Will the real epistemology please stand up!

As we continue our thinking about epistemology, we need to revisit one of the demands of the Enlightenment project that claimed that all dogma be tested at the bar of history. This was a reaction to what was felt to be the mysticism of the Middle Ages. Since the project’s inception there have been two primary approaches, one is to make history the only criteria, albeit with skeptical presuppositions lying under the surface, and the other is a flight from history, refusing to let the skeptics set the rules for the game and choosing to believe on the basis of one’s experience or the tradition of the Church. The Jesus of history was unfortunately pitted against the Christ of faith.   

With the former there is the arrogance that we cannot learn anything of value from the ancients (those less “modern” than ourselves) and with the latter there is the fear of what might be found out if the data were explored, thus provoking Descartes’ challenge to the culture of his day, “dare to know.” 

The irony, as N.T. Wright has put it, is that without history there is no way for orthodoxy to protect itself from reinventing Jesus over and over again; it appears that Paul was right after all: if Christ is not raised, our faith is in vain. We must not, with Kant, conclude that the upper and lower stories (heaven and earth) can never be bridged, nor, with Kierkegaard that a “leap of faith” is necessary that is not soundly grounded in the Jesus of history. We must, therefore, press into history to find what we will find, but not with the skeptical presuppositions of Descartes but with the courageous faith of those who believe—but belief on the basis of that which can be affirmed in history. True believers have nothing to fear if 1) we approach the data humbly to let God tell us how he has chosen to do what he does, 2) with the acknowledgment that “we see through a glass darkly” and 3) that in many instances have fragmentary information. This should keep us from arrogant dogmatism.  

At the heart of Enlightenment skepticism is an epistemology that is flawed. Its flaw is that one cannot find anything historically probable from ancient literature. Why have Enlightenment scholars believed this? The assumption is that because an ancient writer wrote from a perspective that we now believe to be “ancient” that he had nothing valid to say, nor could we learn anything about history from his writings. These assumptions have precipitated the historic “split” between history and theology, as if one can not “do history” while at the same time “theologizing.” It is a false and dangerous dualism. The exegete must walk the line between the historical reality being cited and the author’s viewpoint about that reality. The astute exegete can separate one from the other and benefit from both for the sake of the church.  

So, it is imperative first that we dive into the study of history, specifically the history behind Jesus, and second that we find ways to do so through the vehicle of ancient literary documents, for that is how this history comes to us. These documents must be examined as literature, as theology, and for their value as lenses into history.  

Before we delve into the subject of the probability of historical verification we need to first negotiate the problems raised by epistemology. How do we know what we can know? And can we be sure about it? 

The basic epistemological method of the Enlightenment was known as Positivism, that we can know reality only through empirical observation. If data is not verifiable through replication and testing then it is downgraded to “beliefs” that cannot be verified. This, of course, led to the rejection of miracles as inexplicable phenomena and, therefore, non-verifiable. They were thus rejected as true knowledge. When one ceases to believe in the supernatural, guess what? The supernatural ceases. Remember when Jesus could only do a few miracles at Nazareth because of the skepticism in the atmosphere? As a consequence, because miracles faded away eventually there were no “analogies” for the miraculous (“oh, I saw something like that once”). Furthermore, since miracles were not provable through cause and effect verification, it was assumed that the accounts of miracles in the Bible were spurious. The historical data in the literary text, therefore, was approached with this bias from the Enlightenment epistemology. 

Critical Realism

According to philosopher Bernard Lonergan, whose work is adopted by Ben Meyer and N. T. Wright, the way out of the fog is an epistemology called Critical Realism. Affirming Postmodernism's realization that we are human beings in community, critical realism assumes that individual observation does not hang statically in a vacuum, as is assumed in Enlightenment thinking, but is immediately tested within the worldview stories told by the observer’s societal system. Data is evaluated on the basis of how well it fits within the stories already being told that make sense of reality.  

Data that is sifted against the worldview stories is “critical” in that it is tested through the process of hypothesis/verification or hypothesis/falsification. It is “realistic” in that it seeks to fit the data into a working system of reality. Let’s apply this to the biblical storyline about Jesus.  

What happens when something is observed or recorded that does not fit within the stories told within a worldview, such as Jesus casting out a demon? That data is either placed into a category called “does not fit; awaiting more data” or one must question whether the worldview stories that are being told are large enough to explain all of reality. The latter perspective, called by Chuck Kraft “naïve realism,” was the position of the Pharisees. What Jesus was doing did not fit into their worldview, and since it was assumed that their world accurately perceived capital R reality (Kraft), it was assumed that Jesus was demonic.  What else could explain his casting out demons and healing the sick?

A “subversive” story is that story which is told that twists the old story enough to account for the new data. A critical realist (as opposed to a naïve realist) has the courage to examine the new data against the known stories of the day and asks, “Could it be that we don’t know all that there is to know? Could it be that my stories will need to change?” What courage it takes, whether modern or ancient, to receive a subversive story that more adequately explains the data! The reception of such a subversive story has been called by Thomas Kuhn a “a paradigm shift.” The Pharisees rejected their opportunity to walk through their paradigm shift, opting naively to try Jesus as a false prophet (and ultimately by the Romans as a state criminal). Postmodernism’s rejection of the Enlightenment project  in search of newer stories represents the courage to ask of Enlightenment presuppositions, "Is it so?" Yet the question remains, is Postmodernism’s story large enough to contain ALL the data?  

What is at stake here is the story that is being told in the Bible; Postmodernism rejects the biblical affirmation that it tells the one story that explains all other stories. Especially at stake are the gospel accounts that present the Jesus of history. By assessing the data through the epistemological method of critical realism can we offer a set of hypotheses to explain the phenomena of the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith as heralded by the early church? Or do we have to resort to the skeptical positions of German theologians of another generation like Reimarus, Strauss, and Wrede? Is the alternative that we must follow the flight from history and follow nineteenth century liberalism and theologians like Barth and Bultmann? Perhaps there is a way to assess the ancient texts, theological documents as they are, to find verified hypotheses that explain the history that they intend to convey. 

In 1979 N.T. Wright read Ben Meyer’s The Aims of Jesus where Meyer broke new ground by building on the original premise of Albert Schweitzer who rejected all the nineteenth century attempts to cast Jesus as a European gentleman. “Who would want to kill that Jesus?” asked Schweitzer. Beginning on a new foundation Schweitzer sought to find the Jesus of history in his original setting within apocalyptic Judaism. Building on that foundation, Meyer then attempted to view Jesus through this apocalyptic, restoration of Israel paradigm. Rather than looking for a dissimilar Jesus to ascertain what is historical in the gospel narratives, as the skeptics were committed to doing, Meyer sought to look for what was precisely similar but subversive (i.e., what could get a man killed) in his setting to make him a truly plausible historical figure. He then sought to uncover what Jesus himself would have thought his mission to be. When N.T. Wright read this approach he immediately recognized it as something altogether new and dubbed it “the third quest for the historical Jesus” in an article he wrote in 1979 (the nineteenth century Jesus literature being the first quest and mid-twentieth century redaction critics attempts to crack the gospels the second quest).

This is precisely the importance of what men like N.T. Wright are doing in the current day to save the historical Jesus from the rubble of skepticism. In Wright’s massive, multi-volume attempt to assess Christian origins and the question of God (see his first volume, The New Testament and the People of God to get a feel for what he is doing), Wright is engaging the historical questions on the grounds of hypotheses and verification, and with these tools is laying a firm foundation for an historically plausible Jesus as the most probable (with history we are dealing with probability, not certainty) explanation of the explosion of the Christian faith.  

What Wright and other Third Questers, such as James Dunn, Ben Witherington III, and Graham Twelftree are doing is taking critical scholarship up on its own ground, assessing the plethora of Jewish and Greco-Roman primary sources, and coming up with positive statements regarding historical probability based on a critical realist epistemology. They are approaching the data with the eyes of faith, not to skew what they see but to temper the hermeneutics of suspicion (i.e., assuming the data will be negative toward  faith) that has prevailed in critical scholarship for the last four hundred years. As it turns out, ancients have something to say—and we can hear them! This epistemology is “critical” in that it evaluates historic probabilities and “real” in that it seeks to piece together reality on the humble assumption that the ancients are trying to talk to us.