A Theory about Evangelical Grumpiness

Matt Wilcoxen

Yesterday one of my friends on here linked to a post by Carl Trueman.  It was critical of the emerging church movement. (On a side note: are we still talking about these people?  Boring.)  Anyways, at one point Trueman said of this movement:

Truth as assertion, truth as rest, was out; truth as journey or conversation was in.  The thrill was not in arriving; it was in the traveling itself. It is, of course, a view of truth which sits perfectly with the coffee house Christianity of the comfortable West; I am not sure if it could have inspired the Apostle Paul to remain confident through all the trials and tribulations he had to endure in the first century.

With that comment, Trueman shows precisely what is wrong with evangelical theology in America: it has no room for truth as journey.  For what it’s worth, I’m against what Trueman is against: I don’t think truth is a linguistic construct devised in community.  But I also don’t think truth can be directly equated with the “assertions” we make about God.  These assertions do have a take on reality, but they aren’t truth with a capital ‘T’.  Truth with a capital ‘T’ is Jesus Christ.

Quoting Ps. 105: 3, St. Augustine talked about seeking the truth in De Trin. XV (among many other places!):

Now it would seem that what is always being sought is never being found, and in that case how is the heart of the seekers to rejoice and not rather grow sad, if they cannot find what they are looking for?  He does not, you see, say “Let the heart of those who find,” but “of those who seek the Lord rejoice.”  And yet the prophet Isaiah testifies that the Lord God can be found provided he is sought, when he says, Seek the Lord and as soon as you find him call upon him, and when he draws near to you let the godless man forsake his ways and the wicked man his thoughts (Is. 55:6).  So if he can be found when he is sought, why does it say Seek his face always?  Does he perhaps have to be sought even when he has been found?  That is indeed how incomprehensible things have to be searched for, in case the man who has been able to find out how incomprehensible what he is looking for is should reckon that he has found nothing.  Why then look for something when you have comprehended the incomprehensibility of what you are looking for, if not because you should not give up the search as long as you are making progress in your inquiry into things incomprehensible, and because you become better and better by looking for so great a good which is both sought in order to be found and found in order to be sought?  It is sought all the more delightfully, and it is found in order to be sought all the more avidly.

So truth will always be journey and conversation because the truth is God’s eternal Word, whose depths we will be plumbing throughout all eternity.  When we start thinking that truth amounts to the propositions and assertions that we pull out of the Bible (as important as these are), we think of truth as something we’ve mastered.  This makes life boring, and I think this conception of truth is what makes conservative Christians like myself grumpy.  So next time you wonder why some evangelicals are so freaking grumpy, I’m guessing it’s an overly propositional conception of truth.  Try to converse about this with them, but don’t be surprised if they can only make assertions.

Matt Wilcoxen
Matt is a former regular contributor to The Two Cities.

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6 responses to “A Theory about Evangelical Grumpiness”

  1. Andrew Faris

    Matt,

    I’m a total amateur in this sort of theological epistemology/prolegomena stuff. Honest. That’s not being self-deprecating.

    On the one hand I really like where you’re going here. It seems that the tension of following the God who is both knowable and incomprehensible forces us to believe that the truth revealed in the Bible is truth with a lowercase “t”, as you say. We’ll never get to the end of it.

    But then, what of the very truth claims you make there? Or perhaps more appropriately, what of the very truth claims that God is knowable yet incomprehensible? Maybe the obvious response is that we still don’t know just how incomprehensible or even knowable God really is, so that even those are lowercase true.

    Anyway, I could go on and on. But it would be more efficient for you to just tell me the answer.

    Andrew Faris
    Someone Tell Me the Story

    P.S. I love the blog. It looks great and so far the content has been fantastic. Also, I gotta think I’m high in the running for “most Two Cities comments” so far, right?

    Reply
    1. Matt Wilcoxen

      Andrew, briefly: I don’t want this post to come off too one-sided. I think it’s a both/and…something akin to a critical-realist epistemology. Has God revealed himself? Yes, in Jesus Christ and the Bible. What has he revealed there? That he is the transcendent Lord who is beyond all our comprehension of him. Further, even the truth revealed in the Bible is something we encounter in a deeply relational way (reading or hearing Scripture via the Spirit), so that it’s always fresh and new and we always have to be at least open to surprises. Even further–the truths of the Bible (which Augustine sees as summed up in the Apostle’s creed) are not the *end* of theology, but the beginning of theology; his whole theological project is about intensive reasoning within the bounds of orthodoxy.

      Now that I think about it, I’m sure someone as bright as Trueman agrees with this idea to a large extent. (Carl, please don’t hurt me.) Nonetheless, it is largely true that a lot of people within evangelicalism see theology as extracting propositions from the text and collecting them into a ‘system’. This sort of approach does lead to a sort of arrogant grumpiness in my opinion. It leads to a sort of calficication of the heart *and* mind.

      Anyways, that’s my take.

      Thanks for checking the blog out. I know we all follow yours. I will try to put you in our blogroll. It might take me a little while to figure out though. This blog looks nice, but the controls are a little funky. (Speaking of your blog: tell Glenn I want to read his writing sometime, not just watch all the amazing stuff he finds online, although that’s good too. 🙂 ).

      Reply
  2. Kevin O’Farrell

    I just love that kid’s face in the picture. I wish all evangelicals looked that cute when grumpy.

    Good post as well.

    Reply
  3. refe

    NT Wright presents a balanced alternative to the ‘positivist vs. phenomenalist’ or ‘critical vs. post-modern’ debate in his book The New Testament and the People of God. It sounds like you have likely read it based on your reference to critical-realism, which is the methodology he discusses.

    I’ve really only just begun to dig into these issues, but already the post-modern ideology is shockingly naive. Check out this paragraph from the Semeia journal that the Society of Biblical Literature puts out:

    “The reader is in and not in the text. The reader can never be separated from the texts that surround him, partly because “reader” and “text” are interchangeable signs, but also because the reader is an active producer of what she reads. The text exists so that the reader may fill it. The reader exists so that the reader may fill her. Neither the reader nor the text has a single, stable center; both the reader and the text may be endlessly exchanged. For poststructural critics, reading is not what it is for most other critics—that is, discovering meaning or significance, looking over, scanning, decoding a text to arrive at an objective interpretation. Rather, readers read to expose themselves to the flickering significances of the text … “

    That is just a mess.

    But on the other side of the aisle, the die-hard positivists like Trueman (I’m not familiar with him, so I’m just using him as an example since he was in the post. By the way, what an appropriate name in this instance…) have done nothing for their case in being unwilling to even consider the value that post-modern ideology does bring to the table.

    That’s why I like Wright’s critical-realism approach. It takes on the legitimate aspects of post-modern thought – such as this idea of story – without abandoning the legitimate aspects of the kind of literary criticism we’ve been doing since the enlightenment.

    Reply
  4. Matt Wilcoxen

    Refe, thanks for the thoughtful comment. Yes, postmodernism’s understanding of epistemology (or “hermeneutics”) is typically quite muddled. I’m curious: does the author you quote seem to rely heavily on Ricoeur?

    Anyways, I agree with you that evangelicals need to allow their epistemology and conception of truth to be augmented. My quoting Augustine is an effort to show that to do so is actually a return to the classical way of Christian thought, not some postmodernism intrusion.

    Reply
    1. refe

      That was a quote from Temma Berg if I remember correctly. She(?) doesn’t cite Ricoeur but references several of Derrida’s works. The article that quotes Berg does reference Ricoeur extensively, though, as well as Derrida and Bleich. They’re kind of the 3 post-structuralist musketeers, I suppose.

      Reply

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