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Vocation and Epistemology

Vocation and Epistemology

Last updated on: September 25, 2014 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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Vocation and Epistemology 2014-09-24T19:49:01-04:00 Gene Veith

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More and more Christians are discovering, or re-discovering, the doctrine of vocation, and the richness of that teaching means that vocation can illuminate countless dimensions of life. Now the noted Christian philosopher John Stackhouse has written a book entitled Need to Know: Vocation as the Heart of Christian Epistemology (that last word referring to the philosophy of knowledge–how we know what we know, how we know that we know, etc., etc.). Excerpts from a review after the jump.

From Clifford Williams, Need to Know: Vocation as the Heart of Christian Epistemology // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.

Stackhouse describes his book as “general epistemology,” by which he means that it covers a wide array of topics in epistemology. It does, indeed. The book begins with a description of the current situation in epistemology, with descriptions of three senses of pluralism and four cognitive styles: the enlightenment mentality, romanticism, a process approach, and the postmodern mentality. It moves to the vocation motif — what humans were created to do with their lives and, specifically, what Christians are to be doing with their lives. The book’s basic idea is captured in the phrase, “vocational epistemology”: because God means for us to fulfill our vocations, God will see to it that we know enough to do so. After explaining this idea, Stackhouse gives accounts of five resources that can be used to fulfill our vocations — experience, tradition, scholarship, art, and scripture — along with three modes of apprehension — intuition, imagination, and reason. In the remainder of the book he treats a number of other issues in epistemology, including the authority of the Bible, the social context of our thinking, and the principle of proportionate assent. . . .

Other insights that readers may appreciate include Stackhouse’s remark that a hermeneutic of suspicion needs to be balanced with a “hermeneutics of love” (189), that “knowledge making is always political” (192), and that beliefs are contained in “webs” — in “constellations” of beliefs (156, 161). He says this last fact means that: “disagreements are not always over particular propositions A or B, but over entire complexes of ideas, whole models of explanations that in turn reside within worldviews” (160). And this fact, in turn, means that knowing “is not simply a matter of ‘S-knows-that-p,’ the classic formulation in analytical philosophy” (160), and that sometimes people “may literally talk past each other” when disagreeing about a particular claim (161). . . .

A last theme that needs more attention is the vocational epistemology that promises “God’s sufficient provision for the basic calling of every Christian” (242). This calling involves the “primal commandments to love God, love our neighbors, and love the rest of Creation” (71). That is, if God calls us to live in certain ways, then God will see to it that we possess the knowledge that is required to fulfill that call. Stackhouse’s inference from this central claim is that we can be confident that we actually do have knowledge “of the world.”

HT: Korey Maas

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