Are We Reasoning the Same Way?
TECHNICAL ARTICLE 1
This article forms the first part of a technical trilogy that revisits earlier questions about church and culture by making underlying patterns of reasoning and ontology explicit.
Are We Reasoning the Same Way?
Hermeneutical Drift and the Question of Shared Ontological Assumptions
This article begins a technical three-part series examining whether contemporary church debates and late-modern cultural debates are shaped by shared ontological and hermeneutical assumptions—even when they reach divergent ethical conclusions.
1. Agreement at the level of conclusions—or at the level of reasoning?
Much recent theological discussion has focused on whether churches are “capitulating” to contemporary cultural positions on sex, gender, and identity. That framing, while understandable, risks obscuring a more fundamental question. The most decisive issue may not be whether churches and culture arrive at the same conclusions, but whether they increasingly rely on the same forms of reasoning to get there.
It is entirely possible—indeed increasingly common—for ecclesial bodies to reject particular cultural outcomes while nonetheless employing similar conceptual moves to the prevailing culture in their theological deliberation. When this occurs, disagreement at the level of doctrine can mask convergence with the prevailing culture at the level of ontology and hermeneutics.
The question, then, is not simply what is being affirmed or denied, but how meaning itself is being located, authorised, and justified.
2. Divergent destinations, shared logic
Outside the church, contemporary theories of sex and gender are often united by a common ontological claim: the sexed body does not disclose personal identity in a determinative way. Identity is instead grounded in interior self-perception, psychological continuity, or narrative self-construction. Ethical reasoning follows accordingly.
Within the church, the situation is more complex. Many ecclesial traditions explicitly reject this claim and affirm the goodness of creation, the givenness of the body, and the authority of Scripture. Yet when internal debates are examined closely, similar patterns of reasoning to those outside the church often emerge:
- Creation is affirmed in principle, but treated as under-determinative in practice
- Embodied distinctions are acknowledged, but regarded as theologically negotiable
- Meaning is relocated from ontology to interpretation
- Authority shifts from reception to adjudication
These moves do not necessarily result in identical ethical conclusions. But they do indicate a shared grammar of reasoning, one that quietly shapes what counts as plausible, defensible, or pastorally responsible.
3. The relocation of meaning
At the heart of this convergence with the prevailing culture lies a decisive shift: meaning is no longer understood to inhere stably in what is given, but to arise through interpretive activity.
In classical Christian theology, creation was not a neutral substrate awaiting semantic assignment. The world was meaningful because it was ordered, purposive, and communicative—deriving its intelligibility from God. Bodies, relations, and differences were not merely factual realities but theological data.
By contrast, much modern reasoning—both secular and ecclesial—treats givenness as insufficient. Meaning must be clarified, supplemented, or even corrected by interpretation. This is often framed as a hermeneutical necessity: contexts change, symbols shift, and meanings evolve.
Yet once interpretation is elevated from response to source, the ontological status of creation subtly changes. Creation no longer teaches; it awaits explanation.
4. Hermeneutics without ontology
This shift has significant consequences for biblical interpretation. When creation is treated as theologically thin, Scripture is increasingly read as a set of regulative texts detached from a thick account of the world they presuppose.
In such a framework:
- Commands are foregrounded, while creational patterns are backgrounded
- Ethics becomes a matter of textual permission rather than ontological alignment
- Appeals to Scripture focus on limits rather than on disclosure
The result is a form of hermeneutics that is formally conservative yet materially underdetermined. Scripture remains authoritative, but the kind of authority it exercises is subtly altered. Rather than revealing reality, it arbitrates disputes within a reality whose basic structure is no longer assumed to be self-interpreting.
5. The functionalisation of theology
A further consequence of this hermeneutical shift is the growing dominance of functional reasoning. Once ontology recedes, theological judgments are increasingly justified by outcomes: pastoral effectiveness, harm reduction, inclusion, or missional viability.
Such concerns are not illegitimate. But when function becomes the primary criterion of theological judgment, it inevitably displaces questions of origin, order, and purpose. What something is becomes secondary to what it achieves.
This is one reason contemporary debates often stall. Functional criteria proliferate, but without a shared ontological framework, they cannot adjudicate competing goods. Ethics accelerates while theology thins.
6. A diagnostic claim (and its limits)
The claim advanced here is deliberately modest but consequential:
church and culture may increasingly disagree at the level of conclusions while converging at the level of underlying assumptions about meaning, authority, and embodiment.
This is not a claim that all theological revisionism is equivalent, nor that all cultural reasoning is simply mirrored within the church. It is a diagnostic observation about shared pressures and shared conceptual habits.
If correct, it suggests that resistance to cultural outcomes will remain unstable unless the church attends more carefully to the ontological and hermeneutical premises shaping its reasoning.
7. The question that must be asked next
If contemporary church debates are marked by recurring patterns, unresolved tensions, and accelerating ethical innovation, then the most pressing question is not yet constructive but analytical and historical:
How did this way of reasoning come to feel natural—indeed inevitable—to us?
Answering that question requires stepping beyond immediate controversies and examining the deeper theological shifts that have reshaped Christian thought about creation, meaning, and authority.
That is the task of the next article.
In Technical Article 2, we will trace how a gradual thinning of ontology—particularly in relation to creation and embodiment—has reshaped Christian ethical reasoning, and why appeals to Scripture alone have proven insufficient to arrest this drift.
This article is part of a three-part technical investigation. The full series is introduced here: Is There a Thicker Alternative? – A Technical Continuation