Part One

(Interpretation, Meaning and Subjectivity)

Dad,
I was laying in bed last night having trouble going to sleep because I couldn't stop thinking about our discussion. So, I thought I'd write down a few of those thoughts and send them to you.
This won't necessarily answer all the questions that came up yesterday – it probably won't even make sense – and it won't be complete. I'm not dumb enough to think there aren't countless things I haven't considered yet – both in scripture and tradition as well as practically.
Also, I should just mention that whatever I say here will be sort of “initial” – i.e. it will probably ignore a lot of the practicalities in favor of getting things theoretically right first (if that makes sense – it has to be worked out practically over time)

OK.
First, the ideas of “journey” and “dialogue” and all those annoying buzzwords we mentioned relate to what I was saying to you yesterday about the sense of continuity that the church's revelation has about it. Perhaps it is born of being in a time of excessive information in which we have a much clearer view of the long history of Biblical interpretation and understanding. For instance, Augustine, Aquinas and the Counsels continued to add to our "Christian theology" (while at the same time the Jews were perpetually interpreting their scriptures with, occasionally, superb insight) but they did not understand things in the way that we do now – or even did a hundred years ago. When you look at all the nuance and difference in tradition that the church in every age and part of the world (as well as denomination) has adopted you begin to suspect that there will never be a final answer – that there will only be a continuing interaction between ourselves and God's Word. It also becomes clear that we have not “evolved” in the sense of continual improvement, but merely changed over the centuries.

You may not like the way this sounds, but I think it is impossible to say that language is independent of its users. Words have meaning – but that meaning is always determined by the context in which the user finds him/herself and even, beyond that, by the outcomes of the intercourse between the people using them (a conversation is really a culture within a culture – or, inversely, a culture is really a long, overarching conversation).

This, of course, shouldn't lead us to say that we can make words mean whatever we want, but rather to a hermeneutic of authorial intent (cultural/ historical/situational setting and so on). So far so good. However, although original meaning is determined by the author and his situation, there cannot be a final meaning until there is a receiver of the words. I can say as much as I want in Urdu, for instance, but I have communicated no sense outside of myself until someone who speaks Urdu actually hears what I’m saying. Words are essentially useless unless there is someone to receive them. And then, of course, two people, rather than only one, become involved in the conceptions those words convey. There is one conception in the mind of the author/speaker and one in the mind of the receiver – and it is simply impossible for those two conceptions to be identical because the persons involved are not identical in any literal sense.

When you read this letter you will have certain responses to what I am saying. You will probably, as far as I’m concerned, misinterpret this or that sentence or idea and comment accordingly. I will try to correct your interpretation and in doing so, possibly make some slight (or large) mistakes of my own about your comment so that we will end up exchanging meaning back and forth in an effort to get the same conception in each of our heads, realizing that our conceptions will never be exactly the same because we are two people and not one.

This is the key point about human beings: we are unavoidably subjective. We have no other way of experiencing or understanding except our own, individual perspectives – our consciousnesses. Yes, imagination helps us “see” from another perspective – but even then it is only myself that can create the imaginary other. Because it is persons or living things that experience “reality” there cannot be, literally speaking, an “objective reality”. In fact, such an idea is almost absurd because this “objective reality” would have to, at some point or in some imagined framework, exist without any consciousnesses present to experience it and would, therefore, being completely unknown, be no reality at all since only a conscious being can call it so. To experience – to be conscious – is to be subjective. (Hence, my comment yesterday about natural “laws”. Sure, on a practical level, describing physical law is very useful, but we as human beings only develop these laws because they are consistent, seemingly common, features of our past experience. They, like everything else, are experienced subjectively – I will never feel/see/understand the effects of gravity from any "neutral" perspective, only my own – there is no guarantee that what I call gravity is the same for everyone). This, to me, is inescapable.

Now, I know this is probably making you squirm because of the apparent implications, but wait till I finish.

This is where interaction becomes so important. Since I am unavoidably subjective and cannot partake in some imagined objective world, the only choice left to me is to interact with the things or beings I encounter from my relative position. In fact, it could easily be said that this interaction defines existence – without it we could not be supposed to have consciousness at all. Because every vantage point is intrinsically subjective, I am nothing except in relation to something else. (This would seem even to play out in the triunity of God himself. It also has interesting implications in terms of our relative degree of “existence” in relation to God. Everything that “exists” might be said to do so only in relation to what existed before it – i.e. Him).

Getting back to the conversation between you and I that I referred to before (that we're having right now), I can only "experience" or "learn" or "understand" what you have to say about my words by conversing – interacting – with you about it. If we stop talking, of course, it's not because we’ve reached our goal of objective reality on one or the other side of the conversation or even as a synthesis of both – we still maintain our subjectivity about whatever the other person has said (even if we "completely agree"). What we're actually doing, then, is – rather than coming to some fixed, objective knowledge about what the other person has said – in a small way, striving to reach a point of sameness, of unity of mind where, ideally, we would be of literally a single consciousness, both fully having the other's literal point of reference. Since we can never get to this ideal point, what we do instead is continually "dialogue" (in a broad sense which supercedes mere conversation) and in that way come to know, not a series of immutable facts, but each other – ever transforming persons.

It may seem like I've really gotten away from what I was saying at first about scripture, but I haven't. This is my main point: It seems to me that we have focused too long on coming to know facts rather than the person of God. I do not know you, Dad, as a list of attributes. I know you because I continually communicate with you. If I stopped communicating with you then I would, I suppose, know you less and less as the time between our interactions lengthened. It is the same with God.

A really good illustration of the distinction I want to make is that trusty old Glenn Matthews illustration of the train of faith. He says you must put your faith in the facts and then the feelings will follow – where the faith is like the fuel that goes into the engine of facts and the feelings are the caboose.

I'm not suggesting we turn that around and put feelings in front or anything like that. I'm suggesting we throw out the train altogether. Faith must be in the Person of God – in the person of Jesus Christ. All those "facts" are not to be trusted because they are merely a part of the back and forth conversation between us and our immutable Father. The Father himself is what we trust. If we could put our faith in the facts as the illustration says, it would imply – as I mentioned yesterday – that there is something above and outside of God, a point that not only contradicts orthodox theology but the idea of intrinsic subjectivity I have been discussing.

We can put our faith in God himself because he is a real person (real in that complete sense I mentioned – the Acts 17:28 and Colossians 1:17 sense – compared to his realness we are not real at all) and we can trust what he says to us in his word (just as, to much lesser extent, you can trust that I am saying what I mean in this letter), but as I have been saying, we can't come to a oneness of mind with him about his meaning and therefore we must continually interact with him through his word in order – not to finally come to perfect understanding of what he is saying, which is impossible – but to know him.

If, at any stage, we pull some "nugget of truth" out of scripture and declare it once for all to be the truth of God, we will cease to interact with him on that point and stop coming to know him. We must move away from seeing truth as an objective reality toward seeing it as a person – Christ. In some ways, this relates to what Jesus said in John 17:3: "This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent". We often water that down conceptually to say, essentially, "To have eternal life you must believe in God". But I think the intention is closer to the idea that eternal life is that continuous dialogue with God that must take place in an “eternal present” (a topic for another time). The concept of believing on him for salvation, by the way, is clearly dealt with elsewhere in scripture.

I think putting our faith in doctrine, in the "facts", instead of a person will very slowly kill our faith. I think we have to get away from the whole conception (in relation to your question) of "rules" and "dogmas" and the like. If you stay within that conception then you will think I am suggesting anarchy. Not at all. I am suggesting that rules do not belong to relationships but religion. Rules are, on a broad level, a means of power. Every religion in the world defines itself by a set of rules because they are a means for us, as human beings, to achieve a certain perceived control over our destinies. If, on the other hand, ours is truly a faith of faith then power is exactly what we must give up. Faith, in its truest sense cannot be in rules and doctrines because those things are a means of defining what actions will lead us to a specific end – power over our destiny. Do you see? Faith in the sense we talk about it, can only be in a person – a being that we must continually be knowing, not that is known at some point in time – for it to be a complete relinquishing of power – for it to be faith at all.

This is linked to what Paul is saying in Romans 7. That chapter has often been explained to me as a description of the struggle of the Christian life. But that (to my mind) mis-interpretation belies the distinction I am making between two types of thinking. What, in context, Paul seems very clearly to be driving at is that the struggle is one of life under the law. The more you seek power over yourself, the more you are beaten down by yourself. It’s as if he's describing a man trying to lift himself into the air by the seat of his pants – the man expects his arms to lift his legs into the air and take his arms with them, but, obviously, his arms would have to be in the air first. But "thanks be to God!" we have been given the Holy Spirit who enables us to live a life of relationship in which power plays no part, instead of a life of striving toward an impossible goal through our rules and regulations and fixed doctrines.

[I should say, to curb your sweating, that prepositional truth, beliefs, doctrines and the like are not thrown out here, they merely take a subordinate role as tools of our ongoing interactional dialogue. If we pretend, as it seems many people are doing now, that everyone is right – or that no one is right – we actually deny our subjectivity rather than embrace it. Meaningful interaction can only come from an assertion by the actors of their point of view. The moment one of them relinquishes completely their right to subjectivity, the interaction, on a meaningful level, ceases.]

What I am driving at, to summarize, is that Christianity must not be about a series of "truths" we have mined from the scripture but about "The Truth" a person who is continually known through an interaction with his word – that is a personal, individual interaction as well as a corporate and historical interaction. Christianity is not about reaching some goal but about knowing God in the only place anyone can be known, the present – which is eternal – and that through the mediation of his Holy Spirit.

Our faith is about relationship. About engaging with God.

Which brings me to the role of the church in all this. We can't interact with him in his word without interacting with each other. The upshot of everything I have been saying about subjectivity is that we, as subjective entities, only have meaning in relationships. This is, I think, why scripture emphasizes a plurality in every unity – even God himself is plural. Or, I should say, because God himself is plural, we as human beings cannot have meaning except in plurality.

I think the reason Christ begs for his followers to be one in John 17 and the reason we are described corporately as the temple of God in 1 Cor and elsewhere is – more than simple illustration of our need for “teamwork” – an indication that we meet God when we are together – not merely around each other, either; really together ("gathered together in his name"), touching spirits one with another. This is where God will dwell on earth and where we will meet with him. We won't meet with him, we won't continue to know him without this interaction. The Church to me is not just necessary because we need to encourage each other in our individual faiths but because we cannot interact with God without interacting with each other.

This last part, in particular, is not fully formed – I'll work on it some more – but it is the root of my frustration with this "let's dissolve formal church" mentality. I think that idea has been born out of the perception that formal church often hinders the sort of meaningful relationships the church is essentially about – and I would agree with that sentiment to an extent. But in rejecting it completely we fail to interact with those who have come before us (both still living – in my case, for instance, you – and long dead) and destroy the very "dialogue" we are running around whining about.

Well, this could really do with some careful revisions and some serious shortening. But I will just send it to you anyway – full of millions of holes. I couldn't get it all perfect anyway.

Let me know what you think.

Your son physically and spiritually,

chad