Conclusion
6
Honoring True Otherness in a Still-Antipluralist Culture
Esther L. Meek
It is a most valuable exercise in which we are cooperating—to reconsider, twenty-five years out, the message and impact of a great thinker’s work. We may from this vantage point identify dimensions and implications of the work that at the time of publication were sensed as unspecifiable intimations. Lesslie Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, like any profound truth, continues to live and surprise us.1 As you will see in this essay, I think that this project therefore honors the signature of reality and of what it means to know.
I came to Newbigin’s work already formed as a Polanyian epistemologist, and also already embarked on the mission to which Newbigin the missiologist was calling his readers in the West. I heard his summons as follows: something is stopping the ears of people in the West, such that they do not even hear the gospel. That something is defective epistemology. Newbigin has drunk deeply at the well of Michael Polanyi to identify that defective epistemology and to offer Polanyi’s fresh, positive alternative—not the patching together of warring opposites. Polanyi himself did not set about to address matters of church and mission, but rather of science and, secondarily, of the broader culture. In my own work as a Christian believer I was tapping his insights for reasons deeply similar to Newbigin’s: to justify my Christian belief to myself, and to help people considering Christianity who have questions about knowing—thus, for preevangelism. Newbigin’s work has lent vision, encouragement and resources as I have gone on to develop my own proposals in covenant epistemology.
From my vantage point, Newbigin’s major contributions are as follows. First, he channeled and popularized the valuable work of Michael Polanyi. Polanyi’s insights are profoundly sophisticated and cross-disciplinary. They are also deeply liberating. His legacy has been thwarted by people who misunderstand him or oversimplify him, as well as by people so liberated by his ideas that they subsequently attributed their fresh insights to themselves rather than to this humble innovator.2 Unlike many, Newbigin succeeded with respect to all three of these, keeping alive and significantly disseminating the Polanyian message.
Second, and faithful to a Polanyian vision, Newbigin maintains, quite distinctively, that epistemology is the key to mission in the West.3 Third, and this is obviously a personal value, not at all widespread: Newbigin’s work shapes my own covenant epistemology, as will become evident. And fourth, foremost and most obvious to all, Newbigin has offered Christian believers in the West a fresh, movement-starting vision of what it means to be the Christian church in mission.
I have worked especially with Newbigin’s Proper Confidence.4 My agenda has continued to be entirely epistemological, since it fascinates me. I earnestly believe that in the West most ordinary Christian believers and churches still languish in a damaging, defective epistemology. I call it the defective epistemic default, or the knowledge-as-information mindset.5 It continues to domesticate the gospel, as Newbigin and David Kettle, and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, put it.6 It continues also to hamper science and business and engineering and artistry and everything else. It continues to depersonalize and render the world two dimensional, leaving us bored and clueless as well as disconnected from, and distrustful of, reality. Brueggemann pronounces that this epistemology prohibits the proclamation of the resurrection of Christ.7 On the other hand, our defective epistemic default feeds our ambition to amass, control and commodify. Epistemological therapy is my mission. When a person’s understanding of how to know is reoriented, this both restores humanness and bears witness to the Lord.8 It also makes us better at knowing ventures, no matter the field.9
In this essay I will argue that the West is not, and perhaps never was, pluralist. It is characterized, rather, by homogeneity, since it remains caught in the debilitating dynamic of the ancient Greek problem of the one and the many. The one-many dynamic is perpetuated in the West’s deeply entrenched defective epistemology. Thus, if Michael Polanyi’s epistemology offers epistemic corrective, we in the West need to have it traced over again and again for our healing reorientation to occur. Newbigin accurately represents Polanyian epistemology as he adapts it so powerfully to his breathtaking vision of the church and mission. Twenty-five years ago, and perhaps still today, however, Christian readers of The Gospel in a Pluralist Society can hear the accent placed, with respect to Polanyi’s subjective and objective poles of knowing, very much on the subjective pole. I believe that it is important now to shift the accent to the objective pole.
This has been my own trajectory as well: twenty-five years ago I very much needed the message regarding the subjective pole of knowing. I needed to hear that from Polanyi. But thanks to apprenticeship in Polanyian epistemology for decades now, I have grown to be enamored of the real, and to trust the real in confidence. It is the “repersonalization of the real” that I would like to commend to you in this essay.
To that end, I will trace over Polanyian epistemology in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. I will acquaint you with its augmentation in my own covenant epistemology, an augmentation that underscores the objective pole of Polanyian knowing. Covenant epistemology reorients us to a fresh epistemic vision of knowing as transformative encounter, in which the real is personlike, and knowing is interpersonally relational. Perichoresis, dancing around, is the healthy dynamic of interpersonhood, which holds only in a universe that has at its heart the dynamic mutual relatedness of persons in love.10 Since perichoresis is the dynamic of covenant epistemology, shifting our epistemic orientation is also shifting to a dynamic of perichoresis. This holds concrete, healthy implications for mission.
Homogeneity: “The Specter at the Banquet of Modernity”
First I want to address the matter of whether this culture is—in the words of the conference title where this chapter was first presented—still pluralist. I suggest the answer is no, and that in some sense perhaps it never has been. Modern Western culture is still trapped in the damaging dynamic of the ancient problem of the one and the many. The great old pre-Socratic question is about reality: Is reality ultimately one—a monism? Or is reality ultimately many—a pluralism?
The problem of the problem of the one and the many is that the very question thrusts you into an unstable tension of opposites that is always tending toward imbalance and mutual absorption. If you overemphasize one, it eats up the other. It also turns into the other. In our own day we can see this: we emphasize the many so much that we passionately say that everybody is unique. But effectively, then, everybody is unique just like everybody else. Strangely, you feel pressure to be unique.11 That is the dynamic of the problem of the one and the many at work. The one-many dynamic is intrinsically debilitating and unhealthy. It depersonalizes—in fact, it never was personal—and it eclipses and prevents true particularity. The dynamic is one of power and control—or loss thereof.
The opposing tension of these opposites characterizes the entire Western tradition of ideas.12 Plato’s form of the Good, or Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, is the one. Individual, concrete things are the many. Greek philosophy privileges the one over the many—general, essential characteristics, seen as immaterial, eternal, ideal and abstract. There always remains ambivalence about particulars: they are not interesting for their particularity but only for the things they have in common. In fact, maybe they aren’t real in their particularity at all. After all, they are changing, transient, material.
You can see particular and general as both necessary in any statement we make. If someone says, “Esther is a philosopher,” the speaker is choosing a particular item, and the predicate affirms something general of the item. You can infer that you need to work with both to have not just communication but, more fundamentally, knowledge. Additionally, the Greek tradition tends to emphasize the general as the locus of knowledge and reality. The one, the general, gets privileged over the particular. And the particular can fall by the wayside.
Here, in part, I follow the argument of trinitarian theologian Colin Gunton in his 1993 book The One, the Three, and the Many.13 Gunton is concerned that humans’ relationship to non-human culture is deeply broken and is damaging both it and us. It manifests itself in the way we treat the environment, the paradoxical busyness of our lives, the continuing challenges of totalitarianism alongside notions of utter freedom, the triumph of skepticism, and the loss of meaning in a culture committed to certainty and truth. What we need desperately, Gunton urges, is a philosophy of engagement—a way of understanding ourselves as deeply connected with the world.14 Without it, he says, we are doomed.
Modernity as forged by Rene Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum is one in which the solitary self is disengaged from the world.15 In the modern world, God has been effectively displaced. How did this come to be? Gunton proposes that Christendom’s defective understanding of the Holy Trinity, especially with respect to the three divine persons’ involvement with creation, led it, in premodernity, to succumb to the deep dynamic of the ancient philosophical problem of the one and the many.16 In ancient Christianity, God came to be identified with the one, and immanent reality with the many. This defective Christian theology, then augmented in the 1300s by William of Ockham’s exaltation of the will, came, untreated, into modernity. The modern era begins, we might say, around 1600 with Francis Bacon’s still popular “Knowledge is power.” Bacon claimed that humans should pursue what is properly theirs: supreme mastery over nature. Descartes followed Ockham in eschewing final causes, purposes, in nature. All that is interesting about nature is mechanistic causality. Humans, then—actually, disembodied minds—are “little mortal absolutes,” set up to wrest what they will from nature. There remains no place for God in such a scheme. He is the transcendent one whom we must unseat in order for human reason to reign. The Enlightenment was that cultural exaltation of reason. Human reason becomes the immanent one.
Despite the pretentiousness of it, the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel was correct in diagnosing in this Western milieu a historical dialectic of idea driven by alienation, in which thesis generates its own antithesis. Hegel’s dialectic epitomizes the intrinsically flawed and degenerating dynamism of the problem of the one and the many. The only hope is for synthesis to come from the struggle. But that synthesis would never be shalom, for it would be a fresh thesis, generating through alienation its own antithesis.
Friedrich Nietzsche rightly sensed the disease and decadence endemic to Western culture’s exaltation of reason—and the Christian coopting of it that makes God the immaterial, unchanging, incurably abstract One. He was the first to name its abuse of power. Recent generations, thankfully, are way more attuned to the connection between power and what is taken to be truth. The times in which Newbigin wrote The Gospel in a Pluralist Society witnessed the onset of a rebellious and vocal exaltation of particulars, an effort to cast off all power-infected generality. This was and is our pluralist society.
But the problem with Nietzsche and also with our generation is that his and our best proposals fail to escape the deadly dynamism of the problem of the one and the many. If truth is perspective, if you exalt the individuals, individuality collapses into its own monism. The French philosophers known as postmodern (Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault) have bequeathed us amazing studies of very concrete particularities rightly sensitive to how things like power shape truth. They open our eyes to intriguing and important detail that we perhaps have never even noticed. But similar to Nietzsche, they do not ultimately escape the one-many dynamic itself. The result assassinates the one but thereby neither redeems the many nor ultimately escapes the one to attain true particularity, true otherness, true freedom.
Modernity thus involves an immanent monism, according to Gunton. He cites Stanley Jaki’s evocative and memorable claim “The specter at the whole banquet of modernity is homogeneity.”17 Homogeneity in modernity continues to issue in control (or lack of it), power (or its abuse), quantification, commodifation, expansion, totalization. It continues to foster depersonalization and loneliness of persons, and misappropriation of the nonhuman world.
The exaltation of pluralism in Newbigin’s and our day is only the current form of opposition to the oppressive rule of the immanent One. Homogeneity—inappropriate pressure that inhibits others from being their true selves in abiding otherness—and not pluralism is the problem.18
My sense of our times is that now we are past postmodernism and are back to modernism.19 We are as modern as we ever were, if not more so. Postmodernism was a desperate attempt to challenge homogeneity with pluralism, but it did not win the day because it itself remains caught in the one-many dynamic. What we have now is what I call a “perforated modernism.” We have brought our postmodern suspicion with us to perforate the metanarrative; that is how we keep homogenous power at manageable levels.
Protestant Christians, in our marriage to modernism, are often the ones most powerfully infected with the epistemic default. Newbigin’s work is to challenge Christians’ modernist epistemology, which domesticates the gospel.20 It is thus not only the public, atheistic sphere that remains haunted by the specter of homogeneity, caught in the debilitating one-many dynamic. Christians are caught as well. And we are clueless about the one-many problem.
Perichoresis
Gunton proposes that we recover a strong doctrine of the Trinity, specifically with respect to the three persons’ ongoing involvement in creation.21 He commends the work of Irenaeus over that of Augustine. And he proposes that the key to true resolution of the problem is to replace the deadly one-many dynamic with one that is entirely different: perichoresis. Perichoresis means dancing around and through. The Cappadocian fathers introduced this motif as a great way to picture the dynamic interaction of the persons of the Trinity. In perichoresis you have nothing abstract or general at all. You have a mutually feeding relationality (or relatedness) and particularity (or individuality or otherness).
Dancing is an all-encompassing mutual relationship that actually enhances each dancer’s distinctive particularity. Each becomes more him- or herself in the relationality of the dance. At the same time, each dancer becoming more themselves actually makes the whole dance better. Thus, relationality feeds and accentuates particularity; particularity feeds and accentuates relationality. Each is for the other—as opposed to the tense and unstable opposition that the one-many dynamic affords. The result is dynamic communion that deepens over time.
The persons of the blessed Trinity do nothing but give themselves in love to one another. Each becomes more himself in that self-giving love. The resulting overflowing exuberance actually is, I believe, what creation is, and what we are. Perichoresis just is the definitive dynamic of interpersonal love. Love is at the core of all things.
Great relationships enact perichoresis—what psychologists term differentiation.22 Defective relationships involve emotional fusion; they devolve into something like the one-many dynamic. When things get clicking along well in a relationship, business, church or government, that organization is approaching perichoresis. When things aren’t going well, it can be seen as playing out the one and the many. Perichoresis alone establishes true particularity. The perichoretic relationship (alone) contributes true liberty, and in that dynamic, enriching, hospitable space, the individuals in that relationship flourish to become truly themselves.
As I imagine it, when a dynamic state of perichoresis is attained, in a relationship of any sort or size, it’s as if a beautiful form comes into focus—a phenomenon that stands out from its backdrop in splendor.23 A design team may say, we’ve got a good thing going! A football team may win the championship. A church may say, the Holy Spirit is present. And a mission may result in the fruit of mutually redemptive, mutually enhancing communion, rather than in the effacing perpetuation of a religious and social power inequity.
Gunton says that “redemption means the redirection of the particular to its own end and not a re-creation.”24 The purpose of all human action is the sacrifice of praise to the creator that, when directed toward the world, is action directed to allowing the world to be truly itself before God. Perichoresis is what Gunton proposes as the philosophy of engagement that alone will bring healing to humans’ relatedness to the world. But in these lines we may also properly hear a perichoresis of mission. This is the heart of what I am commending in this essay.
Gunton is critical of most cultural artifacts and ventures with respect to this matter—since so many are imbued with the damaging one-many dynamic. He cites very few with approbation, but one is the epistemology of Michael Polanyi. Subsidiary-focal integration (SFI) is intrinsically perichoretic.
I will explain SFI presently and show how it embodies perichoresis. But first let me summarize my claim thus far: I believe that the one-many dynamic plays out in Western culture as the historic Greek balancing of the general and particular. General and particular exhibit a mutually antagonistic and unstable opposition. The one-many dynamic offers no space to true pluralism, true otherness, for it has within it no possibility of persons in relation. Perichoresis, by contrast, is the health-giving, shalom-evolving dynamism in which the pair is not many and one, particular and abstract. The proper dynamic is not particularity and generality, but rather particularity and relatedness. Each partner gives to the other in encounter and interpersonhood. Perichoresis alone fosters true particularity—true pluralism.
Tracing over the Polanyian Lines in Newbigin
Now let us note Polanyian lines of argument employed by Newbigin. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society displays that Newbigin taps not just one but many dimensions of Polanyi’s thought. As I list them here, I also want to group them roughly in connection with what Polanyi himself calls the subjective pole and the objective pole of knowing. Polanyi himself placed greater emphasis on the subjective pole as he composed Personal Knowledge around 1950 for the Gifford Lectures.25 Subtitled Towards a Post-Critical Epistemology, his magnum opus defended the personal, responsible, faith-like commitment that is justifiable and necessary for all knowing. Polanyi argued that it is legitimate to hold a belief responsibly and with conviction even if it might prove to be false. But in later years Polanyi said, in retrospect, that his most original insight in Personal Knowledge had been his subsidiary-focal integration; and in later essays, he tells us, he emphasizes it over the faith-commitment dynamic.26
Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society evidences an emphasis similar to Polanyi’s earlier work. The following themes emphasize the subjective pole of knowing. Newbigin repeats in full Polanyi’s Critique of Doubt.27 The Gospel in a Pluralist Society exposes the faith commitments that undergird the widespread claim opposing public facts to private values, calling us to confident affirmation in this intellectual climate.28 Newbigin follows Polanyi in affirming that all knowing begins with faith;29 it is, in Newbigin’s own words, “on the way,” and there are “no insurance policies.”30 Newbigin adopts Polanyi’s concept of indwelling; he calls Christian believers to indwell tradition, to indwell the Christian story as lenses, to indwell God’s ongoing action.31 He calls for acceptance of the Christian vision as a personal act.32 He emphasizes patience and learning as part of such indwelling.33 Newbigin pairs tradition, plausibility structure and hermeneutic with indwelling. He employs the wonderfully provocative Polanyian word clue to designate Christ, the clue to the larger pattern of God’s purposes in history.34 Indwelling, in fact, can be said to be The Gospel in a Pluralist Society’s major takeaway. The church is to be the hermeneutic of the gospel as it indwells the Christian story.
These more subjective Polanyian themes offered Newbigin critical aid in his critique of the complexities of modernity. In a way, he helped evangelicals be okay with subjectivity by rendering all knowing appropriately subjective. In subsequent years many have appropriated the notion of story and narrative—a motif in Newbigin but never in Polanyi—as that which we indwell. Newbigin did it well and helped the Christian church be more Christian in a pluralist society.
But Newbigin does Polanyi well—not just the subjective but the objective pole in Polanyian knowing. The following are Polanyian motifs of the more objective sort that can be glimpsed in Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Newbigin obviously applies the motifs explicitly to Jesus Christ and his gospel. They take breathtaking form in Newbigin’s central “new fact” of Christ.35 In Christ, “something radically new is given,” claiming to be the truth.36 Newbigin calls this the starting point for a new way of understanding. It “opens a world of infinite possibilities that beckons us into ever fresh regions of joy.”37 Newbigin repeatedly notes Polanyi’s distinctive claim that knowing has both subjective and objective poles: personal commitment with universal intent.38 He notes how this asymmetric duality “opens the way for new and often unexpected discovery.”39 He speaks of grasping reality fumblingly—reality that will reveal its truth through further discoveries as we continue to seek.40 The committed discoverer claims to be in contact with a reality beyond him- or herself.41 Newbigin notes, with Polanyi, orderliness in reality, hidden and waiting to be discovered.42
What is more, present in Newbigin is an important emphasis that goes beyond what Polanyi himself registered, into the range of covenant epistemology’s themes, and into the range of the claims I am commending in this essay. Newbigin explicitly affirms the real as personal.43 We should in our engaging it be listening, trusting—rather than acting as if we are entitled to masterful exploration. Reality as personal addresses us.44 Newbigin explicitly states a key thesis of this essay: reality at root is relationship; he contrasts this with the dynamic of the one and the many.45 For Newbigin the reality that comes is the reign of God: a present reality among us the church, a reality whose presence is veiled but which creates crisis, calling for our patient cooperation.46 Finally—and this comment of Newbigin’s suggests the final outcome of my work in this essay—Newbigin calls us to welcome all the signs of the grace of God at work in the lives of those who do not know Jesus as Lord. “In our contact with people who do not acknowledge Jesus as Lord, our first business, our first privilege, is to seek out and to welcome all the reflections of that one true light in the lives of those we meet.”47 In this we reflect Jesus Christ and the welcome that lies at the heart of God and the gospel.
Thus, Newbigin is true to Polanyi in both subjective and objective themes, and also in stipulating their interconnectedness. Newbigin deeply understands the crucial implications of the entirety of Polanyian epistemology to redraw the epistemic playing field therapeutically—and the critical importance of this for the West’s apprehension of the gospel. But I wonder whether his readers may have come away with the subjective emphases, and not so much with the objective ones. My problem is this: subjectivity by itself, even when it is well done, fails to challenge the debilitating one-many dynamic and cultivate true particularity. We need to hear Newbigin afresh, and hear Polanyi as well. Further, we need to augment Polanyian epistemology, such as my own covenant epistemology does, to deepen and enrich the objective as personal. Without this emphasis, it is possible for us to accept our subjectivity but still fail to honor true particularity, in ourselves and others. We need this clarification now, twenty-five years out from The Gospel in a Pluralist Society’s first publication, even more than we did then.
SFI and IFMs: Polanyian Epistemology and Its Respect for the Other
Thus far I have given a somewhat unfair portrayal of both Newbigin and Polanyi. Now as I explicate Polanyi, this portrayal will be reoriented in a way that makes my case. What I have described up to this point is a misrepresentation in this very critical respect: even though “subjective pole” and “objective pole” is Polanyi’s own language, using the terms in an unqualified manner is simply false to the Polanyian vision. The fact is that Polanyian subsidiary-focal integration ties these together integrally and transformatively. Apart from a full grasp of subsidiary-focal integration, the reader of either scholar has entirely misunderstood Polanyian epistemology. With subsidiary-focal integration, you no longer have either subjective or objective in the common sense.48
All knowing has a two-level structure: we rely on and attend from clues we subsidiarily indwell to pursue, integratively shape and focus on a coherent pattern, which we then submit to as a token of reality.49 To expound this briefly, think about learning to read a new language—let’s say, Chinese. At first you focus on the page, on the shapes of the characters. You entrust yourself to an authoritative guide and painstakingly follow his or her direction to associate the characters as directed. Eventually there must come a kind of shift from attending to the characters and sounds to attending to their meaning—attending from them, relying on them subsidiarily, to attending to, focusing on the coherent pattern that is the sense of their meaning. And that shift is not linear or deductive. It is a creative integration, often an aha moment of insight. Integration transforms disparate particulars, first, anticipatively, into clues, and then, in the breakthrough of insight, into meaningful aspects of the coherent pattern. All knowing sustains this two-level structure in which subsidiary is connected to focal in a logically creative, integrative relation. Pattern makes sense of clues; it is fraught with the signature character of the clues.
In an act of knowing, that which is subsidiary cannot be articulated; it is logically unspecifiable. This doesn’t mean that you can’t ever articulate subsidiaries; it means that you can’t articulate them while you are relying on them subsidiarily. You rely on them acritically. This is what it means to indwell clues subsidiarily. In any knowing event, your body as felt—your felt body sense—comprises one of the three sectors of clues melded into an integrative feat. (The other two are the situation you are making sense of and the directions that guide you.50) But, Polanyi says, this bodily indwelling just is your feeling your body to be your own. In sustaining the performance of bike riding, for example, you know your body in the balance it keeps subsidiarily as part of the performance. All other clues you indwell subsidiarily—tools, language, directions, theoretical frameworks, even the bodies of others to whom you are listening—effectively expand your body in its subsidiary bearing on the focus.
In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi spoke of faith as “our manner of disposing ourselves” toward that to which we attend. I find this immensely helpful: it renders subjective-sounding faith in bodied key. Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder Andrew McCutcheon disposes himself toward catching the line drive. I dispose myself toward my bike as I ride it: I rely on it, trust it—you can throw religious-sounding words at the very palpable but inarticulable phenomenon that we all know well. Balance keeping is not subjective. It’s palpable, developable and absolutely critical to riding a bike.
Subsidiary never occurs without focal and vice versa. They cannot be broken apart—just like part and whole can’t be broken apart. At the same time, neither is reduceable to or determined by the other. You can have the inbreaking focal pattern without having its subsidiaries exactly right. You can have the “necessary” components and remain forever blind to that pattern. They are integrationally, transformatively related. They are perichoretically related as well—a dynamic, mutually enhancing duality.
Polanyian indwelling just is subsidiarily relying on clues as we integratively shape and focus on a pattern. Creatively scrabbling to indwell clues—to indwell the thing that we are trying to understand—actually prompts the logical leap of integration to discovery or understanding. In Polanyi, indwelling actually can’t be either subjective or objective in the old sense; indwelling is intrinsically both—or, better yet, neither. Our entire epistemic orientation to the world is from-to, proximal-distal, subsidiary-focal.
All knowing is skilled knowing. And every act of coming to know what we do not yet know must involve that shift from creative, responsible, active shaping of clues into a pattern, which we then submit to as a token of reality. In the trajectory of learning or discovery, or the creative act, our groping and imaginative struggle to make sense of puzzling clues is guided by a “sense of increasing proximity to an as-yet unspecified solution.”51 The moment of insight brings that struggled-for but never determinable shift in which reality breaks in. That integration transforms the knowers, and the world we have therein apprehended, changing us and it and leading us in ever deepening understanding and communion with the real.
Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society is faithful to Polanyi in this, although he does not emphasize that it is critical to understand subsidiary-focal integration to get Polanyian epistemology. But Western readers are marked deeply by the defective one-many dynamic and its attending implications, including a defective epistemology that divorces subjectivity from objectivity. Such readers who also possess only a passing exposure to Polanyi can have their “indwelling” fall apart: their sense of it can revert to the subjectivity or to an objectivity that is totalizing and repressive—or both. We can hear Newbigin as condoning subjectivity. We fail to hear Newbigin revamping what we take to be objective, and we haven’t connected the two integrally.
That is Polanyi’s subsidiary-focal integration: let’s call it SFI. Proceeding on with Polanyi: in that moment of inbreaking insight, “we know that we have made contact with reality when we anticipate an indeterminate range of as yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications.”52 This is what I came to designate as IFMs: a sense of indeterminate future manifestations. When I heard this sentence of Polanyi’s, it fell on my modernity-parched ears as an oasis might fall on the vision of a desert traveler. Reality might be there!
Knowing intrinsically reaches beyond itself. It must—or it fails. It involves risky commitment to what you do not yet know. In the moment of deep insight when you espy the focal pattern, as well as leading up to it and, later on, from it, you anticipate and trust those tantalizing IFMs in their witness to the profundity of your insight.
Inbreaking reality doesn’t so much answer our questions as dispel them. It comes on its own terms, not on ours. We know we have grasped the real just when the real surprises—not when it confirms. It can break in graciously when we simply don’t have all our subsidiary ducks in line. We may even have a defective epistemic default—perish the thought!—and yet still be blessed with its coming. Reality is far bigger than we have hitherto imagined, and far more dynamic. As a Christian believer, I connect this with the gracious descent of God and with the motif of reality as gift.
The twin theses of SFI (subsidiary-focal integration) and IFM (indeterminate future manifestations attending contact with reality) are key to Polanyian epistemology and Polanyian realism. Readers of Newbigin’s The Gospel in a Pluralist Society might not have understood them fully. But now let us tie in Gunton’s insights: subsidiary-focal integration is intrinsically perichoretic. The focal pattern transforms the clues. The subsidiaries imbue the pattern with their signature particularity. With respect to pattern, the subsidiaries can be changing, just as my body sustains a rich dynamism of efforts as I balance on my bike. Indeed, since our bodies as felt comprise one of the three sectors of clues, your apprehension of a sunset and mine will be fraught with a distinct array of felt body responses as we co-celebrate the sunset. Likewise, the focal pattern itself develops. Our sense of it unfolds and deepens as we apprehend and yet are surprised by those IFMs. This underscores what both Newbigin and Kettle, as well as others, claim: that epistemology is key to redemptive gospel flourishing. Epistemology is key to enacting perichoresis.
Covenant Epistemology
Polanyi’s two theses, SFI and IFM, are what led me to develop covenant epistemology. It seemed to me that if what Polanyi is describing is true—and I had come to trust him in this—that the whole thing had about it “hints of interpersonal reciprocity.” Over the years of indwelling Polanyian epistemology, intrigued especially as I am with its connection to reality, I came to be struck by the person-like response of reality to the knower. Discovery of the real doesn’t explain so much as redraw my questions. Reality has a profoundly deeper objectivity, with the capacity ever to surprise. Reality appears to be in the driver’s seat. It walks in, sometimes, and takes over, changing me. Reality somehow behaves like a person. This, in turn, suggested to me that best epistemic practices should involve treating reality as we would a person. I should see knowing as inviting the real.
Newbigin’s work played a key role in this insight for me. In Proper Confidence, he talks of Polanyi’s promise of IFMs. He draws out of it an implication that Polanyi himself had never named: that reality is like that because it is God’s, and because it is personal.53 I had also seen both that biblical covenant, according to theologian Mike Williams, was itself relationship, and that Annie Dillard, in “stalking muskrats” as she calls it, exhibited covenantal behavior.54 She effectively binds herself to live life on the terms of the yet-to-be-known, in order to invite it. Add to these that Newbigin, and also education guru Parker Palmer, argue that reality is personal, and I set about to craft and defend the covenant epistemology thesis. Covenant epistemology commends, as the paradigm of all knowing, the interpersonal, covenantally constituted relationship. Specifically, that paradigm is the redemptive encounter in which we are redemptively and transformatively known by Christ. Covenant epistemology seeks to provide what all of these thinkers have enjoined.55
Intrinsically, perichoretic SFI remains a sine qua non of covenant epistemology. But interpersonhood, as I call it, augments it. I work with insights from John Macmurray, Martin Buber, James Loder, Colin Gunton and others to make the case for the real as personal and for knowing as mutually transformative encounter.56 The real graciously self-discloses through and within our loving pledge to live life on its terms and follow where it may lead. I offer an extensive “epistemological etiquette”—surprising best practices for inviting the real. Knowing isn’t information so much as it is transformation. Paraphrasing Abraham Joshua Heschel, we should learn not in order to comprehend but, rather, in order to be apprehended.57 We invite the real by loving in order to know, pledging ourselves to “love, honor and obey” the yet-to-be-known that we seek to know.58 We invite the real in our readiness to know—that is, in maturing into great lovers who give the gift of the self.59 We invite it in a posture of humility, respect and patience. We strategically locate ourselves in the place where reality is likely to break in. We practice hospitality and welcome. We listen actively, taking the risk to move beyond our preconceived categories, to be changed ourselves, to be the ones needing to hear. Such listening is no longer a passive registering of information but invites the self-disclosure of the real. Our epistemic goal is no longer comprehensive information or total, homogenizing sameness. Our goal is communion. The goal itself invites the real. Communion is friendship; it is perichoresis, in which I and the other become more ourselves in true particularity and otherness. I came to see that the knower and yet-to-be-known relationship should be perichoretic—overture and response, welcome and consent. These are highly personal, illocutionary acts. Knowing is knowing and being known in perichoresis.
In A Little Manual for Knowing, released last year, I summarize covenant epistemology in a “how to” for knowing ventures in any field. I cast the knowing venture as pilgrimage graciously met with gift. Pilgrimage involves love and pledge, invitation and indwelling. Reality’s self-disclosure may come in gracious response, which leads to mutually transformative encounter. The relationship of knower and known continues in dancing communion toward shalom.60
So covenant epistemology takes subsidiary-focal integration’s intrinsic openness to a surprising reality and, as it were, props the door open permanently by putting a person in it. More objective than objectivity, Parker Palmer would say, is the objectivity of a person who, in their trustworthy character, nevertheless surprises, a person whose gracious overtures of love invite our response of love. Knowing can no longer be the same.
Knowing as per covenant epistemology has as its heart dynamic perichoresis—the very dynamic that alone successfully redraws the one-many conflict that continues to deface Western culture. Perichoretic relationship is healthy interpersonal relationship characterized by face-to-face, mutually indwelling, mutually transformative encounter in which each may be truly other, truly themselves. No wonder my decades of being a Polanyian have gently transmuted my suspicion of reality into trust! No wonder reality seems now to me to be intoxicatingly beautiful, fraught with the presence of God. Healing epistemology is key to the conversion of the West. This is a posture, a welcome, into which the welcoming God may come.
Implications for Church and Mission
I am proposing that this healing epistemology is also key to mission in and beyond the West. The impact of Newbigin’s work is massive and important, without doubt. But if what has generally been heard is its subjective insights, even its great injunction to indwelling is perhaps being grasped only in defective form. It may fall short of the robust perichoresis of SFI and IFM. It may thus fail to redraw the damaging, unstable dynamic of the one-many, fraught as it is with power, control and commodification. It may fail to reinstate the very dynamic that, I would argue, is the heart of reality, and the heart of the gospel.
In the West we have moved beyond postmodernity to something I call “perforated modernism.” Western culture is as modern as ever, but we tap our postmodern suspicion: we keep homogenizing power at manageable levels by poking holes in it. Hacking is a great example of this. This situation continues to display the one-many dynamic.
The Christian church in the West continues to embrace the defective epistemology of modernism, a knowledge-as-information mindset, and it continues to bear the mark of the one-many dynamic. It may mistakenly assume the problem is that we are pluralist. We continue to be plagued with a kind of evangelical imperialism. The one-many dynamic lends an imperialist tinge to our “kingdom” work. We see mission as spread of Christ’s kingdom, and rightly so; but we subtly infect the notion of kingdom with a dynamic of power. We implicitly imagine that we have something to bring to the other, who, without us, is clueless and with us, will become like us. Or, in fear of wielding inappropriate power, we seek to qualify or limit mission. In saying this, I am not suggesting that we do not bear witness to the objective truth of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. But do we, whether we are aware of it or not, still bear the entrenched patterns of the one-many dynamic, such that our vision and our efforts retain the feel of it to others? Or does the gospel to which we witness bear the telltale marks of our wonder at its mystery—our wonder at it being greater than what we might package and dole out, fundamentally different from items we might amass?
Where reality is impersonal, we may amass and commodify with little sense of the presence and abiding otherness of the other. We may be pursuing mission in a way that actually dishonors the real, personal, other—God and his creatures, both nonhuman and human. This is inconsistent with the heart of the gospel, and with the heart of reality. And we may be persisting in this in an era that more than ever needs to be delivered of the depersonalizing one-many struggle.
What I am calling for is a repersonalization of the real. We want to see the face of God everywhere before us—in the world and in the person or persons it is our mission to reach for Christ. What if we treated reality—that is, God and his stuff, both humans and nonhuman culture—as persons or person-like, in which we as persons anticipate perichoretic relatedness? Would we not see ourselves as seeking the true redemptive particularity, the abiding otherness of the other? Would we not simultaneously see ourselves as seeking to be apprehended by Christ in a relationship with the other that proves mutually transformative?
What if we remembered that there is no corner of the world where and no person to whom the Lord that cannot help but be his gracious, personed, self-revealing self?61 What if, further, we treated the Lord in his proper otherness by entering a new place and a new interchange with another with the delighted anticipation of finding that the Lord is already there and at work, that he himself is reaching through that other to woo us? What if our missional strategy was one of inviting the real—inviting God and inviting the other to God-redeemed flourishing particularity?
Newbigin himself, as I noted earlier, enjoins us to welcome all signs of the grace of God at work in the lives of those who do not know Jesus as Lord. Expectancy and welcome—all reflections of the one true light. “In our contact with people who do not acknowledge Jesus as Lord, our first business, our first privilege, is to seek out and to welcome all the reflections of that one true light in the lives of those we meet.” In this we reflect Jesus Christ and the welcome that lies at the heart of God and the gospel.
The Christian church must reorient to a perichoretic involvement with a reality as with a personal other. But reorienting epistemically to embrace a perichoretic dynamic of knower and known restores knowing to love- and pledge-borne perichoretic invitation to the real. And when it is invited and welcomed, reality may bless both with its gracious self-disclosure and its restoration to a dynamic, personal other. We welcome the personal other; we expect with delight to be surprised by truth.
What might missional perichoresis look like? It would be loving, seeing and seeking the face and person of God in the world and in the other. It would be recognizing the Lord and his action already at work before us—in both senses. We would listen for what the Spirit is already at work doing. We would invite him and his transformative self-disclosure in the persons we seek to reach for Christ and, through them, to ourselves. We would listen and confer dignity and welcome, honoring the otherness of the other. We would anticipate mutual transformation—we need them to have God. We would preserve the otherness of these persons as persons, anticipating with delight that we will be surprised by truth. We may anticipate, in this his world, the descent of God.
Conclusion
I have argued, first, that the debilitating dynamic of the ancient problem of the one and the many continues to characterize our modern world. This dynamic adversely impacts the West in our engagement of the world. The Christian church is not immune to it. The one-many dynamic is of a piece with the West’s defective epistemology, the knowledge-as-information mindset. A healthy epistemology is, as Newbigin, Kettle and others have argued, key to unleashing the true Christian gospel, church and mission in the West. Newbigin espouses Polanyian epistemology. Covenant epistemology augments Polanyian epistemology to underscore its implicit perichoresis, the healing dynamism of reality, by placing the accent on the objective (understood in a Polanyian sense) pole of knowing—on the real—as personal and self-transcending, overflowing with its signature indeterminate future manifestations. This emphasis is consistent with Newbigin’s vision and helps us be even better at carrying it forward.
Most fundamentally, perichoresis must be the dynamic of mission. Love and pledge, invitation and indwelling, pilgrimage in search of gift. Then—surprise! Encounter! Transformation—our transformation! Dancing communion toward shalom.62 This is the true trajectory of all knowing ventures in a repersonalized world belonging to the Lord, and accords deeply with the shape and tenor of Newbigin’s majestic vision.