In what I thought was an excellent Opinionator piece in the NY Times, Stanley Fish asks: “Must there be a bottom line?”  He reviews Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s new book, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion [http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/must-there-be-a-bottom-line/]. 

“The assumption she challenges — or, rather, says we can do without — is that underlying it all is some foundation or nodal point or central truth or master procedure that, if identified, allows us to distinguish among ways of knowing and anoint one as the lodestar of inquiry.  The desire, she explains, is to sift through the claims of those perspectives and methods that vie for “underneath-it-all status” (a wonderful phrase) and validate one of them so that we can proceed in the confidence that our measures, protocols, techniques and procedures are in harmony with the universe and perhaps with God.”

“It is within the context of such a desire that science and religion are seen as in conflict, in part because the claims of both are often (but not always) totalizing; they amount to saying, I am the Truth and you shall have no other truths before me. But if religion and science are not thought of as rival candidates for the title “Ultimate Arbiter,” they can be examined, in more or less evolutionary terms, as highly developed, successful and different (though not totally different, as the history of their previous union shows) ways of coping with the situations and challenges human existence presents.”

…

“That is to say, we have certain problems, goals and difficulties with respect to the physical world, and of the models available to us for application and elaboration, science more often than not proves to be the most efficacious. Were our purposes otherwise — say, to deal with trauma, political hopes and fears, the project of community building — we might have recourse to other models and ideas from literature or philosophy or religion or even sports.”

“Once the shift is made from asking “what is and should be the ultimate ground of our actions?” to asking “what resources are available to us for dealing with these problems and opportunities?,” the question of which model or way of conceptualizing things is true or truer becomes, Smith observes, less urgent and less interesting…. ”

Again, it is a great, thought provoking article that I recommend, and it also makes me want to ask OST readers:

This short excerpt gets at a similar point made by Walter Brueggemann.  In Texts Under Negotiation, he urges the faithful to take a contextual path of interpretation, which stands against objectivism (what is and should be the ultimate ground of our actions?) and unbridled relativism (there are no grounds for responsible action?).  In this way, Brueggemann says:

“the practice of Christian interpretation in preaching and liturgy is contextual, local, and pluralistic.  We voice and claim that rings true in our context, that applies authoritatively to our lived life.  But it is a claim that is made in a pluralism where it has no formal privilege.”

The Holy Bible, Brueggemann says, can be seen as a fund “to provide the pieces, materials, and resources out of which a new world can be imagined.”

Fish and Brueggemann, while coming from different perspectives, overlap on the issue of interpreting the world with a pragmatic sense.  For faithful followers of Jesus living in the increasingly urbanized, pluralistic, and interconnected world, it is not about finding the Ultimate Ground to justify our action.  Rather, I argue, it is about drawing from circumstantially available resources (of which the Bible is the most significant, but not the only available resource) to creatively, faithfully, and lovingly engage problems and opportunities that emerge in our lives.