How Do We Transcend Modernity?
A Conversation about Post-Modern Thought and the Gospel of Jesus Christ
For those who might be interested, this is a portion of my email exchange with Richard Williams a few years ago about post-modernism and the Gospel of Jesus Christ:
Me: I don't mind setting aside terms such as "omniscience" or "omnipotence" for a moment. But there is an abundance of restoration scriptures that teach that God knows all things (e.g. 2 Ne. 9:20). Perhaps I have misunderstood, but does this make Nephi's brother Jacob a modern? If we set aside the "omnipotence" that descends, as you say, from the Greek notion of "Being," can we still agree with Jacob that Heavenly Father knows "all things, and there is not anything save he knows it" Perhaps the question is "What does Jacob mean when he says that God knows all things?" or is the question "Why does it matter that Jacob says that God knows all things?" I've read a bit about what Terryl Givens has to say about the Church in the wilderness, and the problems that we have inherited from Augustine in particular, and I think I understand what you mean by God knowing all that is, and is knowable. But if I have understood Elder Maxwell correctly, I still agree with him that "There are no qualifiers, only flat and absolute assertions of the omniscience of
God."But that only begs the question again: "What is 'omniscience,'?" or
if you prefer, "What is knowing all things?" If it is possible to set aside the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Nephites, and even the post-moderns for a moment, there is another statement by Elder Maxwell that resonates with me:"The Gospel also permits us to bring knowledge and love together. Gandhi worried about what he called the coldness of some intellectuals- their lack of heart, lack of warmth, and lack of love for the people whom they wanted to help. Commitment to the principle of love would mean, in effect, that our knowledge- as we seek to transmit it and share our insights- is encapsulated in love. This love underlies a kind of brotherhood that can transcend not only nationalism but also the problems of differential economic status. Knowledge is power, but it is a dangerous kind of power without love. We should not seek knowledge to control, to manipulate, or merely to exhibit."
President Nelson has written eloquently on a similar topic, and I am fond of Parley P. Pratt's statement on Intelligence and Affection. In other words, as important as it might be to understand that God knows all things or what it might mean that God knows all things, it seems to me that it is much more important to know and to feel, to "taste" if you will, that God is love, and that He loves His children. My sense of the connection between love and truth was enhanced by reading Andrew Skinner's recent book To Become Like God. (Here is a link to a review that I wrote for
Interpreter). All of this is just to repeat that I do not know the meaning of all things, but I know that God loves His children.
Richard Williams: I think you have sort of answered your own question here - by the time you get to the relationship between love and knowledge. The real problem
with omniscience and God's "knowing everything" revolves around what it might mean for him to know everything - or to know at all. The problematic part problematic for our doctrine and our understand of god and his moral purposes - is the defining (and limiting) of knowledge to something like "the possession of facts or information." I think the clearest example of the most problematic aspect is laid out in relation to the principle of agency, and whether the future, including the individual future of God's children is open and optional or fixed and determined.
Most people want to extend God's omniscience into the future so that he knows the future with the kind of certainty modernism touts and requires - not subject to doubt or variability. We usually think of God's foreknowledge as absolute and certain - it's just us who doesn't know it. This implies that it (the future) is somehow already in place to be known. So God can simply "look down the timeline" and see what's there and thus know the future. But if my future is this in place to be known, what good is my moral agency? The usual response is something like: "It's in place and God knows it, but you don't know it, and so God has to let it happen so that you will then know it too, and know that his judgment is just.However, that makes mortal life a bit of a game - the fix is in, but we
have to go through the motions and live it out. Poor Martin Harris, he
was doomed to lose those 114 pages from the beginning. In what sense was
he really an agent. If God looks down the timeline and sees my future and
I turn out to be an axe murderer, I would like to say: God, I believe
you, please don't make me really do it. I don't want my future victims to
suffer." One presumes that the answer is something like: "No, you have
to do it to learn from it, and know my judgment is just." The future
suffering of my future victim and his or her family is also unavoidable.
This whole thing does not make moral sense to me. So I must conclude that
the future is not in place, and therefore not knowable - even by God - in
the sense modernism understands knowledge - and the way omniscience is
understood. So I prefer to contend that God only knows - only needs to
know - everything that IS, everything that exists. Since the future does
not exist now, he doesn't "know" it now - although He's pretty smart, and
knows what the options are (so he can give us counsel and direction, and
intervene where absolutely necessary). The only other requirement is
that God always knows what to do all the time in order to bring about good
and his purposes, and good in our lives. It has been my experiences that
some people want to have everything in place and want God to know
everything that is already in place, otherwise they can have no confidence
in him or in anything. But I think that such a reality would make faith
unnecessary, and really problematic. That kind of knowledge means we
don't need to live by faith-as trust in God.
Another approach to the question is to remember that the traditional conception is not the only way to think about knowledge or what it means "to know." Most Latinate languages have at least two words for "to know." In Spanish they are "saber" and "concocer." Saber is used to describe propositional knowledge or factual knowledge - to know "that"_______ . Concocer is more like "to be intimately acquainted with." Thus Adam KNEW Eve, to know my father, or my best friend, or to "know Paris," or to know God. So we have a possibility - that God could have all knowledge but not as propositions or events already in place. Martin Heidegger did a very interesting and important analysis of the verb "to be," and showed that we don't mean the same thing every time we use the word. A similar analysis (clearly in the spirit of post-modern thought) could be done for the verb
"to know." I know Spanish, I know my wife loves me, I know it's Friday, I know Jesus is the Christ, I know how to play basketball, I know the book of Mormon is true. None of these uses is the same - and not just because they require different modes or events to bring them about. The knowledge itself is different. So, what might we mean when we say God knows everything? Modernist thought forces us to be way too narrow. Post modern thought opens other doors to understanding - which I find more compatible with my own faith and hope. But many postmoderns take it to epistemological relativism - but it does NOT need to go there.
Me: Thank you. What is the foundation required by the modernist tradition?
Richard Williams: Basically any number of rational systems - of ethics, of metaphysics, or epistemology, and even of physics. Newtonianism comes to mind as an example - the universe is a rational system capable of capture by the human mind. Mathematics is the language by which the ultimate reality can be known. Mathematics is the language of God. Any number of variations of this can be given: Physics as a closed determined system, human beings as determined organisms, Hegelianism, Marxism and other structuralist positions (e.g., feminisms) where there are unseen unembodied systems/structures/forces at work in a vast rational process.
Me: But somehow the post-modernism of Heidegger, Husserl, Levinas, etc. escapes these rational systems? I suppose this is one way in which I can investigate these upstream post-modern authors.
Richard Williams: I think so.
Me: By that do you mean the triumph of reason/rationality?
Richard Williams: Yes.
Me: How has this modernist tradition found its way into our religion?
Richard Williams: Much early LDS "theology" was Newtonian. There is lawfulness in the universe which even God Himself must obey and uphold. There are moral laws that function much like physical laws - which predate God Himself, which He also had to perfectly obey in order to become who he is. Even when God does a miracle, it is really His using a higher law we don't understand to overcome a lesser law. The Glory of God is intelligence - literally. God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent in the traditional sense. The atonement is a thing in itself, a grand abstraction tied to cosmic justice that can balance cosmic scales for us. . . .
Me: I see. Thanks. (I will reread your devotional address,
which may be the answer to this question). I agree that God is a real and
loving Person engaged in a world of other similar beings within a universe
of things (matter), etc. and that this constitutes an anchor for our
faith, knowledge, morality, etc. But if anti-foundationalism is the
essence of post-modern thought, and anti-foundationalism rests on the
claim that there really are no universal realities, or anchors, how can
the reality of God as a Person constitute an anchor in connection with
post-modernism?
Richard Williams: In my judgment most of the antifoundationalism of the
postmodern movement is aimed at the abstractions and the power of the
rational mind. That is what they were reacting to. Since then it got out
of hand, and that's why we avoid postmodern positions as expressed and
understood down stream. There is nothing like an embodied being who can
one day come and say "Handle me and see," and can talk, offer forgive,
entice, and do whatever he takes it into his heart to do to provide an
adequate foundation for knowledge morality, and life itself. They just
don't know about such a being.
Me: I see. As much as I appreciate the Greeks, I feel like I bumped into this
problem quite a bit in my studies. In other words, it seems to me that a
lot of ancient and medieval political philosophy celebrates the supremacy
of reason, or the mind as the highest thing in man. It makes sense to me
that "freedom and reason make us men," but there is so much more to man.
Richard Williams: Exactly. Freedom and reason and necessary but not sufficient.
Me: It makes sense to me to strive to comprehend the intellectual waters in
which we are swimming, or the intellectual air that we breath. Is it
impossible to escape the environment, even for a moment, to understand
things as they really are, or are we necessarily trapped in an unending
sequence of cartoons? It seems to me that you describe a few moments of
escape, such as the gift of coming to know that Jesus is the Christ.
Richard Williams: I believe we certainly can escape any one given environment
(intellectual/spiritual), but never all of them - that is just a fact of
our being the kind of beings we are - with others and among things. This
is just to say that genuine change is possible. We can get closer and
closer to "knowledge of thing as they are . . ." Being in discourse with
God helps us, as does freeing ourselves by giving up falsities.
Me: I agree that being in discourse with God helps us, as does freeing
ourselves by giving up falsities. But if we can't escape all of them, why
do we try to escape any of them? I mean, has God, and has Jesus Christ
escaped all cartoons, and don't they mean for us to escape them as well?
Richard Williams: I would prefer to say that they have produced the finished artistic project and are moving beyond or finishing it again and again (we wouldn't
want to condemn them to eternal boredom). I think they like working with
us on our works of art also.
Me: I see. This reminds me of a great quote by G.K. Chesterton in his book
Orthodoxy:
"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit
fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They
always say, 'Do it again'; and the grown-up person does it again until he
is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in
monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is
possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every
evening, 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that
makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately,
but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal
appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is
younger than we."
Richard Williams: Interesting.
Me: In the meantime, Nephi's reply to the angel's question about the
condescension of God resonates with me: "I know that he (God) loveth his
children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things." (1 Ne.
11:17)
The problem of privileging individual feelings seems like one of the major
fruits of the modern project.
Richard Williams: (Agreed)
Me: The necessity for defending the faith also makes sense to me. I agree wholeheartedly with the following sentences from your autobiographical essay: "The defense of faith these days, must often address the assumptions and concerns that are alive and influential in our postmodern world, including relativistic morality, the legitimacy and authority of individual feelings, and the pursuit of
individual fulfillment as a fundamental purpose of life. This also, to a great extent, was not the case even in the fairly recent past."I was even surprised (although perhaps I shouldn't be) to discover a few of these kinds of ideas floating around the office here at Wheatley. Escape is not an easy task.
Richard Williams: (Amen) The battle isn't won at once, and I think, ultimately, one has to "come to it." If it could be instilled by argument, modernist rationalism would triumph after all.
Me: How does one "come to it"? Do you mean by revelation? Experience? The
"tasting" of which Lehi, Nephi, Alma and others have spoken? Are
post-modern ideas not instilled by argument?
Richard Williams: The answer is "all of these." Some can be instilled by argument, but if the power is in the argument rather than in the arguing and the "taking up" then modernism/rationality triumphs and there is no real agency - and everything else falls apart also.
Me: I see. Thank you for your patience. I am eager to escape at least one level of cartoons. :)
I enjoyed your description of the experience that you had when you met young returned missionaries, and when God called your existential bluff. I can also relate to the "nothingness" experience that you recounted that reminded you how utterly dependent we all are on the goodness and the love of God. The rest of your autobiographical essay also helped me to better understand your devotional address. Thank you for sharing. I look forward to further conversation.
Richard Williams: Thanks for your kind words and charitable reading. I look forward to it.
Since this email exchange a few years ago, I’ve discovered that the layers of modernity and post-modernity are so much thicker, denser, and more numerous than what either Richard Williams or I supposed at the time. A few people, such as Leo Strauss, Pierre Manent, and my dad have penetrated and peeled away these layers more than anyone else I know.
But all of these things give me a greater appreciation for the work of the Nephite prophets, including Mormon and Moroni, who saw our day and wrote to us as if they were present so that we would understand how to repent and come unto Christ to be saved.