The Bible as the Ποῦ Στῶ for Knowledge and Personal Significance
When God gave his Word to us, he gave us much more than simply basic information about himself. He gave us the ποῦ στῶ, pou stō, or base that justifies both our knowledge claims and our claims to personal significance.
THE JUSTIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
It is an epistemological axiom that unless there is comprehensive knowledge of all things somewhere there can be no knowledge anywhere. This is because all knowledge data is inextricably interrelated. For the finite knower to begin from himself alone with any datum, whether that datum be subjective or objective, ideal or material, mental or nonmental, and to seek to understand it comprehensively and exhaustively must inevitably lead him to other data, but being finite he cannot examine any datum or all possible relationships of that one datum comprehensively or exhaustively, not to mention examine all the other data in the universe. Furthermore, there is no way he can be assured that the next datum he might have examined at the point at which he concluded his research in his finiteness would have accorded with all that he had concluded to that point or would have required him to reevaluate his entire enterprise to that point. The only way to escape the force of this fact is to avoid the entire question of epistemology.
The entire history of philosophy up to more recent times may be summarized as precisely man’s rational effort, beginning with himself and accepting no outside help, to “examine” enough of certain chosen particularities of the universe—particularities both subjective and objective, ideal and material, mental and nonmental—to find the universals which give to these particularities their meaning. To be somewhat more specific, men have attempted to come to knowledge and then to the justification of their claims to knowledge via the epistemological methods of rationalism or empiricism.
Rationalists, believing that all knowledge begins with innate criterial a priori truths from which further truths are derived by the deductive process, urge that by this method one will arrive at knowledge that is certain. But even if these criterial a priori ideas were to include the laws of logic, our own mental states, and the existence of objective truth, we can, as Frame has urged,
deduce very little from such a priori ideas. Certainly, we cannot deduce the whole fabric of human knowledge from them or even enough knowledge to constitute a meaningful philosophy. Nothing follows from the laws of logic, taken alone, except possibly more laws of logic. From propositions about our own mental states, nothing follows except further propositions about our own mental states. From the statement “there are objective truths,” nothing specific follows, and a statement that tells us nothing specific … is not a meaningful statement.… Thus if knowledge is limited to the sorts of propositions we have just examined, we will know only about our own minds and not about the real world because our mental states often deceive us. Thus rationalism leaves us not with the body of certainties that Plato and Descartes dreamed of but with no knowledge at all of the real world.
Empiricists, believing that a world of “real facts” is “out there” to be studied and comprehended, urge that knowledge is to be gained through the inductive method of the scientist—observing, forming hypotheses, experimenting, and inferring conclusions from that experimentation. They are satisfied that such a procedure provides humanity with a program for the achieving of knowledge. But aside from the fact of myriad a priori assumptions that are implicit in the inductive method, one who would consistently follow the empirical approach to knowledge must surrender many claims to knowledge that would otherwise be made without hesitation. For example, to cite Frame:
(i) Empiricism cannot justify a general proposition, such as “all men are mortal.… Similarly, the propositions of logic and mathematics, propositions that claim to be universally true, cannot be established on an empirical basis. (ii) Empiricism cannot justify any statement about the future.… (iii) Empiricism cannot justify any statements about ethical values. Statements about sensible facts do not imply anything about ethical goodness or badness, right or wrong, or obligation or prohibition.… (iv) [But if empiricism cannot justify the language about ethical values, then it cannot justify any claim to knowledge, for] empiricism cannot justify empiricism. For empiricism is a view of how one ought (an ethical “ought”) to justify his beliefs, and on an empiricist basis, we cannot justify from sense-experience the proposition that we ought to justify our beliefs in that way.
[And, of course,] empiricism rules out claims to know God, if God is thought to be invisible or otherwise resistant to empirical “checking procedures.” Immanuel Kant attempted to avoid the pitfalls of pure rationalism and pure empiricism, neither of which, he averred, can justify its knowledge claims in isolation from the other, by formally arguing in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason that the knowing subject, although he possesses the innate ideas of space and time as well as twelve specific categories of thought (unity, plurality, totality, reality, negation, limitation, substantiality, causality, reciprocity, possibility and impossibility, existence and nonexistence, and necessity and contingency), also needs the objective facts of the “noumenal world”—the world as it really is apart from our experience—which are brought to him by sensory experience. Otherwise, these “thoughts without percepts” would be “blank” or “empty.” On the other hand, if the knowing subject has only the data of the noumenal world streaming via the senses into a mind that is a blank tablet, these “percepts without concepts” would be “blind” or “chaotic.” So he argued for the necessary combining of some elements of both rationalism (which provides the form) and empiricism (which provides the “matter”) in the acquisition and build-up of knowledge.
However, because the mind’s innate ideas and categories of thought impose a structure on the sensory data brought to it, one can never know the objective facts of the world as they really are but only as the mind itself has “created” them. Standing always between the knowing subject and the thing to be known is just the knower’s creative knowing process itself. But if one can never know “the thing in itself” (das Ding-an-sich) but only “the thing as it has been created by the mind,” we are left again with skepticism if not total ignorance. Also, Kant’s epistemology, as later thinkers noted, raises the prospect of the nonexistence of even his objective noumenal world, for since it is unknowable it cannot be shown to be objective. Furthermore, although he posited a “pre-established harmony” as the basis of his categories in human minds (having rejecting the Christian view of man as a knower created in the divine image for the purpose of cognitive relations with God, the external world, and other selves as the ground for knowledge), Kant can provide no valid reasons why such a pre-established harmony exists. For if, as he contends, knowledge is exclusively a joint product of forms and perceptions, he cannot explain how it is possible to acquire valid information about the categories which for him are purely mental.
It should be apparent that all of these philosophical efforts have ended with dismal results. In more recent times, from Hegel and Kierkegaard to the present, many philosophers, recognizing the failure of this human effort to arrive at the certain knowledge of anything, have concluded that this failure was due to these earlier thinkers thinking rationally (or antithetically). Of course, when Hegel abandoned the biblical concept of rational antithesis (A is not non-A) for his concept of dialectic truth (the thesis-antithesis-synthesis process), in which concept syntheses continue to emerge from the process of conflict between opposing theses and antitheses and in which concept truth is to be found only at the ultimate end of the process, his own philosophy is untrue because it is only a part of the unfinished dialectic process. In other words, if Hegel’s philosophy is true, it is false! And when Kierkegaard abandoned the biblical concept of truth for his concept of truth as unresolvable theses and antitheses, he gave up all possibility of ever identifying a real truth statement anywhere. Accordingly, these philosophers have abandoned rationality for irrationality and are now urging that meaning has nothing to do with thinking rationally. Truth is relative and life’s meaning is to be achieved by a “leap of faith” to anything that gives even a momentary raison d’être.
All this the Christian eschews in favor of the epistemology graciously given in the fact and propositional content of Holy Scripture. He recognizes that in the fact of Scripture itself he has a truly profound solution to man’s need for an infinite reference point if knowledge is to become a reality. He understands that because there is comprehensive knowledge with God, real and true knowledge is possible for man, since God who knows all the data exhaustively in all their infinite relationships and who possesses therefore true knowledge is in the position to impart any portion of that true knowledge to man. The Christian believes that this is precisely what God did when he revealed himself to man propositionally. And he rests in the confidence that it is precisely in and by the Scriptures—coming to him ab extra (from “outside the cosmos”)—that he has the “Archimedean ποῦ στῶ” that he needs for the buildup of knowledge and the justification of his knowledge claims. Taking all his directions from the transcendent ποῦ στῶ of the divine mind revealed in Holy Scripture, the Christian affirms, first, the created actuality of a real world of knowing persons and knowable objects external to these knowing persons. Second, he affirms the legitimate necessity of both sensory experience and the reasoning process in the activity of learning, for the legitimacy of these things are authenticated by the Scriptures themselves. Finally, he happily acknowledges that the divine mind which has revealed something of its knowledge in Scripture is his ποῦ στῶ for universals in order to justify his truth claims. In short, he makes the Word of the self-attesting Christ of Scripture the epistemic basis for all reasoning and knowledge—even when reasoning about reason or about God’s revelation.
Source: Reymond, R. L. (1998). A new systematic theology of the Christian faith
THE JUSTIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE
It is an epistemological axiom that unless there is comprehensive knowledge of all things somewhere there can be no knowledge anywhere. This is because all knowledge data is inextricably interrelated. For the finite knower to begin from himself alone with any datum, whether that datum be subjective or objective, ideal or material, mental or nonmental, and to seek to understand it comprehensively and exhaustively must inevitably lead him to other data, but being finite he cannot examine any datum or all possible relationships of that one datum comprehensively or exhaustively, not to mention examine all the other data in the universe. Furthermore, there is no way he can be assured that the next datum he might have examined at the point at which he concluded his research in his finiteness would have accorded with all that he had concluded to that point or would have required him to reevaluate his entire enterprise to that point. The only way to escape the force of this fact is to avoid the entire question of epistemology.
The entire history of philosophy up to more recent times may be summarized as precisely man’s rational effort, beginning with himself and accepting no outside help, to “examine” enough of certain chosen particularities of the universe—particularities both subjective and objective, ideal and material, mental and nonmental—to find the universals which give to these particularities their meaning. To be somewhat more specific, men have attempted to come to knowledge and then to the justification of their claims to knowledge via the epistemological methods of rationalism or empiricism.
Rationalists, believing that all knowledge begins with innate criterial a priori truths from which further truths are derived by the deductive process, urge that by this method one will arrive at knowledge that is certain. But even if these criterial a priori ideas were to include the laws of logic, our own mental states, and the existence of objective truth, we can, as Frame has urged,
deduce very little from such a priori ideas. Certainly, we cannot deduce the whole fabric of human knowledge from them or even enough knowledge to constitute a meaningful philosophy. Nothing follows from the laws of logic, taken alone, except possibly more laws of logic. From propositions about our own mental states, nothing follows except further propositions about our own mental states. From the statement “there are objective truths,” nothing specific follows, and a statement that tells us nothing specific … is not a meaningful statement.… Thus if knowledge is limited to the sorts of propositions we have just examined, we will know only about our own minds and not about the real world because our mental states often deceive us. Thus rationalism leaves us not with the body of certainties that Plato and Descartes dreamed of but with no knowledge at all of the real world.
Empiricists, believing that a world of “real facts” is “out there” to be studied and comprehended, urge that knowledge is to be gained through the inductive method of the scientist—observing, forming hypotheses, experimenting, and inferring conclusions from that experimentation. They are satisfied that such a procedure provides humanity with a program for the achieving of knowledge. But aside from the fact of myriad a priori assumptions that are implicit in the inductive method, one who would consistently follow the empirical approach to knowledge must surrender many claims to knowledge that would otherwise be made without hesitation. For example, to cite Frame:
(i) Empiricism cannot justify a general proposition, such as “all men are mortal.… Similarly, the propositions of logic and mathematics, propositions that claim to be universally true, cannot be established on an empirical basis. (ii) Empiricism cannot justify any statement about the future.… (iii) Empiricism cannot justify any statements about ethical values. Statements about sensible facts do not imply anything about ethical goodness or badness, right or wrong, or obligation or prohibition.… (iv) [But if empiricism cannot justify the language about ethical values, then it cannot justify any claim to knowledge, for] empiricism cannot justify empiricism. For empiricism is a view of how one ought (an ethical “ought”) to justify his beliefs, and on an empiricist basis, we cannot justify from sense-experience the proposition that we ought to justify our beliefs in that way.
[And, of course,] empiricism rules out claims to know God, if God is thought to be invisible or otherwise resistant to empirical “checking procedures.” Immanuel Kant attempted to avoid the pitfalls of pure rationalism and pure empiricism, neither of which, he averred, can justify its knowledge claims in isolation from the other, by formally arguing in his monumental Critique of Pure Reason that the knowing subject, although he possesses the innate ideas of space and time as well as twelve specific categories of thought (unity, plurality, totality, reality, negation, limitation, substantiality, causality, reciprocity, possibility and impossibility, existence and nonexistence, and necessity and contingency), also needs the objective facts of the “noumenal world”—the world as it really is apart from our experience—which are brought to him by sensory experience. Otherwise, these “thoughts without percepts” would be “blank” or “empty.” On the other hand, if the knowing subject has only the data of the noumenal world streaming via the senses into a mind that is a blank tablet, these “percepts without concepts” would be “blind” or “chaotic.” So he argued for the necessary combining of some elements of both rationalism (which provides the form) and empiricism (which provides the “matter”) in the acquisition and build-up of knowledge.
However, because the mind’s innate ideas and categories of thought impose a structure on the sensory data brought to it, one can never know the objective facts of the world as they really are but only as the mind itself has “created” them. Standing always between the knowing subject and the thing to be known is just the knower’s creative knowing process itself. But if one can never know “the thing in itself” (das Ding-an-sich) but only “the thing as it has been created by the mind,” we are left again with skepticism if not total ignorance. Also, Kant’s epistemology, as later thinkers noted, raises the prospect of the nonexistence of even his objective noumenal world, for since it is unknowable it cannot be shown to be objective. Furthermore, although he posited a “pre-established harmony” as the basis of his categories in human minds (having rejecting the Christian view of man as a knower created in the divine image for the purpose of cognitive relations with God, the external world, and other selves as the ground for knowledge), Kant can provide no valid reasons why such a pre-established harmony exists. For if, as he contends, knowledge is exclusively a joint product of forms and perceptions, he cannot explain how it is possible to acquire valid information about the categories which for him are purely mental.
It should be apparent that all of these philosophical efforts have ended with dismal results. In more recent times, from Hegel and Kierkegaard to the present, many philosophers, recognizing the failure of this human effort to arrive at the certain knowledge of anything, have concluded that this failure was due to these earlier thinkers thinking rationally (or antithetically). Of course, when Hegel abandoned the biblical concept of rational antithesis (A is not non-A) for his concept of dialectic truth (the thesis-antithesis-synthesis process), in which concept syntheses continue to emerge from the process of conflict between opposing theses and antitheses and in which concept truth is to be found only at the ultimate end of the process, his own philosophy is untrue because it is only a part of the unfinished dialectic process. In other words, if Hegel’s philosophy is true, it is false! And when Kierkegaard abandoned the biblical concept of truth for his concept of truth as unresolvable theses and antitheses, he gave up all possibility of ever identifying a real truth statement anywhere. Accordingly, these philosophers have abandoned rationality for irrationality and are now urging that meaning has nothing to do with thinking rationally. Truth is relative and life’s meaning is to be achieved by a “leap of faith” to anything that gives even a momentary raison d’être.
All this the Christian eschews in favor of the epistemology graciously given in the fact and propositional content of Holy Scripture. He recognizes that in the fact of Scripture itself he has a truly profound solution to man’s need for an infinite reference point if knowledge is to become a reality. He understands that because there is comprehensive knowledge with God, real and true knowledge is possible for man, since God who knows all the data exhaustively in all their infinite relationships and who possesses therefore true knowledge is in the position to impart any portion of that true knowledge to man. The Christian believes that this is precisely what God did when he revealed himself to man propositionally. And he rests in the confidence that it is precisely in and by the Scriptures—coming to him ab extra (from “outside the cosmos”)—that he has the “Archimedean ποῦ στῶ” that he needs for the buildup of knowledge and the justification of his knowledge claims. Taking all his directions from the transcendent ποῦ στῶ of the divine mind revealed in Holy Scripture, the Christian affirms, first, the created actuality of a real world of knowing persons and knowable objects external to these knowing persons. Second, he affirms the legitimate necessity of both sensory experience and the reasoning process in the activity of learning, for the legitimacy of these things are authenticated by the Scriptures themselves. Finally, he happily acknowledges that the divine mind which has revealed something of its knowledge in Scripture is his ποῦ στῶ for universals in order to justify his truth claims. In short, he makes the Word of the self-attesting Christ of Scripture the epistemic basis for all reasoning and knowledge—even when reasoning about reason or about God’s revelation.
Source: Reymond, R. L. (1998). A new systematic theology of the Christian faith
sung by Rick at 2:25 PM
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