It's called "Fideism", Phil...

Phil Johnson is playing the part of an Orwell character over at TeamPyro. In this post, part of a series on the John MacArthur book "Truth War", Phil wonders how "vital" truth is, and has this to say:

Phil Johnson:
So give him a look like, "Huh?" and remind him that the position you are defending has historically been associated with a point of view that is known for its militant opposition to modernism. Then ask if he understands what "modernism" is.

The irony. What's that pre-modern position called Phil? What's the underlying epistemology you're espousing, here?

Phil goes on, and lets us know how clever he is by zooming right past modernity when talking to post-moderns, and scoffing at their assumptions about his "modern", foundational epistemology. Not so fast, pomos! Phil's not even reached a modern epistemology, something he's quite proud of, even as schedules his next flight on a modern jet, and posts on his modern laptop, relieved from his cold by modern medicine.

Phil Johnson:
He'll most likely respond with a condescending look and tell you in an exasperated tone that—while this all is probably far too complicated for you to understand—you have naively bought into foundationalist epistemology; your worldview has recently been totally discredited; and you need to acquire some epistemic humility.

I don't think there's any problem with complexity here, or mental horsepower. What's in play here is dishonesty and intransigence. Why not just be honest about your fideism, Phil? You eschew epistemology as a discipline. It isn't that you are epistemologically arrogant so much as that you think you are above the discussion of knowledge in the first place.

I'll skip down to the end -- it's just Phil, safe behind his administrative controls, dissembling about the problems of post-modern epistemology. Now post-modern epistemology is problematic; even post-moderns will tell you that. Modernism is fraught with tensions, too. But these are both advanced fighter jets compared to the trike Phil's peddling around, complaining about the comparative weakness of the others.

Here's his finish:

Phil Johnson:
I don't think there's a fancy name for the view of knowledge the Reformers and other biblically-oriented Protestants held, other than "basic Christianity." Call it "Calvinism" if you like. Or you can label it "the Proverbs 1:7 view" to be even more accurate.

"Fideism", Phil. Why not just call it what it is, epistemically?

Read More...

Summary only...

Ad Hom Is The Pyro Answer!

Phil's latest post laments the demise of modern evangelicalism, sullied as it is by the waxing tide of postmoderns, Open Theists and that sinister New Perspective on Paul that NT Wright is seducing the faithful with of late. Phil wonders: How did it come to this?

Phil Johnson:
The problem can be traced, I think, to a craving for academic respectability and worldly admiration. In the middle of the 20th century, several leading evangelicals proposed a whole new kind of evangelicalism—less militant, more tolerant, and (above all) shrewd and market-savvy about public relations. They seemed to operate on the assumption that the way to win the world is by making the evangelical movement and its message as appealing as possible to worldly people. In other words, let's "sell" Christianity the way Budweiser sells beer.

Why not? If they like us, surely they'll like Jesus, too.

It's really just the 'badness' of all these lesser Christians Phil is surrounded by, alas. They compromise their principles, don't you know. They don't -- they can't -- arrive at their positions through earnest inquiry. The Open Theist may say he's pulling his conclusions from scripture, and from logical implications that arise from that analysis. But really, Phil has traced the real cause, and that cause is slavish capitulation to the world's ways, anything at all in order to please Babylon.

Phil has canonized certainty here, as well, so this is pretty much a done deal. Cut and dried.

Phil draws his "tracings" through the 70s (soft on God's wrath), 80s (interest in health, wealth and success), and the 90s ("so bent on winning the world's admiration" that they just stopped talking about the Gospel at all). All the motives are as corrupt as they can be, and you know that's what the motives really were, because, remember, Phil has certainty and certainty is good.

Seriously, though, I honestly don't think it occurs to Phil that his brand of Calvinism might actually be a part of the problem. That would involve doubt, and high-impact doubt, at that, so we know that's not going to be entertained, given Phil's commitment to certainty for certainty's sake. He regularly fails to distinguish his own interpretation and take on things from the AbsoluteTruth™, a sign that Phil is a fundamentalist first, and a Calvinist second. He laments evangelicals steering around "the offense of the cross" -- which he conflates with his Calvinism.

It doesn't occur to him that Piper's reassurance to his little girl that "we all deserve that kind of death and worse, kid" when the I-35 bridge collapses in Minneapolis isn't really the "offense of the cross", but the offense of Calvinism. I know it's hard for Phil to keep those things separate -- what is the case and what he thinks is the case -- and the canonization of certainty fairly innoculates him from any reflexes that might help him out here.

But, at length, one wonders why Phil doesn't cut to the chase, and quote his hero Spurgeon, who suffered none of the temptations Phil entertains to put on the airs of reasoned polemic:

Sit thou down, reason, and let faith rise up!

Wouldn't that just be neater, cleaner, less disingenuous than all of this? You wouldn't have to assault the character of all your critics and theological opponents, and you'd own up to the organizing principle of your Calvinist worldview, in one tidy step.

Phil tries to tie things up near the end with this:

Phil Johnson:
I think it would be a mistake to conclude that the blame for evangelicalism's demise lies merely (or even primarily) with the style or character of the movement's current or recent leaders. It's actually a much bigger and more widespread problem than that. The real root of evangelicalism's problems goes back to the whole movement's blithe and chronic neglect of the gospel as it is presented in Scripture—starting several decades ago. All those attempts to tone down and tame the gospel have changed the fundamental character of evangelicalism's message. By systematically doing away with all the hard parts of the message, evangelicals have essentially done away with the gospel itself.

"As it's presented in scripture" Phil grabbing the high ground here for himself, yet again. Those other guys' interpretations? Bah, that's not what scripture says. How do I know?

It's obvious. And I'm certain, doncha know.

I think the "self-knowledge" genes, wherever they may be, must be turned off in the fundamentalist constitution. How else to explain this trait, across so many fundamentalists? There's what is, and there is what I think about what is. And while these two can and should overlap, and to as great an extent as possible, they need to be kept separate, because they are separate. And sometimes, the two don't hardly overlap at all.

So Phil surveys the religious landscape, and doesn't like what he sees. Evangelicalism has not evolved in a direction that he would like. In addressing the problem, though, Phil is confronted with his own problem, a trilemma:

1) Argue your case on the merits. Everyone else is wrong, and hears the reasoned, articulated case for why.

2) Doubt that you are the conflation of what is and what you want things to be.

3) Embrace the comfortable vanity of your certainty, and just dismiss the slackers as the whores and prostitutes they are.

Now 1) seems like the obvious winner on the face of it. But (and surely Phil knows this), it's a bit of a trap. It quickly leads to stalemate, as there is no arbitration process for Biblical interpretation. In science, we can devise tests designed to provide distinctions and falsifications that provide objective adjudication between competing hypotheses. Phil's a milieu is religion, though, and it affords him none of that, such is his trade.

So, 1) has the effect of declaring a tie between all contestants, surely an insufferable outcome for Phil. What to do, then?

Well, doubt and tentatitivity seem to have a lot going for them in other areas. Application of skepticism in the sciences yields knowledge and tools that are, well, "skeptic-proof", and demonstrable as such. But Phil know's that plugging doubt is the crucial finger in the dam; pull it out, and the levee eventually gives way.

So, by virtue of elimination, Phil is fairly forced to the ad hominem explanation. I'm sure he's a nice guy and all, and he doesn't relish the kinds of disparagement he's got to dish out. But he's a fundamentalist, after all, and a Calvinist fundamentalist at that. And these are wages paid out from that path.

Read More...

Summary only...

Phil Johnson: Certainly Clueless

Phil Johnson from this post over at Pyromaniacs a couple days ago:

Any assertion not so qualified risks being labeled "excessive confidence," which according to Brian McLaren is a "cancer" responsible for practically everything that's wrong in the world.

Except for one thing. When you start seeing what a noxious malignancy certainty is, then it's OK to be really, really confident about uncertainty itself. In McLaren's words, "Thinking along these lines, I became convinced that, yes, many of our world's worst atrocities were indeed the result of overconfidence" (Everything Must Change, p. 39).

You won't hear postmodernists or their Emerging-church cousins saying many things with that kind of settled conviction! But their doubts about certainty per se are unwaveringly emphatic.

You don't have to read very much of Phil's stuff to understand his penchant for projecting his own problems onto his opponents. Here, he's annoyed because Emergent types somehow maintain some certainty in their uncertainty about various theological issues.

You see, certainty for Phil is some thing you do, like mowing your lawn. It's not the result of a process of weighing and evaluation evidences with reason and logic, it's the means to an end, not the end itself, of an inquiry or anything else. A good pyromaniac is certain because being certain is good, so long its about the things a Pyro should be certain about (other things not sanctioned by Johnson demand solipsistic skepticism, but that's for another post).

We're dealing two different objects of scrutiny here, and this is a either a subtlety Phil just can't grasp, or Phil's hard in "spin mode" here. Uncertainty about theological propositions is the natural, rational, default position, if only because for so many theological claims there is no "feedback loop" to provide any objective verification about the basic soundness of the claim. Certainty about doubts themselves is trvial to justify, on the other hand. The doubts may be unfounded, but certainty about the fact that one has doubts needs nothing more than a little introspection to establish. In the case of historical abuses and tragic moral transgressions by Christians, there's little controversy in being certain there either. Can we be certain that murderous abuses of ecclesiastical power by, say, Torquemada or Calvin were, in fact, cases of extreme overconfidence in one's theological views?

Think about what uncertainty in that regard means from Phil's standpoint: Maybe Torquemada was right after all, or the nice folks who put Michael Servetus to death were as right as rain, and entitled to their confidence in it.

Here's a paragraph from a little further on in the post:

Ironically, the canonization of doubt as a virtue is also a clear echo of the very worst tendency of modernism (see the Ronald Nash quote above)—which means, really, that the "postmodern" skepticism of our Emerging friends isn't technically postmodern at all. Their modernist ancestors were fine with so-called scientific certainties; but they despised spiritual certainties—especially certainties grounded in the conviction that the Bible is truly God's Word. Emergent Christianity has expanded (not rejected) the modernist mindset by insisting on uncertainty about everything—except, of course, the infallible dogma of uncertainty.

Setting aside Phil's hyperbole here ("canonization of doubt" -- sheesh, point me to that canon, I'd like to see that!), what we have is Phil's objection to confidence in modernist empirical claims not being extended automatically to similar confidence in pre-modern spiritual claims. This may be news to Phil, but it shouldn't be news to anyone else -- these are claims with completely different epistemic foundations. They have different levels of trust to the reasoning mind because they deserve different levels of trust. Spiritual claims do not and cannot perform and be tested or falsified the way empirical claims can. We trust empirical claims because they are performative, and we reserve confidence in spiritual claims because they are speculative, and afford no validation or verification -- even in Phil's best case -- until after the inquirer is dead.

It's a hall of mirrors, looking through the "Phil Johnson" lens - an inchoate epistemology if there ever was one. That's bad enough, but read the whole post (or any of his posts), and note the supreme confidence Phil has in his perverted certainty.

Read More...

Summary only...