“I allow for the things of God to be beyond rationality, to be suprarational. I believe this is a rational thing to do since, if God created the world out of nothing, He is outside this universe and not conformed to its rationality.”
Dr. Ken Schenk
Wesley Seminary Dean and Professor of New Testament and Christian Ministry
I am working on wondering what the point of interacting with you is any further Ken since you hold that God is beyond rationality. If God is beyond rationality and if the creator creature divide is so vast then all of this is speculative hookah smoking and there is no such thing as either one of us being ‘right’ and our systems are left to being promulgated and embraced not because they correspond to reality but because they find a way to get in the stream of popularity and as such I might be better served by learning more about marketing then I do about doctrine.
If God is trans-rational or supra-rational then all your ratiocination in the world is just so much making of mud pies. On one hand you insist that God doesn’t conform to our rationality while on the other hand you continue in a rationcination that presumably anticipates a correspondence to a God that by your own admission doesn’t conform to our rationality. You are lost in a sea of subjectivism Ken. You have a man of water climbing a ladder of water affixed to a sky of water speculating about a God who is beyond rationality.
How, pray tell, could we find out that God is irrational? If God doesn’t conform to our rationality then how could we ever label him either as supra-rational, trans-rational, rational or irrational? Your God is so transcendent – so other that he dwells in Kant’s noumenal realm making conversation about him meaninglessness (aka – Logical positivists), with faith defined as being a Kierkegaardian existential leap.
And why would you ever think that this universe has a rationality that is unique to it? Where is that idea taught in Scripture? If God is “outside this universe and not conformed to its rationality” then how could we believe that God’s Word conforms to our rationality? If God does not conform to our rationality then it could be that when the Scripture says that God is love what it really means (admitting that we can’t really know what it means since God doesn’t conform to the universe’s rationality) is that God is a Ice Cream Cone.
Like many denominations in the West the Wesleyans have a major problem in their Seminary faculty. Let us pray that God is pleased to raise up new Denominational training centers where men are ‘t taught to be irrational.
“If God does not conform to our rationality then it could be that when the Scripture says that God is love what it really means (admitting that we can’t really know what it means since God doesn’t conform to the universe’s rationality) is that God is a Ice Cream Cone.”
It shouldn’t take more than a moment’s reflection to grasp the self-referential absurdity of attempting to use logic to refute logic. As you point out, apart from rationality language itself descends into meaninglessness; revelation becomes incomprehensible.
This is such a slippery statement. To deny it without qualification, one would seem to be at risk of affirming some sort of analogia entis. Yet to affirm it, in the way it is probably intended, would place one on a trajectory with the extremist nominalism of the Barthians…
I am not familiar with Ken Schenk. Where is he coming from with this statement?
Adam,
He refuses to be labeled. I just see variant versions of subjectivism (Barth, Bultmann, Ritschl, Schleirmacher, etc.)
No one denies that the finite can not contain the infinite but to say that God is beyond rationality is irrational (unless of course God is beyond rationality in which case there would be no way to determine what either rationality or irrationality looked like).
I agree it is a ridiculous statement. It’s just that people sometimes use language rather “loosely” and so not knowing the author I just wondered if he really meant it in the liberal/neo-orthodox sense.
Believe me … that is the way he is using it.
The anti-logic statements remind me of the nature of sin–to flee from the identity of God into its contradiction. When men say that God is beyond logic or extra-logical, they aren’t really preserving the Creator-creature distinction, but rather they are obliterating any identity between Creator and creature, which has the effect of practical libertinism, since a man who cannot know God is a man who cannot know the obligations of such God upon him, ergo, the man may live however the man wishes.
It is simply more evidence of antinomianism–an antinomianism so rampant it isn’t even content with laws of thought.
The same reasoning that Joshua sets forth is the reasoning behind Deconstructionism.
It is insane.