Spiritual Epistemology: A Follow-up to Identity Theft

Spiritual Epistemology

I thought it might be important to attempt to articulate the problem with the claim that God will reveal the meaning of His word through the action of the Spirit.  I realize that this may step on some sensitive toes, but I think it must be said – and debated.  So, here goes.

In my travels I speak before a lot of people all over the world.  It is common among conservative Christian and Messianic groups to make the following claim:

“Spiritual things can only be known through the action of the Holy Spirit.  Yes, we should study the culture, the languages and all that, but in the end it is God who must reveal the meaning of the text to us.  We pray for enlightenment and when it comes we know that this is what the Scripture means because we have the witness of the Spirit in our own spirits.  The scholar’s work is important but it isn’t essential.  After all, God knows what He really meant to say and He can communicate that meaning directly to us if He wishes.”

This argument is appealing.  First, it seems to have Scriptural warrant (Paul does say that spiritual things must be spiritually discerned).  Second, it takes the onus of real, serious scholarship off the backs of the ordinary believer.  Now all I really need is prayer and a sort of spiritual intuition.  Third, it sounds so right.  It gives the credit to God and shows utter dependence on Him.  And fourth (and perhaps most importantly), it puts the true meaning of the text out of the arena of critical analysis.  After all, if God reveals it directly to you, who am I to say that you’re wrong.

This description of how we know things is what I would call Spiritual Immediacy.  It presupposes a direct conscious contact with the Spirit and it is self-authenticating.  It is very similar to knowing that I have a headache.  You don’t know directly that I have a headache because you don’t feel my actual pain, but no amount of argument on your part can convince me that  I don’t feel the pain.  My awareness of my own headache is direct and immediate and is not subject to your assessment of its veracity.

But for precisely these same reasons, I have no real assurance that you aren’t faking.  And that’s the problem.  There is no way for me to know for certain that you feel pain in your head.  Even if I run all the tests possible, I cannot have the same direct experience that you have.  Therefore, I must rely on the truthfulness of your report without actually having any way to absolutely verify it for myself.

Now this may not be of much consequence when it comes to your headache but it is of considerable consequence when it comes to understanding the meaning of a divine revelation.  If there is no independent, observable testing method for determining the truth claims about the meaning of a text, then the purported claim about its meaning is no more valid that a claim about your headache.  I can accept it on faith, but I could just as easily be deluded or deceived.  While it sounds laudable to accept the meaning of Scripture on faith, it is very dangerous – and not scriptural.  I do not have to provide a history of the number of doctrinal claims and faith statements made on the basis of someone’s direct conscious contact with God’s revelation of the meaning of a verse or passage.  History is replete with example of serious, and sometimes disastrous, examples of people and whole communities who thought they had a message from God but ended up fools – or dead.  Scripture is not so naïve as to assume that God alone provides meaning.  All Scripture comes clothed in the garments of culture and all culture is subject to the limited and sinful perspectives of men.  While it is noble to claim that God “superintends” His word so that the essential meaning is preserved, the history of human interpretation suggests otherwise.  The bottom line is that men interfere with the meaning of the text all the time.  They can’t help it.  They are subject to their own paradigms.  The only way to understand the text is to attempt to understand it within its own cultural context.  Whenever we encounter an epistemology that suggests God overrides cultural clothing in order to directly reveal the true meaning of the text to some individual or group, we better start looking for a king without clothes.

A strong part of the appeal of the direct conscious contact theory is its immunity from criticism.  No one likes to be wrong, especially when it concerns matters of faith.  If there is any area where we want certainty, it is the area of spiritual beliefs.  But our concern for certainty actually stands in opposition to the position of Scripture itself.  Faith is not certainty.  It is trusting  the evidence even if you don’t know absolutely for sure.  The attempt to derive certainty from a spiritual encounter is really a form of idolatry.  It says that knowing what is true is more important than knowing who made the claim.  We sometimes encounter this kind of “acceptable” idolatry in the form of the claim that the Word of God is the most important element of belief.  We end up worshiping the Bible rather than the One revealed in the Bible.

For these reasons, I am sensitive to the claim that “all I need to do is pray about this” or “I know that God revealed the meaning of this text to me because I feel so strongly about it.”  Unless these psychological states of mind are open to true examination and real criticism, they are useless for anyone except their author.  In fact, they have no meaning to anyone other than the author.  They are mystical affirmations of direct experiences with God, affirmations that no one else is able to share and consequently, no one else can understand.  If this is your position on interpreting Scripture, well and good.  Just don’t try to say anything that makes any sense to anyone else.  Do us all a favor, and simply shut up about it.

Let’s put this in a positive way.  First, the Bible recognizes that men will claim they have a revelation from God.  Therefore, it offers tests for these claims – and a long history of how many such claims were actually false in spite of the religious status of the one making the claim.  Second, the Bible does not ask for certainty.  It asks for trust – and not even trust in the text, but rather trust in the God behind the text.  Of course, the text tells us that we should trust this God, and in that sense it is circular, but it is not viciously circular since it also provides ample external evidence that such a God is trustworthy.  Third, the Spirit of the Lord is operative in drawing the reader into the mind of God, but that does not imply that it is not necessary to understand the text in its own context.  No verse in Scripture comes undressed.  God has chosen to reveal Himself within the hearts and minds of men and every man is subject to his own paradigm.  Therefore, while the application of a text may be cross-cultural, the meaning of a text cannot be for every text comes dressed in the language of its writers.  To suggest otherwise is to suggest that these men didn’t understand what they were writing.  We might claim that they didn’t understand the fullest implications of their own words, but that only means that we, from another time and place, see more than they saw.  It does not mean that the text is only understandable to us!  Finally, the history of textual criticism clearly demonstrates that men have intentionally and unintentionally altered, added to and subtracted from the words of the original authors.  Moreover, no scholar seriously doubts that the text as we have it today wasn’t arranged and rearranged according to the purpose of the original authors.  An appeal to direct conscious contact epistemology simply ignores all of this evidence.  And for what purpose?  So that we won’t have to deal with the inherent ambiguities that are part of a document that has been transmitted over thousands of years through the hands of many, many people.

Spiritual immediacy might work for headaches, but it will give headaches to anyone who seriously attempts to use it as a basis for understanding the meaning of Scripture.