Advent Edition: The Most Fascinating Philosopher of Religion You've Never Heard Of
I have the privilege of teaching in a rather storied department. We sometimes like to boast that Philosophy at Calvin College (now University), a smallish liberal arts college in the midwest, has produced four presidents of the American Philosophical Association. Many are familiar with figures like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff who played a critical role in the founding of the Society of Christian Philosophers. (You can read a lovely recollection from Wolterstorff about the role the department played in what he calls "the renaissance of Christian philosophy" in the late 20th century. Nick has also written a lovely and moving memoir that recounts his time at Calvin.) William Frankena became one of the most significant moral philosophers of the past century.
I've made it something of a personal mission to restore attention to the fourth of these Calvin-trained APA Presidents, O.K. Bouwsma, who went on to teach at the University of Nebraska for almost forty years (1928-1965) before finishing his career at the University of Texas. (Fun fact: his son, William, was a Berkeley historian who wrote an influential biography of John Calvin.)
I'm highlighting Bouwsma here, this week, in this newsletter, mostly because I'm looking for an excuse to share a passage from Bouwsma that I think is a beautiful rendition of Christianity to consider during Advent.
My fascination with Bouwsma is verging on fanaticism, only because I find him such a distinctive and refreshing voice. Indeed, I'm drawn to Bouwsma because his method is more akin to literature than logic. This stems in part, I think, from his indebtedness to Wittgenstein. (His little book, Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-1951, which recounts actual conversations they had at Cornell and Oxford, is also a good entrée to Bouwsma, too.) That's not because Wittgenstein is "literary" but because Wittgenstein's attention to how language works sort of gives Bouwsma license to cultivate a voice in his writing that is at once playful and contemplative. The writing is not just some transparent vehicle for thought; how something is said--how the question is pursued in language--is as important as what is said.
But Bouwsma is also distinctive in his ability to think through philosophical questions by concretizing them in allegories and images. Rather than a linear, logical progression (If...then...), Bouwsma's procedure is parabolic: "Imagine...", he begins. Imagine this scene, this person, this situation. Just this week I returned to his wonderful, almost mystical essay, "The Mystery of Time," which begins:
"Once upon a space there was a man who laid linoleum, a fantastical fellow, who did not believe in clocks."
Suffice it to say, this is not the way most papers begin at the American Philosophical Association. But as soon as Bouwsma begins such a reverie, I don't want to get off the ride.
Well, I'm perhaps trying your patience. I have so much I want to say about Bouwsma. (I'm thinking I need to write a book. I have a dream of a rather fantastical book that hinges on the fact that Bouwsma's papers are housed at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, alongside the papers of David Foster Wallace. The philosopher and the novelist, but the lines are blurred, because it almost feels like the philosopher wants to be a novelist, and the novelist started out wanting to be a philosopher. But I digress.)
While Bouwsma made his mark as a creative and idiosyncratic historian of philosophy, as a lifelong Christian, reared and shaped by the Reformed tradition, he regularly returned to religious themes. A number of these studies are gathered in his collection, Without Proof or Evidence, published by the University of Nebraska Press (along with most of his other books).
As you might guess from the title, Bouwsma thinks that the project of marshaling "evidence" for faith is misbegotten, the outworking of a category mistake. "For it does not show understanding when a man asks for evidence when it makes no sense to ask for evidence." But it's a hard habit to break, and Bouwsma tries to discern where this demand for evidence comes from.
All the same the urge is there. And how are we to explain that? Out of what does this misunderstanding arise? Out of the disposition to regard all uses of language as the same.
There's the Wittgensteinian approach: some of our most intractable philosophical problems come from asking bad questions, and the tendency to keep asking those questions is because we don't appreciate the different things language does.
There are all kinds of spheres of life, Bouwsma concedes, where the expectation of "evidence" that produces "knowledge" is entirely appropriate.
We make knowledge by the lightyear. We make so much that we do not have heads enough to store it. We store it in boxes and books and slot machines. This is our preoccupation. Knowledge will save us.
Well, from ignorance, maybe, Bouwsma says. But our dogged pursuit of knowledge also hampers us from reaching other shores. "It is the pursuit of knowledge that fashions our minds and at the same time cripples us. For it renders us incapable of understanding those uses of language to which we have then become strangers."
And the very real risk, Bouwsma worries, is that this narrow fixation on knowledge and its "evidence" will block us from hearing other voices that beckon--voices that might actually save us.
A man may in this way become an expert on the sounds of insects, the chirp of crickets, the hum of the mosquito, the buzz of the bee--he may have a menagerie of evidence--and yet he may have no ear at all for the still, small voice until it sounds like the blast of the whirlwind.
Such is the case if we mistakenly assume that anything true looks like knowledge and must come round the mountain with evidence in tow.
This, he suggests, is precisely how people go wrong with Christianity. The language of "belief" tilts us into thinking of Christianity as a knowledge set. And so we end up "misunderstanding" Christianity as "a set of doctrines, of propositions, a theory, an explanation."
Here, finally, we get to the passage I want to share with you--an inspired reverie that is almost a call to worship:
But when then is Christianity? Christianity is a faith, we all know that. It is also a hope and a fear. It is a promise and a threat. It is a light shining in the darkness. It is a knock at the door. It is a guest at supper. It is coals of fire. It is weeping at a betrayal. It is reconciliation. It is hearing the voice of the shepherd. It is new wine to drink. It is madness. it is a house built on the rock. It is the Truth walking. It is the eternal in rags. It is the finishing touch. It is the lily of the valley. It is the Roysterer son, home again, home again. It is the black sheep found. It is the rich young ruler, sorrowful. It is the widow's mite. It is love rebuffed. It is rosemary for remembrance. It is a lamb slain. It is "a brand plucked out of the fire."
To "demonstrate" this by marshaling evidence is like trying to count a dance or taste an idea. One does not prove such mysteries. One bears witness.
Imagine God became human.
Additional Resources
There are scant resources that provide an introduction to O.K. Bouwsma, I'm afraid. (Hence my thinking about a possible book.)
If you're looking for an introduction to Wittgenstein, which is the most important philosophical source for Bouwsma's sensibility, I might humbly suggest my little book, Who's Afraid of Relativism? which was written to be an introduction to Wittgenstein and pragmatism.