Worldview, Postmodernism, and Hermeneutics

Do you find that you need coherence in your worldview?  Do you need your understanding of reality to harmoniously fit together as best as possible with as few unexplainable inconsistencies as possible? Research suggests that humans in general seek to make storied sense of the world around us (cf., "The Aposotolic Gospel: Narrative (2)"). Many such stories have been constructed throughout history and across cultures to interpret shared human knowledge and experience. The greatest of them seek to function as metanarratives; that is, as overarching stories that individually claim to be absolute and comprehensive in their explanation of human knowledge and experience. Such stories develop over time and find their expression in various religions and philosophies, some ancient, such as the great faiths of the world, and some relatively recent, such as scientific modernism.

Postmodernism, however, categorically rejects the plausibility of a metanarrative. Since all human knowledge is perspectival, postmodernism argues, there can be no metanarrative that is true for all humans. There can only be personal or group narratives, which nevertheless often function as metanarratives for those who subscribe to them. But such subscription is based on a lack of awareness of the limitations of perspectival knowledge and experience. Consequently, the quest for a coherent metanarrative is an exercise in futility. There can only be a fragmented collection of potentially equally valid stories. There is no overarching true story that makes sense of our collective human knowledge and experience. There is no Truth, there is rather a kaleidoscope of variegated "truths."

The Church, on the other hand, has historically claimed that the Christian Bible unabashedly presents the world with a metanarrative that is divinely revealed. Its primary theme is the costly redemption of creation by its Creator. Its key elements involve God's creation of the world crowned by the fashioning of humans in God's image, human rebellion against God, God's purposeful interaction with a chosen people for the ultimate benefit of all humanity, God's incarnational appearance in and departure from this world following his death and resurrection, God's continued interaction with humanity by his Holy Spirit, and his promise to return incarnationally in order to consummate his redemptive plan for creation, particularly humanity.

The challenge for the Church is to coherently expound the biblical metanarrative to each successive generation and era throughout history and around the world in the light of collective human knowledge extant at any given time. The reason this is a challenge is that the sacred writings which comprise the Bible were historically and culturally conditioned. God condescended to reveal universal, eternal truths relevant to his redemptive purposes through the medium of human knowledge and experience extant at the times such revelation was divinely communicated. In other words, eternal redemptive truths were clothed with the particularities of historical-cultural human knowledge and experience, which of course finds its ultimate expression in the historically-culturally conditioned incarnation of the divine Logos.

For example, the scriptures have innumerable references to an ancient phenomenological understanding of cosmology and cosmogony; that is, an understanding of the origin, development, and general structure of the universe that is primarily based on human sensory observation. When human knowledge in the Modern era supplanted the ancient understanding, this produced a crisis for many in the Church who could not discern the distinction between universal, eternal truths revealed in the biblical record and the historically and culturally conditioned medium through which they were transmitted. Consequently, it took two centuries for the Catholic Church to officially acknowledge the validity of Galileo's pioneering heliocentric astronomical research when in 1835 all such works were finally dropped from the Index of Prohibited Books.

Today, however, most Christians read the biblical text with its ancient cosmological references and don't think twice about their incompatibility with present cosmological knowledge. Rather, we typically read such texts as though they are poetic expressions, and we interpret them in the light of present knowledge. But for the original authors such cosmological descriptions were a reflection of their understanding of the universe. The reason we are able to read such texts without epistemological difficulty is because previous generations already labored to adjust their worldview by integrating modern scientific knowledge with the biblical record. We are the heirs of their mental labor, having been bequeathed their integrated worldview.

On a personal level, the greatest challenge many Christians will ever experience with regard to the coherence of their worldview takes place at the time that the reality of God in the person of Jesus is revealed to them by God's Spirit and they experience spiritual conversion through repentance and faith. The profundity of this revelational experience challenges whatever aspects of their worldview did not allow for the validity of God's reality revealed in Christ. However, this will not be the end of the struggle for many believers to integrate contemporary human knowledge and experience with the biblical record. Collective human knowledge continues to grow, presenting new challenges of integration.

The presupposition of a biblical worldview is that all knowledge is ultimately derivative of God. The revelation of Jesus Christ and of Christian scripture must ultimately be compatible with all growth in true knowledge. By true knowledge, I mean that which progressively conforms to an accurate understanding of that which constitutes the reality of God's creation as known and experienced by humanity. Against postmodernism, Christians believe there is ultimate reality, since God is the sole author of all creation. Our perception and understanding of that reality continues to change as humanity's collective knowledge and experience grows. But such epistemological mutability does not indicate an intrinsic inability to construct a coherent metanarrative that encompasses both the physical and metaphysical worlds. Rather, it is merely an indication of the progress of human knowledge and experience with God and his creation, provided of course we are not departing from either the eternal truths of Christian scripture or from a strict adherence to critical research in every branch of human learning.

Consequently, the Church is in desperate need of educated preachers and teachers whose grasp of hermeneutics (the principles of biblical interpretation) enables them to remain faithful to the historic Christian faith and its divinely revealed metanarrative without retreating into a ghetto of epistemological fundamentalism. The challenge is to discern where contemporary knowledge and experience is mere speculation which stands in opposition to biblically revealed eternal truths, and where it is indeed beyond reasonable doubt and in need of integration with the biblical worldview in spite of its apparent contradiction at times with the medium of the ancient historical-cultural context through which the biblical record came into being. In other words, we continue to embrace the truth that God created the universe, but accept the fact that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth even though the culturally conditioned language of the bible purports that it does.

Two questions we must ask ourselves involve two errors which can be observed to have been historically committed by the Church.  First, have we rejected some advancements of human knowledge in certain disciplines out of a rigid inability to distinguish between eternal truths regarding redemption in the biblical record and the historically-culturally conditioned medium through which they were given? Second, have we uncritically accepted purported advancements of human knowledge in certain disciplines out of an ignorance of biblically revealed eternal truths regarding redemption and out of a failure to subject such knowledge claims to critical research and analysis? In either case, the cause for such errors is, among other things, intellectual flabbiness.

As Christians, we should seek to glorify God by seeking to understand his revelation and his creation in an integrated, coherent worldview. The explosion of human knowledge that has occurred over the last several centuries challenges us to harmoniously fit new knowledge together with the ancient biblical witness, which we believe is divinely given but historically and culturally conditioned. While the biblical texts do not substantially change in spite of advancements in biblical textual criticism, our knowledge in many academic disciplines continues to grow, develop, and change, sometimes substantially. Hence, biblical and theological reflection is ever necessary in each successive generation in order to present the biblical metanarrative of redemption in a coherent manner that is compatible with the contemporary collective knowledge of humanity.

If we fail to do this, we will fail in both evangelism and discipleship. We will fail in evangelism because many will not be able to make storied sense of the biblical message in light of their prior commitment to reasonable contemporary knowledge. We will also fail in discipleship because many who do accept the biblical message will not be able to integrate their biblical faith with reasonable contemporary knowledge, and so will live fragmented, compartmentalized lives with no worldview coherence. The end result in both cases will be the intellectual and cultural irrelevancy of the Church. Frankly, many portions of the Church already occupy such a position.