Maximus, Moser, and Religious Epistemology
I’ve finally landed on a writing topic that I think is manageable and that I will enjoy that I will turn in for both Philosophy of Religion and Theological Explorations.
In P of R, one of our emphases was on the topic of Religious Epistemology, part of which was reading Paul Moser’s The Elusive God, in which Moser argues that religious epistemology should be reoriented away from the question of “does God exist?” to the question “am I, as a cognitive agent, in a proper disposition to be able to discern God?” When I read Moser’s book I was fascinated with his discussion because he is neither going the route of (1) nasty conservative apologetics (like a Norman Geisler, Frank Turek, Lee Stroebel, etc) who arrogantly give a God’s eye view and usually have a fairly condescending attitude towards the nonbeliever, or (2) fideism, which gives up on the entire enterprise of validating or giving reason for Christian faith. Fideism typically accepts some sort of non-foundationalism or truth-relativity.
Against both of these options, Moser wants to say that there is a healthy and reasonable approach to religious epistemology that still aims at truth and justification but does not claim to have a be-all-end-all argument that can devastate skepticism once and for all.
In Theological Explorations, we read 500 pages or so of work in recent epistemology and now are working through the primary works of Maximus. In reading Maximus, his notion of deification (Theosis) involves the person becoming like God through acquaintance with God.
Bearing all of this in mind, my paper is going to look at constructing a religious epistemology that attempts to retain the task of providing good, valid reasons for Christian faith by using Maximus’s concept of theosis. This will be in the vein of what Moser does, but I feel like Moser has a pretty limited understanding of what it means for a person to be in a proper disposition to know God. Moser seems to imply that volitional oppenness (genuine willingness) to see God and know God is all that is required for God to reveal himself to you. But, I don’t think this does justice to the common experience of reality, nor does it adequately deal with the sinfulness of human nature that blocks our ability to see God and, more specifically, whether it is healthy for us to see God.
In the end, I think that Maximus’s doctrine of deification is a good religious epistemology. If you follow Maximus, he suggests that ascetic practices and contemplation lead a person to theologia (direct perceptual knowledge of God). The validation for Christian belief arises out of direct perceptual knowledge of God, but Maximus’s steps towards that block against gullability and fantasy. When one strips off the hindrances of human fallenness and puts on the virtues, they are able to see God and know God in a direct way. That direct perception is reason to justifiably believe in the legitimacy of Christian faith.
Should be fun…. :)
