The Case for Christian Anarchism - part VII

7. When Christianity is held as a theory, faith then becomes exposed as nihilism.

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Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (Matthew 4:7)

I. What is the basis of philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, present propositions together in order to reach some particular conclusion that follows on from said propositions and the logical form applied to them. When presenting ideas in the propositional form, the philosopher assumes the worthwhileness of “approximation-knowledge”1 and is open to challenge and counter-challenge.

II. What is the basis of faith? Proceeding from the Absolute, the Lord God, faith is the fullness of time2, the ultimate content-giving content of all contents3, the wrestle with “the absurd”4—the “salt” to Christian character5.

III. What does the propositional form lend to the discussion of faith? Nothing at all whatsoever.

IV. What does the propositional form lend to the discussion of life? Little at all, but plenty in the eyes of the aesthete—exhausted by the categories of his exhausting imagination.

Philosophers are, as a breed, an immodest bunch. While the scientist accepts that, in their production of scientific approximations, there is a certain “limit” to their methods and what they could show, the philosopher might be quite so ready to think that there can be some undemonstrable notion that sits outside of their expertise. The problem, it seems, arises from the type of content that the expert deals with: the biologist must deal with living things, the architect must deal with housing things, but the philosopher is doomed to wrestle not only with ideas but also directly through the mode of his wrestle at once—that is to say, he must think of ideas and the idea of ideas without falling into conflation and philosophical incoherence.

As a part of this, the propositional form, i.e., the ability to express certain facts (or would-be facts) about reality as statements which can be assessed as either true or false, is often assumed as being the point of contact between the philosopher’s grasp and their target area of inquiry. When we engage in reflection on the world, we take the content of that reflection from direct experience or some other piece of knowledge otherwise gathered from the inquiries of others. For many philosophers throughout the history of the bloodsport, this form has ...