an elephant, a Fish, and some blind folk walk into a bar...

Let me make this perfectly clear:

I hate--nay, loathe(!)--the "blind-guys-describe-an-elephant" analogy.

For those of you not familiar with this story, it goes as follows. A bunch of blind guys stumble upon an elephant. One grabs its foot and describes the object as a thick tree trunk. One grabs the ear and describes it as a wide, flat, leathery sheet. One grabs the trunk and explains that the object is really a thick snake-like thing. They argue over who is right without resolving anything. The basic idea is that the elephant is God and different religions grasp the elephant at different points. None of us has complete knowledge, and we ought to listen to one another in order to learn the whole of the animal.

I didn't always dislike it. I mean, it has a good point about the multiplicity of religious experience and the benefits of dialogue. It affirms the limits of human knowledge and encourages humility. All good things.

But it has a few limitations and, ultimately, lacks real theological sophistication. Some objections I have:

1. There is a chance that not all the bind guys are actually touching a single animal. One may in fact be stroking a snake that is next to the elephant

2. We do not approach the divine blindly. We are not religious blank slates. We have socially constructed conceptual minds that impose categories of interpretation upon any experience we might have.

3. Different understandings and interpretations of an object do not depend upon different "parts" of the object. Disagreement can occur when a bunch of people grab the exact same part of the elephant.

The main issue for me, though, is that this story ignores the role of the community in interpretation. In most versions of this analogy, the blind men are not described as a community that come to a shared understanding of the object by way of agreed upon standards and shared language. No, they are normally competing "religions" or "communities" or "theologies" that seem to exist as isolated, singular interpreters.

There is a chance that Stanley Fish has completely gone out of fashion, but I still find his literary theory insightful (and helpfully accessible). I've been reading his classic Is There a Text in This Class? It is a defense of the linguistic community as the locus of interpretive meaning in a text or speech-act.

One of my favorite examples he gives is of a list of linguistic theorists left on a chalk board from an earlier class. When the new class, studying medieval religious poetry, comes in, Fish tells them that the list is an hieroglyphic medieval poem. The students then set about creating meaning from this list by identifying theological themes in names like "Jacobs-Rosenbaum," "Thorne," and "Ohman(?)." The key here is that the words do not have any intrinsic meaning; neither, though, is there an unlimited range of possibilities. Rather, within a given social context, certain rules of signification allow people to create and communicate meaning with one another.

Here's where this knocks up against the elephant. Even though the students were "creating" meaning in the experience of the list of names, they had communally agreed upon standards that allowed them to assess which options were legitimate or not. They could debate with one another. They could critique one another. And they could define the limits of appropriate meaning.

Not everyone is touching an elephant; and faith communities have agreed-upon language and parameters beyond which one can say, "Sorry, my friend, but I think you are actually holding a poisonous snake." Moreover, within a cultural-linguistic community, we may all grab the elephant's leg but establish standards for the most adequate way to describe it. "No, sir, it is not actually slimy and studded with diamonds." Finally, we don't stumble upon the elephant with no resources; we bring to the experience the language of our faith--or culture, or whatever--that enables it to actually be an experience in the first place.

So I have two theological rants that grow out from this for me, rants which I won't go into completely here, but which will probably come up in later posts:

1. Relativism does not mean that nothing ultimate exists; what it means is that we have a finite and contingent mode of knowing and signifying. So when we speak of our faith as "cultural-linguistic" it is not a debasement of our theological claims. It is an acknowledgment of the limits of reason to access and explain that faith. This is why, in the butchered words of Barth, Belief cannot reason with Unbelief--it can only preach to it.

2. Because faith does not originate in reason it is all the more important that our understanding of it and discourse about it be rationally governed. This may seem to contradict my previous statement, but it makes sense if you consider systems of logic to be based upon socio-linguistic norms. That is to say, the responsibility of good Christian theology is to learn its language and explore the different ways of knowing offered within our community. Likewise, it is the necessary role of Church leaders to practice appropriate mystagogy--habituating the community to its language, training them through liturgy, scripture, preaching, and practices to not only speak the language but adopt it as their own.

There is a very good chance that I will look back on this post as way too imprecise. But my language is still maturing too..