If Christ is the Answer, What is the Question?

Christ is the truth. What is said about him are mere approximations to the truth.

Okay, but... what kind of truth? And excuse me, but what was the Question?

While we're on the subject of Augustine in particular, we are more generally on the subject of Christian philosophy. 

Now, some people think that, properly speaking, these two cannot coexist in the same head, since philosophy considers the whole scope of reality in an impersonal manner, with no preconceptions, while Christianity obviously limits itself up front by certain principles and axioms, for example, the doctrine of creation (including the special creation of the human soul), of monogenesis (all men are brothers, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it), of free will, etc. 

In fact, a whole lotta things must first be true before Christianity can even be possible. To cite one obvious example, deconstruction cannot be the case, because if it were, no stable communication would be possible between God and man. Scripture in particular would mean anything and nothing.

Which reminds us of an important aphorism:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible.

A vision of reality outside of which religious language is meaningless. There are many such worlds, the world presumed by deconstruction being just one of them. But we will insist that there is only one reality. And one human nature. And a surprising link between them.

As for the Christian world, there is great disagreement about the role of philosophy. At one extreme are those who claim that revelation completely overrides and obviates our vain philosophizing, while at my extreme is a person who will go so far as to insist that non-Christian philosophy is an impossibility and an absurdity; or, to put it a bit less bobnoxiously, that philosophy from our end is crowned and perfected by revelation at Godsend. 

I'm not even the first to suggest this. In an essay called Is There Such a Thing as a Non-Christian Philosophy?, Pieper answers "no, there is no non-Christian philosophy!," at least insofar as "we understand by philosophy what the great originators and fathers of Western philosophy... understood it to be." Which is to say,

It is wisdom as God possesses it: God alone can be called wise in the full sense; He alone has "the answer," the interpretation of reality from one angle (namely from Himself); no one but God knows what the philosophical question deals with: the whence and the whither, the origin and the goal, the design principle and the structure, the meaning and the organization of reality as a whole.

I just read a somewhat tedious book called Engaging the Doctrine of Creation: Cosmos, Creatures, and the Wise and Good Creator, but let no one say I don't eat my vegetables. It has a chapter on the relationship between scripture and philosophy that reminded me of the second aphorism cited above. Levering quotes N.T. Wright to the effect that "Western orthodoxy"

has had for too long an overly lofty and detached view of God. It has always tended to approach the Christological question by assuming this view of God and then fitting Jesus into it.

This goes to a genuine problem -- again, of revelation at one end and philosophy at the other, and is there a way to harmonize them? Which comes first? It's easy enough to say "God," but what if, for example, God communicates in a language or modality that we cannot understand? 

Thus, it seems that revelation is limited up front by man's (philosophical) capacity to understand it. God must condescend to our manner and mode of understanding him.

Am I wrong?

Let's take an obvious example, the word "God." Supposing we have no earthly conception of God, what can it mean that he communicates to us, and how could we recognize it? 

But supposing we do have a conception, then how do we relate the two? For example, Jews have a particular conception of the job requirements of the Messiah, and reject Jesus on that basis. Moreover, just as we can point to OT passages that confirm our view, Jews will point to others that contradict it.

For Wright, it "is not that we know what the word god means and manage somehow to fit Jesus into that." Rather, the converse: that we must "somehow allow our meaning for the word god" to be reoriented around Jesus.

Now, Jesus is scandalously particular, whereas philosophy deals in universal principles, abstract concepts, timeless generalities, and transcendent truths. Which is another way of saying Logos. But the central claim of Christianity is that the universal Logos is particularized in a single man at a certain point in history. Which is again a scandal to the (purely) philosophical mind.

In the book, there are a number of discussions as to whether the purpose of scripture is to convey stable propositional truths, or to, for example, reveal God's love for us, or to provide a means to relate to him, or, more generally, to override our presumption that reality can be reduced to formulaic truths. 

Obviously the latter goes to how Protestants (at least the original ones) view scripture. It is not for us -- i.e., our depraved minds -- to understand it, rather, just accept it. 

But one can obviously go to the other extreme -- say, Jefferson's deism that excises the parts that don't fit into a preconceived philosophical template.

I like to think there's an easy solution to this problem of universals and particularity, of abstract and concrete, of propositional truth and the truth of relationship. Indeed, I can probably express it in two words, Incarnation and Trinity, the historical truth of the former revealing the propositional truth of the latter.

Levering cites one scholar who 

distinguishes strongly between biblical "particularists" and what might be termed philosophical universalists. The latter do not pay sufficient attention to God's actions in history as narrated by scripture; instead, they presuppose certain philosophical attributes of God and then impose those attributes upon the God of the biblical narrative. 

Well, don't do that. But don't just throw out the philosophical baby with the scriptural bathwater. Or is it the scriptural baby with the philosophical bongwater? My point is that we need both, in a kind of ascending dialectic.

I guess it all goes back to Gödel: from our end, any philosophical system will contain assumptions or axioms that cannot be justified by the philosophy. Understood. But this doesn't mean we should just chuck philosophy, rather, try to harmonize it with God's Own Principle, AKA the Logos. 

Philosophy ultimately fails because one has to speak of the whole in terms of its parts.

It reminds me of the old gag that God becomes man that man might become God. Well, the Logos becomes particularized that the particular might become universal, which is none other than the process of theosis or sanctification.

About this cognitive dialectic or spiritual metabolism we have in mind, the Aphorist says

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.

Supposing ultimate truth is not only a person, but irreducible person-in-relationship... well, let's just say that, thanks to the Incarnation of the Logos, 

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

Which circles back around to the aphorism at the top, and threepeat as necessary.