I am resolved to keep close to clear and express revelation: therefore our savior himself having said expressly, that he is… the true vine, John 15:1, I maintain that as it was certain by sense [perception] to those who conversed with him, that he was a true and very man, so it is certain by revelation that he was also a true and very vine.
That any person should be a true man and yet a true vine, is indeed an incomprehensible mystery; but Almighty God has a right to require of us, to believe on his Word, what we cannot comprehend or understand. He has already posed us with diverse mysteries and (seeming) contradictions, in visible and ordinary objects, both of sense and reason, thereby to prepare and dispose us, to receive with a humble faith, what he should reveal in his Word. That the Lord Christ is a true man, and at the same time a true and very vine, is a point of pure and mere revelation; and no way knowable by sense or reason. Therefore as to his viney nature we ought to acquiese in revelation, without further scruple or inquiry. The revelation concerning it, is so clear… “I am… the true vine”, that to quarrel with this doctrine, is to give the lie to God, and prefer our knowledge before his.
What is the union of the soul with the body? How do the parts of matter hold together? Are bodies made up of divisible parts, or of indivisible? If we cannot answer… these and such like questions, without involving ourselves in great difficulties, and even in contradictions, why do we admire [wonder] that there may be some (seeming) contradictions, in our Lord Christ’s being both a man and a vine? Do we better comprehend, how God possesses eternal life all at once; or how he is whole and all present to every… point of space, than we apprehend, how the Lord Christ may be both a man and a vine? Who can comprehend infinite wisdom, infinite justice…? But if we do not comprehend those attributes, why do we pretend to comprehend the extent of infinite power, or to say of it, “You shall come here and no further; you can make a man or a vine, but you can’t make a human vine, or a viney man”?
How many have been as confident, that the very notion of a spirit implies a contradiction… as any anti-scripturist and idolator of reason can be, that it’s a contradiction… that a man should be a true vine, and a vine a true man? This should make us cautious and modest; it should serve to instruct us, that it’s easy for us to mistake our own shallowness and errors, for impossibilities and contradictions to true reason.
(Letter, pp. 4-5, shortened and modernized, with bold added)
Next time: Nye’s and Dale’s comments on this vine-man analogy, and Dale’s on his schminger story.
Hi James,
I think we agree about quite a lot, which we should, both being sort of Plantingian or Reidian.
“it’s clear that Prots, RCs, Vinists, etc., will likely reach different conclusions as to what paradoxes should be tolerated.”
Right.
“My main point is that the legitimacy of an appeal to mystery as such does not license a doctrinal free-for-all. Some communities will allow some appeals to mystery; other communities will allow other appeals to mystery; but no community will allow just any appeal to mystery.”
I agree. But it wasn’t my point that a free-for-all would ensue. My point was more this: what you think defeats the belief of the Vinists may just as well defeat your own view. Or, something with the same status as what defeats the Vinist beliefs, may defeat your own as well. I put it in terms of imaginary rather than real groups, so that age, prestige, interests, and popularity are taken out of the equation.
“As for your transubstantiation example, I doubt you’d get very far by appealing to common sensory experiences and modal intuitions. You think the deliverances of sense experience and modal intuition can defeat the deliverances of the Magisterium. A good Catholic would presumably think the reverse. But that’s just because he’s a good Catholic.”
Let me put this first person. Suppose I once held to transubstantiation, and someone like the current me came out and objected as you describe. And – it doesn’t move me. Looking back, I’d say it should have, even though it did not. In fact, I may well conclude that even though I *said* I believed this wafer was a whole human body, I in fact didn’t believe it, as evidenced by my never feeling wierded out by the whole thing. In any case, I agree that there will be dialectical standoffs.
But as Plantingians, we hardly think that’s all there is to it. Rather, we think the non-transubstantiationist Christian’s rational faculties are functioning better than the transubstantiationists. We think that unbeknownst to him, he’s suffering from credulity – he’s letting his trust in what is in fact not a divinely authorized source override the clear and consistent deliverances of his multiple senses.
I wouldn’t write Nye off too quickly. In the Vinist case, he’s highlighting that it’s no good to accept apparent contradictions, when the evidence of revelation is so dubious. I mean, the case is funny precisely because we’re sure we’ve got a better, non-vinist interpretation. Well, he’s gone through the NT with a fine comb, and thinks he has on the whole better readings than his opponents. And that part of his case, we haven’t touched on at all.
Hi Dale,
No, not in the US yet. Not until the New Year.
Okay, let me clarify my earlier comment. I’m certainly not espousing epistemological relativism. Yuck! No, I’m merely pointing out (what I take to be uncontroversial) that different Christian traditions, and the communities that adhere to those traditions, have different views as to what counts as divine revelation and how one gets from divine revelation to epistemically warranted doctrine. So if one of the criteria for a legitimate appeal to mystery in defence of a paradoxical doctrine is that the individual components of the doctrine must all be strongly warranted by divine revelation, then it’s clear that Prots, RCs, Vinists, etc., will likely reach different conclusions as to what paradoxes should be tolerated.
For the Vinist, who apparently considers the sacred traditions of the Vinist Fathers to be authoritative for the interpretation of Scripture, the claim Christ is a true vine (understood literally) may well be deemed as warranted as the claim Christ is a true man. For me, on the other hand, who is inclined to view the sacred traditions of the Vinist Fathers as about as authoritative as a randomly selected Wikipedia article, the first claim won’t be deemed nearly as warranted as the second, so the appeal to mystery will fall flat.
My main point is that the legitimacy of an appeal to mystery as such does not license a doctrinal free-for-all. Some communities will allow some appeals to mystery; other communities will allow other appeals to mystery; but no community will allow just any appeal to mystery.
As for your transubstantiation example, I doubt you’d get very far by appealing to common sensory experiences and modal intuitions. You think the deliverances of sense experience and modal intuition can defeat the deliverances of the Magisterium. A good Catholic would presumably think the reverse. But that’s just because he’s a good Catholic and you’re not. 🙂 More precisely, you hold to different epistemic norms (subjectively, that is, not objectively). And that’s not to say you’re stuck with a stalemate; only that the debate will inevitably move to meta-issues.
All this to say that I think Nye’s parody falls flat as a critique of ‘mysterianism’. (I’m not too thrilled about that label, but perhaps I’m going to have to get used to it…)
Hi James,
Thanks for the feedback. You in the US yet?
Does each community have “its own epistemology”? We have to be careful with this; we’re all creatures of one God, made with the same faculties, and it has to be possible for someone outside my tradition to come along and deliver a defeater for my beliefs. I think you agree that communities can’t be so epistemically isolated as to rule this out. You suggest that we can’t helpfully discuss specific interps, but must ascend to a more theoretical level, debating competing epistemic standards, authorities, etc. I’m not sure this is so. The Catholic and I have all the same sensory experiences about that little wafer, and probably the same modal intuitions as well (i.e. it seems that thing can’t be a whole human body). So must we really debate the merits of Tertullian? It seems not. But then, our intuitions are probably stronger about this: there’s a guy who knows absolutely everything, but there’s some fact he doesn’t know.
BTW, Carl’s hit-and-run comment is little more than wishful thinking. His appeal to the sensus fidelium would beg the question against the Vinists. How does he know that they aren’t guided by the Holy Spirit too? Because they aren’t members of the Roman Catholic Church?
Dale,
Hey, thanks for consulting all those folk on my behalf. It’s probably best if you continue as an intermediary for now, since the sparks tend to fly when “complacent traditionalists” rub up against one another. 😉
What these examples show, I submit, is not that mysterianism opens a Pandora’s Box of paradoxes, nor that it offers a free pass to any bizarre doctrine, but only that communities with different religious epistemologies (Protestant, RC, Vinist, Fingerite, etc.) will end up licensing different mysteries. But surely this has no more significance than the fact that such communities reach different doctrinal conclusions anyway.
Protestant mysterians like me will apply the criteria for a legitimate appeal to mystery within the framework of a Protestant epistemology (sola scriptura, verbal inspiration, GH hermeneutics, etc.). Roman Catholic mysterians will apply the same (or similar) criteria but within a different epistemological framework. So the same criteria may well lead to different doctrinal conclusions — and the tolerance of different mysteries. But that’s no fault of the criteria. Nor does it follow that anything goes within a particular religious community.
So the debate here boils down to differences in religious epistemology. It doesn’t have much to do with mysterianism as such. For the same reason, it wouldn’t be very productive to debate the interpretation of John 15 with the Vinists. I’d start with our differences as to the epistemic authority of the Vinist Fathers.
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Brandon – I agree with your take. Formally, there’s really nothing wrong with it. It’s rather a howler because there are better interpretations of the texts in question. The evidence for the alleged mysteries, then, can’t outweigh the appearance of contradiction (with the vinists and fingerites) or somehow make the unintelligibility acceptable (schmingerites).
Yes, you are supposed to take this seriously, for these sorts of interpretations are made. “This is my body.”
Consulting with my Vinist friends, they tell me that while Jesus is a vine-man, ordinary believers like you and me are, obviously, branch-men. Further, if Jesus weren’t a vine-man, he wouldn’t be able to vinize us – i.e. add vine-branch natures to our human natures. Happily, he is a vine-man. They also tell me they were annoyed by your naughty Protestant way of interpreting this passage without reference to their long and glorious vinist tradition, as if it were a text-atom, floating free from the vinist hermeneutical tradition. The vinist fathers, they point out, neither affirmed nor practiced this spartan, revisionist “grammatical-historical hermeneutics” you speak of. These great men indeed took the passage literally, and it is question-begging to say they missed the point. Further, your method of interpretation an every-man-for-himself affair, and is doomed to lead to schism time and again.
To my ear, their views sound a little extreme – I mean, common sense and grammar are what they are, however the vinists prefer to read this text…
I also consulted the Fingerites and Schmingerites. Some of them referred you to Luke 11:20. The Fingerites made the point that you proudly prefer your own Reason to their distinguished tradition. They think part of the reason you reject their reading is that it is apparently contradictory (that God has no body at all but writes with his own finger). They point out that it doesn’t have the form P and not-P, and that you must inferring something, no doubt without warrant, to get a contradiction from their claim. Besides, they added, once you all that cat out of the bag (proud, all-conquering Reason) it’ll wreck your couch and poop in your kid’s sandbox.
Those Fingerites sometimes get carried away with their metaphors.
The Schmingerites asserted that you reject the Schminger Mystery because you don’t understand how it works. They say you’re arrogantly denying what you don’t fully understand.
Personally, I defended you. I said, he probably thinks the Schminger theory is ad hoc, and is just a less natural reading than his (or that of the Fingerites).
They said Anderson is “full of Schmit”. I don’t know what they meant by that…
Anderson would probably reply, “Am I supposed to take this seriously?” 🙂
I guess if he were feeling more obliging, he would say that there’s no exegetical warrant for a paradoxical interpretation in this case. It’s entirely natural to take Jesus as speaking metaphorically; it does no violence to the text or to principles of grammatical-historical hermeneutics.
In fact, to take Jesus literally would be to miss the obvious point of the passage: “I am the vine; you are the branches.” (Or should we take it that all Christians are viney-men as well? Or just grapey-men?)
So, what do I win? 🙂
Dale knows this already, of course, but for the benefit of those who have yet to enrich their lives through the purchase of ‘Paradox in Christian Theology’, I should mention that I discuss the criteria for a legitimate appeal to mystery in chapter 7. Buy now while stocks last!
Setting aside questions of exegesis and possibly some name-calling, there isn’t anything particularly wrong with it. It breaks down into the following features:
(1) an appeal to evidence (revelation);
(2) an argument from parity;
(3) a caution based on analogy.
Respectable arguments are built on structurally weaker foundations. Since we’re in the seventeenth century, pointing attention to the problem of divisibility in the argument from parity is a genuinely telling point, since philosophers at the time were tied up in knots on the subject, and continued to be for most of the eighteenth. The basic gist of the last paragraph is entirely right: it is, in fact, very easy for people to see contradictions where there are none, due to error on their part. It’s in no way a demonstration, so there are counterarguments that could be made against it; but it doesn’t purport to be one.
The vulnerability of the argument simply lies in the strength of the evidence to which it appeals, i.e., in (1); (2) and (3) simply make the point that seeming contradictions are actually pretty common in plenty of fields where we are sure that the apparent contradictories can be reconciled (that’s 2) and that there are plenty of ways in which apparent contradictions arise entirely from our own error and ignorance (that’s 3). That is, the question is, do we really have good reason to believe that Christ is true man and true vine? If we do, then we have, ipso facto good reason to think any seeming contradiction merely seeming; and while one might nitpick about the details of (2) and (3), they’re decent enough arguments that this can and does happen at times and that there are perfectly good reasons for why it does happen.
This attack is only a problem if you are a Protestant and thus lack a sensus fidelium.
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