“What Hath Athens to Do with Azusa Street?”
Thinking in Tongues, James K.A. Smith
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Yup but I find the more comfortable I become with other people having their own opinions, the easier it becomes to accept my own whether or not anyone else agrees. I think owning what truth is given us to see is a moral imperative. And I’m not talking about stone tablets or angelic messengers, just ones own mind as an inescapable, necessary conduit for whatever that will be.
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More broadly, I will argue that implicit in pentecostal spirituality and the experience of pentecostal worship are philosophical and theological “intuitions” (I use the word loosely) that, when made explicit, offer challenges to received wisdom and the status quo. Far from being a seething bed of emotionalist anti-intellectualism, then, pentecostal spirituality can be a source for philosophical critique.
James K.A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues
This is pretty cool 
“In fact, the chapter subtitle hearkens back to my junior year in college: sitting in chapel, I excitedly opened a letter from the University of Notre Dame. Several weeks earlier I had the audacity to write a personal letter to one of the leading figures in philosophy of religion: Alvin Plantinga…”
James K.A. Smith, Thinking in Tongues
Just poking my head in for a minute.
I’m not even a low-rent James Smith, but here’s my translation of the academic jargon. The reference is to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s 1960 book Truth and Method. Gadamer argued that no hermeneutical “method” could arrive at an “objective” truth in a text. The reader is limited by his/her cultural “horizon,” but the text can expand that horizon by exposing the reader to a different cultural experience/viewpoint. The goal is to bring oneself “closer” to the horizon of the text, although the two can never merge. (There is no “objective” vantage point from which the view things. All is culturally situated.) For more info, check out Anthony Thistleton’s dissertation turned into a still-influential 1980 book: The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein
Can’t help you on Habermas. Haven’t read him.
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That explanation helps a little. Thank you.
Ha! I hear that. Maybe squatter grade. I’d enjoy a conversation and I think he may as well.
I was introduced to him through my church in a deacons training session several years ago. We were asked to read his book Letters to a Young Calvinist, and I enjoyed his even tone and especially liked his little cherry on top of Piper’s Desiring God in the chapter Enjoying God by Enjoying Creation.
Last year, after discovering Keener, and taking a look at his Spirit Hermeneutics, I learned Smith is pentecostal. As a coeditor for the series that Keener’s book was supposed to be part of, he’s not on the fringe and yet even a knowledgeable mod in the reformed group I used to be part of was sure that I had him mistaken for someone else when I said he was pentecostal.
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This reminds me of the infinite task that my phenomenology professor said that philosophy is. He was old school European, student of Merleau-Ponty, and he took about every comment and question from our late-modern, medieval and phenomenology classes in the coolness of total confidence. But he lost it, epically, when I read my paper on Heidegger (as he encouraged reading) while connecting it to how God comes to us me. I think Smith would like to hear that story, and how nothing for Heidegger is possibily best understood as an uncaused cause which is unobservable by nature and not (or not yet) aware of its action.
Edit: I made the change because in thinking back on that, I didn’t make a general statement about how God comes to us, I made a personal statement about how God had come to me, and that seems to be what was so offensive, as my professor interrupted me and loudly told me not to make this about me.
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@Kendel this made me LOL so hard. I’ve not read much Kierkegaard but I do feel this every time I read:
- Augustine… actually, any Church Father
- Thomas Aquinas (despite him being my absolute fav of all time theologian man crush)
- NT Wright*
- Carl Trueman*
- Aristotle/Plato
*I wish had better editors who were able to reign in their reckless verbosity. 
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Welcome to Fear and Trebling, Liam. First paragraph is below. I take it as a dare.:
Not only in the world of business, but also in that of ideas, our times are holding ein wirklicher Ausverkauf [a real clearance sale]. Everything can be had for such absurdly low prices that in the end it becomes a question as to whether anyone will want to make a bid. Every speculative scorekeeper who conscientiously calculates the momentous progress of modern philosophy, every lecturer, teaching assistant, university student, every one of philosophy’s outliers and insiders does not remain standing at the point of doubting everything, but goes further. Perhaps it would be ill timed and untimely to ask them where they really are going, but it is surely polite and modest to take it for granted that they have doubted everything, for otherwise it would indeed be odd to say that they have gone further. They have all taken this preliminary step, then, and presumably so easily that they do not find it necessary to say a word about how they did it; for not even someone who, in anxiety and concern, sought a bit of enlightenment, found anything of that sort: i a hint of guidance, a little dietary prescription about how one comports oneself in undertaking this enormous task. “But of course, Descartes has done it, hasn’t he?” Descartes, an honorable, humble, honest thinker, whose writings no one can read without the most profound emotion: he did what he said, and said what he did. Alas! Alas! Alas! this is a great rarity in our times! As Descartes himself so frequently repeats, he did not doubt with respect to faith. (“Memores tamen, ut jam dictum est, huic lumini naturali tamdiu tantum esse credendum, quamdiu nihil contrariam a Deo ipso revelatur. … Præter cætera autem, memoriæ nostræ pro summa regula est infigendum, ea quæ nobis a Deo revelato sunt, ut omnium certissima esse credenda; et quamvis forte lumen rationis, quam maxime clarum et evidens, aliud quid nobis suggerere videretur, soli tamen auctoritati divinæ potius quam proprio nostro judicio fidem esse adhibendam.” ii See Principia philosophiæ , pars prima [ Principles of Philosophy , part 1] §28 and §76). He did not shout “Fire!” and make it everyone’s obligation to doubt, for Descartes was a quiet, solitary thinker, not a bellowing night watchman; he modestly confessed that his method had significance only for himself and was based in part on his earlier, bungled knowledge. ( Ne quis igitur putet, me hic traditurum aliquam methodum, quam unusquisque sequi debeat ad recte regendam rationem; illam enim tantum, quam ipsemet secutus sum, exponere decrevi. … Sed simul ac illud studiorum curriculum absolvi [sc. juventutis], quo decurso mos est in eruditorum numerum cooptari, plane aliud coepi cogitare. Tot enim me dubiis totque erroribus implicatum esse animadverti, ut omnes discendi conatus nihil aliud mihi profuisse judicarem, quam quod ignorantium meam magis magisque dexteissem. iii Cfr. Dissertatio de methodo [See Discourse on Method ], pp. 2 and 3). 3 — What those ancient Greeks (who, after all, did have a bit of understanding of philosophy) assumed to be the task for an entire lifetime because expertise in doubting is not acquired in days or weeks; what was attained by the old, veteran combatant (who had preserved the equilibrium of doubt through every seductive snare, fearlessly denying the certainty of the senses and of thought, uncompromisingly defying the anxiety of self-love and the flattering advances of sympathy)—in our times, this is where everyone begins.
I’ve been crawling through the book with some friends over in a private thread. Too many distractions in my life to just plow through. But plowing this field is not entirely straight-forward anyway.
Liam, what have you read by SK? Impressions? Thoughts?
Anyone else?
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His second Descartes quote, while expressing some humility,
Let no one think, therefore, that I am here delivering some method which every one should follow in order to govern his affairs aright; for I resolved to expound only that which I myself followed. … But at the same time as I completed that course of study [sc. youth], in the course of which it was necessary to be recruited into the ranks of the learned, I began to think quite differently. For I noticed that I was entangled in so many doubts and so many errors, that I judged that all my efforts to learn had profited me nothing else, than that I had grown more and more tired of my ignorance.
…I appreciated less than the first:
Remember, however, as has already been said, that this natural light is to be believed only so long as nothing to the contrary is revealed by God Himself. … Besides the rest, it is the highest rule of our memory to impress those things which have been revealed to us by God, so as to be believed to be the most certain of all; and although perhaps the light of reason, as clear and evident as possible, may seem to suggest something else to us, yet we must trust to the divine authority alone, rather than to our own judgment.
…especially after having been given, not as surpassingly great as Paul’s revelations, but revelations nonetheless, revelations of God’s providential sovereignty, not to mention an infirmity to boast in, à la 2 Corinthians 12:9.
I don’t think Smith is Pentecostal, but I could be wrong. You should check out his 2021 “change of heart” article. I’ll throw out a few “pithy quotes” following the link.
The path to philosophy is paved with polemic and fueled by brash confidence in the power of logic. When I answered the call to be a philosophical theologian 25 years ago, I imagined the world’s (and the church’s) problems amounted to a failure of analysis. If only we could think more carefully, the truth would come out. Good arguments would save us. And yet here I am, in the middle of this profession, in the middle of a career as a philosopher, with second thoughts. I’ve had a change of heart about how to change someone’s mind.
Nothing beats the love of wisdom out of you like a graduate program in philosophy. It is an apprenticeship in polemics. Philosophy begins in wonder, Plato tells us. But a doctorate in philosophy is where wonder goes to die. What begins as a quest for wisdom ends as a search for a job. And a job is the reward for repressing wonder and pursuing mastery. The goal of graduate study in philosophy is to carve out a niche of debate like a territory to be conquered—and to be the last one standing in a field littered with the vanquished arguments and the misbegotten fallacies of your opponents. Pair this formation with the ardor of the apologist and you get a carefully honed polemical sword wielded with the confidence of having the Truth on one’s side. Stand back: I’m here to teach.
I used to imagine my calling was to defend the Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love.
It’s not that I’ve given up on truth. It’s just that I’m less confident we’ll think our way out of the morass and malaise in which we find ourselves. Analysis won’t save us. And the truth of the gospel is less a message to be taught than a mystery enacted. Love won’t save us either, of course. But I’ve come to believe that the grace of God that will save us is more powerfully manifest in beloved community than in rational enlightenment. Or, as Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.”
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That’s a great article. I’d reread it now, but I’m about to get back into reading his book Thinking in Tongues… and he is certainly small p-pentecostal. Surprising isn’t it. Just when you think you know someone.
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The middle paragraph was super. I think the description of grad school’s effect on pretty much any passionate course of study is nearly the same.
The last paragraph is simply beautiful.
Thanks for this, Jay.
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So the quest for knowledge and understanding are subsumed in polemics whose bar is set much lower than understanding at merely being more persuasive than your opponent. With an easy opponent you might get by with no understanding of anything more than what is makes the bigger splash and wins favor. Smoke and mirrors will do. I guess I should be glad I passed up graduate school as a philosophy major because this makes it sound more like rhetoric than any philosophy course I ever took.
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Nothing beats the love of wisdom out of you like a graduate program in philosophy.
Hahaha… or what can inspire greater audacity than to be a philosophy undergrad with a casual interest in political philosophy reading Cohen and Nozick in a grudge fest, or to read Rawls and to then see in Paul how fairness and desert are coequal. As Smith says, we can’t think our way out of this mess. There is no single principle of reason to settle the dilemma between fairness and desert, which in the words of John Betz, is a good reminder that “the Enlightenment proposed a doctrine of reason that required no faith, a vision of society that required no tradition, and a politics that required no God, the source of all light and being.”
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While true enough, it is yet unfortunate that this becomes an excuse to abandon any labor of thought, which is at least as important as any other sorts of labors we find it prudent to undertake.
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Hopefully by understanding the dilemma, we would be encouraged to think differently about the mess. As Smith is evidently doing, a recent book of his, has me curious to say the least, The Nicene Option.
We need to examine our presuppositions and prejudices to see if they are legitimately held and maybe abandon some of them and adopt others, thereby thinking differently.
(It shouldn’t be too surprising that I’m reminded of this… ; - ):
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I ran across this quote yesterday at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The author was specifically talking about preserving artistic and cultural artifacts, but I think, and suspect the author would agree, that it has wider application as well:
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