Above All Earthly Pow\u2019rs <\/a> ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=leithartcom-20&l=ur2&o=1\")
<\/em> simultaneously bracing, stimulating, and frustrating. Wells examines the consequences of the confluence of two main cultural trends \u2013 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s theology is structured by certain kinds of dualisms that I do not find in Scripture. <\/p>\n
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 \u201cpreliminary to both\u201d a study of modernization and beliefs. I\u2019m 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: \u201cOur consciousness is wrought through a complex interaction between our interior and exterior worlds, between the \u2018I\u2019 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.\u201d He illustrates by saying that a materialist and an animist with regard trees in different ways. Knowledge is not merely \u201ca private free-floating creation . . . prompted by the external world,\u201d but neither is it \u201csimply given to us.\u201d Instead, there is a \u201cdelicate choreography\u201d between the external and internal. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u201cinternal\u201d or \u201cexternal\u201d? Or, to take a page from the phenomenologists: Thought is intentional, that is, it is never pure thought but always thought of <\/em> something. If knowledge is, as Polyani would have it, a kind of \u201cindwelling\u201d of the world that involves the body, then it appears that the need for this delicate choreography dissolves. <\/p>\n Elsewhere I have expresses similar reservations about Wells\u2019s use of the sociology of knowledge. \u201cSocial\u201d factors can only be seen as \u201cinfluences\u201d 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 \u201cclass\u201d or an \u201cinstitution\u201d? 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 \u201cpure\u201d instances of the social and the religious. But such pure instances simply do not exist. <\/p>\n
In a second passage contrasting Eros and Agape spirituality, Wells argues that \u201cChristian faith . . . is about listening. Eros spirituality is about speaking.\u201d 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 \u201cimpossible 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.\u201d But this presumes that there is such a thing as a \u201chuman situation\u201d as such, a human situation that is not always already addressed by God\u2019s Word. <\/p>\n
Finally, Wells, again opposing Eros and Agape, says that for postmodernism God is not \u201cobjective and dangerous to us,\u201d but rather \u201cat our convenience because he is accessible on our own terms.\u201d The truth is that \u201cGod stands over against us. To know him is not the same thing as knowing ourselves.\u201d Again things are more nuanced than Wells suggests. We are not God, but it is not fully biblical to say that God \u201cstands over against us.\u201d 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\u2019s claim about the opposition of self-knowledge and knowledge of God, while true in one obvious sense (knowing that I\u2019m 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. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Like many of David Wells \u2018s books, I\u2019ve find his recent Above All Earthly Pow\u2019rs simultaneously bracing, stimulating, and frustrating. Wells examines the consequences of the confluence of two main cultural trends \u2013 the postmodern ethos and the increasingly pluralistic religious situation of the West. He makes many good points: in many respects I like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology"],"yoast_head":"\n
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