Author: David Opderbeck

Jeff at Dawn Treader posts a very nice summary of the different classes of presuppositions people might bring to the knowledge table, and asks whether there is a way to adjudicate among them. Here’s my take: not to pound a drum, but it seems to me that foundationalism breaks down for the very reason that it’s impossible to choose between competing foundational presuppositions.

One way to choose between competing presuppositions, as one of Jeff’s commenters suggested, might be by some criterion like falsifiability or testability. Even then, however, we have to presuppose that our criterion is meaningful and will lead to truth. A counter-example might suffice to falsify a claim, but only if the counter-example was observed and reported without significant bias, and there were no external factors affecting the example. You have to presuppose away observation and reporting bias as well as external factors. Presuppositions are built on presuppositions are built on presuppositions…. it never ends. Only God knows the absolute, total truth for sure, or, if there is no God, no one does.

For example, say we test the theory of gravity by dropping bowling balls from a roof. What if one bowling ball out of a hundred floats up rather than falling down, because of a miraculous intervention by God. If we presuppose naturalism, and eliminate any other naturalistic causes, we’ve falsified the theory of gravity. But we’d be wrong, because our presuppositions are wrong.

It seems to me this is where alternatives or adjuncts to foundationalism come in. A test of coherence, for example, can help. Which set of beliefs provides the most coherent account of human experience and history? We can ask, say, whether naturalism provides a more coherent account of altruism and the moral sense than Christian theism. If we combine the various tests available to us — reason, “common sense” perception, coherence — we can gain some anchors for the presupposition or faith commitments on which we choose to base our lives. At the end of the day, there’s always the possibility we could be wrong, but the hand we’re dealt as human beings is that we’re fallible and limited, so we have to make commitments based on probabilities using the tools available to us.

Rob at Mind and Soul put me on to a new blog devoted to books and book reviews, Mind & Media, run by Stacy Harp. You can apply at Mind & Media to become a book reviewer, as I have, and get your official book reviewer logo:

There are some other goodies there as well, including exclusive author interviews. Great idea!

Morning sunlight reflects from a glass heart in the kitchen window.

The Empire State Building peers over its smaller neighbors, soaking up the sun like a big steel sunflower.

The Emerging Blogroll has been growing steadily. As a reminder, here is the code:

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php?r=90cd7a5d18beb54b5b08706194775e7a”>

Please share this with your fellow bloggers. If anyone wants to be added, they can email me at david_opderbeck@baruch.cuny.edu. The more the merrier.

One of my church’s missionary told this story (via video) at our missions conference last weekend. I thought it was a wonderful story:

A local Indonesian tribal leader and his wife had become Christians. The wife, Aoki (I may be getting her name wrong), died suddenly, and, in the tradition of the tribe, her body was taken into the forest, where it was to be hoisted into a tree while the people made noises to scare away her spirit. In the midst of this ritual, the husband heard a voice telling him not to proceed because he now was a Christian. He didn’t understand why, but he halted the ritual and brought the body back to the village.

The missionary was summoned to the village to talk about what happens after a person dies. It was a public meeting, packed with people from the surrounding area. It became evident from the crowd’s murmurings that some of the local people who were opposing Christianity were using the woman’s death as evidence against the faith. They had misunderstood the nature of eternal life, and argued that the woman’s death proved Christians do not live forever.

The missionary turned to Rev. 7:9, which speaks of representatives from “every nation, tribe, people and language” worshiping Christ in heaven, and told the crowd that at that very moment, Aoki was in heaven as a representative of their tribe. The crowds grumblings turned to shouts of joy as they realized that Christ had made it possible for their people to live eternally in heaven.

What a great story, on so many levels. The tragedy of Aoki’s death, the traditional exorcism ceremony, the Holy Spirit’s prompting of the husband, the missionary’s presence and wisdom, all worked together so that a culturally and technologically isolated group of people could understand and receive the gospel.

This past weekend my home church had its missions conference. This is an annual event during which we emphasize world missions. My church devotes a substantial portion of its budget to support missionaries all over the world.

I have to confess that the missions conference, and missions in general, often leave me feeling ambivalent. I’ve supported missionaries in various ways, mostly financially, for many years, some good friends of mine are missionaries, and I even was chair of the church’s mission education committee for a few years. But I always come away from the missions conference wondering if it was a bit too much and a bit too lopsided. The conference is something of a rah-rah time, intended to motivate people to go on long or short term missions trips, to give to the missions fund, and to think and pray about missions. All of that is good, but I wrestle with broader questions about how to contextualize the gospel. How much of our missions efforts reflect an appreciation for the cultures to which we bring the gospel? The missions conference sometimes strikes me as triumphalist and colonialist, as if we have the gospel because we’re somehow inherently better than those to whom we want to bring it. And we never seem to hear about the families that limp back from the missions field, their idealism shattered and faith in rags, because of what they encountered once they hit the trenches. I want to hear those stories.

The odd thing is, I know that triumphalist impression is miles away from the hearts and minds of our church’s missions leaders and missionaries. Our missionaries include some of the most intelligent, dynamic, thoughtful people you’ll ever meet, and our Missions Director is a broad and careful thinker about these sorts of things. So maybe it’s just me and the residual feelings and attitudes I carry from growing up in a less discerning, more fundamentalist climate. Or maybe part of it is that institutionally we’re scared to really “let it all hang out” at the missions conference. I’m not sure, but I’d love to hear from anyone who has similar feelings about how missions are presented at their local church.

A blanket of snow on the woodpile.

Through the looking glass today:

Bob Robinson at vanguardchurch-bob’s blog writes about why, as a person who is reformed in theology, he also is drawn to the Emergent movement. This is great stuff, which really resonates with me. He notes that many Emergent thinkers haven’t abandoned the concept of orthodoxy, but stress “the importance of seeking orthodoxy for the sake of developing a Christ-like community.” He also writes: “I feel that we who are both ‘Reformed’ and ‘Emergent’ must make very clear is that a hallmark of Reformation Theology is ‘semper reformata’ (‘always reforming’).”

Anna Aven, who’s blog Deep Soil is one of the prettiest God blogs I’ve seen, writes about women “keeping silent” in the church. This caught my attention because Anna asks why churches that admonish women to wear head coverings don’t admonish them to practice the “holy kiss,” which is mentioned more often than head coverings. I grew up in a Plymouth Bretheren church that was big into the head covering thing. There was one guy who also was into the “holy kiss” thing, which I remember because my dad, who is a wonderfully warm man but not one to kiss other men, always made sure to extend this guy a friendly, but firm and distant, handshake, so as to avoid the kiss. It makes me laugh to this day.