Facts and Values

It seemed simple once - - this distinction confidently taught to grade school children by those knowing nothing of its lineage.  "Children, please listen up.  There are facts and there are values.  You can say that Sally got the wrong answer in science class because science deals with facts.  She can have the wrong answer because there is something to measure the facts against.  However, you cannot say, and you must not ever say, that Sally has got it wrong when she says that there is a God, or when she says that there is not a God, or when she claims Frank was wrong to push Molly.  After all, every person is entitled to his own opinion."  

Every future teacher secondary school teacher I had in my university classes knew and believed in the fact/value distinction. Future school teachers, after all, have to be taught to respect familial and cultural diversity.  It is not wrong that Piper has two mothers or that Alex faces Mecca each day. Of course, the reality of such diversity entails that many of our most cherished judgments are simply values.  There is nothing to measure the probity of Piper having two mothers against; there is no fact of the matter that decides the truth or falsity of Alex facing Mecca.  School teachers teach the facts of grammar, mathematics, science and history, and let the kids "express themselves" in art, music, theater and the interpretation of literature.  While most kids don't any longer have the chance to study philosophy or theology in secondary school, if they could do so today, they would find these disciplines relegated to the same arena as art, music and theater. "Kids need to respect the views of others," their teachers confidently intone.  There can be no fact of the matter in philosophy or religion.  Some kids are Catholics, some Lutheran, some Jewish, some Islamic, and some reject religion all together.   There is no fact of the matter which makes Catholicism "right" and Islam "wrong." To suggest this simply displays abject intolerance.  

Maybe the exposure to this distinction when young explains its popularity today.  Everywhere within popular culture we find the presupposition of the arbitrary and capricious nature of value. The great ideals of humanity (beauty, goodness and truth) are confidently thought to be mere affairs of subjective value.  Some people believe there is a God, but others do not.   This is fine because there is no fact of the matter about there being or not being a God.  Some people believe that abortion is right and others believe it wrong.  This is fine because there is no fact of the matter about its rectitude.  But while Amber might believe abortion wrong, since there is no fact of the matter about its rectitude, she ought not to block access to abortion for others who might believe it is morally permissible.  Since Amber's value is personal, it concerns only her personal behavior.  For her to claim that her personal value ought to govern public policy is for her to succumb to close-minded intolerance.  Does she not know that abortion can be right for Alex but wrong for Piper?  If she knows that abortion could be right for another, she simply has no right to block access to abortion to another - - even if she believes it is a heinous murder.

American people in the second decade of the twentieth century quite naturally assume that talk of God is valuational, that it concerns not a publicly observable arena, but rather expresses the perspective or orientation on life of the author or speaker and his culture.  When theologians write of God and pastors preach passionately from the pulpit, contemporary readers and hearers increasingly simply read or hear the words as valuational expressions; they naturally assume that these words offer a personal or cultural perspective or reveal personal or cultural dispositions and orientations.  The young particularly have been well trained not to understand the words as being factual.  They must not understand these words that way, for to do so would itself be an act of intolerance.   This is where the preacher starts today.  She  starts with an audience trained to be open-minded enough not to regard her words as descriptive and factual.  Paradoxically, the more open-minded the hearer, the more difficult it is today for the hearer to hear the Word.   In this way, the Word is sacrificed on the altar of the fact/value distinction.             

Philosophical Impediments to Proclamation

Theology was once a lofty discipline whose practitioners were among the brightest and best of their age.  In Luther's day candidates for the Doctor of Theology had first to receive a Masters of Arts in philosophy.  They knew the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), and they had exposure to the quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music).  They understood Latin deeply and some learned Greek and Hebrew as well.   Luther knew his Aristotle well enough to realize that the Aristotle he encountered in the text was not the Aristotle that many theologians embraced in the High and Late Middle Ages.  Like in every age, Luther's era was a time in which philosophy and theology were deeply related.

Our age also is a time in which theological and philosophical matters are deeply connected.   The relationship between the two is so profound that many thinkers (often very deep theological thinkers) often overlook or miss it entirely.  But theologians today ignore philosophical issues at their own peril.  Deeply-educated in the Biblical text, its historical and social context, its history of reception, and effective homiletical techniques to proclaim it, theological thinkers often fail to examine and appreciate deeply enough the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon into which the text is preached.  In failing to grasp the differing philosophical assumptions between textual origination and reception, they overlook the presuppositional issues making it difficult for the text to be properly understood be contemporary readers and hearers.  These issues, I believe, our explicitly philosophical.  They involve such traditional and meaty philosophical concerns as ontology (the study of being), epistemology (the study of knowing), and semantics (the study of meaning).

In the following series of posts I will spell out what I believe to be some of the philosophical impediments to Biblical proclamation in our time.  I will deal with such issues as the fact/value distinction, the loss of normativity, the problem of truth-conditions for religious and theological language, the problem of the external world as it relates to the divine, the question of agent motivation, the problem of reductionism, and, of course, the question of freedom.  (Of course, the discussion will be necessarily brief and undeveloped.)  Throughout, the questions of dualism, physicalism and idealism will be engaged.   The overarching issue is semantic.  What does (or can) the Gospel mean in an age where the horizon of understanding of the reader or listener is pluralistic, therapeutic, and anti-realistic?  What can God-talk mean to those today (particularly the young) who neither know the intellectual tradition, nor are normatively determined by it?