The Art of Imperious Ignorance
by Michael J Ovey, The Gospel Coalition:
Earlier this year I found myself lured from the secure theological fastnesses of north London to a consultation on one of the hot topics of our day. One delegate listened to the contributions about what relevant biblical passages meant and then commented that s/he still did not know what the passages meant and the explanations offered just didn’t do it for him/her. The passages were unclear. I was surprised in one way, because I thought the explanations had been nothing if not clear. Unwelcome very possibly, but not unclear. The response, though, was not a disagreement in the sense of offering an alternative explanation which should be preferred for better reasons. This was not direct disagreement but something much more oblique. It was a disagreement that took the form of declaring that the passages were not clear.
Of course, in another way this is no longer a surprising response to attempts to explain passages from the Bible or synthesise them—over the years one has heard it in regard to God’s knowledge of the future, predestination, God changing his mind, same-sex marriage, the role of women, etc. The Bible is unclear, it is said, and so we must be content not to know. We must be ignorant. In that sense I think we are observing an argumentative move that is perhaps increasingly common.
In this article I want to argue that the claim to be ignorant on the grounds that something is unclear is actually quite ambitious. More than that, it can be an imperious claim that exercises power over others without, at times, the inconvenience of reasoned argument. No wonder it is so popular.
Please note, I am not suggesting this is always the case and that every claim of unclarity is manipulative and power-driven, but it is worth thinking through how such claims can be.
By way of illustration, take the pro-Arian Creed announced at Sirmium in 357, which marked a new phase in the Arian controversy as Arian opposition to Nicene trinitarian theology became more overt. For our purposes the relevant part of the Creed comes just after it outlines a prohibition on using the terms homoousios (one and the same substance) or homoiousios (of a similar substance). The Creed states:
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