Letter to Alan: Common Grace & Movies

Photo by Pete Bell

Fearghas,

                  What is your basic take on common grace? I ask because I am trying to reply to a sermon by [] who believes movies are sinful. He presupposes this from the outset which possibly means he takes the whole idea of fiction to be deceit and a form of lying. I am trying to work out an answer without going to the other extreme which sees movie-going as a mere innocent pastime which does not involve spiritual judgement.

                                                            Alan

 _________________________

Hi Alan,

I would summarize "Common Grace" as basically the obvious fact that God reveals truth to non-Christians as well as to Christians. (And since we are all sinners, we all suppress it to some degree). God causes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust. He bestows talents on the Christian and the non-Christian. It is also important to register that Truth is not just propositional, it is structural and existential. To be completely devoid of truth would involve utter insanity, and indeed utter physical disintegration, since the coherence of our very atoms is also an expression of truth.

I think John 1 is a useful starting point - 

"In him was life, and that life was the light of men...The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world."

From which I take the import that there is no light whatsoever in human existence which does not derive from Christ. All truth is His, wherever it is found. There is no other source of truth. Cf John 8:44 - 

 "You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies." 

And of course Rom 1:18-20 famously insists that all the truth we encounter (including "non-propositional", "concrete" truth) exhaustively testifies to the reality of God -

"The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities— his eternal power and divine nature— have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

So also Isaiah, eg -

"Listen and hear my voice; pay attention and hear what I say. When a farmer plows for planting, does he plow continually? Does he keep on breaking up and harrowing the soil? When he has leveled the surface, does he not sow caraway and scatter cummin? Does he not plant wheat in its place, barley in its plot, and spelt in its field? His God instructs him and teaches him the right way. Caraway is not threshed with a sledge, nor is a cartwheel rolled over cummin; caraway is beaten out with a rod, and cummin with a stick. Grain must be ground to make bread; so one does not go on threshing it forever. Though he drives the wheels of his threshing cart over it, his horses do not grind it. All this also comes from the LORD Almighty, wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom." (Isaiah 28:23-29 NKJV)

Thus Van Til frequently comments that just as the child cannot slap the father's face unless the father raises the child high enough, so the atheist cannot attack God without presupposing God. In other words the language, the logic, the range of reference etc which the atheist employs are not "neutral" but saturated with God's credentials, God's ID. The articulate Hitchens has (ironically) plundered them from God. As Dawkins and Attenborough systematically plunder the animals from God. Van Til also writes  -

  "The argument between Christians and non-Christians involves every fact in the universe. If it does not involve every fact it does not involve any fact. If one fact can be interpreted correctly on the assumption of human autonomy then all facts can. If the Christian is to be able to show the non-Christian objectively that Christianity is true and that those who reject it do so because they hold to that which is false, this must be done everywhere or else it is not really done anywhere." (p 171)... "And since God's face appears in every fact in the universe they oppose God's revelation everywhere. They do not want to see the facts of nature for what they are; they do not want to see themselves for what they are. Therefore they assume the non-createdness of themselves and of the facts and of the laws round about them....Shall we in the interest of a point of contact admit that man can interpret anything correctly if he virtually leaves God out of the picture? Shall we who wish to prove that nothing can be explained without God first admit that some things at least can be explained without Him? On the contrary we shall show that all explanations without God are futile." (p 200) ("The Defense of the Faith")

Parables are essentially visual and dramatic "short stories" (as are also OT episodes like David & Goliath, Jonah & the Fish etc), which would well lend themselves to film. Christ in His parables thus endorses and uses a literary "art form" which the Holy Spirit had already overwhelmingly anticipated and demonstrated via the highly varied literary forms of the OT text. Christ makes an aesthetic judgement when He remarks about the lilies (the antecedents of which He created, "sculpted", "painted", "choreographed") that "Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these... yet a greater than Solomon is here". Do we imagine Christ the carpenter never appreciated the beauty of the various wood-grains and colours he worked with? Did He never carve a shape or pattern? Did he never sing as He laboured? The parables also, importantly, make it clear that Christ presupposed (and, I would contend, clearly endorsed) world-immersed social and workaday lives in his hearers - in other words, lives which were not simply spent "reading the Bible" but were concerned with "implementing the Bible" in all areas of life. 

In John 17 Christ prays - 

15 My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. 17 Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world.

The above of course echoes Matt 28 and Acts 1, where the disciples are sent into all the world with the Gospel. This "Great Commission" command in turn reminds us of the so-called "Cultural Commission" of Gen 1 -

28 God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

The universality of this call is also backed up by Paul - 

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Cor 10:3-5) 

For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen. (Rom 11:36)

When Paul wrote "The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world," I really don't think he intended for a moment we should not, for example, answer Hitchens' or Dawkins' polemic with Bible-based philosophical and scientific arguments. What he did surely mean is, firstly, that we don't engage in fisticuffs with Hitchens and Dawkins, and secondly, that we realize that our arguments are always in the prayerful awareness that the Holy Spirit alone opens people's eyes:

Don’t have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments, because you know they produce quarrels.  And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful.  Opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will. (2 Tim 2: 23-26) 

Hans Rookmaaker in his art lectures used to say that if we Christians did not grapple in the name of Christ with our contemporary culture, we should not be surprised if our children or grand-children end up in concentration camps - because we will have ceded so many crucial battle-fields to pagan thought-systems. So it is imperative that we appreciate that the Gospel is not just about assenting to "information" which is to our betterment come the hereafter. Rather the Gospel is about the recalibration of all the structures of existence which in human disobedience have been directed away from God instead of unto God. Should Christians just let civilization go to hell in a handcart? Do we not realize that every vestige of "civilization" is a mercy of Christ, delivering us from evil, and giving us our daily bread? Without the kindness of Christ no ambulance would be forthcoming. Without common grace, cars would not move aside to let the ambulance pass. Christ alone gives meaning to politics, to science, to engineering, to farming, to architecture, to speech, to art, to movies. The choice is essentially between Christ and nihilism. But God in His common grace gives so many non-Christians faith that life is a constructive worthwhile venture, worth getting up for, worth fighting defensive wars for, worth surviving all adversities for. God bestows the gift of "ontological heroism" on the "just" and the "unjust". Thus we pray "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done...on the earth".

The "movie" thing is of course not too far removed from the "novel" thing, and in the first instance it is surely a question about the legitimacy of the "aesthetic" realm as a call of Christ. If it is being argued that God is not interested in aesthetics, then we have already tried to address that briefly above. Like Christ, the Psalmist was not insensible to the aesthetic side of creation  -

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8)

So if aesthetics as such are legitimate, WHY are they legitimate? They are legitimate ultimately because they are "from Christ and through Christ and to Christ" (Rom 11:36). All life is about Christ. Full stop. Ultimately, aesthetics are ONLY about Christ. Christ Who is altogether lovely. We worship Him in the beauty of holiness. Aesthetics are legitimate because they are an integral part of the fullness of Truth. Sure, sin tries to hijack aesthetics, but that is true of all aspects of creation. It is plain to see for instance that biology and cosmology have been largely hijacked by an anti-God agenda - do we therefore conclude that Christians should have nothing to do with these? 

So is it only Christians who can discover and express aesthetic "truth"? We have seen above that the answer is most certainly "no". To answer "yes" would mean the rejection of an incalculable amount of art, music, poetry, drama, architecture, car-design, clothes design, landscape gardening, not to mention tea cosies. It is patently obvious that just as non-Christian engineers have been enabled by the common grace of Christ to construct bridges and skyscrapers which don't fall down, and as non-Christian medics have been enabled by the common-grace of Christ to develop medicines and procedures to heal people, so also non-Christian artists have been enabled by the common grace of Christ to explore aesthetic reality and elicit truth. 

Not all novels are frivolous. It is ridiculous if such a point needs made. There are serious novels out there intelligently analysing the human condition. There are novels which informatively deal with historical matters. The step from novel to film is small in a sense (pictures in your head to pictures outside your head?) and infringes no Biblical injunctions I can think of (other than awareness of the strong arguments against pictorialising the face of the Lord - which was also an issue with painting). Some films ostensibly focus on "fact" (documentaries?) rather than "fiction" (sci-fi?). Yet a documentary can be perniciously biased (eg Dawkins' self-indulgent TV diatribes) and a sci-fi movie can raise constructive questions about where humanity is headed and what it means to be human (Blade Runner, Matrix etc). War films can be historically informative, salutary warnings of what humanity has been capable of, and give an insight into the human being's varied reactions to the reality of death (“Schindler's List”, "Thin Red Line", Saving Private Ryan"). 

All the above seems self-evident. But I think another extremely important point which certainly should be made is that Christians are allowed before God to enjoy imagination. We do not have to find some moralistic justification for reading a novel or watching a movie, as if the Holy Spirit was some kind of frosty-faced prim Victorian nannie. We are to enjoy existence. We are to enjoy possibility. We are to enjoy imagining. We are to enjoy play. Before God. In the company of God. Relaxing, laughing in His presence. Whether we eat or drink or watch a film, we give thanks to the Lord and seek His blessing and company. Some people are more imaginative, more artistic, more aesthetic than others, of course. So low-aesthetic or anti-aesthetic Christians should be aware that by calling aesthetic matters per se into question (as supposedly un-Biblical) they are putting an intolerable burden on other Christians for whom aesthetics is at the heart of their call before God. Is it somehow more “righteous” NOT to watch a movie than to watch a movie? Let us beware -

Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.” Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?” He replied, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” Peter said, “Explain the parable to us.” “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person’s mouth come from the heart, and these defile them. For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.” (Matt 15:10-15)

That comment: “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be pulled up by the roots. Leave them;" is reminiscent of the "wheat and tares" parable. Van Til sees common grace in some such terms. Just as the Children of Israel wandered in the wilderness until the sin of Canaan was ripe for judgement, so the Christian and the non-Christian are constructing their different versions of civilization. Different at their core yet not so easy to tell apart sometimes. Yet the time will come, says Van Til, when the two sides, Civitas Dei and Civitas terrena, reach "epistemological self-consciousness" and it will become more and more easy to tell them apart. Hitchens and Dawkins and Attenborough are surely as "epistemologically self-conscious" as any Christian. Their faith is as strong as ours, as clear as ours, as committed as ours, as philosophically and dogmatically articulated as ours. But a broad swathe of society are not "epistemologically self-consciousness". They are confused sheep, following first this plausible shepherd, then that. 

So we still have to be wise about what we eat and wise about what we read and wise about what we watch. "Fact" and "Fiction" are more elusive concepts than is at first sight apparent. A lie is a "fiction", but a work of imagination is not a "lie" if it realizes the real potential within God's creation, if it is true to "how humans behave" or how nature presents itself, and so on. Nor is a work of imagination a "lie" even in envisaging a new reality – the building-blocks, however re-assembled, cannot but be borrowed from the current reality. Thus like the wheat and the tares it is not always easy to tease the aesthetics of "Fact" and the aesthetics of "Fiction" apart. When Christ calls Herod a fox (Luke 13:32) was that "fact" or "fiction"? Is the Psalmist purveying "fact" or "fiction" when in Psalm 18:8 he says of God -

Smoke rose from his nostrils; 
consuming fire came from his mouth

Is the Book of Revelation "fact" or "fiction"? Is Pilgrim's Progress "fact" or "fiction"? Is Moby Dick "fact" or "fiction"? The point is that it is overwhelmingly obvious from the nature of Scripture that "metaphor" (an aesthetic device) is not only legitimate but is an exemplary means of elucidating truth. Herod was not a fox. It would be a lie to say he was. But the metaphor informs us in a flash of familiarity just what the personality of Herod was like. In other words, the metaphor (the "fiction") imparts truth ("fact"). If Christians considered it to be morally wrong to use the "imaginary picture language" of metaphors in their everyday speech (let alone in preaching) where would it leave them?

OK, so now tell me this: What is the most influential medium on contemporary consciousness? It is film. Obviously. It is TV and it is movies. Let us note that these highly aesthetic-oriented vehicles popularize the rarified (accurate or erroneous) thoughts of the philosophers and thinkers. So we ignore them at our peril. And to our bewilderment, as we become more and more estranged from what is going on in the minds of broad society. And to our detriment as Christian communicators since we will find fewer and fewer points of contact with misbelievers. And to our mystification when they misunderstand us or stifle a laugh at our terminology because the language has changed so that the words we use mean the opposite to them that they mean to us. 

Where would Attenborough be without the collusion of movie-makers? But are the creatures which Attenborough points to "un-Christian"? Of course not. They rather testify to the Creator. So is the movie technology which Attenborough depends on "un-Christian"? Of course not. It rather testifies to the Creator. So is the aesthetically discriminating eye of the cameraman who frames the shot, or the aesthetically-governed judgement of the editor who edits the footage into a pacy program "un-Christian"? No. These may testify to the Creator. The medium as such is not at fault. Ultimately it is Attenborough's heavily agended use of the medium which is problematic. A knife can cut bread or kill someone. It is not the knife but the heart which directs the hand which wields the knife which is responsible. Out of the heart are the issues of life. What does an “unspun” animal look like? Is it possible for any of us to divest ourselves of theoretical preconceptions and simply encounter the unfiltered “actual”? In one sense, the optimum natural world documentary would seem to be one which lets the animal "speak" for itself. Of course that would require raw noises of nature as the only soundtrack (a plausible editorial decision for a series) But we can clearly also benefit immensely from accurate scientific insight where that is forthcoming.

Humans, whether Christian or non-Christian, are inconsistent to our pontificated beliefs. I betray Christ daily. I am internally inconsistent in my representation of the truth I aspire to profess about God's reality. Novels and films are inevitably internally inconsistent in their representation of the truth about God's reality. We need discrimination. A film may be good apart from one scene which compromises it. A film may be poor yet have one scene which elevates it. We need a critical faculty. Brian Godawa is one Christian involved in film-making and critiquing -

http://www.godawa.com/

  

With all the above in mind I wish to quote again those sweeping magnificent words of Dooyeweerd regarding common grace -

    

"We have nothing to avoid in the world but sin. The war that the Christian wages in God's power in this temporal life against the Kingdom of darkness is a joyful struggle, not only for his own salvation, but for God's creation as a whole, which we do not hate, but love for Christ's sake. We must not hate anything in the world but sin. Nothing in our apostate world can get lost in Christ.There is not any part of space, there is no temporal life, no temporal movement or temporal energy, no temporal power, wisdom, beauty, love, faith or justice, which sinful reality can maintain as a kind of property of its own apart from Christ.
...It is all due to God's common grace in Christ that there are still means left in the temporal world to resist the destructive force of the elements that have got loose; that there are still means to combat disease, to check psychic maladies, to practise logical thinking, to save cultural development from going down into savage barbarism, to develop language, to preserve the possibility of social intercourse, to withstand injustice, and so on. All these things are the fruits of Christ's work, even before His appearance on the earth. From the very beginning God has viewed His fallen creation in the light of the Redeemer."

(Herman Dooyeweerd, "A New Critique of Theoretical Thought" Vol II, p 34)

And finally for now a wonderful passage from Calvin himself which I also love  -

Therefore, in reading profane authors, the admirable light of truth displayed in them should remind us, that the human mind, however much fallen and perverted from its original integrity, is still adorned and invested with admirable gifts from its Creator. If we reflect that the Spirit of God is the only fountain of truth, we will be careful, as we would avoid offering insult to him, not to reject or condemn truth wherever it appears. In despising the gifts, we insult the giver. How then can we deny that truth must have beamed on those ancient lawgivers who arranged civil order and discipline with so much equity? Shall we say that the philosophers, in their exquisite researches and skilful description of nature, were blind? Shall we deny the possession of intellect to those who drew up rules of discourse, and taught us to speak in accordance with reason? Shall we say that those who, by the cultivation of the medical art, expended their industry on our behalf were only raving? What shall we say of the mathematical sciences? Shall we deem them to be the dreams of madmen? Nay, we cannot read the writings of the ancients on these subjects without the highest admiration; an admiration which their excellence will not allow us to withhold. But shall we deem anything to be noble and praiseworthy, without tracing it to the hand of God? Far from us be such ingratitude; an ingratitude not chargeable even on heathen poets, who acknowledged that philosophy and laws, and all useful arts were the inventions of the gods. Therefore, since it is manifest that men whom the Scriptures term ‘carnal’ are so acute and clear-sighted in the investigation of inferior things, their example should teach us how many gifts the Lord has left in possession of human nature, notwithstanding its having been despoiled of the true good....

Nor is there any ground for asking what concourse the Spirit can have with the ungodly, who are altogether alienated from God. For what is said as to the Spirit dwelling in believers only, is to be understood of the Spirit of holiness, by which we are consecrated to God as temples. Notwithstanding this, he fills, moves and invigorates all things by virtue of the Spirit, and that according to the peculiar nature which each class of beings has received by the Law of Creation. But if the Lord has been pleased to assist us by the work and ministry of the ungodly in physics, dialectics, mathematics, and other similar sciences, let us avail ourselves of it, lest, by neglecting the gifts of God spontaneously offered to us, we be justly punished for our sloth. (Institutes 2:2:15-16).
Fearghas.

Letter to Alan: Postmodernism

"Rabbit" by Calum Colvin (2005)

Fearghas,

             I see there is a growing number of post-modern theologians in the evangelical camp (Emerging Church) who believe we cannot get “outside” of language to touch reality. I am sure it is because they take Kant’s idea of the “thing in itself” as a given and marry it with Berger’s “social construction of reality”. It is as if they take half-truths and make them full truths and end up with a false vision. What do you think?

            Alan

 _______________________________________________

Hi Alan,

     A big discussion, as you know. I think the answer is "Yes"!

But to contribute slightly more...

     In Dooyeweerdian terms there is no "thing in itself". No unknowable "ding an sich". No Kantian division between unknowable "noumena" and knowable "phenomena" (which Kantian view has led to the current "fact/value" dichotomy whereby science (so-called) is presented as objective logically substantiated empirical "fact", while "religion" in contrast is deemed to be a subjective dogmatic assertion of "values". In Stephen J Gould's formulation the latter division is self-servingly portrayed as "non-overlapping magisteria" or "NOMA" - in other words both sides are compatible as long as neither intrudes into the other's domain (like shark and tiger). Darwinism thus annihilates creationism without even a whiff of argument needed because Darwinism is deemed to be objectively scientifically logically FACT-based, whereas creationism is subjectively non-rationally dogmatically VALUE-based. Darwinist science lays exclusive claim to the cosmos and logic. Christianity inhabits what is left! Christianity and particularly creationism are allowed to squat beyond that Pale of scientific civilization but must expect to be instantly gunned-down if they trespass within the compound of terra firma, ie of proven reality. Thus creationism is a matter for the RE class (subjective personal myths and values) only. It would be simply preposterous to allow utterance of such untestable unverifiable assertions within the Science class, which has arrived at its solid real-world Darwinist convictions by testable verifiable empirical logical objective scientific method. Jonathan Sarfati critiques Gould's view as follows -

     "(Gould’s NOMA) is based on the philosophically fallacious fact-value distinction, and is really an anti-Christian claim. For example, the Resurrection of Christ is an essential part of the Christian faith (1 Corinthians 15:12–19), but it is also a matter of history; it passed the ‘testable’ claim that the tomb would be empty on the third day, and impinges on science because it demonstrated the power of God over so-called ‘natural laws’ that dead bodies decay, they do not return to life...This NOMA distinction really teaches that religion is just in one’s head, which seems to dull the senses of many Christians more than an overt declaration that Christianity is false. So this is even more dangerous."

  CMI’s response to PBS-TV series Evolution/ Episode 1: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea 

     The schema of the "thing-in-itself" as a primary "unknowable" unchanging "substance" with "knowable" secondary properties which are subject to change (colour, taste, smell, sound etc) is completely rejected by Dooyeweerd as not just deriving from Kant but from Plato and Aristotle. This Hellenic Kantian viewpoint dominates modern evangelicalism because of a failure of the Reformation to critique and reject the (Thomistic) syncretic Scholasticism which has left us with a pietistic anti-world body-soul sacred-secular dichotomy. That the foregoing is indeed the case is clearly evident from the fact that most evangelical theological seminaries and the broad mass of individual evangelicals (perhaps the majority?) will argue for Darwinism against creationism (of course with the proviso that the Darwinist evolutionary process was somehow unfathomably "God-directed"). In other words evangelicals by and large will argue that Richard Dawkins is perfectly correct apart from his atheism. The actual factual science is deemed to be sound. The argument is just the "upstairs" one of whether or not there was a Divine hand mysteriously at work.

     Dooyeweerd rejects the notion of "substance" as the primary characteristic of "things". He insists that the defining characteristic of reality is not "substance" but rather "meaning". Meaning always refers beyond itself. The marks on the screen you are staring at just now "mean" something (I hope) because they refer beyond themselves to a higher complexity of reality (our shared language and thought). All things exhaustively refer to God, derive meaning from God. For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. In Him we live and move and have our being. There is no "thing-in-itself" as raw brute otherness. According to Dooyeweerd there is God the "Meaning-Giver", and beyond Him there is ONLY given meaning. There is no OTHER meaning but that which flows from the Creator who is the source of all temporal reality. It is not that we have blank phenomenal "physicality" which is then "baptised" by God with metaphysical meaning. Physicality itself is an expression of meaning as it (physicality) exhaustively refers back to the Creator. 

     There is NO anchorage within time which can provide the concentration point or source of meaning for "things". The attempt to integrate experience around such an absolutized  temporal focus is the essence of apostasy and idolatry. And Dooyeweerd points out that any idol will eventually call into being its counter-idol. Hence the unbridgeable schisms between (Hellenistic) Form and Matter, (Thomistic) Nature and Grace, and (Humanistic) Nature and Freedom. The latter dichotomy (between natural scientific mechanistic "Law" and personal hedonistic "Freedom") is more and more apparent in contemporary secular society. Dawkins has essentially championed the Law-side (ie the "purposeless bio-chemical universals" side), but more recently he has tried to rescue human "freedom" from the omnivorous chemical machinery he champions. We can, by the way, also see the "Natural Mechanistic Law" versus the "Freedom of the Human Personality" split surfacing in movies with a "human freedom" versus "relentless machine" theme - the Terminator films, the Matrix films, and so on. Even the Alien films perhaps, since the insectoid alien is essentially a mindless genetic killing machine.   

     So in Dooyeweerdian terminology, Dawkins exemplifies the "Natural" (ie the "immutable Laws of Physics and Chemistry") side of the humanism. But (to reprise and expand a Rookmaaker metaphor) Dawkins has realized how this polarity of humanism is threatening not only to box himself in but also to turn him body and brain into boxwood. Our very bodies and minds must also be products of blind chemical processes. There can be NO free personality possible on that side of the tracks. No purpose. No choice. Only the universal acid of mindless chemistry. So more recently Dawkins finds need to escape from the box. We have apparently now reached a stage in our evolution, he says, when we have the unprecedented ability to "take charge" of our evolution. You can see how the other humanist polarity is kicking in here. But only marginally for Dawkins. He is still of course insistent that objectively-speaking there is no purpose, no good, no evil. There are only the values that we arbitrarily (subjectively) decide upon for ourselves. 

     Humanist Natural Law versus Humanist Personal Freedom. Richard Dawkins' "law" side of the polarization purports to integrate ALL of reality around absolutized "matter" (and "logic", though that can only be an emergent property of "matter"). For Dawkins, the (literal) matter of existence is exhaustively accounted for by Darwinism. And Darwinism is utterly a-teleological (ie devoid of purpose or design). Darwinism is thus the ontological meta-narrative. The "Big Story". Yet that postmodernist word "Story" is so inadequate and misleading. Inadequate, because the word might be misconstrued as allowing a measure of imaginative "made-up-ness" regarding Darwinism. Misleading, because it might suggest that Darwinism is simply the most plausible among competing stories. Which of course it is certainly not. Most damning of all, the word "Story" suggests an Author, and yet the non-negotiable premise of all science is that there is no Author. You know, better not to think of Darwinism as "Story" at all. "Story" is not "Scientific". "Story" belongs to... to.. the Arts. The subjective "humanities". Scientists by definition are NOT subjective. We need a term which speaks only of "Objectivity". Hmmm. I have it! What about "Description"? That's much better. That speaks only of the cataloging of empirical facts and of raw evidence. No distorting intrusions of subjectivity. 


     Those skeptical of Darwinism can of course tell at a glance that it is "Story". The ultimate "Success-Story". No question. So successful that it has long-since been elevated to the level of Paradigm. An internalized worldview. It is no longer fundamentally critiqued because it has become the fundament. It has become the precondition of critique. If we pause for a moment and ask ourselves what conceptual framework dominates Westernized civilization, global academia, global media (serious and populist), there is surely but one answer. Darwinism. Darwinism is the air we breath. And it is that very all-pervasiveness which lends power and plausibility to the Darwinist conceit that it is not "Story" but "Reality". It is not aprioristic front-loaded "interpretation" (wash out your mouth!), but diligently confirmed scientific "description". 
     OK. So what does the Darwinist description boil down to? “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” (Dawkins, R., "God’s Utility Function", Scientific American 273(5):62–67, November 1995). 


TS Eliot was so prescient -
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
("The Hollow Men", 1925)

     Post-modernism, in its turn is, I think, one face of the humanist "free personality" counter-idol. It turns from the totalitarian mechanistic "objectivity" of modern science, and instead asserts a totalitarian personalistic "subjectivity".  There IS no "Big Story" (or if there is it is beyond our reach, beyond our apprehension). All we have is our own personal short stories. Our own highly limited personal encounter with existence. If we remember the old parable of the seven blind Hindus bumping into an elephant. One thought it was like a wall, one like a snake, one like a piece of string, one like a spear, one like a tree-trunk. All true in a limited way - true as small stories. All remiss as the "Big Story". 

     And words are violence. Words assert one small narrative against all the other (equally valid) narratives. Exclusivism is universalism. That is bad. It is bad because it is presumptuous and intolerant. And moreover it is ridiculous, because (as we post-modernists now know) we cannot truly know. And that is irony. And thus irony becomes the only legitimate register for enlightened communication. The irony of always knowing that your statements contradict your knowledge that statements cannot truly be made. So self-parody is a must when you speak, or when you produce art (cf Calum Colvin). Otherwise you are arbitrarily "privileging" one view over another. You are in danger in effect of positing a universal. That is seriously out of order since we ironically know the universal truth that universals are invalid by definition. It can be seen immediately that Dawkins will be angrily at variance with this view, although it is as humanist as his own. He will be angry because he espouses the scientific (materialist) "universals" of physics and chemistry and biology. So, unsurprisingly, post-modernists really get up Professor Dawkins' nose. Almost as much, so it seems, as do theists and creationists:

http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824-postmodernism-disrobed

     I in fact detect a whiff of unconscious irony from Dawkins himself in the fore-mentioned article. At least I smiled inside as I read:

"Apparently, when you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when somebody punctures the established bag of wind."

  

     So if Dawkins is absolutizing the logical and bio-physical Dooyeweerdian modalities, where is post-modernism going wrong? I might suggest post-modernism is absolutizing the "lingual (symbolic)" and "historical (formative)" modalities. By reducing experience to the "lingual (symbolic)" everything thereby "refers" to something else. But there is no "something else" which is not itself referring in its turn to "something else"! So we end up with an all-encompassing maelstrom of signposts (or hyperlinks) which point only to other sign-posts. And to "privilege" one signpost over another is an existential faux pas. This lingual relativism is further compounded by historicistic relativism. Post-modernism, by reducing all of experience ultimately to the "historical (formative)" sphere, thereby repudiates and outlaws all "universals", since a universal, to remain universal, must transcend the shifting sands of time. 

     It is interesting to note the fashionable cosmological notion of a "multiverse" as opposed to a universe. Our own universe is in this context reduced to only one of countless equally legitimate variations of itself. What makes us think this local "reality" (or universe) has any more claim to validity than the universe next door where things fall up the way? Our sense of being in any kind of "special" ("God-given") place is being constantly eroded. The Big Bang cosmology arbitrarily asserts that the universe is "unbounded" and thus our galaxy is nowhere special. That is dogma. If a "bounded" universe is assumed, then there are indications that our galaxy does in fact occupy a favoured central-ish location. We find the implications of the post-modernist view in the screenplay for example of Quentin Tarantino films - "Pulp Fiction" and especially "Reservoir Dogs". An event has occurred. What happened? We don't know exactly. We only have Mr Blue's subjective account and Mr Pink's subjective account, and so on. In the recent Di Caprio film "Inception" we find again a plot involving (Matrix-plus) onion-layers of narrative until you have to really think hard to decide what "reality" is or was. And at the end you are left wondering whether you've even got it right. 

     So (in summary) from a Dooyeweerdian perspective, humanism (in both its polarizations) is centrally flawed because it attempts to make some aspect of temporal experience the integration point of all existence. It attempts to find the basis of meaning, of logic, of language etc within created reality instead of looking to the only source of all meaning, the living God who inhabits eternity. Our anchorage is within the supratemporal "veil" (Hebrews 6:17-20).

     Van Til insists that humans encounter the face of God in every fact. Nature is in no way a brute otherness. Nature is exhaustively and continuously revelatory of the Triune God. Romans 1 tells us that the invisible attributes of God are clearly perceived in the things that are made, so we are without excuse in our unbelief. And since we are made in God's image, we in a sense discover ourselves in nature as in a mirror. That's how Attenborough gets away with it. There is human self-identification at work when nature is viewed, and so we are drawn into the spectacle with him, discovering ourselves as we discover the animals. But all the while he (I think quite calculatedly) suppresses any recognition of God's face in nature. In Van Til's terms I suspect he is "epistemologically self-conscious". A consummate propagandist for his Godless view of "reality".

     In fact, when it comes down to it, I guess I am not sure about this "reality" word, particularly if we conceive of it as "something in itself". I follow Dooyeweerd in that. I am wondering if only God is "reality". Could it be that humans only truly touch "reality" when that touch is as if touching the hem of His garment...?  

Fearghas. 

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ADDENDA

"Derrida, Van Til and the Metaphysics of Postmodernism: An Essay" by Jacob Gabriel Hale (2004)

Extracts:

The overall goal in what is attempted here is to define the postmodern dilemma as not so much an epistemological crisis, but rather an ontological one as it is revealed in the thought of Derrida. By placing the debate around the issue of ontology, I believe the church has much to say to those secular thinkers who have recognized and admitted the inherent bankruptcy that western philosophy has produced. To those prophets of demise, whom we call postmodernists, I give them Cornelius Van Til. 

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The most popular misunderstanding of Derrida is that he attempts to destroy any notion of objective truth... Instead of trying to deny the possibility of objective reality, Derrida wants to point out the deep complications that arise when one considers how words relate to the world outside of us.

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Therefore, the thrust of Derrida’s thought is to challenge the idea of an impersonal, abstract, indefinable being that grounds knowledge, meaning and language. Derrida asserts that the history of western thought has presupposed a kind of empirical dogmatism in which naïve metaphysical assumptions have served as the foundation of meaning. It is precisely at this point, in regards to the metaphysical and ontological notions of western philosophy, that Derrida’s philosophy has to be understood... For Derrida, the metaphysical and ontological notions that have served as the foundation for knowledge throughout the history of western philosophy are arbitrary and superstitious.... According to Derrida, words do not derive their meaning from a logos or the presence of objects in our consciousness. Rather, words find their meaning in other words which in turn derive their meaning from other words.... Meaning as such has no outside foundation and is constantly in flux. Because signs refer to other signs and meaning is decided instantly by the interpreting subject, meaning is constantly changing, thus doing constant violence to the text. Therefore, interpretation is said, by postmodernists like Derrida, to consist of a continuous inescapable cycle of subjects doing violence to both words and objects as they continually re-make and redefine them according to their own personal image.... For Derrida, deconstruction is a basic element in all of language. It is the revealing of the process of meaning, knowledge and thought crumbling under its foundationless-ness. According to Derrida, all language should be allowed to deconstruct so that its usages and meanings cannot be used to empower its users of others... Derrida asserts that meaning is not grounded in metaphysics or an ontological foundation at all, but rather is inter-linguistic, where words and signs constantly change and negotiate meaning. This is perhaps the most important feature of Derrida’s thought for our discussion. 

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Given this definition of the postmodern project, how then should the church respond? Should we, with Derrida, triumphantly announce the death of western metaphysics, or should we resist this idea, and work to show that the modern vision of epistemology and ontology should be maintained. More often than not, the latter has been the choice among most Christian thinkers and apologists. In these cases, efforts have been aimed at proving the existence of certain abstract principles, which in turn ground knowledge objectively. Among these principles are the law of non-contradiction, causality, the general reliability of sense experience, reason, etc. For many Christian apologists, these principles must be maintained in order to keep knowledge from collapsing into a quagmire of relativism. However, one of the problems of this approach is that it achieves nothing more than reasserting the same modernistic notions that postmodernism rejects. Therefore, no constructive gains are made in dialogue. 

What then should be our approach? It is my contention that postmodernism has done the church a great service in illuminating the inherent bankruptcy of secular thought in general. Though it might appear tempting to reassert modernistic foundations in the face of postmodernism, we must not forget the great harm modernistic thought has done to the church for centuries. As Christians we should maintain that though God gives common grace to the pagan, there can be no cogent philosophy of life that does not swear allegiance to the Lordship of Jesus Christ... For Derrida, meaning is inter-lingual and has no outside referent because that which is outside of us is meaningless in-itself. This is the entire thrust of Derrida’s thought. Therefore, our task is to combat modernity and postmodernism with a re-examined ontology and metaphysic. 

It is here that we shall now turn to Cornelius Van Til. Though much of postmodernism postdates the bulk of Van Til’s intellectual enterprise, much of Van Til’s thought is directly applicable to some concerns that postmodernism has raised... Through his analysis of western thought, Van Til shows how philosophy after philosophy deconstructs itself into irrationalism. 

*****

For Van Til, all “things” consist of being related to God’s nature. Therefore, any arbitrary notion of ‘substance’, ‘essence’, ‘logos’, or ‘being in general’ as the ontological foundation of “things” is false. As we have seen, if any of these were the ontological foundation of reality than nihilism would ensue. Rather, ontologically speaking, the being of God is revealed in all things; therefore all things are inherently meaningful including mankind’s own constitution and therefore are actively revelatory in revealing God’s being. So for Van Til, the history of philosophy has gone wrong in asserting a metaphysical understanding of reality that is impersonal, abstract, and inherently meaningless. 

The significance of Van Til’s ontology will become more evident as we look at how it grounds epistemology...  which distances him from what is termed natural theology. According to Van Til, the knowledge of God is not inferred, induced, deduced, or derived from any sort of evidence, fact or observation. Rather, the knowledge of God is immediately apprehended at the moment of consciousness. In Husserlean terms, the knowledge of God is immediately “present”, and “given.” Unlike others, who call themselves classical apologists, Van Til maintains that our knowledge of God does not come from an argument from facts and evidences. Based on Romans 1 this cannot be the case because, as Bahnsen points out, there are some who do not have the cognitive abilities to reason in this manner. Yet, according to Paul, they still know God. Because the knowledge of God is immediately present to us through that which is made (both nature and self), Paul can say with confidence that in knowing God’s acts (both nature and self) we truly “know him.”... [Footnotes: This is expressed in Van Til’s own words, “The cosmos-consciousness, the self-consciousness, and the God-consciousness would naturally be simultaneous.”... According to VanTil, the knowledge of God must be known before any functions of the mind can be consciously distinguished....Therefore, it is impossible to reason from abstract principles to God. Rather, the ability to even recognize relations in things and therefore identify principles is proof itself that the knowledge of God is known.] 

*****

In other words, rather than asserting that knowledge is grounded in reason, sensory experience and causality, Van Til asserts that reason, sensory experience and causality are in themselves grounded in God...  In other words, the knowledge of God, according to Van Til, is not a simple proposition in which other propositions are justified. Rather, the knowledge of God is the necessary-transcendental precondition for all other knowledge.

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Words as signs are inherently meaningful because that which constitutes them are our experiences as meaningful human beings living in a meaningful world with other meaningful human beings. In other words because God is continuously revealing himself in all things, including ourselves, our representation of things in signs is inherently packed full of meaning. For Derrida this is not possible because metaphysically speaking, there is nothing ‘outside’ of us that is inherently meaningful. However, for Van Til, this is not only possible, but the contrary is impossible due to the revelatory ontology of all nature and the self. The “center” therefore, is outside of language and is grounded in the infinite personal God. Along these lines Van Til writes that, “Being from the outset covenantal, the natural revelation of God to man was meant to serve as the playground for the process of differentiation that was to take place in the course of time." Unlike Derrida, Van Til is able to say that creation, not language, is the playground of meaning, because God is immediately present in all creation and therefore in all the contents of our consciousness... If this ontology of nature, the human self and language as divine self revelation is accepted, then this takes the epistemological dilemma posed by Derrida and turns it on its head. Instead of asking the question, ‘how is meaning possible?’, the question becomes how is meaning not possible?

*****

Van Til has said nothing new to us. He simply stands in the midst of all secular thinkers, whether modern or postmodern, and reminds them that it is in God and God alone that we “live, move and have our being.”

http://reformedperspectives.org/files/reformedperspectives/hall_of_frame/HOF.Hale.Derrida%20and%20VanTil.6.30.04.html 

http://reformedperspectives.org/articles/jac_hale/HOF.Hale.Derrida%20and%20VanTil.6.30.04.pdf

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"Imagination, Image of God and Wisdom of God: Theosophical Themes in Dooyeweerd's Philosophy" (or 141 pages pdf) by Dr. J. Glenn Friesen 

Extracts from Introduction -

The Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) is more relevant today than ever before. Postmodernism is questioning the validity of modernism’s rationalistic and dualistic thought. It attempts to fully temporalize all of humanity’s existence and concerns, and it rejects any role of the transcendent. And in its emphasis on our historical constructs of reality, postmodernism has relativized all values, leaving both our everyday praxis and our theoretical thought without any foundations. Postmodernism is acutely aware of this lack of foundations. A key postmodern theme has been the discovery of what many call a post-critical (or post-liberal) position concerning the possibility of a re-enchantment of life and of the cosmos, based, in part, on a hermeneutics of retrieval. But just what is it that postmodernism is seeking to retrieve? And how do we re-enchant our world after the devastation to the foundations caused by the hermeneutics of suspicion?

I believe that Dooyeweerd’s philosophy, and in particular his ideas of imagination, help us to answer these questions. For Dooyeweerd, our acts of imagination do not only play a role in our aesthetic and artistic creations. Imagination is also fundamental to our act of perceiving the world, and to both our pre-theoretical and our theoretical knowledge. In our acts of imagination, we retrieve the wisdom of the past, a wisdom that reflects God’s Wisdom or Sophia. This is therefore an answer to one problem posed by postmodernism.

Our acts of imagination are also involved in our cultural formation of the world–when we realize and form that which has previously existed only as “figure” and not as reality. In our acts of imagination we find the figure, and in our cultural formation, we literally real-ize the figure, making the temporal world real in its fullest sense. Is this not the re-enchantment of the world that postmodernism is seeking? Dooyeweerd himself speaks of a ‘spiritualizing-through’ [doorgeestelijking] of temporal reality, and of man’s purpose to illuminate from within [doorlichten] all of temporal reality so that the supratemporal fullness of meaning shines through it (see discussion below).

Like postmodern philosophers, Dooyeweerd also opposes the rationalism of modernism and its various dualisms. He rejects the modernist dualism between a material body and rational soul, and the rationalism at the basis of such a dualism. Dooyeweerd also rejects the irrationalism that results from inverting such a dualism in order to elevate the body (or feelings, or aesthetics) over rationality. And he vigorously opposes any other dualisms where one aspect of temporal creation is elevated over the other aspects. He rejects even the idea of substance, since it is an improper absolutization of the physical aspect of our experience.

Dooyeweerd’s understanding of perception is one of his most astounding ways of overcoming dualism. He rejects the empirical and phenomenological assumptions of a dualism between an independent observing subject and an independent object. Our experience is not of independent things, but of “individuality structures” that depend on man for their full realization and individuality. And the process of perception is a subject-object relation that occurs within the modal aspects of temporal reality, in a nondual act of perception.

But Dooyeweerd’s opposition to modernism and to dualism does not mean that Dooyeweerd is a postmodernist. For, in contrast to postmodernism, Dooyeweerd maintains the importance of the transcendent, especially of our supratemporal selfhood and of its relation to the temporal cosmos. And he maintains the importance of God’s law, both in its central supratemporal form of love and in its temporal diversity, a law that provides the foundation for our existence, experience and theoretical thought. Dooyeweerd’s law-Idea [Wetsidee], together with his Ideas of cosmic time and the supratemporal selfhood, form the basis of his philosophy. I will compare this law-Idea to the idea of God’s Wisdom or Sophia.

Dooyeweerd distinguishes God’s eternity from the supratemporal aevum or created eternity. And both eternity and aevum are distinguished from the cosmic time of our world. Our selfhood is supratemporal, but we are also “fitted into” temporal reality by our temporal body or what Dooyeweerd calls our ‘mantle of functions’ [functiemantel]. I will discuss this in more detail. But in making this distinction between selfhood and temporal mantle, Dooyeweerd is not introducing another dualism. Our selfhood is not one of our temporal functions. It is not, for example, merely our rational function. It is the supratemporal center, or heart, out of which all of our temporal functions proceed and are expressed.

Dooyeweerd says that a proper understanding of our supratemporal selfhood is tied to proper knowledge of God (eternity) and of the temporal cosmos (cosmic time). We cannot understand God, self or cosmos except in an interrelated way.

Dooyeweerd’s emphasis on our supratemporal selfhood is a kind of mysticism. It is not a mysticism of identity with God, or any kind of pantheistic mysticism. It is a nondual mysticism, emphasizing our total dependence on God. We are “from, through, and to” God as our Origin [3]. Although the correspondence is not exact, I have compared this to panentheism.

Nor is Dooyeweerd’s mysticism to be interpreted as a spiritualizing flight from the world. Although for Dooyeweerd our world is fallen, broken, and in need of redemption, we should not seek to escape from it. Rather, our task is to assist in the working out of its redemption, for this is the purpose for which we were created. As we shall see, this emphasis fits with theosophy’s emphasis on discovering the structures within temporal reality instead of escaping from temporal reality.

Dooyeweerd criticizes modernism by (1) transcendent criticism from his own perspective (2) immanent criticism, showing modernism’s internal inconsistencies and dualisms, even based on its own assumptions and (3) a transcendental critique based on the conditions that make possible any kind of theoretical thought.

But Dooyeweerd’s transcendental critique depends on his view that every philosophy needs to account for itself in terms of three transcendental Ideas: the Ideas of (a) Origin, (b) totality, and (c) temporal coherence. From a Christian perspective, these three transcendental Ideas correspond to (a) God (as Origin), (b) selfhood (as supratemporal religious root, fallen and redeemed in Christ, the New Root, in Whom we participate), (c) and cosmos (for Dooyeweerd, cosmos is only the temporal part of creation).

To the extent that postmodernism has given up trying to answer these three transcendental questions, Dooyeweerd’s transcendental critique of postmodernism will not be convincing. Many postmodernists deny not only any need to discuss an origin, but also deny any idea of totality, especially a supratemporal totality like Dooyeweerd’s view of the selfhood. Indeed, much of postmodernism denies any identity of the selfhood at all, preferring to see it as a construct of many diverse and fragmented experiences. But perhaps some postmodernists will be willing to look at these issues again in the light of Dooyeweerd’s views on imagination.

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So although Dooyeweerd opposes modernism, he is not himself a postmodernist. I suggest that he is a pre-modernist, one who has returned to philosophical roots that pre-date modernism. A postmodernist will object that it is not possible to return to pre-modernism. Do we not have to first follow the hermeneutics of suspicion before we can attempt a retrieval of the past? But Dooyeweerd’s approach is different. His philosophy seeks to cut off such unfruitful and dead-end thinking at its root. We do not have to first agree with the ideas of the autonomy of thought, and of the temporalization of our existence, in order to then reach the despairing realization that these are dead ends. For if those ideas are adopted, no positive retrieval will be possible. Our views of God, self and cosmos will remain dis-enchanted. But in criticizing modernism, Dooyeweerd has not evaded it. From out of his pre-modern roots, he has gone through modernism and beyond it, not adopting it, but criticizing it using its own tools of thought. He has anticipated the concerns and the problematics of postmodernism, but he has provided answers that are very different.

So my suggestion that Dooyeweerd is a pre-modernist should not be misunderstood. He is not a pre-modernist in the sense of Protestant fundamentalism. For fundamentalism, with its emphasis on rational propositional truth, is itself a form of modernism. Dooyeweerd criticizes those who seek to use the Bible as a textbook for philosophy.

Nor should Dooyeweerd’s pre-modernism be understood as a return to the kind of Catholicism that regards philosophy as the handmaiden of theology. Dooyeweerd rejects all attempts by the Church to control theoretical thought. For Dooyeweerd, theology is itself a theoretical discipline that depends on philosophical assumptions. And not even philosophy is ultimate, since it, too is theoretical, and relies on the givenness of our pre-theoretical experience. Philosophy attempts to theoretically “give an account” of our pre-theoretical experience, but that experience always remains primary. Dooyeweerd’s philosophy is experiential, but not in the subjectivistic sense of ‘Erlebnis,’ but in a sense of a conscious ‘Hineinleben’– a conscious experience of the relation of our supratemporal selfhood to the temporal world (NC II, 474-475). Our supratemporal selfhood is at the root of all our experience; we discover it in what Dooyeweerd calls an act of ‘religious self-reflection.’

So Dooyeweerd is not a modernist, nor a postmodernist, nor a Biblicist or fundamentalist, nor a philosopher whose thought is confined within a particular theology. Does Dooyeweerd’s pre-modern philosophy fit into any tradition at all? Elsewhere, I have shown how Dooyeweerd’s key ideas situate his philosophy within an existing tradition. This is the Wisdom tradition, or Christian theosophy, best exemplified in the philosophy of Franz von Baader (1765-1841), who also criticized modernism, using terminology and arguments very similar to the ones that Dooyeweerd used a hundred years later.

http://www.members.shaw.ca/hermandooyeweerd/Imagination.html

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