Hammer in Hand: A Review of Through the River by Jon and Mindy Hirst
Through the River: Understanding Your Assumptions about Truth
I should start this post with an apology to Mike Morell and the other folks at Ooze Viral Blogs: I’m certain they sent me this book some time in October, but I’m just now finishing up, well past the 30 days that we’re supposed to take to get our reviews live.? I can only hope that my infant-slowed progress doesn’t keep me from receiving other titles when they come available.
Now on to the review.
Having done a bit of reading in philosophy of science and philosophy of language, I could tell relatively soon in this book that Dr. Paul Hiebert’s expertise lay somewhere around those subfields of philosophy. Jon and Mindy Hirst set forth an allegory of a village of people living along a river, some living on the rocky shore, some living on the rocky shore on one side of the river, some living on the sandy islands in the river’s shallows, and some living in the grassy valley on the other side of the river. ?In terms of their approaches to the world, the Rock-Dwellers prefer solid proofs for solid claims, disputing in spirited debates until someone is right and someone is wrong. ?River-Dwellers inhabit islands of people who already agree with them, so they feel no need to establish that their way of life is any better or even any different from those on another island. ?And the Valley-Dwellers combine the solidity of the rock with the flexibility of the islands. ?Respectively the Rock, Island, and Valley people represent Positivism,?Instrumentalism, and Critical Realism.
The influence of philosophy of science, as I said, wasn’t hard to spot. ?Positivism, instrumentalism, and realism are, after all, common shorthand for philosophies of science, and questions of a sentence’s truth are common to both lines of inquiry.? To the extent that this book is a primer on those inquiries’ basic categories?for a generally educated Christian, it’s a success.
The problem comes when the book ventures outside of relationships between science and language and tries to take on ethical and academic-theological questions.? If a man with a hammer in hand sees everything as a nail, then a trio of writers with philosophy of science vocabulary in mind seem to see?everything as a question of truth-claims.? Those intellectual tools are valuable, make no mistake, but they’re ill suited to answer certain questions.? When the authors made an attempt to account for Plato in terms of 19th- and 20th-century philosophy of science debates I merely chuckled, but when they got to some more complex questions, I did have serious reservations.
The example that rises immediately to mind has to do with intercultural Christian missions.? The Hirsts chalk up a shift from civilize-and-evangelize missions among English-speaking Protestant missionaries to a social-service model to a shift from what they call a “positivist truth lens” to an “instrumentalist truth lens.”? The fact of the matter is that scientific instrumentalism has its roots in David Hume and?other Enlightenment writers just as positivism has its roots in Francis Bacon and other Enlightenment folks.? In other words, the days of greatest English and American missionary activity featured a contest between world-systems, not the dominance of one followed by the intrusion of another.? Once again, the introduction to the vocabulary worked, but the authors seem to have gotten the philosophy-of-science fever, painting the whole of Christianity with its terms when, to be fair, they apply best to a relatively narrow span of human pursuits.
One other problem that occupied my mind as I read was how the Hirsts were locating their Critical-Realist truth lens, the one that’s clearly the culmination (even more clearly than H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Christ Transforming Culture” is the culmination of Christ and Culture) of the book. ?There are passages that claim that Critical Realism is a very new way to apprehend the world, one that comes from the action of transcending postmodernism/Instrumentalism. ?Then there are other passages that seem to hold Critical Realism as the natural culmination of most human inquiry. ?I think that both of those stories have a place in a comprehensive philosophy, but once again, trying to make everything a nail means that some of the things one whacks with one’s hammer aren’t going to serve very well.
Had the book set out on a humbler quest, I would have ranked it an unqualified success, a good primer on some important questions. ?Unfortunately, some jobs just aren’t right for the hammer.
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