I often run across Christians in my own circles who say things like, "We find ourselves living in a postmodern age that has, regrettably, invaded even our own families and the church." (I saw this on the website of a [broadly Reformed] Christian bookstore today.) This is a statement I can sympathize with because I do see the negative results of much off postmodernism on the church and the family. But, based on how I think most conservative Christians understand postmodernism, it seems like what they are really saying is, "Postmodernism is the enemy. It comes to invade and to destroy. Period." With no mention of papa-invader and mama-destroyer: modernism. (Yes, I realize that last sentence was a fragment.) This kind of understanding of postmodernism fails on a few fronts. First, it (often, and usually unwittingly) juxtaposes postmodernism and modernism, when in fact, the two are like father and son. And you know what they say, the apple doesn't fall...etc. Second, it assumes a superiority of modernism as a worldview, when truly, modern thought may be even farther from Christianity in some ways than its progeny. (To clarify, I am a presuppositionalist, so I realize how easily that last comparative statement breaks down.) And third, such a baby-out-with-the-bathwater analysis of the zeitgeist arrogantly disregards those very positive contributions it has made. Perhaps the most important contribution we have inherited from postmodern philosophy is the demise of modern foundationalism. (See, there is some discontinuity between papa bear and baby bear.)
One of the distinguishing marks of modern rationalism is what has been termed foundationalism, the idea that there are self-evident universal truths governing the world and that we can somehow tap into these truths univocally through the exercise of reason. It's the idea that through the mind we can access with bare clarity the pure nakedness of metaphysical reality. There is no barrier between us and the noumenal realm. The phenomenal context of our existent is transcendable, and the noumenal is immanent, if we but use the right code to access it, the code of reason, or, couched in more pious terms, the code of biblical revelation.
Postmodern reflection on foundationalism has come along and challenged this assumption. Postmodernism tells us that we are so situated in our phenomenal context and language that we cannot break out into the noumenal. The world of bare metaphysical reality is unnaccessible to us. The main barrier to this epistemological (meaning knowledge--how we know and what we truly can know) pole-vault is language. Language, because it consists of a circular pattern of metaphorical predication (analogical is probably a much better term), prevents us from accessing things as they really are. All we can ultimately say about anything is that it is like something else, which, in turn, is like something else, ad infinitum. This, as I think I can show, is helpful; but only to an extent. Postmodernism typically takes this view and says, "Since we can't know anything in its bare metaphysical reality, we can't truly know anything at all." This, of course, is where we get relativistic pluralism. We can't know truth; therefore, for all intents and purposes, there is no truth. Your truth is your truth; my truth is my truth; let's have a smore and sing Kumbaya. The problem is that the great barrier to our epistemological pole-vault is not simply language (it is that, but there's more). The deeper barrier is ontology, the nature of being.
The "problem" of epistemology is a result of our being creatures. And we only see it as a problem because we are rebellious creatures who want to transcend our creatureness and get a God's-eye-view of reality. Foundationalism is our modern-day Tower of Babel. We think we can cross that great divide between physical situatedness (limited perspective, both in quantity and quality) to metaphysical, univocal knowledge (pure perspective, at least in quality if not in quantity). By univocal knowledge I mean knowledge that has a 1-to-1 correspondence with reality, with God's knowledge. We want to grasp--really wrap our minds all the way around--universal truth, rather than accept it as its been mediated and accommodated to us. Reality comes to our minds truly, but analogically, rather than either univocally ("modern") or equivocally ("postmodern")
To set up this conception of epistemology, which, as I am attempting to show, is rooted in ontology, I am going to quote somewhat at length from a paper I wrote entitled "The Aesthetics of Jonathan Edwards and the Archtypal/Ectypal Distinction."
Ontologically, what the archetypal-ectypal distinction means is that there is a qualitative difference between God’s being and his creation’s being—the Creator-creature distinction. It is not as if God has most being and we have a small slice of his pie of being; that would be a mere quantitative ontological difference. God has made his creation with qualitatively different being. The archetypal-ectypal distinction applies to epistemology and theology as well. Willem J. van Asselt* appeals to the Reformed archetypal-ectypal distinction, looking particularly at the formalization of the doctrine in the works of Franciscus Junius, to dispel the myth that Reformed scholasticism manifests a commitment to mere rationalism. He points out that the archetypal-ectypal distinction in theology, as developed by the post-Reformation Reformed orthodox, insists on a distinction between archetypal knowledge, that incommunicable knowledge that God has of himself, and ectypal knowledge, the communicable knowledge that humankind has of God from God.
In regards to archetypal theology, van Asselt says: "It is the theology according to which the triune God knows himself in himself and also knows everything that is outside him by an indivisible act of knowing. It is the eternal and essential wisdom, and therefore God’s essence itself in which all things are present without being the result of discursive process in God. …It is essential and most simple, eternal, intuitive, absolute, incommunicable, infinite and most perfect. …It is incommunicable for it belongs to God alone (propria Dei): It cannot be comprehended by any creature; we adore it and do not search it out.
Van Asselt goes on to describe the relationship between archetypal and ectypal theology: "This uncreated and essential archetypal theology differs entirely from ectypical theology which is accidental and finite and a sort of outflow and efflux of the former: ‘Ectypal theology…is wisdom concerning divine things informed (informata) by God from the archetype through the communication of grace in order to glorify him.’ …Although theology is preeminently in the mind of God himself, this divine self-knowledge is the causal basis for human theology."
It must be born in mind, as van Asselt shows in his article, that the Reformed scholastics were not drawing on pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment principles of Rationalism in the systematization of this distinction but on the thought of church fathers, medieval theologians, and the Reformers themselves. This connection with orthodoxy down through the centuries is important in establishing the catholicity and orthodoxy of the Reformed archetypal-ectypal distinction. Neither was this distinction limited to Junius and his contemporaries; rather, “during the second half of the seventeenth century Junius’ classification became normative for many Reformed theologians in their approach to the issue of theology as a discipline.” Van Asselt lists Leydecker, van Mastricht, Turretin, Cocceius, Burman, Heidegger, Heidanus, and Braun as well as English Puritanism as representing to some degree Junius’ theological classification. Beyond this, it can be found in many Reformed theologians of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries.
It is important to note the divisions within ectypal theology, for they bear upon how creatures are supposed to think about the ectypical revelation we have received... Junius distinguishes between the ectypal theology in the mind of God (internal) and the ectypal theology as God communicates it to humans (external). “The internal concept in the mind of God is his divine will and grace; the external form is the body of knowledge that God decided to reveal to mankind.” This external form is properly seen as a “relational theology, for it depends upon God’s accommodation of himself to a form which finite beings are capable of grasping.” This, says Junius, should be the main focus of theologians, ectypal theology as God has sovereignly caused it to be mediated and communicated to human beings, rather than even ectypal theology as it exists in the mind of God. So we see the importance of establishing not only a distinction between archetypal and ectypal theology but also between ectypal theology as it is and ectypal theology as it has been accommodated to the human mind. After all, we are created, body and soul, and are not, in fact, Cartesian res cogitans.
Practically, in the doing of theology, what the archetypal-ectypal distinction tells us is that we may not presume to speculate about the inner essence and knowledge of God as God. As creatures, we have only to think about and worship God as he has described himself in his Word and as he is toward us, whether in law or in grace in his Son. Van Asselt appeals to the archetypal-ectypal distinction to defend the Reformed orthodox against accusations that they had attempted a mere rationalistic theology. According to van Asselt, these theologians never spoke of God as such but only as he is in covenant with us in Christ. This means that all speculation about God is filtered through—or better, derived from—our understanding from Scripture that God is a covenant-making and -keeping God and that all our knowledge of him is in the context of a covenantal relationship.
Michael Horton** deals with this subject in relation to our knowledge of God in his book Covenant and Eschatology. Horton shows that divine revelation is given in the form of divine accommodation to human creatures—a necessarily relational act. Revelation of divine things, as it is ectypal and not archetypal, does not give univocal knowledge—nor does it merely equivocate—but rather, God accommodates his knowledge of himself in human language that is analogical. It follows that our theological formulations then are also analogical.
Just as God can speak to us only in terms that we can understand (and therefore engages in analogical speech himself), we answer God’s revelation by appealing to the linguistic patterns that are available to finite creatures who are ‘pilgrims on the way.’ While for some analogy can only be regarded as weakness, it is in this very weakness of accommodation that God acts in strength, as Paul reminds.
Horton continues, "So analogy is not an extratextual invention, but forms the very pattern of divine speech-accommodation. In this way, both divine utterances and human response (divinely authorized in scripture and witnessed to in the church) are united by analogical patterns of discourse.
Language attributed to God uses human referents to describe that which is not human but divine, so it must be analogical. Given this accommodated mode of communication between Creator and creatures, there must be an inherent relational basis for all talk about God. As Horton concludes, “We do not know God as God is in the divine hiddenness, but we do know God in his condescension, in his willingness incompletely yet truthfully to reveal himself.”
What has been said above about archtypal and ectypal knowledge applies not only to theology but to all knowledge, since we are creatures and relate to the rest of creation as creatures. My point in expressing all of this is that we seem to need, first, a better, more biblical, humble, and creaturely understanding of how we know and what we know compared to how God knows and what God knows. And second, I think we need to be more careful and nuanced in our analysis of culture and the prevailing schools of thought, rather than spouting off sweeping condemnations and painting ourselves into a corner that we really don't want to be in. For those of you who made it to the end of this "short" article, let me know your thoughts. Am I completely off my rocker and capitulating to the spirit of the age? Or is there biblical, extra-modern, extra-postmodern sense to be gleaned in these ramblings?
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*All Van Asselt quotes from Willem J. van Asselt, “The Fundamental Meaning of Theology: Archetypal and Ectypal Theology in Seventeenth Century Reformed Thought,” Westminster Theological Journal 64 (2002): 319-35.
**All Horton quotes from Michael S. Horton, Covenant and Eschatology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 184-186.
