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Does contemporary theology require a postfoundationalist way of knowing?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2007

Kevin Diller
Kevin Diller*
Affiliation:
St Mary's College, St Andrews KY16 9JU, UKkd32@st-andrews.ac.uk
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Abstract

In his The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology, F. LeRon Shults recommends postfoundationalism as a via media between modernist foundationalism and postmodernist antifoundationalism. He advocates postfoundationalism as an epistemological approach which avoids the pitfalls on either side and provides the best way forward for constructive theological work. In this article I attempt to assess how well Shults's proposal treats Christian theological knowing. I begin by entertaining a Barthian theological concern which might be employed as soft criteria for an assessment of any proposed theological epistemology. This concern stipulates that an epistemology in the service of Christian theology must respect a commitment to the objective reality of God who, as Word become flesh, makes himself known through the human experience of reality to his church, while recognising the fallibility of human knowing, presupposing a knowledge of God accessible through experience always only by the prevenient, self-giving action of God. I then turn to a brief analysis of the Shults–van Huyssteen case against foundationalism and nonfoundationalism, focusing particularly on the postfoundationalist critiques of foundationalism and fideism in dialogue with Barth. The article concludes with an appraisal of the postfoundationalist recommendation. I argue that Shults's approach maps well to the theological concern for critical realism and a recognition of the social embeddedness of human knowing. Postfoundationalism's underlying commitments, however, leave it closed to an external source of warrant, and as a consequence repudiate a from above view of theological knowing. I suggest instead that only a theofoundationalist epistemology avoids the pitfalls sketched by Shults in a way that maintains proper epistemic humility without entering the ghettos of fideism or scepticism.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , August 2007, pp. 271 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2007

At age 4 my nephew was able to impress his aunts and uncles with an answer to the question ‘what is a question?’. ‘A query for information’, he would say, confidently expecting that your eyes would widen and face would brighten at such a parsimonious fountain of wisdom. The title of this article is a query for information; but underneath it is a query for information on the very nature of query and information. How could we go about answering a question about the nature of question and answer without begging the question in the answer? It appears that there may be an unavoidable circularity or self-referential hypocrisy inherent in any critical investigation of epistemological method. But then again, maybe this fear is just an instance of ‘Cartesian anxiety’.Footnote 1 Maybe my intuition itself is based on a false presumption about what it means to answer a question.

And this is really where I want to begin. What does it take for an answer to be an adequate answer to a question? If your first inclination is that an adequate answer ought to correspond to a singular, universal reality and be supported by reasons which are inferentially connected to trustworthy grounds, you might be a classical, modernist, evidentialist foundationalist. If your first inclination is that an adequate answer must describe a particularity that coheres within a culturally, contextually, relationally and linguistically conditioned web of beliefs, you might be a postmodernist, neo-fideist non- or anti-foundationalist. And, if you think that there is another option in between these two positions that takes the best of both alternatives while thereby avoiding the blind-spots that each points out in the other, you might be a postfoundationalist – or so F. LeRon Shults suggests in his book, The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology. Shults recommends J. Wentzel van Huyssteen's postfoundationalism as the best way to think about theology's way of knowing, and proper epistemology in general.Footnote 2

This article will attempt to assess the Shults–van Huyssteen via media position for the way of knowing in theology. My concern is not about its adequacy as a general epistemology but particularly about how well it treats theological knowing.Footnote 3 An assessment, however, requires criteria; and here we are again at the potential problem of circularity. I will begin by entertaining an important theological concern that could operate for us as soft criteria for an assessment of any proposed theological epistemology. I will attempt to hold this theological first-principal in a provisional and fallibilist way that might make Shults happy. These will not be foisted as a litmus test for selecting and confirming a high court epistemological nominee. (It would be unfair and uninteresting to take a foundationalist approach to critiquing postfoundationalism – unless we find that there is no other possible approach to take.) In order to keep pressure on the question of theological priority, I suggest that we consider the concerns of Karl Barth, a theologian well known for his admonitions about the encroachments of philosophy. I will then set out the Shults–van Huyssteen case against foundationalism and nonfoundationalism in favour of postfoundationalism, and follow up with a critical appraisal.

Karl Barth's critical concerns for theology's way of knowing

Barth saw Feuerbach as the ultimate nemesis of theology and at the same time a prophet of the age. Feuerbach drew attention to the fact that Christian theology, when justifying itself by an analogy from the human being to the divine being, grounded God in man. In Feuerbach's eyes, this was progress: ‘While I do reduce theology to anthropology, I exalt anthropology to theology; very much as Christianity while lowering God into man, made man into God’.Footnote 4 Barth read this as a charge to theology, that it not allow a general human anthropology to take priority over the particularity of revelation. The object of theology must not be a God invented by man, and the way of knowledge in theology ought to address and preclude this possibility.

Barth saw it as particularly important to weed out any initial metaphysical presupposition that would predetermine theology's way of knowing. It is often noted that Barth stands the Enlightenment on its head by reversing the priorities of epistemology and ontology that were themselves reversed by Descartes.Footnote 5 He challenges the classical foundationalism of Enlightenment modernism on the grounds that, starting with Descartes, an ontology was smuggled in, which suggested that a ‘self-understanding of human existence’ could offer a ‘pre-understanding and criterion of theological knowledge’.Footnote 6 The most notorious metaphysical presumption is a softening of the distinction between humans and God which is presumed when a path of knowing is taken from below to above. He warns that Feuerbach's challenge ‘becomes acute whenever incautious use is made in theology of mystical ideas, of the union of God and man’.Footnote 7

The priority of the way of knowing in theology is, therefore, from above to below.Footnote 8 It is always and definitively initiated by God who makes himself known in his revelation. Humans do not construct or even reverse engineer a knowledge of God, but the church receives the gift of knowing God, ‘by listening to Jesus Christ and as obedience to Him’.Footnote 9 ‘Faith grasps the promise that we shall be led into all truth’.Footnote 10 The gift of faith is the gift of knowing God. ‘Πίστις says more than –>γνῶσ#x03B9;ς, but in all circumstances it says –>γνῶσις too’.Footnote 11 In receiving the gift of faith ‘the proclamation of Christ confirms itself to people, in which people, touched by its truth, themselves become its bearers, and in which the knowledge of God becomes real’.Footnote 12 In order to avoid the possibility of reversing this order, which would result in a knowledge of human invention, theology must assert that it does have a foundation. It is not the foundation of self-assured knowing grounded on introspection (Cartesian rationalism), sense perception (Lockean empiricism) or transcendental logic (German idealism).Footnote 13 The foundation is secured in and by the very object of theology himself. Barth's foundationalism ‘renounce(s) any foundation apart from that which God has given once and for all by speaking’.Footnote 14 This is because it ‘has no basis or possibility outside itself, which can in no sense be explained in terms of man and man's situation, but only as knowledge of God from God, as free and unmerited grace’.Footnote 15

Because of his pronouncements against natural theology and the dangers of philosophical usurpation, Barth is regarded by some as anti-philosophical or philosophically naive.Footnote 16 On the contrary, Barth recognises that ‘If we open our mouths, we find ourselves in the province of philosophy’.Footnote 17 Theology is done ‘within the framework of philosophy’.Footnote 18 In his view, this fact makes it all the more important for theology to be critical about constraining philosophical assumptions. Real naiveté is found when theologians uncritically accept notions like modernist foundationalism. Barth observes that, ‘The confidence of the Enlightenment in the right and the power of rational thought was naive, untested and therefore unsecured, stuck fast in half-truths and open to all kinds of counter-blows’.Footnote 19 The difference for Barth is that he starts with the presupposition of the revelation of God in Christ, and looks for the proper philosophical concepts to convey what is meant and entailed by that presumption.Footnote 20

An excellent source for locating Barth's material concerns for the interaction with philosophy is in a 1929 essay with the English title Fate and Idea in Theology.Footnote 21 Here he highlights the benefits and dangers for theology of realism and idealism, which he sees as opposite poles in philosophy. While too cursory a summary risks over-simplifying Barth's position, I believe his main insights can be stated succinctly. Barth begins with realism because he finds a measure of realism to be an unavoidable (we might even say incorrigible) starting point. ‘If we are going to talk about God as the object of theology, then we will already be advancing a typically realist proposition’.Footnote 22 God is objectively real; and by claiming that God is real we include God in the reality in which we experience ourselves and the world.Footnote 23 The danger, if taken uncritically, is that the realist will suppose that knowledge of God can be read directly from the data of given experience, whether subjectively or empirically. But the confidence with which theology grasps its knowledge of God is a ‘confidence in God's self-giving’ which is ‘rather different from realism's confidence in God's givenness’.Footnote 24 Barth noticed that a confidence in God's givenness entails an unwarranted anthropological assumption that we have a properly functioning human capacity to know God by means of the use of our own endowments applied to the data of given experience. This assumption is not entailed in the presupposition of revelation; in fact, our fallenness, not to mention God's otherness, suggests quite the opposite.Footnote 25 The knowledge of God requires the accompanying action of God breaking through to us in revelation, in which he himself is the very content.

‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ – what does that mean if not that the Word, and hence the God with whom we have to do, entered into our own particular mode of being, that of nature and history? Jesus Christ as the Word of God to us and therefore himself as God is the content of revelation. And also the Holy Spirit, who illumines the Word for us and us for the Word, is himself God, is the content of revelation.Footnote 26

God lifts our reason to give us a knowledge of himself through the medium of creaturely experience. ‘Reason's normal activity is not interrupted; but it is directed, guided and ordered by something superior to itself, something that has no part in its antithesis.’ While encountering us through the data of given experience, however, the knowledge of God can never be reduced to that experience or derived from it independently from the determining act of God.Footnote 27 This is where the chastening of idealism is helpful. In its pursuit of truth, idealism is critically reflective about the limits of human knowing.Footnote 28 Idealism recognises the problem of our inability to secure a neutral ground of knowing outside of ourselves, a ‘view from nowhere’. We have no unobscured access to the knowledge of God through the data of experience. If we are to know God, God must make himself known to us.Footnote 29 But the chastening of a critical idealism should never be seen to repudiate what Barth has affirmed in a proper critical realism – namely, that God really reveals himself to us through otherwise inadequate creaturely thoughts, experience and words, without becoming identical to them. Those who would claim Barth for postmodernism are in danger of hearing the second word of chastening idealism as a repudiation of the first word of critical realism, which stakes its confidence in the Word that became flesh.Footnote 30 There may be postmodern parallels in Barth, but the fact that knowing God is, from below, a human impossibility does not change the fact that God, from above, has made it possible for humans to know him.

Barth's caution against alien philosophical assumptions is due, at least in part, to his sensitivity to avoid Feuerbach's conclusion that theology is merely anthropology. Starting with a presupposition of revelation he is committed to the actuality (Wirklichkeit) of God.Footnote 31 He guards this concern by asserting a strong differentiation between God and the human knower for whom theology is a ‘fallible human work’ that must be done as ‘obedience to grace’,Footnote 32 requiring that the knowledge of God, dependent on God's free self-giving act, move from above to below. And it is the individual only as a member of Christ's body, the church, who is lifted up in this from above revelation of God.Footnote 33 Let us summarise these Barthian concerns into one statement:

(TC) Christian theology is committed to the objective reality of God who, as Word become flesh, makes himself known through the human experience of reality to his church, but recognizes the fallibility of human knowing, presupposing a knowledge of God accessible through experience always only by the prevenient, self-giving action of God.

Shults–van Huyssteen Postfoundationalism

We are now ready to launch head first into the Shults–van Huyssteen proposal. I will refer primarily to Shults's The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology, which contains the cleanest and most systematic presentation. While Shults's wider concern in the book is to suggest that Wolfhart Pannenberg's theological method is largely postfoundationalist, our interest will be focused on how he distinguishes and argues for postfoundationalism itself.

As I painted it in the introduction, postfoundationalism is described as an alternative between two extreme positions, foundationalism and nonfoundationalism, often considered to be two mutually exclusive and equally unacceptable notions of rationality. Shults, however, considers this to be a ‘bogus dichotomy’.Footnote 34 His argument for a third middle way attempts to harness the helpful intuitions of each without taking on board their more negative elements. As Shults states, ‘Postfoundationalism aims to develop a plausible model of theological rationality that charts a course between the Scylla of foundationalist dogmatism and the Charybdis of nonfoundationalist relativism’.Footnote 35 The post of postfoundationalism is not to be understood as signifying the complete overthrow of foundationalism in the way that postmodernism is often mistakenly thought to signify the utter divestiture of modernism. On the contrary, those foundationalist as well as nonfoundationalist intuitions that are judged to be helpful are retained.

At least at first glance, it appears that what Shults is doing is the same kind of thing that Barth is doing in Schicksal und Idee; and, at second glance, the comparison grows even stronger. In Shults's view, foundationalism offers us a singular, objective and unitary notion of truth, where knowledge of reality is based on an experiential connection to it. Nonfoundationalism reminds us that beliefs are complex, interrelated and greatly shape interpretations of experience, tainting all knowing with a subjective fallibility. This synthesis strongly parallels the one Barth draws between realism and idealism. Even the rejections are parallel. Pure foundationalism is rejected as overly positive and uncritical. Pure idealism becomes subjectively relative. For the very same reasons, both Barth and van Huyssteen have been classed, at times, as critical realistsFootnote 36 – realists chastened by idealism – foundationalists cautioned by nonfoundationalism. One might expect that Barth and not Pannenberg would be sought as the proto-postfoundationalist.Footnote 37 This, however, is apparently not to be. Shults and van Huyssteen consider Barth more foe than friend. In their view, Barth is the worst combination of foundationalism and nonfoundationalism – he is a fideist foundationalist.Footnote 38 It seems to me that this rejection of Barth is very worth investigating further, and that a fruitful way to dig into postfoundationalism is to focus on the postfoundationalist critiques of foundationalism and fideism.

A postfoundationalist critique of foundationalism

Early on in the discussion, Shults signals a significant continuity between what he views as failed modernist foundationalism and postfoundationalism's ‘new theological rationality’. We cannot and should not attempt to escape foundations altogether in theology. Built into the very nature of inferential reasoning is a distinction between an inference and that upon which an inference is based. He says: ‘It is important to capture our pre-analytic intuition that being rational includes having good reasons as a basis for our beliefs’.Footnote 39 Postfoundationalism still has to deal with the problem of ‘articulating how theological claims may be rationally justified’.Footnote 40 Shults accepts that part of the basic structure of reason involves anchoring beliefs in supporting grounds. Furthermore, Shults is willing to accept this as true based on its being a ‘pre-analytic intuition’, or a priori as simply part of ‘the dynamics of inferential patterns in thinking’.Footnote 41 He argues, moreover, that nonfoundationalists betray a tacit commitment to foundations in the very way they argue for nonfoundationalism.Footnote 42 We have, therefore, a basic insight that foundationalism provides which should be retained; but, on Shults's view, there are also at least two reasons to reject foundationalism in favour of postfoundationalism. The first reason has to do with foundationalism's ambitious entry requirements, and the second has to do with its limits in describing knowledge structures.

Foundationalism's problematic entry requirements

The first problem with foundationalism is its very optimistic view of the power of human reason to guarantee certainty by grasping and anchoring all reasoning in apodictic starting points. Foundationalism's mistake is to assume that ‘human reason could attain absolute and certain knowledge based on self-evident foundational experiences or a priori propositions, from which necessary and universal conclusions could be reached’.Footnote 43 The version of foundationalism that Shults is critiquing here is distinguished as strong or classical foundationalism. According to classical foundationalism all knowledge has a linear inferential relationship to basic beliefs about which we can be certain that they could not fail to be true. The trick to this version of foundationalism is in establishing the criteria for a belief to be accepted as basic. Shults points to a problem of infinite regress.Footnote 44 Alvin Plantinga has delivered one of the most incisive refutations of this version of foundationalism. He demonstrates that the traditional strict criteria of self-evidence, incorrigibility and being evident to the senses do not meet their own standard.Footnote 45 What both of these critiques point to is the problem alluded to at the beginning of this article. To what grounds could we appeal non-self-referentially to establish the certainty that is required to anchor the grounds of all knowledge?

It is important to see that the initial problem Shults raises with classical foundationalism is aimed at its stringent entry requirement – namely, that we be able to demonstrate the apodicticity of our foundational beliefs. What Shults is really objecting to could be called an internalist evidentialist requirement applied to foundational beliefs. Following Mikael Stenmark's definition as Shults does, evidentialism is the notion that ‘it is rational to accept a proposition or belief only if there are good reasons to believe it is true’.Footnote 46 We could say that evidentialism becomes internalist when what it takes for reasons to be good reasons is that they deliver an unmistakable assurance of truth based only on the resources internal to one's cognitive apparatus. If an internalist evidentialist requirement is binding on foundational beliefs then Shults is no doubt correct that we face the problem of an infinite regress.Footnote 47 So the foundationalism that Shults rejects with his regress argument can be stated as follows:

(CF) For all inferential and immediately foundational beliefs, a belief p is justified for person S if and only if S has unmistakable assurances of the truth of p based on resources internal to S's own cognitive apparatus.

This version of foundationalism is indeed unable to escape the problem of regress because no belief can serve to assure unmistakably its own truth.

There are, of course, other versions of foundationalism that are not susceptible to this critique, because they do not involve the same strict requirements for beliefs in the foundation. Shults recognises this fact and therefore suggests a second argument against foundationalism that he believes applies even to the weak foundationalism promoted by reformed epistemologists.Footnote 48 Again following Mikael Stenmark, Shults considers a more modest definition of foundationalism:Footnote 49

(WF) ‘There are two types of beliefs: basic and non-basic. The former are justified non-inferentially or immediately, while the latter are justified by inferential appeal to basic beliefs.’Footnote 50

We can call this a weak foundationalism because the foundation entry requirements are not tightly constrained. In fact no requirements are specified for what qualifies as immediate or non-inferential justification of a belief. But Shults still finds something objectionable about this account of the structure of knowledge.

Foundationalism's problematic understanding of the structure of knowledge

Shults follows Susan Haack's criticism of the foundationalist commitment to ‘one-directionality’ in belief formation.Footnote 51 In her penetrating book, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Haack argues for her own alternative to foundationalism and coherentism – foundherentism. She unearths in foundationalism what she takes to be the implicit assumption of a requirement for linear inferential reasoning. Inferences form links in a chain of reasoning that connect non-foundational beliefs back to the foundation. The discussion is usually conducted around what qualifies as an inference or basic belief. Haack, however, rejects the assumption ‘that there need be a chain of reasons at all’.Footnote 52 Beliefs, she claims, can enjoy justification on the basis of ‘mutual support’Footnote 53 and need not always rely on a unidirectional inference. On a coherentist model, of course, the mutual support of beliefs is an intuition that characterises the entire structure of knowledge. Coherentism, in its purest form, considers coherence with the belief structure to be the only criteria for belief justification. Haack observes that the typical foundationalist objection to coherentism is that it is a type of circular reasoning. But this, she argues, is a misreading of coherentism that occurs because the foundationalist is still assuming a chain of inferences that appears to loop back on itself.Footnote 54 Plantinga agrees here with Haack:

the coherentist does not really tout circular reasoning. . . . A pure coherentist resolutely rejects warrant transmission altogether; for her, all propositions that enjoy warrant in a noetic structure are basic in that structure.Footnote 55

Haack is not recommending a pure coherentism because it gives no place for justification to flow from experience of the world. If external justificatory input were not allowed, it is hard to see how beliefs could be connected to truth about the world. ‘A theory couched in terms exclusively of relations among a subject's beliefs faces an insuperable difficulty about the connection between the concepts of justification and truth.’Footnote 56 This is a critically realist intuition shared by Haack, Shults, Plantinga and Barth.

Haack's solution is to combine an openness to external input missing from pure coherentism along with an openness to mutually supportive beliefs missing from foundationalism. She acknowledges that a weak form of foundationalism might allow for mutual support among derivative beliefs, but never that mutual support could establish a foundational belief. For if a foundational belief were established on the mutual support of say an external stimulus, along with the support of other existing beliefs, then foundationalism would no longer have a truly privileged class of beliefs. All beliefs could be dependent on the support of other beliefs to some extent. But what argument does she advance to press the need for a notion of mutual warrant transfer between beliefs? Haack gives a number of arguments against foundationalism. But most of these, she admits, only affect strong, pure or infallibilist forms of foundationalism. Her argument against the unidirectionality in a modest, weak foundationalism has two parts. She first begins with a ‘common enough kind of situation’ which she believes illustrates that warrant is transferred mutually in the establishment of beliefs that foundationalists take to be basic. She considers the belief that arises from the simple sense experience of seeing a dog, which the foundationalist accepts as basic because it is delivered by sense experience. She contests that the notion of the basic givenness of sense experience is overly simplistic in this case because the belief that a person is seeing a dog is mutually supported by other beliefs like: ‘that his eyes are working normally, that he is not under the influence of post-hypnotic suggestion, that there are no very lifelike toy dogs around, etc., etc.’Footnote 57 For the second part of the argument, Haack places the burden of proof on the foundationalist assumption that mutual warrant between beliefs cannot ground a basic belief. In her view, the foundationalist has no good reason for insisting ‘that there must be a distinct, privileged class of basic beliefs which get their justification entirely without the support of any other beliefs’.Footnote 58 For clarity's sake, my understanding of the argument can be outlined as follows:

  • Tension: Foundherentism holds that there is no privileged class of basic beliefs that are justificatorily independent from all other beliefs, while foundationalism says there are.

  • Arg. part 1: There is a case of belief (that which involves seeing a dog) where a belief that foundationalists hold to be basic is shown to require the support of other beliefs; this case is, furthermore, indicative of all basic belief candidates.

  • Arg. part 2: No argument can be produced to secure the foundationalist claim that there is a privileged class of basic beliefs that are justificatorily independent from all other beliefs.

  • Resolution: Therefore foundherentism and not foundationalism must be correct.

At least two objections can be raised against part 1 of Haack's argument and if either are successful would recommend abandoning the conclusion. The first objection questions whether the right kind of argument has been employed in part 1. Even if Haack is correct that the belief that one is seeing a dog requires the support of other beliefs, she has not given us any reason to suppose that this can be assumed of all basic belief candidates. The inductive form of the argument limits its range somewhat. Even if we suppose that her conclusion is decisive for all perceptual beliefs, the most it could ever establish would be the more modest claim that not all beliefs foundationalists take as basic really are.Footnote 59

The second objection is that Haack has not presented us with an example of the mutually supporting beliefs professed by foundherentism. The supporting beliefs she mentions (eyes working normally, not under hypnosis, no toy-dog look-alikes present) do not in any way challenge the possibility that the sense experience is operating alone as the unidirectional basis for the belief. Appealing to John Pollock's distinction between reasons and defeaters,Footnote 60 Haack's supposed supporting beliefs merely represent the absence of a defeater, not a reason or basis for the belief. The function of a defeater is to undermine a belief. The function of a reason is to support a belief. It is the sense experience itself that grounds the belief that I am being appeared to dogly. This leads directly to the belief, in the absence of a defeater, that I am seeing a dog.Footnote 61 In fact we would think that something is wrong with someone who doesn't believe they are seeing a dog when they have a visual experience of a dog and have no other reason to believe that their visual experience is not to be trusted.

It is possible that we could attempt to strengthen Haack's argument here by suggesting other beliefs that are operative in the interpretation of visual experience, beliefs that function as positive reasons rather than merely indicating the absence of defeaters. After all, in order even to be aware that a certain visual stimulus is accurately interpreted as being dogly appeared to, requires an up-and-running nexus of background beliefs, enabling a complex activity of flexibly rigid form recognition. There may even be some mutuality in the way that a new visual experience might serve ever so slightly to confirm or shape the interpretative framework. These observations, it seems to me, offer much stronger inductive support for the case Haack would like to make. But this interpretative framework that I am calling a nexus of beliefs is really nothing other than my developed faculty of perception. This is what Plantinga calls properly functioning internal rationality, ‘forming and holding the appropriate beliefs in response to experience’.Footnote 62 I do not reason in terms of inference from my faculty of perception. I look out of the window and see two objects and one appears further away from me than the other. Immediately upon perceiving these objects I form the belief that the one is further away from me than the other. This belief is not based on an inference from beliefs I have about how to interpret three-dimensional impressions arising from stereoscopic vision. It certainly does not require that this belief be checked for coherence with the rest of my beliefs. It is a belief that we all accept in the basic way. The adequacy of the interpretative framework has to do with how well it serves the formation of true belief on the unidirectional basis of experience. Neither Haack nor Kant himself provides us with any reason not to accept some perceptual beliefs as basic and therefore acceptable independent of inferences from other beliefs. Furthermore, if all Haack has in mind is the role played by interpretative frameworks, her position becomes difficult to distinguish from the critical realism of Barth and Plantinga. But here is where we pick back up with an important theme of the Shults–van Huyssteen postfoundationalism.

Shults contends that a ‘distinctive move is found in postfoundationalism's attempt to link (without conflating) epistemology and hermeneutics’.Footnote 63 Postfoundationalism takes seriously the foundationalist epistemological position that experience is the basis of belief, while also maintaining the nonfoundationalist hermeneutical position that one's web of belief conditions experience.Footnote 64 In Shults's words: ‘Interpreted experience engenders and nourishes all beliefs, and a network of beliefs informs the interpretation of experience’.Footnote 65 Here again is a restatement of critical realism. But in light of our conversation with Haack a new question is raised. Even granting the fallibility of our beliefs, conditioning and conditioned by subjective interpretations, can there still be a privileged class of beliefs, or are all foundations insecure? Shults appears to answer that while some beliefs may have more weight than others, all foundations are insecure and so no foundations are unassailable.Footnote 66 Barth's position is that in the closed system of human cognition it may be that all epistemic foundations are hopelessly insecure, but God has broken in to give a knowledge of God that is secured by and in God. But this is seen as a foundationalism built on faith alone. In Shults's view, it is Barth's fideism that makes his foundationalism unacceptable.

A postfoundationalist critique of fideism

On the postfoundationalist analysis, positivistic evidentialism would be the error most often associated with foundationalism; whereas fideism is more typically a quandary for the nonfoundationalist. Shults claims that there is a ‘hidden fideism in nonfoundationalist thought’.Footnote 67 Put most simply, fideism is the denial of foundations. If there are no foundations then knowledge is an arbitrary and relativistic assumption established within the community of knowers. Van Huyssteen assesses Ronald Thiemann's nonfoundationalism as essentially fideistic: ‘On this view religious beliefs have no need for explanatory support and in the end can hardly be seen as more than a groundless language game.’Footnote 68 This really is the same critique that Shults levels against Barth:

The truth of this Word is self-evident for those who receive it in faith; on this incorrigible foundation, Barth builds his Church Dogmatics. The obvious problem here is that proponents of other religions (or other Christian denominations) can assert the same self-evidence for their faith; how are we to judge between them?Footnote 69

Shults is aligned with Pannenberg's dismissal of Barth as positivistic, ‘basing theology on an arbitrary venture of faith on the part of the theologian’.Footnote 70 Shults stipulates that ‘the Christian idea of God cannot be held onto as a self-justifying foundation’.Footnote 71 He and van Huyssteen are particularly motivated to maintain the voice of theology in interdisciplinary dialogue.Footnote 72 This is evident in the ‘obvious problem’ Shults registers with Barth's incorrigible foundation. Anyone in the debate could pick their own favourite starting point, and if that's okay, the debate is over.

It is interesting that Shults does not give us an explicit definition of fideism. From his usage, it would appear that he believes a fideistic move is made whenever an unsupported assumption becomes the ground of knowledge.

  1. (F1) A position is fideistic whenever an unsupported assumption becomes the ground of knowledge.

If this is true, then to avoid fideism obviously requires that all knowledge must be supported. But this looks like a simple affirmation of evidentialism, defined earlier as the position that ‘it is rational to accept a proposition or belief only if there are good reasons to believe it is true’. Although never stated explicitly by Shults, postfoundationalism like Pannenberg is committed to evidentialism, but not blindly. Shults has already lodged an infinite regress argument against evidentialism. Shults sees that evidentialism is in danger of collapsing under the weight of its own requirement. What supporting reason can be given to support the belief that no belief is rational unless it has a supporting reason? Postfoundationalism, nevertheless, is committed to some modest form of evidentialism. What is unexpected, however, is that Shults accepts Stenmark's presumptionism as compatible with postfoundationalism. Presumptionism holds that ‘it is rational to accept a belief unless there are good reasons to cease from thinking that it is true’.Footnote 73 Now this would appear to mean that it is rational to accept a belief without a reason to support it unless there are good reasons to cease from thinking that it is true.Footnote 74 Perhaps Shults does not hold F1 but rather understands fideism to be the acceptance of a belief when there are good reasons to think it is not true.

  1. (F2) A position is fideistic whenever an unsupported assumption becomes the ground of knowledge and there are good reasons to think it is not true.

But if assuming a revelation from above or a starting point in God is fideistic, then, given F2, Shults would have to believe there are good reasons to think that God has not revealed himself – which he might hesitate to affirm.

There is a resolution to this possibly false dilemma I've created, and it requires assigning Shults's notion of fallibilism a primary role. Shults advises ‘If we want to avoid fideism, we must hold onto the ideals of truth, objectivity, and rationality, while at the same time acknowledging the provisional, contextual, and fallible nature of human reason.’Footnote 75 The real problem with the fideistic move is not that it assumes a foundation without a reason to support it; the problem with fideism is that the foundation is assumed with certainty and immovability.

  1. (F3) A position is fideistic whenever an unsupported assumption becomes the unassailable ground of knowledge, or there are good reasons to think it is not true.

This is the same important qualification that Shults places on his evidentialism. Precisely because of the inability of escaping the infinite regress, we are faced with the realisation that all our knowing falls short of certainty, and therefore foundations must be fluid. So long as our foundations remain provisional and revisable, the broader interdisciplinary, interfaith debate can continue – not from places of neutrality, but clearly also not from places of intractability. The real sting of fideism is its lack of humility which stifles dialogue and prevents the growth that can come from being challenged by other views. Where the hubris of human certainty infects our thinking ghettos form and stagnate.Footnote 76

This leaves us, however, with a perplexity regarding the postfoundationalist critique of Barth. Barth clearly affirms the fallibility of all human knowing.Footnote 77 That affirmation seems as important for Barth as it is for Shults. So how is it that Barth can claim faith as a secure (non-fluid) foundation? Let us look again at the account Shults gives of Barth's fideism. ‘For Karl Barth the “act of faith”, the risk one takes in affirming the self-authenticating Word of God, leads to a positing of this Word as an epistemic foundation’.Footnote 78 And let us also recall the two quotations above: the first from Pannenberg who understands Barth to be ‘basing theology on an arbitrary venture of faith on the part of the theologian’; the second, Shults's stipulation that ‘the Christian idea of God cannot be held onto as a self-justifying foundation’. These three characterisations of Barth's position each betray a major misreading of Barth. The misreading is so significant that it has turned Barth 180 degrees from his actual position. For Barth, faith is not a human act risked to affirm God's Word; quite the contrary, faith is the gift of God in the act of the Word of God risked to affirm the human knower. For Barth, theology is not based on a venture of the theologian; rather, theology is based on the knowledge of God in faith secured by the revelatory act of God. And finally, the Christian idea of God does not constitute a self-justifying foundation; God himself is the one and only self-justifying foundation for the knowledge of God.

Does contemporary theology require a postfoundationalist way of knowing?

We began by considering some of Karl Barth's concerns for a proper philosophical construal of the way of knowing in Christian theology.

  1. (TC) Christian theology is committed to the objective reality of God who, as Word become flesh, makes himself known through the human experience of reality to his church, but recognizes the fallibility of human knowing, presupposing a knowledge of God accessible through experience always only by the prevenient, self-giving action of God.

In many ways the objectives and commitments of postfoundationalism map well to these concerns. One significant point of agreement that has not been mentioned has to do with the concern to maintain that it is the individual as a member of Christ's body, the church, and not the individual in isolation from it, who is the recipient of God's self-revelation. Postfoundationalism accommodates this view by maintaining that human knowing is socially embedded and not merely the province of the isolated individual subject. My emphasis has been to show that both postfoundationalism and TC can be rightly considered critically realist views, which seek to harmonise a commitment to the objective reality and rationality of God, while acknowledging the limitations, embeddedness and fallibility of human reason. Barth, however, is prepared to suggest that God has responded to the limitations and fallibility of human reason freely and securely establishing for us the gift of knowing God; and while the human concepts are never adequate in themselves, they do become adequate by God's decision and power. It is a similar move that Alvin Plantinga makes when he argues that the internal instigation of the Holy Spirit could serve as a direct source of warrant.Footnote 79 Postfoundationalism appears closed to an external source of warrant, and as a consequence it repudiates a from above view of theological knowing. Shults quotes Pannenberg's rejection of Barth's from above:

Theology has to learn that after Feuerbach it can no longer mouth the word ‘God’ without offering any explanation; that it can no longer speak as if the meaning of this word were self-evident; that it cannot pursue theology ‘from above,’ as Barth says, if it does not want to fall into the hopeless and, what is more, self-inflicted isolation of a higher glossolalia, and lead the whole church into this blind alley . . . . The struggle over the concept of God has to be conducted indeed in the fields of philosophy, the sciences of religion, and anthropology. If Feuerbach should prove right in these fields then the proof of atheism for which he strove would in fact be accomplished.Footnote 80

Barth was keenly aware of the problem of starting with a general amorphous theism, which is why he always pointed to the particularity of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The irony of Pannenberg's position is that only by taking the from above view is there any hope of allowing theological pressures to inform anthropology and not vice versa. The recommendation that the struggle over the concept of God be conducted in the field of, among others, anthropology, plays clearly into Feuerbach's hands. Postfoundationalism shares this rootedness in and optimism about a general anthropology.Footnote 81

At the beginning of this article, I alluded to the fact that the first and most obvious problem with most epistemologies is self-referential. Postfoundationalism, as an attempt to bring together two failed epistemologies, is doubly diseased by an impossibility of meeting its own standards. On the one hand, postfoundationalism is committed to evidentialism and it would appear to be an evidentialism of the internalist sort that confines human knowing exclusively to those beliefs justifiable by resources internal to one's own cognitive apparatus. That knowledge is or should in fact be so restricted, however, has certainly not itself been justified evidentially. On the other hand, postfoundationalism is committed to fallibilism, which intends to say that while it is believed that the objective reality of God and the world does break through to us in experience, we remain slaves of our own subjective, conditioning interpretations. Maintaining this commitment is a recognition that we cannot see our way out of our own epistemological morass; but if this is true and the last word, epistemological agnosticism appears rather to be more consistent than postfoundationalism.Footnote 82

As an instruction for method in theology, postfoundationalism would sell theology's birthright for a rather unappetising meal. Shults and van Huyssteen appear ready to dismiss the from above option recommended by Barth and reformed epistemology, preferring to defend a closed and inextricably fallible human system.Footnote 83 The birthright of Christian theology (–>θεολογεῖν)Footnote 84 is reflecting in the confidence of faith on the very gift of revelation out of which it was born. What does postfoundationalism give us in return? The critical realism linked with the strict fallibilism of postfoundationalism intends to eliminate the dogmatism and relativism that stifle interdisciplinary cross-pollination. But for all its appeal to human fallibility, postfoundationalism remains strangely optimistic, and seemingly modernistic, about the promise of the scientific advance of human knowledge through interdisciplinary dialogue aimed at developing ‘more adequate’ explanations using ‘intersubjectively criticizable criteria’.Footnote 85 Shults writes: ‘Postfoundationalism aims to overcome this ghettoization of Christian theology . . . by engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue across contexts in search of more adequate explanations’.Footnote 86 Human fallibility is certainly correct, but when human fallibility is the final word, the postmodernists are right, there no longer exists any secure place from which to judge explanatory adequacy.Footnote 87 Van Huyssteen's pressing question is, ‘Do we still have good reasons to stay convinced that the Christian message does indeed provide the most adequate interpretation and explanation of one's experience of God, and of our world as understood by contemporary science?’ Trapped inside a fallible human system, a non-question-begging answer to this question is not possible. Only through the experience of the act of revelation itself can the question of revelation's adequacy be justified to us. Postfoundationalism appears to characterise theology not as faith seeking understanding, but rather doubt seeking a criteria for adequacy.

In trust and obedience, theology rests confidently on ground secured by God alone, never contained adequately in human propositions apart from the revealing action of God which transforms them into adequate vehicles of truth.Footnote 88 With its foundation in the self-revealing God of grace, the gift of faith that seeks understanding has real cognitive content. Beginning with this gracious gift, theology must respond effectively to the critiques of Feuerbach by shifting our confidence and starting point from humanity to God. We are not left adrift in either a modern or postmodern anthropocentrism, whether uncritical or critical, fundamentalist or fallibilist, dogmatic or humble. The hallmark of our humility is an awareness that while we are yet fallible God infallibly bridges the epistemic chasm. We have been given a ‘treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us’.Footnote 89 Far from fideistic, this is our only escape from the ghettoes of human reason. ‘For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness”, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’.Footnote 90 Theology takes a theofoundationalist, not a postfoundationalist way of knowing.

Footnotes

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References

1 Bernstein, Richard J., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), pp. 16–19Google Scholar. Bernstein suggests that Cartesian anxiety is what motivates a ‘misleading and distortive’ dichotomy between objectivism and relativism.

2 Shults, F. LeRon, The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology: Wolfhart Pannenberg and the New Theological Rationality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999)Google Scholar.

3 This is not to suggest that there is a broader or more general way of knowing outside of the way taken in theology. As Karl Barth says, ‘theology understands itself as (the) fundamental reflection about human existence as discussed within the framework of philosophy’. Karl, Barth, ‘Fate and Idea in Theology’, in The Way of Theology in Karl Barth: Essays and Comments, ed. Martin, Rumscheidt, Princeton Theological Monograph Series, 8 (Allison Park, Pa.: Pickwick Publications, 1986), p. 27.Google Scholar

4 Ludwig, Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George, MarionEvans, Eliot (New York: Harper, 1957)Google Scholar, quoted in the introductory essay by Karl Barth, p. xv.

5 Christoph Schwöbel gives voice to this Barth commonplace. ‘What characterizes the modernity which is the target of Barth's critique? The first is the inversion of the order of being and knowing, of ontology or metaphysics and epistemology. In pre-modern times, the question of the being (or essence) of something had primacy over the question of how it can be known’. ‘Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. J. B. Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 29.

6 CD I/1, p. 36 (KD I/1, pp. 35–6). Elsewhere: ‘The Modernist view from which we must demarcate ourselves here goes back to the Renaissance and especially to the Renaissance philosopher Descartes with his proof of God from human self-certainty.’ CD I/1, p. 195 (KD I/1, p. 203).

7 Karl, Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (London: SCM Press, 1972), pp. 537–8Google Scholar.

8 Barth uses the expression ‘von unten nach oben’ to describe the wrong way to ground theological knowing and to distinguish from the only proper and indeed possible orientation for theology ‘von oben nach unten’. KD I/1, pp. 135, 178, 179, 189, 255, 440. This does not mean that the medium of revelation is not of the unten. The incarnation is a historical, this-worldly, and indeed empirical reality; nevertheless, the Ursprung is von oben and therefore the way of revelation, the way we come to know God ‘von oben nach unten führt’, p. 440.

9 CD I/1, p. 17 For listening and obedience Barth uses the related words Gehör and Gehorsam (KD I/1, p. 17).

10 Ibid., quoting John 16:13.

11 CD I/1, p. 229 (KD I/1, p. 241).

12 Barth goes on to say, ‘Augustine rightly says: Si tollatur assensio, fides tollitur; quia sine assensione nihil creditur [if assent be taken away, faith goes too; for without assent there can be no belief] (Enchir., p. 20). And Thomas Aquinas has the correct definition: fides cognitio quaedam est, inquantum intellectus determinatur per fidem ad aliquod cognoscibile [Faith is a kind of knowledge, inasmuch as the intellect is determined by faith to some knowable object] . . . Thus it is in faith, as the possibility given in faith, that we have to understand the knowability of the Word of God. In the event of faith it is as it were born, it comes into view, and it is to be sought and found.’ Ibid. (I've updated the translation of Menschen from men to people.)

13 These are the three modern manifestations of foundationalism according to Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, pp. 32–5.

14 CD I/1, p. 120 (KD I/1, p. 123).

15 Ibid.

16 Bultmann accuses Barth of having ‘failed to enter into debate with modern philosophy and naively adopted the older ontology from patristic and scholastic dogmatics’. Karl Barth and others, Karl Barth–Rudolf Bultmann Letters, 1922–1966 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981), p. 38. Harnack sees in Barth's unscientific notion of revelation a teetering between ‘absolute religious scepticism and naive biblicism’. The accusation that Barth heralds an uncritical neo-orthodoxy is in this same vein.

17 Karl, Barth, Credo: A Presentation of the Chief Problems of Dogmatics with Reference to the Apostles’ Creed (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936), p. 183Google Scholar.

18 Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 27.

19 Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, p. 394.

20 Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 36. For similarities in the a posteriori nature of the reflection of theology and science see Torrance, Thomas F., God and Rationality (London: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

21 Published originally in 1929, Karl, Barth, ‘Schicksal und Idee in Der Theologie’, in Theologische Fragen und Antworten (Zollikon: Evang. Verl., 1957)Google Scholar.

22 Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 35.

23 Ibid., p. 36.

24 Ibid., p. 40.

25 Ibid., p. 41.

26 Ibid., p. 35.

27 Ibid., p. 49.

28 Ibid., pp. 42–3.

29 Ibid., p. 47.

30 See especially Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 27–33. Ward suggests that Barth presents two antithetical views without providing a way to move between them. He presents these as two competing models of language which reflect respectively a naïve realism and a strong idealism. ‘Barth needs to provide a . . . coherent account of the interplay between two antithetical models for the nature of language. One offers a direct correspondence between signifier and signified, word and Word, but constitutes a natural theology and dissolves the distinction between the creaturely and the divine, the human and God as Wholly Other. The other denies the possibility of moving beyond mediation and, therefore, the possibility of any true knowledge of God as Wholly Other.’ Word became flesh is not enough for Ward. See critical reviews in Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Graham Ward's Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology’, Scottish Journal of Theology 49/1 (1996). David Guretzki, ‘Barth, Derrida and Différance: Is there a Difference?’, Didaskalia 13/2 (Spring 2002).

31 Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 36.

32 CD I/1, p. 4 (KD 1/1, p. 2).

33 ‘By “theology” we understand that discipline of the church. Theology is thus related to the church as its theological sphere of life.’ Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 26.

34 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 27.

35 Ibid., p. 26.

36 Barth is most notably identified with critical realism in McCormack, Bruce L., Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development, 1909–1936 (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1995)Google Scholar. For postfoundationalism and critical realism see van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel, The Shaping of Rationality: Toward Interdisciplinarity in Theology and Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 213–19Google Scholar. and Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, pp. 46, 50–1, 79.

37 While Barth is not embraced as a postfoundationalist, he is claimed by some as a proto-postmodernist: Isolde, Andrews, Deconstructing Barth: A Study of the Complementary Methods in Karl Barth and Jacques Derrida (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996)Google Scholar; William, Stacy Johnson, The Mystery of God: Karl Barth and the Postmodern Foundations of Theology, 1st edn, Columbia Series in Reformed Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Graham, Ward, ‘Barth, Modernity and Postmodernity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. Webster, J. B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

38 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, pp. 52–3.

39 Ibid., p. 30.

40 Ibid., p. 31.

41 Ibid., p. 30.

42 Ibid., pp. 29, 30.

43 Ibid., p. 31.

44 Ibid., p. 33.

45 Alvin, Plantinga, ‘Reason and Belief in God’, in Plantinga, Alvin and Wolterstorff, Nicholas (eds), Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 61ffGoogle Scholar.

46 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 40.

47 This is precisely what Michael Bergmann demonstrates when treating the ‘conceptual awareness’ notion of internalism: ‘A Dilemma for Internalists’, in Thomas Crisp, Matthew Davidson, and David Vander Laan (eds), Knowledge and Reality: Essays in Honor of Alvin Plantinga, (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming).

48 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 47. As reformed epistemologists he has singled out Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff.

49 Mikael, Stenmark, Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life: A Critical Evaluation of Four Models of Rationality (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), p. 44Google Scholar.

50 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 47.

51 Susan, Haack, Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), p. 19Google Scholar.

52 Ibid., p. 23.

53 Ibid., pp. 25–7.

54 Ibid., pp. 23, 26.

55 Alvin, Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 79.Google Scholar

56 Haack, Evidence and Inquiry, p. 27.

57 Ibid., p. 31.

58 Ibid., p. 32.

59 My thanks to Marc Cortez for his helpful suggestions in response to Haack.

60 Pollock, John L., Contemporary Theories of Knowledge (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), pp. 175–6Google Scholar.

61 See Alvin Plantinga's account of the role of defeaters and his illustration of seeing a sheep. Alvin, Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 343–4, 359–61Google Scholar.

62 Plantinga is extremely helpful in sorting out these issues under the heading of properly functioning internal rationality. Ibid., pp. 110–11. For an excellent analysis of coherentism and perception see Plantinga's chapter on Laurence BonJour in Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate, pp. 87–113.

63 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 19.

64 Ibid., pp. 42–5.

65 Ibid., p. 44.

66 Ibid., p. 64.

67 Ibid., p. 55.

68 Van Huyssteen adds ‘In fact, these kinds of beliefs become a species of belief whose truth is discovered by means of criteria internal to the language game itself’. Wentzel, van Huyssteen, Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 186Google Scholar. Referenced by Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 72.

69 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 52.

70 Wolfhart, Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), p. 277Google Scholar.

71 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 244.

72 Ibid., p. 71.

73 Stenmark, Rationality, p. 212. quoted in Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 40.

74 Similarly Alvin Plantinga concludes that Christian belief can have warrant in the basic way (meaning one need not have an argument to support it) so long as there are no defeaters. Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, p. 352.

75 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 58. referring here to van Huyssteen, Essays in Postfoundationalist Theology, p. 259.

76 Bonhoeffer's charge that Barth resorts to a ‘positivism of revelation’ seems to be motivated by a fear that Barth's theology, with its analogia fidei repudiation of human religion, removes the church from the world in a way that denies the lordship of Christ over the world. ‘The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up, as it does in the last analysis, a law of faith . . . but the world is to some degree made to depend on itself and left to its own devices, and that's the mistake’. Dietrich, Bonhoeffer and Eberhard, Bethge, Letters and Papers from Prison, 3rd edn (London: SCM Press, 1967), pp. 280, 286, 328–39Google Scholar. Barth was simply perplexed by this charge, see Eberhard, Busch, Karl Barths Lebenslauf: Nach Seinen Briefen Und Autobiographischen Texten, 2. Aufl, durcgesehene. ed. (Munich: Kaiser, 1976), p. 381Google Scholar.

77 In fact, Barth's view of the fallibility of human reason has lead to the potentially misleading suggestion that Barth is a nonfoundationalist postmodern. See Johnson, Mystery of God, pp. 3–4, 15, 18, 31, 154, 170, 184; Ward, ‘Barth, Modernity and Postmodernity’, pp. 280–4.

78 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 52.

79 Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, pp. 347ff.

80 Wolfhart, Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology: Collected Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 189–90Google Scholar, quoted by Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 182. Shults goes on to explain that Pannenberg demonstrates that Feuerbach's analysis ‘falsely assumed the infinity of the human race’. It is worth noting that Barth critiques Feuerbach for building his position on the false notion of a general humanity abstracted from the individual human who is both wicked and subject to death. Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 539–40.

81 In comments on Pannenberg, Shults explicitly affirms that theology takes its ‘methodological starting point, not self-authenticating ground’ from a ‘general anthropology’. Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 157.

82 Shults appeals to Andy F. Sanders's defence of fallibilism. ‘Sanders emphasizes that “fallibilism” avoids self-defeat, because it is aware that even the belief in fallibilism may be mistaken, but since it does not deny we can have true beliefs, it may consistently offer reasons for accepting fallibilism’. Ibid., p. 58. referring to Sanders, A., ‘Traditionalism, Fallibilism and Theological Relativism’, Nederlands Theologisch Tijdschrift 49 (1995), p. 195Google Scholar.

83 My thanks to Daniel R. Driver for his comments on this part of the article.

84 I am using theology in the sense of the church's talk about God and not the academy's study of theories about God. This is the sense Athanasius distinguished as θεολογεῖν, as Alan Torrance notes: ‘Athanasius distinguished between the anthropomorphic projection of our opinions (epinoiai) onto the divine – what he termed muthologein (mythologising) – and theologein or analogein. In theologein (God-talk proper), our terms are extended to project (ana-logein) beyond their ordinary context of use in such a way that they refer to the reality of God. No longer mere epinoiai (arbitrary human opinions or ideas projected mythologically onto the transcendent), these terms become dianoiai – concepts that project through (dia) to the reality and being of God. The condition of this is meta-noia, as Paul interpreted it – that is, the transformation of our thinking and concepts (noiai) and thus our terminology. The implication is that there is a semantic shifting of our concepts in parallel with the “reschematization” of our minds (Rom. 12:2) so that they might truly and appropriately refer to the divine. In sum, theologein – that is, valid or truthful (alethos) reference to God – requires a reconciliation of our noiai to the extent that we are, in Paul's words, echthroi te dianoia, alienated or hostile in our conceptualities. This reconciling takes place so that we might have that mind which is in Christ Jesus and thereby participate in the new, transformed semantics (or “language games”) of the Body of Christ – where our logoi participate in the Logos, who is God concretely present within the created order.’ Alan J. Torrance, ‘Is Love the Essence of God?’, in Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.), Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 123–4.

85 Shults, Postfoundationalist Task, p. 184.

86 Ibid., p. 62; emphasis mine.

87 Shults continuously takes refuge in the notion of explanatory adequacy (ibid., pp. 24, 58, 62, 75, 78, 117, 184, 217, 226, 244–5, 248). But this is the question at the centre of the matter, the question I began this article with: what does it take for an answer to be an adequate answer to a question? Shults does briefly recognise this as problematic, but remains steadfast in his optimism that pressing fallibly on will advance knowledge. ‘In light of the postmodern critique of reason, the issue of determining which explanations are “more adequate” is more problematic than Pannenberg implies. Nevertheless, the difficulty of the task does not mean we should stop searching for intersubjectively criticizable criteria’, p. 184.

88 ‘it would have to be made clear that the unity of reality and truth occurs in and only in God's Word. It would also have to be made clear that we do not confuse our own theological reality with the truth’ Barth, ‘Fate and Idea’, p. 58.

89 2 Cor. 4:7, ESV.

90 2 Cor. 4:6, ESV.