Episode Details

As churches consider what to restart, discontinue or create from scratch post-coronavirus, how pragmatic should we be in our decisions?

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Uncovering the principles in our pragmatism

My mate Phil has a nickname that we love to tease him with. ‘Pragmatic Phil’ we call him. It comes from a (typically ill-informed) Sydney Morning Herald article late last year that styled him this way.

The reason it works as a nickname for Phil is the same reason that ‘Bluey’ works as a funny and perverse Aussie nickname for redheads. Anyone who knows Phil well knows him to be a very principled pastor, and certainly no ‘pragmatist’.

That’s the way we normally think of it anyway—that there are biblical principles in ministry (and people who major on them), and then there is pragmatism, where the decisive factor is whether something works practically or not. (‘Pragmatism’ is the view that a course of action is best judged not by some external rule, ideology or theory, but according to its practical consequences.)

We usually think of principles and pragmatics as opposing forces to be negotiated or balanced in some way. There’s the urgent impulse to just do whatever is going to be effective. And there’s the nagging voice in our heads that reminds us of our biblical and theological principles.

And so it is common to speak of ‘principled pragmatism’ as the ideal middle way—an approach that acknowledges the necessity (and unavoidability) of thinking pragmatically at various points, but gives due weight to the important biblical principles that should discipline and control our sometimes rampant pragmatic impulses.

I’d like to suggest a slightly different angle for thinking about pragmatic decision-making—one that I hope might be useful as we emerge from the COVID19 chrysalis and face a slew of decisions about what to do next and how.

The common ‘principled pragmatism’ approach assumes that pragmatism is principle-free, and requires principles to be added to it for discipline and control. And this is how pragmatism likes to market itself as well: “Never mind your theorizing and your purist theological principles—I’m about smart, practical solutions that actually get results”.

However all pragmatism is deeply principled. It likes to pretend that it’s not, but it is. (And in this, it is like most forms of consequentialist ethics—but that’s a discussion for another time.)

Let’s bring four of pragmatism’s principles to the surface and shine the light of day (or the light of Scripture) on them.

The first is a general underlying principle that the world we’re operating in has a rational order to it, where effect follows cause in a predictable manner—so that it is possible to devise actions that predictably bring about certain results. Pragmatism assumes an ordered field of action, and reasonably so—this aligns not only with our experience but with the Bible’s teaching that the world was created in God’s wisdom to be a good and ordered habitat.

However, the Bible also teaches that as a result of sin and judgement, the created world is a disordered field of action, subject to futility, frustration, decay and death; that hard work produces thorns and thistles, as well as bread. The biblical principle leads us to regard the rational predictability of the world with caution, recognizing that cause does not always lead to a predictable effect in a fallen world.

The second principle of pragmatism is that we humans have the knowledge and mental power to master the rational order of the world, and bend it to our will; that we’re smart enough to figure out the lines of causality, and come up with solutions that work. Again, this is also consistent with our experience and with the Bible—up to a point. Mankind is