I mentioned that taking an approach like Popper’s, in theology, would invite problems. I am exploring Popper’s work because I suspect the theological problems it solves are greater than the problems it creates. Still, I owe some account of what I think those problems are, and that requires me to explain what it might look like if a Popper-like approach to theological method were widely adopted.
Let me begin there. What if churches and theological schools everywhere did theology according to the idea that no method always works?
For schools, the good news is that most Protestant, English-speaking schools teach a wide variety of methods already. For instance, these schools emphasize the role of imagination. The emphasize careful listening. They teach a variety of Biblical study methods, from historical to socio-rhetorical to literary approaches. All of this training would remain vital.
The bad news (so to speak) is that these schools teach only a little critical reasoning. I say this from firsthand experience. I hesitantly generalize my experience based on ATS accreditation standards, and the witness of some friends who chose to attend different schools than mine. Because the school culture is clear that everyone’s methods are interesting, many students and faculty draw the unreliable conclusion that everyone’s results are acceptable. While the objectivity and dependability of theology are never questioned, the focus of classroom instruction remains idea generation, not idea testing.
Some venues for critical reasoning do remain. Papers and conferences do not publish indiscriminately. Solid professors moderate solid discussions in their classrooms. But the key venue – the coursework to obtain the degree – has largely lost its critical salt.
I will offer two points of evidence. First, the personal reflection paper is a key element of most theology courses. It is extremely difficult to critique a personal reflection. Why is so much of theological training dedicated to writing them? Why so much comparing of ourselves with ourselves?
Second, and related, practical course work often dances around divisive questions. Whenever coursework addresses a divisive issue – who should churches ordain, who should churches marry, to whom should churches serve the sacraments, etc. – coursework is framed as the how of keeping people together, distinct from the why. The underlying premise is that in any real church, people do not change their minds on anything. No one is open to intellectual repentance.
Today’s theological academy shies away from training people in proving wrong ideas wrong. This would need to change. It would absolutely not involve what doctrinal conservatives call “correction” or “reproof.” These practices depend on authority. They may be useful, when authority is useful, that is, when critical discourse is useless. But if folks widely adopted a Popper-like approach to theology, then people could be corrected with discourse. The need for naked authority would happily diminish. Passages often used in “correction” and “reproof” are known on the Internet as the “baseball bats of the Bible” for their potential for violence. Surely everyone would be happier, the less violence is needed?
Likewise, for churches at large, the biggest change would be cultural. Churches would have to find new ways of framing their identity, limiting how much of the collective identity stems from shared belief. To cultivate openness and boldness, person by person, household by household, a deep spiritual transformation would have to take place. People would learn to speak, as they once learned to dance: carefully, gracefully, publicly.
I do not claim to know how this happy repentance might come about. But if it did, this is roughly what it would require.
Now to the problems. So far, I have boldly proposed the idea that a Popper-like approach would set churches and schools free to solve big problems without recourse to authority figures. I proposed that this practice would lead to increased unity in the church, if it could be cultivated.
Let me now model openness to correction. There are some really good objections to this idea, and I do not have good responses to all of them. I call these the four Cardinal Problems with a Popper approach to theology.
- The Problem of Privilege
- The Problem of Authenticity
- The Problem of Moral Agency
- The Problem of Cost
The Problem of Privilege
The first problem, though not the largest, is that the idea of converting whole churches to guiding belief with critical discussion is impractical. I have been saying that it would be better to adopt critical discussion, than to train skilled theological leaders to guide the beliefs of their communities. But is there any reason to think that a greater number of people in church would participate in critical discussion, than who now become faith leaders? Perhaps not, or perhaps not many. So critical discussion still privileges people. It just privileges different people, and perhaps many fewer. Perhaps I’m just taking the log out of one eye and jamming it into the other.
Personally, I do not give this problem too much weight.
First, the point of adopting critical discussion is not to include more people. That is a happy result, if a wide swath of believers chose to practice critical discussion together. The main reason to cultivate critical discussion is to do good theological work – work that stands the test of time, that learns from failure, that purges errors quickly so that it can be bold in testing new ideas. So far, I have not really offered any defense for why good theology is worthwhile to have. (If you have made it this many pages in, I am bound to think you agree.) But if we agree that it is, then it should not matter whether that theology comes from 12 disciples or 144,000.
Second, let us grant that most people either cannot or will not develop their beliefs using critical discussion. So, critical discussion privileges an elite. Well, the status quo privileges an elite too – with this difference, that the criteria for today’s theological decision makers are not tied to their results. The criteria for good critical discussion are open to all. If we are going to have an elite, let us at least have an elite made up of the people most willing to accept being wrong!
Finally, I have argued in another place that churches are less effective when they depend on central narrative makers and decision makers. Central truth sources are bound to miss key information needed for decision making. Churches, let alone groups of churches, are just too large to be watched over in this way. The more individuals and households can participate in theological work, the less opportunity for voices to go unheard. Cultivating a culture of critical discussion would ensure objections to ideas are heard early and respected. So, in a sense, it does matter whether theology comes from 12 disciples or 144,000. We may accept that only 12 disciples may propose a true idea, but we should prefer that its truth be tested with the united powers of all 144,000.
The Problem of Authenticity
To grasp the second cardinal problem with a Popper theological method, I ask, would this method be “Christian” in the common-sense use of the word? If not, then it will never be adopted, no matter the possible advantages. Any Christian who used the method would be reasoning incoherently and acting inauthentically.
The reason is that ‘Christian’ is an identity marker, not just a reasoned conviction. Those old ‘WWJD’ bracelets had something to them. There was a point in asking oneself whether Jesus would do such-and-such. If Jesus faced today’s situations of church and world, would Jesus think about God using a Popper method? If Jesus would not, then arguably no follower of Jesus would, and a Popper approach would not yield ‘Christian’ theology.
I am suggesting that a Popper method is just a way for a community of many people to seek truth when it is difficult to find. How could Jesus possibly not support that noble goal? I will suggest two plausible doubts.
First, the method relies on being open to being wrong, especially about the things one most believes to be right. If Jesus did practice this level of self-criticism, the Gospels do not provide much insight into it. (Though, Paul’s letters openly demonstrate self-criticism right alongside solid conviction. Perhaps the response to this problem is along the lines of ‘strong convictions loosely held.’)
Second, the method depends on being willing to falsify the beliefs of others. Practical spiritual problems show up, around gentleness and pride. We all know from experience how hard it is to expose the errors of others with gentleness. And we all know how hard it is to be discovered to be wrong. Can a ‘Christian’ way of thinking be founded on criticizing others’ views? Christian faith is an identity marker, not just a reasoned belief. It is likely that many more Christians hold the faith as identity than as reasoned conviction. When critical theological discussion calls identity markers into question, people are much more likely to respond by shutting down the conversation than continuing it. (See again how the snake’s head of authoritarianism has come above ground!)
In this kind of environment, one must be taught to abandon beliefs without viewing the belief as an identity marker. The quality of being wrong must be an identity marker of a community that thinks in a Popper way. The more often one is wrong, the faster one gets one’s mistakes out of the way. It is not a given that the identity marker of ‘wrongness’ is compatible with the identity marker of ‘faithfulness.’ As we will see below, every commitment one makes in faith is a risk of self-delusion instead of truth. In a Popper community, one should seek to minimize commitments as much as possible, for the sake of truth. (Let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and don’t take oaths on heaven or Earth…) Yet the whole church depends on a frequent remembrance of Jesus’ oath to the church. So the identity marker of ‘wrongness,’ in church, is not one that Jesus necessarily shares… and we are back to the problem.
I suspect there is a way forward. The Old Testament witnesses to many models of faith who embraced their wrongness, and found favor with God that way. (Though, it is important to remember neither to embrace beliefs known to be wrong, nor to assume that one’s one propensity for error is less than others’.)
Before leaving this problem, I should also mention that it relates to interpreting the Scriptures, and to the tradition of theological discourse. There has been no past consensus to reason together using a Popper method. If specific Christian communities do so today, then they are switching methods. They will have to face the problem that the cornerstone thinkers of the Church do not use the same method they do. Again, this problem relates both to identity and to reason. How does one relate to one’s faith ancestors who use an opposed method of thought? (Paul seems to like the ‘origins and sources’ model of thinking that Popper so forcefully rejects.) And if their methods are bankrupt, what is one to do with their influential theological conclusions? Reject them? Re-prove them from other means, without regard to their influence?
The Problem of Moral Agency
To unearth the third and fourth cardinal problems, I will ask the question, is there something that separates theology from the natural sciences, in a way that makes a Popper-like approach fail in theology? I can think of at least two key ways in which theology is not a science.
I should note here – though I will cover this much more in a later chapter – that ‘Not Being a Science’ is almost an Unforgiveable Curse in academia these days, and I do not mean it in that way.
When a natural science uses Popper’s method, some scientists put forward a theory, and then they (and many others) test it with experiment. The point of the experiment is to prove the theory wrong. Like a worldwide game of CLUE, scientific theories gain acceptance if people cannot put up the cards to prove them wrong. This whole system depends on people having cards and showing them – that is, doing experiments.
Now in every science, there are limits to the kinds of experiments you can ethically do. Even physics, chemistry, and biology can lead to experiments questionable on ethical grounds, for instance the testing of weapons of mass destruction. A certain famous film about dinosaurs was right to ask whether ‘scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.‘ As the science involves more and more human knowledge, these ethical limits become more strict. There are many ethical limits on experiments in psychology or the social sciences, because experimenting on people is fraught with ethical problems.
People are moral agents. If we respect one another, we will learn from one another, not by experiment or manipulation, but through relationship. So, a whole separate class of academic disciplines prioritizes human relationships rather than experiments. Economics, law, and political philosophy each teach us not to try many experiments, because we would have to treat people as objects. (Authoritarians do not understand this distinction.)
As people have bodies as well as souls, the discipline of medicine is also constrained to treat people as agents.
Indeed, we have some intuition that we should extend this sphere of relational knowledge to the whole planet, with its nonhuman creatures, rather than treating all nonhuman creatures as mere objects for human use. So, the discipline of ecology is partially constrained by respect for relationship.
It may be possible to practice some or all of these disciplines in a Popper way. For instance, economics can start from first principles that respect human agency, and still have reasoned debate about how to extend the principles. But the whole discipline is therefore at risk of being useless, if it makes a bad-and-untestable assumption about human nature. These disciplines are existential. They are staked on the success of their existential beliefs about human nature, but they cannot ethically test these beliefs. Instead they require, hope, or trust that all the participants can and will accept the discipline’s beliefs about themselves. Their ‘givens’ are far from given.
We have not said yet what exactly theology studies. But it seems clear that theology involves what the Wesleyans call ‘soul care.’ The theologian, especially the pastor and the practical constructive activist, are more like doctors or judges than they are like engineers or physicists.
So, we should expect that theology involves some of these untestable, first-principles assumptions about the moral agents – the people – it describes. A theology based on a wrong assumption will fall apart, as the moral agents don’t behave the way the theology describes. This conclusion is a powerful result, in that we can reject many theologies that have failed this test! But it also means that theology will change in unpredictable ways as new truths of its moral agents are discovered – or as those moral agents change.
This may not seem to be a bad thing. Isn’t it important that theories change when disproved? Well, if you are Popper, yes. But it’s not for nothing that the Bible emphasizes God’s unchangeableness, and the indestructibility of God’s relationship with humanity. Christian theology requires some ideas about God taken as assumptions – or, what is the same thing, taken on faith. God may falsify theology by acting outside those assumptions. Christian theologies all posit some level of past, known commitment between God and the human race.
And just as theology posits God’s commitments, theology also posits the human response to those commitments. To live in relationship with God means being bound by past commitments to God, but also to ourselves, our families, our churches, and other groups. These commitments have claims on us. What happens if one’s theological beliefs jeopardize those relationships? It is far from clear that the commitment to good theology overrides all these others.
Say one doubts the priest – does that mean leaving the church, too? Does good theology mean truth at any cost? Say two men discern a call to the contemplative life, but one of them is married and the other is free to become a monk. Their theologies may posit the same God, yet their theologies must differ, and the two men should act differently. Years later, one man might have learned much more about God from his life than the other. (Maybe the monk, maybe the husband!) Living the most faithfully to one’s commitments does not always mean living to seek the most truth possible. The more commitments one has, the more likely they will interfere in the search for truth. That is the problem of moral agency.
The Problem of Cost
I asked the question, is there something that separates theology from the natural sciences, in a way that makes a Popper-like approach fail in theology? The problem of moral agency separates theology from the natural sciences, because of how it limits the practitioners. But the practitioners are also limited by the costs of experiment.
In a game of CLUE, if you make a real accusation of the murderer, you must stake everything and win or lose. If you get it wrong, you lose. Because making CLUE accusations has a cost, the players do not accuse until they are very confident. Players use low-cost ‘suggestions’ to test their ideas before betting their win or loss on an idea. If everyone had to guess the murderer, the weapon and the room right on the first try, everyone would lose in the first turn of almost every game.
Experiments are the same way. In the sciences, most experiments can be done at no cost to anyone other than experimenters. And even the experimenters will try to do their experiments at low cost, so they can test the theory several times.
Even so, some experiments come with high costs. If you mess up the experiment once, it’s game over for you. The most dangerous experiments are those whose effects cannot be anticipated, let alone controlled.
There are some high-cost experiments in physics and chemistry and other hard sciences. But, the more an experiment affects human personal and social systems, the greater the shadow of its unforeseen consequences. Systems of many people, many actors or agents, are so complex that no experiment is free of unforeseen consequences. That means that experiments tend to have much higher costs in those disciplines of human nature – economics, law, medicine, ecology, and so on – than they do in the natural sciences. ‘Life finds a way.‘
Again, we have not exactly said what theology is, or what it studies. But from observing what theologians do, it is clear that theology involves statements about the relationship of God to the human race. How is one to know when it is safe to test these statements? When is it safe to try to prove a theological idea wrong? In Biblical terms, when is it safe to test God? The God of the Bible seems to have some idea of when it is safe, but there are clearly situations when it is unsafe. Perhaps there are human ways to relate to God that are just better if no one takes them?
One step further: Christian theologies tend to follow the Biblical tradition that right knowledge of God means right knowledge of one’s neighbors and one’s land. Since this knowledge is relational, the traditional view is that relationship with God is a necessary condition to dependable ethics, economics, ecology, and so on. This right relationship was especially important for priests and kings – who, in the New Testament, are the whole Church.
So, is the discipline of theology free to experiment with its beliefs? If there is no relationship between right theology and rightness of the other relational disciplines, then the cost of believing in a particular theology is low. Theological error can go right alongside prosperity, justice and wholeness. But if there really is a relationship between right theology and the rightness of those other disciplines, the cost of theological error is steep.
You would think that a high cost of error would motivate people to engage in critical discussion to discover error quickly. In other words, you would think that a high cost of error would chase churches and theological schools into Popper’s arms. But no: recall that in Popper’s point of view, most new ideas will be found to be wrong when tested. If the cost of error is high, then free experiment will simply ruin the experimenters – and perhaps many others along with them. Actual tests of new ideas must be extremely rare.
Yet another step: trying to put God to the test may change one’s relationship with God. The Biblical tradition suggests that God is not fond of being understood on human terms. Perhaps Descartes was wrong to assume God would save skeptics and scholars from self-deception. So, there is a problem of recursion. If knowledge of God is relational, then the cost of trying to test that relationship may be damage to the relationship itself.
What Is Theology?
I do not have full responses to the second, third and fourth Cardinal Problems here. They trouble me today, as they have for years. As I draft more chapters of this review of Conjectures and Refutations, I will try to respond to each problem as it arises.
Each problem suggests a reason why Popper’s method might not work in theology. To explain these four problems, I have had to rely on a common-sense picture of what theology is and does. Is this picture accurate? This question leads us to the demarcation problem of theology. What ‘counts’ as theology always involves describing the relationship of humanity to God.
Faith Carpentry 