On Epistemology and Knowing God

In the words of Martin Luther, who says in the preface to his Ninety-Five Theses, "out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light," I would welcome discussion on the following theses.

§ 1

When Paul says, "Do not be conformed to this world" (Rom. 12:2), the Greek word for "world" is aion, which means, "age" or "time." Among other things, Paul is saying:  Do not be conformed to the philosophical times.

§ 2

That God has made Himself known in Scripture is compromised by any philosophy which holds that God is unknowable or we are unknowers, particularly with respect to a direct and verifiable knowledge of reality — inclusive of facts, history, and textual meaning.

§ 3

The self-disclosure of God through Scripture may be compromised by undermining the knowing process itself:

(1) on God's side, when any aspect of God's self-disclosure through words is undermined, such as a denial of the divinity, uniqueness, infallibility, inerrancy, clarity of Scripture or — in these postmodern times — the meaningful knowability, stability, determinacy, and accessibility of Scripture;

(2) on the human side, when the mind is characterized as incapacitated in some manner for an objective,  truthful, verifiable, reliable, and sufficient knowledge of words, facts, God, persons, events, or things in the world — as they actually are and for practical purposes mandated in Scripture by our Creator and Redeemer.

§ 4

When Moses says that the Word of God is not "far off" or inaccessible — not "in heaven" or "beyond the sea" — but near us — in our hearts and on our lips that we might obey it, he is assuming what is known in Continental philosophy as a "metaphysics of presence," — i.e.,  a metaphysics with a correlating epistemology that includes the existence of a God who has made Himself known (or present) through words and an account of knowing that regards the mind as capable of knowing those words (or receiving that presence) to the point of accountability (Deut. 30:11-14; 1 Cor. 14:19, 24).

§ 5

This assumption does not diminish the necessary role of the Holy Spirit for imparting a saving understanding of the truth of God's Word but only serves to emphasize that in this process the Holy Spirit as primary cause works with and through the necessary secondary cause of the human mind's epistemic ability to have a true and objective apprehension of the words of God based on its being made in the image of God (1 Cor. 2:11-16).  Where there is not a saving understanding of this truth, there is and can be a non-saving understanding of it which is significant in its divinely appointed role of making people accountable to God for their rejection of the truth.

§ 6

To claim on philosophical grounds, such as Continental philosophy's doctrine of the death of God or the rejection of any Logos upholding the universe, that words are unstable, indeterminate, and unreliable for conveying meaning or that the mind is radically and constitutively errant for receiving meaning is on a par with the claim that Scripture is errant; all of these claims will equally undermine the integrity of the communication process between God and people.

§ 7

In general, a denial that God is knowable (with any objective certainty) or that humans can know (with any objective certainty) makes an affirmation of the inerrancy of Scripture a moot point; by comparison, such a denial makes the issue of inerrancy look like child's play — which is to say: What good is an inerrant Scripture, if one cannot know with a verifiably objective certainty what it means?

§ 8

The Scripture as the normative Law of God governs and maintains its position as the Word of God only through the understanding—i.e., through its effectiveness in successfully making immanent to the mind a transcendent and stable meaning conveyed through words. This is why the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy in its 1982 statement on hermeneutics wrote the following: "While we recognize that belief in the inerrancy of Scripture is basic to maintaining its authority, the values of that commitment are only as real as one's understanding of the meaning of Scripture."

§ 9

Where such transcendence is universally denied to words as words or to the mind itself (on either metaphysical or epistemological grounds such as one finds in Kant), the Law in principle is overthrown — which is to say, Scripture (whether considered errant or inerrant) is in principle overthrown.

§ 10

When applied to Scripture, the so called "metaphysics of absence" which declares that a text has no meaning but what a community of readers or experts bring to it means that human immanence necessarily trumps any assumption of divine transcendence as what ultimately determines an understanding of Scripture.

§ 11

This implies that the imposition of cultural perspective on any understanding of Scripture is epistemically necessary or unavoidable — that we all wear blinders or see through linguistic or cultural glasses in approaching an understanding of Scripture, such that our culture absolutely determines what we take to be the thoughts of God revealed in Scripture without any hope or expectation of actually knowing in a neutral manner the true or objective "thing in itself" of Scriptural meaning.

§ 12

Such a philosophical approach to understanding means in the final analysis that the church exists under a historical determinism or necessity in its knowledge of God, which  means that the church can only and necessarily impose its culturally conditioned reading on Scripture; it's culture-bound thoughts are all that can serve as God's thoughts, and there is no direct, epistemic access to an external or objective standard in Scripture itself to check or verify whether or not this understanding is the truth.

§ 13

God says in Scripture, "My thoughts are not your thoughts" (Isa. 55:8-9; 1 Cor. 2:9-16) — such is the difference between the holy God and unholy people. But a certain epistemology is necessary to make this differentiation either theoretically or practically meaningful.

§ 14

If the mind is characterized by an epistemology which holds that it is so conditioned by its time or culture that it cannot have access to the actual and objective thoughts of God revealed in Scripture and if the only possibility for understanding Scripture is that one's time, language, or culture must necessarily color, shape, and distort such, then the only possibility that exists for such an understanding in its fullest range is one in which people can do nothing else but impose or read their own culture or world into Scripture.

§ 15

On that account, there is no other possibility than that of a humanly centered and cultural understanding of Scripture, which is to say (contrary to Isa. 55:8-9), "our thoughts are and must be God's thoughts," as Hegel maintained based on what he saw as the logical implications of Kant's epistemology.

§ 16

Where a stable, determinate, and communicable meaning is denied to words or texts in general (and by implication, to the text of Scripture in particular), the Scripture with its transcendent meaning no longer "stands" (1 Pe. 2:6) over the church — only the reader's immanent meaning or that of the church's leadership or consensus "stands."

§ 17

Under this epistemological assumption then, the sole and supreme authority of Scripture over the church's faith and practice, which has always been the cardinal principle of the Reformation, is in theory or principle (if not in practice) given up.

§ 18

In this way, the Roman Catholic doctrine that ecclesiastical culture with its past and presently developing tradition is on a par with Scripture and functions in a decisively final, mediating role in understanding Scripture gains access through philosophy (particularly Kant) to the thinking and teaching of those of our own generation who are heirs to the Reformation but are abandoning what is arguably the most important belief of the Reformation: Sola Scriptura — viz.,  that Scripture alone is to be the basis, final reference point, or "supreme judge" for the faith and practice of the church.

§ 19

That the Holy Spirit is appealed to for assurance that the church's institutional leadership (or its consensus) will project the appropriate meaning upon a Scripture regarded as being unable to provide any objectively or directly accessible meaning of its own is a misuse of a promise uniquely given to the apostles concerning the Spirit who would lead them into all truth (Jn. 16:13; 1 Jn. 1:3; 4:6).

§ 20

This promise of the Spirit just spoken of is one that God's people enjoy and receive inseparably, sufficiently, and solely from a verifiably accessible and objective understanding of the words of God found in Scripture alone — words uniquely given by God through the apostles and prophets (Eph. 2:20), as Calvin argues (Institutes, 1:9:3) and the Westminster Confession declares (1: 1, 6).

§ 21

That the Reformed doctrine of divine sovereignty is used for assurance that the church's institutional leadership or its consensus will project the appropriate meaning upon a Scripture regarded otherwise as unable to provide an objective and accessible meaning of its own is a misuse of the doctrine of divine sovereignty; for God in his sovereignty permits and uses even gospel-denying error in the church's institutional leadership or its consensus but does not by that fact commend such to His people. Paul warns that leaders in the church will fall away and take disciples with them (Acts 20:29). The Reformation movement itself was a challenge to doctrinal directions supported by the institutional church's leadership. And the Westminster Confession presents Scripture alone as the "supreme judge" in "all controversies of religion" and over all the declarations of ecclesiastical councils (1.10).

§ 22

That Scripture in fact reveals to us a God who has made Himself known to humanity through words and who holds all people accountable for the same, implies that all people whether unregenerate or regenerate who come within range of God's words can know their meaning and do understand Scripture to that extent. Those people who thus hear the Word of God are spoken of in Scripture not primarily as knowers and unknowers but as believers and unbelievers  (or as the obedient and the disobedient) which assumes a level of knowledge to be believed or not (obeyed or not).

§ 23

The only kind of knowledge that can be applied to or shared by all people universally such that they might be judged by the same standard as believers or unbelievers is the objective knowledge provided by Scripture or what the Scripture refers to simply as "the truth."

§ 24

To bury one's epistemic talent through philosophical doubt, skepticism, or epistemological idealism for fear that the Lord is a hard epistemological taskmaster will not be seen in the end by the Lord as humility but as a failure of stewardship and a soul-damning arrogance.

§ 25

God's self-disclosure in and through Scripture takes place consistently under an epistemological realism  which does not recognize any Kantian, "categorio-centric predicament" — i.e., it does not support an epistemological idealism which regards the human mind as subjectively "centered" or "locked into" its own ways of thinking such that it is "locked out from" a direct relationship to extramental or external reality and therefore cannot check or verify its knowledge against that reality (what Kant calls "the thing in itself").

§ 26

Belief in the "categorio-“ or “ego-centric predicament" means that one's own mind is regarded as not able to objectively validate or arbitrate over any of its competing perspectives of reality, i.e., one cannot check such perspectives directly against objective reality itself so as to discover the absolute or non-relative truth and reject whatever is false.

§ 27

Consequently, "truth" itself becomes only and always relative to an individual or a group (such as a particular denomination or religion) and never a reliable claim as to what actually is or exists — or what the Bible actually means or who Jesus Christ actually is — regardless of anyone's (or any group's) perspective.

§ 28

The epistemology one finds in Scripture, though not presented in the form of a theory, does not recognize a radical disparity or lack of accord between the categories of thought (or ways of thinking) in the human mind and what actually exists in the real world.

§ 29

This is known in philosophy as the "correspondence theory of truth," and it is assumed and relied on throughout God's self-disclosure in Scripture even with and under the effects of human finitude and  the effects of original sin (also known as "the noetic effects of the Fall") upon the mind.

§ 30

A "correspondence theory of truth" is necessary for the validating evidences (signs, wonders, and miracles) which God himself has provided as a foundation for belief in Scripture as the Word of God (Heb. 2:3-4) as well as a foundation for belief in Jesus as the Messiah of God (Acts 1:3; Jn. 20:30-31); hence, there is in Scripture a divinely appointed foundationalism which assumes epistemological realism (not the epistemological idealism of Descartes, Kant, and other modern and postmodern philosophers) and serves as the basis for faith.

§ 31

It is only through a direct knowing between the mind and external reality (as opposed to the indirect knowing of epistemological idealism) that one can know the truth about the ordinary world in the context of which the extraordinary took place, as revealing God's glory and providing validating evidences for the Christian faith just mentioned.

§ 32

Again, the evidences for faith (in Scripture referred to as "the works of God") and the meaning conveyed through the words of God's prophets recorded in Scripture serve in God's purpose as the manifestation of His glorious witness to people — for the elect, as the means by which they come to faith, and for the non-elect, as that which leaves them without excuse for their unbelief.

§ 33

One cannot through accommodation to the philosophical times change the conditions, prerequisites, or methodology of knowing integral to the self-disclosure of God in and through Scripture (i.e., discard the epistemological realism integral to that disclosure) without radically changing (1) how one knows God, (2) what it means to know God, and (3) what one knows (or can know) about God.

§ 34

To claim that in His sovereignty or by the work of His Spirit in Christ, God will somehow overcome the Kantian, "categorio-centric predicament" in our knowing as Christians is to make God a "God of the Epistemological Gaps" — gaps unwarranted by Scripture and created by an errant, human wisdom. To say that in His sovereignty God will fill epistemological gaps created by the fleshly wisdom of Western philosophy is equivalent to suggesting that if we throw ourselves down from the pinnacle of the temple (i.e., fall for  unbiblical and unrealistic problems for knowing contrived by philosophy), the Lord will catch us. We may put the Lord our God to the test by expecting our daily bread from God without working, by expecting God to rescue us after jumping in water while knowing we can't swim, or by expecting God's Spirit to keep us in the truth of Scripture or Jesus Christ while denying in theory or in practice the reliable epistemic equipment and means God has provided each of us so that we might know the truth and know we are in the truth (1 Jn. 1:1-4; 2:21; 4:1-6; 5:13).

§ 35

None of the promises of God that find their Yes and Amen in Christ Jesus (2 Cor. 1:20) are aimed to make up for or deliver us from philosophical problems for human knowing that are in conflict with the ordinary, common sense knowing that God has created, ordained, and presently sustains by his powerful Word (Heb. 1:3). God used this common grace of ordinary knowing both in the past when he spoke through and worked with the prophets and uses it in the present for his self-revelation through Scripture.

§ 36

Jesus entered Jerusalem not on the white horse of the skepticism, idealism, and philosophical speculation of the Greeks, predating his first coming and part of the culture at large in his day. Whatever crisis of truth there may have been in the academic culture of his time, our Lord ignored it. Instead, he entered Jerusalem on the donkey of common sense or common grace assumptions associated with ordinary knowing. The spiritual realities that come to us by the spiritual senses (spiritual eyes and ears) are conveyed through the orderly working of the physical senses (physical eyes and ears). That is, the glorious light of the spiritual and extraordinary knowledge of the glory of God in the person of Christ comes to us through the donkey-like epistemic equipment of our ordinary eyes and ears — i.e., ordinary knowing.

§ 37

Therefore, when we try to determine what the effects of either human finitude or the Fall are upon the mind and its knowing, we must look to Scripture alone and not philosophy. No theology is truly Reformed if it seeks to enhance itself as Reformed by a syncretism of Scripture and philosophy.

§ 38

Are we to suppose, for example, that the church was kept in the dark for over 1,700 years as to the full extent of the limitations of human finitude or the noetic effects of the Fall until Kant ?

§ 39

With human finitude and the noetic effects of the Fall present in Moses, when God said to him, "What is that in your hand?," Moses did not say, "I have a 'categorio-centric predicament,' Lord.  I don't know what is in my hand.” Rather, he said simply: "A staff." Based on that epistemically successful conversation, which included ordinary knowing, Moses was commissioned as Israel's deliverer, prophet, and leader — faithful in all God's house as a servant.

§ 40

Belief in the Kantian, "categorio-centric predicament" also has this negative feature: it breaks down the integrity and efficacy of an eyewitness report as confirmation of the truth or reality of an event — an integrity and efficacy God Himself utilizes throughout Scripture to validate a word or work as from Him (Lk. 1:1-4; 24:48; Acts 1:8; Heb. 2:3-4) .

§ 41

Under this presupposition of a "categorio-centric predicament" for knowledge, an eyewitness report necessarily reflects one's cultural, perspectival, or subjective bias or interpretive slant on things as much as it does any supposed truth regarding — or objective reality of — the event itself.

§ 42

Under this presupposition, to the extent that the eyewitness account must necessarily reflect such biases or interpretive slants, the eyewitness account is to one degree or other a myth, illusion, or fiction unrelated to the actual truth or objective reality pertaining to a person or event in question.

§ 43

That the apostle Peter's epistemology does not reflect such a presupposition is apparent, when he says: "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,' we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain" (2 Pe. 1:16-18).

§ 44

Peter demonstrates here a confidence, first, that what his mind was registering based on his sensory experience was actually happening in the world (his mind was faithfully representing what he was experiencing in the world), and, second, that what his mind was registering in this way could be faithfully conveyed in words to other people with such integrity and reliability that the truth or the objective reality of the Father's testimony to the Son (confirming that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ of God) could be known as the truth or reality over against any supposition that the Christ of the apostles was a myth or fiction of the apostles' own making.

§ 45

In validating the truth (or conceptual framework) of the gospel against any charge that it was a fiction, Peter does not appeal to his apostolic authority or any special, mystical, or subjective operation of the Spirit associated with that office, nor does he get lost in a supposed infinite regress of appeals to various competing conceptual frameworks, such as one finds in perspectivism; rather, he turns directly to the confirming evidence produced by an assumed correspondence between human categories of thought and what had actually happened empirically in the real world with respect to Christ's transfiguration.

§ 46

In short, there was no "categorio-centric predicament" in Peter's epistemology, as he pointed to the confirming evidence of his own eyewitness testimony pertaining to the power and coming of Christ and in that manner he demonstrated that the Christian faith is based on truth or historical fact, not fiction — objective, empirical evidence, not merely a subjective and groundless perspective based purely on a mystical, existential, or divine revelation.

§ 47

A belief in the "categorio-centric predicament" derives from epistemological idealism's denial that we can really and directly know in a verifiable manner what actually happens or has happened in our everyday world. Epistemological idealism holds that all we know directly or immediately are our ideas, conceptual framework, or perspective on reality, while we know only indirectly and mediately the reality to which such refers.

§ 48

Such a denial levels both the ordinary and the extraordinary items of knowing to the status of fiction (as postmodernism says: "all our truths are fictions"), which in turn may be embraced as part of one's "web of belief" and/or utilized perhaps for merely pragmatic reasons as a truth that works "here" and "now" and for a particular people and time — but certainly not an absolute truth that abides everywhere and forever the same for all peoples and times.

§ 49

That the Scripture recognizes no "categorio-centric predicament" with respect to knowing the meaning of God's words is also made clear by God's command: "Go, write it on a tablet before them and inscribe it on a scroll, that it may be in the time to come as a witness forever" (Isa. 30:8). God's words serve only as a witness "in the time to come" insofar as they are seen as transcendent, epistemically accessible, and identical in their meaning to both the cultural time in which the words originated and the cultural time in the future in which such words would serve as a witness.

§ 50

That Scripture disallows any "categorio-centric predicament" in its epistemology is apparent as well in God's prescribed method of verification for identifying a false prophet: "And if you say in your heart, 'How may we know the word the LORD has not spoken?' — when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken" (Deut. 18:21-22).

§ 51

The people of Israel could not use such a method of verification, if they had a "categorio-centric predicament," making it impossible for them to know in any direct or absolute sense the actual and objective meaning of the text (the prediction itself) or the actual and objective history which would make the prediction either "come true" or prove false.

§ 52

If there truly were a "categorio-centric predicament" in knowing, it would also be (and Nietzsche loved to remind people of this) impossible to obey the ninth commandment: "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor"; for under such a supposition all our witnessing with respect to one another must necessarily be false.

§ 53

From a Biblical perspective, the sin of bearing false witness is not a matter of a mind constitutively defective and errant such that truth-telling becomes impossible (thus reducing all lying to unwitting sin) but rather a disregard for and a misrepresentation of the truth one actually and certainly knows based on a correspondence account of truth and arising from a malicious desire to harm one's neighbor.

§ 54

Though there are lies that may occur from ignorance (unwitting sins), the ninth commandment implies that one knows one is lying and that one may know things reliably enough in general to know the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie. Such knowledge therefore plays a significant role in what makes bearing false witness a morally culpable act before God in terms of the ninth commandment.  To say that knowing in general is defective — that lying, distortion, or fiction-telling is the norm due to philosophical problems with knowing in general — involves the removal of that aspect of the guilt of bearing false witness that rests on successful or reliable knowing.

§ 55

To claim that the noetic effects of the Fall creates a special incapacity for the mind to truly know its world implies that non-Christians are more suspect and defective in the general state of their knowledge than Christians and that the renewal of the mind in Christ produces a more accurate knowledge of all things in the world.

§ 56

This means that Christians would make better scientists, doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc. and have in general a more accurate knowledge in all fields of human learning than non-Christians — a view that is indefensible not only on Scriptural grounds but also on the grounds of what we actually experience (as Calvin argues in the Institutes, 2:2:12).

§ 57

Hence, given the universal human capacity to know God to the point of accountability (set forth in thesis # 4) and given the integral role such a capacity has to God's self-disclosure manifested in and through Scripture, the noetic effects of the Fall must be seen as having to do not with whether one can know things (the content or possibility of knowledge) but with what one does with or how one evaluates or responds to what one knows (i.e., how knowledge is related to or used).

§ 58

As John Owen says, "The difference between believers and unbelievers as to knowledge is not so much in the matter of their knowledge as in the manner of knowing" (Works, Vol. 6, p. 69).

§ 59

Sin does not, therefore, mean that either the regenerate or the unregenerate are unable to reliably or verifiably know the real world or understand the actual meaning of words (whether human or divine), but rather, it means that under the power of sin one will not glorify God with such knowledge.

§ 60

That a regenerate and an unregenerate person may differ in their account of how the world came into existence does not mitigate the fact that they can and do agree about much of what they know about that world.

§ 61

Even with respect to Jesus' miraculous healing of the blind man in Jn. 9, both the unbelieving and the believing Jews came to know that the man born blind had received his sight. The noetic effects of the Fall did not keep the unbelieving Jews from knowing that much.

§ 62

Where human finitude or the noetic effects of the Fall is interpreted as a denial that words (or categories of thought) can correspond to or match up with the actual world and where one's epistemology undermines a belief in a reliably and directly knowable external reality, the would be knower of God (as mentioned earlier) must shift his confidence from a sole dependence upon Scripture as an objective and directly knowable standard to relative, extrabiblical, supplemental sources such as the temporally conditioned perspective of his (1) culture,  (2) tradition, or (3) church — i.e.,  one turns to human sources.

§ 63

As already stated, such an epistemological shift in essence constitutes a replay of what the Reformers faced with the Roman Catholicism of their day — viz.,  a violation of the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura  — the timeless truth of Scripture alone as the basis of one's faith and practice.

§ 64

God's revelation to us through Scripture alone means among other things that Scripture is not mediated through one's culture, tradition, or church but is and can be understood by individuals and on its own terms — directly and without mediation.

§ 65

With this the Westminster Divines seem to agree: "All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them" (Westminster Confession, ch. 1, sect. 7).

§ 66

This direct accessibility to a knowledge of Scripture's meaning is exemplified for us by the Jewish Bereans attested by the Spirit as "more noble" than the Thessalonians because they examined the Scriptures directly to test whether or not the apostolic testimony concerning Jesus as the Messiah was true (Acts 17:11; Heb. 2:4). They successfully tested their conceptual framework against the actual teaching of Scripture, regardless of any conceptual framework or set of presuppositions they may have had previously based on what their Jewish leaders and their religious culture taught them. They were not epistemically determined by their culture.

§ 67

To say that one can only see through their culture assumes that culture can actually be something so uniform, intransient, monolithic, fixed, and integral to the human mind that the mind is (and can be) radically determined in its knowing processes — that it must only and always wear cultural blinders beyond which it cannot see.

§ 68

But in fact culture is neither uniform, intransient, monolithic, fixed, nor integral to the human mind such that it could (even if it wanted to) structure and shape all knowledge. If it were, it would not be something that itself must begin directly from experience and something that is itself constantly being changed directly by experience; rather, experience would always be filtered, screened, disarmed, and made to conform to culture. (Of course, I am using “experience” here and elsewhere in my theses in an epistemologically realistic sense.)

§ 69

Culture contains variety, change, and difference. One has to always ask: which culture? whose culture? what culture? — culture under what time frame? — And this uncertain, mixed, and changing thing called "culture" determines what we can know?

§ 70

Culture is (among other things) the way humans are in their thinking and acting at a particular time and place. The assumption that an experience or a thought or idea are necessary for change to occur in culture points to the necessity of affirming the possibility of transcendence — seeing beyond one's culture.

§ 71

In Acts 9, when Saul of Tarsus (who became the apostle Paul) was on the road to Damascus to arrest Christians there, he had the culturally conditioned, conceptual framework of his unbelieving Jewish culture.

§ 72

When Jesus Christ appeared to him on the road to Damascus, Saul had no categories of thought, either as an unbelieving Jew or as an educated man, to know the identity of the One who was appearing and speaking to him. Saul said: "Who are you, Lord?"

§ 73

Saul's culture, conceptual framework, or "categorio-centricity" (however problematic for knowing) did not prevent him from seeing and attempting to mentally and objectively process what the light around him and the voice speaking to him actually meant on their own terms and apart from any subjective or culturally biased standpoint on Saul's part.

§ 74

In that sense, Saul's cultural conditioning or conceptual framework did not function as a pair of glasses, a filter, or a grid — correcting, shaping, skewing, or eliminating what was foreign to his own, normal categories of thought.

§ 75

As Saul of Tarsus listened to Jesus' words, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," his conceptual framework as well as his categories of thought began to change to reflect the reality before him. (As Francis Schaeffer says: "Wise men choose their presuppositions.")

§ 76

Hence, a conceptual framework operates more like a map than a pair of glasses or grid. It is something that guides our interaction with experience but does not determine the possibilities for knowledge gained from that experience. And maps can be — and sometimes are — altered to more accurately represent the lay of the land or the reality one directly observes.

§ 77

The point is this: How we see things (the presuppositional aspect of seeing) does not exhaust the possibilities for what we see (the objective aspect of seeing) — or can see. To save the metaphor of presuppositions as glasses: one can remove one's glasses — they are not fixed or "cemented" (as Abraham Kuyper says) to the face — or alter one's prescription for one's glasses to bring things into clearer focus.

§ 78

How Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus saw things (with the presuppositions of an unbelieving Jew) did not exhaust the possibilities of what he could see (viz., the light from heaven that flashed about him) and what he saw and heard in those circumstances completely altered his presuppositions.

§ 79

Moreover, the Word of God itself comes to us not primarily from any religious or cultural perspective but from the perspective of God directly delivered through the prophets and is therefore the Perspective of perspectives — the Truth of truths.

§ 80

It does not come to us through the perspectives of various peoples and times such that the Word itself is significantly conditioned by such enculturating processes to the point that it is not purely the abiding, eternal, and transcendent Word of God.

§ 81

Therefore, what one hears from the Law of Moses is not ultimately the Hebrew perspective but God's Word (the Perspective of perspectives) to the Hebrews.

§ 82

What one hears from the Gospels or the epistles of the apostles of Christ is not ultimately the early Christian perspective but God's final Word through His Son to the world.

§ 83

When Jesus says, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my Word will never pass away" (Mt. 24:35), it is as much as if He had said, "Cultures, peoples, and times will come and go, but what I am saying I say to all and for all (cultures, peoples, and times) and this Word that is the same for all abides forever."

§ 84

When Jesus says, "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free" (Jn. 8:32), he is speaking of a transcendent, absolute truth that (among other things) is knowable on its own terms and as knowledge liberates us from the epistemological and relativistic conditioning of our world or culture.

§ 85

Finally, the Kantian claim, "The mind can only have phenomenal knowledge (knowledge of the way things appear to the mind) and not knowledge of the noumenal  (of the way things actually are)," is self-contradictory, since it necessarily provides for us the big metaphysical picture as to the way things actually are for knowing (i.e., the noumenal) and then says the noumenal is unknowable. Hegel, perhaps Kant's most famous successor (if one ignores the fierce objections of Schopenhauer), recognized this problem and declared that phenomenal knowledge is the noumenal.

§ 86

The claim, "You may not realize it [real-ize = metaphysical claim] but we all see the world through a pair of glasses," is made in the manner of one who speaks without glasses — i.e., it is a noumenal claim.

§ 87

So also the claim, "We have a categorio-centric predicament," implies in a self-contradictory manner that there is no such predicament for making and communicating the claim itself.

§ 88

And the claim, "We know and see things only through the eyes of our culture," is made in the manner of one who speaks outside of or apart from culture. Otherwise it loses its force as a reality claim.

§ 89

The claim, "We can only know things from the perspective of our own historical situation," is made in the manner of one who speaks a-historically — i.e., objectively or transcendently to history.

§ 90

The claim, "There are no truths, only fictions," is spoken like the truth. (And one is often scorned among academics today, if one does not embrace this postmodern "truth.")

§ 91

The claim, "There is no transcendent truth or Truth with a capital 'T,'" is delivered as a transcendent truth — or Truth with a capital "T."

§ 92

The claim, "We cannot have a God's eye view of the world," is made in the manner of one speaking from a God's eye view of the world.

§ 93

The claim, "neutrality is a myth," is a neutral-sounding, neutral-weighted claim. Without a neutral status, the claim that "neutrality is a myth" loses its compelling or non-mythical force. If "neutrality is a myth," then this claim itself is a myth. Where myths are all that we can hope for with respect to any claim, to say that a particular claim is a myth is no objection to accepting it.

§ 94

The claim, "There are no 'brute facts' only interpretations" is made in the manner of one declaring a "brute fact."

§ 95

But when a speculative claim about the metaphysics of a knower is made, it is (as Hume rightly argues) testable against experience. I would argue that we must ask as Christians, Is this really the way knowing is based on what we know of knowing itself: first, from the God of Scripture — i.e., (a) his way of making himself known to us in Scripture, (b) what he commands in relation to knowing and obeying Scripture, and (c) the epistemological assumptions necessary for his appointed, foundational evidences to actually work as evidences both for confirming Scripture as his Word and Jesus as his Christ; and second, from what his common grace indicates in our common experience of ordinary, every day knowing, which the God of Scripture both recognizes (as in his conversation with Moses) and assumes for the revelation of himself through his works and words?

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