external monologue

hooked on polyphonics

(sorry for the long delay in recent bloggery. apparently there were some updates being done on the server where i'm hosted. seems everything is now in working order, which is a good thing because i've been achin' for an update.)

so....

if you were in chattanooga on monday night and you weren't at the UTC Twenty-Frist Annual C. S. Lewis Lecture, then, well, you missed out. big time. the speaker was Roger W. Lundin, an english prof from wheaton college up in chicago. the title of his lecture was 'Nimble Believing': Modern Literature and the Conflict of Interpretations, and his ideas dealt with a number of issues i've been thinking about a great deal lately. at root, the thrust of his lecture dealt with what has been called "the problem of many authorities," and particularly as it has to do with the christian tradition. this is originally seen in people like Martin Luther who felt there were contradictions between the various authorities of scripture, reason, and tradition. this led ML to a "theory of contraction" by which he eliminated the latter two in favor of scripture alone (sola scritura). however, this didn't ultimately solve the problem. as those of us in the reformed tradition have seen, there is no lack of competing authorities even within our small slice of the christian ideological pie. which leaves us in a bit of jam. with all these apparently contradictory ideas floating around about various interpretations of the bible one begins to wonder if a knowledge of "real" truth is even possible. since thinking about this can get pretty depressing, the response has typically been for individuals to take hold of one idea, and unrelentingly apply it to every situation and dilemma, avoiding exceptions, and denying complexity.

Lundin calls this "monological" thinking. that is, seeing the world as strict black and white, true and false, distinctions, with no place for paradox. an example he gives of this type of thinking in church history is the doctrine of docetism which attempted to deny Christ's humanity. those monological thinkers, unable to handle the tension of Christ being both God and Man, saw his humanity as mere illusion and his divinity as reality. black and white. easy.

but as we know, neither christianity nor christ are easy to understand. christ's message of course is simple, but his person, is incomprehensibly (sp?) complex. as much as we'd like to break these doctrines down into such simple categories, its just not that easy. Christ is God. Christ is Man. a seeming paradox, and yet a necessity in order to affirm the truths of the scriptures. but i'm getting sidetracked here...

Lundin's response to this sort of monological thinking is what he calls the polyphonic approach, based on the musical idea of polyphony. He asserts that though truth, in reality, is unified, it is approached bia a plurality of consciousnesses. in other words, multiple voices commenting on "unified truth" need not be contradictory by nature, but that instead, perhaps we get at truth by way of 2 or more voices. that is, our understanding of what is true is informed by the combination of our perspectives, not the contradiction of them. now, i know this sounds dangerously close to perspectivalism but i think its slightly different. the truth is that we are broken, fallen people, and we are unable to see the world as it absolutely is. this doesn't mean that we can't understand the doctrines of the scriptures necessary for faith, but it does mean that, due to our fallen natures, we misunderstand and twist even the book of truth that God has given us. praise God for the work of the Holy Spirit, in working in us and graciously showing us our need for a saviour, but we would be foolish to think that the Spirit's work immediately and economically removes our fallen proclivities. no, instead we fight the old man, day by day, until the day we see the Lord in glory. with this in mind, who are we to claim a perfect and irrefutable understanding of the scriptures that have been argued over by men of great learning since time immemorial.

hmm... i'm beginning to worry myself a bit here. i guess the gist of what i want to say is that i was quite impressed with Lundin's willingness to face the tensions, the apparent paradoxes of Christianity, fearlessly. i'm fed up with people trying in vain to diffuse the radical and disconcerting truths of this faith that we love. and i see Lundin's response as an honest and open approach to grasping these mind-blowing realities.

(i got pretty excited about all this on monday and shot off an email to the man himself. his reply is here if you want to read it.)

please comment...

Posted by andy at April 11, 2003 06:02 PM