Toward a more nuanced epistemology

Well, earlier I spoke pretty harshly about how objective history and journalism is a joke. Well, it’s easy to trash things, but what do you do about it?

So, after outlining all these different ways we know things and not glossing over their shortcomings, Wright pulls a “not so fast! we still need this stuff”. We need it, but perhaps carefully shaped into something better.

The hard-and-fast distinction between objective and subjective must be abandoned as useless.

If anyone, reading that sentence, at once things ‘so there is no such thing as objective knowledge’, that merely shows how deeply ingrained the positivist tradition has become in our culture, just at the moment when its perpetrators have finally admitted that it was wrong.

What is needed, I have argued, is a more nuanced epistemology.

Assuming for the moment a Christian worldview, we can at least say this: knowledge has to do with the interrelation of humans and the created world. this brings it within the sphere of the biblical belief that humans are made in the image of the creator, and that in consequence they are entrusted with the task of exercising wise responsibility within the created order. They are neither detached observers of, nor predators upon, creation. From this point of view, knowledge can be a form of stewardship; granted the present state of the world, knowledge can be a form of REDEEMING stewardship; it can be in one sense, a form of love.

N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p.44