Epistemology/Doc's Epistemology Rant

From Neoredemptive

Most epistemology is thoroughly anthropocentric, i.e., it is concerned with how a person or a community of people (acting simply as man qua man) come to know whether something is true or not.

Foundationalism assumes that there is some corner of human knowledge which holds indubitably to actual truth, untainted by sin. Coherentism and reliablism are just flavors of foundationalism (with "systems of truth must be coherent" and "systems of truth must reliably describe past and future events" as their favorite indubitable assumptions) which assume our rational capabilities are sufficiently undamaged by sin to assess coherence and reliability. Linguistic theories of knowledge turn everything -- and particularly "living the Christian life" -- into a language game, where we are "good christians" because we have learned to speak, think, and act within the "grammar" of the "christian community", leaving us only ethics without the Holy Spirit and a spirituality completely devoid of the grace of God.

But it's all still about people, of themselves, trying to figuring out "God" -- which is called natural theology or (per David Wells) "eros spirituality". Such projects are intrinsically doomed to failure, because "the world in it's wisdom did not know God" (1 Cor 1:21) and the things of God are "spiritually discerned" (1 Corinthians 2:14). Christian knowledge of God, the self, and the world -- "agape spirituality" -- comes only and wholly through Special Revelation by the grace of God.

Yes, we should understand the epistemology of our culture. But whether that is modern, postmodern, transmodern, feudal, classical, hypermodern, or anything else, we risk completely discarding anything distinctly Christian in our faith when the ground rules for knowing, thinking, and talking about faith rest upon human wisdom and the vain philosophies of our age rather than the wisdom of God.