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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2007
In his The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology, F. LeRon Shults recommends postfoundationalism as a via media between modernist foundationalism and postmodernist antifoundationalism. He advocates postfoundationalism as an epistemological approach which avoids the pitfalls on either side and provides the best way forward for constructive theological work. In this article I attempt to assess how well Shults's proposal treats Christian theological knowing. I begin by entertaining a Barthian theological concern which might be employed as soft criteria for an assessment of any proposed theological epistemology. This concern stipulates that an epistemology in the service of Christian theology must respect a commitment to the objective reality of God who, as Word become flesh, makes himself known through the human experience of reality to his church, while recognising the fallibility of human knowing, presupposing a knowledge of God accessible through experience always only by the prevenient, self-giving action of God. I then turn to a brief analysis of the Shults–van Huyssteen case against foundationalism and nonfoundationalism, focusing particularly on the postfoundationalist critiques of foundationalism and fideism in dialogue with Barth. The article concludes with an appraisal of the postfoundationalist recommendation. I argue that Shults's approach maps well to the theological concern for critical realism and a recognition of the social embeddedness of human knowing. Postfoundationalism's underlying commitments, however, leave it closed to an external source of warrant, and as a consequence repudiate a from above view of theological knowing. I suggest instead that only a theofoundationalist epistemology avoids the pitfalls sketched by Shults in a way that maintains proper epistemic humility without entering the ghettos of fideism or scepticism.
1 Bernstein, Richard J., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 16–19Google Scholar. Bernstein suggests that Cartesian anxiety is what motivates a ‘misleading and distortive’ dichotomy between objectivism and relativism.
2 Shults, F. LeRon, The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999)Google Scholar.
3 This is not to suggest that there is a broader or more general way of knowing outside of the way taken in theology. As Karl Barth says, ‘theology understands itself as (the) fundamental reflection about human existence as discussed within the framework of philosophy’. Karl, Barth, ‘Fate and Idea in Theology’, in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comments, ed. Martin, Rumscheidt, Princeton Theological Monograph Series, 8 (Allison Park, Pa.: Pickwick Publications, 1986), p. 27.Google Scholar
4 Ludwig, Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George, MarionEvans, Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957)Google Scholar, quoted in the introductory essay by Karl Barth, p. xv.
5 Christoph Schwöbel gives voice to this Barth commonplace. ‘What characterizes the modernity which is the target of Barth's critique? The first is the inversion of the order of being and knowing, of ontology or metaphysics and epistemology. In pre-modern times, the question of the being (or essence) of something had primacy over the question of how it can be known’. ‘Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. J. B. Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 29.
6 CD I/1, p. 36 (KD I/1, pp. 35–6). Elsewhere: ‘The Modernist view from which we must demarcate ourselves here goes back to the Renaissance and especially to the Renaissance philosopher Descartes with his proof of God from human self-certainty.’ CD I/1, p. 195 (KD I/1, p. 203).
7 Karl, Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (London: SCM Press, 1972), pp. 537–8Google Scholar.
8 Barth uses the expression ‘von unten nach oben’ to describe the wrong way to ground theological knowing and to distinguish from the only proper and indeed possible orientation for theology ‘von oben nach unten’. KD I/1, pp. 135, 178, 179, 189, 255, 440. This does not mean that the medium of revelation is not of the unten. The incarnation is a historical, this-worldly, and indeed empirical reality; nevertheless, the Ursprung is von oben and therefore the way of revelation, the way we come to know God ‘von oben nach unten führt’, p. 440.
9 CD I/1, p. 17 For listening and obedience Barth uses the related words Gehör and Gehorsam (KD I/1, p. 17).
10 Ibid., quoting John 16:13.
11 CD I/1, p. 229 (KD I/1, p. 241).
12 Barth goes on to say, ‘Augustine rightly says: Si tollatur assensio, fides tollitur; quia sine assensione nihil creditur [if assent be taken away, faith goes too; for without assent there can be no belief] (Enchir., p. 20). And Thomas Aquinas has the correct definition: fides cognitio quaedam est, inquantum intellectus determinatur per fidem ad aliquod cognoscibile [Faith is a kind of knowledge, inasmuch as the intellect is determined by faith to some knowable object] . . . Thus it is in faith, as the possibility given in faith, that we have to understand the knowability of the Word of God. In the event of faith it is as it were born, it comes into view, and it is to be sought and found.’ Ibid. (I've updated the translation of Menschen from men to people.)
13 These are the three modern manifestations of foundationalism according to Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, pp. 32–5.
14 CD I/1, p. 120 (KD I/1, p. 123).
15 Ibid.
16 Bultmann accuses Barth of having ‘failed to enter into debate with modern philosophy and naively adopted the older ontology from patristic and scholastic dogmatics’. Karl Barth and others, Karl Barth–Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922–1966 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), p. 38. Harnack sees in Barth's unscientific notion of revelation a teetering between ‘absolute religious scepticism and naive biblicism’. The accusation that Barth heralds an uncritical neo-orthodoxy is in this same vein.
17 Karl, Barth, Credo: A Presentation of the Chief Problems of Dogmatics with Reference to the Apostles’ Creed (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936), p. 183Google Scholar.
18 Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 27.
19 Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, p. 394.
20 Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 36. For similarities in the a posteriori nature of the reflection of theology and science see Torrance, Thomas F., God and Rationality (London: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.
21 Published originally in 1929, Karl, Barth, ‘Schicksal und Idee in Der Theologie’, in Theologische Fragen und Antworten (Zollikon: Evang. Verl., 1957)Google Scholar.
22 Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 35.
23 Ibid., p. 36.
24 Ibid., p. 40.
25 Ibid., p. 41.
26 Ibid., p. 35.
27 Ibid., p. 49.
28 Ibid., pp. 42–3.
29 Ibid., p. 47.
30 See especially Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 27–33. Ward suggests that Barth presents two antithetical views without providing a way to move between them. He presents these as two competing models of language which reflect respectively a naïve realism and a strong idealism. ‘Barth needs to provide a . . . coherent account of the interplay between two antithetical models for the nature of language. One offers a direct correspondence between signifier and signified, word and Word, but constitutes a natural theology and dissolves the distinction between the creaturely and the divine, the human and God as Wholly Other. The other denies the possibility of moving beyond mediation and, therefore, the possibility of any true knowledge of God as Wholly Other.’ Word became flesh is not enough for Ward. See critical reviews in Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Graham Ward's Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 49/1 (1996). David Guretzki, ‘Barth, Derrida and Différance: Is there a Difference?’, Didaskalia 13/2 (Spring 2002).
31 Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 36.
32 CD I/1, p. 4 (KD 1/1, p. 2).
33 ‘By “theology” we understand that discipline of the church. Theology is thus related to the church as its theological sphere of life.’ Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 26.
34 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 27.
35 Ibid., p. 26.
36 Barth is most notably identified with critical realism in McCormack, Bruce L., Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1995)Google Scholar. For postfoundationalism and critical realism see van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel, The Shaping of Rationality: Toward Interdisciplinarity in Theology and Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 213–19Google Scholar. and Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, pp. 46, 50–1, 79.
37 While Barth is not embraced as a postfoundationalist, he is claimed by some as a proto-postmodernist: Isolde, Andrews, Deconstructing Barth: A Study of the Complementary Methods in Karl Barth and Jacques Derrida (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996)Google Scholar; William, Stacy Johnson, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology, 1st edn, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Graham, Ward, ‘Barth, Modernity and Postmodernity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. Webster, J. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
38 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, pp. 52–3.
39 Ibid., p. 30.
40 Ibid., p. 31.
41 Ibid., p. 30.
42 Ibid., pp. 29, 30.
43 Ibid., p. 31.
44 Ibid., p. 33.
45 Alvin, Plantinga, ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in Plantinga, Alvin and Wolterstorff, Nicholas (eds), Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 61ffGoogle Scholar.
46 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 40.
47 This is precisely what Michael Bergmann demonstrates when treating the ‘conceptual awareness’ notion of internalism: ‘A Dilemma for Internalists’, in Thomas Crisp, Matthew Davidson, and David Vander Laan (eds), Knowledge and Reality: Essays in Honor of Alvin Plantinga, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming).
48 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 47. As reformed epistemologists he has singled out Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff.
49 Mikael, Stenmark, Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life: A Critical Evaluation of Four Models of Rationality (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), p. 44Google Scholar.
50 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 47.
51 Susan, Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), p. 19Google Scholar.
52 Ibid., p. 23.
53 Ibid., pp. 25–7.
54 Ibid., pp. 23, 26.
55 Alvin, Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 79.Google Scholar
56 Haack, Evidence and Inquiry, p. 27.
57 Ibid., p. 31.
58 Ibid., p. 32.
59 My thanks to Marc Cortez for his helpful suggestions in response to Haack.
60 Pollock, John L., Contemporary Theories of Knowledge (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), pp. 175–6Google Scholar.
61 See Alvin Plantinga's account of the role of defeaters and his illustration of seeing a sheep. Alvin, Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 343–4, 359–61Google Scholar.
62 Plantinga is extremely helpful in sorting out these issues under the heading of properly functioning internal rationality. Ibid., pp. 110–11. For an excellent analysis of coherentism and perception see Plantinga's chapter on Laurence BonJour in Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate, pp. 87–113.
63 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 19.
64 Ibid., pp. 42–5.
65 Ibid., p. 44.
66 Ibid., p. 64.
67 Ibid., p. 55.
68 Van Huyssteen adds ‘In fact, these kinds of beliefs become a species of belief whose truth is discovered by means of criteria internal to the language game itself’. Wentzel, van Huyssteen, Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 186Google Scholar. Referenced by Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 72.
69 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 52.
70 Wolfhart, Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), p. 277Google Scholar.
71 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 244.
72 Ibid., p. 71.
73 Stenmark, Rationality, p. 212. quoted in Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 40.
74 Similarly Alvin Plantinga concludes that Christian belief can have warrant in the basic way (meaning one need not have an argument to support it) so long as there are no defeaters. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, p. 352.
75 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 58. referring here to van Huyssteen, Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology, p. 259.
76 Bonhoeffer's charge that Barth resorts to a ‘positivism of revelation’ seems to be motivated by a fear that Barth's theology, with its analogia fidei repudiation of human religion, removes the church from the world in a way that denies the lordship of Christ over the world. ‘The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up, as it does in the last analysis, a law of faith . . . but the world is to some degree made to depend on itself and left to its own devices, and that's the mistake’. Dietrich, Bonhoeffer and Eberhard, Bethge, Letters and Papers from Prison, 3rd edn (London: SCM Press, 1967), pp. 280, 286, 328–39Google Scholar. Barth was simply perplexed by this charge, see Eberhard, Busch, Karl Barths Lebenslauf: Nach Seinen Briefen Und Autobiographischen Texten, 2. Aufl, durcgesehene. ed. (Munich: Kaiser, 1976), p. 381Google Scholar.
77 In fact, Barth's view of the fallibility of human reason has lead to the potentially misleading suggestion that Barth is a nonfoundationalist postmodern. See Johnson, Mystery of God, pp. 3–4, 15, 18, 31, 154, 170, 184; Ward, ‘Barth, Modernity and Postmodernity’, pp. 280–4.
78 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 52.
79 Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 347ff.
80 Wolfhart, Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology: Collected Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 189–90Google Scholar, quoted by Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 182. Shults goes on to explain that Pannenberg demonstrates that Feuerbach's analysis ‘falsely assumed the infinity of the human race’. It is worth noting that Barth critiques Feuerbach for building his position on the false notion of a general humanity abstracted from the individual human who is both wicked and subject to death. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 539–40.
81 In comments on Pannenberg, Shults explicitly affirms that theology takes its ‘methodological starting point, not self-authenticating ground’ from a ‘general anthropology’. Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 157.
82 Shults appeals to Andy F. Sanders's defence of fallibilism. ‘Sanders emphasizes that “fallibilism” avoids self-defeat, because it is aware that even the belief in fallibilism may be mistaken, but since it does not deny we can have true beliefs, it may consistently offer reasons for accepting fallibilism’. Ibid., p. 58. referring to Sanders, A., ‘Traditionalism, Fallibilism and Theological Relativism’, Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift 49 (1995), p. 195Google Scholar.
83 My thanks to Daniel R. Driver for his comments on this part of the article.
84 I am using theology in the sense of the church's talk about God and not the academy's study of theories about God. This is the sense Athanasius distinguished as θεολογεῖν, as Alan Torrance notes: ‘Athanasius distinguished between the anthropomorphic projection of our opinions (epinoiai) onto the divine – what he termed muthologein (mythologising) – and theologein or analogein. In theologein (God-talk proper), our terms are extended to project (ana-logein) beyond their ordinary context of use in such a way that they refer to the reality of God. No longer mere epinoiai (arbitrary human opinions or ideas projected mythologically onto the transcendent), these terms become dianoiai – concepts that project through (dia) to the reality and being of God. The condition of this is meta-noia, as Paul interpreted it – that is, the transformation of our thinking and concepts (noiai) and thus our terminology. The implication is that there is a semantic shifting of our concepts in parallel with the “reschematization” of our minds (Rom. 12:2) so that they might truly and appropriately refer to the divine. In sum, theologein – that is, valid or truthful (alethos) reference to God – requires a reconciliation of our noiai to the extent that we are, in Paul's words, echthroi te dianoia, alienated or hostile in our conceptualities. This reconciling takes place so that we might have that mind which is in Christ Jesus and thereby participate in the new, transformed semantics (or “language games”) of the Body of Christ – where our logoi participate in the Logos, who is God concretely present within the created order.’ Alan J. Torrance, ‘Is Love the Essence of God?’, in Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.), Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 123–4.
85 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 184.
86 Ibid., p. 62; emphasis mine.
87 Shults continuously takes refuge in the notion of explanatory adequacy (ibid., pp. 24, 58, 62, 75, 78, 117, 184, 217, 226, 244–5, 248). But this is the question at the centre of the matter, the question I began this article with: what does it take for an answer to be an adequate answer to a question? Shults does briefly recognise this as problematic, but remains steadfast in his optimism that pressing fallibly on will advance knowledge. ‘In light of the postmodern critique of reason, the issue of determining which explanations are “more adequate” is more problematic than Pannenberg implies. Nevertheless, the difficulty of the task does not mean we should stop searching for intersubjectively criticizable criteria’, p. 184.
88 ‘it would have to be made clear that the unity of reality and truth occurs in and only in God's Word. It would also have to be made clear that we do not confuse our own theological reality with the truth’ Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 58.
89 2 Cor. 4:7, ESV.
90 2 Cor. 4:6, ESV.
