John Dewey and the Ethics of Historical Belief by Hutt Curtis;

Author:Hutt, Curtis; [Hutt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3408725
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

While they may be “partial and perspectival” depending upon the position of the imaginer, “they are not necessarily untrue or unrepresentative of what was grasped.”76 Harvey wrote that “all images represent the impression upon us of some subject in some definite context.” In the case of the image of Jesus, three main elements were woven together—each supporting the others. These included “the content and pattern of his teaching and preaching” which provided a guide for interpreting actions which were “symbolic exemplifications of the teachings.” Thirdly, the crucifixion was an “emblem” that epitomized memory-impression as a whole.77 Following Dewey, however, it must be reemphasized that the so-called timeless message of such images is activated and makes sense only in specific presents. Their significance is thus invariably subject to changing conditions and interests. If there is no match between the background, sensibilities, and concerns of the viewer and the original progenitor of religious images then Harvey's salvage operation falls apart. It is incumbent upon Harvey to do more to show that such a harmonization is warranted—especially in regard to the historical Jesus. In the years since Harvey first penned The Historian and the Believer, many scholars of early Christianity have rejected his view that a basic, unified configuration of the “memory-impression” has been bequeathed to us by Jesus and Christian tradition. Instead, many different images of Jesus (some suppressed for centuries) have proliferated—for example, as gnostic, rabbi, and social revolutionary. One or another of these options, or perhaps different ones not yet noted, might come to be accepted as most likely. This will be though, a result of coherent deliberations and inquiry in the present—not an imposition or, to use the language of William A. Christian Sr. cited by Harvey, a “suggestion” from a distant and probably unknown past.78

Most critically, all Deweyans—from Rorty to Morton White—would adamantly oppose Harvey's “protective strategy”79 whereby internal religious beliefs about the past are insulated from criticism by historians through radically separating the study of science from that of revelation. Alternatively, Deweyans agree that there is no radical difference between how scientific statements, whether in the natural sciences or external history, and religious beliefs are justified. As Dewey wrote in A Common Faith, this “method of swerving aside the impact of changed knowledge and method upon the intellectual content of religion” by dividing the “realm of nature” (fact) from the “realm of grace” (interpretation) was illegitimate.80 Dewey never thought that the method of changing belief through inquiry was restricted to a particular type of subject matter. Dewey's famous argument against the authority of alleged “special modes of immediate knowledge” which validate the religious interpretation of mystical experiences is thereby extended to the distinctive claims generated by internal histories. The scientific method, a fine-tuning of ordinary common sense, was always “open and public”—or, to use the language of H. Richard Niebuhr and Van Harvey—“external.” The “doctrinal method” on the other hand, was “limited and private.”81 Dewey rejected what Wayne Proudfoot, explicitly targeting Niebuhr and indirectly Harvey, characterized as

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