Evangelicals and Evidentialism

I was very surprised the other day when I was arguing with one of my Orthodox friends and they accused me of being an "evidentialist". I was, at the time, cynically and rather grumpily poking at the traditions of the Orthodox church (such as church hierarchy and the veneration of Mary) and calling into question the validity of their historical claims. It seemed to me, I told him, that there was no certain way to know that the traditions of the Orthodox Church were (as they claim) passed down to them from the Apostles pure and untainted, and I insinuated that, having no way of being certain about the historical "earliness" or "validity" of these claims (on the basis of a multitude of conflicting scholarship), that it was difficult for me simply to "take the Orthodox scholars' word for it".

The resulting accusation of evidentialism shocked me because I realised (as he later pointed out to me) that my arguments took me into dangerous (though common) theological ground. Evidentialism is an attitude toward epistemic justification that considers knowledge to be directly related to the amount of available evidence about the particular claim. Beliefs require sufficient evidence to be justified, and beliefs without evidential justification do not constitute knowledge. The great irony is, as blogger Matt Anderson points out in several of his latest posts, that this belief is radically opposed to our Christian faith, as it is both practically impossible (i.e. "what if all of reality is just a big computer program designed to fool our senses and our reason into believing a set of falsehoods, and we are really just a brain in a vat or a complex set of electrical impulses... how would we know it?"), and also theologically flawed. Our belief that the bible is the inspired Word of God is not based on historical and forensic evidence gathered to support this conclusion. We believe in the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures because we trust the testimony of God about His work... and we believe that God has testified about His Scriptures that they are inspired by Him.

This belief is one that runs contra to much current evangelical work and interest, which attempts to set itself apart from the post-modern and ultra-modern forces in our culture by making the effort to base Christian truth-claims on the justification of historical fact and empirical evidence. The ironic tension of our age converges nicely in this central issue of justifying our faith, as we simultaneously attempt to denounce Islam and L.D.S claims through evidential trumping and to claim the supremacy of the Holy Scriptures as authority in our lives (a claim that is made invalid if the scriptures themselves need to be in any way justified by external sources... if the bible is the supreme authority then it is necessarily prior to any means of validation). When it comes down to it, our faith is based on a belief in the testimony of God that is self-evidently present in our faith itself. We are witnesses of that which we believe, and this witness and obedience to the self-speaking presence of God is the basis of all of Christianity.

On these grounds, disarming the claims of my Orthodox friend become surprisingly difficult. We would certainly like to argue about dates, manuscripts, historical revision, cultural influence, interpretive communities, etc. But what our faith comes down to is not this evidential pandering but rather the simple question of what means God sanctified for the ends of His life-giving self-revelation. Could He have spoken through the teachings and the traditions of the historic Orthodox Church? Most certainly. Did He speak through his saints in the gospels and the teachings of St. Paul in his epistles? Most definitely. The two claims are not mutually exclusive... and if it was, as the Orthodox claim, the inspiration of the Church (Christ's true body on earth) that facilitated the inspiration of the Scriptures, then as followers of Christ we certainly need to pay attention to the Orthodox claims...