Why this strikes me as particularly interesting today is that yesterday I appeared on the internet radio show of John Chisham, my long-time nemesis. John's a conservative (he might even say fundamentalist)
"The Church Is Broken" Episode 5 from tony jones on Vimeo.
The video gives a sense of the disagreements between John and me. And if you listen to the radio show, you'll get even more of it.
What I find most intriguing, however, is putting Fish's proposal about liberal's liberals' (my term, not his) blinding commitment to the objectivity of science in connection with conservative's conservatives' (like John's) blinding commitment to the objectivity of the Bible. Time and again on the show, he and his co-host, Rusty, spoke as though their hermeneutic position on the Bible was the sole, objective, and self-evident version of the text.
For instance, when we were debating whethter an ontological change takes place when someone is "saved -- John asserted that a person's "very nature" is changed at the moment of salvation -- they appealed to Rusty's conversion. Rusty said that, upon his conversion, God immediately made him hate the drugs to which he had formerly been addicted. This, they said, is evidence that God changes someone's nature at the moment of conversion.
I countered that Rusty's experience, while valid, doesn't prove anything, any more than if I presented to them a person who went cold turkey off of drugs and, without God's help, went from loving drugs one day to hating them the next -- and we've surely all heard of cases like this.
The response from John was interesting. He basically said that Rusty's experience was valid and the other former addict's invalid. Why? Because the Bible says so. That's it.
Here's Fish:
To bring all this abstraction back to the arguments made by my readers, there is no such thing as "common observation" or simply reporting the facts. To be sure, there is observation and observation can indeed serve to support or challenge hypotheses. But the act of observing can itself only take place within hypotheses (about the way the world is) that cannot be observation's objects because it is within them that observation and reasoning occur...
So to sum up, the epistemological critique of religion -- it is an inferior way of knowing -- is the flip side of a naïve and untenable positivism. And the critique of religion's content -- it's cotton-candy fluff -- is the product of incredible ignorance.
Fish's post really deserves a full reading, but he's trying to say the same things about his liberal readers as I am about my conservative interlocuters: we're all boxed in by our hermeneutic presuppositions. The only real danger is to pretend that we're not, to pretend that science is "objective" or that the Bible's meaning is "self-evident."
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Actually, Cole, grammar is often subjective, irregardless of what you say. ;-)
Tony,
If you are ever in the Fort Worth, Texas area, i would absolutely love to sit down over some jamba juice or something and have a chit chat with you.
While we may have different views on our faith, your intelligent and an academic with a tendency for skepticism and i love it.
Just an open invitation from a thinker to a thinker.
Benjamin
Re: Fish, i think terry eagleton (prominent literary critique in the uk, and a defender of religion against the 'new atheist') provides a wonderful critique of him which is worth reading:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n05/eagl01_.html
If one wants to use contemporary philosophical tropes to defend religion, I think Eagleton would be the one to look to, not Fish. He's much more elegant in his prose, and miles ahead of him theoretically, as well as understanding theology.
Cole,
English is not my native tongue, still I try hard to obey the rules of grammar, syntax and spelling in writing.
I understand that the occasional mistakes Tony makes bother you. They are as nothing compared to the disasters arising from many (most, perhaps) of the really conservative American Christians responding on this website.
Perhaps we should love Tony for his clarity of thought and willingness to do battle with our oppressors while forgiving him the occasional error in numerus and causus.
One of the most challenging tasks I face in teaching freshmen is to disabuse them of the concept that logic "proves" anything. Logic can, at best, make clear to us the truth about a situation, process or state of being. It is not, in and of itself, truth.
The same applies to mathematics.
Sadly, there seems to be no means for fundamentalist Christians to parse their statements. Had they not ascended to such levels of power and authority in the US, it would not matter so much. That they have, it must be our highest priority to use this period of tolerance and exhaustion with the hateful christianists among the general public to anchor our rights as gay and transgender people. The right to marry. The right to raise children. The right to be, should we so desire, gay and Christian. Transgender and Christian. Most of all, the right to human status.
Ted, you reject homosexuality as an innate trait. I understand that, while disagreeing with you. What I have yet to see you offer is any grounds for your rejection. Can you give any reasons or is it just that it "grosses you out" that I like it when my husband takes me in his arms and makes me purr like a cat when his rough beard rubs against the side of my face?
I should think the nature of your objection should determine the manner of your response to extending us human status - something you reject, for which, however, you have yet to provide any grounds.
Lesslie Newbigin already scaled this mountain and came to a similar conclusion as that of Prof. Fish. The difference between you and Newbigin, though, is that you see "hermeneutic presuppositions" as something that inhibits us, whereas this recognition liberated Newbigin to take faith as a starting point for all forms of intellectual discourse.
So stop b*tching about fundamentalists, take up the Christian creed, and go try to figure out how it's true.
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