Every now and then someone makes a remark that crystalizes a lot of information that was just sitting there unpatterned and unnoticed. A remark like that happened to me recently. I was describing a nagging difficulty I was having with the ABC channel in Portland. Their by-line, the characterization they add to nearly anything about the station is, “KATU is on your side.”

I was complaining about this to my son Doug one morning and I said that the part of that designation that bothered me was the “sides” part. The way I hear it, it presupposes a stable opposition of interests. That is why there are “sides.” It stops a little short of saying that there is THEM and then there is US. It stops well short of saying who THEM is, so just who they have in mind by US is unclear.

What I was musing on in my conversation with Doug was that my mind seems to slide so quickly from the claim “We are on your side” to the presupposition, “There are sides and whatever side you are one, we are on that one too.” It was the “sidedness” of the claim that caught my attention.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “You always do that.”

I scarcely noticed at the time. We went on talking about whatever it was we were talking about. But it kept coming up in my mind and I began to catch myself treating other topics that way. Since then, I have been thinking, “Was he right? Do I always do that?”

Let me try to put the question in a way I will understand it better. A claim is made. The claim has presuppositions. I understand what the claim is but my attention is drawn to the presuppositions, or—to be fair—to one of the many possible presuppositions.

My daughter, Dawne, was recently in a conversation where she identified herself as “pro-choice.” A woman in the group “corrected” her. [1] The woman informed her that she should say “pro-abortion” rather than “pro-choice.” This part of me—the part Doug identified as characteristic of my thinking and processing of information—went immediately to “Really? This woman thinks that the right to choose and the decision to abort a fetus are the same question? Really?”

It seemed to me that you could make a decision about what decision was the right one or you could make a decision about whose decision it was to make. You could focus on the choice or on the chooser. Not both.

So now I am interested. I’d like to poke around in this question a little. If you are a regular reader of this blog, consider this an alert. There may be lots of these coming up.

It is at this point that, in fairness to the regular readers, I should say just what topics are going to be coming up. But, of course, I can’t do that. The sequence of events that would produce these blogs would be: a) a claim is made, b) I am drawn to the presupposition of the claim, and c) judge it to be an appropriate claim or not. That’s really it. In coming to some judgment about it, I am not going to be concerned whether the claim is valid. That’s a whole other matter. I want to look at the presuppositions and to the extent I consider the claim I want to see how the claim is derived from the presuppositions.

I got a real lift, some years ago, from Gordon Kaufman who was, at the time, a systematic theologian at Harvard. He was writing a chapter on “the divinity of Jesus” and his point was that the standard approach is to postulate what “the marks of divinity” are and to show that Jesus bears those marks. His question—the one that produced the lift for me—was this: How do we know what the marks of divinity are?” Or, more exactly, “Is there some other source of information we trust more and that we can apply to the matter of adjudicating the claims Jesus made?”

This topic has gone long enough and I have been clear enough that you know the question I am dealing with is not whether Jesus is “divine” or not. The question is how we would know. The minute Kaufman pointed out that the conventional method of establishing the divinity of Jesus requires another, a purportedly superior, source of knowledge, I heaved a great sigh of relief. My first reaction was, “He’s right.” My second one was, “Now I can let that question go.”

So we go, in ending this blog, from the question of whether he was or not to the question of how we would know if he was or not. That is the same shift I see in moving from “pro-abortion” to “pro-choice.” It changes the question. And it is the same shift I see in going from “on your side” to “why are there sides?”

We’ll see.

[1] Had the woman asked me, I could have told her that Dawne would not respond well to that.