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Wolterstorff, Nicholas
Contents
Reformed Epistemology and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Divine Discourse (Paul Cassell, 2005)
Reformed Epistemology and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Divine Discourse
Paul Cassell, 2005
Background
Nicholas Wolterstorff received his BA from Calvin College in 1953 and his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1956. Before taking up his current position as Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale, he taught for two years at Yale, and then for thirty years at his alma mater, Calvin College. After concentrating on metaphysics at the beginning of his career, he spent a good many years working primarily on aesthetics and philosophy of art. In more recent years, he has been concentrating on epistemology, on philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. In the fall of 1993 he gave the Wilde Lectures at Oxford University, which led to the book Divine Discourse, and in the spring of 1995 he gave the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews University. He has been president of the American Philosophical Association (Central Division), and of the Society of Christian Philosophers ("Wolterstorff_Nicholas" Retrieved March 31, 2005). He is strongly influenced by his Calvin College and Dutch Reformed upbringing, which were thoroughly neo-Kuyperian (i.e., indebted to the thought of Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper), and perhaps best known for his association with a group of philosophers of religion including Alvin Plantinga and William Alston. These philosophers have developed an approach commonly called “Reformed epistemology,” an epistemological position drawn from the Calvinist or Reformed tradition in Christianity that argues that knowledge of God is natural (Livingston 1999, p. 506-7).
The first part of this paper will survey the problems in the philosophy of religion addressed by the Reformed epistemologists, including Wolterstorff, as well as the answers they give. The second part will address the specific topic of ‘divine discourse’, which Wolterstorff has taken up in his book by that name.
The Evidentialist Challenge
The primary challenge that modernity has posed to philosophers of religion has come from the understanding of truth in terms of ‘foundationalism’ or ‘evidentialism,’ initiated in the modern era by Descartes and given religious expression by John Locke. Classic foundationalism says that all our beliefs must be based on secure, basic first principles in order to count as rational. We must supply arguments based on these secure first principles in order for our beliefs to be warranted. Further, a basic, first belief must be self-evident or evident to our senses (Livingston 1999, p. 507).
The basic claim of the modernist challenge to faith in God is summed up by Wolterstorrf as “No religion is acceptable unless rational, and no religion is rational unless supported by evidence.” (Wolterstorff 1983, p. 6) More specifically, the argument usually runs thusly: 1) theistic beliefs are not properly basic beliefs because they are neither self-evident nor are they evident to the senses; 2) because religious beliefs are not basic beliefs they can be rational only if they are warranted by sufficient evidence; 3) theistic beliefs are not supported by sufficient evidence; therefore, they are not rational and should not be believed (Livingston 1999, p. 507).
There has been a long history in Christian thought assuming points one and two above are correct, and some have tried to respond to this challenge by supplying ‘evidences’ for Christian faith. These evidences have included accounts of miracles, the fulfillment of prophecy, philosophical arguments (e.g., the argument from design), and accounts of conversions. But Wolterstorff and the other Reformed epistemologists have denied that it is necessary to accept the challenge at all.
The Problem with the Challenge
Those who support the Reformed epistemology project think that appeals to ‘evidences’ are misguided because they are unnecessary and ultimately unhelpful. They argue that the first point above – that theistic beliefs are not properly basic because not self-evident or evident to the senses – is an incorrect starting point for talking about knowledge of God. In fact, they argue, this is an incorrect starting point for talking about most of what counts as knowledge for human beings.
Reformed epistemology takes as its inspiration the views of John Calvin and other Reformed theologians on the nature of the knowledge of God. This tradition argues that the knowledge of God is a natural kind of knowledge planted in every human being by God himself. Calvin writes, “The prophets and apostles do not boast either of their keenness or of anything that obtains credit for them as they speak; nor do they dwell upon rational proofs. Rather, they bring forward God’s holy name, that by it the whole world may be brought into obedience to him.” (quoted in Plantinga 1983, p. 67) Calvin’s argument is that there is a natural instinct towards divinity, and this natural instinct is triggered by certain kinds of experiences on earth. For example, because of this natural instinct, viewing the stars on a clear night may trigger the belief that the “excellencies of divine art…reveals itself in this innumerable and yet distinct and well-ordered variety of the heavenly host.” (quoted in Plantinga 1983, p. 66)
The Reformed epistemologists believe they have another strong ally in their court from the Reformed tradition – Karl Barth. According to Wolterstorff, Barth’s basic position was that to accept natural theology would be to prefer reason to Christ (Wolterstorff 1983, p. 7). In an extended analysis of Barth’s position on the subject, Plantinga says that the basic problem Barth saw in trying to answer the evidentialist challenge is that it assumes that rational arguments, rather than the revelation of Jesus Christ, are what lead the believing debater to become a believer. Thus for the believer to engage in evidentialist arguments, “either the believer must adopt what Barth calls “the standpoint of unbelief” or he must pretend to his unbelieving interlocutor to do so.” (Plantinga 1983, p. 69)
Reformed Epistemology
If believers have not become believers on the basis of sense-data or self-evident propositions, how is it that they do so? Is it possible to argue that this could be rational? The heart of the Reformed epistemological position is expressed succinctly by Plantinga: “It is entirely right, rational, reasonable, and proper to believe in God without any evidence or argument at all…belief in God resembles belief in the past, in the existence of other persons, and in the existence of material objects.” (Plantinga 1983, p. 17) Note what belief in God is similar to – belief in the past, other persons, and material objects. These beliefs are basic not to just common life, but to science as well. And as we will see, each of these beliefs fails the test of the evidentialist challenge.
How do we come to believe in the first place? Plantinga argues that “God has so constructed us that in the right circumstances we form the belief in question.” (Plantinga 1983, p. 90) Wolterstorff argues that this position comes out of a wider intellectual position about belief formation that was articulated by Thomas Reid, the eighteenth-century Scottish “common sense” philosopher. Reid argued that we each have “a variety of dispositions, inclinations, propensities, to believe things…what accounts for our beliefs, in the vast majority of cases anyway, is the triggering of one and another such dispositions.” (Wolterstorff 1983, p. 149) In an important way, when these beliefs are triggered in us, we cannot help but believe them in the moment. For example, if I see a quickly moving object in my peripheral vision, I am disposed in such a way to duck, whether or not I can identify what I believe is threatening me. I am justified in believing that something is threatening me at that moment. Similarly, when I see a starry sky, I am deeply moved and in awe. Some sort of religious yearning and worship is evoked, whether I want it to be or not.
Does this mean, then, that just because we can rationally entertain a belief as true in the moment, that all our beliefs are necessarily true? Do we have any responsibility to assess our beliefs to see whether they are rational or not? As Wolterstorff puts it, “it is Reid’s view that we are prima facie justified in accepting the deliverances of the credulity disposition until such time as we have adequate reason in specific cases to believe the deliverances false...the deliverances of our credulity disposition are innocent until proved guilty...” (Wolterstorff 1983, p. 163) Thus we do not have carte blanche to believe anything; we have warrant to believe those things natural to us until we have reason not to. And furthermore, when a believing disposition is triggered, we have the obligation to pursue it further if, given the situation, there are not higher priorities that would prevent us from doing so. Perhaps the moving object in my peripheral vision was just a shadow; perhaps my experience of God was just the mescaline I ingested earlier.
What the Reformed epistemologists would argue, however, is that what would count as irrationality in belief would not be the failure of the belief to fit into some system built on sensory evidence or self-evident propositions, but instead would be the failure to submit the belief to certain handed-down social practices which have been shown to increase the reliability of our beliefs and make error more obvious. These social practices are what we do have control over, and they keep us from being slaves to every natural disposition to belief. This claim tells us that rationality or irrationality does not reside in any particular belief, but rather in the will of the believer. Is he/she acting responsibly and rationally to seek the reliability and truthfulness of their beliefs, and to eliminate error as they find it? (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 270)
What this means for the discussion at hand – how believers come to believe and whether or not the belief is rational – is that the rationality of the disposition to believe in God is a situated rationality. There is not a generic answer for everyone. “Philosophers...ask in abstract, non-specific fashion whether it is rational to believe that God exists…the proper question is always and only whether it is rational for this or that particular person in this or that situation…to believe.” (Wolterstorff 1983, p. 155)
Wolterstorff has put forward a philosophically tighter version of Reid’s position of ‘innocent until proven guilty’:
A person S is rational in his eluctable [i.e. possible to refrain from believing] and innocently produced belief Bp if and only if S does believe p, and either:
i) S neither has nor ought to have adequate reason to cease from believing p, and is not rationally obliged to believe that he does have adequate reason to cease; or
ii) S does have adequate reason to cease from believing p but does not realize that he does, and is rationally justified in that. (Wolterstorff 1983, p. 168)
Thus what Reformed epistemology holds out for the philosophy of religion is a change in how we assess the rationality of religious belief. “The interesting and important question has become whether some specific person...who believes immediately that God exists is rational in that belief. Whether a given person is in fact rational in such belief cannot be answered in general and in the abstract, however. It can only be answered by scrutinizing...the ways in which that believer has used his noetic capacities.” (Wolterstorff 1983, p. 176)
The Collapse of the Evidentialist Challenge
What, according to Reformed epistemology, is the specific problem with foundationalism? There are two fundamental problems. First, foundationalism is too limiting. As mentioned previously, much of what we and our skeptic neighbors believe to be true is not justifiable in terms of foundationalism. As Plantinga writes, “most of the beliefs that form the stock in trade of ordinary life are not probable [compared to self-evident and incorrigible beliefs]…consider all those proposition that entail, say, that there are enduring physical objects, or that there are persons distinct from myself, or that the world has existed for more the five minutes; none of these proposition, I think, is more probable than not with respect to what is self-evident or incorrigible.” (Plantinga 1983, p. 55) Could science continue without the belief in the past, other minds, and physical objects? It simply wouldn’t exist. So if we cannot submit even science to the foundationalism test, why should we submit religious belief? Second, foundationalism itself is a belief. (Livingston 1999, p.506-7) Foundationalism’s chief tenet – that the only properly basic beliefs are those that are self-evident or incorrigible – is not itself self-evident or incorrigible, and no attempt has been made to offer a foundation for that belief in self-evident or incorrigible statements. So whether you are a foundationalist or a theist, your being one or the other can only be judged by what it offers you as you negotiate the world you live in, including the social world you live in.
Critique of Reformed Epistemology
The great value of Reformed epistemology is pointing to the ‘naturalness of religiosity.’ It is an empirical fact that religion of some form or another is present in every culture and time period. This seems to indicate that religiosity is a natural disposition of the human mind. What is more problematic is the further belief that belief in God –specifically the belief in the Christian God – is what is natural to human beings. The very fact that religion has taken a multitude of forms that do not look like Christianity, or even theism, suggests that if there is a basic religious attitude, it can manifest itself in a variety of ways. Thus religiosity may be considered ‘properly basic,’ but probably not any particular religious doctrine. In order for the Reformed epistemologist to make his case that the God of Jesus Christ is in fact any more intelligible than any other religious belief, he needs to add another concept – a method for God to ‘channel’ our natural religiosity. Although I am not sure this was Wolterstorff’s intention, in fact his book on ‘divine discourse’ could be interpreted as such a method.
Divine Speech
The issue
In his book Divine Discourse, Wolterstorff highlights an overlooked aspect of the Western religious tradition, but one so fundamental to it that Wolterstorff expresses amazement that it has not received philosophic treatment. The issue is divine speech. Does God speak? Do we live in a world in which God could speak? Do modern theories of language give us any traction on this question? What could give us the right to believe that God is speaking to us in particular situations? (This last question is where Wolterstorff’s commitment to Reformed epistemology will come into play.)
Wolterstorff begins by telling the story recounted in Augustine’s Confessions when Augustine is confronted by the child’s voice in the garden saying ‘take it and read, take it and read.’ This event happened during a crisis of Augustine’s life that had to do with his standing before God. Augustine thought it was so strange that he became convinced that God was speaking to him. So he rushed inside and picked up his copy of Paul’s letters and read the first line that his eyes fell upon. Again, the verse that he read seemed to be God speaking to him. The content was such that he converted to Christianity on the spot. The point of this dramatic opening to the book is that reports of God speaking are fundamental in the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. God is reported to be speaking in a variety of ways in these texts, and believers throughout the centuries have reported that their lives have been changed not by a tradition, a text, or an experience, but by God speaking to them through a tradition, a text, or an experience.
The practice of interpreting scripture for divine discourse in homiletic and devotional settings is the most ancient scriptural tradition, far more ancient than interpreting it for theological content or for literary qualities. And like these modern forms of engaging the text, seeking divine discourse looks past historical scholarship, while not being oblivious to its existence (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 17-8.
Speech-Action Theory
Wolterstorff’s question is: What does modern philosophy of language offer us by way of thinking about divine discourse? One contribution is the distinction from contemporary speech-action theory between illocutionary and locutionary actions. Simply put, I command, promise, assert (illocutionary actions) through words uttered or written (locutionary actions) (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 37). In the biblical tradition, locutionary actions – the media of divine discourse - include words, dreams, visions, apparitions, illnesses, national calamites, national deliverances, droughts, etc (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 38) The illocutionary acts include affirmation, judgment, instruction, challenge, promises, etc.
A second contribution of contemporary philosophy of language to divine discourse is the notion of double-agency discourse. Double-agency discourse is when two people’s agency are involved in one speech act. A secretary who writes a memo for his boss, an ambassador who speaks for her government, a prophet who speaks for God, all participate in double-agency discourse. A third contribution comes in asking how much and what kind of superintendence is occurring between the two agents. For example, words can be dictated by a strongly superintending boss; ghost authors can write on behalf of a moderately superintending author; and a popular song can be quoted by a love-struck boy to his girlfriend with virtually no superintendence by the song’s writer. A fourth contribution concerns the different kinds of authorization involved in a speech act. A memo can be signed by a boss who authorizes it, or a secretary can be deputized to write and sign letters on her own initiative (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 41).
As Wolterstorff develops the argument about divine discourse, one of the key ideas he focuses on is ‘speaking in the name of’ (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 43). For example, an ambassador is deputized to speak in the name of his government; the specific words are left undecided, but this does not give the ambassador absolute freedom. What is not left undecided is whether the words should be of a certain sort or not (condemning or supportive), or under what conditions or events those words should be spoken (if Hitler invades Poland, then this should be said; if he pulls back, then this should be said). “If the ambassador was deputized to say what he did in the name of his head of state, then the head of state speaks (discourses) by way of the utterings of the ambassador; locutionary acts of the ambassador count as illocutionary acts of the head of state...the head of state performs illocutionary acts by way of the ambassador performing locutionary acts.” (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 45)
Does the ambassador speak in her own voice? She may or may not. She may only read an official note given to her by her government. Or she may present her strongest argument that defends her government’s position. Probably most often, the ambassador moves back and forth between speaking in the name of her head of state and speaking in her own voice; both however, could amount to communicating a message from his head of state (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 45). Wolterstorff argues that biblical prophets seem to move in and out of speaking a message for God and speaking for themselves, but in both cases being deputized to represent God. Both Hosea and Jeremiah give a picture of this in their prophetic role and in their description of their own calling.
As a result of applying these modern notions of philosophy of language to divine discourse, a richness concerning the notion of divine speech is opened up for the reader of the Bible; what is possibly the single most obvious feature of the sacred text ‘pops out’ for analysis and study. And in terms of believers who through the ages have sought the ‘voice of God’ through the texts of the scriptures, it is possible to note that the text might have been a medium of divine discourse not only in the past but in the present as well.
Can God bring about the events generative of his speaking?
A key question Wolterstorrf wants to address is whether or not it is necessary for God to intervene in the world for God to speak. He first considers and then disposes of the idea that God created the universe so that it would unwind in such a way that at the right time, events would occur that would be interpreted as God speaking.
Wolterstorff boils the question down to whether or not the scientific picture of the world as a closed natural order leaves room for God to act. Wolterstorff thinks it does. He challenges the notion of a closed natural order on several fronts. First, it is not necessary to think that science requires assuming a closed natural order. Quoting William Alston, Wolterstorff arges that all any particular scientist need assume in order to do science is that there is a “good chance that the phenomena he is investigating depend on natural causal conditions to a significant degree.” (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 125) Further, the idea of the ‘laws of nature,’ and specifically deterministic causal laws that have very precise application, are only applicable assuming no other influences. They are ‘other things being equal’ (ceteris paribus) laws. They do not rule out other influences. Again quoting Alston, “since the laws we have reason to accept make provision for interference by outside forces unanticipated by the law, it can hardly be claimed that such a law will be violated if a divine outside force intervenes.” (Wolterstorff 1995, p. 125-6)
Are we entitled to think God speaks to us?
Finally, we come back to the argument Wolterstorff made above regarding the evidentialist challenge and to his answer, namely, ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ We should not rule out of hand instances of divine speech but rather try to rule out false ones and avoid obvious errors by looking at situated obligations to use social practices.
As an example, Wolterstorff recounts the story of Virginia, a Christian in Massachusetts who had an experience of God speaking to her. She carefully pursued a series of social practices including talking to her husband, her pastor, and a psychologist to make sure she was not otherwise behaving erratically, and tested the message of God against the reality of the situation the message applied to, the results that the message, if acted on, would result in, and other people’s assessment of the wisdom of the message. Since the message passed all these tests, Wolterstorff believes Virginia was fully within her rights to believe that in fact God had spoken to her.
Relation of Divine Discourse to Reformed Epistemology
I suggest that what Wolterstorff has begun to work out (unintentionally, perhaps) is a theory of general vs. special revelation; general revelation coming out of the contribution of Reformed epistemology and special revelation coming out of the contribution of Divine Discourse. To sum up why this is so, one could argue that as human beings we have a ‘properly basic’ natural religiousness that legitimately points to something besides and transcending our own experience of self and world; and as a result of divine discourse that natural religiousness is ‘channeled’ towards the awareness of sin, and the encounter of God through Jesus Christ. This view would frame Wolterstorff’s achievement in Reformed epistemology as being necessary but not sufficient for a philosophically sound belief in the God of the Bible, and would grant his work in Divine Discourse as another necessary step taken in that direction. A final step would probably need to address the legitimacy of the specific beliefs about Jesus Christ contained in the New Testament and church doctrines, as divine discourse may point to such beliefs without necessarily justifying them or saying why such beliefs are to be held as true.
Bibliography
Livingston, J. C. (1999). Modern Christian Thought, Volume II: The Twentieth Century (2nd Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall.
Plantinga, A. (1983). “Reason and Belief in God.” In Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God. A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff, eds. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press: 16-93.
Wolterstorff, N. (1983). “Can Belief in God Be Rational If It Has No Foundations?” In Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God. A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff, eds. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press: 135-86.
Wolterstorff, N. (1983). “Introduction.” In Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God. A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff, eds. Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press: 1-15.
Wolterstorff, N. (1995). Divine discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks. New York, NY, Cambridge University Press.
“Wolterstorff_Nicholas” (Retrieved March 31, 2005). Yale Philosophy Department Website, http://www.yale.edu/philos/people/wolterstorff_nicholas.html.
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