Is there any satisfactory alternative to the Western-epistemological method in our youth ministry?

If ever you needed evidence that click-bait isn’t really my thing, this title might be it. So to the four of you who clicked on this, hi! This is a very brief summary of my thoughts on something I’ve been both pondering for a while – namely, how should we model to young people how to think in what methods we use to teach them. We’ll get to juicier, more applicable thoughts in later posts (or you can find some old stuff here, here, here, and here!), but if you’re interested in the dry, note-form background, here it is. This has also been at the heart of some of my lectures on youth work and philosophy. To the two of you who are left, thanks for sticking around!

While studying Philosophy with Oxford University I wrote a paper entitled ‘Is there any satisfactory alternative to epistemological scepticism’. My answer was largely yes, but no, but yes, but no, but. So here we are.

Youth ministry comes with the expectation of teaching within conversational frameworks. Open Bible studies, Q&As, small groups, one-to-ones are all more common practice in youth ministry than regular church ministry. There’s an enormous plethora of resources available to help us do these practices well, however, in my experience they suffer from the simple problem of not being personal. None of these resources – as good as they are – can predict the attitudes and personalities of the people in my groups on any given day.

What’s needed, therefore, is not a new resource, but rather a new method. Most of our resources are based in a classical Western analytic method. Each question has a narrowly defined parameter for an answer, and the answers all point together towards an increasingly specific point. Teaching times are designed to have a cutting edge every time.

What is an epistemological method?

For starters, I’ve been quietly and glibly calling myself a ‘lay epistemologist’ for quite a few years. The subject that fascinates me more than any other is ‘what is thought’, and how should we, do we, could we, think. Epistemology then, at its most basic, is the theory of knowledge. How we obtain and distinguish between types of knowledge (as truth, facts, opinions, hyperbole, applicable, abstract etc.), is the place of our epistemological method – or the practical filter, or lens that we use to view and process cognitive stimulus. So, you see/perceive something – run it through our method – and then decide what to think as a result.

Most of us are only really familiar with the analytic method – so much so that you might believe it’s the only natural, de facto, method. Therefore, we’ll start there.

Analytical methodology

The Western analytic methodology (as made famous by philosophers such as Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Reichenbach, Frege, and Searle) follows exactly the pattern seen in our resources and most common teaching styles. It begins with a lot of information on the table, then slowly whittles it down, disregarding ideas and views, until only one ‘indisputable’ thought remains. It breaks ideas down into concepts, turns concepts into premises, and uses premises to prop up a single conclusion. It’s the basis of deductive logic. The key values of this method, therefore, are precision, clarity, and actionable qualities. This looks for ‘proofs’ and tests hypothesises in a largely mathematical fashion. This is usually the same pattern we follow in our talks: exegeting a piece of scripture down until we have a single sentence application.

I’m not against this idea out of hand. It certainly has its place. The problem, however, is that a lot of what gets cleared off the table is useful – and can often include the nuances needed to understand the more complex dramas of a passage or of human life more generally. Also, ideas are not always well-prepared to be reconceptualised into purely premise-type forms. The concept, although helpful as a way of distilling or summarising information, or as a way of moving quickly to action points, can miss out on a huge amount of truth.

When I first went to Bible College, everything we were taught came through this particular methodology which could make one assume that the Bible was written with pure logic and reductionist form in mind. This makes poetry, story, metaphor – frankly a lot of the Bible’s literature – feel rather redundant.

The analytic method makes us feel safe as it is supported by the idea that truth is singular, and that we have all the necessarily tools needed to distil it. It gives us the power. This isn’t just a Bible College thing as almost all of the English-speaking world has learned everything in this way since the 17^th Century. It’s largely underwritten into all our major community processes: Education, politics, law, culture, entertainment. Most of us evaluate everything based on this method (some being more naturally gifted at it than others) without even realising that it’s a method not a de facto natural state of reasoning.

So, what can we do?

Other potential methodologies

Eastern/Oriental

We could, instead, reach across the globe to an Eastern methodology (Confucius, Rumi, Laozi) where all ideas remain on the table and arriving at limiting conclusions are almost entirely discouraged. The focus tends to be how can you live your best life rather than what is true. Considering the nature of ministry – there’s a lot to respect here. Whereas Western, analytical philosophy breaks ideas into pieces and travels in a linear way towards a single idea, Eastern philosophy tries to grasp the whole, seeing ideas in a circular, repetitive way.

I certainly have a lot of patience for the Eastern method because it sees things as a unity, rather than breaking things up into segmented parts. Most of nature requires togetherness rather than separation, and things work in large eco systems, not separated echo chambers. Wholistic medicine is making enormous leaps forward using this approach, as is unifying, cross-discipline education. These are based in the Eastern method of approaching ideas.

The issue is that Eastern philosophy as a method is just less interested in truth (or at least in facts) and can have us going around in circles indefinitely. As a method it can at least turn us inwards so far that we lose our connections to the world outside or any notion of God’s plan for the future.

Continental

We could delve then into the phenomenology and existentialism prevalent in the Continental method (Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, Heidegger, and Deleuze), looking instead at mostly personal experience and spending more time in purely abstract, a priori thought experiments in the hope at reaching more subjective yet personal applications.

As a general rule, analytic methodology reaches for mathematics, logic and the science, whereas Continental looks at the overlap of history, space, time, culture, language and experience. Kant, famously said that natural sciences rely on ‘pre-theoretical substrate of experience’ thus cannot be seen as the most accurate way of arriving at truth.

I like Continental approaches to thinking, as they allow us much more time in abstract complexities, rather than tying us down to minimalistic, highly questionable, reductionist soundbites. They also look for an ‘ultimate’ that exists beyond the ability of human reasoning, leaving us with less scope for the idol of human knowledge.

The problem, however, is the subjective nature of this as a method means it often overrides, bypasses, or side-lines absolute truth or authority. Not to mention you could spend long days swimming around in purely dizzying epistemological mush – leaving everyone in a small group feeling lost, confused and vulnerable.

Rabbinic

This is an odd one, because it sits really as a subset of the Eastern approach, and – if you wanted to be really pedantic – it’s more of a hermeneutic key than an epistemological method. The rabbinic method depends on a question-driven technique that orbits an eventual answer but requires scriptural knowledge to get there. It’s also known as textual reasoning or discourse. Questions are asked, then answered with questions that lead to and from various parts of the Torah, letting the question, the answer, and the text all dialogue together to arrive – hopefully – as deeper interpretations.

I like this a lot! It allows the Word of God to speak particularly into the situations of people in our groups, while still holding it accountable to itself. It also opens things up more than closing them down, and keeps pointing back to the text. That’s quite cool! If you know what you’re doing (by which I mean you at least have a solid grasp of the Bible, and know how to mediate conversation) then this method can work immensely well in small groups or one-to-ones, as well as think-tanks and seminar groups.

This method, however, also comes with its problems – especially in a culture where knowledge of the Bible is practically non-existent, and simply answering questions with questions is categorised as chronic avoidance. It also places a lot of trust in the ‘rabbi’ (or group facilitator), giving them arbitration authority over what’s true or objectionable.

Socratic

Similar to the rabbinic method (in fact it probably largely informed it), is the Socratic method. This is again odd, because those in the analytic tradition would at least claim this as part of their approach. It is, after all, based in Plato – the Father of philosophy and the Hero (along with Aristotle) of all Western thinking.

The Socratic method is largely dialectic, relying on answering deeper and more specific questions, opening options up, while at the same time narrowing ideas down. It usually starts with a hypothesis or truth statement, then probes it by asking a series of challenges. It’s largely interrogative demanding the why behind every answer and exploring how far the why-answer goes. It chips away (like the analytic method) but does so with far more exploration and open-handedness.

This is a tool which I use a lot in Bible studies with young people. We explore concepts and probe ideas with a series of why questions and challenges. It allows us to explore nuance, apply directly, and remove taboos around what we should and shouldn’t talk about – or know.

The problem with this is less about whether it helps us arrive at truth, and more how it does that. It becomes very hard to falsify a truth claim when ideas or suggestion are constantly thrown back indiscriminately at the learner. This method makes it very easy to manipulate people into certain contortions of truth and can easily drain the room of the curiosity it needs to feed it. Questions become weaponised, and all dialogue becomes defensive dialogue.

Did we find an alternative?

All these methods have problems, so what do we do then? Are we stuck with the analytic method which gets to at least some truth, even if it glibly bypasses much of it, and is somewhat accountable, even if it’s only really accountable to our interpretations?

The answer, like in many things, is awareness, moderation and variety; not blinkered reliance without examination. We should be aware of our methodological biases as we teach and draw truth out from others. We should employ strategies from different epistemological methods (which could be as simple as asking both closed and open questions), drawing threads together – remembering that the method is a way to get at truth, the method itself is not necessarily truth.

We should be less defensive, therefore, of our methodologies. We should ultimately rely on God for his direct and indirect revelations, remember that He is so much bigger than our abilities to reason and that he inhabits our thoughts – He doesn’t just inform them.

For those on the neo-Reformed end of the theological spectrum (who I imagine would have the most problem with this), I’d ask them to consider the exegetical approaches of our heroes, such as Calvin, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Luther. They reached wide and broad, rarely closed things down, and drew massively complex threads together with several conclusions, not just one. They reached for God to overrule their interpretations, and left things up for him to examine, inform, and convict.

So, what’s the best method? It’s using all of them as tools, with an underlying faith in God to uphold His truth, supported by a constant language of prayer. Seems legit to me.

Therefor youth workers need to be critical thinkers and conversational mediators – not just presenters of resources or leaders of material. Honed skills will always outperform the best resources.