacked on top. That concept is being laughed at in all kinds of philosophy departments these days, and so our duty as evangelicals is to act the part of the desperate nerdy kid trying to laugh his way into the inner ring. He doesn’t get the jokes but he always knows exactly when he has to laugh.
So instead of a metaphor that sees knowledge as building blocks, let us use the metaphor of an interlocking network or web. Hmmm? Okay, fine. Just as a mason needs a foundation on which to lay his brick, so a spider needs some fixed branches from which to spin his web. The idol of modernity falsely claimed to be able to fix the starting point, while the triune God of the Bible actually does fix it in Himself and His self-revelation. But it turns out that they don’t abhor idolatrous certainty; they abhor certainty period. And the place these people are seeking, a place where there is no traction point, no place to rest, no point to settle, has a name. It is called the outer darkness, a place where there is, at last, no foundationalism of any kind.
Over the last year, I have read more philosophy and pretend-philosophy, pap and stuff that rhymes with pap, than I have in some time, and it has been a good reminder to me of why I hate this stuff so much. While Tertullian overdid it I think when he asked his famous question — what does Jerusalem have to do with Athens? — there is still some wisdom in it, particularly for some people’s children. It wouldn’t take more than a couple dozen Frankes and McLarens to establish Tertullian’s point forever, and seal it up in a drum. Watching erstwhile evangelicals trying to earn the respect of the philosophical world is just tragedy in slow motion. It is like watching film of somebody giving a couple of glasses of Scotch to a three-year-old, except that the three-year-old might not drink it. You start reading these johnnies, and if you don’t watch yourself, after a couple of drinks you start caring what Wittgenstein might have meant by something.