Challenge of Nonfoundationalism to Indian Christian Theology

Challenge of Nonfoundationalism to Indian Christian Theology
T. Jacob Thomas

Introduction
The basic nonfoundationalist position is that there are no fixed or absolute universal foundations for knowledge. Knowledge exists in particular cultural and linguistic communities and such knowledge does not need any validation from out side its community. The nonfoundationalist approach would help us to think about reality in a different way, not in fixed categories but in an interconnected, independent web of existence. With regard to theology of religions nonfoundationalism can justify the truth claims of different religions and make religions coexist in a galactic world, rejecting a monistic and centred world. It can also provide sufficient strategical validity to contextual theologies in India like Dalit or tribal theology in their struggle to find a place in the vast spectrum of knowledge formations. Major Western epistemological schools like rationalism, empiricism and idealism as well as the Indian advaitic school have been basically concerned with universal validation of knowledge. The nonfoundational or antifoundational rejection of any absolute or universal claims of truth, would help the emergence and justification of contextual contested knowledge theories. Postfoundationalism attempts to combine both foundationalist and nonfoundationalist approaches to knowledge. It affirms the foundationalist vision of truth as necessary but holds that our current knowledge is not final; hence ambition for any metanarrative is out of place. However, several people see nonfoundationalism nihilistic. In order to understand the role of nonfoundationalism constructively we will first examine the major traditions in philosophy and theology which were foundationalistic and then the tenets of nonfoundationalism will be looked into. Finally some modern nonfoundationalist heologies will be evaluated for their usefulness in the Indian context.
The Epistemological Dilemma in Philosophy and Theology
Epistemological debates since the time of the Greek Sophists in the 5th century BCE dealt with questions such as what is truth and how can we know anything, that is, the possibility of reliable and objective knowledge. The Sophist Gorgias argued that nothing really exists and that if anything did exist it could not be known; if knowledge were possible, it could not be communicated. Protagoras, another major sophist, held that no person’s opinions can be said to be more correct than another’s. However, the Sophists were put to oblivion by the opposing school of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who held that it is possible to have exact and certain knowledge of world and its “unchanging and invisible forms,” or ideas. They held that what we see and touch are imperfect copies of pure forms; abstract reasoning can provide genuine knowledge of these forms. The real problem Plato confronted was how to distinguish episteme (knowledge) from doxa (opinion) and authenticate one’s knowledge. For this he appealed to intuition. This was met with the problem that when we rely on intuition with out giving any reasons for it we do not have any basis to judge between alternative intuitions. If we give reasons for our choice of correct intuition, then we are no longer relying on intuition , but on reasons; again we are left with out any reason to justify our reasons. That means, there was no sound basis or foundation for thought.
Aristotle called the basic forms of knowledge which are grasped by the mind, scientia, first principles. The knowledge we get from experience is actually processed by the mind abstracting or deducing new facts from those already known, in accordance with the rules of logic, which was set down for the first time in systematic form by Aristotle. St. Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle in regarding perception as the starting point and logic as the intellectual procedure for arriving at reliable knowledge of nature. The challenge taken up by Aquinas was to make theology a science in accordance with Aristotelian logic. For this he posited the articles of faith as the first principles, on the basis of the authority of the church. However, the Enlightenment philosophers, armed with the spirit of reformation, attacked such authority and challenged the Thomistic way of understanding. Schleiermacher, the enlightenment theologian built his theology not on the authority of the Church but on the self-consciousness of every human being, the “feeling of absolute dependence,” as the foundation for sure knowledge of God.
Classical Foundationalism
The traditional foundationalist philosophy has as its core tenets: idea of a basic dichotomy between the subjective and the objective; the conception of knowledge as being a correct representation of what is objective; the conviction that human reason can completely free itself of bias, prejudice, and tradition; the ideal of a universal method by which we can first secure firm foundations of knowledge and then build the edifice of a universal science; the belief that by the power of self-reflection we can transcend our historical context and horizon and know things as they are in themselves.
Cartesian paradigm of the solitary thinker served as the background for the modern search for secure foundations. In his Meditations (1641) Descartes identified “clear and distinct ideas” as the foundation for knowledge. He made the foundation of all knowledge the certainty of the self and as a corollary the existence of God. He was following the mathematical ideal of certainty to know that “something is so and can’t be otherwise” and asserted, cogito ergo sum, I cannot doubt that I who doubts exist. The result was dualism between mind and matter, thinking thing (res cogitans) and extended thing (res extensa), which made mind as the source of knowledge and not empirical evidence as empiricists argued.
For John Locke, the father of empiricism, all human knowledge comes to us through our senses. Faith helps us, when reason fails, to make the leap towards revelation, not a certainty but a probability. According to the skeptical epistemology of David Hume ( 1711-1776) we can trust only the knowledge that we acquire from our perceptions. Our perceptions,can be divided into two categories: ideas and impressions. Ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions, or, in other words, that it is impossible for us to think of anything, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses. We cannot believe that a certain thing, such as God, soul, or self exists unless we can point to the impression from which the idea of the thing is derived.In his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding he defines the term impression as our lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will. Ever since the time of Hume knowledge found it difficult to establish itself on any sure foundations. George Berkeley, another, empiricist held that human knowledge of external physical objects is always subject to the errors of the senses, and concluded that one cannot have absolutely certain knowledge of the physical world a position which was contrary to that of the rationalists. The classical philosophical schools such as the Cartesian rationalism, Lockean empiricism and German idealism accepted the criteria that a knowledge is valid if it is universally true and accepted beliefs that are self evident, incorrigible and “evident to the senses” as foundations of sure knowledge. Immanuel Kant agreed with the rationalists on the possibility of getting exact and certain knowledge, but along with the empiricists he held that such knowledge is more informative about the structure of thought than about the world outside of thought. He has made room for faith by setting limits to reason, the boundary of knowing. Pure practical reason helps us to postulate freedom, God and immortality.
The Linguistic Turn and the Death of Foundationalism
The linguistic turn refers to the demise of the long reign of the philosophy of Cartesian monological subject and the recognition of the centrality of language in the constitution of knowledge To understand something is no more to form mental “representations” of it as modernism insisted, rather, understanding has become a matter of actively interpreting our world experience—by means of language. The enlightenment belief that reason is neutral and would lead to truth irrespective of context, tradition, or language was found shaky. Several people have contributed to this turn beginning from John Locke to Gadamer. It was Schleiermacher who liberated the hermeneutical theory from the Enlightenment “objectivity” to the consciousness of the feeling subject, paving the way for liberal humanism with its universal concept of human nature. Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger rejected the concept of knowing subject by the “lived experience” of the involved subject which would discover itself. Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) Philosophical Investigations marked the shift in linguistic analysis. His linguistic analysis perceived reality in terms of language games. No truth is possible outside the language. Languages are shaped by cultural systems and traditions into which we are born. Language is inextricably woven into the fabric of life. Language determines our knowledge. Hans-Georg Gadamer ( 1900-2002) was critical of modern approaches to humanities that modeled themselves on the natural sciences and scientific methods and argued that a “historically effected consciousness” is embedded in the text which itself was the product of particular history and culture. Interpreting a text involves a “fusion of horizons” where the meaning emerges in dialogue with the text's history with the interpreter’s own background. The final outcome of all these developments was coming to the realization that no absolute knowledge is possible as the enlightenment conceived.

Poststructuralism

Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics contended that language is a system of relations and the meaning is processed within that structure. The text has no given meaning and the author disappears behind the structure. The problem with Saussure’s structuralism has been that it rejects not only the Cartesian knowing self but also the subjectivity and subverted the emerging identity consciousness among the socially oppressed women, Blacks, Dalits and tribals. The resurgence of identity politics among the submerged or subaltern groups challenged the unitary notions of human kind as false universalism that blocks substantive differences such as race, gender, or ethnicity , and contested all traditional knowledges. Poststructuralism and the strategy of deconstruction addressed this growing concern. Jacques Derrida’s notion of decentred universe challenged all fixed or absolute notions of centre and periphery and has conceived universe as a free play. There is no authoritative centre, which makes validation of knowledge necessary. Derrida has gone beyond Saussure’s notion that words derive their meaning in their difference with other words and pointed out that since the text has no foundational meaning any number of meaning can be formed by deferring the meaning of a word. This endless passive and active interplay of meaning is termed by Derrida as “differance.” Differance happens not in the difference of words as in structuralism but when something is known only from its absence. The poststructuralist strategy of deconstruction devised by Derrida categorically asserts the absolute impossibility of attributing to any text one single ultimate meaning. In deconstruction "objective truth is to be replaced by hermeneutic truth
It brings out the politics behind the construction of meaning. That means sacred texts, such as the Bible, do not have a single ultimate meaning nor are such texts necessarily authoritative. Deconstruction is a rebellion against absolute truth claims. It contest the given knowledge absolutised through hierarchical dualities which Derrida calls binary oppositions, creating superiority and inferiority structures of thought and social practices. Deconstruction disrupts and displaces the hierarchy and dismantles its authority and creates space for the “marginals” to present themselves as social agents.The web of relations outside the text may determine both the meaning of the text and the nature of its authority.
The linguistic turn led to the demise of the foundationalist tenet that for truth to exist there must be some sort of “extralinguistic” reality. Instead the legitimacy of a plurality of stand points and interpretations over an absolute or a contextual conception of knowledge or truth was affirmed. The linguistic turn has led to the postmodern argument that there are no truths, but only rival interpretations. This does not mean that language is everything, but that we know everything by means of language. There is no need of any foundation, either by way of intuition or by experience.

Postmodernism – Deconstruction of Knowledge

The perspective character of knowledge has been given ever-increasing importance since the age of Nietzsche. Human experience, insights and the perspective shape new ways of achieving and producing knowledge. The new view on knowledge does not assume reason to remain the same at all times and in all places. Rather it is now assumed that the subject of knowledge constitutes itself through a large number of social factors in its cultural context, like gender, wealth, class, and tradition.
Knowledge has now become a communicative function, an interplay between competence and performance, a “social construction of reality.” It is no longer result of any inherent human characteristic. Circumstances in society affect the subject’s knowing and knowledge. The question of the nature of knowledge is now replaced with the question of knowledge’s social connection and of rationality in communicative social course of events.
The philosophical core of postmodernism is a rejection of foundationalism, defended as the belief in given or fully attainable truths. LeRon Shults notes that postmodernism was born “out of the death throes of foundationalism.” The distinguishing features of the postmodernism can be identified as (1) rejection of an essentialist metaphysics; (2) a nonfoundationalist epistemology; (3) the historical contingency of all ides and a constructivist view of knowledge; (4) an aversion to metanarratives; and (5) the decentering of the self. Postmodernists differ from one another in important respects.
The nonfoundationalists defend an aesthetic relation to self; one should affirm “one’s liberty” by devising a personal style in opposition to all ruling norms. They attempt to immunize particular interpretations from critique by appealing only to the intra communal factors; they disengage themselves from any inter communal or extra communal factors. From a static and monist outlook on human kind, these newer attempts emphasized that the knowledge is produced in the interaction between subject and context. This means the earlier anthropological essentialism was discarded in favour of a relational view of the human person.
Postmodern theologies

The Liberation theology as well as the consequent third World theologies, though aimed at “a radical break” from the Euro-centric epistemologies could not escape the project of modernity, the dialectical progress of history and the Marxist “metanarrative” of class struggle. These contextual theologies could not accommodate epistemological and anthropological pluralism because of their basic foundationalistic world-view. Several contemporary scholars responded to the challenge raised by the nonfoundationalist theory of knowledge in a variety of ways. These nonfoundationalist theologies are postmodern as they reject the modern project of metanarratives but in that attempt find themselves in the awkward position of emitting ultraliberal as well as ultra conservative responses.

Among the liberal postmodern theologians Mark C. Taylor, Thomas J.J. Altizer, Robert P. Scharlemann, Charles Winquist, David Ray Griffin and Don Cupitt are important, though their works are not identical. Don Cupitt and Mark. C. Taylor endorse the line of thought of postmodern philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. Both of them are influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas on the death of God. To them the death of God meant “the death of a transcendental signifier stabilizing identity and truth” and their concern is not a theology in the traditional sense but an “a/theology.” As Taylor calls it.

Among the conservative Postmodern theologians Graham Ward includes the names of George Lindbeck who initiated the Postliberal school of theology and his Yale colleague, Hans Frei , whose Biblical interpretation became basic source for this school, and other Yale students like William Placher, Ronald Thiemann and Kathrynn Tanner. Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbry also is included among the postliberal theologians. John Milbank, a sociologist, whose theology of Radical Orthodoxy, though nonfoundationalist, is premodern as it rejects any traffic between theology and contemporary human or natural sciences.
Postliberalism

Postliberal theologians reject the nonfoundationalists claim “that knowledge is grounded in a set of non-inferential, self-evident beliefs.” For them experience comes to us always as interpreted . There is no way for us to check them against some primordial, uninterpreted experience.” The nonfoundational or antifoundational character of Postliberalism goes back to Karl Barth or even to Aquinas. Barth held that there could be no “foundation, support, or justification” for theology in any philosophy, theory or epistemology” Karl Barth affirmed the self-authenticating Word of God as the foundation of theology. The truth of this Word is self evident to the believer. It may not make any sense to those who do not share the faith. This Barthian approach to Bible has influenced the postliberalist thinking that other religions or schools of thought can have their own valid set of foundations with no need of authentication from any outside authority. Lindbeck also is open about his indebtedness to Aquinas who wrote that the Christian language about God is true, but we do not know how it is true. We know God loves us, but we do not know what love would be like for God. We cannot go beyond our experience; we can only work within the rules the community provided to talk about God. As the title of the postliberal theologian William Placher’s book suggests, Christians need not "apologize" for their theology not conforming to non-Christian standards of rationality.

The postliberal approach finds important the differences among religions, rather than their commonalities. They don’t agree with the pluralists that all religions are saying the same thing. Postliberal theology “emphasizes the scriptural stories or narratives by which Christians identify God and the Christian community and come to understand their own lives.” Interpreting Hans Frei, the postliberalists argue that the Christian story for them can shape the Christian communal identity. It has the assimilative power to absorb the world. Postliberal theology emphasizes the importance of an intratextual use of scripture, relying on “the distinctive internal logic of Christian beliefs and practices. Kathryn Tanner “refuses to locate divine acts in some larger narrative of what is happening in creation, but insists on the primacy of God’s activity, but she sees such an account as ‘empowerment’ of quests for social justice rather than ‘tyranny.’ Postliberalists attempt for the “creative fusion of hermeneutics and epistemology.”



Postfoundationalism
If the problem with foundationalism was that it missed the communal factors by absolutizing the thinking subject, nonfoundationalism attempted to “immunize particular interpretations from critique by appealing only to those communal factors”. J. Wenzel van Huysteen, a Princeton theologian and proponent of a postfoundationalist theology fears that postliberal approach to community would develop ghetto mentality or “closet foundationalism.” For van Huysteen, the task of theology is “both to understand and explain.” He criticizes the postliberalists for rejecting the latter aspect of theology and making it simply “narrative” Our knowledge of reality is always mediated by our interpretation of experience. Our claims of truth are not absolute because our interpretation of reality is fallible. Our language is metaphorical and therefore cannot be absolutized, even if it is fully operational with in a given community. He says that interpreted experience is key to the relation between truth and knowledge. According to Mark Bevir, postfoundationalism implies that the individuals can have experiences and exercise their reason only against the background of a social practice or tradition. Individuals can exist only against the background of the community: “an individual is embedded within the community.” Postfoundationalism safeguards identity not by immunizing it against any critique but by emphasizing difference – otherness. It does not make a closed community, as is the tendency in postliberalism or radical orthodoxy, but rather stands for “an open community.
Van Huyssteen, suggests “critical realism” as a way of overcoming the dichotomy between the thinking individual and closed community. According to Tom Wright, a New Testament scholar and the Bishop of Durham,
...[critical realism] is a way of describing the process of "knowing" that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower (hence "realism"), while fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (hence "critical").

Van Hyussteen has his own version of critical realism that “affirms the embedded nature of human knowledge and existence” Critical realism, believes that the conceptual categories that we use to identify and understand social events are not exogenously determined; rather these categories are socially and historically determined. Critical realism is mainly employed by scientist turned theologians like John Polkinghorne, Ian Barbour, and Arthur Peacocke who were influenced by the scientist turned philosopher, Michael Polanyi. Polanyi's ideas were taken up enthusiastically by T. F. Torrance a theologian who finds dialogue with science important. Following van Hyussteen LeRon Shults attempts to develop a postfoundationalist theology based on the theological method of Wolfhart Pannenberg, who promotes dialogue with science and the philosophy of Calvin Schrag. Schrag holds that though our knowledge is contextual and fallible that do not automatically entail relativism. Reason has a binding effect across the contexts. Based on this philosophical approach postfoundationslim “insists on developing transcommunal and intersubjective explanations,” a necessary correction to postliberalism. Now we will briefly look at how Indian Dalit theologians deal with the challenge of postmodern theories.

Dalit theology

Dalit theology emerged as an academic discipline in the 1980s. It emerged as a quest for a “contested epistemology; it offered a “methodological challenge to the grand narratives of ‘prefix-less’ theology and Indian Christian theology.” Arvind P. Nirmal(1936-1995) rejected the Brahminic tradition in Indian Christian theology He observed that even though a third world theology was emerged in the 1970s under the influence of the Latin American Liberation theology it “failed to see in the struggle of Indian dalits for liberation a subject matter appropriate for doing theology in India.” Liberation theology or the third world contextual theologies could not offer a proper method for analyzing and interpreting the story of the Dalits. Dalit theology needed “a methodological shift in this postmodern context.” In his search for a suitable critical and constructive method Nirmal digged out the neglected Indian protest tradition of Lokayata or Carvaka school of Indian philosophy which rejects the Brahminic notion of esoteric knowledge. Vinaya Raj introduces a nonfoundationalist poststructuralist method of deconstruction, suitable for Dalit theology. He writes: “Deconstruction-- the poststructural method, as it believes in the fluidity and nonfixity of the meaning/subjectivity helps us to produce new meanings through discursive readings.” The nonfoundationalist poststructuralist strategies offer alternate ways of looking at theories of self and social formations, and transform existing caste practices and institutions in order to construct a sense for Dalits as active social agents.

Conclusion

Colin Gunton is of the opinion that we should not give up our search for foundations. For him non-foundationalism is a reflex to foundationalism. He argues, “that the basis and criteria of rationality are intrinsic to particular human intellectual enterprises, which should not have imposed upon them in a procrustean way the methodologies which are appropriate for other forms of intellectual life.” Yet Gunton rejects non-foundationalism as it constructs a barrier to outside critique. The nonfoundationalists “run the risk of the rank subjectivism… they evade the intellectual challenge involved in the use of the word ‘God’.” Basing on the theology of Cappadocians Gunton writes that since God is a communion of persons and each person is distinct but inseparable from the others, God’s being consists in relationship with one another. He writes,

…[the] three persons are for and from each other in their otherness. They thus confer particularity upon and receive it from one another. That giving of particularity is very important: it is a matter of space to be. Father, Son and Spirit through the shape – the taxis – of their inseparable relatedness confer particularity and freedom on each other. That is their personal being.

For Barth the doctrine of the imago Dei means that God created human beings for fellowship. Humans are naturally fellowshiping beings, with other beings and with God. It also means only in relationship with God that we can be fully human. There is no objectively existing datum that can be called religion, no “true religion” as such. Neither are we able to discover truth. We only become real only in relation between objectivity and subjectivity. Hendrick Kraemer called this Barthian approach “Biblical realism.” Since we cannot understand ourselves or others wholly we must focus on what we are made for—relationship. So the encounter with other religions must focus on the relational aspects of the encounter. The relational character of being human existence, the network of existence need to be the common ground between people, defined by way of religions, ethnicity, race, language or gender. Postliberlaism failed to note this relational aspect of Barthian theology, instead they used him mainly to insulate themselves from any outside scrutiny. Postliberal suggestion that Christian community exists alongside other communities with each having its own rules of discourse and linguistic conventions, each becoming a system unto itself, without any cross-cultural, universal values, is not satisfactory. The problem the postliberalists want to solve is not solved as there still looms the danger of the most dominant group exerting its values upon others. Colin Gunton criticizes postmodernity as “an imperious for truth which abolishes all other truth by a form of homogenization. It is, despite appearances, a form of universalism” Postliberlaism deprives itself any theological warrant to establish mutual relationship as the rules of each community remain separate.
The challenge to Christian theology in India is to demonstrate that Christian faith, at its very heart, and not only in its moral preaching, promotes the dignity and honor of human personhood. Christians have to acknowledge the criticisms raised by contemporary discourses on casteism, racism and, sexism. In order to accept the other, to accept difference, theology should change its universal, fixed, absolute categories of knowledge and values and reorient its theoretical basis to accept the validity of multi-foundational faith, values and practices. If we redefine our worldviews it is possible to see that as stars in relation to galaxies, or galaxies in relation to the universe or universe in relation to multiverse are not necessarily centred on any particular point; the world organism, even the atoms and the subparticles exist only in relationship, one keep the other in its place with their simple presence, mutually influencing and shaping other’s identity. If that relationship is broken the entire universe will collapse. Hence our theologies need to be relational with respect to individuals, communities, genders, races, and all creation, resisting all efforts to subsume the difference or drift away from one another.
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