Tradition on Fire: Polydoxy, Orthodoxy, and Theological Epistemology

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores four accounts of fire in texts that have become influential to theological epistemology, written by Luce Irigaray, René Descartes, George Fox, and Blaise Pascal. Each of these fires represents an epistemological conversion to a particular way of knowing about God. While the authors of the Keller and Schneider volume resist a strict binary opposition between polydoxy and orthodoxy, the book as a whole—whether inadvertently or inescapably—functionally reduces orthodoxy to a single epistemological viewpoint, diagnosed by Irigaray as the Logic of the One. This singular view of orthodoxy has two drawbacks. First, it is inadequate to the multiplicity of Christian orthodoxies. It cannot account for the fires of Fox and Pascal, or for the orthodoxies that threatened them. Second, polydoxy itself is limited. Reading all orthodoxies through the lens of Irigaray's critique re‐inscribes the Logic of the One that she protests. Furthermore, this pattern belies the relationality that polydoxy emphasizes. Thus, the continuing development of polydoxy might require attending to the specific multiplicities of orthodoxy itself.