Liberating Reason Through Tradition : A Hermeneutic Critique of the Subjective-Objective Dichotomy and Its Implications for Christianity

The Enlightenment’s pursuit of verification pushed all knowledge into two categories: the objective and the subjective. Following this starting point, I argue for three things: First, that the Reformation movement is essentially conducted in the same spirit and with the same result as the Enlightenment: a push towards a certain kind of verifiability that ends up creating the same dichotomy between objective and subjective. Second, that the way to liberate reason from these problematic categories is to turn to Gadamer and the hermeneutic movement to re-contextualize and re-define how reason is used to acquire knowledge in light of our experience of it. Finally, that Eastern Orthodoxy provides a strong model for a Christianity animated by these hermeneutical principles, and further, that sacramental theology takes Gadamer's idea of truth as indwelling to its next logical step.