David Wells on Pomo

David Wells on Pomo December 23, 2005

Like many of David Wells ‘s books, I’ve find his recent Above All Earthly Pow’rs simultaneously bracing, stimulating, and frustrating. Wells examines the consequences of the confluence of two main cultural trends – the postmodern ethos and the increasingly pluralistic religious situation of the West. He makes many good points: in many respects I like his confrontational approach, he gives a broad but clear definition of postmodernism and distinguishes it helpfully from postmodernity, he rightly recognizes the strong continuities between modernity and postmodernity and especially the economic setting for both, he appreciates postmodernism’s emphasis on the reality of bias in human thought and the limits of reason while recognizing the dangerous directions such insights can go when detached from a Christian framework, he recognizes that there are varieties of foundationalism, he is unabashed in his confession of orthodoxy of a strong Protestant kind.


But I found the book frustrating, particularly when dealing with theological issues, or perhaps better, when he deals with the intersection of theological and philosophical concerns. My frustration comes from the sense that Wells’s theology is structured by certain kinds of dualisms that I do not find in Scripture.

Three passages will help to identify my frustrations. First, prior to showing the connection between the social and economic processes of modernization and the beliefs they encourage, he offers a brief excursion into epistemology, which he claims is “preliminary to both” a study of modernization and beliefs. I’m suspicious about the priority of epistemology. But my point is that he sets up the problem of knowing by opposing the external world, which is other, to private, interior self: “Our consciousness is wrought through a complex interaction between our interior and exterior worlds, between the ‘I’ within us and the world by which we are surrounded. In many important respects, this world provides us with the ways in which we think of ourselves. And, to some extent, we provide the ways in which that outside world is ordered and experienced.” He illustrates by saying that a materialist and an animist with regard trees in different ways. Knowledge is not merely “a private free-floating creation . . . prompted by the external world,” but neither is it “simply given to us.” Instead, there is a “delicate choreography” between the external and internal.

Wells interestingly does not describe consciousness as the interior world, but as a product of the interaction between interior and exterior. But precisely because his scheme appears to enshrine the subject-object duality of the egocentric predicament, this starting point problematizes knowing in unfortunate ways. Or, to put it differently, where does the body fit in Wells’s scheme? Is it part of the internal world or the external world? Or, to turn the point around, can consciousness be self-consciousness? Is the consciousness that we reflect on “internal” or “external”? Or, to take a page from the phenomenologists: Thought is intentional, that is, it is never pure thought but always thought of something. If knowledge is, as Polyani would have it, a kind of “indwelling” of the world that involves the body, then it appears that the need for this delicate choreography dissolves.

Elsewhere I have expresses similar reservations about Wells’s use of the sociology of knowledge. “Social” factors can only be seen as “influences” on knowledge or religion if, as Milbank has argued, we first can disentangle the social and the religious, or the social from beliefs. Social factors can influence other factors only if we can distill reality in such a way that will isolate the residue of the social. But of course we cannot, for society is in some, perhaps large, measure a matter of belief. What, after all, makes up a “class” or an “institution”? Likewise, social factors can be said to influence religion only if we can extract the religious element from the social, and the social element from the religious, so that we have “pure” instances of the social and the religious. But such pure instances simply do not exist.

In a second passage contrasting Eros and Agape spirituality, Wells argues that “Christian faith . . . is about listening. Eros spirituality is about speaking.” But, surely, we want to say that Christian faith is about both, about speaking in response to listening. God did not create humanity to be mute spectators of His glory, but to enter into the divine conversation that is the life of the Trinity. He goes on to say that it is “impossible to speak from the human situation to God. If God has not first spoken of himself, there can be no authentic human speaking of him because that speaking reveals only human longing and intuition.” But this presumes that there is such a thing as a “human situation” as such, a human situation that is not always already addressed by God’s Word.

Finally, Wells, again opposing Eros and Agape, says that for postmodernism God is not “objective and dangerous to us,” but rather “at our convenience because he is accessible on our own terms.” The truth is that “God stands over against us. To know him is not the same thing as knowing ourselves.” Again things are more nuanced than Wells suggests. We are not God, but it is not fully biblical to say that God “stands over against us.” In Him we live and move and have our being, so that it is entirely biblical to say that God surrounds us and envelops us and encloses us. And Wells’s claim about the opposition of self-knowledge and knowledge of God, while true in one obvious sense (knowing that I’m bald is not equivalent to knowing God is bald), fails to capture the brilliance of Calvin (and, following him, Van Til), both of whom argued that knowledge of God and self were inescapably intertwined. Frame, building on Van Til, to so far as to say that self-knowledge is a perspective on all knowing, so that all knowledge of God is simultaneously knowledge of self.


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