A good storyteller follows the rules of the road: goes with the flow but avoids the potholes.
“Historical, contingent truths can never be proofs of rational, necessary truths.”[i]
Words reveal the invisible essence of our soul, even as creation is a string of discourse stretching from one end of heaven to the other. Only the Holy Spirit was able to tell us about the miracle of the six days in a way which, while remaining profound we could grasp nonetheless. Between an idea of our soul and a sound which emanates from our mouth measures the distance equal that between spirit and body, even that between heaven and earth. What kind of incomprehensible domain joins these things so disparate and so equally distant from one another? Are not our thoughts humiliated over the fact that they fail to become visible unless coarsely fitted out in the pattern of arbitrary signs? Furthermore, what better proof for divine omnipotence – and humility – than that He desired and thus brought to pass having the depths of His mysteries and the treasures of His wisdom breathed into the form of a servant of such gibberish and confusion as one who possesses the tongue of human abstraction?[ii]
Alle Wunder der Heilige Schrift geschehen in unserer Seele (J. G. Hamann)
That the attainment of truth in human minds should proceed as Aquinas says “through certain doors” is a mystery that is explored, though not wholly explained, by the sacred history presented in Holy Writ. Odd indeed as it sounds, my conclusion is that those in search of understanding knowledge might consider periodically setting aside epistemological texts and turning to Scripture.[iii]
Why odd? What key unlocks what Oswald Spengler called the “metaphysical structure of historic humanity”? Like a dead relative whose remains we have boarded up in the room where we found them, the odor of this question does not go away, even if we do not ask it anymore. We have “simply” stopped noticing the smell, needing no longer to even ask from whence it comes. Only the occasional guest stranger who enters our home signals to us by initial grimace and strained politeness that something seems to be wrong. “Scientific history,” one scholar tells us is, “the sort of study that modern historians generally engage in.”[iv] This term refers to the service that provides the mundane product the history-making industry grinds out every year through the discipline’s publishing and promoting cartel holding sway over the interlocking organizations and operations of the university system, which controls the production of normative historical knowledge in Europe and North America. The product of such work, we are correctly told, is the result of “the attempt simply to arrive at an accurate account of past events based upon sufficient evidence, without regard to learning lessons, predicting the future course of events, or grasping the ‘meaning’ of human history as a whole.”[v] Being creatures made in the image of God and thus of manifold multiplicity, we do best blindfold with one hand tied behind our back such one fold work. Therefore we bind ourselves accordingly and gouge out our eye of faith, willing to go to hell so maimed. We sacrifice all that is living, powerful and noble throughout the generations on a puny altar of “scientific history.” Well do we modify the dimensions of our petty priestly duties by the disabling and deceptive adverb, “simply.” We are an adulterous generation, we eat and wipe our mouth, and say, “We have done no wrong.” But what do we have to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom we are to judge? God judges those outside. Lord, let me be purged of what evil is in me that keeps me from making good evangelical history, or remove me from among those who need no such purging.
In the first volume of his valuable work Christianity & Western Thought,[vi] Colin Brown appropriately enough by the standards of civil-religious engineering that direct the designing and constructing of the connections students travel through the curriculum of the modern world of higher education, judged it unnecessary to detour their attention to a Christian campaigner in criticism of Enlightenment criticism called the “Magus of the North,” Johan Georg Hamann (1730-1788). It is strange to read from such an excellent scholar “deeply committed to the Christian faith”[vii] about how important Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is,[viii] and yet not hear a single word spoken about his contemporary and acquaintance, Johann Georg Hamann, who also was his profoundest critic. At least one odd principle of judgment must be in play to compel a Christian teacher to omit such a strong voice of Christian testimony to Biblical truth in the Enlightenment era, and yet nonetheless, adore,[ix] review, assess and thus contribute to the continued vitality of an apostate of that age who undermined the health of the living church – her most holy faith – and sought to rob her of the wisdom for salvation hers through the sacred writings; who then sought to disrupt prayer in the Holy Spirit and to sever her from the love of God while she waits for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.
It is a binding appeal for accompanied by a belief in the ethereal power of the imagaination – misused, desperate and sick – over the character and actions of others that led Colin Brown to censor one voice and engage the other. As he said in his introduction, “This book is about the changes in preconceptions, world views and paradigms that have affected the ways in which people have thought about religion in general and Christianity in particular in the Western world.”[x] We deceive ourselves if we fail to see intrinsic to our awarding acknowledgement to those who “influence” the life of the church is our habit of paying homage to them. That Brown adores Kant does not mean he worships him in the Biblical sense, but rather that his paying attention to him and ignoring Hamann corresponds more to the pagan practice of worship, which was motivated by either the purpose of gaining favor with or disarming the demands of a bothersome character. Why bother with what does not bother us? What is it to us that one cried out, ”For who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God”? Why listen to the stutterer who stammered, “Is there not a cause”? We acknowledge the “influence” of Kant because we know him like a circus bear. We know his tricks, we wrestle with him for the show, because it is safe to do so, we inflate his affects because it serves our purposes. We set him in a pantheonic order of his liking because it pleases us. We heighten his fame by pointing him out like star gazers, swelling him up to Goliath stature so that we might play the role of David to cut him back down to size. We focus upon him as if an expert witness, awarding him a stature that he could never earn if we stood him beside his contemporary Hamann, if they were allowed to speak to one another in our textbooks and curricula, if we let our students listen in on both of them. Why Kant? Why not Hamann? What would happen if we forgot Kant, and in place of his absent memory we immersed our mind in the baths of this entkleidende Metacriticus bonae spei? What if we too dared to strip ourselves of ourselves to put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth, walking like living parables, looking like naked pagans in the eyes of the world? For in the eyes of the globalized moment, this strange ready God has made for us all, He makes everyone born a Dane, a follower of Jesus fulfilling His kindling dream to come by the power of the spirit of the anti-Christ, except for those the Father has given the Son that He may give them eternal life. We fail to remember how we were beaten or bested into plodding the beaten path we follow, and that by way of the process the Germans call Bildung to which we subject our students. Do not we best them too, and beat them over the head to make sure they walk it too? Why do we persist entertaining the same subjects of study in our syllabuses? Are we not “simply,” uncritically, doing nothing more than putting on display our having mastered the standard set of techniques and scripts authorized professional participation permits, awarded by the prevailing consensus of community membership, which we worked so hard to earn?
Why is it that by our efforts at holy laughter we only make fools of ourselves? Oh for holy confidence, oh for godly courage, for simple faith working through love long enough to just sit down and have a real good laugh. Constantly gnawing even while yawning with modern nervousness, .~ do not have the time for such a cathartic outburst. .~ am too busy hiding from one .~ cannot see, not knowing where .~ am, not knowing where .~ am going in this moment when the Lord is bringing to nothing what things that are. God help me (and He does), .~ don’t know what to hold on to or in what direction to head out. .~ cry out to you Lord, .~ follow you Lord, but .~ have no sense of connection or direction or consistency in which .~ can rest. .~ am so often dulled into believing .~ am alone except for awkward lapses as episodes of interruption that relieve me from my sense of lostness adrift in a sea of misunderstanding amidst fragments of debris, bits of stories about guaranteed certainty and absolute integrity tossed to and fro by the waves of cunning carried on tides of craftiness concocted through the hypocrisy of liars devoted to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons. I hear Woyzeck’s pounding drums beating not beneath me but inside me. What irony! Free masons in me adorning the monuments of the righteous though dead, who, through faith still speak to me while .~ stay busy, busy, busy building the tombs of the prophets.
Do not allow yourself to be deceived, Michael do not deceive yourself.
We read and thus we write c.s. lewis tells us as if c. p. snow cares to know, we seek, we achieve, “the extension of being,” we want to be another by another to better be ourselves as if brought safely through the water makes us a willing partner whose appeal to God for a good conscience no longer matters, nevertheless, what never happened, happened (1 Peter 3:21-22). We enter or give entry, we listen or speak, to commit adultry or to keep our bed of marriage with our Lord undefiled. Let the ear be submissive, chaste and listen with fear with a gentle and quiet spirit, hoping in fear without being frightened by any fear. Let the tongue live with the listening ear in an understanding way, as with a weaker vessel, grant her honor as a fellow heir of the grace of life, so that the prayers spoken may not be hindered.
Having the promises beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God, pursuing peace with all men, and the sanctification with honor without which no one will see the Lord.
If you think you are wise in this age,
become a fool that you may become wise.
Do not be deceived;
God is not mocked,
for whatever you sow Michael, that will you also reap.
If you think you are religious and do not bridle your tongue, you deceive your heart,
your religion is worthless.
Normality is nothing more than the prevailing pattern of depravity.
We live in a world in which depravity remains constant,
yet hypocrisy ever increases as the lie that grows with lawlessness.
What we confess as providentially conditioned progress governs the prayer,
“Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
These are all drafts dunker, drawings of the load you pull. Edit them out, set them aside, take up your task as if they neither exist nor have any influence upon the you you are believing. Gird up your loins, embrace the good confession He made before Pontius Pilate, submit to rightful authority and speak! We are trapped by our wanting to set ourselves free, not by our wanting to be free as He desires. We suffer the realization that “it seems that only by learning what [the Scriptures] have to teach can [we] come to read [the Scriptures] aright, but also that only by reading them aright can [we] learn what [the Scriptures} teach.”[xi] To drink the tonic God offers to make us wise for salvation by our reading the Bible we must first accept the authority of the Bible, which Kant rejected and Hamann embraced. Why listen to Kant and censor Hamann? Why not expand the arc of “the hermeneutic circle” to include reading Johan Georg Hamann? Why not read Johann Georg Hamann within “the context of [the] tradition of religious and intellectual practices of inquiry”?[xii] Why not expand “the authority of the tradition of inquiry and interpretation which [has] grown up around”[xiii] the sacred writings to include, if Kant, then Hamann in tandem with him? Is not the latter philosopher enough to qualify an opportunity to address the same things that we allow Kant time to speak to? Whose rules hold sway over the Christian tradition of inquiry and interpretation that prohibits Hamann having a hearing? What cause for dismissal? What cause for embarrassment? What fear of loss? What cause for greater reputation? What lust for gain? We deceive ourselves if we think of modern philosophy as a way to understand the world rather than as primarily a determining factor of influence upon how we read the Bible.
God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal, “The Lord knows those who are his,” and “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.” And for whom is the solid food of the Scriptures except for the mature, skilled in the word of righteousness, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil, that is trained by constant rebuke and correction? Trained by the exact things .~ shirk and shill to shield myself from the shame .~ fear, forgetting love casts out all fear. It is for discipline that we endure! Discipline me Lord that .~ may share in your holiness among your saints as you allow. Lord release me into your loving will, issue your painful discipline that you may yield in my life the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Lord, .~ yearn to live the good life. As the Father of spirits .~ confess subjection to you, although ,~ do not know what it means, nor do .~ know how to do this. .~ perform the trigonometry of truth to locate my position as helpless. Head out with me from where you are reader, let us trust Him together to get us away from wherever we do not belong. Let us go out together not knowing where we are going, believing we will live in the land of promise.
The Scriptures teach us that men make up gods to worship them, and that this is called idolatry. “Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy, with its emphasis on the knowing and willing self as the cognitive and moral center of the universe, created the conceptual space in which the notion of worldview could flourish,” David K. Naugle teaches us in his chronicle of a corollary idol titled, Worldview, The History of a Concept[xiv] Failing to see myself in another proves .~ am blind. Thinking .~ can see everything from my vantage point is vain. Failing to see myself before God is depraved. .~ too burn what .~ have cut to stay warm, .~ too make a fire to bake my bread, but why should .~ worship the god another has made? Why should .~ fall down before this all-seeing eye of self with its worldview to adore it, or fall into the shallow grave its maker dug out with it, or take it up into my prayers for deliverance? Don’t .~ have enough lust to flee from, don’t .~ make false gods enough to keep myself from?[xv] .~ know together we have become worthless, and that together there is no fear of God before our eyes. Let us admit together our blindness that He may relieve us of our guilt who said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” Blind us Father, we wish to see Jesus.
It is as odd a practice to keep talking about Kant without mentioning Hamann, as it would be to talk of poisonous snakes and not mention the antivenin available to counteract their deadly venom. Roger E. Olson tells a story about Kant, “the greatest Enlightenment thinker of all,” yet too has banished Hamann, his greatest metacritic to oblivion. Again, this is strange because Olson’s working principle for selecting, arranging and presenting the content of his book he explains is based on the principle, “People live from the stories that shape their identities. Those of us who call ourselves Christians are shaped by the Christian story.”[xvi] Why inject into the life stream of Christian identity the infectious tale of Kant without including the leukocytic defense of Hamann? R. C. Sproul teaches who knows how many generations of the church that Immanuel Kant’s thought “represents the watershed of modern philosophy,” and that this philosopher created a “philosophical revolution” perhaps of “greater impact than the Copernican revolution in science” with “more far-reaching consequences than the American Revolution in politics.”[xvii] Yet he fails to mention the work of Johan Georg Hamann who devoted his life to refuting Enlightenment-based prejudices that distorted the integrity of revealed knowledge. What ruler do we obey that demands we “understand the concepts that shaped our [!] world,”[xviii] with so much ado about Kant without examining the courageous effort of a contemporary Christian who fought this thinker’s idolatrous onslaught?[xix]
The most insidious element in the nature of the choice to do so is that it seems so ordinary. So natural. So expected. God however is extraordinary, supernatural and surprising! Why not teach the next generation of His people accordingly? Why should we order our speech to conform to the hierarchy of listeners before whom we speak? Should we preach rebellion because we speak into the context of disobedience? This is not a priority of lockstep sequence, but rather one of priority, freely chosen as an exercise in discernment. Brown, Olson and Sproul’s choice to speak about Kant and ignore Hamann exhibit’s a lack of faith. I do not mean this in terms of integrity or intensity. I am not questioning the godliness of these men. I am however rebuking how they turned their eyes of faith to see what they wanted to talk about, without looking at what they chose not to talk about. Why? Because they do not know how to control the things they were not taught. O for the creative break that only fatigue can make. To rely upon powers of influence and relations of affect, as these organizing concepts are presumed to operate by the established academic method of handling intellectual traffic, restricts our field of vision by which we decide the ways we should live out our life in Christ, as nothing more than wisps of smoke passing through this world as sojourners and exiles. This is not to say our course of action should be anti-intellectual and reactionary. Nor should our style be a cautious sheltered one of tactical withdrawal from the marketplace of ideas or the public square. Instead, wherever we find ourselves, worship and prayer in the Spirit and truth should be our first line of witness followed by confession and service. There will be differences of conscience over how we should present ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God. Yet we should all work for the building up of the church until we all attain to the unity of faith and of knowledge of the Son of God. Therefore our historiography should include space for the social construction of knowledge about the past with a view that our audience ought first always be the living church surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. We should always speak to puzzle angels and to manifest God’s manifold wisdom to rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. We should speak in such a way that matches wise conduct toward outsiders, and that testifies to the best use of time; thus in such a way that anyone without gifts who happens to overhear us may listen in to say, “Amen.”[xx] Thus our purpose of communication should first be generational edification, the giving of precious truth to men and women who are yet boys and girls struggling bravely to become men and women who want to be mature and perfect. Only as an extension of this work do we apologize for Christ and refute the affects of false knowledge that either distorts or denies Him.
Furthermore, the recognition that modernity has transformed history into an argument,[xxi] used to justify contending attitudes toward the past, should be for us as Christians a sobering realization. What myth do we pretend to be worthy of respect that keeps us from seeing how the discipline of history today is used to advance a myriad of agendas, many of which are adverse to the health of the church? The past is but one part of the living stream of speech that makes up the arena of divine discourse into which we are born for a time. In this living stream we receive God’s word from the past rooted in creation and encounter His Spirit sent to us from the consummation secured by the only begotten Son of God made man, who is Lord and Savior of all, Jesus Christ. It is such a past and future together that form the present. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy (Revelation 19:10 with Ephesians 1:9-10). To gain a balanced appraisal of this arena of divine discourse requires us to consider its quadrilateral nature. All the past is made up of four avenues of life: historical consciousness, prophecy, fulfillment of prophecy and providential conditioning. A fair judgment of the past demands a full examination of it. We deceive ourselves if we think there is any historiography practiced that stands without theological foundation. The proper use of history requires the abuse of scientific historiography because a full examination of the past is only possible from the vantage point of the consummation.[xxii] We have the outline, but see all within its perimeter as in a mirror dimly. This makes our surveying, navigating and engineering this life a difficult project, leaving much room for error. Understanding historical reality is cruciform helps us at least to lay out our errors upon a fuller, richer backdrop of the past as it really happened. If we may say such an approach lacks “objectivity,” or it is prejudicial to a “provincial” way of doing history, then we speak in the imperfect passive voice. Professionals once wrote scientific history. Historians were writing in such a style as a past action while alternatives were emerging. In this present time of transitions we as evangelical Christians should examine our heritage to better understand what style(s) of historiography we should ply. Sometimes a man must go into his own tent because there is no other means by which to protect his family from the elements of a hostile environment.
Sound confession requires our convictions and conscience to be grounded together in a good reading of the Scriptures serving the growth and governance of the church. The breadth of confession does not encompass our deciphering out and making explicit all of God’s actions in history. His work is unfathomable. Nor does confession provide us the formula by which we can predict God’s future actions. Confession of faith offers us opportunity to point out possible connections among human events that transcend the confines of contemporaneous cause and effect. Making such connections better equips us to create a historical narrative that invites general listening in while edifying the church. This work is to be done with no less skill, truthfulness and openness than is that insisted upon by profane professionals. If anything Christians should desire and aspire to even higher standards of scholarly distinction. I would argue the point in fact that it is primarily our responsibility to protect and to practice these high standards of scholarly distinction. Because this is the case, we should realize, I believe, that sometimes didactic duties to the church charge us to strike out in an unanticipated and little followed direction instead of sticking to the plan of knowledge prevailing civil-religious surveyors lay out as suitable plot lines and lot boundaries of legitimate and valuable knowledge. Even should we admit that the value of history is “not to teach lessons but to provide perspective,”[xxiii] we should at least be willing to ask for the sake of those who come after us, “From what vantage point and to what purpose?” Of course we teach lessons through the discipline of history! Of course we teach how to be a professional historian all the while teaching lessons about life in doing so! And of course we teach history to students to teach them lessons about life from our perspective! Our false claims to the contrary, no one simply historifies to provide perspective from the “context of no context“[xxiv] about the past of a world “adjudicated to nobody.”[xxv] Evangelical Christian scholars should admit this, and openly announce the intent to write good history from a confessional standpoint to the end of building up the church.
In the land of silence man remains inert and incommensurable. Without speech he is without a standard by which to make judgments. He who has no name may not speak. Speech judges us whenever we respond to another’s actions. Speech judges me when reckoning a memory of what I have done. I am unintelligible unless I speak. I can neither be praised nor condemned. We lust after meaning without words yet we yearn for words to be spoken that award meaning to our lives. Man without speech then is a conceptual fiction, such a thing as a non-speaking human is not real. We only make such a thing real by speaking about “it.” We wonder how human “it” might be by discussing this question together. The exception proves the norm. The feral child syndrome in all form of manifestation demands the person be cared for with all the rights to which he or she is entitled owing to being like us, to his or her having been made in the image of God even if totally lacking any capacity to behave accordingly. We would name such a child. We would brainstorm over the challenge of learning how to communicate with the child suffering the burden of the speechless state. By faith in our Creator we trust these fellow members of His offspring will exercise these qualities in the ages to come. Man is a creature of perpetual speech, in communication with God and with others. Man hears speech and remembers, he pieces things together of what he remembers in party with others while making new memories with them. By means of perpetual reminiscence and communication we carry out our names. We continue on the project of our own personhood.[xxvi]
The essence of receiving life to live in this world is to realize that this world is spoken in God’s language. God calls into being that which does not exist yet what He desires to exist by the power of His spoken command. He brings nothing to being by wordless thought, which is another conceptual fiction, as if either God or man could endure living in the medium of thoughtlessness. We believe in our ignorance (in ourselves), our immanent, telepathic partner in faith, to be the more powerful actor, and thus the governor over our talking to one another. God however brings the insides of His divine word out into the outside of the not divine by bringing to hearing-faith being that outside outside of the not divine via the bridge of speech. God’s Word is Pontifex Maximus of creation in which the generations of men and women live. God’s word alone is the only bridge builder to and only pathfinder through His creation and this world of human generations. “Hamann is one of the first thinkers to be quite clear that thought is the use of symbols, that non-symbolic thought, that is, thought without either symbols or images…is an unintelligible notion.”[xxvii] In the beginning was the Word! Hamann said, “Where there is no word there is no reason — and no world.” Therefore he concluded, “All idle talk about reason is mere wind; language is its organon[xxviii] and criterion!”[xxix] Hamann rebuked[xxx] the Enlightenment’s idolatrous concept of reason from his confession of the transactional nature of knowledge through receiving and delivering, through tradition enlivened by faith. “Hamann attacked the alleged independence of reason from experience and its daily induction.” Reason is neither pure nor autonomous; we exercise our faculties of reason within a web or relations through which we live by way of words. As either an intensive or reflexive reference, ‘myself’ is never alone inside or out. .~ pretend .~ do not exist unless .~ admit .~ live as hearing another speak. If .~ hear then it is because .~ have learned to speak. If I think then I speak because someone else spoke to me. Speech, however, as Hamann contended, “always has and unavoidably always has an empirical side so that all talk of a pure reason would be a contradiction in itself.” That is, speech is the life lived among the living and the dead. Nothing on its own is analogous to anything, everything is alive with His word spoken in the way He created, being upheld now with groaning anticipation by the word of His power, kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. What would we dare handle, taste or touch except that His word tells us everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer? The multiplicities of hearings together make up the reality we read all around us. We do not seek similarities, we yearn for the one arrangement that produces fullest harmony, that is the reading the church wishes to hear and make known as the manifold wisdom of God to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. Filled with the Holy Spirit we desire to speak to one another accordingly, in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with our heart to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father, subject to one another in the fear of Christ, being strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. Then believing is being known and reading, “the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” is not mere rhetoric or only literal, but a living moment of our Living Lord given us to enter, and then? Let the Lord decide.
If we listen to Hamann we perhaps hear the father of “counter-modernity” speaking.[xxxi] Or maybe we learn by listening to him that at the same time of modernity’s birth postmodernity was born too, with the same simultaneity with which we now rejoice and weep. Where we think of being, Hamann confesses wording as faith working through love. Hamann fought to thwart the hope of those champions of the Enlightenment who worked to bring to an end the divine work of prayer. His metacritique of their claim to base all action upon reason countered that human action was dependent upon divine revelation. Hamann confessed God’s revelation as the essence of living (historical) human existence. Human thought is the transitional middle between God speaking to man and man acting upon what he has heard, interpreted, understood, reckoned, and decided. Accordingly, fedeism is not a subjective state but rather our ontological condition, our state of being, our way of living. Hamann denied the possibility of Kant’s critique of pure reason based upon his view of language as the human medium for trafficking in the living of things, which God has given us, who not only empowers us to detect or reflect the meaning He has revealed, but also the freedom to create alternate meanings against His will, allowed as He allots. Because we can “only think in language, then it is simply not possible to investigate our thinking instrument – to say what it can or cannot think in advance of its deployment.”[xxxii] Our words give us the confidence to conceive “what ‘things’ and objective realities are.” Since this is the case, “it is not possible to separate out within language the ‘categories – whether of ‘reason’, the ‘understanding’ or ‘the imagination’ – by which things are thought, from ‘intuitions’ or the empirical contents of thoughts themselves.”[xxxiii] Hamann insisted that pure reason conceived could never be pure reason proven without provincial qualifications. This had to be the case because “all reason begins as a process of interpretation, or ‘divinatory’ understanding of meaning.”[xxxiv] Hamann’s metacritique of Kant’s philosophy imposes a more humble limitation upon human reason, subjecting it to conditions of linguistic and historical determinations, reminding us as theologian John Milbank points out, that “local and particular experiences always enter into our general conception of epistemological categories, making them endlessly revisable, and justifiable neither de facto and a posteriori, nor de jure and a priori, [since] these culturally particular categories can only justify themselves as a kind of ‘conjecture’ about the transcendent, and the relation of this transcendence to finitude.”[xxxv]
Hamann was first a Christian, and only as such was he the critic of the modern Enlightenment. As a philosophical theologian Kant said the chief objects of metaphysics were “God, freedom and immortality.”[xxxvi] Kant believed that these metaphysical problems form “the basis for our greatest expectations and for our points of view about the end purposes of life.” He said, “For this reason it is futile to want to strike an artificial sense of indifference over research [of such things], since human nature cannot be apathetic about these things.”[xxxvii] In considering these matters, questions about God took priority because “The Supreme Being” is “a concept which crowns and encloses the entirety of human knowledge.”[xxxviii] With this Hamann would agree. However, he insisted knowledge about God could never be independent of the teachings handed over to us through traditions of their being told and believed. As the apostle Paul wrote and taught, “Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed (1 Corinthians 15:11).”
Hamann believed that creation is marinated in the word of God because “through [His word spoken as language] are all things made.” The medium of speech in which we form words was not invented by us, it has been given to us by divine initiative in a moment when our capacity to speak was activated by our hearing God speak to us as the “Great all-giver.”[xxxix] “And God said to them… (Genesis 1:28).”
Hearing the word of God is man’s highest calling. Responding by being obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching revealed in the sacred writings is our true duty and only source of real joy. All of reality within and without is our reading material to this one perfect end. Reality gives counsel, the trees advise, the stones cry out, and the stars stare down at us like enraptured saints, explaining what they know. All are waiting to be rightly interpreted, intrinsic to their being is the knowledge that they shall be rightly read. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now (Romans 8:19-22). “O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times (Matthew 16:3)?” The two should never be siphoned apart as if sending mixed signals. History, prophecy and its fulfillment as well as providential conditioning work as an orchestra of reality to perform as they have been composed. What is impossible is for any member of this symphony to strike a miss-played note or take up an unexpected motif. “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out (Luke 19:40).” It is not impossible for stones to cry out. What is impossible is that there would have been no crowd to greet the Lord as He entered Jerusalem. What we believe is possible determines the world we talk about, but does not govern the world in which we live.
The same method and the same source is the only means by which .~ can learn about myself. This draws me into an even more intimate ring of reading. .~ discover who .~ am before God only be understanding myself in relation to Him and my neighbor.
We can take apart completely to distinguish the pieces of whatever signs we examine, claiming possession of knowledge about the things we handle as wages for our work to our own advantage. Nevertheless, all things join together to say the same thing but in infinite fittings of rich variety, so that no matter our motive or method to analyze them they obediently arrange themselves to say the one necessary thing — the only thing they know, the only thing they have been given to say. We are literally called to play our part in the drama God has set out in this world within the reading hall of creation on cue (quando, when & qaualis, in what manner) as He directs the signals for our picking up the story of salvation as we receive it as timed in ordained measure and relation attuned to our unique reckoning at getting the meaning of it. Each of us is wrapped and saturated in the message because the Speaker is actually not far from any of us, His word is near us, in our mouth and in our heart and the voice of faith has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.[xl] The great mystery of man is that although made literate to read reality he cannot understand it. “How can I, unless someone guides me (Acts 8:31)?[xli]
Hamann fought a two-front war against the conflicting claims to all knowledge — of the Church on the right and of science on the left. He condemned any system, centralization, monism as authoritarian. When speaking of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum he said, it is all very well about the cogito, but what about the “noble sum?” Hamann stands at the ramparts to protect the human soul from the siege machines of quantification marshaled by ideals of reason or engineered by dictates of dogma.[xlii] He battles in the name of divine quality against the tapes and types of scientific data as the measure of the good, the beautiful and the true. The society of convenience depends upon tools designed by sins of presumption, he refused to use them. He fought a battle against applying God’s word to our agenda, to ply God’s word, to bend it or submit it to the work we choose as we wield it as a tool in the line of business we call church life, academic life, political life, socio-economic life or whatever other life subject to the confinements of quantitative generalization. He rejected imprisoning social and personal life to scientific principles of organization, as if the Enlightenment celebrated calculations of satisfaction between human beings could be reckoned by reducing our lives to a common standard of universal measurement based upon a universal lexicon of concepts, which graph human happiness while factoring out enthusiasm. He rejected quantification based upon alleged verification of numerical hypotheses and any planning of people’s lives as a result of this boasted expertise, whether for individuals or for groups. He rejected physics and biology in their youth, he would have hated them in their rebellious adolescence. He hated the social sciences with their moral categories and economic classes cutting human life up into objects of criticism and control, making being made in the image of God a variable to be modified with programmatic precision. He was a fool. He died to the end comforting others, little comforted himself by those who loved him and tried to help him with the terrible burden of protecting life he felt obligated to bear.
[i] Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
“Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft,” in
Gesammelte Werke, ed. Paul Rilla, vol. 8 (Berlin, 1956), p. 12; quoted by Isaiah Berlin, ed. by Henry Hardy,
The Magus of the North (New York: Farra, Straus and Giroux, 1993), p. 31.
[ii] Johann Georg Hamann, quoted by Sven-Aage Jorgensen in his commentary of Hamann’s Aesthetica in nuce, footnote seventeen in Johann Georg Hamanns Briefwechsel (Stuttgart, FRG: Philip Reclam, 1968, originally 1762), pp. 86, 88 with mike mcduffee liable for the translation.
[iii] J. Haldane, “Reason, Truth and Sacred History,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 68 (1994), p. 183.
[iv] Gordon Graham, The Shape of the Past (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 2.
[v] Gordon Graham, The Shape of the Past, p. 2.
[vi] Colin Brown, Christianity & Western Thought, A History of Philosophers, Ideas & Movements From the Ancient World to the Age of Enlightenment, vol. 1, (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1990).
[vii] Ibid., p. 10.
[viii] Ibid., pp. 309-330.
[ix] ad/to + orare/to speak.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Undoubtedly an example of a violation of some particular ordinance of the academic code. Nonetheless, the quote is primarily a statement made by A. MacIntyre from Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1990), p. 82 as quoted by Gordon Graham in his The Shape of the Past (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 193 with my own alterations in brackets.
[xii] Gordon Graham, The Shape of the Past, p. 194.
[xiii] Gordon Graham, The Shape of the Past, p. 195.
[xiv] (Grand Rapids, Michigan/Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), p. 59.
[xv] Isaiah 44:14-17; 1 John 5:21.
[xvi] The Story of Christian Theology, Twenty Centuries of Tradition & Reform (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1999), p. 540 and p. 11 respectively.
[xvii] R. C. Sproul, The Consequences of Ideas (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2000), 117.
[xviii] The subtitle to Sproul’s book.
[xix] I have selected these texts to make visible the problem of prejudicial redaction because we use them as assigned texts for courses taught out of the Theology Department at Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Illinois. Alarming to me is that Sproul would have us adore Aristotle in the name of Jesus as proposed by Thomas Aquinas. According to Sproul we have been waiting for a philosopher-messiah ever since Aquinas has been dethroned. Praise God the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fall down before the Lamb with the prayers of the saints in their hands and not their treatises on metaphysics.
[xx] Beginning always devoid of the Spirit but under His conviction in the subjunctive mood, “Oh, if this could be true, that it would last long enough for me to lean on, how I wish I could be sure.” The God that is Amen gives to the outsider without gifts the gift of His word to relieve him of his subjunctive sigh and turn it into the imperative of His love.
[xxi] Joli Jensen, Redeeming Modernity, Contradictions in Media Criticism, (Newbury Park, London, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1990), p. 200.
[xxii] Panneberg has theologically reasoned well through this dimension of historical knowledge.
[xxiii] Robert Darnton, George Washington’s False Teeth (New York/London: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003), p. xiii. This is the comment of an excellent historian, one who handles the past with great creativity and sensitivity and is able to tease from it knowledge that others had not imagined as being accessible. Having said that, his comment strikes me as corresponding to a mentality that might have prevailed among the elite of imperial Rome when fulfilling their civil religious duties, more mere gesture than sincere oblation. So this is how we become gods? So this is why we write professional history? Children of Lot, flee Romathens!
[xxiv] From the title of a lovely insightful essay on American culture by George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1980).
[xxv] Part of caption to a map located inside the back cover to Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution, Autobiography of Western Man (Norwich, VT: Argo Books, 1969).
[xxvi] A cumbersome term we use to avoid using one that once thrilled but now embarrasses us, our soul.
[xxvii] Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North, p. 75.
[xxviii] A word out of fashion, in the plural either organums or organna, from the Latin organum meaning tool or implement or engine to do work. An organon is a system of principles for use in acquiring knowledge, usually applied if at all and to our loss, to philosophical or scientific inquiry. The organonoic way of life is submission, devotion and learning through the disciplines of studying the Scriptures and exercising prayer before God.
[xxix] Hamann quoted by Berlin, The Magus of the North, p. 79.
[xxx] Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Metacritique of the Purity of Reason.
[xxxi] The phrase is from John Milbank’s work, Theology & Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1993), p. 4. This entire paragraph is based upon Milbank’s analysis of Hamann and Herder, pp. 148-153.
[xxxii] John Milbank, Theology & Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason, p. 151.
[xxxiii] John Milbank, Theology & Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason, p. 151.
[xxxiv] John Milbank, Theology & Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason, p. 78.
[xxxv] John Milbank, Theology & Social Theory, Beyond Secular Reason, pp. 63-64.
[xxxvi] Immanuel Kant quoted by Wilhelm Weischedel, Der Gott der Philosophen, Band 1, (Nordlingen, Germany: dtv wissenschaft, 1971), p. 193. Weischedel edited Kant’s work in six volumes (Frankfurt a.M./Darmstadt, 1957). My translation.
[xxxvii] Immanuel Kant quoted by Wilhelm Weischedel, Der Gott der Philosophen, p. 192.
[xxxviii] Immanuel Kant quoted by Wilhelm Weischedel, Der Gott der Philosophen, p. 193.
[xxxix] Of course we can coin a phrase, and certainly distort a meaning; but only according to its kind. Biblical “evolution” does not relate only to creatures of air, land and sea after their own kind; the same forces of life are at work in the languages God interjected into history at the Tower of Babel.
[xl] Hamann said we are free to take part or resign from it and perish, according to Berlin he rejected determinism as a scientific fiction. See The Magus of the North, p. 85. Hamann’s speculation that man began with mere sensations and images to first speak in song and poetry followed by prose makes sense if we remember God first encountered us through the theophanous display He aesthetically judged most appropriate for our being living faith in His presence. This precedence resonates with His having made us in His image, thus serving God’s pleasure to speak to us (Genesis 1:27-31). We might give impetus for reflecting further on this encounter as an exercise in edification by asking, “When did we begin drinking water?” The question draws our exchange back to the second day of creation (Genesis 1:6-8), the only one about which God did not have it written that He saw what He had done was good.
[xli] Note the diligence of an honorable man. The Ethiopian had traveled to Jerusalem to worship. Returning to Ethiopia he busied himself reading the Scriptures. He answers honestly the question posed him, “Do you understand what your are reading?” He invites Philip to come up and sit with him. He asks Philip a good question which allows the evangelist to work from the text to tell him the good news about Jesus.
[xlii] I concede I have much more learning to do that I may become more familiar with and understand this flank of his campaign. What is the serviceable thing to do for a man who confesses a falsehood? How do I promote the good of eternal life in his life? Torture? Fine or Imprisonment? Censorship? Of course not! How asinine such actions strike us now matches just how normative they once were to earlier generations. Islamist supremacists today work to recidivise this torturous brutality. We may well have temporarily exchanged less violent evils for these, but the coins in the trade remain convertible.
