in-fraction

On Phantasie

2012-01-06T18:14:00.000-05:00

Dear friend,

You and I were talking yesterday about something I call phantasie. That is my word for a lifestyle of illusion, where one's activity and thoughts swim in dreamy reveries and stories, swallowing hours, days, even years if indulged. Phantasie numbs the heart and mind against the real quiddity of the world outside, so that one goes willing into the invisible prison of one's own imagination.

My thinking of phantasie goes in three directions. First, the gospel is a summons to real life, a life peopled with real bodies and words with real meanings. The gospel calls us to resist phantasie. The living God calls us to love him and to love our neighbor. Second, phantasie seduces us as a distraction from the void. We do not feel the challenge of the meaningless, of the absurd, or the end because we are waking dreamers whose world is alive with drama and color (See my post "Blue Longing or Yellow Laziness".) The cross permits us to look into the void and to not be afraid without needing to shoulder the heavy angst and absurdity inevitable for the existentialists (See my discussion of Emile Cioran). The third part of my thinking about phantasie addresses its affect on the doctrine of revelation. I was raised in traditions that encourage a kind of mystical connection with Jesus through public and private worship, parallelled by an individual and devotional hermeneutic in the case of scripture. It was only when I began reading the Reformers (primarily Martin Luther and John Calvin but also statements such as those in the Book of Concord) that I began to gather the tools to challenge this tradition and to step out onto a path by which the Spirit, rather than speaking in an inner voice to us, has inspired and now illumines/opens our ears to hear the voice of scripture, "he who has ears, let him hear." The tedious ordinaity of reading, of thinking over a historical context, asking grammatical questions, toying with how authors are using words, etc.--the banality of these things becomes the human aspect of a simultaneously divine relationship (See my post "You are Removing God from the Everyday".) Phantasie is that affective prison that turns our own psychology into a little god whose introspective self-doubt distracts us from the judge and redeemer of the Real. Because it numbs us to reality, it prevents us from owning our relationship to the truth of things--it is an enemy of the truth. Thus, it is sin and bondage. Thus, it is what is being put away in this age, and it will not go into the next.

I have struggled with phantasie at various times of my life. It is a subtle and normally invisible opponent. No one talks about it, and especially as our culture is so obsessed with make believe, but you can spot its victims easily enough: smart, creative people who, for one reason or another, retreat from real life and real human community and relationship into the world of films, TV, books, etc. Don't we know these people well enough? Haven't we been those people on occasion? I've lost years to phantasie. Years of being drugged without realizing one is drugged. And so susceptible am I to its power that I'm shy of such things even today.

Ours is a culture addicted to phantasie, to its amusements, to its escapes. We exist simultaneously as citizens free of its dominion by grace, waiting in hope for our full deliverance into the Real, and as people who still struggling with it or give in altogether. Confession and repentance is a daily discipline, as is gratitude and praise.

Warmest Regards

Science's crisis of faith

2011-12-22T00:52:00.000-05:00

MIT physicist and novelist Alan P. Lightman has told too much, I think, for the priestly class to let him live. And that is too bad, because Lightman can do the math and the metaphor at the same time, and how many people can do that? For, as he says, “Theoretical physicists ponder things that other people do not.” But that is exactly what I like: you aren't supposed to notice that, and, if you do notice it, by all means keep it to yourself.

Pardon the transition, but let's talk for a second about the priestly class. And don't think that the first world doesn't have a priestly class. Civilization has to have a priestly class. I think of French historian Georges Duby's division of medieval society into those that prayed, those that fought, and those that worked. And how can we tell who is in the first category? Here's two ways, listed in no particular order and by no means exhaustively.

First. They have their own language. Everyone is familiar with the monastics of the middle ages, chanting the psalms for hours at a time and saying mass at lip-lynching abracadabra speeds because it was in Latin. Who cares if the warriors or workers understood—and perhaps its better if they didn't. Medieval Latin was the JavaScript, C++, XHTML, and Ruby on Rails of its time, invented by and for the priestly class. Consider the following comment by author and social philosopher George Steiner:

Science is becoming inaccessible to us. Who can understand the latest innovations in genetics, astrophysics and biology? Who can explain them to the profane? Knowledge no longer communicates; writers and philosophers in our day are incapable of enabling us to understand science. At the same time, the scope of imagination in science is dazzling. . . . I am concerned by what it means to be literate today. Is it possible to be literate if you do not understand non-linear equations?

Second. They are ensconced in their own institutions. Another way of saying that is that you should suspect isolation and pageantry to accompany them. I've already mentioned the monastics—and one can go back to the cenobites in the Egyptian deserts if you like. But before them there are innumerable examples of austere and remote temples, high places, and even priestly cities in every civilization. And when they do emerge, they tell myths of fantastic speculation and drama—half entertainment, half mysticism using the most sophisticated technologies of the day to awe the public and cement themselves as the mouthpieces of the gods and the arbiters of all knowledge. It is the priestly class that brings fire from heaven to earth—best not forget that (because they've been known to burn, torture, imprison, and silence men, women, children, nations, peoples to maintain their power.)

I want to say there is more here: That they demand sacrifice. That they ultimately undermine their own foundations. That they attract and nurture the political and cultural futures of their societies. That they have a love-hate relationship with the warrior/political classes of their times. And that they have a readily identified costume that isn't worn by others.

The scientific establishment is, in my opinion, guilty as charged. Take for example the half-a-lifetime of painful and expensive mathematical hazing it takes to even catch up to what is current (thus barring we normals from real understand. We understand at a step removed. Our is, if you please, at the level of myth.). Or consider the role, and cost, of universities—especially those that boat scientific prestige. Undergraduate education is a court of the gentiles; masters degrees the court of the women. Gown and mortarboard mark the initiates. And who can argue but the university system of our day, bloated and fat on the blood of the middle-class, of itself regulates class, income, and mate-selection using impenetrable occult matrices to separate the wheat and the chaff.

That being said, we return to our Lutheran whistle blower Dr. Alan P. Lightman, and discover another priestly mark, those tales of speculation and drama. We've been expecting our priests—like any good clerics—to give order to the seeming randomness and chaos of the world, and they have. But it may all have been a Ptolemaic act, in the end. They have chanted and cut themselves all day, but no fire has come from the god, and the sacrifice remains.

(more to come)

Heraclitus's chiasmus as a philosophical step toward sacrament?

2011-11-29T00:43:00.001-05:00

Philosopher Patrick Lee Miller of Duquesne University was interviewed recently on the blog The Immanent Frame on the basis of his recently published book, Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy (Contiuum, 2011). It is an excellent interview. Miller uncovers layers of possibility in the deep strata of Western foundations where they are torn between the pressures of Heraclitean philosophy and Parminidean metaphysics. And Miller himself is of interest, as his influences are Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. In what follows, I'm going to piece together chunks and bits from the interview—a style that I really hate, but that occasionally works as a kind of personal notebook for later review. Anyone wishing to cite Miller should use the original post. The reason I'm doing this is because Miller is getting at what seems to me to be a natal but real philosophical option for discussing sacrament that departs from the absurdities of Aristotle. So here it is then:

NS: What is at stake in the questions of time and consistency that you’re probing through your inquiries into ancient philosophy?

PLM: If you’ve ever lost someone you loved, or ever deeply regretted something you’ve done, then time is a problem for you. We’ve all longed for the past, whether to be with someone or to be without some deed. Nietzsche expressed this very clearly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where his hero says that our impotence before “greedy time” makes us resentful of it. To cope with this resentment, we dream of hinterworlds outside of time, eternities that promise to redeem us from its greed. There, everything will be made whole, every beloved will live again. So goes the dream. The sort of rationality pioneered by Parmenides—consistency—makes time impossible, and so when Plato combined it with the philosophical religion of Pythagoreanism, the result was a moralized rejection of time. We can cope with greedy time, for Plato, by seeing it as not only unreal, but evil. Our real life is not here, but there, among the Forms in eternity. If that’s so, however, why not commit suicide and get there immediately? This is a serious problem for Platonism. To avoid its nihilism and affirm our life in this world, we need a way to understand time as fully real. I argue in the book that Heraclitus offers this way.

Time is inconsistent if it is composed of moments. Thanks to the paradoxes of Zeno, Parmenides’ student, Aristotle saw this very clearly. If time is composed of moments, each one must come into being and then pass away. But when? A moment cannot be born in itself, nor can it die in itself, without violating the principle of non-contradiction. Neither can a moment be born or die in another moment, for that, too, would be contradictory. So, the principle of non-contradiction forbids moments, as Aristotle saw, yet it also requires them—a consequence he did not recognize. “The same thing,” he writes, “cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time.” Now, referring to fire’s relation to its fuel, Heraclitus called it “need and satiety.” Consistency demands that we analyze this apparent contradiction by distinguishing the duration of fire’s burning into different times. But no matter how finely we do so—ultimately, to the point of moments without duration—the contradiction persists. And likewise for other temporal processes; fire is just a particularly vivid illustration of the problem.

Although philosophers today overlook it, Hegel thought this problem serious enough to develop a new logic. British Hegelians were thus also worried about it. Bertrand Russell began in this tradition, but later rebelled against it to found analytic philosophy—which would venerate, not coincidentally, a logic without tense.

Parmenides's consistent reason fails to accommodate time, whereas the Heraclitean alternative succeeds. Heraclitus was the ancient alternative to Platonism. Where Platonism, indebted as it is to the Pythagorean devotion to reason as consistency / non-contradiction, sees an unquenchable rivalry between transcendence and immanence, Heraclitus synthesizes the two. He can do this because his understanding of reason included analysis—the separating out of things to understand them—and synthesis—putting things together. Heraclitus thus sublated the antithesis between time and eternity. Paying close attention to time and any process in time, we have to acknowledge that it is contradictory at every moment. There should therefore be a higher-order logic that accounts for the operation of reason whenever it thinks about time or itself. This is what I call chiasmus.

Chiasmus is a way of thinking. Whenever we wish to understand anything as temporal, including ourselves, chiasmus is needed. Using chiasmus we can see the difference in time and feel the summons of eternal unity; eternity is present at every moment of time.

Christianity blends the eternity of Platonism with the temporality of the Hebrew bible. Time can be holy. Think of the liturgical calendar. Augustine wrestles with this in the Confessions in order to make sense of the Incarnation. From antiquity, chiasmus has been used as a symbol for Christ.

Christianity is like baseball

2011-10-27T14:26:00.001-04:00

There is an article that has stayed with me for quite a while now. The article is "How Baseball Explains the Nature of Language" by Alva Noë. Noë is a philosopher of perception at UC Berkeley. He is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media, and he blogs on NPR's science blog 13:7 Cosmos and Culture, where this article was published.

Now I've been asking methodological questions about theology for over a decade now. What is theology? What makes theology good or bad? Does theology mean anything? Does it have purpose? Is it useful? What is appropriate to it and when could it be said to go off the tracks? Is it a craft or a science? How do you know if you are doing theology versus, say, sociology, psychology, political theory, writing protest songs, or abandoning oneself to phantasie under the illusion of piety? What are its basic moves, its tools, its core principles? How can one define its edges and sort out its territories? Is theology native to confession or imported (or worse) into/onto it?

Nearly all of these sorts of questions are simply assumed by surveys and the literature (though not by Barth who plows right in from the start), and so I've been forced to work backward into the questions, which is my usual and oh-so-efficient method. Nevertheless, I have made slow, imperceptible progress. My hypothesis is that theology is not akin to philosophy or a philosophical system, but resembles more a craft, something that is made by human beings and that also makes them back.

So if theology is a craft, then what structures and orders it? What are its tools? I've been around the block long enough to have heard a bit about Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games, and I own a copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations. But his work outstrips my abilities--and Noë's article enters the picture at exactly this point, meeting low-brow abilities like mine with exactly the sort of metaphor this citizen of Red Sox Nation can respond to: baseball.

A fundamental of Noë's argument is that context governs meaning. The phrase "home run" is meaningless outside of the context "baseball". Baseball creates a space in which meanings like home run, triple play, our grand slam can come to be and make sense. (Wittgenstein put it like this in the first proposition of the Tractatus: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist / The world is all that is the case. Think also of Heidegger’s Dasein—that we are thrown (Geworfenheit) into this world. Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf.) But what sort of activity is baseball?

Baseball is based on rules, but it far transcends them. Baseball includes all of these actions—throwing, hitting, catching, how to steal a base, how to bunt—and all of this new grammar—double-play, foul ball, home run. But it also includes a higher-order discussion of how it is best played and what makes for the best team and the best game. “Baseball people are concerned not just with how you play, but with the very question of how one ought to play baseball.” And it also brings with it an ethic: “When you are initiated into the baseball world, you learn to care about such things as stolen bases and pick-off attempts.”

Baseball is a human space. And this space is not just system, but a practice, a game, an activity which by definition is participatory, social, and makes as much as it is made. "To learn baseball," writes Noë, "is to come to be able to see and feel and be motivated in ways that are meaningless to strangers of the game. Baseball is more than a system of rules, it is a practice."

Noë says that there is a class of actions that human beings practice, a class based on rules, but that can’t help but transcends rules. A class that always has both first-order activities (what is done) and second-order activities (how we evaluate what is done). He calls these “baseball-like practices” and practices whose “ontologies are practice relative” and includes in these other social practices such as dance, art, law, speech, and language.

As a philosopher of language, Noë is taking linguistics to task. Linguists, he says, want desperately to be descriptive and evaluate only what is there. But they cannot do that, he maintains, because language is one of those class of actions that cannot be described from the outside. We live inside language; we can’t examine it from some removed and untouchable location. “We are so deeply embedded within and at home in the language world (compare: the baseball world) that we find it difficult to believe in the practice relativity of our convictions and commitments.” And because of that language is not only a first-order practice, like chemistry or geology, which can be comfortably described and dissected, but always and everywhere a second-order practice which can’t help but comment and critique itself.

And so I say that Christianity is a baseball-like practice whose ontology is practice-relative. It is a human practice, and that means a social, a political practice. It is based on rules (law), but those rules create a space of actions and activities and words and meanings and, almost instantly, the second-order discussion of how this should all work called theology. But going deeper than that, it is a revealed religion, which means it is based in language (Word) and, because language is a baseball-like practice, then by definition it must have grammar, it must have ethics, it must have theology.

Coming the long way around, then, Christianity is a practice-specific, a baseball-like ontology that exists along the first-order—its practices (liturgy, public and private)—and the second-order—the ethics generated by and for those practices as well as the metaphysics, the theology that questions the fitness of the whole.

Well, I’ve thrashed around in this for a while. Such thrashing is not Noë’s fault. His article isn’t about Christianity, after all, but an intramural jab at linguistics. There is something lex orandi, lex credenda (the law of prayer is the law of belief) about it. And there is something of Plato’s Paradox of the Meno and previous discussions on this blog about the epochē that are here as well. I’m dissatisfied as this last point I’ve neglected altogether in this description. At any rate, I’d better post.

To break or to be broken

2011-07-20T15:19:00.003-04:00

And so this American experiment and the quality of the Americans it produces comes down to this word "freedom". Do we break upon its surface, or will we be broken? Is it a politic or a pathway? Will I measure out freedom by the span of my arms, or will I measure it by the outstretched arms of Another?

. . . . . . . . . .

Along this same line, consider the following juxtaposition in a quote from a Cardus op-ed piece by Jane Clark:

"Dr. Anthony Esolen, professor of Renaissance Literature at Providence College, says that throughout literature, the word "villain" simply indicates a person who does not respect things as he ought. Villains are brutes, louts, cowards, petty criminals. They do not appreciate and treasure the small, sacred things, but instead tromp through the world like Jack's ugly giant, crushing everything tender and innocent. Small boys smashing butterflies are villains, as are fathers beating their children. They are intentionally ignorant (note the etymological root: ignore) of the right ordering of the world, which requires tenderness and thoughtful care for the small and weak things.

It is helpful to consider villainy alongside its opposite: virtue. Virtue is the habit of paying proper deference, which can include reprimanding evil as we encounter it. In many ways, virtue is synonymous with respect. It seeks the true nature of things and strives to deal with them as they ought to be dealt with."

A word about the historical-critical method

2011-02-27T19:58:00.007-05:00

R R. Reno made this comment in the June/July issue of First Things. Printing it here is a public admission of personal doubt--perhaps just a small one, a question, a confusion, or perhaps not--concerning the interpretive method of my schooling, namely this historical-critical (grammatical) one. Reno says,

For more than two centuries, the tradition of historical-critical study of the Bible has sought authoritative readings of the Bible that distill key normative theological concepts out of many studies of particular strata of the biblical text and it's history. Because of the mathematics of conditional probability, these efforts cannot succeed. Historical judgments about discrete portions of texts and slices of ancient Israelite history can discipline and enrich our larger-scale, traditional interpretations of the Bible. But the techniques of modern historical analysis that provide critical insight lack the creative, synthetic power to generate canonical readings. (7)

I am not an expert in hermeneutics or in the interpretive tradition, but I have had a little schooling. I know enough to know that Neoplatonism and the four-senses tradition were put aside, when Enlightenment science picked humanity from the navel of the cosmos. History replaced metaphysics. And method overcame genius, pragmatic wisdom, or contemplative and mystical insights. German criticisms sometimes hilariously gave us the historical-critical method and conservative scholarship wiped out the critical part and replaced it with the word "grammatical"--as much a political as academic move. It has held an easy peace in the burned over landscape of dead trees and souls that remain after the total war between fundamentalists and modernists, a war presided over by the janus god Modernity. This peace has held for nearly half a century, but, today, that peace is slipping. There is R. R. Reno's observation, above, but the sensibility behind it can be observed in growing calls for theological exegesis. I should observe that R. R. Reno is general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.

Where I am concerned, I have long wondered how to make the "well, if you understand the historical situation" results of exegesis and the well-worn "Bible says" truisms stand together. Paper after paper and commentary after commentary discover new readings based on historical and grammatical science--findings that are shared in the classroom and discussed at conferences but rarely--at this point--make it into pulpits and sunday school curricula. These finding are not hostile to the text, as were the assaults of the Tuebingen school, but they are different, nevertheless. And, slowly but surely, they will collectively reshape confession.

I am mostly glad. Perhaps we are seeing the fruit of the Reformation--the gospel message restored to the church after so much cultural accretion. But if these results are based in history alone, if these results are arrived at by a method born of science, then how can they be completely trusted as dependable by the church of Jesus? This method removes the Bible from the churches. It is the Bible of the schoolmen--no matter how devout. Can this Bible be trusted? Does God call ministers without first making them historians? To ask such questions sounds like American anti-intellectualism. It is not. Mine is a question about the role of the Spirit and a growing certainty that Jesus's reign should extend even to method.

Get a Sensei Q&A

2011-02-24T16:29:00.002-05:00

The following is a Q&A I put together for some friends recently as part of a longer discussion on personal theological development. I had made the point that one of the things you must do is to choose a sensei to guide your development, and followed it up with this Q&A.

Q: I have no idea where to begin.
A: Ask someone who can give you guidance and, chances are, you have a book on your shelf now. Learn to glance over foot/endnotes and bibliographies. Do not lose sight of your question. Senseis are asking their own questions. They may overlap with yours, and sometimes yours is swallowed up into theirs, but, eventually and in the end, it is always your question.

Q: What if I choose a sensei I cannot understand?
A: This is not uncommon. To some degree, the best senseis are bewildering and frustrating long before they become enlightening. Nevertheless, if you are really in over your head, know your limits and choose a lesser light or a book or article or video or talk guided toward a popular audience. Sometimes senseis are intentionally obtuse for various reasons. An example is the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who teaches at the U of Notre Dame. Plantinga started his career by intentionally skewing as difficult as possible. He would give talks that no one would understand . . . and he did that for years. Eventually he earned the fearful respect of the philosophical community. And only after that did he begin to speak understandably.

A quick word about vocabulary. Runners have their time. Stocks have their performance against the market. Ideas have vocabulary. You know you are making progress when your vocabulary grows. If what you are reading etc. never challenges your vocabulary, then you are not in the presence of a sensei. Also, there are times you just skip the vocabulary. You can’t know everything. You are the one asking the question, after all, and they serve your ends, not the other way around.

Q: I’m afraid of finding a sensei. After all, I don’t know enough to judge whether they are orthodox or not. What if they lead me into bad ideas? (or the variant, “My tradition hates this person and has taught me to avoid them for the sake of keeping my salvation.”)
A: This is quite right. You should be afraid. The best senseis think so far ahead of you that you have agreed to their assumptions long before you are ever aware they have made any. And often your frustration with them and the bewilderment you are feeling is only proof that you are a novice and undeveloped in a topic (goodbye pride!). Most are not like that. But a strategy of beginning with a sensei who is anathema to your tradition (for example, in my case, feminist scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether) has its merits. Again, a personal example, I am reading Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics right now, and already the line between what I think and what he thinks has blurred beyond the point of knowing for sure which is which. But I’ve spent a long time preparing for this, so I’m not wholly afraid of never coming out on the other side. I’m also reading him in community with a half-dozen or other bloggers under the guidance of a prof from Fuller Seminary, which will help. My entire life, Barth has been spoken against as a dangerous watchword, and to say I’m not concerned about his influence would by lying.

Q: Why take this trouble?
A: I apologize if this sounds like some kind of occult art. It isn’t. It flows quite naturally from asking your question. If it is a question you really care about, then you want to hear an answer. If you don’t care enough to follow through, then I might ask if you are really asking your question at all. You should go back and ask why you are afraid of your question. Maybe you have never really asked a question before in your life. Just because someone can use a question mark at the end of a sentence doesn’t mean they can ask a question. Positively, though, there are moments where things fall together. There are moments where what was impenetrable before this time falls open as easily as a storybook tale. There are moments where you see past your assumptions, the bedrock cracks, and you see you were standing on something more connected than before. There is nothing like that experience. It is so affirming, so empowering, so humbling, and so exciting.

Q: I’m not a reader / I don’t really like academic stuff.
A: These are really two questions, but they are so close that I’ll address them together. Some people are not readers. There are learning styles. Thankfully, in our day, there are videos and MP3s, and sometimes you can go meet a sensei. Nevertheless, here’s the truth: leaders read. Our culture still exalts reading as the primary vehicle of intellectual exploration and growth. Often you will find that a sensei has long-form and short-form pieces. I’ve often wondered, for example, why people don’t read sermons. There are usually books of, say, Wesley’s sermons or von Balthasar or Bonhoeffer or St. Gregory of Naziansus or Van Til or Hauerwas or Barth or Augustine etc. People also write journal articles. These short-form pieces are often better ways of getting at an idea than the long-form books (which often contain unnecessary linguistic, citational, or other forms of what amounts to showing off).

As for not really liking academic stuff. I totally get that. We Westerners have so exalted the university system that it has become its own nation of priests and Levites. And, theology too has been unnaturally split between “church theology” and “academic theology” so that pastors are now taught counseling techniques while biblical and scholarly languages and the philosophical challenges of our traditions and our age are left as the inconsequential playthings of egg headed ivory-tower brainy types.

That is a complete and utter lie. Doesn’t every Christian have the Holy Spirit? And if so, isn’t that Christian beloved of the father and enveloped in the life of the Trinity? That is the very foundation of theology, is it not? One’s question(s), then, are the real beginning of theology for you, and this is spiritual discipline, not the accumulation of an academic degree or indulging in a proclivity for libraries.

Stop thinking of books and such as academic stuff. Some is. You can ignore that stuff, but don’t ignore what speaks to your question. That isn’t academic, it is about you. And, where it speaks to your question, it is the most relevant and practical dialogue on the planet.

Q: Is there any other way of dividing up senseis?
A: Yes. Do it not just by subject but historically. Every Christian, IMHO, should know three things. (a) the Bible (b) the creeds (by which is a meant having some clue of basic dogma) (c) church history. If you know nothing about church history, then you should get yourself an accessible survey like Church History in Plain Language or Gonzales’s accessible surveys and learn the story of the family. Do a little genealogy. We are all the newest members of the church triumphant spread out over time and space.

Q: How long should I stay with a sensei?
A: Until that sensei has taught you his or her five-point exploding heart technique. Sensei’s are normally classified by one or more signature moves. The more important the sensei, the greater the number of signature moves. But the real mastery comes when the many collapses into the one, and you can see the unity of intent that makes your sensei unique. When that happens, you can anticipate their moves and choreograph their catalog. Your own unity will strengthen and you will know that it is time to seek a new sensei. With practice, you will be able to sense the unifying force underneath senseis you have only just met, and you will see that it is the quality of that unity which separates skilled warriors from the heroes of legend. (Please note that this question presumes your faithfulness to your own question. Not that you can’t learn from anyone. You can. But few of us have the luxury of time or patience to learn at the feet of someone whose teachings do not speak to our needs.)

I’m sorry this went too long. And perhaps I have been too extreme or unnecessary. Perhaps, too, a caveat should be made that says that none of this is necessary for salvation or for an admirable life of witness, service, and devotion. But, in saying that, please don’t think I’m saying that it is okay to shirk responsibility. As the quotes says, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” And again, “The mind, once expanded, never returns again to its original shape.” (That latter one is a pilgrim’s prayer and a good saying against hard times.)

Church Dogmatics 1.1.3 Preaching as "the audible sacrament"

2011-01-22T00:05:00.003-05:00

This section was a complete challenge to me. Barth not only discusses preaching, but he discusses why preaching exists, how it is arrived at by an ecclesiology that is itself immersed (baptized) in revelation.

Preaching has always been a given from my youth. We read the Bible. We talk to others about what we’ve read or hear from them what they’ve read. Preaching is this same thing but broadcast out with greater authority due to the calling of the preacher and the deference of the community of hearers.

Yet, this isn’t a preaching supported by dogmatics, rather sociology or cultural anthropology. This is an emotional or intellectual appeal. Not that the preachers from my youth have not been sincere men. Not that they did not understand their own ministries dogmatically--they may have and probably did. No, I mean my understanding was largely a shallow one.

Later Reformed theology taught me to respect the Word preached, but the dogmatic apparatus was still missing.

Now I completely see the oversight; “in this dogmatics preaching is not only assigned less importance, but virtually no importance at all“ (65)! And without the confessional apparatus, how can one truly address oneself to or urge the church on to attend to proclamation? How can one understand what should be preached and why? “Proclamation along these lines can only end with its dissolution. Proclamation as self-exposition (read, oh twenty-first century, the term “authentic” or “authenticity”) must in the long run turn out to be a superfluous and impossible undertaking” (64). Indeed, without preaching the church is either the mystery of performance or a center of social justice practiced by human beings “alone in and with (the) world” (Ibid).

And now I am left to wonder about proclamation as a sacrament. “The Word is the audible sacrament and the sacrament, the visible Word” (71). I may be instructed by preaching, but do I receive grace in the hearing--a grace that allows for the “hearing of the promise” and for “obedience to it” (67)? So is grace available--I speak as if it is a substance--as a punctiliar judgment once-for-all applied or is it an ever flowing stream “whose waters make glad”?

Church Dogmatics pp 25-44: the Church Emerging

2011-01-16T00:28:00.003-05:00

Here are a few disconnected thoughts puffed and wheezed at the summit of the slight but sheer face of Barth’s prolegomena.

Having established his presuppositions in the previous section, Barth fixes the task before him, namely to overcome Modernity (Pietism) and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism in favor of a (miraculous) Evangelische Theologie. The whole forms a scholastic Quodlibet. It is dialectical and masculine. We feel the direct, interested squint of the sportsman. The leaning in and warming to an argument from one who likes nothing better. “If this faith falls” he says, by which we may understand the two forms of faith aforementioned, “so does this interpretation of faith, so too the presupposition of an anthropological prius of faith, and so finally the possibility of prolegomena of this kind” (39)

Barth’s agenda follows in the footsteps of the Reformers by emphasizing the fallenness of humanity and the unmerited grace of God. First, he puts the error in both of these dogmatic emphases at the feet of any definition of faith which finds traction in humanity, in “human possibility” (38). That, he says, cannot be, recalling the doctrine of human depravity. Similarly, the correct definition is one that centers itself not on human possibility or decision, but only (sola) on the free (gratia) revelation of the triune God in the person of Jesus Christ.

Barth’s attitude toward Reformation emphases does not cease there, however. As I’ve said before, he seems to take up Reformation emphases without fear and explore them, twentieth-century feet soldiering about in sixteenth-century boots. The result is a Christologic prolegomena out of which an ecclesiology emerges. Let me just throw this against the wall.

Sacraments: “In, with and under the human question, dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12). Barth’s discussion of the necessity of faith for dogmatic work is working with the same tools as form the doctrine that the efficacy of the sacrament is not bound by the worthiness of the priest who administers: “The time has come to go back with a new understanding to pre-Pietist doctrine of the theological habitus in virtue of which the theologian is what he is by the grace of God quite irrespective his greater or lesser likeness to [Kierkegaard’s existential awareness]” (20). Note especially Barth’s trouble with the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation whereby “that which is beyond all human possibilities changes at once into that which is enclosed within the reality of the Church . . . Roman Catholic faith believe this transformation (emphasis mine). . . . It affirms an analogia entis . . . the possibility of applying the secular ‘There is’ to God” (41). This hints at a much more existential sacramental theology perhaps to come.

Community: "The results of earlier dogmatic work, and indeed our own results, are basically no more than signs of its [truth’s] coming. They are simply the results of human effort. As such they are a help to, but also the object of, fresh human effort. . . . Our dogmatic labors can and should be guided by results which are venerable because they are attained in the common knowledge of the Church at a specific time. Such results may be seen in the dogmas enshrined in the creeds. (15)” “To be in the Church . . . is to be called with others by Jesus Christ. To act in the Church is to act in obedience to this call. This obedience to the call of Christ is faith” (13).

Spiritual Disciplines. Prayer as “the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work” (23). “We do not speak of true prayer if we say ‘must’ instead of ‘can’. According to Romans 8.26ff., the way from ‘can’ to ‘must’ is wrapped in the mystery at the gates of which we here stand” (23-24). Penitence. “Dogmatics must always be undertaken as an act of penitence and obedience” (22). Confession. “There can be success in this work . . . on the basis of divine correspondence to this human attitude: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief’” (24).

The Great Commission. This is the substance of preaching, the need to test what one preaches, and a warning against apologetics which gives unbelief an ontological hold on the argument that it neither deserves nor has.

Election underlies the entire enterprise. Election is the event. The free work of God. To bind God’s freedom is to bind his election. (And what affect will this have on Barth’s doctrine of baptism?)

Church Dogmatics 1.1.2

2011-01-10T23:07:00.003-05:00

You say what you are. That’s what Barth is getting at in this section. Perhaps “are” is the wrong term, as it presupposes a metaphysic of being (and the personal jury is still out as to whether Barth’s is a metaphysics of ontology). Nevertheless, Barth’s doctrine of revelation--what you say--is dictated by what you are. Say, then, that you are God, then Truth is what you are. So what you say of yourself, what you reveal of yourself, is Truth. Say, then, that you are a human being. Limited. A created thing. A creature. Your “saying” is also limited and created, encompassing at best only a world of created things.

But when the Church becomes--when it is elected in God’s providence for faith in the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, then it confesses what it knows to be there, but with created lips. And so Truth erupts eschatologically into the world through its confession--a confession it is given, not one it has appropriated, a confession born of seeking not of obtaining. “It does not have to begin by finding or inventing the standard by which it measures [what is true]. It sees and recognizes that this is given within the Church. It is given in its own peculiar way, as Jesus Christ is given, as God in His revelation gives Himself to faith. But it is given” (12).

There are two levels of knowledge, even as they are two levels of what can be expressed. Because it is Jesus who speaks, and because Jesus is the incarnate Son, and because the Son enjoys the pure agape of trinitarian fellowship with the Father, then his word can be trusted. His word, he himself, is an analogia fidei (τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως) which is a true canon. “He is the truth, not merely in Himself, but also for us as we know Him solely by faith in Jesus Christ” (12).

The one level is a level of perfect comprehension and speech--a “charismatic theology from within” whose characteristic theologian in Paul. The other is steps out after, asking and fumbling according to the ontology of those who ask. “As the Church accepts from Scripture, and with divine authority from Scripture alone, the attestation of its own being as the measure of its utterance . . . (16 emphasis mine). This is a “theology from without” whose characteristic theologians are the second-century apologists. “It alone creates fellowship and can be ecclesiastical and scientific” (22). Nevertheless, it is “always undertaken as an act of penitent obedience” and its chief method is prayer born of faith that the Spirit “will guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16.13 ESV). It believes that “in, with and under the human question [note the inference to Luther’s doctrine of the Eucharistic presence] dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12).

I should note, as well, that this two-layered matrix of speech, the Truth and the questions that point to the truth, is very reminiscent of the scholastic argument that the efficacy of the sacrament was not bound to the piety of the officiant, or lack of it.

I like that Barth is not content to set out on beaten paths. He goes to foundations and comes back with a doctrine of revelation that I’ve heard lampooned and spoken against my whole life. Barth’s theology can make a dead dog into divine revelation. He denigrates the scriptures, they say, and dissolves revelation into subjectivity.

Most of these criticisms and the critics that wield them have not read Barth, or, if they have read him, have not attempted to understand him--at least that is my governing hypothesis. I do not think he denigrates church history, the creeds, or the scriptures. They are, in fact, the matrix upon which his Dogmatics is built. So the truth of the matter is more subtle.

I have the feeling Barth is not out to change the accident but the substance of theological activity in the world. And I have a feeling he is wresting the podium from the hands of confident rhetoricians and reminding everyone, “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great” (Prv. 25.6 ESV). The self-revealing of the Triune God is a power beyond the epistemological dictates of scientific reductionism, and He is coming into the world.

And I wonder if Barth is reading Calvin better than Calvin has been read in a very long time. I wonder if Barth is breathing the spirit/Spirit of the Reformers and grasping the true sense of ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, the church reformed and always reforming, and therefore calling subsequent comfortable Protestant-scholasticism what it is.

Karl Barth; revelation; analogy of faith; election

Church Dogmatics 1.1.1

2011-01-04T00:33:00.014-05:00

Why does Barth care about science? Right away, with this obsession with science, we twenty-first century readers realize we’ve crossed over into a different way of things. Einstein yet lives. Science has shoved the epistemology of the West under the iron lid of its own method. What concord should Jerusalem have with Athens? Why does Barth care about science?

Earlier today, I commented on Daniel Owen’s blog Beginning Barth that it seems to me as if “Barth is offering theology on the altar of post-enlightenment scientism.” But having read the whole of this section, I do not think this is the case. Barth does flirt with science, but the word and thing are not identical to what is commonly understood. Theology can be called a science in that it has internal consistency that is defined according to its object. But it cannot be called a science if it must submit to “the idea of unity, the possibility of myth, and the humanistic relevance of Christianity” (Arthur Titius, Berlin 1932. Note Barth's attentiveness to the scientific pronouncements of his day).

What emerges is a taking up of the term “science” as an act of solidarity, an act done from forgiveness and for evangelical hope (or judgment). That which is not assumed cannot be atoned for, and theology extends an invitation to every other science, saying, “come and be assumed.” Theology is no different from them. It also is a flawed, human discipline. And it is weaker than they, for rather than being fixed solidly in this age, theology hovers in gossamer fragility between the times. “It cannot think of itself as a link in an ordered cosmos, but only as a stop-gap in a disordered cosmos.” There is a signpost here pointing decades forward to Jürgen Moltmann’s assertion that eschatology is the only foundation of dogmatics. And there is also a statement made about the possibility of natural theology. It is possible, if I understand Barth, but it is improbable. “Might it not be that Jer. 31.34 is in process of fulfilment? . . . There might be such a thing as philosophia christiana.” “Now if God be wisdom (sapientia Deus est), as truth and scripture testify, then a true philosopher is a lover of God” (Augustine. De Civitas Dei Chap 8 Sect 1).

The difference between those sciences and this theological one (Augustine’s de divinitate ratio sive sermo), is the central principle. Those other sciences judge “the utterance of the Church about God in accordance with alien principles” whereas theology has its own principle: Jesus Christ, the “basis, goal and content” of the Church.

Barth’s treatment of Christ the Center is amazingly apophatic. Biblical theology (Does Christian utterance derive from Him?), practical theology (Does it lead to Him?), and dogmatic theology (Is it conformable to Him?) are three circles overlapping in a venn diagram from whose center one respectfully turns “it is well neither to affirm nor to construct a systematic center”. The threefold pattern of theological disciplines, its questions, and the three-fold adjectives he uses of Christ (basis, goal and content), loosely correspond and together beat the tempo of a trinitarian schema to come. The apophatic Christology of a center that is “neither affirmed nor constructed” and the apophatic nature of the one ousia at the center of three hypostasis. This is poetic metre. Aesthetically pleasing, yes, but is this a truly necessary trinity? Did Barth begin with science and end with . . . worship?

Karl Barth; Church Dogmatics; science; apophatic theology; Augustine

Preparing to Read Karl Barth

2011-01-02T15:56:00.015-05:00

So it seems that I and a dozen or so other bloggers have answered J. R. Daniel Kirk's invitation to read through Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics (CD). And you would think that, having written lengthy reviews on several "how to read Barth"-style books, and having read a bit of Barth over the years myself, that this would be an enthusiastic undertaking. Nevertheless, I'm terrified.

Blogging takes time. Thus the long falling off since Caleb was born. Two kids don't translate into T-I-M-E. Can I find time enough to write again and stay with it?

Interpreting Barth correctly is a kind of cottage industry among Barthians. Will I understand him? Will I miss some fundamental foundation and read a thousand pages in the wrong direction? And, in so doing, will I embarrass myself?

Barth himself was not kindly received by thinkers from the traditions of my youth, namely Southern fundamentalism and conservative Reformed. Based on their reading, Barth is the quickest way to undermine every sure plank of doctrine. His is the hand to topple unwary young minds into the slough of liberal despond.

And then there is the simple difference in time. The first volume of the CD was written in German in Switzerland in the 1930s. That means that Barth's interlocutors, his enemies, his politics and, indeed, his language require interpretation beyond bare cogitation.

In the face of these difficulties, the presence of a community of, at this writing, strangers comes as great comfort. I have no doubt that they will educate me more than I them. It feels right to be climbing in to the CD in the presence of a congregation (ekklaesia).

Finally, something Ezra Pound said in his book The ABCs of Reading stays with me. Pound said that a student should study masters. "It is my firm conviction," he said, "that a man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many."

Barth himself is, undoubtedly, a master. And with him comes a community of masters; indexed citations cluster around Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and, most prevalently, Luther. Who can hang back in such a company? And so, friends, let us begin!

Karl Barth; Church Dogmatics

Theology as craft

2010-09-17T00:48:00.004-04:00

Theology is not who you have read most recently. It is not the newest jewel in your cap of jargon. It is not the recognition that the argument has been better traced by another. It is not understanding of the history of ideas. It is not the playground of the leisure class. Theology does not require your razor wit or applicable metaphor. It is not necessary for it to prove anything, nor does one who needs proof go to it. It does not swell with victory over its enemies, nor is it threatened by them. It fills dogma as a vessel. Yet, dogma does not exhaust it. If one learned the Summa by rote for recitation, would it make one a theologian? Doesn’t the Devil quote the bible chapter and verse?

I have degrees. What did I learn?
I have spent. What did I buy?
I have read. What did it profit?
I should know better, and yet have so often regressed.
I should be a teacher, but do footnotes teach?

What is theology, then? I deny it as a footnote or a name. I forbid it to be bound hand-and-foot by historical situation. I forbid it to be owned. And so, not philosophy or taxonomy, it must be something else, something ignored and of little account in modernity. Ah, yes, it is that thing behind the work of self-discipline--that is the way. Theology is rules that engender ways of being. In short, it is a craft.

theology; methodology; craft; liturgy; ethics

Channeling Napoleon Hill

2010-03-12T16:09:00.005-05:00

What follows is a comment made to a post that my pastor, Father Jody Howard, made following an article in the Living Church about the challenges facing the Episcopal Church. At the end of the article, Rev. Dr. Neal Michell, canon for strategic development in the Diocese of Dallas, writes, “The problems facing our church are spiritual in nature. We have not been faithful enough disciples of Jesus Christ. We have not reached out to those around us with the Good News of Jesus Christ.” My response is as follows:

Brueggemann's call for a return to personal discipleship is definitely part of the solution; however, that is simply not enough. That may become a vibrant monasticism or fundamentalism, (which may be the option that best exemplifies God's design for the church in the world. For me, the jury is still out on that one. And if it does come down here, I choose monasticism over fundamentalism.) but it will not solve the puzzle of why there simply isn't traction in the culture. In my mind, this is a problem with language and with anthropology. Language because there is simply no longer a common linguistic "game" that allows people to talk about religious ideas. (And, one might say, this is part of a broader problem: that the public square has so collapsed that even talking about ideas of public consequence has been reduced to grandstanding, party politics, and the manipulation of conspiracy theories.) Anthropology because the formula for a whole human being living a human life no longer includes the habits and practices of faith as a necessity but has relegated it to, at best, an app that can be downloaded and run on the software of the self if one so chooses, for reasons that are highly personable but lend themselves to the psychotic, the aesthetic, the social/political, or even the pragmatic--but certainly not the necessary. Western human beings are practical atheists, one and all, and it is a struggle even to be religious for the religious. The church catholic in the West has ignored these extremely thorny philosophical problems and applied, instead, Western and especially American ideas of individualism and success-through-right-action (channeling Napoleon Hill).

theological anthropology; Walter Brueggemann; missions; culture; atheism; modernity

GEB 2: strange loops and the back end of materialism

2010-02-19T23:26:00.003-05:00

GEB is a series of rooms, locks, and keys, and the first of these keys is the concept of a strange loop. Discussing the central musical idea of the work, the “Canon per Tonos” of J. S. Bach's Musical Offerings, Douglas Hofstadter writes,

What makes this canon different from any other [is that] it is so constructed that [its] ending ties smoothly onto the beginning. . . . These successive modulations lead the ear to increasingly remote provinces of tonality, so that after several of them, one would expect to be hopelessly far away from the starting key. And yet . . . the original key of C minor [is eventually] restored.

This mobius strip of a thing, traveling further and further from a point only to arrive there again, Hofstadter calls a strange loop. It is a phenomenon that “occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system [a tangled hierarchy], we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.”

Strange loops occur in different ways. Hofstadter finds them in the work of M. C. Escher in, for example, “Ascending and Descending” or “Waterfall.” But implicit in all of them, he says, whether they encompass a dozen steps or only one, is the concept of infinity. “What else is a loop,” he writes, “but a way of representing an endless process in a finite way.” The representation of strange loops through modulation of musical keys or in the optical illusion of a waterfall existing on two and three dimensions at once is paradoxical—the conflict between finite and infinite. It smells like a higher mathematics and is, as he continues, a kind of translation of the Epimenides paradox or liar paradox, namely “All Cretans are liars,” when Epimenides himself was from Crete. Epimenides gives us a linguistic paradox. A self-referential statement of language which is neither true nor false. What is it?

Hofstadter goes on quite a while discussion twentieth century mathematician Kurt Gödel's discovery of a strange loop at the heart of mathematics. His description is hard to feel, being read today at the end of a continuum that begins with special relativity, quantum mechanics, and the literary term. Nevertheless “Gödel showed,” he says, “that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system is involved.” If I understand him correctly, he is saying that Gödel discovered at the base and heart of mathematics itself that disorder is the beginning even if order is the end: that language shouldn't make sense, but does. That Escher shouldn't be able to draw his waterfall, but there it is. That Bach can write a canon without end, a canon that cannot be written by formula, a canon whose every note makes sense only as it is nested in a network of contexts and relationships, that “there is something deeper” than “mere fugality.” He scrawls a question mark across Euclid's planes and then asks how it can be done.

So what is Hofstadter after? Why paint a picture of the mystery of meaning arriving from an infinite variety of tangled disorder? Hofstadter is after one mystery: the mystery of intelligence. Where does intelligence come from? And can it arise from systems of logic when such systems exist only as they bracket acceptable possibilities—a bracketing unavailable to real intelligence. Life, the context of human intelligence, is not a bracketed thing. Life is messy and random—infinitely so. There are rules, and then there are rules about rules, and then there are rules for constructing new rules, and so on and so forth. “Sometimes the complexity of our minds seems so overwhelming that one feels that there can be no solution to the problem of understanding intelligence.” And, lest it be missed, Hofstadter is a materialist . . . a materialist face to face with the question of the meaning of life and the challenge of transcendence—which, for him, is not an option. He's painted himself into a metaphysical corner, how shall he escape?

J. S. Bach; intelligence; meaning; Kurt Gödel

NYT, Elif Batuman, and theology

2010-02-18T22:49:00.005-05:00

Elif Batuman scored a review of her book The Posessed in the February 10, 2010 edition of the New York Times. Not that I am much of an aficionado when it comes to especially contemporary fiction. Nevertheless, there is a part of Dwight Garner's review that caught my eye.

Ms. Batuman’s search for something more from literature than “brisk verbs and vivid nouns” led her, swooning but alert, into the arms of the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Babel.

And it led her to write this odd and oddly profound little book, one that’s ostensibly about her favorite Russians but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs, the making of “King Kong,” working for the Let’s Go travel guidebook series, songs by the Smiths, even how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. Crucially and fundamentally, it is also an examination of this question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books?

Now, I ask you. Why can't theology do that? Why can't theology talk about grad school, love affairs, The Queen is Dead, and "our favorite books"?

I believe that as much as it was the printing press and mercantile politics and nationalism and justification by faith, as much as it was all of these, it was also the readability of the Reformation that made it so dangerous and so popular. How many of the church fathers were rhetoricians, trained in the subtle and liquid power of the spoken word? Why is it that the Bible not only can be literature, but is literature?

Our schools produce schoolmen, and their grammar is exactly so. And how many today read John of Salisbury or settle in with a bit of Duns Scotus? Are these inspiring or do they serve as foils for the construction of the endless paper parcels that make for an academic career?

I've said it before, I think to a large degree that the appeal of deconstructionism was a loosening of the corset of tenure for the sake of a little literary imagination. God, I wish theology would take the hint.

Elif Batuman; theology as literature; boredom; scholasticism

GEB 1: stumble trip

2009-12-17T00:49:00.005-05:00

Douglas R. Hofstadter, now a professor of cognitive and computer science at Indiana University, wrote Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in the late seventies. Today, it is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning book and something of a cult classic. Reading it gains one admission to a worldwide fraternal order. I hadn't known that. What I did know was that it asks questions about the self, about what “I” means, and about the origin of meaning and thought—and that it suggests answers. “In a word,” write Douglas R. Hofstadter, “GEB [Goedel, Escher, Bach] is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.”

epistemology; Douglas R. Hofstadter; materialism; subjectivity

a universal dual

2009-01-06T11:47:00.007-05:00

I have been struggling for three years or more to escape from one universe into another. Wandering and flailing in the dark, gathering snatches of truth from rumor and hearsay, leaving the familiar paths of habit--catchphrases and methods--and striking out into the woods after this or that light or landmark.

When I say universe I'm speaking of a universe of meaning: familiar symbols, habits, and assumptions that fix the stars and horizons that make up the mental furniture of daily life. Human beings exist in a meaning universe more directly than the physical one. Ask the reductionist-materalist how difficult it is to truly cleave to the "nothing but" of things and then watch them realize that this, too--this arrival at the bare whatness of objects in the physical universe is just another shaping of the mental universe of meaning. That's the double-edge of Kant's great divide: even the scientist is a phenomenologist.

I didn't furiously start and break into the forest chasing after a new universe. You don't realize you've left a path until it is long behind you. It starts with tiny deviations. "Look at that over there!" Then a quick investigation to get a better view. Soon you've left the trail behind.

The first steps were quite simple: the resolution that matter is not of itself a sinful thing. The body too can hope. An eschatological lean toward the Postmillenial end of Amillenialsm. A strict habit of avoiding material notions about godself so that the triune being is not a thing among things. A denial of the present-day urge to use the doctrine of providence as a divining rod. A realization that it is modernity that values authenticity, this baptized in "God has a plan for my life" (the kingdom of God recruits worshipers for God's sake, not for the sake of a realization of one's inner you.) Leaving Anabaptist traditions behind and joining an Episcopal church. These all taken together slowly lead away from that universe that others have called the enchanted universe.

Just naming the darn thing took years. The enchanted universe--yes! I've blogged about this before. This is the universe in which the Christianity of my youth dwells. Naming the other universe has taken nearly as much time. I'm an alien and a stranger to it after all. Moving in large rooms by candlelight. Nothing is familiar. This is the sacramental universe.

I've not fully arrived in the latter. And so much of the habits of mind and the phrases that go with being a Christian go with the former, it has been an odd process of sorting it all out. The brits have pants but call them trousers. Both universes have the word "worship" but mean very different things. It is a repatriation.

Here are a few things I've discovered: One fundamental difference between the two is the way each understands the relationship between God and the world. The god of the enchanted universe is far away, though invoked and expected in the smallest parts of daily life with great fervency. Matter in the enchanted universe is hopeless, the world will burn up and the soul will one day put aside the body and go on to a better realm. The god of the sacramental universe is astonishingly close, though far less invoked and expected in daily life. One expects laterally, the way that plants grow or time flows in unnoticeable continuity that evades the most intense awareness. Matter has hope, the world will be redeemed and transformed, and human beings will go into the new creation as embodied persons, transformed, yes, but still human beings. The eschatologies are different, and so is the drama. Warfare characterizes the former; wonder the latter--at least in my experience.

The way religion and science relate to one another is also very different depending on which universe you inhabit. In the former, science is a helpful maker of comforts but is not allowed to say anything of real importance. In the latter, science is taken seriously. It is not embraced, but it becomes a partner in dialogue. If one is a Christian coming up in an enchanted universe, the only option available if you take the scientific route is to put things in tight boxes, otherwise there is no motivation to engage in the mental and physical rigor of scientific investigation. If one grows up in a sacramental universe, there is a great deal of motivation to pursue the sciences, perhaps more motivation than if one grows up an agnostic.

At any rate, the doctrine of revelation is far different in the two universes. In an enchanted universe, revelation is immanent and pregnant in all things, what is necessary are the keys to its discovery. It is personal, and so God is personal. In a sacramental universe, revelation is restricted to word and sacrament: and perhaps even to word through sacrament (word governed by sacrament). It is largely impersonal, though one's person is caught up in the story. God became a person, and so what is confessed is a God in three persons. The self is wholly at the center of the enchanted universe; God's redemptive purpose at the center of the sacramental one. Faith is also differently understood. In the former faith is a Kierkegaardian leap full of the will and human drama; in the latter it is a signpost planted by the Holy Spirit sticking stubbornly from one's own rocky heart, sometimes a beacon but most times a nuisance.

science and religion; enchanted universe; sacramental theology; Christianity

Science & Religion: a second and historical look

2008-10-08T23:55:00.008-04:00

Turns out, Christianity and science have walked further together than apart, at least that is the message of Profs. David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers. Taking on directly the popular and prevalent view that science and religion have always been at war with each other, Lindberg and Numbers maintain that historical investigation suggest otherwise. “Although it is not difficult,” they write, “to find instances of conflicts and controversy . . . recent scholarship has shown the warfare metaphor to be neither useful nor tenable.”[1]

The thread of antagonism they trace back to an American historian named Andrew Dickson White. White taught at the University of Michigan and served in the New York Senate before assuming the presidency of Cornell University, where he refused to impose any religious examination of students. He wanted to create an asylum for science, and some pious citizens did not approve. Therefore, in 1869, a thirty-seven year old White began a white-hot, lifelong anticrusade on behalf of science and against dogmatism, culminating in his two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

History of the Warfare has been amazingly successful in the intervening century. Translated into German, Italian, French, Swedish, and Japanese, it is still in print today. Not only, but modern historians still defend its conclusions. Bruce Mazlish, for example, has written in favor of White’s conclusions, saying that they are “beyond reasonable doubt,” a declaration to which the Harvard historian George Sarton would agree. Sarton went so far as believe that White’s thesis should be levied against non-Christian cultures.

Nevertheless, despite its dazzlingly dense references and “military rhetoric,” History of the Warfare is eisegetic in its interpretations. White was wrong, and Lindberg and Numbers are out to prove him so.

White claimed that Christianity “arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years” crushing its appearance under the boot of superstition and ignorance. Is this true?

Lindberg and Numbers, beginning with the church fathers, find a more complicated truth. As it turns out, the church fathers took on the approach toward science that characterized the pagan cultures in which they lived. Some ignored science. Others believed that it had its place. Augustine, for example, believed that, though science could not dictate dogma, it should be respected in its sphere.[2]

It frequently happens that there is some question about the earth or the sky or the other elements of this world, the movement revolutions or even the size and distance of the stars, the regular eclipses of the sun and the moon, the course of the years and seasons; the nature of the animals, vegetables and minerals, and other things of the same kind, respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from the most certain reasoning or observation. And it is highly deplorable and mischievous and a thing especially to be guarded against that he should hear a Christian speaking of such matters in accordance with Christian writings and uttering such nonsense that, knowing him to be as wide of the mark as . . . east is from west, the unbeliever can scarcely restrain himself from laughing.[3]

Christian apologists also found science useful—and their use of it helped preserve and extend what science was available in often tumultuous times. Science aided theology. Science was its handmaiden—a position far different from White, who would say they were enemies. As it is, “Christianity was not the enemy [of science], but a valued (if not entirely reliable) servant.” They worked in tandem with each other, and often the exchange was beneficial.[4]

One benefit of the relationship was that science gave Christianity categories which allowed it to dialogue with the world. “The notion that any serious Christian thinker would even have attempted to formulate a world view from the Bible alone is ludicrous.” Theologians could adapt parts of a worldview that are, well, worldly from the natural philosophy at their disposal. In the thirteen century, for example, theologians busily integrated Aristotelian categories, taking on it physical, metaphysical, and cosmological and integrating them with creedal fundamentum. This synthesizing process culminated in the condemnations of 1270 and 1277, whereby theologians and philosophers were forbidden to pursue certain Aristotelian positions, such as pure determinism.

Interestingly enough, Lindberg and Numbers deny that these condemnations prove intrinsic warfare. They maintain that the condemnations allowed thought to run outside the shadow of Aristotle. Fourteenth century attacks on Aristotelian dogma led to new questions, such as the rotation of the earth on its axis. Questions which otherwise may have languished. Further, the authors state the the condemnations also turned scientific questioning away from fruitless rationalism.

A central concern of the condemnation was the desire to preserve the sovereignty of God over creation. God is omnipotent over the material world, and this means that the physical laws that govern it are subject to the will of their creator and can be changed if necessary. And that meant that an investigation into underlying causes could very well be a fool’s errand.

The condemnations generated a certain skepticism about the ability of the human mind to penetrate with certainty to the underlying causes of observed events; this attitude encouraged the view that science should restrict its attention to empirical fact. . . . Four hundred years later, the idea of God’s absolute sovereignty and its corollary, the total passivity of matter, became central features of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic world view.”[5]

Lindberg and Numbers pursue their argument into the affairs of Copernicus and Galileo. In the case of Copernicus and the publication of his system in 1543, there was no reason for religion to attack Copernicus and every reason to hear his voice as one of many. The rotation of the earth had already been proposed by Nicole Oresme, a bishop of the fourteen century, and Nicholas of Cusa, a cardinal of the fifteenth. Various members of the church, including a bishop and a cardinal, urged Copernicus to publication, and his manuscript was dedicated to Pope Paul III. A young Lutheran mathematician, Georg Jachim Rheticus, saw it through the printing process. And the theologian Andreas Osiander wrote its preface. Organized Catholic opposition to Copernicus didn't appear until the seventeenth century. “The church,” they say, “had more important things to worry about than a new astronomical or cosmological system.” Up-and-coming mathematicians “adopted Copernicanism simply as a mathematical reform, offering a better way of predicting planetary positions, while overlooking or rejecting the radical thesis that the earth really moves.”

Where Galileo was concerned, the issue was not science versus religion but politics and the question of Scriptural interpretation. Galileo and his telescope came on the scene amidst the wagon-circling activities of the Roman Catholic church during the Counter-Reformation. The Protestant Reformation had waged a now seventy-year-old argument with Roman Catholicism on many fronts, one of the most divisive being biblical interpretation. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) forbid scriptural interpretation on any matter of faith or practice “contrary to the sense determined by the Holy Mother Church.” And Galileo’s teaching did just that. Galileo argued that nature and scripture were two organs of divine revelation, and that reason was their proper interpreter, not the Church. When questioned, his science was not unique enough to support his hermeneutics; other natural explanations, such as that provided by Tycho Brahe, served well enough and did not run afoul of orthodoxy. At best Galileo raised questions about the relationship between reason and revelation. At worst, he acted imprudently by mixing scientific observation and hermeneutical method. Nevertheless, as Lindberg and Numbers state, the Galileo affair is an ecclesial one. Everyone involved identified themselves as Christian and acknowledged the centrality of the Bible. The struggle was between opposing theories of biblical interpretation: Trent’s conservative position versus Galileo’s liberal one. Both positions could claim an intellectual tradition, but neither existed apart from militant politics in Galileo’s day; his flair for cultivating powerful enemies notwithstanding.

The story of Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species falls along similar lines to those of Copernicus. Once again, the publication of Darwin’s ideas finds a religious atmosphere eager to dialogue with or even absorb his views. “Clergy were among the first to embrace and popularize [Darwin’s] hypothesis.” Nevertheless, Andrew White brings up the matter of Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, and so it is helpful to look closer at what Wilberforce actually said.

It is a bit of a history-of-science, isn’t-Darwinism-fantastic chestnut that, on June 30, 1860, in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Wilberforce condemned Darwinism for contradicting the Bible. He is reported to have said, “that he was not descended from a monkey.”

Upon hearing this remark, Darwin’s friend the zoologist Thomas Huxley shot back: “If I had to choose, I would prefer to be a descendant of a humble monkey rather than of a man who employs his knowledge and eloquence in misrepresenting those who are wearing out their lives in the search for the truth.”

As legend has it, the Bishop shot back and asked Huxley whether it was “on your grandfather or grandmother’s side that you claim descent from the apes.” To which Huxley rejoined, “I would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop.” (The authors note that J. R. Lucas and others have demonstrated this story to be apocryphal.)

What White fails to mention is that Bishop Wilberforce had earlier written that he would be willing to embrace the theory of natural selection if it proved correct.

If Mr. Darwin can with the same correctness of reasoning [as Newton] demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms . . . only we shall ask leave to scrutinise carefully every step of the argument which has such an ending, and demur if at any point of it we are invited to substitute unlimited hypothesis for patient observation. . . . We have no sympathy with those who object to any fact or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears is taught by Revelation.[6]

Darwin said the Bishop’s review was “uncommonly clever,” and said that Wilberforce “picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts [of the Origin], and brings forward well all the difficulties.” Wilberforce was no idiot.

Lindberg and Numbers outline several different theories that attempt to understand the subsequent conflict over Darwinism. I will list them here:

(1) James R. Moore says that the Darwinian debates occur not between scientists and theologians, but in individual minds struggling to come to terms with the new paradigm, a “conflict of minds steeped in Christian tradition with the ideas and implications of Darwinism.”

(2) Neil C. Gillespie argues that the conflict was between competing systems of science or “epistemes.” “Because the new episteme for science differed from the old in having within it no place for theology, serious questions were thereby raised that made the conflict” very real. The conflict rose from transformations within science, not as a result of a war between scientists and the religious.

(3) Frank M. Turner sees the conflict as a result of a change in priestly class. The authority and prestige of one group of intellectuals was passing to another, including political control of education and the social power of religious dogma and explanation. In Turner’s view, the conflict is as much a social and political as intellectual.

In the end, the picture Lindberg and Numbers paint between religion and science is a human one. People in the day-to-day struggle to come to terms with what they know and how they know it: religious ideas and scientific ones bleed, inform, and bump each other as a reflection of the minds of the people and the cultures that contain them. “Christianity and science alike,” they conclude, “have been profoundly shaped by their relations with each other.” What is needed is an ideological history that refuses the simple—and thus seductive—answers of White and warfare and commits itself to the difficult, nuanced, but worthwhile retelling of the story.

__________

The above largely taken from the article by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers. “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science.” Church History 55 (1986): 338-54. A similar article appeared as the introduction to God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science. University of California Press, 1986.

[1] As a critique to the warfare metaphor, the authors also cite James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, 1979), 19-122. See also Ronald L. Numbers, “Science and Religion” in Historical Writings on American Science, ed. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter, Osiris 1, 2d ser. (1985): 59-80.

[2] Augustine, Enchiridion 3:9.

[3] Augustine. De genesi ad litteram 1.19; trans. Meyrick H. Carre, Realists and Nominalists (London, 1946), 19. For another translation, see Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J., 2 vols., Ancient Christian Writers 41-42 (New York, 1982), 1:42-43.

[4] See also David C. Lindberg, “Science and the Early Church” in God and Nature, 19-58.

[5] For a good account of the effects of the condemnation, see Edward Grant, “The Condemnations of 1277, God’s Absolute Power, and Physical Thought in the Late Middle Ages,” Viator 10 (1979): 211-44; reprinted in Edward Grant Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy (London, 1981), article 13.; Gary Deason, “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in God and Nature, 181-85.

[6] J. R. Lucas, “Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter,” The Historical Journal 22 (1979): 313-30. See also Sheridan Gilley, “The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Reconsideration,” in Religion and Humanism, ed. Keith Rommins, Studies in Church History 17 (Oxford, 1981), 325-40.

science and religion; David Lindberg; Ronald Numbers; history of ideas; Augustine; Christianity; history; Andrew White; church history; Nicolaus Copernicus; Galileo Galilei; Charles Darwin; Samuel Wilberforce; James Moore; Neil Gillespie; Frank Turner; natural philosophy

Plantinga pulls a Samson

2008-08-01T18:33:00.002-04:00

Alvin Plantinga throws out a cute little argument against naturalists, or, in other posts here, reductionists, in the July/August 2008 issue of Books & Culture. It is quite a straightforward move, almost syllogistic, and it goes like this:

Naturalists say that science proves their position, and in particular evolution. Plantinga disagrees. “Evolution and naturalism are not merely uneasy bedfellows,” he writes. “One can’t rationally be an evolutionary naturalist.” Now why does he say this?

Here’s the critique: if the mind has arrived by means of evolutionary processes, forces conditioned by history and the larger cosmological context, then how do we know that what it thinks is true is true? Plantinga quotes Darwin:

With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[1]

He goes on to say that for the naturalist, beliefs, along with other mental states, are caused by neurophysiology. And evolution says that this equipment has been adapted, and is still adaptive for the purpose of genetic reproduction. I like his quote from Francis Crick, “Our highly developed brains . . . were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents” (from The Astonishing Hypothesis). Natural selection doesn’t care about truth, it cares about sex, and if false beliefs mean more sex, then that is fine.

Plantinga, with the help of a math buddy, asks, then, what is the chance that any one proposition is true? Out of one hundred beliefs, how many will be false and how many will be true. Answer: not even a handful, and there’s no way to tell one way or the other.

Evolutionary naturalism, then, is self-refuting. Or, as he says, “One who accepts evolutionary naturalism has a defeater for the belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable: a reason for giving up that belief, for rejecting it, for no longer holding it.”

What this means is that evolution spoils naturalism of its epistemological power. The reductionist is the one in danger of falling into nd unholy skepticism (although Plantinga points out that Aristotle, the Stoics, and Hegel managed to be atheists without simultaneously embracing naturalism.) And what about the Christian? Well, is there any need to explain it? Get thee, saint, to Augustine and read his de Magistro, and get thee to the imago Dei, the doctrine of the logos, of creation, and of general revelation.

[1] Letter to William Graham (Down, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), Volume 1, pp. 315-16.

Alvin Plantinga; epistemology; naturalism; reductionism; evolution; Charles Darwin; philosophical theology; imago Dei; general revelation

three scientists

2008-06-19T00:22:00.038-04:00

Science, too, stumbles toward religion. The horizon of human imagination and aspiration is just too large and too curious to submit to the narrow confines of a method, measure, rule.

So far I have pointed out the misunderstandings and mischaracterizations that have largely shaped the attitude of religion as it addresses science. Now I would like to survey three voices that come from the other direction; science addressing religion—well, not properly religion, more like faith or ethics. Two of these come from interviews broadcast in 2008 on American Public Media’s radio program “Speaking of Faith.”

The first is "Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth" with author Janna Levin, assistant professor of astrophysics at Columbia University and author of A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines, among other books.

The second is "Science and Hope" with Templeton Prize winner Dr. George Ellis, professor of applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town and a Quaker.

The third is an interview between host Dr. Moira Gunn and biologist and author Stewart Kauffman broadcast 6 June, 2008, on the podcast IT Conversations. The context of their discussion is Kauffman's book Reinventing the Sacred, but the subject is really emergence.

The Conversations

The conversation with Janna Levin centers largely around the following points. (1) Truth goes beyond what mathematics can demonstrate; Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. (2) How do we know what is real, when our perception is a point along a phenomenological continuum? We don't see the quantum. Our intuition is based on the neurons that have evolved in this world for our purposes. There are no true things that are unambiguously true, save things like 1+1=2. The rest of it is always something we approach without arriving, glimpsing truth out of the corner of the eye. “Every judgment is by its form one-sided and, to that extent, false” (Hegel). (3) How is it that mathematics not only exists, but we can perceive and understand it? (4) Time, determinism, and freedom [16:00], including the existence of free will. I especially like her reminder that we have come through radical changes in worldview since, say, pre-Copernican societies [33:15]. Same for her commitment that existential meaning must be based on truth. Levin is a reductionist, seeing, for example, many of our behaviors as an outgrowth of animal instincts encoded through evolutionary processes. At the same time, she is uncomfortable with this, only too glad to argue for free will in a world of lawful inevitability and subconscious instinct.

George Ellis is a cosmologist and an activist. And in his experience there exists what he calls “deep ethics,”an ethics emerging from the mathematical fabric of the universe. It is there, and no one knows why. As Ellis says, “We haven't got a clue in what way mathematics is embedded there, but it is there in some platonic space waiting to be discovered. We actually haven't got a clue how the laws of physics are embedded in the universe. We know they're there. We know they're effective. We don't know how they are embedded.” This deep ethic emerges whether one wants it to or not. And it is kenotic in nature: it is selfless, it is humble, it serves others. The proof of its existence is “self-authenticating. There is actually no other way of saying it. It is just something you either see or you don't see. There is no proof. It's something you recognize or you don't recognize.”

Ellis says that science has limits. “Science sees nothing about aesthetics or meaning or metaphysics.” Of course, this language evokes the God of the gaps problem. Ellis says, “It’s not the God of the gaps, it’s the God of the boundaries.”

The point about this is that there are boundaries to what science can handle, boundaries science cannot cross. (Not will not [which is the god of the gaps] but cannot.) And one of these important boundaries is ethics. So let's go back to the ethics. There's a whole lot of people out there trying to say, 'Well, ethics is understood by science through sociobiology.' There's another lot of social scientists saying ethics is understood through sociology and psychology and anthropology, and so on. And they are just profoundly mistaken when they say that, for a whole host of reasons. And perhaps we don't want to get technical about this, but the simple way to see how mistaken they are is to ask the following question to a scientist who says 'Look, science can comprehend ethics.' We can use science as a basis for ethics. 'So fine,' we say. 'Tell us what science says we should do in Iraq today.' Then you get this deafening silence because science is totally unable to say anything about that. The reason is there are no experiments in science to do with what is good and what is bad. There are no scientific units for good and bad. There's no experiment. It's just outside the scope of science, not only now, but forever, never ever will be within the bound of science.

And as for the origin of the universe:

My colleagues are producing theories of what they call creation of the universe out of nothing. But when you probe them, you find they're not producing theories of the creation of the universe out of nothing. They are assuming a huge machinery of quantum field theory and fields and particles and interactions, which generates the universe, not the creation of the universe out of nothing.

And, yet, it had to come from somewhere. “In the end, we run into a metaphysical blank, whether you pursue it scientifically or religiously, and you simply have to give up in wonder and awe and say, ‘I don't know the answer, and it's just marvelous the way things are.’”

Biologist and author Stewart Kauffman studies self-organizing systems, pursuing a cosmological position called emergence, which is growing in scientific popularity. What has to be overcome, Kauffman says, is reductionism, of which he outlines three features: (1) Everything that happens is describeable by natural laws. This means that the universe is (2) fundamentally deterministic. Like a computer, once you know the relevant information, then you can predict everything. And finally (3) reductionism is analytic. It says that knowledge is the product of reducing things to their elemental parts. Reductionism has been very successful, it is true, but not without ethical and existential costs. For the reductionist, the universe is made up of unrelated happenings from which no meaning can be abstracted; bare juxtaposition without explanation or narrative.

For this and other reasons, the adequacy of reducationism is being questioned by some within the scientific community. In its place is a platform called "emergence," which asks questions about the nature of the universe from the perspective of pure and infinite complexity. The result: a universe which cannot be completely explained, now or ever, by the fundamental laws of physics. Two nobel laureates in physics are notable enthusiasts: Phil Anderson, who wrote an article in Science in 1972 entitled "More is Different," and Robert Laughlin, whose latest book is entitled, A Different Universe. Like Anderson and Laufman, Kauffman believes that emergence is not only real and demonstrable, but it is a better platform than reductionism for doing science.

Reductionism doesn't work, he says, because complex things cannot be deduced. Reality is so unplottably chaotic, so infinitely complex, that trying to say "this comes from that" is a fool's errand. You can't simulate the development of complex things. In biology, for example, a physicists cannot explain the coming into existence of the heart. Emergence allows for cause and effect, but it throws its boundaries much larger to encompass the unexplainably complex.

This is the basis for Kauffman's critique of darwinian preadaptation. He asks, "Do you think you could say beforehand all the possible darwinian preadaptations of all the organisms now, or just for humans? Can we know all the adjacent possibles?" The answer is, of course, no. "There just isn't a mathematical framework to even try and do this. How would we know we plotted all the adjacent possibles?" Predictability is impossible. There are just too many variables. The future is just too odd.

So, then, Kauffman outlines four implications from emergence.

1. We cannot do what Newton said we should do. We can't specify the laws and then calculate what is going to happen, because we can't know all the adjacent possibles.

2. We can't make probability statements. We don't know all the adjacent possibles, and so we can't plot a sample that would allow us to come up with a probability statement. Nobel laureate Marie Gilmont says that a law is a compact description of the regularities of a process, but can we really do this? The evolution of the biosphere is beyond prediction and beyond the reach of natural law. What we're left with in the biosphere and up through economics is ceaseless creativity. You don't need a creator for this. Every advance through an adjacent possible reshapes the next adjacent possible. The entire matrix of adjacent possibles changes with every step in a way that cannot be predicted.

3. Reason is an insufficient guide for living our life. We have to reunite narrative, allegory, intuition, emotion, and reason. We have to rethink and understand our integrated humanity, throwing aside the split between the two cultures: science and the arts. Science is no longer the only way to get to the truth. History, art, law--lots of things tell us the truth now, not just the scientific method. We need more than just reductionism to help explain things. We live our lives forward, in the face of mystery, not knowing what is going to happen. What does it mean to be fully human in such a world? Kauffman goes on to talk about religion. He takes to task his reductionist friends, such as Richard Dawkins--Enlightenment atheists. What if you take "god" out of the equation and leave creativity, poses Kauffman, hypostasizing creativity. We have lived with creativity and have invented gods to explain it. Indeed, how many gods have we worshipped in human history? God is our most powerful symbol, but it is rife with abuse. "We can choose to use the word "God" if we want to," he says. But it isn't necessary. Instead, we can use "god," not to mean a creator, but to refer to the creativity that itself characterizes and shapes the universe.

4. We need a global ethic. We are connected to everything, emerging along with the rest of the universe. We are caught up in the natural creativity of the universe: which means, to use a religious word, we are all sacred. We need a shared ethic, a global ethic, an ethic that includes all of life and the planet. The secular West is reduced to fairness for friends, love of family, democracy, and free markets, but this is not a global ethic. We are reduced to consumers. We are commoditized. We need an ethic that will help guide the hetero- or homogeneous civilization that is developing. We need to be reconciled to nature. The notion that nature is there to be used by man, the whole purpose of knowledge from a Baconian view, needs to be thrown off. Instead, we need to embrace nature. So can we use this sense of god, and find meaning in it to orient our lives today? Kauffman thinks we can, and that it is as good as any other model of god, and perhaps better, since there is no theodicy issue.

Grammar

So what to do with the above three examples? I hope they serve to show that not only theologians, but scientists are struggling to make sense of the no man's land that exists between too-tidy reductionism and the Wild West of pure fideism. There seems to be a complete lack of any grammatical rules for passing between one side or the other, any schema that allows statements made by one side to be properly heard and evaluated on the other. No one seems to be able to define what governing power a scientific theory should have in the development of doctrine and vise versa (though things have gone unidirectional for a good while.) Can you just equate the big bang, with all its supporting mathematics etc., and Genesis 1.1? (As, for example, William Lane Craig tries to do in this debate with Peter Atkins.) What happens when they turn the Hadron Collider on early next year in Switzerland and discover the whole brane thing is correct and that the big bang is just a temporal phenomenon in a much larger and more complicated universe? Theology risks too much when it latches such and such a doctrine to today's scientific post--but, for all that, it can't just ignore it. And, if the above three physicists say anything about science, it says that scientists, too, cannot avoid the ethical and, yes, religious implications of their work.

Janna Levin; George Ellis; cosmology; religion and science; ethics; Stuart Kauffman; emergence; complexity; evolution; philosophy of science; probability; freedom; kenosis

Jonathan Edwards may be on to something

2008-01-29T17:23:00.002-05:00

To be frank, I have never been attracted to the theology of American Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. Perhaps because of his historical and geographic situation, he always seems to exist in an eddy of history, a backwater, protected and immune from the force of the enrushing early Enlightenment and its theological questions and challenges. Plus, in matters spiritual or otherwise, the guy was a hard ass. There, I said it.

Nevertheless, this quotation from Sam Storms, the author of Signs of the Spirit: An Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections says I'm no doubt badly mistaken. In an interview printed in Crossway's publicity publication, The Book Report, Storms says:

[Edwards] saw everything in the light of the glory and power and majesty of God, from the smallest of spiders to the most expansive of galaxies. Everything exists by virtue of God's incessant infusion of life and energy. Everything exists to reflect the glory and splendor of its Creator. Everything exists to draw us to God so that we might glorify him by finding satisfaction in all that he is for us in Jesus.

Let's face it. In the wake of a personal openness to science, I'm hunting around to see what models theology can provide. And though I am not at all interested in adopting process theology, a direction which, in my opinion, gives the store away in exchange for contemporary ideological legitimacy, Edwards "incessant infusion" hints at possibility.

Jonathan Edwards; Sam Storms; process theology; science and religion; theology; metaphysics

Evolution: three faithful responses

2008-01-19T02:06:00.001-05:00

In the October 2007 edition of First Things magazine, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., wrote an interesting article surveying the general approaches Christians (he says Roman Catholics, but includes many who are from different traditions) are taking to evolution. I would like to briefly summarize these positions.

“Catholics who are expert in the biological sciences,” Dulles begins, “take several different positions on evolution.” These are as follows.

Theistic evolutionism
Those who, believing that science and religion address “different levels of knowledge,” espouse a combination of “Darwinism in science and theism in theology.” This group rejects “Darwinism as a philosophical system” and “holds that God, eternally foreseeing all the products of evolution, uses the natural process of evolution to work out his creative plan.” Theistic evolutionists believe that science is epistemologically limited. “It can tell us a great deal about the processes that can be observed or controlled by the senses and by instruments, but it has no way of answering deeper questions involving reality as a whole.” God, to this group, gets things going by the big bang, knowing from that point how it will all go. Dulles includes in this group Kenneth R. Miller, Stephen M. Barr, Francis S. Collins, Fred Hoyle, and Arthur Peacock.

Intelligent design
Michael Behe is the only researcher named to this school, though there are others. Here we find the usual appeal to irreducible complexity. God interferes in development by producing organs that are irreducibly complex. Dulles says that sudden divine intervention in the formation of species should not be ruled out. Nevertheless, he prefers Darwin, and warns.

As a matter of policy, it is imprudent to build one’s case for faith on what science has not yet explained [what today appears irreducibly complex], because tomorrow it may be able to explain what it cannot explain today. History teaches that the “God of the gaps” often proves to be an illusion.

Process thinking
A teleological position once called “vitalism,” Dulles includes Henri Bergson, Michael Polanyi, and Teilhard de Chardin in this group. This school believes that mechanical principles just can’t explain the behavior of living things. Living things want to live. And “this internal finality” sets them apart from the dead earth. Life goes somewhere. It stretches out toward the future. Dulles references English physicist John Polkinghorn’s insight that “there must be in the universe a thrust toward higher and more complex forms.” God urges, advocates, and initiates each graduate development. “Many adherents of this school would say that the transition from physicochemical existence to biological life, and the further transitions to animal and human life, require an additional input of divine creative energy.” And we hear from Georgetown professor John F. Haught [see my post “Let’s ask the Catholic about science”] who notes that

Natural science achieves exact results be restricting itself to measurable phenomena, ignoring deeper questions about meaning and purpose. By its method, it filters out subjectivity, feeling, and striving, all of which are essential to a full theory of cognition. Materialistic Darwinism is incapable of explaining why the universe gives rise to subjectivity, feeling, and striving.

Thomist Etienne Gilson, in his book From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again put the blame on Francis Bacon and his peers. Seeking to explain everything mechanically, they elided two of Aristotle’s four causes. They kept the material and efficient causes, but discarded formal and final causality. In their wake, writes Dulles, science “simply disallows the questions about why anything (including human life) exists, how we differ in nature from irrational animals, and how we ought to conduct our lives.” He continues,

Without the form, or the formal cause, it would be impossible to account for the unity and specific identity of any substance. In the human composite, the form is the spiritual soul, which makes the organism a single entity and gives it its human character. Once the form is lost, the material elements decompose, and the body ceases to be human. It would be futile, therefore, to try to define human beings in terms of their bodily components alone.

Final causality is particularly important in the realm of living organisms. The organs of the animal or human body are not intelligible except in terms of their purpose or finality. The brain is not intelligible without reference to the faculty of thinking that is its purpose, nor is the eye intelligible without reference to the function of seeing.

Blogger Michael Liccione has an interesting response to this part of Dulles’ argument in a post entitled, “God and evolution: the state of the question.” Liccione says that there is a good reason for excluding formal and final causes. Progress in the sciences requires their exclusion because including them would undermine the basis for rigorous experimentation. They are good philosophical principles, he says, that help contextualize scientific findings. But that context is philosophy, not science.

I like the way Liccione summarizes Dulles’ position: “Dulles' view may be summed up thus: he finds ID too dependent on a God of the gaps, and TE too deistic. Rather, and given the Church's irreformable teaching about the origin of the human soul, we should look to some form of vitalism as a viable option.” Science, of course, does not think God should interfere at all in the natural order of things. But Dulles is correct when he asserts that Christians believe in a God who incarnates, who works miracles, who reveals—indeed, who intervenes! He warns theistic evolutionists not to hold too tightly to the reasoning that is current in modern science. “Science and technology (science’s offspring) are totally inadequate in the field of morality.” And morality is where Dulles leaves off.

Right and wrong, and the inner understanding that it is a noble thing to choose the right even at the cost of suffering or pain—what can science tells us about this innate higher law, he asks. Evolutionists, he says, say that morality and religion arose for survival value. “But this alleged survival value, even if it be real, tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of any moral or religious system.” And just because science explains a belief, does this discount it? One might also point out that the pursuit of scientific knowledge is, itself, an incorrigibly moral act.

We should recover reason, Dulles concludes. Reason is the full range of human thinking, and we must discover and embrace all of it, and not limit its range merely to that which is empirically verifiable. In this, Dulles’ call to good thinking agrees entirely with Philip Kitcher [see my post “Evolution, providence, and the political”] who said that religious people should look to the riches of their theological and philosophical traditions and discover ways of understanding and dialoging in a secular world of science.

faith and science; John Haught; evolution; epistemology; Avery Cardinal Dulles; causation ; scientific method ; Etienne Gilson

Let's ask the Catholic about science

2007-12-26T00:18:00.001-05:00

Roman Catholic theologian John Haught, Landegger Distinguished Professor of Theology at Georgetown University, was interviewed by journalist Steve Paulson in the Salon article "The atheist delusion," on December 19, 2007. Though Haught is a follower of the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, deeply influenced by Paul Tillich, and, subsequently, a classic liberal when it comes to, say, the historicity of the physical resurrection, I found many of his comments quite helpful. Therefore, in the spirit of previous copyright infringements, I intend to copy from it liberally. Bold questions are Paulson.

On the Relationship Between Science and Religion

John Haught is quite plain that he finds Steven Jay Gould's idea of a "non-overlapping magisteria"--that science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the universe, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value--too simplistic. Gould, he says "defines religion as simply concerning values and meaning. He implicitly denies that religion can put us in touch with truth." Paulson adds that the entire split "seems too easy, a politically expedient ploy to pacify both scientists and mainstream Christians."

By truth, are you talking about reality?

Yes, I'm talking about what is real, or what has being. The traditions of religion and philosophy have always maintained that the most important dimensions of reality are going to be least accessible to scientific control. There's going to be something fuzzy and elusive about them. The only way we can talk about them is through symbolic and metaphoric language -- in other words, the language of religion. Traditionally, we never apologized for the fact that we used fuzzy language to refer to the real because the deepest aspect of reality grasps us more than we grasp it. So we can never get our minds around it.

We can't get our minds around this transcendent reality because we're limited by our language and our brains?

We have to refer to it in the oblique and fuzzy but also the luxuriant and rich language of symbol and metaphor. But I still think we have the obligation today of asking how our new scientific understanding of the world fits into that religious discourse. I don't accept Gould's complete separation of science and faith. Theology is faith seeking understanding. We have every right to ask what God is doing by making this universe in such a slow way, by allowing life to come about in the evolutionary manner in which Darwinian biology has very richly set forth. So science cannot be divorced from faith. However, I think most people do resort to this non-overlapping magisteria as the default position. It's an easy approach. It allows you to put all your ducks in a row. But it avoids the really interesting and perhaps dangerous issue of how to think about God after Darwin.

In my view, after Darwin, after Einstein--just as after Galileo and Copernicus--we can't have the same theological ideas about God as we did before. My view is that theology, instead of ignoring or closing its eyes to [Darwin's thought], should look it squarely in the face. It has everything to gain and nothing to lose by doing so. In my view, Darwin's thought is a gift to theology because it goads modern theologians to clarify their thinking [and, says Paulson, reject "outdated arguments about God as an intrusive designer."]

[Richard] Dawkins argues that a lot of claims made on behalf of God -- about how God created the world and interacts with people -- are ultimately questions about nature. Unless you say God has nothing to do with nature, those become scientific questions.

Well, I approach these issues by making a case for what I call "layered explanation." For example, if a pot of tea is boiling on the stove, and someone asks you why it's boiling, one answer is to say it's boiling because H2O molecules are moving around excitedly, making a transition from the liquid state to the gaseous state. And that's a very good answer. But you could also say it's boiling because my wife turned the gas on. Or you could say it's boiling because I want tea. Here you have three levels of explanation which are approaching phenomena from different points of view. This is how I see the relationship of theology to science.

Of course I think theology is relevant to discussing the question, what is nature? What is the world? It would talk about it in terms of being a gift from the Creator, and having a promise built into it for the future. Science should not touch upon that level of understanding. But it doesn't contradict what evolutionary biology and the other sciences are telling us about nature. They're just different levels of understanding. Suppose you asked me, why am I thinking right now? I could say, my neurons are firing, the synapses are connecting, the lobes of my brain are activated. And you could spend your whole career, as neuroscientists do, unfolding that level of understanding. But I could also say I'm thinking because I have a desire to know. I want to figure things out. That's an explanation that can't be mapped onto the first because a dimension of subjectivity enters in here. You cannot find it by the objectifying method of neuroscience.

So science as it's now practiced has nothing to say about subjective experience, about what happens in our minds?

I think science, especially neuroscience, does a very good job of saying what has to be working cerebrally and in our nervous systems in order for consciousness to be present. And it can also do a very good job of pointing out what has broken down physically and chemically if my brain is failing to function -- for example, in Alzheimer's. But it doesn't have the complete explanation. Many cognitive scientists and brain scientists are saying the same thing. They're almost in despair at times about whether we'll ever be able to jump from the third-person discourse of science to the first-person discourse of subjective consciousness.

Let me try to pin you down a little more. You're saying the scientific method has only so much explanatory power. At least right now, it has very little to say about subjective experience. That still leaves open the question, is the mind more than the brain? Or does consciousness always have some physical correlate?

Don't get me wrong. I want to push physical explanations as far as possible. I'm a man who loves science. I'm in awe of science. I don't ever want theology to put restraints upon science. I believe every thought we have has a physical correlate. But at the same time, I believe there's something about mind that does transcend, while at the same time fully dwelling incarnately in the physical universe. I see that as a microcosmic example of what's going on in the universe as a whole. So I want a worldview that's wide enough to ask the question, why does the universe not stand still? Once radiation came about early in the universe, why didn't the universe say, "Well, we're just fine here. This is a pretty good universe." Instead, there's a restlessness, a tendency of the cosmos to go beyond itself.

We experience this in ourselves. We're just as much a part of the universe as rivers and rocks are. Therefore, we should use what's going on in our own experience as a key to what's happening in the cosmos as a whole. I call this a "wider empiricism." Most modern science has acted as though subjectivity and consciousness are not part of the natural world. It doesn't reflect adequately on why subjectivity enters the universe at all. Why does the universe transcend itself from purely material to living and then to conscious phenomena? Teilhard himself said that what science left out was nature's most important development--human phenomena.

Earlier, you said cosmic purpose is a question that lies outside of science. But it sounds like you're bringing it into science. If you want to look for purpose -- whether it's in evolution or the larger universe -- you'll find it in this inexorable drive toward greater complexity.

We have to distinguish between science as a method and what science produces in the way of discovery. As a method, science does not ask questions of purpose. But it's something different to look at the cumulative results of scientific thought and technology. From a theological point of view, that's a part of the world that we have to integrate into our religious visions. That set of discoveries is not at all suggestive of a purposeless universe. Just the opposite. And what is the purpose? The purpose seems to be, from the very beginning, the intensification of consciousness. If you understand purpose as actualizing something that's unquestionably good, then consciousness certainly fits. It's cynical of scientists to say, off-handedly, there's obviously no purpose in the universe. If purpose means realizing a value, consciousness is a value that none of us can deny.

Haught on ID

Ironically, ID advocates share with their ideological enemies, the evolutionary materalists, the assumption that science itself can provide uultimate explanations. Advocates of intelligent design are really proposing a kind of watered-down version of natural theology. That's the attempt to explain what's going on in nature's order and design by appealing to a nonnatural source. So it's not science. It's not a valid scientific alternative to Darwinian ideas. It's also extremely poor theology. What intelligent design tries to do--and the great theologians have always resisted this idea--is to place the divine, the Creator, within the continuum of natural causes. And this amounts to an extreme demotion of the transcendence of God, by making God just one cause in a series of natural causes.

This becomes the "God of the gaps." When you can't explain something by science, you say God did it.

Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian, said that kind of thinking was the foundation of modern atheism. Careless Christian thinkers wanted to make a place for God within the physical system that Newton and others had elaborated. That, in effect, demoted the deity as being just one link in a chain of causes that brought the transcendent into the realm of complete secular immanence. The atheists quite rightly said this God is unnecessary.

Haught on the Creedal Commitment of Science

[In response to naturalism's demand for proof of the existence of God:] The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It's a deep faith commitment because there's no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It's a creed. The idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable. There's no scientific proof for that. Those are commitments that I would place in the category of faith. So the proposal by the new atheists that we should eliminate faith in all its forms would also apply to scientific naturalism. But they don't want to go that far. So there's a self-contradiction there.

Haught on the Confession that Ultimate Reality is Personal

God (ultimate reality) is personal, meaning he is intelligent and capable of love and making promises. Theologically speaking, personality is a symbol, like everything else in religion. Like all symbols, "personality" doesn't adequately capture the full depth of ultimate reality. But the conviction of the Abrahamic religions is that if ultimate reality were not at least personal--at least capable of everything that humans are capable of--then we could not surrender ourselves fully to it. It would be an "it" rather than a "thou" and therefore would not reach us in the depth of our being. It's when you come to the belief in a personal God that the question of science and religion becomes most acute.

Einstein is certainly relevant in this context. He called himself a "deeply religious nonbeliever." He talked about having genuine religious feelings when he marveled at the inherent order and harmony in the universe. But he thought the idea of a personal God was preposterous. He couldn't believe in a God who interfered with natural events or intervened in the lives of people.

Let's look at why Einstein found that idea of God objectionable. Einstein was a man who thought the laws of physics have to be completely inviolable. Nature is a closed continuum of deterministic causes and effects, and if anything interrupted that, it would violate the fundamental scientific worldview that he had. So the idea of a responsive God--a God who answers prayers--would have to violate the laws of physics, the laws of nature. This is why Einstein said the problem of science and religion is caused by the belief in a personal God. But it's not inevitable that a responsive God violates the laws of physics and chemistry. I don't think God does violate those laws.

I would think the biggest challenge that evolutionary theory poses to most religions is the sense that there's no inherent meaning in the world. If you look at the process of natural selection -- this apparently random series of genetic mutations -- it would seem that there's no place for ultimate purpose. Human beings may just be an evolutionary accident.

Yes, in the new scientific understanding of the universe, there are no sharp breaks between lifeless matter and life, between life and mind. It seems to many people that the new evolutionary picture places everything in the context of a meaningless smudge of stuff, of atoms reshuffling themselves over the course of time. The traditional view was that nature emanates from on high, so that when you get down to matter, you have the least important level. Above that there's life and mind and God. But in the new cosmography, it seems that mindless matter dominates the whole picture. And many scientists, like Dawkins and Gould, have said evolution has destroyed the notion of purpose. So one thing I do in my theology is to say that's not necessarily true.

faith and science; John Haught; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; Paul Tillich; Steven Jay Gould; Albert Einstein; evolution; naturalism; epistemology

Tweaking methodological naturalism

2007-12-21T15:43:00.001-05:00

C Michael Patton on Parchment and Pen has an excellent post going about faith and science, and more particularly on methodological naturalism, which Patton defines as "a method of 'doing' science that does not assume the presence of supernatural phenomenon." Patton goes on to outline how the assumpution of methodological naturalism does not make an atheist of every scientist. Rather, it means that science as a discipline must frame its subject of study, and that the most helpful way of doing so is to bracket the supernatural. Science must, by definition, choose its instruments with a view toward that which is examined--in this case, the material world. Patton provides the example of a doctor who is asked to diagnose a man suffering from chest pain. "The doctor," he writes

does not attribute this chest pain to demon possession even though his worldview may allow for such. He or she must proceed by attempting to understand the ailment naturalistically. This does not mean the doctor does not believe in demon possession, it means that he is under obligation by his field of study to try to understand the problem without regards to the supernatural.

Patton goes on to link methodological naturalism with the historical/critical hermeneutic, which is a connection worth exploring.

In addition, comments to Pattons blog post also prove developmentally interesting. Beginning with a bit of trivia, they point out that the term "methodological naturalism" was coined by evangelical philosopher Paul DeVries at Wheaton College. They are quick to point out that methodological naturalism doesn't have to bracket God, but, instead, presupposes his general providence. As one commentator says, "God’s general providence indeed results in a creation that is extraordinarily consistent (i.e., God is not capricious) and this enables science to work." This is an important clarification because a purely philosophical naturalism has no way of explaining why the material world is subject to discovery. As Einstin said, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."

Dennis Overbye in his article "Laws of Nature, Source Unknown" in the December 18, 2007, edition of the New York Times explores this very thing. Overbye cites the negative reaction Arizona State University cosmologist Paul Davies received when, in a NYT op-ed, he said that the scientific method presumes faith in an orderly universe. Overbye notes that "there is a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws. Which 'came' first--the laws or the universe?" In a tradition goes back to Augustine, the orderly lawfulness of the universe was attributed to the general providence of God. But according to Davis, "God got killed off [in the seventeenth century], and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties." Scientists have since kneeled at many fonts looking to justify their faith. Some have become platonists and hurled the laws of the universe into the higher realm of the forms, meaning pure mathematics. Some, responding to the deep randomness of the quantum universe, state the the laws are deep generalities, which will continue to evolve. And some believe that the laws have emerged naturally from primordial chaos in which millions of universes are born and die unknown to each other, each with its own set of physical laws. But, as Overbye says, "The law of no law . . . is still a law." So, in the end scientists are the ones who are "playing their cards as if they can win, as if the universe is indeed comprehensible."

Another qualifier to methodological naturalism is its tendency toward reductionism, limiting the boundary of what is real to the measurablen dimensions of res extensa and res cogitans. Dave Sims is the one who makes this comment, and it is so good that I'm just going to reproduce it:

If one assumes reality is reducible to material and efficient causes, it will be impossible to have a discussion about whole or purposeful substances with a scientist, at least where one assumes that the authority of science, so defined, is conterminous with theology. Any kind of detente with MN results in a very one-sided conversation where science always has the upper hand, and the sorts of theology that can engage the conversation are a very truncated group from the beginning. . . . The Christian community needs to be willing to re-examine the metaphysics of Bacon, Descartes, Gallileo, and others who left us with a rationalist/dualist science, and see if we can’t reform Aristotelian science without lopping Aristotle/Thomas’s heads off by ruling out formal and final causes by fiat. Until we can do that, any talk about integration and cooperation with Baconian science (MN) is doomed both philosophically and politically.

Sims puts a qualifier on scientific claims to dictate the borders of what is true. What is true, he says, encompasses a wider field that straightforward methodological naturalism allows. Science needs to adjust its assumptions: enlarging its epitstemological possibilities without distorting what already exists. "There are plenty of alternate metaphysical approaches," writes Sims.

Husserl, Whitehead, Bergson, and even Heidegger in his essay The Question Concerning Technology give good examples of how to approach a critique of Cartesian/Baconian science philosohopically. Hans Jonas’s Phenomenon of Life should also be looked at carefully as a template of how to construct a robust critique of contemporary science.

As Vance, another commentator writes, "much of the problem lies in the fact that we have adopted the Modernistic conclusion that science is the search for the ultimate answers, rather than viewing science for the limited scope in inquiry that it is: the search for the best existing natural answers." Vance goes to on to say that "Science should be viewed as just one source of information in our search for ultimate truth. And while [Christians] believe that this larger search should include the supernatural, we should not force this area of inquiry into 'the study of how the natural works naturally,' which is science."

I can see the point that Sims and Vance are making, but they should also ask whether their own (easy) critique of science in general and methodological naturalism in particular doesn't hide the secret desire to re-enchant the universe. "Priests," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight."

faith and science; methodological naturalism; epistemology

The universe in twain

2007-12-20T18:06:00.001-05:00

It is my opinion that fundamentalists (and I’m using this term to mean conservative Christians in the first few decades of the twentieth century, the fathers and mothers of today’s North American evangelical movement), in the face of science’s Newtonian triumphalism and the liberalizing effect of compromises made by academics on the continent and in the more prestigious seminaries of the U.S., intellectually hobbled themselves and their children. By furiously barricading every door and window to dialogue with science, and by shutting themselves away from methodologies that too closely approached the method of Bacon and Galileo, they severed the cord of authority which secured them a voice in the public square. In time, they became a cultural museum.

Their children, the evangelicals, have tried desperately to return from the desert monasteries. And they succeeded in many cases—some may even say far too well where Smith’s free market and its corresponding political process are concerned. Ideologically, however, they have never known what to do with science. The result is a hundred years of catching up to do before conservative protestants in the West, at least (and perhaps their missiologically born descendents in the Southern Hemisphere), can credibly and intelligibly speak to the Western world.

This is evidentially real to me as I clumsily begin trying to live in a world where the Bible and science exist. It is a bifurcated world where the split is sometimes visible sometimes not; a double world in which truth goes by many names by no fault of its own. If I hold a mirror to my face you will see two of me, but not because there are two.

Attempts are being made to bridge the chasm. Postmodernity may even have succeeded in places. But the grammatical universes are still so far apart that, even where they reach a sympathetic parallel, one wonders whether these two seekers will ever touch. Christians are dogmatically right to courageously call out to the perplexed, “Fear not, we are one.” But the above-mentioned are a hundred years or more away from saying how.

science and religion; fundamentalism; twentieth century

Karl Jaspers on creation

2007-12-04T17:32:00.001-05:00

Reading through a collection of essays by the mid-twentieth-century existential philosopher Karl Jaspers, I happened upon one entitled, "The Creation of the World." And though Jaspers was not a Christian, and certainly not a biblical theologian or historian, there is a great deal to be admired in it. Like his contemporary, Martin Heidegger, Jaspers affirms that human knowledge can be nothing but subjective. "The world in its entirety cannot become an object," because we aren't outside of it, but in it. "Fundamental, objectless cognition not only transcends all definite knowledge but defies knowledge." And because we arrive fully submerged in its current and remain so, objective knowledge is ontologically beyond us--even where mathematics is concerned: "Wherever deducations exceed the realm of possible experience and the results will not be subject to experience, either, we are about to delude ourselves. Constructions of mathematical possibilities are as speculative and deceptive as the old, conceptual ones of metaphysics, and equally tempting." But here is where Jasper's discussion of creation gets interesting.

Real knowledge, that is objective knowledge, of what exactly we mean by the word "creation" is impossible to us, he says. If we cannot achieve objectivity about the world we live in, how then can we expect to swallow the origin of this world? So, then, creation

is unimaginable, not to be visualized by any analogy in the world. It is not even a temporal process any more, since time itself has only been created along with everything else. The creation of the world is exempted from temporality, which is part of the world.

And what if we could swallow it? Then, he says, we would cease to be human beings, for "we would no longer be living in the possibilities of our situation; we would command a view of it, would have control over it, and would thus have terminated it. Everything would be manifest. Knowing our beginnings, we would be at the end of our humanity." In fully grasping it, we would step outside of creation into--what? And even if we could fully grasp it, would we grasp an answer to how we come to think and to know? Scientific knowledge--that is an arrived knowledge of the world through testable method--doesn't tell us that.

At this, Jaspers zeroes in on freedom, because freedom is the human way of being in the world. Human beings are fundamentally "en route to realization." We are explorers, forever pushing at the boundaries and possibilites built--thank God--into the very framework of our limited ontologies. "In the awareness of our freedom, which is incomprehensible in terms of the world, we transcend the incomplete world we can know." That is humanity. "As animated bodies we are part of Creation, but our freedom comes directly from God. Thus, while being in the world, we are also from elsewhere. We find ourselves in the world, and yet we are not of this world alone." That is humanity. "We live in time--that is to say, we are never finished; we are only searching and striving. We never know what eternity is, nor what is eternal in us and in our doings, but it comes to be present in ciphers, in parables, in reflections--for example, in the cipher of the idea of Creation." Yes, that is it exactly.

Creation is both beyond us and alien to us, and yet for us, for it insures our very being toward the future. Theologically, we read that creation insures our very being toward God's eschatological culmination of all things.

The idea of God's creation of the world will be a symbol, then, not a matter of knowledge. It is in the abyss revealed by the idea of Creation that we, along with all our mundane knowledge and activities, are engulfed and sheltered at the same time. . . . The idea of Creation stirs us by the very fact that it does not permit us to know. It points to depths in which, at the same time, it hides our origin. [And so] in all our human possibilities it remains essential to illuminate, not to conceal, the mystery that a world exists, and that we are in it. [And] if we are in the world from elsewhere, our mission in the world transcends the world.

So, finally, Jaspers leaves this challenge to those who would disagree with him. "Thinking through it," he says, "will serve to illuminate the absence of knowledge from it." And so he writes:

The symbol [creation] serves to support and to reassure us by the very fact of consciously uttering paradoxes. We say, "God created time"--but the word "created" describes a temporal process, contradicting the meaning of the sentence. We say, "God made the world out of nothing"--and we operate with the word "nothing" as if it were something, again contradicting the meaning of the sentence. What is conceived in the symbolic idea of Creation is not a process we might observe, not even as a figment of our imagination. What it means cannot be adequately meant by us, for it transcends our faculties of imagining and thinking. . . . Its unveiling would either be the delusion of a pseudo-knowledge, causing us to neglect what we can do, or it would be truth--and then it would mean our transformation into other beings that we humans are.

In the reorganization of my own understanding of creation and in the beginnings of an exploration of the disparate worlds of religion and science, I find Jaspers' ideas penetrating and reasonable. And though I am not yet sure what to do with the book of Genesis, nor how the fact of its deeply theological and symbolic nature overturns (or, what is more likely, deepens and expands) safe hermeneutical categories of genre, I believe it is not altogether stupid to propose a hypothesis.

It is my feeling that placing the cosmogenic sections in the early chapters of Genesis more firmly into their Ancient Near Eastern setting will reveal them to be not a "scientific" explanation, but a thorough going theological critique of the cosmogenic cosmologies and mythologies of the nations by firm assertion of the first commandment, and by critique I mean the simultaneously dual nature of judgment, which is to damn and to save.

creation; genesis; science and religion; Karl Jaspers

dug up from 5 Dec. 01

2007-09-07T00:10:00.000-04:00

Going through some old files tonight, I came across this personal note from early December, 2001. Reading it now, it seems like good grist for the mill (meaning, good for blogging.)

This morning, while reading the preface to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, I hit upon the idea for a new form of communicating theology. This form employs a style analogous to Wittgenstein's remarks, in that it is composed of short paragraphs. These follow one another in a long chain clustered around the same subject. The chain can also be broken by a sudden leap from one topic to another.

My intuition says that this form would respect the apophatic nature of Christian spirituality. It would suggest that Christianity is not simply a religion of texts but also of prayer, which exists outside definition. Its patron saint is the German mystic and priest [name illegible], and the various form of table talk popular since Luther. A helpful metaphor is also a scrapbook. When viewing a scrapbook, there is a sense of story, of movement, of life, but there are no pretentions about capturing the entire dimensionality of that life itself. Rather, the life is attested to by photographs. People sharing the experience of viewing the scrapbook together tell stories and reminisce, making connections between people and events in the past and present. Indeed, the best photos draw these connections from the viewer. Like loosely formed poetic images, imposed and creative meanings are welcome. The hope is that by stimulating dialogue, the remarks become a vehicle for theological impulses. They are midwives for theological contemplation.

I wonder if even the construction of these remarks is not done in a different way than is university theology today. University theology is thesis, body, conclusion held together by argument and adorned with bibliography and footnote.

This style, avoiding such ornaments, would be minimalist. The writer wants to only provide enough--and no more--to evoke and stimulate the reader. Footnotes and citations are too intrustive. They restrict interpretive power to the past.

This is not to say that this form is the only method for theology. For most types of theological argumentation, it doesn't work--but it may work for some.

I propose a system of doctrinal remarks stretching to no more than thirty pages.

[This proposal reminds me very much of remarks made in my post on Emile Cioran's use of aphorism.]

theological method; aphorism.

Evolution, providence, and the political

2007-08-29T18:15:00.000-04:00

Again, I'm going to go against copyright for a little while and reproduce a large chunk of a really fascinating review article by James Krueger in The Notre Dame Philosophical Review. Krueger is reviewing the book, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (Oxford University Press, 2007) by Philip Kitcher.

"Kitcher argues that the reason so many find evolutionary theory so disturbing is that it truly is incompatible with a certain kind of religion, what he calls providentialist religion, which involves "belief that the universe has been created by a Being who has a great design, a Being who cares for his creatures, who observes the fall of every sparrow and who is especially concerned with humanity" (122-123). Evolution presents two problems for such religious views. First, it makes suffering an essential part of the world. It forces us to suppose that "a providential Creator . . . has constructed a shaggy-dog story, a history of life that consists of a three-billion-year curtain raiser to the main event, in which millions of sentient beings suffer, often acutely, and that the suffering is not a by-product but constitutive of the script the Creator has chosen to write" (124). Second, all providentialist religions accept certain truths about the supernatural (for example, asserting the existence of some god). Such claims, the argument goes, are simply not subject to rational evaluation and as such there can be no reason to prefer one supernaturalist story to another. Thus the basis for accepting any particular religion disappears. Kitcher contends that these kinds of arguments are at the heart of the enlightenment critique of religion, a broader set of arguments that the debate over evolution must be situated within, and that this critique is devastating for providentialist religions.

. . . .

"It does seem apparent that no amount of scientific response will silence creationist challenges, suggesting that the mistake that drives such arguments must be found elsewhere than in the scientific detail. Here, however, is where Kitcher's approach ultimately becomes counterproductive, for like other contemporary critics of religion, he is unable to take seriously that (providentialist) religious faith could be compatible with rational discourse, that religious believers could have reasons for what they believe. All it could possibly be is a way of satisfying some deep psychological need. If the enlightenment critique of religion is correct, then there can be no rational dialogue about the supernatural, all there can be is unthinking commitment to certain truths. If that is all that is available, then religious claims must be excluded from public debate, they cannot serve as the basis for defending commitments within the context of modern democratic societies (if such debates are supposed to proceed according to reason). In this sense, modern creationists can be understood not as failing to learn the lesson of the enlightenment critique, but of learning it all too well. Accepting the absolute division of rationality and faith, the route to assuring space for religious belief becomes making all beliefs essentially based on simple commitment, not rational defense. Hence, modern intelligent design comes to take on an essentially negative form, highlighting the limits of scientific rationality. There is no longer the need to defend a positive case, for no case can be made on rational grounds. All we have is commitment. All we have is political manipulation and indoctrination. There is no rational basis for any belief, no reasoned dialogue, so anything goes (this is the source of the winks in the direction of Genesis creationism). Thus, the public focuses on evolution being "just a theory," and attention turns to public schools, political action, calls for "equal time" and the like. Kitcher is right: the arguments don't really matter, because arguments can't matter; all that remains is political activity. Religious believers come, perhaps unwittingly, to accept a kind of postmodern critique of pretensions to enlightenment rationality once they are denied the possibility of rational participation in the public sphere by defenders of such pictures of rationality. Once this happens, the prospect for a reasoned resolution to the debate disappears. All there can be is political activity.

"If this story is right, the way forward is to take very seriously the kinds of theological and philosophical arguments Kitcher takes up in his last chapter, and respond to them with careful, rational arguments defending religious faith, not to abandon rational dialogue about substantive (providentialist) religious claims. This means religious persons must move beyond unthinking acceptance and build on rich traditions of theological and philosophical reflection, and critics of religion must recognize the role of reason in such reflections and engage them on that basis. By rebuilding the long tradition of rational engagement with religion, we can give religious believers a voice that eliminates the driving force behind such ultimately skeptical arguments (exclusion from rational public discourse)."

Philip Kitcher; James Krueger; evolution; Darwinism; Intelligent Design; Enlightenment; science and religion.

Integrating Davies and Weinberger

2007-08-15T18:32:00.000-04:00

I found two interviews on Salon today that really got my brain going. Unfortunately, I can only post the chunks that inspired me. Over time I'll whittle them away so I'm not participating in copyright infringement and begin to add my own thoughts. Anyway, here are the two interviews:

Steve Paulson “We are Meant to Be Here” Salon July 3, 2007. Interview with physicist Paul Davies.

There are some obvious questions about the big bang. Can we really talk about it coming out of nothing? Don't we have to ask, wasn't there something that caused the big bang?

Many people fall into that trap. But Augustine, in the fifth century, pointed out that the world was made with time, not in time. I think he got this exactly right. Of course, most people think that there must have been a previous event that caused whatever event we're talking about. But this is simply not the case. We now know that time itself is part of the physical universe. And when we talk about the big bang in a simplified model, then we're talking about not only matter and energy coming into being, but space and time as well. So there was no time before the big bang. The big bang was the origin of time.

People want to ask, what happened before the big bang, or what caused the big bang? But in a simple picture where there's just one universe, the big bang can be the ultimate origin of space and time as well as matter and energy. So unless the universe has always existed, you're faced with the problem that time itself comes into existence. And any attempt to talk about causation has to be couched in terms of something that comes after the beginning and not before the beginning ... because there was no before.

There are some obvious religious implications to all of this. My sense is that a lot of Jews and Christians are actually quite delighted with the big bang -- the idea that the universe was created out of nothing. It seems to correspond to the story of creation in Genesis.

I think there's a misunderstanding by religious people if they think that creation ex nihilo is anything like the big bang. People misunderstand what creation ex nihilo is about. It's not that there existed a God within time who was there for all eternity and then at some particular moment, on a whim, decided, "I'm going to make a universe" and then pressed a button that made the big bang. That raises exactly the objection that Augustine was addressing: What was God doing before making the universe? If the universe was a good idea, why wasn't it made an infinite time ago?

I might also say that it's always a bad idea for people to decide what to believe on religious grounds and then to cherry-pick the scientific facts to fit, because these facts are likely to change. And we may find that the big-bang theory goes out of favor at some point in the future. And then what? Religious people will have backed the wrong horse. So it's fraught with danger to seize on these cosmological ideas. But I personally think we can draw the conclusion that we live in a universe that's deeply imbued with meaning and purpose.

You want to stay away from God.

I want to stay away from a pre-existing cosmic magician who is there within time, for all eternity, and then brings the universe into being as part of a preconceived plan. I think that's just a naive, silly idea that doesn't fit the leanings of most theologians these days and doesn't fit the scientific facts. I don't want that. That's a horrible idea. But I see no reason why there can't be a teleological component in the evolution of the universe, which includes things like meaning and purpose. So instead of appealing to something outside the universe -- a completely unexplained being -- I'm talking about something that emerges within the universe. It's a more natural view. We're trying to construct a picture of the universe which is based thoroughly on science but where there is still room for something like meaning and purpose. So people can see their own individual lives as part of a grand cosmic scheme that has some meaning to it. We're not just, as Steven Weinberg would say, pointless accidents in a universe that has no meaning or purpose. I think we can do better than that.

Do you think one reason the multiverse theory has become so popular in recent years is to keep the whole idea of God at bay?

Yes.

Because a lot of physicists seem to be at a loss for how to explain this cosmic fine-tuning. But with the multiverse, you can say there are an infinite number of universes and we just happen to be lucky to live in one that supports life.

There's no doubt that the popularity of the multiverse is due to the fact that it superficially gives a ready explanation for why the universe is bio-friendly. Twenty years ago, people didn't want to talk about this fine-tuning because they were embarrassed. It looked like the hand of a creator. Then along came the possibility of a multiverse, and suddenly they're happy to talk about it because it looks like there's a ready explanation. Only those universes in which there can be life get observed, and all the rest go unobserved. Notice, however, that it's far from a complete explanation of existence. You still have to make a huge number of assumptions. You need a universe-generating mechanism to give you all these universes. You need a set of laws that can be scattered across these universes, distributed in some way, according to some algorithm. You're no better off than saying there is an unexplained God.

Even the scientific explanations for the universe are rooted in a particular type of theological thinking. They're trying to explain the world by appealing to something outside of it. And I think the time has come to move beyond that. We can -- if we try hard enough -- come up with a complete explanation of existence from within the universe, without appealing to something mystical or magical lying beyond it. I think the scientists who are anti-God but appeal to unexplained sets of laws or an unexplained multiverse are just as much at fault as a naive theist who says there's a mysterious, unexplained God.

You say in your book that there's another explanation for how the universe is structured. You suggest we may actually live in a fake universe. We could be part of an "ingeniously contrived virtual reality show," as in the "Matrix" movies. Do you really think that's a possibility?

Clearly, it's a logical possibility that this entire universe could be a simulation, if we imagine that in a hundred or a thousand years we'd be able to make computers that are sufficiently powerful to simulate consciousness. You need only to believe that consciousness is ultimately a physical process, which in principle we can mimic. Then we clearly have the possibility of building a machine and feeding in electrical impulses to produce this or that sensation. So this raises the obvious question, is there a real world out there? And how do I know that it's not all a gigantic virtual reality show, with my own mental experiences being created by some super-duper computer, so that I'm just living inside this machine? Now, there are a number of philosophers who are enamored of this idea. How would we know from within the simulation that it is a simulation and not the reality? If it's a good simulation, we couldn't know. So we must be open to the possibility that this whole world is in fact a gigantic simulation.

Near the end of "The Cosmic Jackpot," you say that all these explanations about the universe are probably wrong, and "Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limits of the human intellect." Do you think future scientists will ever resolve these questions?

If future scientists are human beings, they may be stuck with the same problems that we have. The way we think, the way we like to analyze problems, the categories that we define -- like cause and effect, space-time and matter, meaning and purpose -- are really human categories that cannot be separated from our evolutionary heritage. We have to face up to the fact that there may be fundamental limitations just from the way our brains have been put together. So we could have reached our own human limits.

Scott Rosenberg, “Delight in disorder” Salon May 23, 2007. Interview with David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous.

You've described your book as an "argument with Aristotle." Here you are, it's a book about "the new digital disorder," and we're arguing with the ancients. How did that happen?

Our culture's been arguing with him for a long time. The argument is, whether there is a right order of the universe -- one right order. Aristotle didn't come up with the idea, but he was the person who articulated it so forcefully that for 2,000 years he was simply believed. This is an order in which everything has a place, and to know what something is is to know that place, and in knowing it you're seeing what makes it what it is. That's why it can't be in two places on the chart, on the diagram -- because then it's two things, and that's chaos.

You also need to know within a category, things are different from the other things in that category -- this is the genus/species idea. It's a deep and fascinating notion -- that to be something is to both be like something else and be unlike it. And it works really well -- it allows you to construct a universe. And it allows you to keep some things implicit. We know this is a bird without also having to think, oh, bird, that's a type of animal, oh, and animal therefore is a type of thing, and things all have these properties. That's one of the mysteries of knowing -- that we don't know everything simultaneously all the time.

So we have this definition, and it's clear and it's precise. The entire system is beautiful and balanced and harmonious. And this is the vision that we carried with us for a long, long time. But we've been shaking it off for generations now -- it's not like, the Web came along and suddenly we were free of Aristotle.

Multiculturalism, relativism, postmodernism -- all these things are disputing the notion of a single order. The Web just slaps us in the face with the fact that there's lots and lots of ways of slicing up the world.

But how we slice it up, how we cluster it, how things connect, depends on what we're trying to do. It's an amazing tool for consciousness to have, to be able to see the world according to the relevant attributes based upon a project -- that's what lets us survive, and do more. But that places the clustering of the universe, to some large degree, on our interests and our cares. Which is, from the Aristotelian point of view, to put it in the realm of whim and madness.

This is also why it seems to me so important that we're doing this socially. One of the mistakes that we've made in our history is to think that if there isn't a single order that's right, then it's up to every person to make it up for herself. And that's what we call madness.

Paul Davies; Steve Paulson; David Weinberger; Scott Rosenberg; cosmology; creation; Augustine; the Big Bang; Aristotle; ontology; taxonomy; the Great Chain of Being; networks; duality; mind/body problem; science; Genesis.

I'm late to the confessing meme

2007-07-27T18:48:00.000-04:00

Forgive me, but I'm at least a month late to jump in on the confessing meme--though I have enjoyed reading the confessions of others. This is a start, and I hope to add to it until I've confessed everything that seems proper.

I confess that I think the sturm und drang over Darwinian evolution is the nasty product of a faulty understanding of metaphysical transcendence and of the relationship between the triune God and the world subsumed under the category "Creation." Therefore, I carefully embrace Darwinian evolution as the best biological science that we have, including an old earth, the fossil record, and the mechanism of natural selection.

Further, I confess that I find Intelligent Design to be an embarrassing return to the argument from design, also called the teleological argument. In my mind, not only does it attempt to resurrect that argument at any cost (where the designer could be a god, an alien, a computer, an invisible force?), it represents a theology of glory, and so is no help to either science or theology.

I confess that I think the universe is enfused, baptized, and besotted by the kenotic agape of the Trinity, its creator. This is, perhaps, a pseudo-scientific way of repeating Rahner's rule, as well as saying that history, human or otherwise, is the love story of the relationships of the triune hypostases stretched out upon the wood of time and space. But note that I am also saying that, like mathematics (physics), ethics is encoded into the deep structure of the universe. There is a morality at the very heart of it all, and that morality is trinitarian, it is kenotic, it is Christological, it is universal. And if, then, we should ever meet or discover in this world a being from another, it too would agree that "Thou shalt not kill" and be judged accordingly.

I confess that I suspect at least the first half of Genesis to be closer in genre to a saga or myth whose theological repercussions may still be said to properly inform the edifice of biblical theology.

I confess that I am completely skeptical about anyone attempting to use God language outside of the context of a lightly-held but rigorous hermeneutic.

I confess that I find myself and my fellow human beings so governed and awash in the power of metaphor that some days I barely know if I know anything at all and stew in a kind of mental skepticism. An addendum: that I know far too little about the proper history and place of the via negativa in historical systematics.

I confess that I have yet to hear an argument against women in the pulpit that fairly takes into account the cultural and historical circumstances of the apostles. And, as an addendum, many of the male pastors I’ve met have been egoistic blowhards.

I confess that I find the soteriological argument between free will and the sovereignty of God to be excruciatingly boring. In my mind, the call of the Kingdom of God is primarily doxological and ethical. Orthodoxy in every detail is of secondary importance--not of no importance, but of secondary importance.

I confess that I'm quite suspicious about the wisdom that comes from psychology, and especially in its affect on religious literature, anthropological understanding, and preaching.

I confess that after nearly twenty years and two degrees, I still wonder just what following Jesus should look like, and, I’m ashamed to say, I irresistibly resemble far more the middlebrow bourgeois culture of white America than I do a disciple of the crucified God.

I confess that I don’t know any poor people, and up to this point have been unwilling to change my and my family’s routine in order to do so.

I confess that it makes no sense to me why so many models in theological metaphysics require divine self-limitation. Beside the impossibility of demarcating or limiting a personality that is by definition unlimited and undemarcated, that entire line of thought seems begotten of the limitations of human imagination.

I confess that I should read Calvin, but wind up reading Luther instead.

I confess that the majority of what passes for Christian culture sounds and feels to me like so much voodoo—far more about personal lusts for power than about the Kingdom of God and true religion. I suspect that what true discipleship demands is far more simple, and far more pervasive: not a new font, but a new word.

I confess that I believe the New Perspective on Paul / Third Quest for the Historical Jesus people have the better argument, and that the resistance to that argument is due far more to the human desire to protect our personal projects than to an honest thirst to discover the best hermeneutical horizon possible for understanding what the triune God is doing in the world.

the imago Dei and the Happy Life

2007-06-12T23:51:00.001-04:00

Genesis chapter one reads:

Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." (vv. 26-28 NRSV)

This text is the origin of the biblical and theological understanding of human beings as made in the image of God (imago Dei). It is a doctrine with profound implications for our understanding of the meaning and value of human life. It is also a doctrine about relationships: the relationship between God and humanity; the relationship between human beings and the creation; and the relationship between the sexes—“in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

What I want to do here is to summarize a chapter entitled “The Image of God: A Theological Summary” from the book Created in God’s Image (Paternoster Press, 1986) by the late Reformed theologian Anthony A. Hoekema. And why am I doing this? Well, I find that over time I refer to this book quite a bit. It was my first introduction to the centrality of the imago Dei, and continues to be a touchstone to which I return. And the overall point is that the re-creation of the image of God in human beings is the goal of human life and the recipe for human happiness. Psychology has a definition. Aristotle had a definition. So does Scripture, and that definition is the imago Dei.

The Image of God: A Theological Summary

The entire constitution, every bit of a human being, mirrors and represents God. As a mirror reflects, so people should reflect God. When a human being is what he or she ought to be, others should be able to look and see something of God: something of God’s love, God’s kindness, and God’s goodness. Human beings also represent God. As God’s ambassadors to the world, humanity represents the authority of God, speaks for God, and should be wholly about the furtherance of God’s program in the world. And no one should neglect the body in this, for the body is absolutely necessary on both counts.

Structural and Functional Aspects

Does the image of God refer to something innate in the person—to what people are—or does it refer to actions—to what people do? Theologians have stressed one or the other aspect over the centuries.

Those who place the image in something innate, something in the structure of the human person have cherry-picked various capacities: reason, for example, or morality, religious sensitivity, responsibility, free will, and even aesthetics and creativity. Really, though, it is all of these. By the image of God in the broader or structural sense, we mean the entire endowments of gifts and capacities that inform what human beings do.

Now in the twentieth century, the stress has been on functional, on what people do; on human beings as they worship, serve, love, etc. Relationality is the key word; people are incorrigibly related, both to one another and to God. People aren’t just what they are, but are also what they do. This addresses a narrower slice of the human being, the relational slice, and so it is absolutely ethical, concerned chiefly with relationships. That means, of course, that in every way it should be informed and governed by the character of the triune God, who is relational in his very being.

Hoekema argues that both is and does, structure and function, should be taken together to circumscribe the whole of what is meant by the image of God. Yet, the structure he takes to be secondary and the functioning as primary. What we have (structure) is given for a purpose (function), and so it is the function which is more important (and it was the function that was lost).

God has created us in his image so that we may carry out a task, fulfill a mission, pursue a calling. To enable us to perform that task, God has endowed us with many gifts--gifts that reflect something of his greatness and glory. To see man as the image of God is to see both the task and the gifts. But the task is primary; the gifts are secondary. The gifts are the means for fulfilling the task. (73)

The biblical data is quite clear: even after the fall, the image of God remained in humankind, but it was also lost. And this division between structure and function allows us to see just how this could be. For the structure remained unchanged, but the function was twisted, broken, and perverted. Human beings were no longer related to God, and so, when that chief relationship left, its straightening and informing effect on all other acts and relationships was taken, too. Indeed, what makes sin so serious is precisely the fact that humanity now uses God-given and God-imaging powers and gifts to do things that are an affront to its maker. The image of God is not lost, but marred in fallen human beings—and that damage must be renewed even as the relationship is renewed.

Christ as the True Image of God

Jesus Christ is the image of God par exellence (Col. 1:15). Looking at him, we see what human beings as the image of God should be like. Obviously there are aspects to Jesus that are removed from us. Not many persons have joined to their human nature one that is fully divine. Yet, this divine nature doesn't really come into play here. We aren't asked to be God, but to image him, and so the human Jesus, being truly and completely human, is not removed from us. And what is imago about Jesus is not reason or intelligence, but, as Hoekema points out, love in action. Hoekema plots this in 3 directions.

Jesus was wholly directed toward God, (Matt. 26:39).

Jesus was wholly directed toward the neighbor, (Mark 10:45; John 15:13).

Jesus rules over nature, (Hoekema refers to Jesus's miracle-power over nature and the demonic).

These three directions prove quite helpful in our developing understanding. First, we saw that the imago takes in the complete human being both structurally and functionally. And now we see the whole person in action along three broad relationships. "In sum, from looking at Jesus Christ, the perfect image of God, we learn that the proper functioning of the image includes being directed toward God, being directed toward the neighbor, and ruling over nature" (75). (All three of these relationships can be found in our Genesis passage, and I hope you'll take a second and re-read it with them in mind.)

Human beings in This Threefold Relationship

Hoekema spend a few pages detailing each of the three relationships just mentioned, but we don't have the space for that. Instead, I'm going to pull out the best material from his discussion of each one.

To be a human being is to be directed toward God. Human life is entirely lived coram Deo--as before the face of God, in love, trust, obedience to him, in prayer and worship, thanksgiving and in public, familial, corporate, and even political action. This vertical relationship is basic to a Christian anthropology. Indeed, here is where we pick up that thread of criticism with psychological well-being.

All views of man that do not take their starting-point in the doctrine of creation and that therefore look upon him as an autonomous being who can arrive at what is true and right wholly apart from God or from God's revelation in Scripture are to be rejected as false. (76)

Human beings can never be "man-in-himself" (G. C. Berkouwer). We are responsible to God, and do all to and for the glory of God.

To be a human being is to be directed toward one's neighbor. "Male and female he created them," that's what the Genesis passage says. People are not complete in themselves, they need others. The imago doesn't exist alone, but in community with others--and though the marriage bond is discussed in this passage in Genesis, Hoekema and all other theologians do not limit the image to covenantal/sexual union. Jesus, after all, was never married. And in the life to come, when humanity will be totally perfected, there will be no marriage (Matt. 22:30). Human beings are incomplete apart from others.

Man's relatedness to others means that every human being should not view his or her gifts and talents as an avenue for personal aggrandizement, but as a means whereby he or she can enrich the lives of others. It means that we should be eager to help others, heal their hurts, supply their needs, bear their burdens, and share their joys, loving others as ourselves. It means that every human being has a right to be accepted by others, to belong to others, and to be loved by others. . . . Man's acceptance of and love for others is an assential aspect of his humanness. (78)

Note that here we discover an argument against racism or sexism that isn't rooted in 1960's-era rights-speak.

To be a human being is to rule over nature. The main thing here is that dominion does not mean what you think it means. We hear that as absolute power over, and for the purposes of fulfilling our wants. But, remember, the restored image of God always takes God's desires into account. The Hebrew roots behind the words in Genesis translated "subdue" and "have dominion" are more about gardening, shepherding, and cultivating than they are about the industrial revolution. And Hoekema is careful to say that this Genesis mandate includes the development of human culture "not only agriculture, horticulture, and animal husbandry, but also science, technology, and art." Theologians today are making much of the green-aspect of this part of the image; we should take care of the planet we're on, its flora, fauna, and wildlife. It is a better basis for ecological stewardship than arguments that either equate human beings with animal life, so that we should conserve because everyone has a right to a piece of the pie, or that try and motivate a green attitude by painting picture of ecological apocalypse. The Christian needs neither argument, but only that God be glorified in our use of his creation.

All three of these relationships are interrelated, and only human beings operate simultaneously in all three. They also reflect God's own being. Humanity's responsibility to and conscious fellowship with God reflects God's own love and fellowship with humanity. The relationship of human beings with others reflects God's own inter-Trinitarian life. And humanity's stewardship of the earth reflect God's own supreme dominion (see Psalm 8.5). The image of God flows out from human beings along these three planes, and it is within them that we perform the image.

Anyway, now we turn to the imago Dei as it has existed historically. In order to understand the imago, we have to understand it in the light of creation, fall, and redemption. Remember, though, all three of the above relationships exist at each stage.

The Original Image
Hoekema, following in the footsteps of theologians before him, wants us to know that human beings were not created as consummate, perfect images of God. They were, as it were, "in a state of integrity" but had not fully developed in the image of God. Theirs was a provisional existence that awaited a probationary test for completion. At this stage, see, there was still the possibility of sin. They were able not to sin (posse non peccare), but were not yet not able to sin (non posse peccare). Their image of God existed at a boundary, and God's command "not to eat of it" stood in the way of its perfection.

The Perverted Image
Alas, they sinned. The fall into sin does not annhilate the imago but perverts it. "The image in its structural sense was still there--man's gifts, endowments, and capacities were not destroyed by the Fall--but man now began to use these gifts in ways that were contrary to God's will" (83). In the place of the relationship to God, there appeared idols (Rom. 1:20-23), perversions of man's capacity for worshipping God. In the place of a loving relationship toward others, those relationships are selfish manipulations, or indifference, or alienation. "Hell is other people," (Jean-Paul Sartre).

He uses his gifts of speech to tell lies instead of the truth, to hurt his neighbor instead of helping him. Artistic abilities are often prostituted in the service of lust, and God-given sexual powers are used for perverse and debasing goals. Pornography and drugs have become big businesses; their purpose is not to help others but to exploit them. The motto of many in today's world seems to be, 'Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost.' Man is still inescapably related to others, but instead of loving others he is inclined to hate them."

And, finally, human beings now exploit the earth for selfish purposes, exploiting and stripping it, polluting it and using its secrets to wage war. Human culture--literature, art, science, tecnology--magnifies the whole, praising it and its achievements instead of God.

The image is still there, but malfunctioning. Crippled all the way down. Corruptio optimi pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst.

The Renewed Image
It is the redemptive process, the ordo salutis that describes the restoration of the image. Human beings are set right again, so that they can properly function in those three relationships. All three persons of the Trinity are intimately involved. The ordo salutis, then, is this (and remember, though we list them they are actually a unitary work of God often occuring simultaneously to each other):

regeneration: by the preaching of the Word, the Spirit acts to make dead people alive again, placing them into living union with Christ. This is the cause of faith, and the beginning of every other part of the order of salvation.

conversion: confession of faith and act of repentance in the believer

justification: an instantaneous act whereby the sin and guilt of a believer are imputed to Christ and the righteousness of Christ is imputed to the believer. The believer is made righteous.

adoption: believers in Christ become sons and daughters of God, joint-heirs with Christ of every blessing, with all the corresponding rights and priviledges.

sanctification: Pimarily the work of the Holy Spirit operating through Word and Sacraments, the restored image of God is manifested to greater and greater degrees.

glorification: The image is perfected in the new creation, and human beings, now dwelling in perfected bodies, no longer have to worry about sin, being now non passe peccare, not able to sin.

The renewal of the image of God involves a broad, comprehensive vision of the Christian view of man. The process of sanctification affects every aspect of life: man's relationship to God, to others, and to the entire creation. The restoration of the image does not concern only religious piety in the narrow sense, or witnessing to people about Christ, or "soul-saving" activities; in its fullest sense it involves the redirection of all of life. . . And is discovered in its richest form in Christ together with his church, or in the church as the body of Christ. (88, 89)

Finally, in this section, Hoekema spends some time making sure his reader understands that the renewal of the imago, though primarily accomplished by the Holy Spirit, is also a cooperation. We are encouraged to put to death our old self, to cast off sin, and to pursue holiness. The renewal of the image is something in which we take an active part. While in this present life, believers are genuinely new but not yet totally new. The image is breaking out through believers into the world, but it is not yet seen competely and perfectly in them.

The Perfected Image
The imago Dei in humanity will only shine out in perfected brilliance when believers are finally glorified. And glorification is not a return to Eden, but a fuller form of human being. Adam and Eve could never have been said to "partake of the divine nature." Just as Christ has been raised and glorified, so those in him will be raised and glorified--their image patterned after His. We can't say much about what this state will be like, but we can say that it will still include all three of those above-mentioned relationships. Hoekema goes to great lengths to stress a new creation that is full of variety and expression, creativity and energy, a world in which the imago Dei as it finds fulfillment in the whole of the perfected human race acts perfectly along all three of those dimensions.

In the life to come we shall see the image of God not only in its perfection but also in its completion. All of God's people, from every age and every place, resurrected and glorified, will then be present on the new earth, with all the God-reflecting gifts that hae been given them. And all of these gifts, now completely purged of sin and imperfection, will be used by man for the first time in a perfect way. Then, throughout eternity, God will be glorified by the worship, service, and praise of his image-bearers in a scintillating and totally flawless recreation of his own marvelous virtues. (101)

Concluding Observations
Hoekema's conclusing observations amount to three points. First, that we must always treat people in light of their destiny. Quoting C. S. Lewis: "It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit." And this should drive us to corporate holiness and also to mission in the face of perdition. I like this quote by John Calvin:

We are not to consider that men merit of themselves but to look upon the image of God in all men, to which we owe all honor and love. Therefore, whatever man you meet who needs your aid, you have no reason to refuse to help him. Say, "he is contemptible and worthless"; but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image. Say that he does not deserve even your least effort for his sake; but the image of God, which recommends him to you, is worthy of your giving yourself and all your possessions. (Institutes III.7.6)

Second, that the imago Dei should deeply inform how the church is and acts. "Our concern in evangelizing people is not just to "save people's souls," but to restore the image of God to its proper functioning in all of life, to the greater glory of God. And third, that sexual difference does not cease in the new creation. Not that sexual procreation will continue--Jesus was plain on this one--but that our sexuality, such an intimate part of our individuality, will not only be retained but enriched, and that the future community will demonstrate the complex wholeness of men and women properly related to each other. This is a strange ending, but one that affirms rather than denies God's creation, and though I don't understand in a logical way why God would continue male and female into the next world, I see that a neutered humanity is no real humanity at all.

The doctrine of the image of God touches so many aspects of the Christian life. The imago to me is the central "why" behind so much of Christian ethics and ecclesiology. Understanding this gives great value in seeing so many disparate ideas congealing underneath one great head. It is Christian anthropology, and it does not deny, or limit, but fulfills everything about human being and life, affirming human beings in their physical, psychological, spiritual, economic, cultural, and indeed in every portion of their lives.

imago Dei; anthropology; theosis; divinization; ethics; Aristotle; virtues.

all that from a book review?

2006-11-17T12:04:00.001-05:00

A few bits jotted down from a book review by Jerry Walls, professor of philosophy of religion at Asbury Seminary, in the 6/21 2006 edition of The Asbury Journal:

Quoting Kevin Vanhoozer's essay "Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture and Hermeneutics" he writes, "Biblical interpretation is the soul of theology. Truth is the ultimate accolade that we accord an interpretation. Christian theology therefore succeeds or fails in direct proportion to its ability to render true interpretations of the word of God written" (106).[1] Wells then goes on to say,

Of course much contemporary hermeneutical theory denies that there are any such privileged interpretations that can be recognized as true ones, or doubts if we could ever determine what they are. . . . Vanhoozer takes seriously the evangelical doctrine of biblical inerrancy but rejects what he calls a "cheap inerrancy" that would use the doctrine to sidestep legitimate issues of interpretation. (106)

Moving on, Walls discusses an essay entitled "The Rule of Love and the Testimony of the Spirit in Contemporary Biblical Hermeneutics" by Mark Wallace. He writes:

Wallace's attempt to make sense of scripture has led him to the conviction that "discerning the theological truth of the Bible is largely a constructive rather than a descriptive enterprise." The thesis that he defends is "that biblical truth is the ethical performance of what the Spirit's interior testimony is prompting the reader to do in the light of her encounter with scriptural texts." As a practical example of his method of interpretation, he offers as a case study an examination of the "pressing" issues of the ordination of homosexual persons and the blessing of the union of homosexual couples. He suggests that if we take the "Spirit-inspired ideal of love and hospitality toward others as the hermeneutical lodestar" that should guide us in our encounters with scripture, then we will be inclined to accept practicing homosexuals as ministers and bless their unions. (109)

When he gets to Alan Padgett, Wells says

[Padgett] sees "the act of interpretation primarily (not entirely) as the discovery of something that is there in the text rather than the creation of something new." . . . Beginning with the broad notion that truth is "the mediated disclosure of being," Christ is the truth because he is the incarnation of God's very being, and the Bible is true because it mediates Christ to use through its texts. (110)

In the conclusion of his review, Wells takes to task the supposed humility of postmoderns who desire to remain so tentative about truth claims. He asks if this is really humility.

In his Introduction to Christianity, the newly elected Pope observed that "it is nothing short of a fundamental certainty" for contemporary people that we cannot know God himself, which contemporary people somehow understand as "humility in the presence of the infinite." The irony here is not merely in the inversion of what we can take as certain, but also in the ground of humility. Whereas classical Christianity would say humility is required precisely because of what we know about God and ourselves through revelation, [2] humility now is understood as a concession that we cannot really know anything about God. (112)

And I like what he says later on:

As Plantinga points out, the Cartesian standard for certainty and knowledge is an unrealistic one, and many people have made the unfortunate mistake of throwing out claims to knowledge and certainty because they cannot meet this standard. (Ibid.)

Though disjointed, and despite Dr. Walls’ overt suspicion of postmodernism, I find these assorted thoughts helpful bricks in the construction of my own understanding of the pervasive, hermeneutical tradition whose skeleton gives shape and orders the motion of that thing called "a Christian worldview," which is in itself the product of a Christian mind. I believe that Plantinga was right. As my friend John G. would say, "it is about knowledge versus certainty." Christians have knowledge, but we don't have Cartesian certainty. For, if the rumors be true, no one does. The human world is thoroughly hermeneutical--interpretation all the way down as Caputo says--for the scientist as much as for theologian.

Nevertheless, some hermeneutics are better than others. The quote from Padgett gets at this, as is my own renewed appreciation of the fundamental aspect of the logos doctrine.[3] The disjunction between hermeneutical systems is absolutely pervasive--that's where that quote about humility comes from. I'm discovering this same sort of thing in other place, where the obvious meaning of a word turns to be something very different when seen in the context of the Judeo-Christian hermeneutical system.[4] This is true for words like self control, faith, love, hope. Hermeneutical systems, then, can be radically different in meaning though syntactically quite similiar. I can hardly believe how pervasive and thorough-going these differences can be. I feel I'm swinging over an infinite abysss when I glimpse the cultural collusions and the social impotence of the churches. I scarcely know if it is possible any longer to really live anything like the Christian life. Maybe the only thing you can do is ask for God's mercy as you marinate and unwittingly participate in the golden-calf-collusion of the world systems? Maybe we just have to wait for a better age, when it can be possible again? Maybe some future Ambrose, Augustine, Benedict, or Luther will arise who can not only glimpse the real critique a properly understood Christian hermeneutic makes upon the world, but can hold it strongly and clearly enough to demarcate it plainly in word and life so that the example, then, can be better emulated. I included the bit from Mark Wallace. When you begin to see the arrived changes at the slightest demarcations in hermeneutical method, the differences are often astounding, and well-explain why, in my own ECUSA denomination, for example, members of the same tradition come out on such different ends. I think there is some truth in Wallace, but I believe that you cherry pick your "Spirit's interior testimony," without a rigorous historical-critical discipline which attempts as much as humanly possible to respect the author's original intent, however off we may, in fact, be (and I think in most cases we don't go too wide of the mark.)[5] At a recent conference, one of the speakers, Fred Dallmayr of the University of Notre Dame, defined postmodernism in a very helpful way. He said, "Postmodernism means that particularity is being taken seriously again and that no particularity should be allowed to become a generality." I like postmodernism because it takes the legs out from under scientific arrogance, and it reflects to a great degree my experience as a creature seeking understanding. I don't, however, follow it to the end so that no particularity can be a generality. I think one did and is: Jesus the logos. But it isn't that we grasp this incarnated-now-glorified Messiah-God as we would grasp a syllogism. Our grasp is a hermeneutical grasp, and even that is enabled and perhaps even directed by the illuminative, regenerating power of the Spirit working through the medium of canonical Scripture and sacrament, primarily, and ecclesial ministration, secondarily.[6] I've gone on long enough. These are notes are for my own benefit, anyway. I have much further to go, and perhaps have forgotten some important point.
__________

[1] Church historian Rowan Greer in his essay in Early Biblical Interpretation has claimed that the debate about how scripture is to be interpreted, especially how the OT is to be read, definitively shaped the more famous debates about Jesus, the Trinity, and Salvation.

[2] Luci Shaw, Breath for the Bones. "If the gospel is foundational, out of it will naturally flow an art that does not deny its foundation but assumes it. If it is a given, we do not need to be reminded of its existence at every point. If our lives are centered in God's reality, we can risk working out from that center in new directions. And if the work of art truly reflects like experience, then it is itself a small facet of the truth of which Christ is author and co-municator. That is the benison of the sacramental view of life: our realization that all of creation rightly belongs in the house of faith. Put another way: the Logos, which first called the universe into being now embraces and defines it, assigning it meaning and value at every level. As C. S. Lewis said, "I believe in Christianity as I believe the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." Yet with all the phenomena of the universe to write about, we are not free agents. Because we are residents in the house of faith, we are accountable and must shape our gift responsibly to perceive and penetrate to the heart of the matters we address and reveal their true shape and significance to the human community."

[3] Marke this well and take it for a sure conclusion. when god commaundeth us in the lawe to do any thinge he commaundeth not therefore that we are able to do yt but to bryng us un to the knowledge of oureselves that we might se what we are and in what miserable state we are in and knowe our lack that thereby we shuld torne to god and to knowlege our wretchednes un to hym and to desyre him that of his mercy he wold make us that he biddeth us be…” ~ W. Tyndale, from his treatise on the Lord's Prayer

[4] Hannah Arendt grasped this problem of same word different, and perhaps hostile, outcome. Here's a quote I picked up: Arendt's phrasemaking and popularization of notions such as "totalitarianism" developed because she "wanted thoughts and words adequate to the new world and able to dissolve clichés, reject thoughtlessly received ideas, break down hackneyed analyses, expose lies and bureaucratic double talk, help people withdraw from their addiction to propagandistic images."

[5] Peter Machinist. Foreword to Hermann Gunkel, Creation and Chaos trans. K. William Whitney Jr. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), xviii. "[Hermann Gunkel, as other scholars of his late-nineteenth-century German age, believed that] to understand the meaning of a text, its language and motifs, is to understand first where they come from. it is not enough, indeed, it is misleading, to focus simply on the individual text alone, as thought it were a completely independent, free creation of its author. The text must rather be seen as one link in a complex chain of tradition; and interpretation, therefore, must try to discover how its author worked within the tradition, what conditions in his community he was responding to, and why he adapted the tradition as he did in order to produce the text that he did."

[6] Ellen F. Davis. "Introduction" from The Art of Reading Scripture ed. Ellen Davis and Richard Hays. (Eerdmans 2003). "The capacity for fruitful theological wondering resides chiefly in the imagination. Theologian Garrett Green has argued persuasively that in many instances the biblical term "heart" refers to what we call imagination. This notion wonderfully illuminates the use of that word in the eucharistic liturgy: "Lift up your hearts"--lift up your imaginations, open them toward God. Yet an aroused imagination is not in itself a holy state, for the "heart" can be healthy or perverted. Perhaps it is in tacit recognition of this fact that Anglican eucharistic worship begins with the Collect for Purity:

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name, through Christ our Lord.

The Collect for Purity introduces the Ministry of the Word. Thus we ask that when the appointed lections are read, we may be changed in order to hear them with healthy "hearts." Yet at the same time, the church understands that through the action of the Holy Spirit, "the word of the Lord" may itself be an agent of cleansing for our imaginations. Therefore, the subsequent reading of Scripture is part of God's gracious answer to the Collect for Purity." I note also a bit from an advertisement for the conference "After Ricoeur" held Oct. 20-21, 2006 at Oklahoma U: "One of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century, Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was the author of numerous works addressing the vast spectrum of human experience. His works addressed such topics as myth, language, cognition, religion, ethics, politics, law, and literature, to name only a few. These diverse subjects informed his study of the human experience, which includes the dimension of suffering in addition to action. Ricoeur came to believe that the human experience is laden with multiple layers of meaning and thus the task of understanding and organizing our world is comparable to a text. We shape its meaning through interpretation and, in so doing, discover the significance of the text as well as the meaning of our own lives."

postmodernism; hermeneutics; interpretation; logos; pneumatology; epistemology; Paul Ricoeur; Hannah Arendt; theological imagination.

the big idea

2006-10-03T20:34:00.000-04:00

The Big Idea is Christian freedom, which is the proper living out of the eschatological life and the proper dismissal of all that is not so. Pragmatic, certainly, but requiring a proper knowledge of freedom as we find it now, and in this context—and certainly not excluding the body. It is the freedom for one's neighbor and from one's religion.

eschatological freedom;

Benedict XVI praises logos

2006-09-14T14:01:00.000-04:00

Pope Benedict XVI’s September 12, 2006 lecture at a meeting with representatives of the sciences at Regensburg University said three interesting things. First, he makes the argument that the “profound harmony” of Jewish and Greek elements summed up in John’s doctrine of the logos is a good thing. Christian thinking (based on the LXX and expressed in the Greek language) did not side with Hellenism in general but with the best portions of it. The Jewish shema-confession of a monotheistic, transcendent, creator-God cuts away the idolatry from Greek metaphysics in a manner reminiscent of Socrates’s iconoclasm. John’s logos, which is “reason” at its fundamentum, “reason” which ties together God’s transcendence, God’s revelation (Deus dixit), and humanity’s ability to understand, represents a “mutual enrichment.” It is the basis by which Benedict can say,

The faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason, there exists a real analogy in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV).

This in hand, Pope Benedict takes to task those who have desired to strip out every Hellenistic element from Christian theology, which includes (though gently) the Reformers, Duns Scotus (who receives no applause), and Adolf von Harnack (who receives even less). Discretion should be exercised, he says, because, with John and the Church Fathers, “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.” So that “not to act 'with logos' is contrary to God’s nature."

Second, then, this logos-harmony defrocks any confession of a capricious God. Dun Scotus’s voluntarism, where our knowledge of God is simply what he wishes us to know (voluntas ordinata), and beyond that he is free to be or do whatever he wants, is simply not reasonable. Such a god does not act reasonably, and so he cannot be the seat of logos itself. And here Benedict does something interesting. He links Scotus’s theology with the Islamic understanding of Allah codified by eastern theologians such as Ibn Hazn who “went as far as to state that God is not bound by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.” Benedict uncovers, then, a subtle apologetic in the gospel link between the revealing, tabernacling logos of John 1.1 and the creating and creative Word of Genesis 1.3. And, if you follow it out, there is an argument here for why Christianity, and even Christian fundamentalism, should not be treated or feared in the same way as faith’s which derive from unreasonable foundations. For Christians, reasonable action is godly action. Christian theology does not threaten the dialogue necessary to a free society of mutually respect and responsible political action. No, such dialogue is part-and-parcel of its deepest theological confession.

Third and finally, Benedict XVI uncovers an element in our modern, scientific notion of knowledge that I’d never thought of before. Scientific reason, he says, has a platonic core. Scientific reason assumes something about the material world that is immaterial, namely, “the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently.” The core simply goes without saying, perhaps pointing to the success of the technologies which it has produced, or the boon to human life and livelihood which have followed. It is true, human beings and cultures have thrived underneath this assumption, and so much so that “the West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality.” The West doesn’t want to ask why our capacities to understand and the ability to understand correspond so well together. Frankly, I’d never thought of this assumption as a latent Platonism, though I’d well-enough identified it as “the modern victory of Aristotle.” Now, the best portions of postmodernity do ask this question. They do seek and discover epistemological room to include much larger portions of human knowing than simply the empirical. But, as above, some kind of nihilistic extreme is avoided in Christian thought because it is unreasonable in the context of the logos.

logos; epistemology; Duns Scotus; Ibn Hazn; Pope Benedict XVI; Joseph Ratzinger; science; Hellenization; postmodernism; John 1:1; Adolph von Harnack.

Please reframe

2006-09-08T11:08:00.000-04:00

Two sources of the malaise of modernity remain: the runaway ubiquity of instrumental reason and the potential for soft depostism as a result of political fragmentation. And though Charles Taylor spends the remaining two chapters of his book on them, I only want to touch on a few main points. Perhaps my own reading betrays a too-tight grip on anthropocentricism, but I haven’t found this material as interesting. On the other hand, if one approaches it from the Schaefferian question, “How should we then live?” I can see this could impact interest and retention in a positive way.

Instrumental Reason

Instrumental reason is market thinking applied everywhere. This point was well made in Bergman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (see the series on this blog, ending “Baudelaire is Melting”), and it is difficult to make more of it than it is.

Whether we leave our society to “invisible hand” mechanisms like the market, or try to manage it collectively, we are forced to operate to some degree according to the demands of modern rationality, whether or not it suits our own moral outlook. The only alternative seems to be a kind of inner exile, a self-marginalization. Instrumental rationality seems to be able to lay its demands on us coming and going. (97 emphasis mine)

No matter what religious or ideological background you come from, you are swept up in market thinking. Instrumental reason puts its barcode on you. Instrumental reason knows no Thou, there is only statistical evaluation on graphs of demand and supply.

Modernity is characterized by grandeur as well as by misère. Only a view that embraces both can give us the undistorted insight into our era that we need to rise to its greatest challenge.

The temptation is to simply give up and give in—even where our own moral outlook is involved (and the very real tragedy of this is why I emphasized that material in the above quotation). But it doesn’t have to be this way. “We have real choice here,” writes Taylor, “even if we tend to be blind to the options open to us” (98).

Taylor’s method, as we saw in his investigation of the arguments surrounding the ideal of authenticity, is to critique the players in the argument. These he calls the “boomers” and the “knockers,” and it is his contention that both sides flatten almost conspiratorially the depth of the issue debated in an attempt to win the argument. That is why he says “we face a continuing struggle to realize higher and fuller modes of authenticity against the resistance of the flatter and shallower forms” (94). “Against them,” he continues,

we need to do a work of retrieval, in order to get a fruitful struggle going in our culture and society. . . . We don’t want to exaggerate our degrees of freedom. But they are not zero. And that means that coming to understand the moral sources of our civilization can make a difference, in so far as it can contribute to a new common understanding. We are not, indeed, locked in. (96, 100-101)

Taylor believes that we can dig down into the moral and ideological sources that got us where we are and bring those out again for purposes of critique. And, turning to technology, he sees a few of those sources that deserve such treatment, not least the ideal of self-determining freedom (discussed in previous blogs on this topic) and, my favorite, the disengaged model of the human subject—the binary anthropology of Descartes’ sublime Meditations. Taylor's rebuttal makes me proud, shooting back with ammunition Heidegger built in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology.” (He also references Albert Borgman (Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) of which he says, “Borgman seems to echo Nietzche’s picture of the 'last men' when he argues that the original liberating promise of technology can degenerate into ‘the procurement of frivolous comfort.' ”) Allow me to quote Taylor at length:

What we are looking for here is an alternative enframing of technology. Instead of seeing it purely in the context of an enterprise of ever-increasing control, of an ever-receding frontier of resistant nature, perhaps animated by a sense of power and freedom, we have to come to understand it as well in the moral frame of the ethic of practical benevolence [re: technology as a means for making people’s lives better], which is also one of the sources in our culture from which instrumental reason has acquired its salient importance for us. [Francis Bacon] But we have to place this benevolence in turn in the framework of a proper understanding of human agency, not in relation to the disembodied ghost of disengaged reason, inhabiting an objectified machine. We have to relate technology as well to the very ideal of disengaged reason, but now as an ideal, rather than as a distorted picture of the human essence. Technology in the service of an ethic of benevolence towards real flesh and blood people; technological, calculative thinking as a rare and admirable achievement of a being who lives in the medium of a quite different kind of thinking: to live instrumental reason from out of these frameworks would be to live our technology very differently. The issue I am putting here in terms of alternative modes of enframing is sometimes posed in terms of control: does our technology run away with us, or do we control it, put it to our purposes? But the problem with this formulation should be obvious. It remains entirely within the frame of domination, and doesn’t allow for a quite different placing of technology in our lives. Getting on top of technology implies taking an instrumental stance to it, as we through it do everything else. It doesn’t open the possibility of placing technology within a non-instrumental stance, as we see, for instance, an ethic of care, or a cultivation of our capacity for pure thought. (106-07, 133n55)

Soft Despotism

As above, market mechanisms are part of the apparatus necessary to enjoy the benefits of living in a modern, industrial society. The market and the bureaucratic state are givens, and this is largely the reason for modernity's culture of continuous struggle and change. Our situation is masticated by the massive and competing force exerted by nation states, multi-national corporations, bureaucratic agencies, and political agendas, micro and macro. Between these, individuals struggle for personal and political authenticity--for family, tribe, and culture--against the eroding tide of atomism and discrete (if not selfish) individualism. This struggle is why we moderns face constantly the threat of soft despotism due to chronic social and political fragmentation; “when people come to see themselves more and more atomistically, as less and less bound to the fellow citizens in common projects and allegiances” (112). Taylor's solution is to struggle harder. (It suggests, too, since "struggle" in Arabic is “jihad,” that 9/11 may have been as much a sign of modernity's real arrival in the Middle East as it was a product of growing Islamic fundamentalism.)

What our situation seems to call for is a complex, many-leveled struggle, intellectual, spiritual, and political, in which the debates in the public arena interlink with those in a host of institutional settings, like hospitals and schools, where the issues of enframing technology are being lived through in concrete form; and where these disputes in turn both feed and are fed by the various attempts to define in theoretical terms the place of technology and the demands of authenticity, and beyond that, the shape of human life and relation to the cosmos. (120)

Previous entries in this series are:
The split between manner and matter.

Charles Taylor; social theory; modernity; Martin Heidegger; instrumental reason; Reneé Descartes; soft despotism; technology.

you have to set aside a block of time

2006-08-31T17:55:00.000-04:00

A good many doctrines and disciplines are governed by an underlying approach to time. The nature of God, the economy of salvation, eschatology, the exegesis of scripture, anthropology, every bit and so much more are influenced fundamentally by the answer they give to the question of time. How, for example, does one responsibly wrestle with the doctrine of the incarnation of the Son without talking of time? Or how can one talk about creation, space and time, when, at the smallest scale, size and duration mean exactly the same thing?[1] Yes, I am fascinated by this borderland between physics, philosophy, and theology (biblical or otherwise), and own several books on the subject. Unfortunately, none have been suitably digested. Their arguments are just too tedious and complicated, which is why only one blog post "Padgett versus Wood on time and eternity" even raises the issue. So thank God for Scientific American!

In a special edition entitled "A Matter of Time," the editors at Scientific American have produced over a dozen articles which explore time's many dimensions: from quantum physics to the technical and historical refinement of clocks. There is even an article ("Remembering When") which details the structures of the brain that collate our experiences into a single life of remembered events.

What emerges in this issue is a growing consensus among physicists and philosophers that time is a dimension laid out already in its entirety just like space. This consensus is called block time (also the B-theory of time, and tenseless time).

A century ago British philosopher John McTaggart sought to draw a clear distinction between the description of the world in terms of events happening, which he called the A series, and the description in terms of dates correlated with states of the world, the B series.

Instead of landscape, think “timescape.” You can talk about a volume of time in the same way you talk about a volume of space. Indeed, according to Lee Smolin's article "Atoms of Space and Time,"[2] space and time are constructed of infinitesimally small and discrete pieces analogous to the way water is composed of individual atoms. And time is distorted just as space is distorted, bending and flexing, contracting and expanding as matter and energy pass through it. Still, there is no flow, no movement from past to future, in block time, and certainly no special, temporal point called "now."

The theoretical basis of block time comes from Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. This theory ”denies any absolute, universal significance to the present moment. Two events that occur at the same moment if observed from one reference frame may occur at different moments if viewed from another.”[3] Objectivity dissolves into the perspective of each and every viewer. “Such mismatches make a mockery of any attempt to confer special status on the present moment, for whose "now" does that moment refer to?"[4] Einstein called this the relativity of simultaneity, and it comes out of a founding principle of relativity called general covariance.

All general covariance says is that the laws of physics are the same for all observers.

Two observers will perceive spacetime to have two different shapes, corresponding to their views of who is moving and what forces are acting. Each shape is a smoothly warped version of the other, in the way that a coffee cup is a reshaped doughnut. General covariance says that the difference cannot be meaningful. Therefore, any two such shapes are physically equivalent.[5]

Translated, this means that though time seems to change or flow, the overall shape of time itself does not, ergo block time. More important, it means that the flow from past to future which seems so natural to us is, in actuality, a completely subjective phenomenon. We observe the passage of time. It is phenomenological.

This is, of course, quite hard to understand when measured against everyday experience. We grow older, as do our children, and, hopefully, we grow wiser, too. The sun moves in the sky. Fruit left in the bowl rots. Our elders die. Given the ubiquity of such evidence, how can we understand the change we see around us? How can we question this ever-flowing conduit of “what was” to “what will be?” And what are the ramifications of doing so? Is a denial of time, a denial of the meaning we give and take from history and memory? Can hope survive without time? The questions pile up like seconds on a clock, and, according to Paul Davies, author and theoretical physicist at Macquarie University's Australian Center for Astrobiology in Sydney, “Modern science has barely begun to consider the question of how we perceive the passage of time."[6]

Still, we must begin somewhere, and Scientific American begins with geography. Instead of measuring time as a continuous flow from one state or one position to the next, we could just as easily describe each change as a discrete point or stage. A vase shatters on the floor. We habitually focus on its physical motion, observing its descent from table to floor as a passage through time. But we could just as easily describe the various states of the vase without a reference to time. Here is the vase when it is a meter from the floor. Here it is only a few hundred centimeters. Lets have another example. Take a bunch of cards of a type and number we would normally call a deck. Each card is a slice of a larger block of time, which is the deck. Now this relationship, the deck, does not exist by necessity just because one card follows another. It is more accurate to describe each card independently. The deck is made by their adjacency, not by any sort of relationship they have to each other.

So, then, how do we account for change? As above, our normal way of going about things is incorrigibly tensed. By this I mean that we inhabit a "tensed" notion of time, a description which refers to grammatical tense--past, present, and future, which are themselves derived from our experience of time. And because of this, we treat the past and the future quite differently. Though we can observe the past, it is not available to us. We cannot expect it, or live into it. Only the future is available to us like that. We, and everything around us, goes into the future (at least from our point of view), and this unidirectional pointing of everything we call "the arrow of time." But is this wrong? Does block time mean we should erase this arrow from our thinking? No, it doesn’t

According to physicists, to embrace block time is not to deny the reality of the arrow of time. The arrow of time is real; there really is a unidirectional sequence of cards. "To deny that time flows is not to claim that the designations "past" and "future" are without physical basis. Events in the world undeniably form a unidirectional sequence."[7]. That is why we do not experience the past. Time's block isn't uniform. The deck of cards--the geography of block time--is not symmetrical. It is asymmetrical. The arrow points in one and only one direction, but seeing the future doesn’t make it necessary that we are moving into the future. "Past" and "Future" should describe something more like geography than motion. "Time's asymmetry is a property of states of the world, not a property of time as such."[8] This means that you can talk about change but not flow. Think, for example, of one of those giant, stone heads on Easter Island. Erected who knows how long ago, they stare forever in a single direction in which they will never go. Quoting again from Brian Davies:

We do not really observe the passage of time. What we actually observe is that later states of the world differ from earlier states that we still remember. The fact that we remember the past, rather than the future, is an observation not of the passage of time but of the asymmetry of time. Nothing other than a conscious observer registers the flow of time.[9]

Physicists and philosophers of science are working to uncover explanations for our perception of time’s flow, and they have uncovered some contributors to the illusion. None the least of these is entropy.

The second law of thermodynamics, the rule that describes entropy, "plays a key role in imprinting on the world a conspicuous asymmetry between past and future directions along the time axis." Indeed, entropy bears directly on "the information content of a system. for this reason, the formation of memory is a unidirectional process--new memories add information and raise the entropy of the brain."[10] This of course assumes a pattern to disorder. “The basic idea is that there are more ways for a system to be disordered than to be ordered. If the system is fairly ordered now, it will probably be more disordered a moment from now.”[11] But why is this so? No one knows. Perhaps the big bang provides the low value of entropy needed to begin an ever-increasing cycle, but if that is the case, then the second law depends not on architectonic laws but on a historical event. A steady-state universe cannot explain entropy.

The brain, too, is a contributor. Kids are fond of spinning, whirling around and around, arms stretched out, until they are hopelessly dizzy. I used to do this for hours while I waited for my parents in our church's common-room basement. Laughing and stumbling, I would lurch about until the world continued to spin even when I stopped. Now I knew that the world wasn't really spinning. It only looked that way, a trick of the inner ear. "Perhaps," says Davies, "temporal flux is similar."[12] Perhaps the perception of time’s flow is just a habit, to be described as David Hume did causation in his Enquiry?

If all of this holds true, the acceptance of block time would require some radical rethinking of a good many religious positions. That is certainly more work than I can do here. Some of the most serious questions asked above remained unanswered. For, as Gary Stix writes, "Recalling where we fit in the order of things determines who we are. So ultimately, it doesn't mater whether time, in cosmological terms, retains an underlying physical truth."[13] Still, referring back to the aforementioned blogpost about the debate between Wood and Padgett, acceptance of a block theory of time means that Wood’s theory of God’s relative timelessness, in which God both transcends time and is temporal in some sense, can work as long as God’s timeliness is understood as an insertion from without into discrete points rather than as a catching up of the divine substance into an irresistible and entropic flow. Wood claims, by the way, that his view is simply a restatement of Boethius--a point worthy of further investigation. And I wonder, too, if this doesn't resurrect the old arguments around occasionalism.

And then, finally, a caveat. As best I can tell, though block time does represent a consensus, it does not approach the status of law. The problem is that block time presupposes the correctness of turning the general theory of relativity into quantum theory, a procedure called canonical quantization. “The procedure worked brilliantly when applied to the theory of electromagnetism,” writes Musser, “but in the case of relativity, it produces an equation—the Wheller-DeWitt equation—without a time variable. Taken literally, the equation indicates that the universe should be frozen in time, never changing.”[14]

Musser goes on to describe how a single question works with canonical quantization to produce absolutely disparate effects. If one believes that space-time exists independently of stars and galaxies—that it is whether or not matter is present—then one is a substantivalist. Or if one believes that space-time is merely a description of how material objects are related, one is a relationist. In the former case, general relativity becomes indeterministic, describing a world which contains a certain amount of randomness. In the latter, the theory becomes deterministic.[15] It is a dilemma which leads physicists to very different understandings of quantum gravity, and suggests that the jury is still far from unanimous when it comes to block time.

Notes
1. Paul Davies, “That Mysterious Flow,” Scientific American 16.1 (2006): 8. "The distinction between space and time underpins the key notion of causality, stopping cause and effect from being hopelessly jumbled. On the other hand, many physicists believe that on the very smallest scale of size and duration, space and time might lose their seperate identities."
2. Lee Smolin, “Atoms of Space and Time,” Scientific American 16.1 (2006): 82-92.
3. Davies, 7.
4. Ibid.
5. George Musser, "A Hole At The Heart Of Physics," Scientific American 16.1 (2006): 12.
6. Davies, ll.
7. Ibid., 8.
8. Ibid., 9.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 11.
11. Musser, 13.
12. Davies, 11.
13. Gary Stix, "Real Time," Scientific American 16.1 (2006): 5.
14. Musser, 12.
15. Ibid., 13.

Suggested Bibliography
Angrilli, Alessandro, Paolo Cherubini, et. al., “The Influence of Affective Factors on Time Perception,” Perception and Psychophysics 59 no. 6 (Aug. 1997): 972-982.
Davies, Paul. The Physics of Time Asymmetry. University of California Press, 1974.
—. About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Dennet, Daniel C. and Marcel Kinsbourne. “Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 no 2. (1992): 183-247.
Gardner, Martin. “Can Time Go Backward?” Scientific American 216 no. 1 (Jan. 1967): 98-108.
Gleick, James. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. Vintage Books, 1999.
Grondin, Simon. “From Physical Time to the First and Second Moments of Psychological Time,” Psychological Bulletin 127 no. 1 (Jan. 2001): 22-44.
Johnson, Alan, Shin’ya Nishida, “Time Perception: Brain Time or Event Time?” Current Biology 11 no. 11 (2001): R427-R430.
Landes, David S. Revolution in Time. Rev ed. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000.
Levine, Robert V. A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist. Basic Books, 1998.
Lippincott, Kristen, ed. The Story of Time. Merrell Holberton, 1999.
McCready, Stuart, ed. The Discovery of Time. Sourcebooks, 2001.
McTaggart, John Ellis. “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17 (1908): 456-473.
Smart, J. J. C. “Times as Becoming,” in Time and Cause. ed. Peter van Inwagen. Reader Publishing, 1980.
Thorne, Kip S. Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. W. W. Norton, 1994.
Webb, J. “Are the Laws of Nature Changing with Time?” Physics World 16 pt. 4 (April 2003): 33-38.
Whitrow, G. J. What is Time? Thams & Hudson, 1972.

time; Paul Davies; arrow of time; Albert Einstein; relativity; cosmology; physics.

The split between manner and matter

2006-08-29T18:07:00.000-04:00

We understand so that we can freely and responsibly make a choice between resistance or embrace. So far, Charles Taylor has built a case for an ethic hidden under the solipsist individualism created by modernity, the ethic or ideal of authenticity. Now, in the last few chapters of The Malaise of Modernity he wants to discover a place from which such authenticity can engage in political debate in the face of soft despotism and the temptation of instrumental reason.

On a larger canvas, one has to remember that Taylor’s arguments find their place in the turn to the subject. Taylor plots a process he calls “subjectivation” where the subject moves to the center of things “once settled by some external reality—traditional law, say, or nature.” Choice takes center stage and asks us to think for ourselves rather than perform for authorities. “Modern freedom and autonomy centres us on ourselves, and the ideal of authenticity requires that we discover and articulate our own identity” (81).

But, he says, let’s not forget an important distinction: that between matter or content and manner or method. It is a very important distinction, and especially as the assumption is always made that simply because you can rebel against all external voices you should. Stated in another way, just because you yourself find meaning doesn’t mean you have to find that meaning in yourself. “Authenticity is clearly self-referential: this has to be my orientation. But this doesn’t mean that on another level the content must be self-referential: that my goals must express or fulfill my desires or aspirations, as against something that stands beyond these.” (82) One only recalls Taylor’s argument to realize that he espouses causes much larger than the borders of the self. Authenticity is with us; self-reference is encoded in the Western self, but our ends, our matter, need not correspond to our manner.

To illustrate the difference between the matter of self-referentiality and its manner, Taylor goes back to art. At one time, he says, artists had a language made up of “publicly available reference points that, say, poets and painters [could] draw on” (83). People had an imaginative and symbolic universe in common, a public stock of images and meanings, a cosmic syntax upon which artists could draw. “But for a couple of centuries now we have been living in a world in which these points of reference no longer hold for us” (Ibid.). This has been replaced by privately created languages of articulated sensibility; “the poet must articulate his own world of references, and make them believable . . . language rooted in the personal sensibility of the poet, and understood only by those whose sensibility resonates like the poet’s” (84, 87). [For poets, Taylor turns to Rilke, Wordsworth, and Shelly.]

Now the reason this is important is phenomenological. With the loss of a common, public domain of imaginative reference points went a common projection of reality. The “objective” has become a statistical line whereby each imagination’s reality is taken to be some of the truth, but not all, and these projections assembled into a vision which approximates the truth (if there is any “the truth” at all.) Indeed

the very idea that one such order should be embraced to the exclusion of all the others—a demand that is virtually inescapable in the traditional context—ceases to have any force. It is only too clear how another sensibility, another context of images, might give us a quite different take, even on what we might nevertheless see as a similar vision of reality. (87)

But note my sarcasm: “if there is any “the truth” at all.” Taylor strongly disagrees with this rash judgment. “It by no means follows,” he says, “that there has to be a subjectivation of matter [where what is painted, poem’d, sung, or prosed is but the pure psychology of the artist, knowable and experienced only by herself].” Taylor reminds me that, “The effort of some of the best of modern poets has been precisely to articulate something beyond the self. . . . The inescapable rooting of poetic language in personal sensibility doesn’t have to mean that the poet no longer explores an order beyond the self” (88-89). His point is well taken. There is no reason why we can’t “call on individual intuitions to map a public domain of references” (87). The classical order—that public domain of imagination—could itself have been such an attempt; a collective, but temporary, trial at understanding the universe in which human beings of that time found themselves. People changed, and so that model had to be discarded. Yet, their cosmos is the same for us, the same all-encompassing universe “for which no adequate terms exist and whose meaning has to be sought” (86). Don’t mistake the seeking for what is sought; nor confuse even an interesting journey with any sort of arrival.

Such confusion slips into an instrumental reason which emphasizes our claims to the deficit of all others, an error which, Taylor argues, should not be.

Just because we no longer believe in the doctrines of the Great Chain of Being, we don’t need to see ourselves as set in a universe that we can consider simply as a source of raw materials for our projects [contra instrumental reason]. We may still need to see ourselves as part of a larger order that can make claims on us. (89)

Going back to his anthropology of relatedness, Taylor asks his hearer to realize that “nature and our world make a claim on us.” We are creatures immersed in a universe of interrelated demands, but hearing those claims upon us, being related to a world of not-I, of Other, is not easy. We must resist solipsism. We must resist instrumental reason. We must explore our world by means of artistic languages of personal resonance. The ideal of authenticity, and its corresponding ethic, the recovery of our own sentiment de l’existence connects us intimately to our world. That’s why a failure to see this, a failure to separate manner from matter, is a tragedy of ethics and a flattening of our very selves.

Final thought. Taylor deals quite a bit in this chapter with Romanticism, and I wish I had more time to investigate the underlying project and purpose of the Romantics. “It was perhaps no accident that in the Romantic period the self-feeling and the feeling of belonging to nature were linked.” In his notes he cites Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968) and Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism (New York: Norton, 1984) of which he says the second chapter contains an excellent discussion of the Romantic aspirations to a natural symbolism. He also quotes lines 307-11 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. It is an addition to his argument to reproduce lines 401-414:

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought
That givest to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion, not in vain
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul;
Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,
But with high objects, with enduring things—
With life and nature--purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

Previous entries in this series are:
Taylor on Art and History .

Charles Taylor; individualism; social theory; modernity; poesis; mimesis; Ranier Maria Rilke; William Wordsworth; Percy Bysshe Shelly; Romanticism; aesthetics; relational anthropology; authenticity; Turn to the Subject.

blue longing or yellow laziness?

2006-07-26T18:19:00.000-04:00

I was shocked to find, in my daily reading of My Way of Life, Thomas Aquinas (albeit paraphrased) saying:

"As far as public revelation is concerned—that is, the revelation which God has entrusted to His Church to be proposed to all men for their belief—the age of prophecy ceased at the time and with the work of Christ and His Apostles. But God still sends private revelations to men as signs of His continuing love and care for them.” (431)

Put as simply as I can think of: Nein! Not that I go along with the analytics who say that that statement alone is true which can be empirically falsifiable, but I believe that human beings are too prone to phantasie for the responsible use of any private revelations. This topic is raised quite effectively in “The Code Breakers” an article by Wheaton College professor Alan Jacobs in this month’s First Things (165 (Aug/Sept. 2006): 14-7) in which Jacobs is all about the attraction and absurdity of “code breaking,” meaning the discovery of secret knowledge about the future, past, or present. He writes:

There’s a wonderful passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace where one of the main characters, Pierre Bezukhov, discovers that if you assign a number to each letter of the alphabet, the words L’Empereur Napoleon add up to 666—the number of the Antichrist. Then Pierre, because he imagines himself as Napoleon’s great antagonist, starts trying to write his own name in such a way that it also adds up to 666 and finds that he cannot, even after he changes the spelling in several different ways. But finally, he decides not only to alter his name’s spelling but also to indicate his nationality, and finally to abandon correct French usage: “L’russe Bsuhof,” astonishingly, yields 666. “This discovery excited him,” Tolstoy notes with the straightest of faces. “How, or by what means, he was connected with the great event foretold in the Apocalypse he did not know, but he did not doubt the connection for a moment.” (14)

If you begin by supposing something to be true that there is simply no reason even to suspect is true and then look for any evidence that might be construed as supportive of that supposal while resolutely ignoring any evidence that might be construed as refuting that supposal [“code breakers have an interest in eliding them and in rushing quickly past inconveniently slippery information”]—well, then, you’re quite likely to find yourself in the position of Pierre Bezukhov, amazed by how a scarily intricate story holds together.

Mathematicians—striving, often unsuccessfully, to remain calm-voiced and to soothe the frenzied thumping of their temples—reply than an elementary knowledge of probability will reveal that such correspondences aren’t surprising at all. Logicians reply that not only have these code breakers cooked the books by manipulating the data but they have also overlooked hundreds of far more likely correspondences. Skilled literary critics reply that if you define a character or a thing or an event in a story vaguely enough, it can become a symbol of almost anything. (15)[1]

All dismissals aside, I was caught up by some of the reasons why Jacobs thinks code breakers do what they do. They do it to be special, seeing what others do not. They do it for the rush. They do it “to become part of what C. S. Lewis called an Inner Ring—the Ring whose goose-bumps-inducing catchphrase is always ‘We few’.” And they do it in order to discover meaning, whether to fix oneself into place within a comfortable matrix of private meaning or to find one’s actions writ into “a vast world historical event, into pure meaning.”

Of course, Jacob's analysis reflects some of the discussion that has been going on here with Charles Taylor's book, and especially Taylor's investigation of the loss of the sacred and the quest for authenticity. Taylor is an optimist to the code-breaker's pessimism; and confident where they have only self-doubt.

“We can never return to the days before these self-centered modes could tempt and solicit people.” He says confidently, where "the days" are days before individual identity was always daily up for grabs.

“Like all forms of individualism and freedom, authenticity opens an age of responsibilization, if I can use this term. By the very fact that this culture develops, people are made more self-responsible. Authenticity points us towards a more self-responsible form of life. It allows us to live (potentially) a fuller and more differentiated life, because more fully appropriated as our own . . . a richer mode of existence. It is in the nature of this kind of increase of freedom that people can sink lower, as well as rise higher. Nothing will ever ensure a systematic and irreversible move to the heights." (The Malaise of Modernity 74, 77)

Still, despite his confidence, Taylor is also honest. Taking up the yoke of one’s own authentic becoming is no picnic. Aspiring to the ideal and the ethic of authenticity is a good thing, but it does require a great deal of effort. Modernity’s gift—the individual—is a gift given the way the world gives, with strings attached: the heavy burden of being, of feeling held out over the Abyss (das Nicht). It is easy to see why some may wish to escape![2]

Phantasie offers an easier out, and one that at least feels richer than the other way of authentic becoming. “The sense of suddenly being plugged into a vast world-historical event, into pure meaning, remains enormously appealing—especially when it’s a meaning others cannot see” (Jacobs 15; emphasis mine).[3]

Jacobs calls such romantic escapsism laziness.

"I think these fanciful tales appeal to what I can only call our plain laziness. The interpretation of literary texts is actually hard work. You have to know a great deal about the history of a culture and about the various forms and genres and techniques of literary writing to have a shot at really figuring out a major work of literary art.

Likewise, the understanding of paintings—especially paintings made centuries ago by people who thought very differently than we think, who lived in a very different social world, whose ideas of what paintings represent and how they represent it are often quite alien to what we take for granted—is achievable only after years, even decades, of scrupulous attentiveness to work after work after work. And the deepest wisdom about the productions of culture will always acknowledge the possibility of error, will always see that subtle alterations in how we think of this detail or that theme can result in quite dramatically different pictures of the work as a whole.” (16-17)

But I think I see something more than just laziness behind it. Something offered by Jacobs himself.

It should be remembered that Alan Jacobs is the author of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis. He is familiar, then, with Lewis’s doctrine of Joy (Sehnsucht) and the blue flower (Blaue Blume, a central symbol of Romanticism “it stands for desire, love, and the metaphysical striving for the infinite and unreachable” [Wikipedia]) Jacobs explains:

“[Lewis] is thinking of Novalis - the pen name of the German Romantic writer Friedrich von Hardenberg, who died in 1801 at the age of twenty-nine. The protagonist of Novalis's unfinished allegorical novel Heinrich Von Ofterdingen becomes obsessed by a vision of a blue flower, which he first encounters in a stranger's tales and then in dreams:

There is no greed in my heart; but I yearn to get a glimpse of the blue flower [aber die blaue Blume sehn' ich mich zu erblicken]. It is perpetually in my mind, and I can write or think of nothing else . . .Often I feel so rapturously happy; and only when I do not have the flower clearly before my mind's eye does a deep inner turmoil seize me. This cannot and will not be understood by anyone. I would think I were mad if I did not see and think so clearly. Indeed since then everything is much clearer to me.

He "yearns" or "longs" (sehn) for the flower - and yet nothing that he can grasp seems so desirable as that longing itself. This is the paradox of Sehnsucht: that though it could in one sense be described as a negative experience, in that it focuses on something one cannot possess and cannot reach, it is nevertheless intensely seductive. One cannot say it is exactly pleasurable - there is a kind of ache, of unattainable longing—and yet, as Lewis puts it, the quality of the experience "is that of an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction." (40; copied nearly in whole from Jolly Blogger. nelmezzo’s post , “The Blue Flower of Joy and Yearning" is a valuable and thought provoking read on this as well.)

Perhaps there is a value behind code breaking. Instead of dismissing the phantasists as lazy, I wonder whether or not they aren't staging a protest for something else. Modernity requires one to quest for authenticity, and doesn't this quest assume emotional as well as political dimensions? And so I say that Jacobs' lazy code breaking, like Taylor’s narcissistic anthropocentrism, is but a deviant form of a greater value, which Lewis called joy.[4]

[1] I have discussed this phenomenon in other posts, examining it according to Jungian psychology and Joseph Campbell’s popular understanding of myth; as well as its cultic religiosity, including its affinity for modern forms of Spinozism, so-called spirituality, and even investigating it as a form of divination, of which I see modern neo-paganism as the community gathered around the pursuit of this kind of experience, either for personal development or to have or be subject to power, whether this be sadistic, masochistic, or something more benign.

[2] Emile Cioran’s work explores the existential difficulty of living with the burden of an un-meaning’d self untethered in a sea of absolute freedom. I also like sculptor Samuel Nigro’s more direct description of this same experience.

[3] Evangelicals are particularly (and popularly) enamored with this in a way analogous to the neo-pagans. I have discussed this in a post entitled, “You Are Removing God From the Everyday!”

[4] I scratched at the eschatological possibilities in a discussion of an abstract by Freddie Rodem, and especially the categories anxiety and nostalgia as potential responses to the eschatological situation.

C.S. Lewis ; Sehnsucht; the blue flower; phantasie; revelation ; epistimology; hermeneutics; interpretation;

a quick meditation on free will

2006-07-25T17:26:00.000-04:00

The pervasiveness of "freedom of choice"--who can see its many influences and arrangements? Who can follow it as far down as it goes and sketch its fundamentum? It is the manure which multiplies our every assumption. It flows under the bark of our very selves; tear at us, and we bleed it like resin. And yet, which of us is his own creator? Who of us willed themselves into being? Who chose her native language, or the history, the morays and folkways, of his fatherland? We believe we have chosen, only to look back later in life and see that our choices were largely dictated by the demands of history, culture, and family expectation. This panic to be original, the moral demand of the authentic--what of it? We don't realize that underneath any free choice (according to our usual definition) there must be a universe of pure chance. All is meaningless in such a world, but we at least know how to be meaningless (and how to lie about it.) Theology disagrees. It suggests a different trope: God first. First God and then us. God's action, our reaction. God's promise, our faithful response. And don't think that in our response we actually see and quantify every edge of God's action. Chances are, we'll spend our whole lives sorting it out, only to come to an admission of happy futility, of resignation, and the freedom that comes with childlike trust at the very end.

On the other hand, we can't very well abandon all effort and become bubbles, floating along on the surface of the warm back of pure providence. Whereas unsupported action, the pursuit of the authentic and original self, most popularly manifested by existentialism, is in error, so is its opposite: limp passivity that goes by the name of "the surrendered life", "abiding", and that rude colloquiallism: Let Go and Let God. Where the one, like the atheist, shuts God from history, the other, like the platonist, denies history of God. All the natural and, indeed, supernatural gifts God has given to human beings for the purpose of getting on with things go unused "until God tells me." But don't you already have it, then? Now get on with it! Creation is affirmed by God, even as God supports creation; neither should be forgotten by the other, and especially by human beings, whose second Adam himself was born of flesh, born of a woman and, with the creed, "crucified under Pontius Pilate."

Taylor on Art and History

2006-07-17T21:57:00.000-04:00

Art and History are on Charles Taylor's mind. History primarily to explain in more systemic detail why individualism appeared and has continued to strengthen its ideological base, ultimately encouraging deviant narcissism. Art because of the close relationship between artistic creation and self discovery. Taylor is interested in explaining why the ideal of authenticity is always sliding into one or the other of its "deviant" forms (narcissim, or, Taylor's new and better adjective: anthropocentrism); modernity by definition atomizes society. I'm not as interested in replicating the bones of his debate as pulling this quote on on the historical development behind the ideal itself, and examining the correlation between authenticity and the aesthetic.

Individualist ideas developed in the thought and sensibility, particularly of educated Europeans, during the seventeenth century. These seem to have facilitated the growth of new political forms that challenged the ancient hierarchies, and of new modes of economic life, which gave greater place to the market and to entrepreneurial enterprise" (58). . . . From its very inception, this kind of society has involved mobility, at first of peasants off the land and to cities, and then across oceans and continents to new countries, and finally, today, from city to city following employment opportunities. Mobility is in a sense forced on us. Old ties are broken down. At some time, city dwelling is transformed by the immense concentrations of population of the modern metropolis. By its very nature, this involves much more impersonal and causal contact, in place of the more intense, face-to-face relations in earlier times" (59). . . . Our technocratic, bureaucratic society gives more and more importance to instrumental reason. This cannot but fortify atomism, because it induces us to see our communities, like so much else, in an instrumental perspective. But it also breeds anthropocentrism, in making us take an instrumental stance to all facets of our life and surroundings: to the past, to nature, as well as to our social arrangements. (Ibid.)

Poesis and the Artists as the Paradigmatic Modern

The ethic of authenticity demands of its devotees the cultivation of self-expression as a means to self discovery and definition. "The notion that each one of us has an original way of being human entails that each of us has to discover what it means to be ourselves." Now, before this culture arose, when individuals and things found their places within an established status quo, art was imitation, mimesis. But now, when we must discover ourselves through expression, our art, too, is poesis, making, and the artist becomes the paradigmatic human being.

Simultaneously, self-definition requires a break with morality. "The very idea of originality [being authentic], and the associated notion that the enemy of authenticity can be social conformity, forces on us the idea that authenticity will have to struggle against some externally imposed rules. . . there is a notional difference between truth to self and those of intersubjective justice. . . . Authenticity involves originality, it demands a revolt against convention" (63).

Recalling his earlier treatment of the ideal of self-determining freedom, we see here again the need for a freedom to be against and to be for. "Authenticity is itself an idea of freedom; it involves my finding the design of my life myself, against the demands of external conformity" (67-68). Of course, this can easily tip into the deviant. Taylor thinks this is exactly what has happened in postmodernism. Following a doorway drawn in the wall of bourgeois social morays by "Marinetti and the Futurists, Antoine Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty, and Georges Bataille" (66), Taylor finds:

"The Nietzschean critique of all "Values" as created cannot but exalt and entrench anthropocentrism. In the end, it leaves the agent, even with all his or her doubts about the category of the "self," with a sense of untrammelled power and freedom before a world that imposes no standards, ready to enjoy "free play," [Derrida] or to indulge in an aesthetics of the self [Foucault]" (60-61).

At any rate, Taylor is quite clear that developments in art and the development of authenticity run on parallel tracks. The eighteenth century, he says, in the turn to the subject ceased to define art and beauty "in terms of the reality or its manner of depiction." Instead defining them by "the kinds of feeling they arouse in us, a feeling of its own special kind, different from the moral and other kinds of pleasure" (64). The line goes through Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and finds its forumula in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement. Beauty--like authenticity--is its own fulfillment and its own goal. The gravity has shifted. "Self-truth and self-wholeness are seen more and more not as means to be moral, as independently defined, but as something valuable for their own sake." Quoting Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Tayor describes a wholeness communicated by the enjoyment of beauty made from the union between self-wholeness and the aesthetic, the experience of which is higher "because it engages us totally in a way that morality cannot" (65). Such ecstasis becomes for Schiller the highest form of telos, "its own form of goodness and satisfaction" (Ibid.).

The Matrix of Authenticity

So we find that Taylor's understanding of the ideal or ethic of authenticity is "full of tension . . . living in an ideal that is not fully comprehended and which properly understood would challenge many of its practices" (56). And he is quite helpful in this chapter to provide a dialectical schema of authenticity, so that authenticity

(A) involves

(i) creation and construction

(ii) discovery

(iii) opposition to the rules of society & (potentially) morality

(B) requires

(i) openness to horizons of significance (for otherwise the creation loses the background that can save it from insignificance)

(ii) a self-definition in dialogue (with that which is Other)

Deviance is discovered where A is embraced and B ignored or vice versa. I find this schema helpful, because, in the end, Taylor is trying to give his hearer insight into how to fight for authenticity. He sees this ideal and ethic as a real good, as something that enriches human life--and yet which requires responsible administration in order to keep it from sliding off into one deviant form or another. I think, for example, of this same kind of process at work in the law/gospel dynamic of Martin Luther and in subsequent reformed theology, where hypervigilance need be kept against either a hardening scholasticism or a lusty, self-indulgent embrace of the heresy of the free spirit.

Previous entries in this series are:
Sorting Some of this Out.

Charles Taylor; individualism; social theory; modernity; Immanuel Kant; aesthetics; Marinetti; Antoine Artaud; Georges Bataille; Martin Luther; heresy of the free spirit; postmodernism; Friedrich Nietzsche; poesis; mimesis.

Sorting some of this out

2006-07-12T17:20:00.000-04:00

There is a need to restate the problem, or at least one of the problems, which Charles Taylor is dealing with in The Malaise of Modernity.

His primary bogey so far has been the cultural slide into soft relativism, a personal and political narcissism which erodes all motivation for personal and political involvement and leads potentially to soft despotism. Why, if self-fulfillment is my goal, should I stay in long term relationships after they have ceased to be fun? Why should I learn the art of political involvement, the give and take of promotion and compromise? Why shouldn't the circle of responsibility be drawn skin-tight around my own changing desires and choices? Aren't I pursuing the authentic life? Isn't the best life that in which I come to realize and maximize myself?

The religious and the secular can make different but parallel arguments. For the secular, I offer Baruch Spinoza: "To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life." And here is Carl Jung, "Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flung in the face of life." Is there any need to raise the specter of Emerson: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist," "what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men," or Thoreau or Whitman? Here’s John Stuart Mill:

“If a person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own mode” (Three Essays. Oxford University Press, 1975), 83.)

The religious have their own anecdotes as well. A prioress at a Benedictine convent describes her philosophy of life this way, "I try to live my life in such a way that when I die and my Maker asks, 'Did you live the life I gave you?' I can honestly answer yes." Add to this the usual reading of Jesus's parable of the talents.

Wherever you go in the West, the impulse to excavate and assume a larger self, or to release or augment the self and its experiences by means of commerce, is all pervasive--and this is as true in religious literature as secular. We are all caught up in it, e pluribus unum.

But it doesn't have to be this way. The slide into soft relativism by those who value individualism needn't occur. Taylor says that soft relativism is simply the product of a shallow understanding, and he argues for a better one: the ethic or ideal of authenticity.

A major pillar of his argument rests in the importance of a background of intelligibility which he calls "horizons of significance." The argument, see, is between what is valued. Soft relativism values anything it perceives as contributing to self realization, but its basis for argument is in the power of choice. Choice, personal or cultural, bestows value. It is a commercial statement, forever subject to fetishism according to the invisible hand of--we aren't quite sure, are we? I suppose we may have discovered the Powers themselves. At any rate, I want to see explicitly how his argument for these horizons of significance goes, because, again, it is part of the backbone of his argument.

(1) Authenticity requires definition over-and-against, it requires contextual field of differences that matter

"However one feels about it," he writes, "the making and sustaining of our identity, in the absence of a heroic effort to break out of ordinary existence, remains dialogical throughout our lives." (35) Taylor asserts that the creation of identity does not occur in monologue, but in dialogue, in agreement or struggle. Difference is a big part of this. "Defining myself means finding what is significant in my difference from others." (36) But what are real and meaningful differences, and what are not? Is being taller a better goal than, say, carrying on a tribal tradition? How do we know.

We know, says Taylor, because every option comes to us against a background (horizon) of significance. Taylor is pretty pragmatic here, he doesn't say how this horizon came to be, simply that it is, and that it is determined largely by what is sacred. He also says we can't just ignore this horizon.

Soft relativists want to do just that. They argue that choice is what makes an option significant. Again reflecting an instrumental, or commercial, free-market sensibility, choice is the arbiter of all horizons; whether a choice is arrived on the basis of reason or feeling doesn't matter. Any other horizon is dismissed.

The problem with this is that choice alone is cheap. If gold grew on every tree, it would lose its value. That's what choice does. By removing any common horizon and making significance absolutely subjective, everything and every option or possibility becomes as easily obtained and easily discarded as any other. If the goal was to become more authentic by choice, then every option can get one nowhere.

Indeed, by exalting choice, soft relativists undermine their own position. "Unless some options are more significant than others, the very idea of self-choice falls into triviality and hence incoherence." (38) There is no longer a way of telling what is more or less good. The value of an option has to come from without, independent of my will, and that applies even to the value of choice: "Self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues (I have also called the options, potentials, variables, etc.) are more significant than others." (Ibid.)

The choices required for authenticity require options that have real substance against a horizon of significance.

"The ideal of self-choice supposes that there are other issues of significance beyond self-choice. . . . It requires a horizon of issues of importance which help define the respects in which self-making is significant. The agent seeking significance in life, trying to define him- or herself meaningfully, has to exist in a horizon of important questions. I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. [Therefore, unlike soft relativism,] authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands" (39-41).

(2) Authenticity requires a way of recognizing differences without flattening them

The above argument means that simply making the choice to value others, simply asserting that a multicultural society is a good thing, does not proscribe value. The ability for those statements to have meaning requires that some common horizon be found for differences which make them valuable. "Mere difference can't itself be the ground of equal value." (51) "There must be some substantitive agreement on value, or else the formal principle of equality will be empty and a sham." Taylor turns to politics.

A political definition will not do it. Definitions of themselves exclude some differences even as they draw a wall of commonality around other differences. This is nothing but choice put in the hands of the polis, and the argument goes the same way as it did for individual choice as a ground for meaning. So what horizon of value does make sense?

Taylor doesn't answer the question definitively. Rather, he encourages his reader to begin to find "commonalities of value," and labels the most crucial of these "sharing a participatory political life." It is a necessary point on the way. Taylor has certainly gone further than narcissism, but it isn't enough in my opinion. What a commonality of value is, Taylor doesn't say. His result is shallow. Offering a political becoming--finding the answer in the process--though culturally a winner, is, in my mind, unsatisfactory.

Taylor's plea not to notice that man behind the curtain suggests a way for theology to provide a better answer. There is more to Taylor than soft relativism, but he does not arrive at a true and satisfactory Truth which would, by its very assertion, provide a touchstone, a north star, a schema of meaning in relation to all other suggested values. Interesting, too, that Taylor suggests a fundamental anthropology during his argument, writing, "There is a picture here of what human beings are like." He may not be sure what this anthropology is--perhaps it is a topic that will come up later in his book--but it is certain that the matrix formed between the relationship of God and humankind is a horizon of value that theology has long understood.

Previous entries in this series are:
The Need for Recognition.

Charles Taylor; individualism; social theory; modernity.

The Need for Recognition

2006-07-11T16:00:00.000-04:00

With the introduction of modernity, well-understood hierarchies of honor collapsed. Where the pecking order of society had been fixed, with differences properly arranged among the classes and functions of human life, now all were equalized. This was sure to effect the discovery and development of personal identity.

The loss of the honor system made identity a commodity. Personal identity had been fixed by society. "What the person recognized as important was to a great extent determined by his or her place in society and whatever roles or activities attached to this." (47) With the emergence of the changes that have been tracked so far in this book, with the emergence of a new ideal of authenticity, individuals were required to discover their own "original way of being" which "cannot be socially derived but must be inwardly generated." (Herder) One witnesses, therefore, the creation of a new and important human need: recognition.

In the previous chapter, Taylor noted that identity is discovered not in monologue but in dialog. This means that others are not only important, they are necessary! "The development of an ideal of inwardly generated identity gives a new and crucial importance to recognition. My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others." (emphasis mine) Recognition is brick-and-mortar in the house of self-identity.

Now when the established matrix of recognition, the social order, collapsed, the supply and demand of recognition needed systemic renegotiation. There was no longer any social guarantee of supply. Failure or loss were real possibilities. This effected social life on both a micro- and macro-scale.

Given the importance of dialogical relationships, it is no surprise that "the culture of authenticity" makes love relationships the "key loci of self-discovery and self-confirmation." Love relationships are the "crucibles of inwardly generated identity." There is a cultural emphasis, too, on the importance of ordinary life, "the life of production and the family, of work and love."

The importance of dialogical relationships--and especially the essential nature of recognition--effected the social plane as well. A politics of equal recognition is the order of the day. Indeed, the refusal to provide equal recognition "can inflect damage on those who are denied it," according to a widespread modern view.

“The projecting of an inferior or demeaning image on another can equally distort and oppress, to the extent that it is interiorized. Not only contemporary feminism but also race relations and discussions of multiculturalism are undergirded by the premise that denied recognition can be a form of oppression" (49-50).

What matters now is fairness. Equal recognition is a political given, demanding "the equal status of cultures and genders." Everyone should have an equal playing field upon which to develop their identity.

"Everyone should have the right and capacity to be themselves. This is what underlies soft relativism as a moral principle: no one has a right to criticize another's values. This inclines those imbued with this culture toward conceptions of procedural justice: the limit on anyone's self-fulfillment must be the safeguarding of an equal chance at this fulfillment for others" (45).

Here's where the critics come in. They say that the individualism which makes love relationships primary and make equality a political must are no good on either count. Narcissistic individualism, they say, makes love relationships only as good as self-fulfillment requires, tossed aside when they are no longer useful. And, they continue, this soft relativism weakens the fortitude necessary for political action in a democratic state. Soft relativism removes all difference. Everyone is absolutely equal, and so judgments of value are impossible and political debate absurd. So does the ideal of authenticity require this? Taylor says no.

His is a careful argument. On one hand, you have to have equality, but the reality is that a political community is made of men and women from various religions, races, and cultures. The differences have to be acknowledged, while at the same resisting favoritism. Each way of being needs a way of being equally valued. How do we do this?

What is needed is a bridge between equality and difference, some property, common or complementary, which is valued along a larger horizon than simple choice (referring to the argument made in the previous chapter.)

"To come together on a mutual recognition of difference--that is, of the equal value of different identities--requires that we share more than a belief in this principle; we have to share some standard of value on which the identities concerned check out as equal. There must be some substantive agreement on value, or else the formal principle of equality will be empty and a sham. We won't really share an understanding of equality unless we share something more. Recognizing difference, like self-choosing, requires a horizon of significance, in this case a shared one. [Thus] developing and nursing the commonalities of value between us become important, and one of the crucial ways we do this is sharing a participatory political life" (52).

And what about personal relationships? Does a desire for authenticity make our relationships just a means to self-fulfillment? Well, not if identity is properly understood. To develop personal identity is a life-long process, and so the recognizing give-and-take of my dialogical relationships will need to track this process. Identity-forming relationships, by definition, can't be any less tentative than personal identity itself. Indeed, "if my self-exploration takes the form of such serial and in principle temporary relationships, then it is not my identity that I am exploring, but some modality of enjoyment." (53) Instrumental relationships aren't a good support for personal identity. "The notion that one can pursue one's fulfillment in this way seems illusory, in somewhat the same way as the idea that one can choose oneself without recognizing a horizon of significance beyond choice." (Ibid.)

To be honest, I'm not sure I understand exactly where he is going with his arguments about authentic political relationships requiring a larger horizon of value. Taylor calls this a denial of procedural justice and the liberalism of neutrality and an embrace of a politics of identity-recognition. Perhaps when I'm done, this will make more sense.

Previous entries in this series are:
Two together—two apart.

Charles Taylor; individualism; social theory; modernity.

Two together—two apart

2006-07-10T18:07:00.000-04:00

Narcissistic modes of contemporary culture which desire self-fulfillment without regard to social obligation are self-defeating. They undermine the conditions necessary for realizing authenticity itself. That is the thesis Charles Taylor has before him as he begins his argument in chapter five: The Need for Recognition. But before an analysis, a few concepts require clarification.

First, I have noticed (and perhaps it has occurred earlier in this book) that Taylor always treats the individual as a participant in two interlocking social spheres. The first and most intimate sphere is the sphere of direct association, each person in relation to their spouse, children, friends, coworkers, etc. The second sphere is meta-social. It is society at large—and especially political citizenship. Taylor always treats both together, consistently demonstrating how a particular argument or state of affairs effects each one.

The second point of clarification is individualism. According to Taylor’s first chapter, individualism is one of the three nodes around which the malaise of modernity rotates. On one hand there are the cultural idolizers who cry “freedom!” and on the other the cultural despisers, who point at narcissism and an absolute subjectivity of self-fulfillment. This ideal Taylor is arguing for, the ideal (or ethic) of authenticity “is a facet of modern individualism.” But I note that Taylor takes up a line from de Tocqueville on page 125, note 17:

Individualism has in fact been used in two quite different senses. In one it is a moral ideal, one facet of which I have been discussing. In another, it is an amoral phenomenon, something like what we mean by egoism. The rise of individualism in this sense is usually a phenomenon of breakdown, where the loss of a traditional horizon leaves mere anomie in its wake, and everybody fends for themselves—e.g., in some demoralized, crime-ridden slums formed by newly urbanized peasants . . . It is, of course, catastrophic to confuse these two kinds of individualism, which have utterly different causes and consequences. Which is why Tocqueville carefully distinguishes “individualism” from “egoism.”

Taylor, of course, believes that the naysayers of individualism, Bloom for example, are doing just that. A mainstay of The Milieu of Modernity is a running argument for self-centered individualism as a faux form of authenticity. Bloom and the naysayers criticize such individualism because (among other things) it brings every human relation under the gavel of instrumental reason, and ultimately erodes effective political participation (mirroring the second and third points made in chapter one.) Taylor agrees, but not without saying, “there is another definition of individualism!” To understand this individualism properly; to understand its ethic of authenticity, is to see that every assertion of individuality is also a statement about the social order. “The individualism of anomie has no social ethic attached to it; but individualism as a moral principle or ideal must offer some view on how the individual should live with others.” And there are the two interlocking rings of social relationships that I talked about above. Now, on to the chapter itself!

Previous entries in this series are:
Gotta have those transcendent horizons.

Charles Taylor; individualism; social theory; modernity.

Gotta have those transcendent horizons

2006-07-07T10:52:00.000-04:00

You can argue reasonably about ideals and about the conformity of practices to those ideals—that is the second part of the tripartite argument Charles Taylor is making in this middle portion of The Malaise of Modernity.

The foundation of his argument rests in three moves. First, the goal is reason, and reason requires an interlocutor. Second, the sort of interlocutor with whom Taylor is making his argument accepts the ideal of authenticity, “they are trying to shape their lives in the light of this ideal.” (Ah! A common ground of discourse!) Third, and this is most important, Taylor argues that human life is fundamentally dialogical.

Identity is no monologue. “However one feels about it,” he writes, “the making and sustaining of our identity remains dialogical throughout our lives.” (35) Again, “we become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves and hence of defining an identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.” (33) We learn language—any meaningful gesture: art, love, dance—from and with others who matter to us. And it isn’t that we pick this up and then go off alone to further develop ourselves. No, “the contribution of significant others continues throughout life.”

I find it interesting that Taylor talks about pleasure. Authentic identity requires others, he says. Solitude ignores “how our understanding of the good things in life can be transformed by our enjoying them in common with people we love, how some goods become accessible to us only through such common enjoyment.” (34) The good life—he hasn’t said this but he may as well have—the good life (for which the ideal or ethic of authenticity is a necessary part), requires an Other, some addressee, be it parents, friends, spouse, an audience, God. Self fulfillment, because its horizon is only the immediate self and no other, pales in comparison . . . and that’s exactly where Taylor is going!

Now comes a thesis statement:

“I want to show that modes that opt for self-fulfillment without regard (a) to the demands of our ties with others, or (b) to demands of any kind emanating from something more or other than human desires or aspirations are self-defeating, that they destroy the conditions for realizing authenticity itself” (35).

Taylor begins with point (b), that the ethic of authenticity demands something more or other than human desires. His proof (more of a sketch) is sublime.

“When we come to understand what it is to define ourselves, to determine in what our originality consists, we see that we have to take as a background some sense of what is significant. Defining myself means finding what is significant in my difference from others" (35). If we ourselves define what is significant—who cares! In order for something to be significant, it must . . . well . . . be significant. But who determines significance?

Personal choice alone does not bestow significance—but that’s what soft relativism says: significance is bestowed by our free choice. Recall Rousseau’s doctrine of self-determining freedom mentioned in the last chapter. If choice did give meaning, dismissing any pre-existing horizon of significance, then choice would at the same time take it away. Since it equalizes all results, nothing comes to mean more than anything else. Difference is meaningless. “Soft relativism self destructs.”

Now, the ideal of authenticity does value self-choice—one chooses an authentic, and thus, meaningful/significant life—but it is the disparate values of chosen outcomes that make choice significant, not the other way round. Significance must be derived from horizons of value existing outside the self which make differences meaningful.

“Unless some options are more significant than others, the very idea of self-choice falls into triviality and hence is incoherent. Self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues are more significant than others. To shut out demands emanating beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization. Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands” (39-40).

Taylor’s argument has a major flaw: he doesn’t suggest any criteria for sorting out which “self-transcending issues” should be preferred. His critique contains no telos. Nevertheless, he moves on to part (a) of his thesis: he wants to show “whether there is something self-defeating in a mode of fulfillment that denies our ties to others.” (41) That argument is the substance of the next chapter.

Previous entries in this series are:
Sources of Authenticity.

Charles Taylor; authenticity; individualism; social theory; relativism; self fullfillment .

Sources of Authenticity

2006-07-06T10:20:00.000-04:00

Charles Taylor thinks authenticity needs to be taken more seriously as a moral ideal. Its caricatures, such as subjective relativism, shouldn't be allowed to determine the debate, whether one celebrates or denigrates them. Instead, Taylor is out to retrieve a via media, the moral force of authenticity, and in order to do that, he asks three things of his reader: (1) that they believe authenticity is a valid ideal; (2) that they agree that one can make reasonable, evaluative arguments about ideals and their moral ramifications; (3) that they understand such arguments to be meaningful; they make a difference. "I hope to be able to make some of this plausible," he writes. "Let me start with the ideal." (23)

The Sources of Authenticity

Born from Renee Descartes' disengaged rationality, "where the demand is that each person think self-responsibly for him- or herself, and the political individualism of John Locke, where "the person and his or her will [is considered] prior to social obligation," (a kind of atomism which ignores altogether the ties of community), the ideal or ethic of authenticity grew up in the Romantic period of the eighteenth century. There was a notion in the culture that being in touch with one's inner, moral sense was a most ethical and good thing to do. People believed that knowing right from wrong was a matter of intuitive knowing rather than a lockstep product of formal obeisance to religious commands. Authenticity took this one step further.

Instead of an ethic where one seeks to know what is good and evil for the sake of one's neighbor (acting rightly), authenticity becomes "something we have to attain to be true and full human beings," (being rightly). "The source we have to connect with is deep in us," writes Taylor. "This is part of the massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths." (26) Taylor sees a progression from Augustine, to the pantheists and deists of the salons, and finally to Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose great popularity "comes in part from his articulating something that was already happening in the culture."

Jean Jacques Rousseau urged his audience to obtain an intimate understanding of themselves, which he called "le sentiment de l'existence." A discovery, or recovery, of this authentic knowing is morally salvific, he said. Indeed, it is more fundamental than morals, and gives joy and contentment to living.

Interesting enough, Taylor sees a parallel development in Rousseau which is often confused with authenticity. This is Rousseau's doctrine of self-determining freedom. This doctrine is "the idea that I am free when I decide for myself what concerns me, rather than being shaped by external influence. It demands that I break the hold of all external impositions and decide for myself alone." It is a doctrine with pervasive political influence, taking on the form of a "contract state founded on a general will," (and because it is generally held, it tolerates no dissonance--a seed of what becomes modern totalitarianism. Immanuel Kant revises this doctrine in a purely moral key, but Hegel and Marx return it to the political.)

Herder, says Taylor, makes our ideal of authenticity from Rousseau's moral inwardness. It is no longer a way to connect with God or a source of social good, but, instead, becomes the way each of us is originally human (and here I will quote at length from Taylor):

"There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's. If I am not, I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me. This is the powerful moral ideal that has come down to us. It accords crucial moral importance to a kind of contact with myself, with my own inner nature, which it sees as in danger of being lost, partly through the pressures of outward conformity, but also because in taking an instrumental stance to myself, I may have lost the capacity to listen to this inner voice. And then it greatly increases the importance of this self-contact by introducing the principle of originality: each of our voices has something of its own to say. Not only should I not fit my life to the demands of external conformity; I can't even find the model to live by outside myself. I can find it only within. Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own" (29).

Previous entries in this series are:
Authenticity Overlooked.

Charles Taylor; authenticity; individualism; social theory; relativism; Rousseau; eighteenth century; Herder; Karl Marx; Hegel; Immanuel Kant; Renee Descartes; John Locke; Augustine; political philosophy .

Authenticity Overlooked

2006-07-03T12:57:00.000-04:00

In chapter two of The Malaise of Modernity--The Inarticulate Debate--Charles Taylor paints a picture of an ideal under assault from forces within and without. The ideal is the ideal of authenticity, which Taylor says has a moral force behind it. Authenticity suggests there is a higher and even better mode of living; there is a life we ought to desire. But this ideal is lost amid the fog of war.

Coming from the outside are naysayers like Allan Bloom. Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind calls attention to an individualism of self fulfillment, a relativism described as:

"Everyone has a right to develop their own form of life, grounded on their own sense of what is really important or of value. People are called upon to be true to themselves and to seek their own self-fulfillment. What this consists of, each must in the last instance, determine for him- or herself. No one else can or should try to dictate its content" (14).

Bloom and the naysayers smell sloth. They point the finger at the pretentious intellectualism of the young and call it self-indulgence, egoistic, and morally lax. After all, in an age of uncertainty, it is better to remain as uncertain as possible lest we be required to act selflessly on behalf of others. They decry self fulfillment for admiring pragmatic survivalism rather than heroism, and hint at the third worry, the worry of a populace so self-focused that it wanders blithe into soft despotism. Bloom especially talks about a narrowing and flattening of the human being.

"Narrower because they [those who hold to an individualism of self fulfillment ] lack what is most necessary, a real basis for discontent with the present and awareness that there are alternatives to it. They are both more contented with what is and despairing of ever escaping from it. . . . Flatter, because without interpretations of things, without the poetry or the imagination's activity, their souls are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around" (Bloom, 61).

Taylor largely agrees. And yet he believes the critics miss something. They miss the moral force underneath its narcissistic popularization: the moral ideal of authenticity--an ideal he believes (and that is the program of the book, to demonstrate and defend this belief) is valuable and should not only be retained but developed, clarified, and observed with care. Unfortunately, Taylor receives no help from those who might agree with him.

Those on the inside get the moral ideal of authenticity mixed up with caricatures. Most, for example, espouse authenticity along with a soft relativism--Taylor also calls it a liberalism of neutrality or simply tolerance. Soft relativists are skittish about the implications of saying that some forms of life are higher or better than others. They say, "a liberal society must be neutral on questions of what constitutes a good life. The good life is what each individual seeks, in his or her own way, and government would be lacking in impartiality, and thus in equal respect for all citizens, if it took sides on this question." The result: public and political reflection shirks any reflection on the good. These "friends of authenticity" clamp their hands over their mouths, leaving the field to its detractors.

Taylor goes on to identify two other factors that conspire in the silence of its friends: a culture enthralled in moral subjectivism and the usual methods of social science explanation. Taylor's discussion of moral subjectivism begins lumping the adjectives all together: individualism of self fulfillment; toleration; the liberalism of neutrality; moral subjectivism. What is he talking about? Are they all the same or different? Still, one can agree that these positions "are not in any way grounded in reason or the nature of things" but find their source in the popularity game of subjective fashion. Real political debate is rendered innocuous, as is any Aristotelian language of human nature. But what about social science? How does it conspire to silence all naysayers on behalf of authenticity? Well, by ignoring it altogether. The "hard" explanations of the social sciences--industrialization or the rise of class mobility--completely ignore the possibility that "soft" moral ideas effect social change. Marxism, notes Taylor, is guilty as charged: ideas are the product of economic changes. But much non-Marxist social science agrees. "And this in spite of the orientation of some of the great founders of social science, like Weber, who recognized the crucial role of moral and religious ideas in history." "What are often invoked [to describe social change] are applications that are non-moral . . . motivations that can actuate people quite without connection to any moral ideal . . . a desire for greater wealth, or power, or the means of survival or control over others."

"Even where individual freedom and the enlargement of instrumental reason are seen as ideas whose intrinsic attractions can help explain their rise, this attraction is frequently understood in non-moral terms. That is, the power of these ideas is often understood not in terms of their moral force but just because of the advantages they seem to bestow on people regardless of their moral outlook, or even whether they have a moral outlook. Freedom allows you to do what you want, and the greater application of instrumental reason gets you more of what you want, whatever that is." (20-21)

Therefore, in the face of withering social criticism from without and crippled by forces from within, little real reflection on the moral force of authenticity is accomplished.

The rub is that everyone, those within and without, are mostly arguing over caricatures. Most of the external attacks, argue Taylor, target caricatures of authenticity, not the real thing. And expressions like soft relativism, he continues, are simply "debased and deviant forms of [the] ideal" which "don't represent an authentic(!) fulfillment of it." According to Taylor, each of its caricatures is in reality a betrayal of its fundamental ideal. "So far from being a reason to reject the moral ideal of authenticity, [each] should itself be rejected in its name. Or so I would like to argue" (22). And here, finally, Taylor begins to suggest a platform for dialogue with naysayers and with so-called friends whose soft relativism has so far made them immune.

"Articulacy here has a moral point, not just in correcting what may be wrong views but also in making the force of an ideal that people are already living by more palpable, more vivid for them; and by making it more vivid, empowering them to live up to it in a fuller and more integral fashion. . . . I think that authenticity should be taken seriously as a moral ideal . . . worthwhile in itself and unrepudiable by moderns. What we need is a work of retrieval, through which this ideal can help us restore our practice" (22-23).

It will be interesting to see where Taylor goes from here.

Previous entries in this series are:
Taylor on Modernity's Malaise; Baudelaire is Melting.

Charles Taylor; authenticity; individualism; social theory; relativism; Allan Bloom.

Taylor on Modernity's Malaise

2006-06-30T18:13:00.000-04:00

In The Malaise of Modernity, where the what is the 1991 Massey Lectures reprinted by the House of Anansi Press and the why is malaise /mu-LAYZ/: a vague sense of mental or moral ill-being, Charles Taylor, emeritus professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, details three "features of our contemporary culture and society that people [fear are representative of] loss or a decline" these being individualism; the primacy of instrumental reason; and the danger of "soft despotism" (1). Let me say a little more about these.

Worry Number One: Individualism

Individualism is usually understood as one of the real achievements of Western civilization.

“We live in a world where people have a right to choose for themselves their own pattern of life, to decide in conscience what convictions to espouse, to determine the shape of their lives in a whole host of ways that their ancestors couldn’t control. And these rights are generally defended by our legal systems. In principle, people are no longer sacrificed to the demands of supposedly sacred orders that transcend them.” (2)

Some go so far as to say there isn’t enough individualism--social, economic, and family hierarchies still confine personal freedom--but others see it differently. They worry that we’ve won our liberty-for-self at a great price. The great chain of being which once put everything in its proper (usually sacred) place in a weighted and even moral universe is irrevocably broken. Modern freedom required it, yes, but in requiring it, the givenness of living and the meaning that came with those cultural relationships is gone. This is what has been called the disenchantment of the world. Gone is a “heroic dimension to life. People no longer have a sense of a higher purpose, of something worth dying for.” There is “a loss of meaning, the fading of moral horizons . . . a centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society” (4). Taylor invokes Friedrich Nietzche’s “last man,” who has no aspirations left but “pitiable comfort.” So when it comes to individualism, many have found its cost historically and existentially regrettable.

Worry Number Two: The Primacy of Instrumental Reason

Instrumental reason is rationality aimed always at the bottom line. Instrumental reason aims at production. “Once the creatures that surround us lose the significance that accrued to their place in the chain of being, they are open to being treated as raw materials or instruments for our projects” (5).

The fear is that “things that ought to be determined by other criteria will be decided in terms of efficiency or “cost-benefit” analysis” (Ibid.). And this is no boundless anxiety. Every area of human life and thought is commonly quantified, measured, documented, and analyzed. Technology itself has come to dominate so many spheres of human living. Taylor talks about an “aura that surrounds technology and makes us believe that we should seek technological solutions even when something very different is called for.” The sick become research subjects, problems to be solved rather than people who should be cured. Per Karl Marx’s “all that is solid melts into air” we have long passed an age where craftsmanship and quality mattered. “Lasting, often expressive objects that served us in the past are being set aside for the quick, shoddy, replaceable commodities with which we now surround ourselves.” And, as Taylor continues, “powerful mechanisms of social life press us in this direction.”

Karl Marx, Max Weber, and other sociologists have noted and explored these impersonal mechanisms, Weber going so far as to call it “the iron cage.” Change in this area is difficult, but hopeless and fatalistic ennui is wrong. “Our degrees of freedom are not zero. There is a point to deliberating what ought to be our ends, and whether instrumental reason ought to have a lesser role in our lives than it does.” But any change will be hard going. “change in this domain will have to be institutional as well [as individual]” and “it cannot be as sweeping and total as the great theorists of revolution proposed” (8).

Worry Number Three: Soft Despotism

The two worries above, it is said, produce a kind of soft despotism. In the old days, political power was seized and enforced by terror and torture, oppression and suffocation. This kind of despotism, however, is sappy and silly. It is entertaining and benign. The hum of the political machine fades into the background of the whiz bang of a technologically-entranced, self-centered populace which, with each so-called election, loses ever more of its political influence. Government “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd” (Tocqueville). The government takes care of everything, relieving its citizens of the bothersome and tiring weight of governance.

“The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” (Ibid.)

Soft despotism represents nothing less than a loss of freedom, or what Tocqueville called “political liberty.” “What is threatened here is our dignity as citizens” (10).

Taylor wants to tackle these problems head-on. They aren’t new problems--scholars of modernity have been talking about them for over a century--but they can be bewildering! Yet if we take the time to understand these worries, he says, we can begin to trace out a way of approaching them. “Our degrees of freedom are not zero,” he says. “The issue is not how much of a price in bad consequences you have to pay for the positive fruits [of modernity], but rather how to steer these developments towards their greatest promise and avoid the slide into their debased forms” (12).

Previous entries in this series are: Baudelaire is Melting.

Charles Taylor; modernity; Alexis de Tocqueville; individualism; social theory.

Trinitarian tidbits

2006-06-26T12:44:00.000-04:00

Reading the latest issue of Asbury Journal, I noted some nice trinitarian bits scattered in its concluding folio. Aggregating them makes a nice refresher course in the reason why theology has blossomed under the needed reminder of its thoroughgoing trinitarianism in the last half-centuty.

The work and experience of salvation is the work and experience of the Holy Trinity

To know God in Christ is to know the Trinity

The fullness of the Trinity participates in Jesus' self-giving for us

The saving, healing presence of the Trinity means that Christians "in pure love renewed" experience the restoration of God's image and become the very dwelling place of the Trinity

Salvation is a trinitarian dogma, involving all of history. Through salvation in Jesus Christ by the Spirit we become experientially, communitarily involved with the God of the universe who is now effectually working to restore all creation

[The implicit trinitarianism underlying the book of Ephesians provides] a way of uniting new birth and sanctification with the socioeconomic and cosmic dimensions of God's work of new creation

The entire life of the church--in all its varied practices--is meant to embody participation in the Father's sending of the Son and the Spirit for the sake of the world

trinity; theology; soteriology; ecclesiology; Ephesians, Book of.

Hütter on Trinity and church

2006-06-23T17:58:00.000-04:00

The church is the location where we come to know God, surely not in every possible way, but in the one decisive way, namely as the One who saves us and draws us into the fullness of the divine life—all of this through faith in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. The church itself is nothing else than the thankful creature of God's saving work, not a proud executor but a glad recipient. Yet this receiving embodied in practices is precisely the way in and through which the Holy Spirit works the saving knowledge of God. For this very reason not only the Catholics but also the Reformers could call the church the 'mother of faith.'"

Quoted from Reinhard Hütter, “The Knowledge of the Triune God: Practices, Doctrine, Theology,” 2. The Church in James J. Buckley and David S. Yeago, eds., Knowing the Triune God: The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 23. More to come.

ecclesiology; Reinhard Hütter

Summa Theologica in a nutshell

2006-06-22T11:45:00.000-04:00

My Way of Life (Brooklyn, NY: Cofraternity of the Precious Blood, 1952) is a "pocket edition of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. I picked it up at Moody Books in Johnson City, TN, when Aquinas was just a rumor in my mind. And, in the last few months, I've taken to reading a page or two a day--quite instructive! Its editors were top-notch Aquinas scholars in their day: Walter Ferrell, O.P., S.T.M., and Martin J. Healy, S.T.D. Saturated in the Summa, these two Roman Catholic historical theologians boiled the Q&A, point-counterpoint of the original down to its main assertions, and presented these in a simple, even beautiful little devotional of faith.

At any rate, an entry this morning on charity caught my eye. It sums up the entire project of the Summa in one, easy-to-understand paragraph. "This," I said, "must be blogged!" So here goes:

"Where then shall men find peace and joy and rest except in the love of God and men? Only a whole-hearted love of God and of men in God will bring peace to the individual and to society. Love can build a world. Hate can only destroy. Hatred sets men at odds with themselves and with God. They cannot judge correctly the value of men or nature. It is only in God that everything in the world receives it true place and its proper value. Only charity perceives everything as it is in God. Only charity therefore can enable a man to judge both the world and himself properly. And only this true judgment enables a man to find that tranquility of order which is peace" (361).

Thomas Aquinas; Summa Theologica; theology; charity; Walter Ferrell; Martin Healy

NYT traces horizons of electronic theology

2006-06-15T15:54:00.000-04:00

What follows is an entry I wrote a week or so ago for the members of jm (jurgenmoltmann.com), an online discussion group. I'm posting it here to serve as a basis for further reflection.
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Dear jm members:

If you haven't read the May 14, 2006 New York Times article "Scan This Book!" by Kevin Kelley, you should. In it, Kelley paints a picture of the possible realization of the universal library through global initiatives in digital scanning--fascinating enough. Kelley discusses how search and retrieval technology will change the equation of value in knowledge and research--certainly interesting. What I'm interested in, however--what we're all interested in--is what all this means for jm; and it means a great deal.

A Change in Priority: No Books

The truth of the matter is that we are poised between the previous age, that of the book which culminated in the creation of the sacred "critical edition," and the next, where value is discovered in the verb rather than the noun. One reaches something akin to the academic sacredness of a critical edition in the new paradigm as one achieves a point at which your project garners the attention and involvement of everyone who is interested in that same topic on a global scale. Whereas before it was a solid, where density is value; now it is becoming gas, where expandability is key.

According to Kelley, "corporations and libraries around the world are now scanning about a million books a year." Google, Yahoo, and other private companies, such as Superstar in Beijing and EBSCO Publishing Inc. in New England, all using state-of-the-art robots and increasingly-good OCR technology, are scanning millions of books. Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon University is already clocking 100,000 pages a day from locations in China and India as part of his Million Book Project. Analogously, Kerry writes, "Nearly 100 percent of all contemporary recorded music has already been digitized." The result will be "the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available [potentially] to all people, all the time." The technology has been in existence already for over a decade.

Since jm's inception, I have hoped that the storage capabilities of this forum (some 25 megabytes) would serve as an initial archive for hope theology in the next digital age of theological development. In a sense, jm would be a resurrection point for the dead letter of works, speeches, papers, conference materials and other ephemera only available to those who have geographic and economic access. Here is a perfect synergy between method and subject: jm pushing out into the future and the wider horizon of the next unknown paradigm. And why does it do this--largely for scholars and readers laboring in the bookless developing world, exactly those for whom so much of the theology and philosophy of hope has been written. But the above causes an adjustment in the initial vision. There is no need or ability to compete with that kind of capital where books are concerned. The focus for acquisitions should be placed elsewhere. jm can and should still pursue a mission to archive non-book materials: white-papers, theses and dissertations, articles, blog posts, URL's, and other non-book materials, but in terms of the larger task--actually collecting the important print materials from established scholars, living or dead--this project is unnecessary.

jm as curator and think-tank

Kevin Kelly spends quite a bit of time discussing the transformation of information that will occur once a majority of books in print are digitized. In a sense, they become "one gigantic text." Linking of books by bibliographies, then by words, then by user-created tags creates new relationships that could not have existed before. Users begin to annotate and then swap out "playlists" of this universal text according to their interests and changing opinions. "Some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages." Amazon already allows you to assemble your own private library, eventually, says Kelly, "users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection."

Frankly, we don't know what this means for god-talk as it is done today, but one thing is certain: the ability to sort out, to recommend, and to appropriately guide discussion in a sea of interrelated information will only become more valuable. The central value which jm will serve once this paradigm begins to become commonly available (it is already, in large part, commercially available) is as a curator of its subject. jm as a curator and guide to previous and subsequent research in Moltmannalia and in the theologies and philosophies of hope.

jm and the hegemony of the copy

The remainder of Kelley's article traces the hegemony of the copy, where "the copy" refers to the hegemonic "lock up" of copyright problems which have locked away cultural material, so that "almost everything created today will not return to the commons until the next century." By 1998's extension of copyright to seventy years beyond the life of a creator, "it was obvious to all that copyright now existed primarily to protect a threatened business model" and leaving "a vast collection of works that have been abandoned by publishers, a continent of books left permanently in the dark." As he says, "the bulk of our universal library is dark."

The problem where jm is concerned is that the theologies and philosophies of hope are largely out of print and yet under copyright, and therefore are part of this dark universe. Not that it is as simple as asking publishers or authors to release or extend their copyright to us, as "the publishing company [often] doesn't know whether it even owns the work, since author contracts in the past were not as explicit as they are now." Up until now, though, it was the only thing open to us, as above. But here comes Google.

In section five of his article, entitled "The Moral Imperative to Scan," Kevin Kelley details Google Book's 2004 initiative to begin scanning the 75 percent of the dead library, the out-of-print books that no one else would touch. I won't detail the details here, but the result would be to lift back into the light so many books, as now previously unknown or unavailable titles would come to the surface by way of user search. "for authors with books in the publisher program and for authors of books abandoned by a publisher, Google unleashed a chance that more people would at least read, and perhaps buy, the creation they had sweated for years to complete." "While a few best-selling authors fear piracy, every author fears obscurity."

Now many publishers aren't happy with Google. It doesn't matter to them whether they were never going to republish some little-bought 1960's era work in the theology of hope, they just don't want Google to do it. Admittedly, this is a complex issue--but only when you look through the eyes of the still-operating-in-the-era-of-copy-corporations. Publishers are not going to reprint what won't sell, and even what sells only has a six-month shelf life. "Publishers only care about these orphans now because Google has shifted the economic equation; because of [Google's] Book Search, these dark books may now have some sparks in them, and the publishers don't want this potential revenue stream to slip away from them."

From the perspective of jm, it is a win-win. Digital technology, and, indeed, modernity itself, has made the old business models obsolete and they are changing even if slowly. From our perspective, what is important is finding a way of capitalizing on the situation at hand so that the "history of hope" as an academic subject is made available in a world where "the value of any work is increased the more it is shared." The best insurance to see thought thrive around hope, in all its manifestations, is to open it up to the future. Therefore, jm must pursue authors and publishers who hold the copyright for out-of-print and unpublishable written works in the theology and philosophy of hope in order to get them to release copyright to Google. If Google is allowed to scan a work into Google search, then that work is instantly made available to the future. It becomes a "living" contributor again, even if its status in the old, copy-based economy of publishing has declared it dead.

One of the tools we can use is to empower authors themselves. Are you aware that an author, if they determine a publisher is no longer going to republish their work or pursue its interest in any way, may request that publisher release their rights back to the author? This transfer is actually written into most standard contracts, but how many authors are aware that they still have power where their own words are concerned? If authors will begin to see the value of making their work available again, then we could see some of the theologies and philosophies of hope now buried in obscurity come out of the tomb of unpublishability and step out into the future.

Kevin Kelley; Scan This Book; Jürgen Moltmann; Jurgen Moltmann; publishing.

Pound's ABC's

2006-06-09T09:57:00.000-04:00

The following is taken straight from an entry in my journal dated 14 July, 2002. I love Ezra Pound, and I love the points he makes in this little book; its spare treatment is exactly what is needed. I wish people taught theology this way; they probably should. Say, maybe that's why I'm posting this? (It could be.)

"I've been putting off writing in the stuff pulled from Ezra Pound's ABC's of Reading (New Directions, 1960). Let me say briefly that the main message of this book is that you learn best by direct encounter with masters of the craft. Rather than essays about the masters, ad fontes, a return to the source, makes the best training. Here are my culled quotes from this book (caps are authors):

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man. [Pound meant poetry, but I believe Barth made the same point about theology.]

The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters (belles lettres) is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful, first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another.

In the middle ages when there wasn't any material science, as we now understand it, when human knowledge could not make automobiles run, or electricity carry language through the air, etc., in short, when learning consisted in little more than splitting up of terminology, there was a good deal of care for terminology, and the general exactitude in the use of abstract terms may have been (probably was) higher.

Science developed more rapidly after Bacon suggested the direct examination of phenomenon.

Melody is the most artificial thing in music, meaning that it is furthest removed from anything the composer finds THERE, ready in nature, needing only direct imitation or copying. It is therefore the root, the test, etc.

Any general (re: categorical) statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there (re: empirical) to meet it.

A general statement is valuable only in REFERENCE to the known objects or facts. Even if the general statement of an ignorant man is "true," it leaves his mouth without any great validity. He doesn't KNOW what he is saying.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

It doesn't so much matter where you begin the examination of a subject, so long as you keep on until you get round again to your starting point.

The critic who doesn't make personal statement, in re measurement he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results. Krino: to pick out for oneself . . . to choose.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate; keep it clear.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

Different climates and different bloods have different ratios between different groups of impulse and unwillingness, different needs, different spontaneities, different reluctances, different constructions of throat, and all these leave trace in the language, and leave it more ready and more unready for certain communications and registrations.

Dichten = condensare / Dichten is the German verb corresponding to the noun Dichtung meaning poetry and the Italian verb meaning "to condense."

Until you have made your own survey and your own closer inspection, you might at least beware and avoid accepting opinions: (1) From men who haven't themselves produced notable work; (2) From men who have not themselves taken the risks of printing the results of their own personal inspection and survey, even if they are seriously making one.

There would seem to be almost no limit to what people can and will misunderstand when they are not doing their utmost to get at a writer's meaning.

It is my firm conviction that a man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many.

The quicker you go to the texts the less need there will be for your listening to me or to any other long-winded critic.

Incompetence will show in the use of too many words.

One definition of beauty is: aptness to purpose.

The list of things safe to read an hour before you start writing, is distinct from the books a non-writing reader can peruse for enjoyment.

An attempt to set down things as they are, to find the word that corresponds to the thing.

The lecturer's first problem is to have enough words to fill forty or sixty minutes. The professor is paid for his time, his results are almost impossible to estimate. The man who really knows can tell all that is transmissible in a very few words. The economic problem of the teacher (of violin or of language or of anything else) is how to string it out so as to be paid for more lessons.

The true problem is, what is the simplest possible statement.

Real education must ultimately be limited to [those] who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

It is only after long experience that most men are able to define a thing in terms of its own genus.

If you want to study the novel, go READ the best you can find.

Ezra Pound; epigraphs; quotes; writing.

Random connects on art and beauty

2006-05-30T17:06:00.000-04:00

The quoted material which follows is from Luci Shaw. Breath for the Bones: Art, Imagination and Spirit: A Reflection on Creativity and Faith. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2007.
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"The benison (blessing) of the sacramental view of life, then, is that the Logos which first called the universe into being, now embraces and defines it, assigning meaning and value at every level. As C. S. Lewis said, "I believe in Christianity as i believe the Sun has risen not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else." Some people say that seeing is believing, but Flannery O'Connor tells us, "For the writer, to belive nothing is to see nothing." As we write about what we see, in all its concrete detail, its hard and shining edges, or its half-glimpsed outlines..." We call attention to. We reveal creation to be beautiful. Beauty is always tied to the real, the observable. It is there to be seen. Experienced. Beauty is perhaps one of the few things that constantly calls us back to God, that reminds us of an ideal of goodness and vitality, a reality that embodies the beautiful. The Benedictines hold that beauty is "truth shining into being," a principle adopted by John Keats in his famous "beauty is truth, truth beauty." In this sense beauty is redemptive. It motivates and awakens us. It surprises us and leads us to pursue a new objective.

"There is something that art says which is so qualitatively different that it demands a radically different expression. Where linear, logical thinking may produce prose with a specific function--information, or historical record, or critical analysis, or instruction, art selects and reflects on a small slice of human experience and lays it out there, a gift to anyone who is willing to savor it and enter into the artist's experience even in a minimal way. The artist, ideally, communicates experience in images and forms so precisely tailored, so personal, so multi-leveled that its insights go far beyond bare facts or mere usefulness.

"When the artist lives in the house of faith, her or his consciousness is suffused with and informed by Christian images, and when that imaginative intelligence is allowed freely to describe life-experience, the images and words supplied and shaped by the artist will reflect Christian belief even when there is no overt effort or intention to do so."

Hannah's natality and Jürgen's novum

2006-05-24T10:52:00.000-04:00

In his short essay "Natality or Advent: Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Moltmann on Hope and Politics" (in The Future of Hope. eds. Miroslav Volf and William Katerberg. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 125-143), David Billings, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College, discerns a hidden-yet-implicit advent in the political eschatology of Jürgen Moltmann. He does this using concepts found in the naturalistic philosophy of Hannah Arendt. Arendt taught in The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt Brace 1973) and other works that political hope requires a concept of natality which sees in each new generation something altogether new. The enemy is a repetitive, circular understanding of time in which nothing new has ever been or will ever be. It is true that, like all living things, human beings live and die. This is the fore and aft of their being. Nevertheless, as Moltmann and Arendt agree, such circularity deflates political motivation.

Hannah Arendt defines natality as "the fact that we all begin this life in birth and that each birth represents something radically new—a new beginning—a newcomer and an individual the world has never seen before." (127) Natality requires linear time. Each individual is an unrepeatable subjectivity that transcends the sameness of the animal world. Natality also suggests a foothold for political hope. In each new person, there is the prospect of actions that have not been before, there is the hope of change that may come. (Contrast this against Martin Heidegger's "throwness" and "being unto death".) "With natality we have an opening of future horizons and the possibility of hope" (132).

Hannah Arendt developed her concept of natality based on an argument in Augustine's Civitas Dei (though Augustine talks about creation rather than birth.) In this particular section of the Civitas, Augustine argues against reincarnation and with it any belief that what seems new in nature is but the product of what has previously existed. This entire wheel of fate, in Augustine's mind, must be broken simply because it denies redemption. If there can never be a new, then there is no possibility of redemptive escape from calamity and evil.

Hannah Arendt's natality takes up the threads of this debate. She seems to bring Augustine's insights constructively to bear on twentieth century political action. Yet, there is a fatal flaw: naturalism. Hannah Arendt was a naturalist, and therefore she could not with Augustine affirm a future eschatological redemption. As Billings begins interrogating the superstructure of Arendt's natality–the basis of her political hope - it crumbles. "Taken by itself and stripped from a context of eschatological ends, natality provides little hope. Yes, the future may be different because of the implicit promise of "the new" in each new birth; this difference may, however, be evil" (134). Political hope demands a surer foundation than what might be. It requires meaning which is grounded in absolute transcendence.

At the same time there is a weakness in Augustine. Denying the circularity of the ebb-n-flow living world in its natura naturans, Augustine sets his sight on redemptive apocalypse. Yet, he skews too far toward into the immaterial, a by-product of latent Manichean neo-platonism. Augustine holds out hope, but not political hope. It is hope that does not suggest action in the world. Billings turns to Jürgen Moltmann.

Jürgen Moltmann's eschatological program, as set out in a dozen or so books between his Theology of Hope and Coming of God, understands a thoroughly proleptic apocalypse. His eschatology is not futurist (not-yet), nor presentative (now-already), but adventus (that which is is coming, but is not yet here). Moltmann teaches this according to his category of the novum. The novum is the breaking open of linear time by transcendent, eschatological time (there is significant borrowing from Karl Barth's understanding of God's temporality). In his promises, chiefly incarnated in the Christ-event, God has begun to arrive. These advent-points open up a history of God, whereby the One who is and was, is also to come. "God's future is not that he will be as he was and is, but that he is on the move and coming towards the world. God's being is in his coming, not his becoming" (137). God's arrival, too, is not an end, but a taking up, a fulfilling. Not a destruction, but a reconstruction in an altogether better way.

The novum provides a powerful political category that corrects Augustine and suggests Arendt. The novum cannot be anticipated by anything that is already here, freeing history from the past. Its entry creates new possibilities against the promise of God's ultimate redemption when he arrives and becomes all-in-all. The novum enters history as advent, and thus enervates human social hopes toward the resistance of faith and the patience of hope. Its penultimate example is the resurrection of the Christ. The resurrection "lets us look beyond the horizon of this world's end into God's new world. Life out of this hope then means already acting here and today in accordance with that world of justice and righteousness and peace, contrary to appearances, and contrary to all historical chances of success" (138). Here is Augustine corrected. But what about the suggestion of Arendt?

There are many similarities between Hannah Arendt's natality and Jürgen Moltmann's eschatology. Billings notes that both desire political action on the basis of the radically new. Yet, Arendt's naturalism cannot take in Moltmann's eschatology. The novum is a miraculous inbreaking ex nihilo that has no analogue in Arendt. But what about the other way round?

Moltmann avoids language about birth because the birth-process resembles so much that old idea of nothing new under the sun. The infant comes forth from its mother, there is nothing new after all. But, as Billings says, "It is the new, utterly unique life inaugurated by birth that can astonish us, not the mere fact that a birth follows labor," leading him to conclude that "the new of natality could be incorporated into Moltmann's thought" (140).

This is a charming and human insight. Natality has a lived humanitas about it, which the abstract novum lacks. Whereas novum only exists as one of two opposing points vis-à-vis reincarnation, natality reveals a continuum between them. Natality finds a middle-way so that it is a new beginning toward the future that does not completely jettison the past. "Natality's newness comes from within. The newcomers that form the new generation are always our children" (141). Note the parallel between natality's newness, which arrives outside of expectation but not outside of being, and the new which politics requires, because it is always immersed in context and tradition.

David Billings suggests that a "Moltmannian natality" enhances the power of political hope beyond that created by the novum. It does so because it does not deny or condemn the past. Both of those options are dangerous in every context. It does so because it sounds the most like redemption and renewal and denies eschatological annihilation. Indeed, writes Billings, "we must not forget that this coming of God is a return. The one who is returning is the one who was born unto us. A stranger is not coming but one of us, a part of the human community" (142). Billings concludes by suggesting that Moltmann's christological perspective should include natality. A union of advent and natality is not unlike the incarnation itself, he says. "When natality is understood in the context of a christological eschatology, the new thing of which I am capable may be a reflection of the birth of Christ within time and within me" (145).
Jürgen Moltmann; Hannah Arendt; natality; eschatology; theology; eschatology; christianity; twentieth century.

do evangelicals simply postpone the inevitable?

2006-05-24T10:47:00.000-04:00

Evangelicals make strong claims about the power of the gospel, that is true. So why, then, do they tend toward pessimism when it comes to eschatology & social expectation? Again, if the stories that people tell embody their hopes, why are evangelicals attracted to the negative? This is the central question that Daniel Johnson, associate professor of sociology at Gordon College, asks in his essay "Contrary Hopes" in The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition amid Modernity and Postmodernity eds. Miroslav Volf and William Katerberg (Eerdmans 2004), 27-48.

In the section "The Contrarieties of Evangelical Social Hope," Johnson admits that there are several answers. A minority of evangelicals take salvation to be largely an inner, spiritual affair. Therefore, they do not see the need for a social conscience. "Christ is to come back . . . to receive his own. . . . nothing else of the world need be transported" (33). This does not reflect the majority of evangelicals, nor the social history of that movement. Evangelicals have historically displayed a social hope. But, as Johnson continues, this hope is tempered greatly by an emphasis on depravity. "The evangelical community has been less sanguine than most about the prospects of actually fulfilling social hopes in the present age." (35) Set in the foundation of depravity, an immovable point of human limitation, is the doorway of apocalypse. Apocalypse opens a way past human limitations into possibility and reveals "the coming-to-be of the "like new" world that is the ultimate object of social hope" (36). Thus, evangelicals do not arrive at hope without first crossing an apocalyptic end.

Such juxtaposition of absolute finality and social hope is the primary gestalt of Johnson's argument. Evangelicals, he says, actually express social hope in the form of stories of civilization gone wrong. Citing Sacvan Bercovitch, Johnson says that American jeremiads are meant to motivate rather than squelch social action.

Johnson offers several reasons for this paradox, grounding each in changes to the society at large. In the section "Hope Lost or Reconfigured?", he begins by noting that culture as a whole, religious or otherwise, has lost the ability to sustain social hope. For one, so many social groups exist that no one can contribute a solid enough narrative upon which great hopes can be hung. The result is a kind of communal melancholy: "the collapse of compelling shared narratives has made conventional forms of social hoping unsustainable" (41). For another, as technological prowess has reduced the threat of natural calamity, it has also introduced new forms of threat, such as nuclear catastrophe. This new class of threats empty apocalyptic hopes, since the end we usually thought of has now been replaced by global, technological calamity. Instead of embracing our apocalypse, we want to avoid them. Hope is hoping such things do not happen, and especially not today. Finally, the expression of social hope in politics used to discover itself in the distribution of wealth, but now consists largely of arguments over where to put various technological "bads" - nuclear power plants, chemical storage facilities - and in the avoidance of risk. Politics is about distributing risk, at much an anti-hope. "If many of the principle actors in a political environment are accustomed to engagements wherein "avoidance imperatives predominate," then they have little cause to entertain positive visions of what the world could become. Still less do they have cause to come together in pursuit of such visions." (46)

Johnson concludes this section by noting that the burden of managing risk has become personalized. Each person is responsible for governing her own exposure to risk in innumerable areas using many different forms of "insurance" (monetary or otherwise.) In the face of risks arrayed in such overwhelmingly complexity, hope becomes a protest against the possible, rather than a campaign for it. "In short, the principal orientation toward the future in evidence today encourages a negative form of hoping...[a] guarding against discretely determined negative outcomes....this may help to account for [evangelical's] satisfaction with purely negative expressions of social hope." (48)

Anyone interested in changing the tide had better take Johnson's diagnosis to heart.

eschatology; social justice; Daniel Johnson; hope; apocalypse; Sacvan Bercovitch; instrumental reason; technology; ethics; political theology; risk.

Smith's 3-points of phenomenological analysis

2006-05-23T15:19:00.000-04:00

James K. A. Smith, associate professor of philosophy, Calvin College, details three key elements of phenomenology in his article, "Determined Hope: A Phenomenology of Christian Expectation." I'm going to quote the entire few paragraphs here, risking redundancy, because Smith's explanation is so straightforward.

"First, as Edmund Husserl observes (in contrast to Descartes), consciousness is intentional; that is, consciousness is never without an object or a world; rather, I always have before me--whether I am perceiving, judging, feeling, or remembering--an "object" of consciousness. I cannot think without thinking of something. Thus, the first fundamental insight of phenomenology, known as the doctrine of intentionality[1], observes that consciousness is always consciousness of.

Second, the object intended is constituted by the ego. This simply means that the ego "makes sense" or, literally, "gives meaning" (Sinngebung [Sinn, meaning; -gebung, given]) to experience by "putting together" or constituting the data of experience into an identifiable "object."[2] The wave of data coming at my senses right now is "put together" and "make sense of" by consciousness so that rather than waves of color and light, I perceive before me a screen, books, a watch, and so on. Anything that would be completely undetermined could not be constituted into an object, and thus could not be "intended" in any way. it would have no "significance" (recalling the connection between something having meaning and being significant) and could not, in the technical sense, be "experience."

Finally, this process of constitution can happen only within horizons of constitution, which provide the context within which I "make sense" of what is before me. In other words, constitution happens within horizons of meaning which enable me to see the object before me as a lamp or as a cup.[3] Thus these "horizons of expectation," we might say, while functioning as conditions, are also precisely what enable me to make sense of my experience."
__________
[1] Consciousness is described as "intentional" because it always "aims" at objects; the Latin term for this kind of aiming (found in Aquinas' epistemology, for instance) is intentio. In Husserl's terminology, to intend an object is also to "mean" an object, to intend it as something; this relates to the principles of constitution and horizonality.

[2]This is a largely passive process according to Husserl, and is governed by processes of habituation and the historical formation of the ego (at least as it is described in later works such as Husserl's Cartesian Meditations).

[3] This is analogous to the role of as-structures in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001). It is precisely when these horizons are "out of joint"--as in cross-cultural situations--that I constitute objects differently. I might, for instance, like Ariel the Little Mermaid, find myself in a foreign environment where I have difficulty constituting the objects before me because I lack horizons, or I constitute them differently, as when Ariel spots the fork and constitutes it as an object for combing her hair.

James K. A. Smith; Edmund Husserl; phenomenology; consciousness; Martin Heidegger.

Archer logizes the phenomena

2006-05-05T21:40:00.000-04:00

Ken Archer, a graduate student at the School of Philosophy, Catholic University of America, makes a good argument for the usefulness of phenomenology to Christian theology in his paper "The Turn to Husserl and Phenomenology by Protestant and Catholic Philosophers for the Redemption of Reason." Taking Dallas Willard, Msgr. Robert Sokolowski and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), Archer argues that all three men understand benefits from Husserl phenomenology as (a) a reading of Scripture rooted in epistemic realism, and (b) a nonfoundational doctrine of ethics built on what people do rather than on abstract first principles, the result of which is " a consequent concern for the formation of ethical people within Christian theology."

Reason, he begins, was pulled away from anthropology and made its own thing. Reason and the rational became a discipline of specialist, tinkerers of method reserving "truth" for whatever is arrived at by their own machinations. Thus "to be rational [was] reserved to those who mastered the activities of mind through the application of methods of inquiry." Phenomenology does not breathe such rarified air.

Rather, says Archer, phenomenology is inherent in everyday thinking. It is not the development and mastery of a method, but a description of what is there, a description "of the structure of all cognitive experience present in all human living." And this is a major point that Archer makes: phenomenology view our daily cognitive experience as already structured towards revealing the truth of things." Phenomenological inquiry, therefore, is but the "discovery and description of everyday reason." "Our daily cognitive lives are inherently structured towards revealing the truth about reality, and are thus inherently rational." So much for the enlightenment.

Husserl discovered, as it were, an Achilles heel above the rim of Descartes's shoe. The enlightenment took reason as "a method or tool of the mind used to master its own actives." Reason was said to operate in a spatial context, leaping out of the so as to talk about the truth of things outside the brain. Consciousness exists on its own, then, an absolute solipsism that collects a real knowledge of the world by the application of an appropriate method. The senses, what the mind knows, require such a method to achieve real knowledge.

Husserl, with others (Archer identifies Lambert, Kant, Hegel, Brentano and Mach) redefined mind. Consciousness, he said, is always consciousness of something in extra-mental reality. Solipsism is impossible, then, because thought is thinking about, thinking of something else. The play between one's ears is impossible because the play itself requires a supporting relationship to the world ad extra. "Consciousness and the world are so directly and inseparably related that, without the world, there would be no consciousness." Therefore, Husserl rejected both legs of Enlightenment reason, and called for a do-over. Why not begin with actual acts of thinking, he said. Instead of requiring a special method to know anything about the world, Husserl said that thinking reveals "the direct and unmediated relationship between mind and world in which the mind present the world as consciousness . . . a consciousness naturally ordered toward revealing the truth of things." A new epistemology is needed, one that examines the structure of this revealing. The way consciousness comes about "reveals the reasonableness of thinking itself."

Now where language is concerned (language in general, scripture in particular), language is no longer a symbolic method to get at the world. Husserl believed thinking, that relationship that is the "thinking of," precedes language (rather than the view that says that if we don't have the language for it, we can't think it.) Language and texts, for all three of Archer's representative thinkers, disclose, rather than prejudice and shut out, the world. Of course, when applied to scripture, this means that scripture is not true for any other reason than reality, itself, is true. Authority has to rest on the truth of the real world, and not in arguments about whether something is revealed or not. All language is structured to reveal the truth of the world, to bring the world to a greater presence for ourselves and others, and this is true whether that language is in the Gospel of Mark or in a "polemical essay, poetry, math equation, the script of a play." The "world revealed in scriptures is fundamentally the same as our world today." Elsewhere, Archer discusses the truth-telling importance of the "theory of theatre" on John Paul II. Therefore,

The approach to texts just discussed does not look for axiomatic claims in texts to serve as foundational premises for knowledge of reality to be certain, rather it allows any text to disclose any essential elements of reality for the reader. An insightful text thus fills in our knowledge of our world by unfolding and revealing more essentials of our world to us.

And what is this but the epistemological principle of identity applied to hermeneutics!

Now the way phenomenology's reconstruction of reason connects with ethics is rather intuitive. Archer explains that "one we learn that reason has been trying to tell us the truth of things" we become more responsible to act rationally. Contemporary ethical theories are either consequentialist / utilitarian or deontological / duty-based" theories. Both assume a foundation, a method. Phenomenology denies the quest for the perfect method. We shouldn't be continually waiting to know more, always carrying about a hermeneutic of suspicion. Rather, we should act on our experiences and memories. What matters is not the formation of an ethic which must then be enacted, but the formation of ethical persons who simply do what they do--live ethically. Archer quotes Dallas Willard, "The Pharisee takes as his aim keeping the law rather than becoming the kind of person whose deeds naturally conform to the law." (Divine Conspiracy 184) And, as Archer admits, all three men understand Husserl's ethical move as a serious return to Aristotle, where ethics is "simply revealing what ethical people do."

John Paul II absolutely conjoined the epistemological and ethical aspects of phenomenology; "moral action [like reason] is also essential to human living." Just as reason is thinking of something inseparably, so living is always moral living. "Man interacts with reality continuously not only via consciousness but also via moral action, which is made possible by the continuous presence of reason which is the basis for responsible action. . . . action and thus moral agency is a constant concomitant to reason. . . . Right reason does not simply give us answers to occasional ethical dilemmas that we face, rather it reveals all of life to be a continuous occasion for moral action." Note, please, this quote Archer pulls from Willard's Divine Conspiracy:

First we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God's kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being "right," we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life." (348-349)

phenomenology; Edmund Husserl; Dallas Willard; ethics; Aristotle;
consciousness; mind; epistemology; language; hermeneutics; Kingdom of God; John Paul II.

Kingdom bits from Moore

2006-04-20T17:29:00.000-04:00

Scattered notes from the article: Russell D. Moore “Leftward to Scofield: The Eclipse of the Kingdom in Post-Conservative Evangelical Theology” JETS 47/3 (Sept. 2004), 423-40.

Dispensationalism

"[Dispensationalism] aroused strong resistance among American Protestants by denying what most evangelicals and all liberals firmly believed--that the Kingdom of God would come as part of the historical process. They could not accept the dispensationalist claim that all Christian history was a kind of meaningless 'parenthesis' between the setting aside of the Jews and the restoration of the Davidic Kingdom. Dispensationalism failed to see how the whole scope of the divine purposes were related to the identity and mission of Jesus.

Cosmic View of Kingdom

"Salvation is related to the overthrow of Satanic rule, that it is cosmic in its scope, that it is to be seen as the restoration of the created order (including human viceregency over the earth), and that it is to be placed within the context of the inbreaking of the eschatological Kingdom in the person and work of Jesus as both the incarnate God and as the head of a new humanity. . . . the emphasis [of redemptive history is placed] where Scripture does--on the telos of the program of redemption--not on God's glory in the abstract, or on the justification of the individual sinner, but in the glory of God in the exaltation of Jesus as the triumphant Final Adam and the meditorial Warrior-King. . . . [Indeed,] a significant advance in the evangelical theology of the Kingdom is possible if the rest of the movement thinks through the warfare implications of an inaugurated Kingdom eschatology."

Note, however, that "without a clear understanding of the nature of the kingdom, kingdom theology is inadequate to the task of indicating what the world is like when it is transformed by the divine rule. the goal of creation and redemption is an eschatological community under the rule of the triune God. The image "Kingdom" is intrinsically corporate or communal, implying a community of people living as subjects of a King."

Evangelical Kingdom theology in the late twentieth century sought to recover the biblical emphasis that the sovereignty of God is not revealed as an atemporal, self-directed attribute, but is instead revealed in the context of the dynamic relation between God and His creation as he sovereignly directs it toward its appointed end--the summing up of all things in Christ (Eph. 1:10) to see to it that Christ "will come to have first place in everything" (Col. 1:18).

warnings
When inclusivist evangelicals argue that the salvation of the unevangelized can come about in the same manner as that of the OT believers, they ignore the Kingdom orientation of biblical soteriology. In a Kingdom-oriented theology of redemptive history, the soteriological role of the Spirit means that he does not, in fact, have a "mission of his own."

Theologies seek root metaphors to help express their vision of God.

Evangelical ecclesiology invariably is dependent upon a robust evangelical epistemology

Pinnock rejects the filioque language of the Nicene Creed because it promotes Christomonism

dispensationalism; history; Kingdom of God; theology of creation; ecology; The Powers; eschatological community; metaphor; ecclesiology.