In Memory of Her

It seems to me that this is a classic work of feminist theology, but it also seems to be a lot more than that:

Schüssler Fiorenza, E. (1994). In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (2nd ed.). London: SCM.

The question, broadly put, is about what the relations between men and women in the early Church were like. The key piece of evidence brought to bear on the question is Galatians 3:28:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (NRSV)

There is, Schüssler Fiorenza argues, sufficient evidence within the Bible and other early writings to suggest two strands of early Christian view of the way the world should be. The first is the egalitarian view, put forward in Galatians 3:28. All the people in a church were regarded as being equal, regardless of sex or position in society or ethnicity. This, Schüssler Fiorenza thinks, is the way the earliest church was. The argument is lengthy and quite complicated, so I will not attempt to summarise it here, but she suggests that some of the Gospel writings and the letters of Paul imply two aspects of Christianity: one of a settled, stable, house church arrangement, the other of itinerant missionaries, such as Paul himself.

The second strand, the itinerant minister-missionaries were, perhaps, the spearhead of the mission operation, but also had a degree of oversight over the churches they founded or worked with. However, this does not seem to have equated with authority over the beliefs of the church. The evangelists had influence, but could not make absolute judgements about which of the many ideas flying around were correct doctrine.

The upshot of this was a lot of different ideas, a lot of argument, about what Christian belief was about and how it is shown. But also there are arguments about the organisation of the churches. Schüssler Fiorenza argues that many of the house churches met in the houses of wealthy women who, as they came from the wealthier strata of society had an expectation of control over church activities and money. That was the way the Graeco-Roman society worked, after all.

The problem was that Graeco-Roman society was also patriarchal. Certainly, the higher up the echelons of society you went, the more control the male of the family was expected to have as the head. Thus the egalitarian strand of Christianity, which gave equal status to slaves and even women, was a problem, especially for the more settled churches in the Greek cities of Asia Minor. They were, by their existence and teaching, undermining society.

Hence, the suggestion is, that the second strand became more dominant. Settled Christianity started to write women out of the church, at least as leaders and participants in the Gospel stories. While this could not be done completely, as, for example, all the Gospels have Mary being the first witness of the Resurrection, it could be done to a greater or lesser extent. Further, some of the later letters in the New Testament propagate ‘household codes’ telling members of households, husbands, wives, children and slaves, how to behave. In these the patriarchal order of the household, and hence the church, starts to be reasserted. This is, of course, a process, and did not happen overnight. There are reports of women functioning as deacons from quite late on in the development of the church, and women who were hosting and funding house churches and their activities could not be entirely removed from the picture and ignored.

Eventually the patriarchal viewpoint became established. Priests were male, and women were secondary. But, Schüssler Fiorenza argues, this is not how the set up had to be, nor was it how Jesus and Paul expected their followers to behave. There are, of course, passages in the Pauline corpus which indicate the subservience of women to men, but these, of course, can be explained by the two strand model Schüssler Fiorenza proposes. There is, she suggests, sufficient evidence for the early equality of women in both the settled churches and as missionary teachers.

One of the things that became clear to me while reading the book was that there was a great deal of discussion and debate flying around in Christian circles, as the mission got going and churches were founded, as to precisely what they believed, how they believed it, what difference it made in their lives and how they were to organise and sustain the churches.

Reading, say, the letters of Paul against this context, rather than as statements of doctrinal truth, gives a different perspective on the New Testament documents in question. As contributions to debates over, for example, whether Christians were to divorce non-believing spouses (1 Corinthians 7) Paul’s comments are given a different dimension. Those married to Christian partners should not separate, and, indeed, should continue to have sex. Those married to non-Christian partners should also not divorce unless the partner insists, but this is Paul’s opinion (‘I and not the Lord’ 1 Cor 7:12) and contribution to the debate, not a definitive answer.

The book is not, except in its introduction to the second edition and epilogue, particularly polemic. It is a detailed study of New Testament texts, early church documents and the context of the early church in its Graeco-Roman environment (not forgetting the Jewish heritage, as well). The question of us today is, of course, what do we do about it. The classic response is to ignore the arguments, models and hermeneutics discussed, but that, while apparently widespread, will not really do. Perhaps the most honest response by those of us who have neither the background or scholarship to respond directly would be to consider what to do about it in our church lives and in our day to day theology. If we are to treat everyone as equals, in accordance with the early baptismal statement recorded by Paul in Galatian 3:28, what difference would it make?

Language and Thinking

To summarise so far: what we think, what we doubt, what we are certain about and what might well be the case are all embedded in language. However, language is not the sum total of everything in the world; our world is not entirely formed by language, although language can play a major part in what we see and what we do. Objects in the world do exist external to our descriptions of them in language; we can bash our nose on a tree without having to describe it.

It should be fairly clear that objects of thought also exist. To use an already discussed example, a marriage is not an object in the world, it is an object of thought. To be sure, in order to be married two people go through a variety of rituals and public and legal declarations (I dare say there are some counterexamples to this, but in general what I say seems to be true). But none of those things constitutes the marriage, although they may be evidence to suggest that the marriage exists. The fact that X and Y are married is an object in the minds of the people concerned: X, Y, their friends and family, and anyone else who they might choose to tell. The system of records of marriages in the country provides evidence that the marriage exists but is not the marriage itself.

The marriage of X and Y, therefore, is an object of thought. It might not be a pure object of thought, in that being married has some consequences in the world of objects, but the concept ‘married’ is just that, a concept. I cannot view the marriage bond between X and Y, I can only accept the evidence that they are married.

There seems to be some sort of gradation of objects here. Firstly, we have the purely material object, such as the tree I have just walked in to and bashed my nose upon. As such, while I might now observe the tree (in a manner I did not before I walked into it (perhaps I was distracted by my mobile phone)) and hence it has become an object of my thought, in general, the tree does not stand for anything else. It is simply the tree which I walked into, and by doing that is responsible for the pain in my nose.

Secondly, there are objects which are both partially material and partially of thought, like marriage. Being married is a conceptual object, but it does have material processes and activities, mostly controlled by convention in society. Granted, some of the conventions have largely vanished over the years, such as the couple not living together before the marriage, but the general point is that we all know what constitutes a marriage, and that is something in the mind, not a physical object.

Thirdly, there are also objects of ‘pure’ thought. For example, you can think of a triangle, a planar figure with three connected straight sides. You do not have to think of a specific triangle (although you might) to be thinking about triangles as objects of thought. Triangles as objects of abstract thought have some properties: the angles add up to 180 degrees, for example. The point is that a triangle as this abstract idea is not a physical object, but an object of thought. There may be triangles such as the one you think about in the real world, but it is not necessary to your thinking about triangles, and might, in fact, inhibit your thinking about triangles.

Perhaps the point here is what Lonergan calls the ‘empirical residue’. To think about triangles and their geometric properties we do not need to know the colour of the triangle, or even precisely how long each side is, so long as they connect up. The colour and size of the triangle constitute part of the empirical residue, alongside such information as the time we are thinking about triangles and where we are. In our geometric analysis of triangles, these things are not relevant. If we were talking about triangles in a work of art, of course, the colour and size would probably be significant, but the geometric properties would be less so.

To think about triangles in general, but not a specific triangle, is to think at a more abstract level. As hinted at above, the more abstract is not necessarily better or worse (or more difficult, for that matter) it is simply to think in a different context than that of a specific object in the world. If you arrive at a result then, of course, you can then, as it were, concretize the result, and apply it to an object in the real world.

To think about God is to think at an entirely non-material level. We cannot apply our thoughts about God to an object in the world, because God is a unique being and is not an object in the world. There is a danger, then, in thinking too hard about God, and thus, as mentioned before, is to run a model to its extremes and find ourselves in a false position. There is no way of actually testing our thinking about God against an object in the world. We have to check our models against other concepts of God, and then, somehow, we have to choose between them. How we do this is a difficult question, of course.

If we consider that our thinking is on a continuum between the totally material, real-world objects, and the totally abstract, such as God, or triangles. Most of our thinking, and most of our concepts, are somewhere between the two, and, as with the triangles, slide between one and the other. What we cannot claim is that everything is material. Excluding non-material objects from our thinking obviously cripples our ability to think. Only being interested in things perhaps also cripples our ability to be human. Excluding totally abstract objects from thinking, such as triangles in general prevents us from developing mathematically. Excluding all abstract objects would, it seems, stop us thinking at all.

Belief and Doubt

 

A telling Wittgenstein quote, in my view:

Doubt comes after belief. (On Certainty, paragraph 160).

Let me try to apply this to belief in God. It is fairly evident, after all, that we cannot doubt the existence of God without at least admitting the possibility of the existence of God, and the proposition that God exists is one which, surely, entails that we have some ideas about the properties of God.

To take a different example: I believe that there is a silver birch tree in my back garden. Now, having made that claim, you might doubt it, but there are known procedures for establishing the veracity or otherwise of my claim. In short, we go and examine the trees in my garden and, possibly armed with a textbook of tree species, identify which, if any, are silver birches.

I might, of course, doubt the accuracy of my own claim. I am not an arboreal expert. However, the tree in question looks to me like similar trees which I have been told are silver birches, and hence, by comparison with those trees and their appearance, I believe that there is a silver birch in my garden.

Given my admissions about my knowledge of trees it is perfectly possible that I am wrong and you might now doubt the correctness of my statement. However, the doubt is likely to be related to my ability to recognize a certain species of tree. You are probably not doubting that there is a tree in my garden, or that I have a garden at all. You might now have started to wonder about my garden, but that is because I have raised the possibility in your mind that I might not.

Once these further doubts start to be raised, however, we find it hard to stop. You might doubt whether there is a silver birch in my garden, whether there is a tree at all, whether indeed I have a garden. But you can go further: do silver birches exist? Do trees exist? Does earth supply the nutrients which trees need to survive (if they exist) and so on, back to the basic question of whether the universe exists or is an illusion.

If we push too far down this line, of course, we land up in a rather mad world (which fortunately does not exist) where everything is doubted. This, of course, is where Descartes found himself with his system of hyperbolic doubt. He had to find one thing which he could not doubt; in his case it was the famous cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. Whether, in fact, he could claim that as something he could not doubt is a bit of an open question which I shall duck.

The point is that, if we are not careful or sensible, we can land up doubting everything and anything. The fact that we do not, that you will quite likely believe that there is a silver birch in my back garden is because we simply cannot afford to travel the road of doubting everything that people say to us, particularly if they are everyday sorts of things, about gardens and trees. As I noted, it was only after I questioned my ability to identify trees that you started to doubt my statement about the silver birch.

God, of course, is not an everyday thing. A broad school of philosophy and theology does not understand the concept of God as referring to an object in the universe. Some people may well do so, and they might be described as pantheists, but most people do not think like that, I suspect. Nevertheless, there is still a residual belief in the ‘three-decker universe’ of heaven above us, then earth, and then hell below. This is a bit of a hangover from medieval world-views (although a lot of medieval philosophers were not quite that naive) and remains as a matter of convenient language – referring to God as ‘Him up there’ may well be a convenient short-hand rather than a direction.

There is a problem here, of course. If heaven being ‘up there’ is a model for how the universe works, there is a danger of making our model absolute, that is, of starting to believe that heaven really is up there and that if we fly high enough we shall find it and, presumably, see God. This is not the case, of course, scientifically and, in fact, theologically it does not work either. Models can be dangerous things if they become embedded in our language and their origins are forgotten.

Still, as Wittgenstein observes, we get told many things as children which we believe. As we grow up, perhaps our belief in some of them become a bit shaky. Other evidence comes to light to cast doubt on these beliefs. But the fact is that we have to have these beliefs before we can cast doubt upon them.

Perhaps the problem with God, as it is with science, is that our childhood beliefs are never properly updated. My own childhood view of God was like the kings in a pack of cards – a bit scary and bearded. But then I came from a non-religious background. On the other hand, people do change their views. Children brought up to be ‘religious’ can become atheists, and vice versa. Too often, as I have mentioned before, we take the models of God that we are given, run them to extremes, and then cry ‘false!’. That these models do not work for us is hardly a surprise.

However, we do doubt. There are plenty of things in the world which we can count against the existence of a loving, caring God. The most obvious and most telling one is the existence of evil, both natural and human. Natural evil is the sort of thing we see as earthquakes and disease; human evil is of course related to what we do to other humans and animals (and in fact, the environment). But evil deserves another post (or many).

On Knowing and Believing

 There is always something stimulating to be found in reading a spot of Wittgenstein. Given that his writings come in small doses, normally, you can usually pick up a book of his and read a few paragraphs and start pondering. I did just that recently and did a bit of thinking for myself as a result.

The bit I read was from On Certainty, starting from paragraph 84. This is in reference to a comment by G. E. Moore, that a part of the common-sense view of the world is that the earth now exists and has existed for a long time. The world has existed since before I was born. This is not a statement that I can, in fact, prove. Stroll notes that the existence of the world is an assumption of the sciences (and any other subject), but it is not proved by them. There is no university department, no research directed to proving the existence of the world.

But what sort of knowledge is this? Wittgenstein observes (paragraph 90) that ‘I know’ expresses a relationship between the speaker and a fact – that the earth has existed for a long time. Most of us would agree with Moore that the earth has existed for a long time, but what are our grounds for knowing that to be the case? What is the basis for this knowledge?

Wittgenstein notes that we are sometimes convinced of the correctness of something by its simplicity or symmetry. This is, after all, how a lot of theoretical physics gets done. After all both Albert Einstein and Paul Dirac believe that the equations of physics should be beautiful. At a more mundane level, when I am balancing the bank account, an answer which matches the balance the bank thinks I have is accepted straight away. I believe this calculation to be correct because it matches, not because there is no error in the calculation.

The sort of knowledge we are referring to here is knowledge of a non-foundational sort. We do not take these knowledge claims back to the basic building blocks of the knowledge, building up an argument that the world has existed for longer than I have been on it. In this sense this knowledge in ‘properly basic’. I have no reason to argue for it; the number of people who disagree is very small. It is in Wittgenstein’s view, certain and therefore does not need arguing for.

There is an interesting link here with the work of Alvin Plantinga, which is usually called ‘Reformed Epistemology’. Plantinga argues that knowledge of the existence of God can be properly basic, in the above sense. As we do not need to create an argument from a more fundamental building block that the earth has existed for a long time, so we do not need to create an argument that God exists from some more fundamental posit. Plantinga rejects, in this sense at least, arguments for the existence of God because, he suggests, God is more fundamental, more basic, than any other claim we can make. The existence of the universe, for example, used in the cosmological argument to suggest that some being must have made it, is not as fundamental as our knowledge of God’s existence. Thus the latter should be used to explain the former, not the other way around.

It could be objected that while Plantinga might have a point of some sort, he cannot prove that the existence of God is properly basic. That is a fair criticism but is also true of other facts that we take to be properly basic. The existence of the earth for a long time is unprovable; we can bring forward various bits of evidence for it being the case, but none of them amount to a proof, just a high probability. Nothing else works if we do not presume that the earth exists and has existed for a long time, but we cannot prove it to be the case.

We can also object that even if Plantinga is correct the assumption of knowledge of the existence of God only applies for some people. After all, there are a fair number of people who do not believe in God around, and, for them, knowledge of God’s existence is not properly basic. The existence of arguments that God does exist suggests that many people do need convincing, and the half dozen or so main arguments for the existence of God suggest that such knowledge is not properly basic.

It has to be conceded that most people do not require arguments that the earth exists. After all, simply jumping up and down should suggest to most people that it does. God is, of course, a bit more difficult. The fact that some people conclude that God exists, perhaps as the result of a spiritual experience, suggests that for them such a belief is properly basic. But can such a belief be generalized?

In a sense, of course. and from certain perhaps rather unhelpful viewpoints, such issues can be accounted for. Perhaps God does not want some people to believe in Him. Why that should be is, of course, a mystery, but then so is the answer to the question of why God created the universe in the first place. In a sense, from within a certain system of thought, knowledge of the existence of God is properly basic. It is just that that system of thought is not one which is in general circulation at present.

Nevertheless, there is an issue at stake here. Wittgenstein’s point about certainty still stands. What can we know with certainty? The answer is probably linked back through language and its uses. I can, linguistically, find what other people are certain about and agree. ‘The earth has existed for a long time’ is a statement that almost everyone would agree on. Those who do not can be persuaded, by such evidence as we have, that they are incorrect.

However, there is some personal knowledge which is properly basic to me, but not to you. ‘I had eggs for breakfast this morning’ is properly basic. You are unlikely to know what I had for breakfast this morning unless you observed me eating it. Similarly, but more radically, ‘I have a slight pain in my knee’ is a statement that you have no way of verifying. These are properly basic statements, but are they, really, equivalent to ‘I am certain that God exists’?

Arguing about God

I noted last time that there is a widespread tendency to set up a model or description of God, push it to and beyond the limits of its applicability, and then declare that as the model fails, the concept of God is false. As noted, we could also do the same thing with, say, the concept of an atom, but somehow we manage to keep atomic models within their rules of applicability, while we sometimes fail with models of God.

There are a number of reasons for this, and responses. Firstly, models about God tend to be verbal rather than mathematical. Thus I can say that my atomic model applies ‘if x is very much greater than y’. This is fine, of course, and widely done in physics. For special relativity, for example, it is usually stated that normal Newtonian laws apply ‘v is much less than c’ where v is the velocity of the particle of interest and c is the speed of light. For practical purposes this is usually set to being around ten percent. It is worth noting, however, that the phrase ‘very much less than’ and its cognates are not as precise as many non-scientific people might expect.

In language even this sort of ‘precise vagueness’ is unavailable to us. We can say, for example, ‘God is love’, but then someone will ask about suffering. We can say ‘God is just’ but then someone will ask about how this, with the concept of Hell and eternal damnation, are compatible with the first expression. And so on. The limits of these models of God are even more imprecise than the limits of models in physics.

Models in theology can, of course, be incompatible, or at least apparently so. God can be said to be impassible, that is, He does not change. There is evidence from this from the Bible. On the other hand, God can be said to be passible, that is that He does change, for example, He changed his mind over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Not unnaturally, this leads to a great deal of theological head-scratching and causes some a-theologians some glee.

Again, there are incompatible models in physics, but that does not cause us to reject them. For example, there are two incompatible models of the atomic nucleus, the liquid drop model and the particle model. Both are used for different purposes within nuclear physics, and, within the limits of the models, both give useful answers. We might ask ‘which one is right?’ but the answer would come back as something like ‘both and neither’. In physics, the model you use depends on the context of the question you are asking. Getting a ‘correct’ answer, that is, one that is useful for designing a reactor, or interpreting an experiment, depends on you choosing a model in the correct range of applicability.

Perhaps theologians are less humble in doing this than some scientists. Even if a few scientists claim that we are on the brink of a theory of everything, most, in their day to day lives as physicists, do not think they understand atomic processes. They can simply interpret them, within the set of models developed for the context. Sometimes it seems that theologians, by which I mean anyone who thinks about God and related matters think that we can get definitive answers about Him. Given that the most successful intellectual endeavors of the past few centuries are in the physical sciences, and that the models in those sciences are not as clear, definitive, and applicable as we might like to think, the theologian seems to be batting on a rather sticky wicket.

Given these limitations, we are not going to solve the ‘problem of God’ any time soon, just as we are not going to solve the universe. The first step along the lines of arguments about God is surely to bring into view clear ideas about the models we use to talk about God and their limitations and incompatibilities. There is a bit of reluctance, it seems, to do this, just in case, I suppose, it turns out that our beliefs in God are false. Intellectual honesty, however, should compel us to admit the limitations as well as the potential of our ideas about God.

The universe is complex and mostly we do not understand it. What ‘really’ goes on in an atom when it emits a photon is opaque to us. We have models of electrons jumping from one state to another. They are not descriptions of how an electron moves within the atom to create a photon, but a description of the initial and outcome states. We might understand these models, but that is not exactly the same as understanding what is going on in the atom. The model is at one remove, a filter through which we observe the processes, initial states, and outcomes.

Given the unity of the human intellect in doing thinking about things, similar restrictions must apply to our ideas about God. If scientific method is the epitome of human thought and rationality, and it generates models with limited ranges of applicability, then thought in other areas of experience, such as theology (or history, or sociology, or whatever) must be similarly constricted. We have models of God, not direct access to the Godhead to be able to observe what is ‘really’ going on. We have models of atoms, not direct access to atomic processes. We have models of history, of what was going on, but not direct access to people in the past and their knowledge and decision make processes. Everything is filtered through our language and models.

This might be imagined to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But denying that we have direct knowledge of God, or atoms, or whatever, we seem to deny too much. Atomic models are useful and, in general, accurate. We can predict things using them. Historical and sociological models do help us understand the past and present. But these models are not the things modeled. Human experience is much more complex, and the world is much more complex than the models imply.

God, more or less by definition, is beyond direct human understanding. We have a load of models of God developed down the centuries, none of which, I suggest, tell us about God directly, but perhaps say more about the human experience of God. This does not mean that God simply dissolves into a mass of incompatible models, any more than the range of models of the atom implies that atoms do not exist. It simply means that human experiences of God are complicated, and that should not, really, be a surprise to us.