Beginning to update, Scope and Nature of Theology (Part II)

Continued from:

With Stephan, on Scope and Nature of Theology (Part I?)
https://correspondentia-ioannis-georgii.blogspot.com/2020/07/with-stefan-on-scope-and-nature-of.html

XVII

Stephan to me

7/5/2020 at 5:45 PM

Re: "Epistemologically, Schleiermacher is basically right:"

I’m sorry I didn’t have time to respond to your recent three e-mails before you posted. But it does not matter much, I don’t really have anything to add.

Your points about Descartes are excellent. I really like your ”dark room” analogy, especially the ”doleo, ergo sum”! It removes the problem I pointed out with ”cogito” (presumably, you can deduce your own existence from pain without the mediation of language) while pinpointing the problem with systematic doubt: it removes sources of error but also - and more importantly - sources of truth.

Your point about ”the historic mess after the Reformation”, including the Thirty Years’ War, was also a very good one. The search for a non-religious platform from which to settle disputes between religions, of which juridical objectivity was a major component, is surely relevant to an understanding of the philosophies of Kant and Schleiermacher, which try in a similar way to find an epistemologically neutral [knowledge not dependent on revelation] platform. But as you say, this attempt does ”not add any impartial umpire”, only another party to the mess. Well put!

Eco having artificial rather than partisan sympathy for the Middle Ages - that was another good one!

Thank you also for correcting me about Lewis’s meaning when he talks of philosophical monism. You are of course right, he is thinking primarily of ontology, not the attempt to reduce reality to some axiom. Again a bon mot: ”Like reality plays checkers, never chess”! It made me think of the wonderful scene in The Tempest, where Prospero draws a curtain aside and reveals Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess - what a lovely metaphor for the love game! Yes, reality is far more like that than like checkers.

To limit one’s deference to experts to precisely those things that they are expert on is excellent advice. Point taken.

Finally, I think we also agree on the nature of revelation and inerrancy, at least to the extent we have discussed it. There are questions here that we have not discussed - about the difference between denotation and connotation, about the cognitive content of revelation and other kinds of content, and about the extent to which different interpretations of the Bible are possible and permissible. But for the moment I am perfectly content with the agreement we have reached and with the insights you have so kindly shared with me.

Stephan

XVIII

me to Stephan

7/7/2020 at 12:43 PM

Re: "Epistemologically, Schleiermacher is basically right:"

Do I suspect rightly, the next point might be given in the letter?

Just one thing, "[t]o limit one’s deference to experts to precisely those things that they are expert on" - not just that, but within their expertise to distinguish between raw facts as observed and conclusions, including routine ones.

Hans Georg