Lessons From Dead People

A fellow by the name of Thomas Kuhn taught me a very important lesson. To summarize his words in a fashion beyond scandal, “If you ask certain questions, you get certain answers.” That is to say, that if I ask my sister the date she is to be married, she does not reply “A number 6, and hold the ketchup.” She may tell me something about July; she may say “in the morning”; she may refer to half past 6 o’clock. She is even permitted to lie about having already eloped. So long as she makes reference to time, she has successfully avoided speaking gibberish. What she may not do is order a cheeseburger without ketchup. For any answer to have sense, it must correspond to the question in the right way. To continue my streak of over-simplifications, this question/answer binary constitutes what another fellow by the name of Ludwig Wittgenstein calls a language game.

We all play in these games on a daily basis. Usually, the more intimate your relationships with other people, the richer your language games with them. Inside jokes, I take it, are complex language games. The success of Jerry Seinfeld hinges entirely upon his talent for making inside jokes accessible to large audiences. We all know about the “Hello, Newman,” and we all participate in the same meanings when we imitate these television antics at the dinner table or in conversation. One Seinfeld fan easily becomes friends with another Seinfeld fan because both of them have a pre-established language game. Meanings are known without ever having met someone.

The same principle holds for Christian language games. Meanings are pre-established and taught to one individual who, through one circumstance or another, finds others whose vocabulary is consistent with his/her own. Christian camaraderie often times stems from Christian vocabulary.

But to bring back Thomas Kuhn, what happens in a world where our secular vocabulary incisively dictates the quality of our Christian vocabulary? What happens when we ask secular questions about our religious world? Don't we end up with secular answers to a Biblical world?

Anthropology, psychology, philosophy of language, sociobiology, ethology, etc etc. have a vernacular all their own, and have infiltrated the Christian vocabulary to the degree that we are beginning to have difficulty distinguishing between what is Sacred and what is secular. Think of the conflation of psychology and spirituality present in our Christian psychology classrooms. Spurious adaptations of Freudian psychoanalysis make me cringe a little. Why aren’t Christians doing theoretical psychology consistent with our Orthodox vocabulary so that Christian practitioners can have their theoretical authority in the church, not Freud? The same can be said of all the above-mentioned fields. I grant that all of these fields aren’t but a century old, and we need time. But isn’t it about time?

I don’t know. But I think I intend very much to develop some strand of Christian theoretical psychology in my Masters Thesis. Well, of course, that’s how I feel about it today.

the K.H.