Tacit Knowledge:
Polanyi, Thomas F. Torrance and Realist Epistemology
Emerging out of post-Enlightenment Western reductionism which had become progressively void of the spiritual realm, there emerged a new term with no spiritual underpinnings—the unconscious—that encapsulated all that lay outside of our conscious-level knowledge. With the rise of Freud then Jung in the psychological sciences, in the physical then philosophical worlds there entered Michael Polanyi. He began his career as a brilliant physical chemist, whose work on the adsorption of gasses (completed while he was convalescing from Diphtheria in a WWI army hospital), should have won him the Nobel Prize. Passed over due to his Jewish background, he, nonetheless secured a position at the Kaiser Wilhelm institute for Physical and Electrical Chemistry. When he was ultimately forced to flee Germany in the middle of the night as Hitler’s rise with intensifying anti-Semitic legislation threatened his life with that of his family, he emigrated to England. There he was given a 100% research position at the University of Manchester. With complete academic autonomy, he then began a massive philosophical endeavor which we’re only just now beginning to understand and apply. Coming to be known as a philosophy of science, Polanyi’s work formed a pathway out of Enlightenment reductionism, philosophical Positivism and its resulting Scientism, towards a true Scientific Realism where the objective was intricately tied, and indeed, developed out of the personal, subjective experiences and moral commitments of the knower. As a true, high-level academic scientist himself with a vital faith that enabled him to grasp both the theological and philosophical foundations of epistemology, he is truly a rare and massively important voice in the age-old debate over faith and science.
In the words of Lesslie Newbigin,
“Polanyi traced the source of the trouble in a false ideal of ‘objectivity’. in the illusion that there could be a kind of knowing from which the knowing subject—a human being shaped by historical, cultural and psychological factors—is eliminated or ignored. The effect of this false ideal was to relegate a vast amount of what human beings know to the realm of the ‘subjective.’ Polanyi, as a working scientist rather than a philosopher of science, knew well the personal factors which shape all scientific work, the learning of skills, and the personal gifts of intuition, imagination, judgment, courage and patience without which scientific advance would never happen.
In the preface to his major work he gives a succinct description of his central concern. After speaking of the personal participation of the knower in the act of knowing, he goes on: ‘But this does not make our understanding subjective. Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality, contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indefinite range of as yet unknown (and perhaps inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as “Personal Knowledge” (Personal Knowledge pp. vii-viii).
As we shall see below, his work has been carried forward in the theological worlds through the work of Thomas F. Torrance who was a great friend and colleague of Polanyi and, before his death, his literary executor. More below. Before a brief timeline of Polanyi’s life, the following are some key resources that enable a greater grasp on Polanyi’s work and legacy.
Michael Polanyi
(1891-1976)
Tacit Knowing. Truthful Knowing
The Life and Thought of Michael Polanyi
Mars Hill Audio
Michael Polanyi and the Christian Faith —A Personal Report
by Thomas F. Torrance
The common sense of Michael Polanyi
by Drusilla Scott
by Michael Polanyi, 1946
Towards a post-critical philosophy
by Michael Polanyi, 1958
The Structure of Consciousness
by Michael Polanyi, 1965
by Michael Polanyi, 1966
(Developed from the Terry Lectures delivered at Yale in 1962)
BIOGRAPHY
1891 - Born in Budapest to wealthy secular Jewish parents
His father a lead architect of the Hungarian railroad system until his bankruptcy in 1899
His mother an avid thinker who established a salon for the intellectual elite
1914 - Medical degree
Scholarship to study chemistry at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Germany
1916 - enlisted in the the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer, serving on the Serbian front.
While recovering from Diptheria in 1916, he wrote a PhD thesis on adsorption, which was later encouraged by Albert Einstein and under Gusztáv Buchböck was awarded a doctorate at the University of Budapest in 1919
1918 - appointed Secretary to the Minister of Health.
When Communists seized power in March 1919 and the the Hungarian Soviet Republic subsequently overthrown, Polanyi emigrated to Karlsruhe in Germany
He was invited by Fritz Haber to join the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Faserstoffchemie in Berlin.
1923 - Conversion to Christianity, and in a Roman Catholic ceremony married Magda Elizabeth Kemeny.
1926 - Appointed as professorial head of department of the Institut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie
1929 - Birth of first son, John, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1986
1933 - Move to the University of Manchester where appointed head of the department of physical chemistry
Two his pupils, Eugene Wigner and Melvin Calvin went on to win a Nobel Prize
1935 - Meeting with Bucharin in Moscow regarding the place of science within the state
Transition from science to philosophy
On the path towards unity in science through intuition, 1935
“The supreme task of the physicist is the search for those highly universal laws from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction. There is no logical path leading to these laws. They are only to be reached by intuition based upon something like intellectual love.”
From the Preface of Personal Knowledge,
“Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications.”
KEY IDEAS
(All very, very relevant to medicine)
Tacit Knowledge
Polanyi on the intuition of his own PhD thesis (that, again, should have earned the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in the interwar period were it not for his Jewish
"The Professor of Mathematical Physics, to whom my paper was assigned, had never
heard of my subject matter. He studied my work bit by bit and then asked me to explain a curious point; my result seemed correct but its
derivation faulty.
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Admitting my mistake, I said that surely one first draws one's conclusions and then puts their derivation right. The professor just stared at me."
He did not start from formal reasoning leading to logical conclusions, but from a few conclusions to which his own experience led him inescapably...
The functional, semantic, and phenomenal aspects of tacit knowledge
The Structure of Consciousness, 1965
Tacit knowing integrates the particulars of a comprehensive entity and makes us see them forming the entity. This integration recognizes the higher principle at work on the boundary conditions left open by the lower principle, by mentally performing the workings of the higher principle. It thus materializes the functional structure of tacit knowing. It also makes it clear to us how the comprehensive entity works by revealing the meaning of its parts. We have here the semantic aspect of tacit knowing. And since a comprehensive entity is controlled as a whole by a higher principle than the one which controls its isolated parts, the entity will look different than an aggregate of its parts. Its higher principle will endow it with a stability and power appearing in its shape and motions and usually produce also additional novel features. We have here the phenomenal aspect of tacit knowing.
And finally, we are presented also with an ontological counterpart of the logical disintegration caused by switching our attention from the integrating centre of a comprehensive entity to its particulars. To turn our attention from the actions of the higher principle, which defines the two-levelled entity, and direct it to the lower principle controlling the isolated parts of the entity is to lose sight of the higher principle and indeed of the whole entity controlled by it. This mirrors the destruction of a comprehensive entity when it is pulled to pieces. The logical structure of tacit knowing thus covers in every detail the ontological structure of a combined pair of levels.
This brings forth the two levels of awareness: the lower one for the clues, the parts or other subsidiary elements and the higher one for the focally apprehended comprehensive entity to which these elements point. A deliberate act of consciousness has therefore not only an identifiable object as its focal point, but also a set of subsidiary roots which function as clues to its object or as parts of it.
On the transmission of tacit knowledge; the role of apprenticeship to a master (Personal Knowledge, p. 55)
An art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice...It follows that an art that has fallen into disuse for the period of a generation. There are hundreds of examples of this to which the process of mechanization is continuously adding new ones. These losses are usually irretrievable. It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts—equipped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics—to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradivarius turned out as a matter of routine more than 200 years ago.
To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another. A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledee must submit to tradition.
Indwelling
The term Polanyi gave to the successful act of tacit knowing in which a person attends from a set of subsidiary particulars to a greater, comprehensive, focal meaning is indwelling. This is the only way to truly know the world.
The Tacit Dimension, p. 18
We identified the two terms of tacit knowing, the proximal and the distal, and recognized the way we attend from the first to the second, thus achieving an integration of particulars to a coherent entity to which we are attending. Since we were not attending to the particulars in themselves, we could not identify them; but if we now regard the integration of particulars as an interiorization, it takes on a more positive character. It now becomes a means of making certain things function as the proximal terms of tacit knowing, so that instead of observing
them in themselves, we may be aware of them in their bearing on the comprehensive entity which they constitute. It brings home to us that it is not by looking at things, but by dwelling in them, that we understand their joint meaning.
Indwelling as the critical key in understanding
Any higher principle can be known only by dwelling in the particulars governed by it. Any attempt to understand a higher level of existence by a scrutiny of its several particulars must fail. We shall remain blind in theory to all that truly matters in the world so long as we do not accept indwelling as a legitimate form of knowledge.
Reductionism, Objectivism and the Principle of Marginal Control
On Reductionism and the destruction of comprehensive meaning
If the scientist attempts to separate nature into discrete blocks of information that can be collected, analyzed and graphed, he will never truly understand nature. By shifting his focal awareness to a set of particulars, he becomes like the pianist who has suddenly shifted his awareness from the melody to the motion of his fingers. True, meaningful, comprehensive knowledge suddenly disappears. He is left only with a type of knowledge that, while perhaps temporarily useful, lacks any deeper meaning...
We can see now how an unbridled lucidity can destroy our understanding of complex matters. Scrutinize closely the particulars of a comprehensive entity and their meaning is effaced. Our own conception of the entity is destroyed.
On the Objectivism of exact science as the destruction of knowledge
The Tacit Dimension, p. 20
The declared aim of modern science is to establish a strictly detached, objective knowledge. Any falling short of this ideal is accepted only as a temporary imperfection, which we must aim at eliminating. But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge. Then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. The idea of exact science would turn out to be fundamentally misleading, and possibly, a source of devastating fallacies
The principle of marginal control in the interrelation between lower and higher levels of meaning
(From Nature as Landscape: Dwelling and Understanding
by Kraft E. Von Maltzahn, p. 93)
The principles operating at a higher level cannot be derived from those governing the lower level. The organizational principle of a higher level exercises control on the particulars forming the lower level; this principle Polanyi calls the principle of marginal control. A higher level can come into existence only through a process that does not exist at the lower level. The individual items of the lower level must therefore emerge into a coherent pattern which forms the next upper level. In moving to a higher level, however, the various possibilities for reaching above the boundaries of the previous level leave open the possibility of failure as well. Unless the higher level (for example, speaking in sentences) exercise a margin of control over the principles governing the lower level (in this case, vocabulary and the rudiments of grammar), the higher level will fail in its execution of that skill. The margin of control is the way in which the principles governing the lower levels are integrated in one particular combination for the successful achievement of the emergent principle. This means that in the example we are using, the speaker must choose the correct grammatical forms, such as the appropriate tense, and must also choose the right words so as not to suggest a wrong meaning. If these go astray, the sentences fail to perform their focus, which is to express a thought.
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TFT &
The Fundamentals of Realist Epistemology
Born in 1913 to missionary parents in the China Inland Mission (more to come…)
Resources & Works
Including:
The Grammar and Ground of Theology
The Mediation of Christ
Warfield Lectures on The Trinitarian Faith
And more...
List of works: 21 volume set
• TFT Society: Participatio
The Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship
Robert Walker
George Dragas
T.F. Torrance a Theologian For Our Times: an Eastern Orthodox Assessment
7 General and Particular Epistemological Principles
From his The School of Faith, 1959).
Each of these principles are possibly the most outstanding guides not only for how we ought to approach not only our study of medicine and the sciences but, moreover, how we should frame our care of the human person. Read and reread.
xxi. Basic Premise:
The nature of the content must be allowed to condition not only the form but the method of instruction. On the other hand, because instruction has to take into account the nature of the receiver, the mode of communication will be conditioned also by the mode of reception.
xxii. Incarnation as a divine form of communication:
Behind everything lies the fact that the Word of God has become flesh, that the Son of God has become man, for it is this Word clothed with our humanity in the incarnate Son who is communicated to us. Communication takes place on the ground of a divine self-adaptation to our humanity which also lifts up our humanity into communion with God. Thus behind all Christian communication or instruction lies the supreme fact that when the Word became flesh, God accommodated or adapted His revelation to human form in Jesus Christ, so that the closer instruction keeps to the humanity of Jesus Christ, the more relevant it is to the humanity of the receiver.
I. 7 General Epistemological Principles
xxiv. Critique of Modern education theory:
From the point of view of the Christian faith two primary elements have been neglected in this development (a) the personal nature of the Truth and (b) the radical nature of evil and the need for reconciliation with the Truth. Both of these demand a profounder conception of the “objectivity” of the Truth than modern educational theory has favored—where by “objectivity” is meant that Truth is something that encounters us and even when we know it retains its objectivity over against us, resists every attempt to subdue it to some form of our subjectivity, even when knowledge of it becomes inward and intensely personal.
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(i) Importance of Adapting our capacities in accordance with the nature of the object:
All knowing involves an adaptation of our capacities in accordance with the nature of the object, and therefore instruction requires a specific adaptation on the part of the learner, a specific mode of rational activity determined by the nature of what is being taught or communicated…[the learner] has to make an effort to relate his reason differently to different kinds of objects—that indeed is the very essence of rationality…Thus the communication of Christian truth requires like all other truth serious adaptation towards it on the part of the receiver.
(ii) Importance of adopting the right attitude
Bound up with this is the question of attitude. One adopts a rather different attitude in biology from that required in archaeology. One does not adopt the same attitude toward a living thing as one does towards a piece of ancient pottery. In all scientific knowledge we must adopt a procedure of impartiality, that is, in the sense of objectivity. In other words, we do not allow our presuppositions to dictate to us a priori anything about the “what” or “how” of what we are investigating…
Because we knowers cannot keep ourselves out of the picture altogether, we must develop a scientific attitude rooted in humility and wonder, that is, learn “how to be really open toward the disclosure of entirely new facts and meanings.”
(iii) Importance of asking the right questions
It is an important step in any branch of scientific research to learn to ask the right questions. Of course to ask questions presupposes that you already have some knowledge, otherwise you would not know what to ask about. Nor would you really ask questions if you already had full knowledge, for then your questions would not be genuine. But in the progress of learning, it is essential to ask questions appropriate to the nature of the object. If we ask only biological questions we can only expect biological answers, and if we ask only chemical questions we can only expect chemical answers. The really scientific questions are questions which the object that we are studying, through it very nature put to us, so that we in our turn put only those questions which will allow the object to declare itself to us or to yield to us its secrets. The more we know about a thing the more we know the kind of questions to ask which will serve its revealing and be the means of communicating knowledge of it. ..
Application to Christianity
Christianity does not set out to answer man’s questions. If it did it would only give him what he already desires to know and has secretly determined how he will know it. Christianity is above all the question the Truth puts to man at every point in his life, so that it teaches him to ask the right, the true questions about himself, and to form on his lips the questions which the Truth by its own nature puts to him to ask of the Truth itself that it may disclose or reveal itself to him.
(iv) Importance of allowing the object to direct investigation
You cannot think unless you have something to think about. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to think about nothing. Unless the mind is given material to think about, it can only turn in upon itself and think about itself—and that is the mark of mental disease. No one more than a child needs to be fed with information, to be given food for thought, otherwise he cannot develop his mental powers or develop the modes of rational activity that are essential for his own independent learning...
Education theories that insist that teachers must concentrate on drawing out (e + ducere) the latent capacities of the child, and help him at every point to form his own judgments, without equal attention to the supply of information, are tragically mistaken. That is to work with the old Orphic myth that all learning is a form of recollection, or to hold that all truth is ultimately self-evident, and at the same time to inculcate the false notion of the autocracy of reason. If modern science has taught us anything about reason, it has taught us that reason is nothing without its object, and that truly rational activity is inseparable from learning to behave in accordance with the nature of what is objectively given, for that is the only way to learning what we do not and cannot know…
Without any doubt a method is more successful when it imparts to a person more that he can grasp at that time, for it so stretches his powers that it helps him to reach beyond his grasp and then grasp beyond his former reach (Platonic method, developed from the mathematicians, of “removing the hypothesis”).
(v) Importance of uniting the realm of the image and the realm of the idea
It belongs to the essence of good education to hold together the realm of the image and the realm of the idea. That is natural to the child who is at once both a born ‘realist” and a born “idealist”, as it were. It is one of the most tragic features of modern occidental civilization that the realm of the image is torn apart from the realm of the idea, and once that happens it is next to impossible to bring them together. Once this radical dichotomy becomes a part of life, people divide into two main groups, those who think mainly in images, usually the more uneducated and less sophisticated people, and those who tend to think only in ideas and abstractions, and for whom the whole realm of concrete image, and therefore of event, is of secondary importance, and for some even ultimately unreal. In that radical dichotomy a peculiarity of our age is the forceful conjunction of material images with scientific abstractions which so radically characterizes Marxist man, but a large part of the blame for that must rest with the idealist divorce of the realm of ideas from the realm of concrete events.
Be that as it may, somehow modern education tends to perpetuate this rift between the image and the idea, and in doing so it creates a grave difficulty for Christian instruction, for Christianity is committed to the healing of the rift between image and idea, and its whole method of communication involves the interpretation of image and idea, the overlapping of the realm of events with the realm of ideas. That follows from the historical involvement of Christian Truth. which can only be known and communicated in a way corresponding to its nature as historical and spiritual Truth. This is of supreme importance for the instruction of the young, that from a very early age they should learn the Truth through both image and idea, and through image and idea in inseparable mutuality.
Thus to teach only the stories of the Bible, that is only its dramatic images, to young children, and not to teach them the elements of doctrine, is to create in them the divorce of image from idea that proves so disastrous later on, when either they have to deny the world of imagery in order to think in ideas, or to repudiate the world of ideas in order to take seriously the concrete world of material images. Either way they are dwarfed and stunted in half of their natures. On the other hand, to teach them Christian doctrine from a very early age is both to preserve and cultivate wholeness in their life and to train their intellectual and spiritual capacities without damage to their natural life.
(vi) Importance of developing appropriate conceptual tools
You cannot make anything unless you have the tools with which to form and construct it. You cannot think unless you have tools with which to think and shape the thoughts in your mind and form your judgments. The tools that the mind requires are conceptions and categories and formulated ideas. Nor can you make much progress in instruction and learning unless you have appropriate and adequate tools for rational communication.
That is surely part of the immense significance of the OT, that is, of the whole history of God’s dealings with Israel, for it was within Israel that there were shaped and formed the tools which were used in the NT to grasp and interpret the bewildering miracle of Jesus. Those tools needed recasting and reshaping in their actual use in the NT, but they did supply the basic material which the NT Revelation required for its communication. (Torrance’s Princeton lectures: words and structural images like the sacrificial Lamb of God, tabernacle procedures for the atonement of sin, the Passover etc.)
(vii) Importance of creating a proper environment (community over individuality)
You cannot make much progress thinking on your own in a vacuum. You cannot think unless you have something to think about. Nor can you think unless you have an environment, unless you have others with whom to think together. Likewise Christian instruction requires the community of others. It does not properly take place in isolation, but only in the midst of the Church, that is in the whole fellowship of life and mission and preaching and worship, for it is only in the essential integration of the Truth with being and action that it can be either received or communicated. The Truth has to be communicated to the learner in his setting in life where he has to adapt himself to the Truth in order to apprehend it, but strictly speaking that requires the adaptation of his setting in life to the Truth, for it is only in togetherness with his fellows that he can fully and adequately apprehend the Truth.
Likewise the communication of it requires the community, for it is only in the manifold communication, that is in the Communion of Saints, that proper and adequate instruction can achieve its end. This belongs to the very nature of reason, as we are learning again today, for that reason cannot, without damage and loss, be abstracted from the person and from personal life and fellowship. It is this interaction of minds, this dialectic of persons, that is so obviously important for real advance even in scientific and philosophical pursuits, which is required in every form of instruction, and not least in Christian instruction, because there, as we shall see, this is demanded from the side of the object as well as from the side of the knower and learner.
II. 7 Particular Epistemological Principles
(i) Jesus Christ is Himself the Truth
As Kierkegaard put it, this is Truth in the from of personal being, Truth which is identical with the Person of the Teacher. But we must go further than that. It is Christ clothed with His Gospel who is the Truth, for this is unique Truth in which Christ’s Person and His Message are an inseparable one. It is this double character of Christian Truth which distinguishes it from all other truth. It is a Person, but in that it is also a message, it is sharply distinguished from all personalisms. It is a message, but in that it is a Person, it is sharply distinguished from all systems of ideas or truths or propositions. Christian doctrine is a communication of truths, but truths that cohere in the one unique Person of the Incarnate Son of God. Christian doctrine is a personal communication of life and being. but not in abstraction from a Message. It is this unique and two-fold nature of the Truth which gives to Christian knowledge and Instruction their unique character…
Christian instruction must be analogous to this two-fold nature of the Truth as Person and Message. That means that the message cannot be communicated except in personal relation to Christ the Truth, and that personal communion with Christ the Truth cannot take place apart from communication of this Message….In no other branch of knowledge is this the case, for nowhere else is truth the from of personal being and nowhere else do truths cohere in a Person.
(ii) The Historical Fact of the Incarnation as the Basis and requirement for Knowledge of the Truth
Kierkegaard has also reminded us that in the Incarnation the Absolute Fact has become a historical Fact, so that knowledge of it must be analogous to its historical nature. The Truth with which we are concerned is identical with the historical Jesus Christ. and therefore it is Truth that can be communicated only historically (that is not of course to deny that it must be communicated spiritually). The Truth is a historical Person, and must be communicated personally and historically. That is to say, the Truth must be communicated to us by other persons in time. It is not something that we can tell to ourselves, or to which we can relate ourselves timelessly. The truth comes to us and addresses us in history, using personal and temporal means, so that in order to learn the Truth we must allow others to tell it to us and to instruct us….
We have a striking illustration of this in the OT account of the child Samuel, to whom the Word of God came several times vertically from above, as it were, in the Temple at Shiloh, but who was unable to apprehend it or understand it except through the help of Eli. By himself Samuel could only interpret it as the voice of a man, and so could only misinterpret it. The Word of God required the agency of personal and historical communication, that is, to be conveyed horizontally, as it were, from one human person to another, before it was really received. Is that not the true communication of the Word since the Incarnation?
Christian instruction requires as its medium a historical community of persons in fellowship with one another in Christ, if it is fully to achieve its end.
(iii) The necessity of self-denial and self-criticism in response to the Truth; willing, personal conformation to the Truth as a scientific prerequisite for an understanding of it
True Christian instruction requires on the part of the learner or receiver a response of self-denial and self-criticism. To a certain extent this must be understood as an adaptation of the general principle requiring communication and learning to ask the right questions. In scientific activity it is the nature of the object that teaches us the right questions to put to it through which it is made to disclose itself to us—but normally “disclose itself” is too personal a way of putting it. Here, however, where we are concerned with Truth in the from of Personal Being, and with Truth as our Creator and Lord, the Truth does disclose Himself to us, and actively puts questions to us. Here our scientific questions are directed not so much to the object, Christ Himself, but are by Him directed back upon us, for we discover we are at the bar, and are being questioned by Him. The appropriate response to that questioning is one of self-questioning and self-criticism, for what hinders our knowledge is not Christ who communicates Himself to us, but we who are the knowers, the subjects to whom He reveals Himself. And therefore when the Truth encounters us He comes with the demand for self-denial on our part—we cannot otherwise follow Him and be obedient to the Truth. In other words, when we encounter the Truth in Christ, we discover that we are at variance with the Truth, in a state of rebellion and enmity toward it, so that the way of knowledge is the way of surrender and acknowledgement through self-denial and repentance.
We bring to the knowledge of the Truth our own preconceptions and our own desires and seek to mould the Truth to our own ways and to subdue it to our own satisfactions, but the Truth stands in our way and blocks us. He offends us, and there is only one way in which communication can take place, through yielding ourselves in repentant obedience to the Truth. Now this is in no sense a sacrificium intellectus—it is the only scientific and rational thing we can do, for if we are to know the Truth objectively, we cannot but adapt our rational activity to the mode of His encounter, and the mode of His self-revelation. To surrender ourselves in obedience to the Truth, to offer ourselves as living sacrifices to Him, is the part of rational worship. Since that is the only way in which Christian instruction can achieve its end, the communication of Truth cannot be divorced from the call of personal decision and obedience, involving repentance and self-denial on the part of the disciple if he is to follow Christ. Its reception requires on the part of the learner a decision against himself.
(iv) Instruction in Christian Truth involves reconciliation with the Truth, primarily between man and God and secondarily, between man and his fellow-man
The man is existentially severed from the Truth, as Kierkegaard once put it, and needs to be reconciled to the Truth. Revelation and reconciliation are inseparable, and communication and healing cannot be divorced from each other. Christian instruction has to reckon with the problem of evil, indeed with original sin. As John Craig pit it, it is not that in the Fall we lost our minds and will, but “we have lost a right mind and a right will”; or as he out it even more sharply, there are “two contrary images in mankind, the image of God and the image of the Serpent” and between them there is a “continual battle.” We are opposed to the Truth, and the Truth is opposed to our untruth. Therefore reconciliation and healing have to take place if real communication is to be achieved. This is a two-fold reconciliation, between man and God and between man and his fellow-man. Here we return to the fact that it is only within the community of God’s people that communication can take place, but now we see that this is the community of the reconciled where reconciliation between man and God and man and his fellow is actualized. It is in the community of reconciliation that the learner receives the required disposition toward the Truth, and himself enters into reconciliation with the Truth.
(v) Christian instruction requires renewal on the part of the learner; conversion as total transformation of being and mind (complete metanoia)
If Christian Truth is Truth in the form of Personal Being in Jesus Christ, then knowing the Truth must involve a relation in being to it as well as a relation in cognition. Thus corresponding to the oneness of Truth and Being in Christ there must be a oneness of knowing and becoming on the part of the believer. Knowing the Truth and being recreated in the Truth are inseparable. “Except a man be born again,” said Jesus to Nicodemus, “he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” In no other sphere of knowledge does knowledge of the truth affect so decisively the being of the knower, but here knowledge of the Truth involves a radical change in being or a conversion. In some respects this also can be looked on as Christian adaptation of the general scientific principle that rational knowledge of an object requires adaptation of behavior in accordance with its nature. Because in Christ Truth and Being are one, adaptation to such Truth on the part of the knower requires of him in the very act of knowing a radical reorientation in which knowing and being mutually involve one another. In the language used at an earlier point, this will involve a reconciliation between idea and image, of truth and action, and a renunciation of the radical dichotomy between a realm of ideas and a realm of events. Reconciliation with the Truth must be allowed to penetrate throughout the whole life and being of the believer, so that reconciliation becomes an internal truth of his own being and mind. It is only out of the wholeness of person and being that true knowing of the Truth can be actualized.
(vi) Christian instruction can only achieves its end through the demonstration of the Spirit
Jesus took care at the Last Supper to tell His disciples that He would send them “the Spirit of Truth,” not in order to speak of Himself or teach them new things, but in order to reveal to them what Christ had already set before them in His Word, and Life, and Action. Jesus Himself is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no one can go to the Father but by Him, but we require the supernatural operation of the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son in order to apprehend the Truth and to become sons of the Truth in apprehending it. In other words, Christian Truth is transcendent to us. It is other and higher than we are. It is beyond us, and we are unable to attain to it of ourselves. We need to be lifted up above ourselves, and enabled to grasp it beyond our natural capacities. For a man of earth to conceive the Truth is as miraculous an act as the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ. We receive the Truth as it is announced to us, but it is only by the supernatural operation of the Spirit that we can really conceive it. Certainly it passes through all the rational processes of our minds and knowledge of it is in no sense irrational, but the mind is adapted to the Truth by the Truth and only through that conformity to it can the human mind rise to know what is beyond it and is actually divine. In other words, the Truth acts creatively upon the knower who yields himself to the Truth, enlarges his powers and begets in him an understanding not otherwise attainable…
All Christian instruction must reckon with this fact…and therefore we must never seek to do ourselves the work of the Spirit, as for example, by sheer force of indoctrination, to mould the mind of the learner by undue pressure. We may sow and plant and water, but it is God alone who gives the increase.
(vii) Christian instruction has to reckon with the fact that the Truth may put the learner at variance with the world
The very fact that knowledge of the Truth requires reconciliation with the Truth, and renewal in the mind and life of the learner, means that he is singled out from the world, incorporated into a community of the reconciled and renewed and so belongs to the Communion of Saints over against the natural societies of the world. He does not come out of the natural societies for he has his natural life in them, but it does mean that his new life in the Truth creates a certain tension between him and the world. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the Truth into which communion he has now entered is essentially reconciling Truth. Therefore he cannot have communion with it without entering into its reconciling operation, without being sent back to the world on a mission of reconciliation. Unless he really engages in that mission it is to be doubted whether he has really entered into communion with the Truth.
Thus the Truth is really communicated to us when we can communicate it to others. Reception of the Truth reaches its fulfillment when from learning it passes in faithful discipleship to witness.
This is all-important for the fulfillment of catechitical instruction. The teacher must never really cease to be a learner. for his teaching is the fulfillment of his learning, while the learner does not really learn unless he learns also from his learning how to teach the Truth to others.
Epistemological illustrations and excerpts from his short work, Preaching Christ Today, which is comprised of
2 lectures given at the
Jubilee of the Scottish Church Theology Society
&
Princeton Theological Seminary
I. “Preaching Christ Today”:
Address to the members of the Scottish Church Theology Society, Edinburgh 1992
Two Examples from Social Anthropology
When you begin to tear these elements in the Holy Scriptures apart, the kerygmatic from the didactic, the historical from the theological, everything goes wrong…
I was particularly intrigued once in coming across a similar problem in the researches of the social anthropologists, Evans-Pritchard on the Azande culture in Africa, and Clyde Kluckhohn on the culture of the Navaho Indians in the southwestern states of America. Let me refer only to the latter. He spent a long time with the Navaho Indians, studying their institutions and patterns of behavior at first hand in direct, carefully and meticulously controlled observation of their way of life, but after many years he realized that he had not really understood them. He had made a point of being as scientifically accurate and objective as possible in results. The trouble was that he had been interpreting and integrating what he observed with a conceptual frame of thought alien to the Navahos. Then when he set himself to study the institutions and behavior of the Navahos again through living with them and absorbing their way of thinking and describing and integrating their own way of life, he found that what he now wrote up about them not only made sense to the Navahos but made scientific sense as well, for this way of conceptualizing what he observed from the inside, as it were, made his observations and judgments accurate and objective in a way that they had not been before (3).
Critique of the Post-Enlightenment “Scientific” method: Failure of the phenomenalist and constructivist conception of science; lessons form Kluckhold
The kind of scientific method that became dominant after the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century concentrated first upon the isolation and observation of phenomena, and then set about establishing natural laws through logical deduction from the empricald date reached in that way, but that meant, even as Kant admitted, reading laws into nature, not reading them out of nature. This is known as the phenomenalist and constructivist conception of science. Scientific theories were reached through observing and analyzing of phenomena and then imposing them in the necessitarian framework of absolute mathematical time and space, in order to give the phenomenalist particulars some kind of rational coherence. This is the kind of scientific method which produced the hard determinist conception of the universe that has done so much damage to all areas of human thought.
Think what happens when that kind of scientific method governs research into the culture of the Navaho Indians. First of all you isolate and determine the empirical data and try to describe them in strictly empirical or observationalist terms. When you have done that, you interpret them, not through a conceptuality inherent in them, but through a conceptual frame of thought derived elsewhere e.g. from a mechanist theory of evolution.
As we have noted, that is the kind of scientific method which Clyde Kluckholn found to be disastrously wrong. And that is precisely the false scientific method that has now been comprehensively destroyed in physics, the most rigorous of all sciences, in the rejection of a dualism between empirical and conceptual factors, or between phenomena and theory. Proper scientific method seeks to penetrate into the intrinsic rationality of any field of reality, grasping it in depth, as Einstein argued, in order to understand it in accordance with its distinctive nature, and to find appropriate ways of formulating knowledge of what is learned in this way. That is actually how scientific method normally operates today (7-8).
The shattering of the dualistic approach of Newtonian mechanics and Builtmann’s Historie by Einsteinian relativity & quantum theory
The Newtonian distinction between two kinds of time, along with the mathematical formalization of the laws of motion, was highly abstract and artificial and left no room for “real time,” or therefore for salvation history. That is why, of course, Bultmann held that Historie understood in this natural causalist way ruled out any thought of incarnation or miracles or resurrection, or of God’s interaction with us in history. His acceptance of the idea of an unbroken continuity of cause and effect governed by natural law made him regard the central Christian beliefs embedded in the Gospels and Epistles of the NT as a mythological account of reported this-worldly events in other-worldly ways lacking objective truth and reality. They were no more than subjective forms of thought devised by the early church in order to make existential sense of the way Jesus was reported to have appeared to his followers. Hence Bultmann devised a “program of demythologizing” and reinterpreting the NT existentially in which modern people can make sense of the NT in terms of their own self-understanding in the scientific world of classical Newtonian mechanics.
The Newtonian conception of absolute mathematical time and space clamped down upon the universe, along with its rational dualism between empirical events and theoretical constructions, gave rise to a rigidly mechanistic account of nature which James Clerk Maxwell found could not explain the behavior of light. A new scientific approach to the created universe and a very different understanding of nature in terms of continuous dynamic fields had to be developed. This reconstruction of the foundations of science, which Albert Einstein held to be the most important in history, led him to develop his theories of special and general relativity. They shattered the determinist conceptions of classical mechanics and led to quantum theory, and a much more refined and dynamic and open-ended understanding of reality….
Einstein overthrew the dualist disjunction between empirical events and scientific theory or between physical facts and mathematics. He showed that if scientists are to be true to the nature of the space-time universe, they must not try to interpret it by crushing their understanding of it into a preconceived static frame of ideas formulated altogether apart from the physical structures of nature, as the Newtonians had done with the timeless necessary system of Euclidean geometry. Everything finally goes wrong when that is done. Rather must geometry be put into the heart of physics where it is transformed through being embedded in the dynamic world of space-time and becomes four-dimensional. This means that geometric patterns and physical structures in our space-time universe are bound inseparably together; conceptual and empirical factors inhere in one another, both in nature and in our understanding of it, and must not be torn apart. That is why our twentieth-century science has made such enormous advance, for it no longer imposes abstract necessary patterns of thought upon nature, but seeks to understand nature out of its own inherent rational order, and is therefore concerned with continuous dynamic fields and with real time.
There we have the immense revolution in the foundation of knowledge brought about through general relativity theory, followed up by quantum theory, which has now been built into rigorous modern science. This involves a way of thinking in which experiment and theory, empirical and theoretical factors interact with one another and must not be divorced from one another, and therefore a way of thinking in which the historical and the historical and conceptual ingredients must be taken together in the understanding of any historical culture or religion (5-6).
Dangers of separating the realm of the image and the realm of the idea (further clarification of general epistemological principle v)
When you tear the visual and mental images apart, or sever the connection between the perceptual and conceptual ingredients in knowledge, then some sort of extraneous matter has to be introduced in order to make the dismembered results stick together (10).
Danger of separating Jesus from the Oneness of God
The history of thought has shown us that it is only when Jesus is known and worshipped as God become man that his humanity has been preserved; when Jesus is detached from oneness with God, what is called “Jesus” is no more than an empty symbol into which people project their own religious fantasies and ideas (16).
The Incarnation as the basis for a right understanding of miracles: the miracle of the “wailing infant” and its implications for God’s this-worldly interaction
What bowls me over every time I read about Jesus in the Gospels is not the wonderful things he did, not the so-called nature miracles in which the wind and sea obeyed him, or even his making the dead alive again, for if Jesus really is God, as John Polkinghorne the Cambridge mathematical physicist has said, one would expect that, for he was the Creator personally present in the midst of his creation. If you really believe that Jesus is God become incarnate you will have no trouble with the miracles. No! What overwhelms me is the sheer humanness of Jesus, Jesus as the baby at Bethlehem, Jesus sitting tired and thirsty at the well outside Samaria, Jesus exhausted by the crowds. Jesus recuperating his strength through sleep at the back of a ship on the sea of Galilee, Jesus hungry for figs on the way up to Jerusalem, Jesus weeping at the grave of Lazarus, Jesus thirsting for water on the Cross—for that precisely is God with us and one of us, God as the “wailing infant” in Bethlehem, as Hilary wrote, God sharing our weakness and exhaustion, God sharing our hunger, thirst, tears, pain, and death. Far from overwhelming us, God with us and one of us does the very opposite, for in sharing with us all that we are in our littleness and weakness he does not override our humanity but completes, perfects, and establishes it.
Meaning of the Cross; not an explanation of evil but a triumph over evil
This is what I believe to be the significance of the cross of Christ—in him we believe that God himself has come into the midst of our human agony and our abominable wickedness and violence in order to take all our guilt and its just judgments on himself. That is for us the meaning of our cross. If I did not believe in the cross, I could not believe in God. The cross means that, while there is no explanation of evil, God himself has come into the midst of it in order to take it upon himself, to triumph over it and deliver us from it (29).
II. “Incarnation and Atonement in the Light of Modern Scientific Rejection of Dualism”:
Address to the Theological Students’ Forum,
Princeton Theological Seminary, April 9, 1992
The Nature of Scientific Inquiry; Kataphysic inquiry
Here I have learned as much from the great fathers of the church, people like Athanasius or Cyril of Alexandria, as I have from modern theologians like Karl Barth or modern scientists like James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, or Michael Polanyi, or from philosophers like John Macmurray. You can express it basically in this way. In any rigorous scientific inquiry you pursue your research in any field in such a way that you seek to let the nature of the field or the nature of the object, as it progressively becomes disclosed through interrogation, control how you know it, how you formulate your knowledge of it, and how you verify that knowledge . I often speak of this as ketaphysic inquiry, a term that comes from the Greek expression κατα φυσιν, which means “according to nature.” If you think of something in accordance with its nature like that, you think of it in accordance with what it really is—so that here thinking κατα φυσιν is to think κατ’ αληθειαν. Hence in this context the terms φυσισ and αληθεια. naure and reality, are really equivalent.
Application to science
Since the universe has been given a reality of its own which, while contingent upon God, is utterly different from him, it cannot be know through a priori reasoning but may be known only out of itself, as it discloses its own nature to us in answer to experimental or physical interrogation (45).
4 Illustrations of how Kataphysic inquiry operates
(i) The Tree:
Suppose we inquire into the nature of a tree and bring all our rational faculties to bear upon it. In doing so we develop a modality of the reason that is appropriate to the specific nature of the tree and do not treat the tree as we would a rock or a human being, for that would be to thing of it contrary to its nature, παρα φυσιν, as the Greeks would say. A tree is alive but not personally alive, and so we adapt our mode of knowing and reasoning in accordance with its nature as a tree.
(ii) The Cow:
Suppose then we switch our inquiry to a cow, which is a living thing like a tree but is an animal, which unlike a tree is a moving being. Here there takes place another switch in the modality of our reason, in which it is adapted to the specific nature of the cow as an animal. Our scientific method is the same, knowing something as rigorously as possible in accordance with its nature.
(iii) The Human Being:
But when we turn our inquiry toward a human being, the modality of our reason changes yet again in accordance with the nature of the human being. Here a radical change is involved because unlike a cow a human being can talk back to us and reveal something of himself or herself to us. Moreover, a human being is a rational agent with a depth of intelligibility that a cow does not have, and a human being is personal in nature, which calls for a two-way relation, a personal interaction, between the knower and the one known. We cannot get to know another human being if we stand aloof and say, now just you keep dumb, and let me try and understand you. We cannot really know another human being except in a two-way interaction with him or her. We have to open our heart and mind to him or her and listen to what he or she has to say about himself or herself. It is only in and through personal interaction that we get to know another human being. In fact, we probably really know others only as we reveal ourselves to them, rather than merely by trying to find out what they are in themselves by way of impersonal observation.
(iv) God—Authentic Theology as Epistemological Inversion
Then let us switch the modality of our reason to God. Now here we have an even more radical change, because God is the Creator and Lord and we are creatures, who, while personal, are utterly different from him in the nature of our being. Hence with God we have to do with a kind of relation which is quite different from that which we have with other creatures. With trees or animals we have to do with objective realities over which we can exercise some control in varying degrees as we subject them to our inquiries, but when we turn attention to other human beings we are not in a position to exercise control over them. A human being is personally other than we are and is more profoundly objective than a tree or a cow, for he or she would object to our attempts to control them. Here, then, we have to do with a measure of objectivity that we do not have with other creatures. But when we turn our attention to God we have to do with a relation of the profoundest objectivity which we can never master. He is the Lord God before whom our human knowing undergoes a radical change, which I sometimes speak of as an epistemological inversion of our ordinary knowing relation. We can know God only through his self-revelation and grace, and thus only in the mode of worship, prayer, and adoration in which we respond personally, humbly, and obediently to his divine initiative in making himself known to us as our Creator and Lord. Here the modality of our reason undergoes radical adaptation in accordance with the compelling claims of God’s transcendent nature—that is precisely what authentic theology involves.
The necessity of personal change on the part of the knower (a response to, rather than a projection onto)
This is very important because it calls for a real change in the whole structure of our soul and mind in our approach to God, and as often as not it is a painful change in which the self-centered structure of our minds is turned inside out and transformed. Apart form such a μετανοια or deep-seated change in mind and heart, you cannot really be a theological student, far less a minister of the gospel. No wonder our Lord Jesus told his followers that they must renounce themselves and take up their cross daily if they were to be his disciples. Does that not in its way also describe the kind of repentant thinking of all unwarranted presuppositions and the objective commitment to the truth which characterize rigorous scientific inquiry? (46-49)
Greco-Roman Dualism as the product of Plato’s doctrine of Eternal Forms; the invisible realm as the changeless eternal basis for all visible reality
The radical dualism that affected all classical culture, that is Greco-Roman culture, drew a sharp line of demarcation or separation, a χωρισμοσ, between the intelligible realm and the sensible realm, that is, a realm of eternal ideas and a realm of empirical events, or a realm of reality and a realm of appearance. Consequently, for the Greeks anything that took place in the empirical or phenomenal realm was regarded as lacking in reality, as evanescent appearance, and even as evil. The only realm to which scientific attentions could be directed was the intelligible realm of eternal and necessary forms that are not affected by the decay and unreality of this passing works. Within an outlook of that kind, governed by a radical disjunction between reality and appearance, the eternal and the temporal, the heavenly and earthly, the intelligible and sensible, the teaching of the Bible, particularly of the NT about God becoming incarnate and acting in the sensible material world, could only be regarded by the Greeks as a crude mythological way of thinking. Thus the message of the gospel, interpreted within the dualist framework of thought prevailing in the culture of the Mediterranean world, was regarded as a mythological way of thinking in which irrational facts and events from this passing world of appearance are wrongly projected into the real world of eternal forms and timeless truth (50).
Overview of 3 basic approaches to the relation between the divine and earthly realms
Let me indicate briefly and diagrammatically the kind of problems that arise here. Picture in your mind the three ways in which two hemispheres may be related to one another:
(1) as adjacent to one another but with a clear gap between them (dualism as represented by Kant, who gave a metaphysical from to that already built into modern classical science by Galileo and Newton);
(2) as touching one another tangentially; and
(3) as intersecting one another or overlapping with one another. (1) and (2) presuppose a dualist framework of thought, whereas (3) rejects dualism in favor of interactionism (51).
Arianism as a poduct of a proposed tangential relation between the phenomenal and noumenal realms
(2) describes a disjunction between the divine and human, the heavenly and earthly, but one in which the two realms are held to relate to one another merely tangentially without any way intersecting one another. That is to say, they touch one another at a mathematical point, but since such a mathematical point is dimensionless, there can be myriads of them. That is precisely how the Arians conceived of the way in which the realm of God and the realm of this world touch one another tangentially at the point called “Christ.” Since that is a dimensionless mathematical point, Arius claimed that there must be “myriads” of such “Christs” or images of God. “Christ” is then ultimately no more than a creaturely, transient, this-worldly symbol of the divine without the objective divine content.
(3) Thinking rooted in a conception of reality which recognizes the intersection of the noumenal with the phenomenal, the divine with the earthly, and therefore seeks to understand the reality of God in terms of His objective self-revaltion rather than our existential self-understanding: κατα διανοιαν vs κατ’ επινοιαν,
How do we within this phenomenal or empirical world know God in Christ if in Him we have no more than a tangential relation to the divine? How can we know God through Christ if Christ is not also on the divine side of that boundary between man and God, and if in Christ human inquiry is unable to cross over the boundary and really terminate upon God beyond? If we in this creaturely world try to make sense of Christ when the human and the divine only bear upon one another tangentially, our attempts to think of God inevitably bend back upon ourselves, so that we interpret Christ and God through Christ our of our preconceptions and in terms of our own self-understanding.
That is precisely how Athanasius regarded the mythological thinking of the Arians, contrasting it with proper and accurate thinking of God on the ground of his objective self-revelation to us in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. If you try to think accurately of God, he argued, you have to think κατα διανοιαν, across or away from yourselves toward God, but the mythologizing Arians thought of God κατ’ επινοιαν, out of themselves, for in the end all they can say about God is of their own devising, excogitated out of their own self-understanding.
Summary:
Those who operate with a sharp distinction between the other world and this world, interpret the teaching of Scripture not in terms of God’s objective self0revelation, but mythologically in terms of humankind’s existential self-understaning (52).
The Doctrine of the Hypostatic Union: indissoluble union of the divine and human natures in the incarnate person of Christ
This Hypostatic union means that in Jesus Christ, God and man, divine and human nature, are indissolubly united in one incarnate person, so that the whole of Christ’s life from beginning to end was a life lived in unbroken relation with God the Father. In that event the saving work of Christ and his incarnate life are inseparable. Redemption begins with the very advent of Jesus, so that his conception and birth of the Virgin Mary are to be regarded as essential constituents in his saving activity, and his humanity is seen to be not just a means to an end. Atoning reconciliation is to be understood as taking place within the incarnate constitution of the Mediator. His person and his work are one. That is why the NT can say that Jesus Christ is redemption, he is righteousness, he is life eternal. He Himself in his incarnate person is our salvation (58).
The Hypostatic Union as necessitating a dynamic, rather than a static, view of God and his relations to man
If God and man are indissolubly united in the one person of Jesus Christ, that must be understood with reference back to an ultimate ground in the very nature of God. If what God is toward us and for us in the incarnation and atonement he is eternally in himself, if the activity of God in the economic Trinity is identical with the activity of God in the immanent Trinity, then the being of God must be understood not in a static but in a dynamic way. This was the point which Athanasius drove home in his stress upon (together with ), the activity inherent in the very being of God. That is admittedly a totally un-Greek conception, which could not but import a decisive change in the foundation of thought. Consider the significance of this in light of our modern scientific rejection of dualism; it implies a fundamental way of thinking which is at once dynamical and ontological, which is what modern science has been struggling to achieve in its attempts to harmonize relativity theory (65).
The Atonement as the redemptive recapitulation of all Time
If we believe that in Jesus Christ, the Creator Word by whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together, became man then we cannot but think with St. Paul of the incarnate and atoning action of God in Christ as penetrating back in time to the very beginning, gathering it up in himself, and thrusting forward in time to the very end in the consummation of his creative and redemptive purpose. We have to de here with real time (to borrow an expression from Henri Bergson), not with the Platonic notion of time as a moving image of eternity. This realist understanding of the incarnation as the redemptive recapitulation of all time since the creation and as the teleological fulfullment of time was a favorite conception of Irenaeus in the second century, and through him it was injected into the classical theology of the early church.
The Challenge:
This carries with it a concept of the redemption of time, which challenges us today to work out a deeper conception of time in the light of the radical change brought about through the incarnation and the atonement, and then in the light of a feedback from this change to reach a fuller appreciation of God’s activity in incarnation and atonement (68-69).