Esther's thoughts and Daniel's thoughts

[Bethany Gates]

Esther:

Dear Bethany and group,

 

"Knowledge of God is only the direct personal expereince of theosis..."  Daniel is writing from a posture that is bascially subjective rather than Objective.  We do not begin with what we know about God, but from what God has revealed to us through His Holy Word and His death on the cross.  Daniel might say "well you only know that because God revealed that to you."  True enough, but I would argure that that truth stands apart from my knowledge as well--it has objective value whether I ever came to know it or not.  Yes, the tree does make a sound when it falls in the forest whether we are there to hear it or not.  This actually relates quite well to the next project we spoke of undertaking beyond Hopko, The Abolition of Man.  Lewis makes the argument against Daniel's highly subjective logic better than I could and far more eloquently.  

 

It's very hard for us as 21st century Westerners to know how much we have been influenced by a viewpoint that, in the end, makes everything subjective and about what we can know.  Many years ago I had a conversation with a young woman who was leaving her husband for another man.  She was in the church, they were in the church, and everyone was trying to reason with her--including me since I was in a pastoral role at that time.  But all she would say was "I have to stick to what I know about God, and God is Love."  I tried to tell her that God's nature, His Being, are beyond what we can know--otherwise we reduce Him to what we can know.  And He is Holy for starters.  He hates sin and evil, and is absolutely opposed to it.  She was in the process of destroying her marriage and she had lost all sense that this was wrong.  There was no objective right/wrong any more and therefore she had lost any understanding that she was in sin.  In the end I got nowhere with her, becuse she was absolutely determined to stick to "what she knew."

 

I suggest we finish Hopko,. go on to Lewis, and then discuss Daniel's article from the standpoint of the importance of Objectivity.

 

Esther

  

Daniel wrote:

Man, good discussion!  

so... Yes, she got it right.  It is all about subjectivity and not objectivity because God is not an object and truth is not objective.  But this has nothing to do with moral relativism; it is moral relatedness.  However, I take her criticism to heart because the terminology of atheistic existentialism is much more prominent in general usage than that of Orthodox Personalism.  So when the Orthodox use this terminology it is only to be expected that it will be interpreted along the lines of Sartre and not those of the Fathers. So this is a very very good criticism because it would be horrible to confuse the ecstatic epistemology of the Fathers with the nihilist or egoist epistemology of Sartre.  Here's how I understand Zizioulas and Yannaras.  

'Objectivity' implies a view from nowhere, that which is true in and of itself.  This is the absolute, a truth so transcendent that perspective become irrelevant.  It is not my view of reality, or your view of reality, but reality in itself: absolute, objective reality.  There are two problems for this view of truth.  

1) Absolute truth is absurd truth because it can have no meaning.  Example: There may or may not be giant redwoods being chopped down somewhere in the Andromeda Galaxy, and they may or may not be making noise.  But this is totally absurd because it has no soteriological relevance for us.  Even if it is actually happening, it cannot be granted the dignity of truth, because it does not relate us to God.  Furthermore, if these Andromedan trees do in fact exist, our knowledge of them is of identical value as our imagination of them: it is totally unverifiable and unknowable because it is unrelated.  In other words, even sincere faith in an abstract truth is as meaningless as the imagination of an abstract principle.  Thus, the abstract, the absolute, and the objective are all mental fictions.  It is their lack of relation to us in the world of experience that precludes the possibility of our speaking meaningfully about them.  We could never speak objectively about objectivity. This leads to the second problem.

2) Absolute truth is accessed through discursive reasoning: logical deduction.  What is conceived in absolute truth is a mental concept existing only in one's mind: this is precisely no longer absolute!  It is entirely subjective in that my own private logic produces it.  If I understood Mark Galli correctly, this is what Karl Barth would reject as a mere idol of God, in that it is a rational deduction and not the active revelation of our Living Transcendent God.  Therefore, to attain the reliability which modernists sought in the absolute, we must look not to concepts of objectivity which turn out to be utterly subjective, but to the interrelatedness of relationship.  'Objective reliability' is only possible through the personal intercommunication of relationship.  There is no truth outside of this because only your imagination could leave experience to invent such an objective truth.  One might have a concept of God's objective truth.  Perhaps it is one's understanding of an orthodox theological position.  But this is only an idea existing in a person's mind.  What could be more subjective than that?  Person A calls it objective truth, Person B calls it delusion, etc.  What is revelation?  It is "disclosure to..."  Absolute truth is precisely non-revealed truth.  So any claim about it is immediately going beyond revelation into imagination.  It must be an idol.  

Relational epistemology is not a free-floating ooey gooey 'feel good n do it' epistemology.  Relational epistemology, or in Yannaras' term 'ecstatic' epistemology, is the anchor grounding us in revelation and protecting us from speculation.  Relational epistemology is a first and second person epistemology.  We the Church know only what we have experienced God revealing to us.  If we claim to know anything outside of this, any 'third person' objective revelation, we are making it up: that is subjectivity!  If we claim to know something about God from some revelation not experienced by the Church (some other scriptures, some other visions, some other philosophy, etc.), then we are making a truth claim without any basis but our own private whim.   

So it is the direct experience of God's revelation (disclosure) that constitutes truth.  Any claim about a non-relational or absolute truth is private speculation.  This is why it is so important for the Church to remain catholic: we experience God's revelation corporately and in this we find reliability.

As for morality, my thoughts are much less developed so far, but off the top of my head: There can be no argument against the statement: "I have to stick to what I know about God, and God is Love."  This is in fact the whole of the Law and the Prophets.  But as we all know, 'love' is not a private feeling; it is voluntary self-denial for the good of the other.  How do we know this about love?  Because we as a community have witnessed the crucifixion.  So the content of love is, again, the Church's experience of God.  For a person to use the aforementioned statement as justification for 'sin' is only evidence that they have replaced the Church's common witness to the primary event of love with a private conception.  If love is an idea, then I can own it and do whatever I want with it.  But if love is the communal witness to the crucifixion and resurrection, then I have to obey it because it is beyond me, yet beckoning to me.  So moral relativism is actually the product of private conceptions of the absolute.  (This is at least what Georges Florovsky argues in the "Slyness of Reason" (1922) regarding the propensity of absolute idealism to become totalitarian coercion (the USSR), but that is getting into the next whole conversation.)

I really appreciate hearing all of this discussion because it keeps me out of my own imagination ;)   I guess I should say though, if people are actually reading what I'm writing, that I'm just doing the best I can to understand some very well respected theologians who are very difficult to understand. I hope that I'm getting them right.  I think I need to send this all to the Metropolitan here to make sure I'm not totally off base.  I would really like not to be so.  

Cheerio!

Daniel