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Fallibilism: A Philosophical-Pneumatological Apologetic

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The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion

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Abstract

Amos Yong makes a connection between fallibilist “philosophical” views of the partial, perspectival, and finite character of knowledge, and a theological perspective grounded in a strong pneumatology. Rather than engendering absolute certainty, Yong argues that the Spirit sponsors an embodied moral certainty that guides faithful discipleship, which is content to live with inquiry that awaits future light.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I argue for truth as correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic in the fifth chapter of my Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective, New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies Series (Burlington, Vt., and Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2002); this chapter adapts and lightly expands on section 5.3 at the end of my alethiological argument.

  2. 2.

    Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life (New York: The Free Press, 1991).

  3. 3.

    See my “The Pneumatological Imagination; The Logic of Pentecostal Theology,” in Routledge Handbook of Pentecostal Theology, ed. Wolfgang Vondey (New York and London: Routledge, 2020), ch. 14.

  4. 4.

    Unless otherwise indicated, all scriptural quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

  5. 5.

    See also the linking of beliefs and practices in my Learning Theology: Tracking the Spirit of Christian Faith (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018).

  6. 6.

    I am otherwise disinclined to apologetics as classically construed in the tradition of analytic philosophy and theology; hence it is with a certain degree of irony that I am deploying this word in the subtitle of this chapter. For more of the dialogical form of apologetic interaction that I would embrace and engage, see Yong, “Toward a Relational Apologetics in Global Context: A Review Essay on Benno van den Toren’s Christian Apologetics as Cross-Cultural Dialogue,” Philosophia Christi 14:2 (2012): 437–45.

  7. 7.

    See also my “Buddhist-Christian Dialogue on Human Becoming: Next Steps for Pneumatological Anthropology,” in A Visionary Approach: Lynn A. de Silva and the Prospects of Buddhist-Christian Encounter, eds. Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Elizabeth J. Harris (St. Ottilien, Germany: EOS, 2021), EOS, forthcoming.

  8. 8.

    Peirce was a leading pragmatist philosopher whose ideas, mediated to me through my doktorvater philosopher Robert Cummings Neville and Jesuit charismatic theologian Donald L. Gelpi, I have found helpful for thinking pneumatologically and trinitarianly; see my essay “The Demise of Foundationalism and the Retention of Truth: What Evangelicals Can Learn from C. S. Peirce” Christian Scholar’s Review 29:3 (Spring 2000): 563–88, reprinted in The Dialogical Spirit: Christian Reason and Theological Method for the Third Millennium (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2014), ch. 1.

  9. 9.

    W. Stephen Gunter, Resurrection Knowledge: Recovering the Gospel for a Postmodern Church (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999), 87. Gunter draws primarily from Polanyi’s notion of “tacit knowing” and applies it to the knowledge of religious faith. Alternative conceptualizations of this aspect of the pneumatological imagination might include Kierkegaard’s notion of knowledge and truth as subjectivity, William Lynch’s knowledge as grounded in faith, and Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s argument for faith and truth as personal.

  10. 10.

    Ronald L. Farmer, Beyond the Impasse: The Promise of a Process Hermeneutic. Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics 13 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 104, emphasis orig.; see also Stephen T. Franklin, Speaking from the Depths: Alfred North Whitehead’s Hermeneutical Metaphysics of Propositions, Experience, Symbolism, Language, and Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 266.

  11. 11.

    See Amos Yong, “Personal Selfhood(?) and Human Experience in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism,” Paideia Project: Proceedings of the 20th World Congress of Philosophy (1998), available at http://www.bu.edu/wcp/MainPPer.htm

  12. 12.

    See Stanley J. Grenz, “Articulating the Christian Belief-Mosaic: Theological Method after the Demise of Foundationalism,” in Evangelical Futures: A Conversation on Theological Method, ed. John G. Stackhouse, Jr. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 107–38; cf. also my eschatologically structured Renewing Christian Theology: Systematics for a Global Christianity, images and commentary by Jonathan A. Anderson (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2014).

  13. 13.

    See also my discussion of Pauline charismatic ecclesiology in The Bible, Disability, and the Church: A New Vision of the People of God (Grand Rapids and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), ch. 4.

  14. 14.

    I argue this point also in another context, relative to the capacity of the resurrection body to eternally grow in relationship and knowledge; see Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2007), ch. 9.

  15. 15.

    Robert Cummings Neville, Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation and Nature (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), ch. 4.

  16. 16.

    See Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 10; cf. also the other two volumes of Plantinga’s trilogy: Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Warranted Christian Belief (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  17. 17.

    For more perspective on Acts 2 in this regard, see my The Hermeneutical Spirit: Theological Interpretation and the Scriptural Imagination for the 21st Century (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2017).

  18. 18.

    For example, Amos Yong, “The Science, Sighs, and Signs of Interpretation: An Asian American Post-Pentecostal Hermeneutics in a Multi-, Inter-, and Trans-cultural World,” in Constructive Pneumatological Hermeneutics in Pentecostal Christianity, eds. L. William Oliverio Jr. and Kenneth J. Archer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 177–95.

  19. 19.

    For more on the subjectivity of knowledge, see also my essay “Observation-Participation-Subjunctivation: Methodological Play and Meaning-Making in the Study of Religion and Theological Studies,” Religious Studies and Theology 31:1 (2012): 17–40.

  20. 20.

    See Evan B. Howard, Affirming the Touch of God: A Psychological and Philosophical Investigation of Christian Discernment (Lanham, New York, and Oxford: University Press of America, 2000), 123, 270–275, 286.

  21. 21.

    James K. A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012).

  22. 22.

    See Donald L. Gelpi, The Firstborn of Many: A Christology for Converting Christians, 3 vols., Marquette Studies in Theology 20–22 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001), vol. 1, chs. 6–8.

  23. 23.

    See discussion of this Heideggerian notion in Calvin Schrag, Existence and Freedom: Towards an Ontology of Human Finitude (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), esp. 67–118.

  24. 24.

    Here I am connecting in some ways with the classical arguments of human knowing being impacted by sin and the fall; see Stephen K. Moroney, The Noetic Effects of Sin: An Historical and Contemporary Exploration of How Sin Affects Our Thinking (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1999).

  25. 25.

    Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace, and trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1965), esp. 203–215.

  26. 26.

    See also Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief, ch. 7.

  27. 27.

    See also my discussion of the pneumatology of Romans 8 in Spirit of Love: A Trinitarian Theology of Grace (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2012), ch. 7.

  28. 28.

    See Philip Clayton, “Missiology between Monologue and Cacophony,” in To Stake a Claim: Mission and the Western Crisis of Knowledge, eds. J. Andrew Kirk and Kevin Vanhoozer (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999), 78–95; for more on Peirce and vagueness, see my Spirit-Word-Community, esp. 153–54.

  29. 29.

    Thanks to Thomas Hastings and Knut-Willy Sæther for invitation to participate in this project and book. Fallibilism is presumed if human beings are to remain humble before God. My colleagues embody this humility coram Deo and I am honored to be associated with them in this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Amos Yong

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  1. Amos Yong
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Correspondence to Amos Yong .

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  1. Overseas Ministries Studies Center, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Thomas John Hastings

  2. Department of Religious Studies, Volda University College, Volda, Norway

    Knut-Willy Sæther

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Yong, A. (2021). Fallibilism: A Philosophical-Pneumatological Apologetic. In: Hastings, T.J., Sæther, KW. (eds) The Grace of Being Fallible in Philosophy, Theology, and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55916-8_4

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