Stackhouse’s Critical Realism: A Pragmatic Epistemology on the Lam

Abstract

Apparently Stackhouse does not make empty promises and I take this symposium to be a critical celebration of the full-fledged Christian epistemology found in Need to Know: Following Christ in the Real World (2014). Stackhouse has provided a realist epistemology as indebted to Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff as his ethics are indebted to Reinhold Niebuhr. It is an epistemology that is socially-located1 and yet does not give up on the claim that humans have “reliable access to reality” (86). It is an epistemology that—in a continual pentalectic (five-sided conversation)—draws on experience, tradition, scholarship, art, and Scripture through intuition, imagination, and reason. In all, it attempts to strike a balance between expecting too much or too little from human rationality (135). Glibly, one might say that if you are like Goldilocks, lost in the forest of epistemology, this may just be the porridge that is neither too hot nor too cold. There is indeed much to celebrate in Need to Know and I want to give more than lip service to this recognition. In order to do so, however, I will need to begin to explain my subtitle.