Some Changes Affected by Sacramental Theology

A couple of threads have come together for me recently, and I want to sketch them out. Each one began independent of the others. But all have found a common nexus in sacramental theology.

Sacramental theology is that branch of theology which asks about the sacraments. And it is a very connected node. Every branch of theology connects to it, that is, has something to say about it, and it has something to say about them. One of the best surprises in my theological life was discovering that sacramental theology existed in the edifice of theology, and that it had always done so ("The sacrament is a manifestation of the Word." ~ Schmemman). But, due to the theological choices made by earlier Christian communities in which I worshiped, it had always been avoided. It was kind of the odd basement or the run-down wing of the castle. Not so any more. Its doors were flung open in 2008, and I was allowed to wander. And, in so doing, it has slowly proved influential and necessary. So, then, getting back to those threads--

The first one has to do with the way that the New Testament casts this age as a second Exodus. Jesus, for example, is often called the prophet, and is obviously the new Moses in the Sermon on the Mount relaying a new Torah. Beyond that, though, Paul warns the Corinthians not to make the same mistakes that Israel did in the Wilderness, and equates old and new testament ritual acts. Clearly there are parallels: the crossing of the red sea becomes baptism and God's supply of water and manna in the wilderness becomes the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

The second has to do with the subtle way that Reformation theology requires sacramental theology. Without it, Calvinism becomes a baptized determinism, with its cold inevitability. With it, Calvin's (if not Paul's) debit and credit of election is balanced with the warm generosity of the open table.

The third has to do with a question I have been asking myself for a while: Why do revivalist churches hammer on sin so much? Why does the either/or in/out saved/damned of sin's dialectic logic figure so prominently in the way these traditions work? Don't get me wrong: Jesus talked about sin a lot. I'm not asking why revivalist churches talk about sin, but why it is their opening gambit? Why isn't it the third behind, say, hospitality to strangers (the other) and evangelism? Anyway, perhaps an answer may be found in the soft-pedaling revivalist traditions make of sacrament. Without the common loaf, these traditions require something else to make a common center. And that thing is dogma. Theology becomes an exercise in border patrol. Exegesis as inoculation. Sacrament resists such reduction. Sacramental theology casts a wider net than a border or than pure reason.

This is not to say that confessions which include sacramental theology must not include a well-considered harmartiology, they must or be innovators. However, the reason and function of that harmartiology is going to be different and differently expressed. How exactly, I haven't yet worked out.

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Postscript: A recent Facebook discussion on the merits of subsidized (free) undergraduate education produced the following comment from a local commissioner that I know. Her response reflects exactly the kind of save/damned, in/out boundary speech discussed in the third point above, albeit in a political context. She wrote:

"With the amount of free college being already provided to a large extent in TN and an extremely high drop out rate.....there are no incentives and no proverbial skin in the game. Not everyone deserves a trophy. In the real world there are winners and losers and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we grow up and [move] on to more productive lives instead of constantly waiting for the next hand out. Life does not hand out participation trophies."

This is the spirit in which she begins to do politics or in which she does politics. And she is representative of the American norm. Why do we begin from this attitude? I don't find it a thoughtful attitude or a compassionate one, and it is definitely not a theological one.

Robinson on Conscience in the Churches

A Winter 2018 post in the American Scholar excerpts Marilynne Robinson thinking aloud about conscience. And, in the doing, she puts to words some of the thoughts about how conscience was supposed to work in the early church that have been swimming around in my head. I've long had the suspicion that more needed to be said about conscience, whatever it is. (We are still waiting on the latest brain scan to tell us.) Anyway, here is the relevant portion:

In his letter to the Romans, Paul asks the new congregation, apparently divided by cultural and ethical differences between its pagan and Jewish members, “Who are you to judge another’s servant? It is before his master that he stands or falls, and the Lord will make him stand.” This is advice meant for members of a community of believers, people who accept servanthood as descriptive of their and their fellows’ relationship to God, and who see this relationship as personal in the sense that God loves where he loves and compensates for his servants’ failings by his grace. Ideally they have accepted a particular obedience, with origins in the laws of Moses, exemplified in the life and teachings of Christ. So much might the apostle see, or hope to see, in the early Church. But history tells us that no great effort has ever been required to narrow the circle of those who should be seen as God’s servants, whose errors would be made good by God’s grace and therefore should not be judged. We all know the enormities that have made themselves presentable to the Christian conscience, often enough campaigns of violence against other Christians. Sects and denominations still remember the injuries their ancestors suffered long centuries ago, and can still become indignant at the thought of them. They might also remember injuries they inflicted, if the comforts of identity were not diluted a little by such ventures into honesty.

Here is another thing Paul says in the letter to the Romans, still in the context of his thoughts on tolerance and the authority of conscience: “The faith you have, have as your own conviction before God.” That is, do not judge fellow believers and do not offend them. It may be fair to wonder whether this excellent advice has gone unheeded all these years because faith has tended to be a conviction shown to men, who, if we can trust Paul, are a good deal more fastidious than God.

This to me is a vital plank about how we approach ecclesiology, moving away from a doctrinal line in the sand (always moving and porous for insiders, always firm and impermeable to outsiders) toward a generous tolerance bound not to tolerance for tolerance sake but to God's ability to govern for himself his own people. More later on this.

On Bonhoeffer's world come of age

Today I finished Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison (MacMillan 1967 rev. ed.) and read for myself those oft-quoted passages of a world come of age and of Christian faith beyond religion. How many dozens of times have I thought about these words Bonhoeffer wrote from Tegel prison to his friend Eberhard Bethge? How many dozens of books and articles have I read from people also struggling to understand Bonhoeffer's pastoral vision?

Bonhoeffer observes that the people of his day are immunized by modernity against religious impulses. "Man," he writes (Mensch), "has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the 'working hypothesis' called 'God' . . . "Everything gets along without 'God'--and, in fact, just as well as before" (168).[1] And he wants to know how Christian preaching and the church should best address this.

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as "religious" do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different. . . What kind of situation emerges emerges for us, for the church? . . . What is a religionless Christianity? (141)

At the same time, he finds the general theological response to modernity, namely the retreat to the subjective and psychological interior life, inadequate. He is no fan of a psychological flight into the inner life, which is taken up by, he says, existentialist philosophy, psychotherapy [psychologism], and methodism (which I take to mean Pietist, individualist brands of Christianity). Bonhoeffer hates their appeal to an emotional God of the Gaps that approaches a human being only "after his weaknesses and meannesses have been spied out [and in] those secret human places that God is to have his domain" (183). "The secrets known to a man's valet--that is, to put it crudely, the range of his intimate life, from prayer to his sexual life--have become the hunting-ground of modern pastoral workers" (181). "If [someone] cannot be brought to see and admit that his happiness is really an evil, his health sickness, and his vigour despair, the theologian is at his wits' end" (179). Such is not the way of Jesus for Bonhoeffer. I like this characteristic of Bonhoeffer's thought: it is muscular and energetic--courageous. "When Jesus blessed sinners, they were real sinners, but Jesus did not make everyone a sinner first" (Ibid). Such acts attempt to reduce a come-of-age humanity to an adolescent, "to make him dependent on things on which he is, in fact, no longer dependent, and thrusting him into problems that are, in fact, no longer problems for him" (169).

I therefore want to start from the premise that God should not be smuggled into some last secret place, but that we should frankly recognize that the world, and people, have come of age, that we should not run man down in his worldliness, but confront him with God at his strongest point, that we should give up all our clerical tricks, and not regard psychotherapy and existentialist philosophy as God's pioneers. . . . The Word of God is far removed from this revolt of mistrust, this revolt from below. On the contrary, it reigns. (184)

Bonhoeffer's way forward is a developing hypothesis. He knew the feel of his insight, but blurred and without edges. He eschewed what he calls a salto mortale, a death-leap back to the Middle Ages. (Here he quotes a song "Oh if only I knew the way back, the long way back to the land of childhood.")[2] And he embraced a way forward without religion, without the "religious a priori" of mankind. Bonhoeffer claimed that Karl Barth had here shown the way by means of the critique of religion Barth discussed in his commentary on Romans (Der Römerbrief, 2nd ed). Taking up the scalpel of penultimate-versus-ultimate that Bonhoeffer discusses in, for example, Act and Being, Bonhoeffer looked for a Christ outside of religion, "really the Lord of the world" (141). He would find Jesus at the center of life, not at the end of it. He would find Jesus not in the clouds, but in the concrete and everyday world. "Jesus claims for himself and the Kingdom of God the whole of human life in all its manifestations" (180).

It is not with the beyond that we are concerned, but with this world as created and preserved, subjected to laws, reconciled, and restored. What is above this world is, in the gospel, intended to exist for this world; I mean that, not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystic, pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For Bonhoeffer, this new form of faith would use a new language "perhaps quite non-religious, but liberating and redeeming--as was Jesus's language" (161). It would speak from the courageous openness of the gospel, calling things what they are and not winking at the godlessness of the world (Luther). And it would not require, citing Paul's teaching about circumcision, people to become religious before they could be disciples. It would take "hold of a man at the centre of his life" and send "a man back to his life on earth in a wholly new way" (176).

Similarly, its god would not have his domain in the secret places of the inner world--the Bible doesn't separate the inner and outer. "It is always concerned with anthropos teleios, the whole man" (183). Its god summons his people to a maturity that means "we must live as men who manage our lives without him" (188), etsi deus non daretur (even if God did not exist).[3] Not that God is absent, but that he has "let himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross.

The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34) . . . He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering. . . . the world's coming of age outlined above which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by his weakness. (188)

Bonhoeffer, following Martin Luther, bends to his work holding a theology of the cross. We know God best as he reveals himself in Christ crucified for sinners. And, indeed, the kenotic direction of his thought--where kenotic means "self-emptying" after the Christ hymn of Philippians chapter two--is what electrified the English west when Bonhoeffer's works were translated after the Second World War. This kenotic theology has since been well-worked-out in many directions: in the liberalism of John A. T. Robinson's popular book Honest to God and in Western liberalism (Spong etc.) and in the liberationist theologies heralded by Jürgen Moltmann, whose first published work was an essay on Bonhoeffer, and from there in Gustavo Guitterez and, after him, in a million splintered shards: womanist theologies, queer theologies, theologies of film, aesthetic theology, etc.

Finally, for I had not meant this summary of Bonhoeffer's response to modernity to go on for this length, he describes in two letters written March 19 and July 18, 1944 (within a year of his execution), his worldly Christian. It amazes me that these portrait miniatures are passed over in the literature; I see the same quotes pulled again and again (an epigraphic example of the word-thing fallacy).

In his letter of March 19, Bonhoeffer talks about maturity, about what it means to be a grown up.

Is it not characteristic of a man, in contrast to an immature person, that his centre of gravity is always where he actually is, and that the longing for the fulfillment of his wishes cannot prevent him from being his whole self, wherever he happens to be? The adolescent is never wholly in one place; that is one of his essential characteristics . . . There is a wholeness about the fully grown man which enables him to face an existing situation squarely. He may have his longings, but he keeps them out of sight, and somehow masters them; and the more he has to overcome in order to live fully in the present, the more he will have the respect and confidence of his fellows, especially the younger ones who are still on the road that he has already traveled. Desires to which we cling closely can easily prevent us from being what we ought to be and can be; and on the other hand, desires repeatedly mastered for the sake of duty make us richer. Lack of desire is poverty. Almost all the people that I find in my present surroundings cling to their own desires, and so have no interest in others; they no longer listen, and they are incapable of loving their neighbor. I think that even in this place we ought to live as if we had no wishes and no future, and just be our true selves. It is remarkable then how others come to rely on us, confide in us, and let us talk to them. . . . We can have an abundant life, even though many wishes remain unfulfilled--that is what I have really been trying to say. (127-128)

It is tempting to say that Bonhoeffer is but describing a socially respected, middle-class, German man in a society that values reticence, a man such as his father. However, such a conclusion is undone by the details. The "centre of gravity" by which Bonhoeffer's man lives is conceptually close to Bonhoeffer's emphasis throughout his writings, including those on the world come of age, on keeping ultimate things (Jesus's reign) ultimate . Bonhoeffer's Christian is not a stoic without desires but a person who values his desires, if only because they pave the road to riches of character. Desires frame the doorway toward the love of neighbor, a key Christian virtue--but as they are mastered. Those who do not master their desires, who cling to them, do not cultivate virtue and Christian character. Indeed, it is in his desires that Bonhoeffer's man becomes present: not dispassionate, but present for others who "come to rely on us." This is an abundant life, he says, even if desires go unfulfilled.[4] In summary, the Christian in a world come of age resists his desires for others and is fulfilled in each moment, even though his life may be fragmented. Such a man cannot help but become morally attractive. He attracts the nations, so to speak, and they come to hear his wisdom.

In the letter of July 18, Bonhoeffer talks about suffering. The Christian in the world come of age lives a secular life, he says, which means sharing in God's sufferings. He can do that because he is a free man, free to live "unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities" (193). He need not be religious in any particular way. Instead, he accepts himself as created by Christ. Living in the world is a metanoia, a repentance, "not thinking about one's own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up into the way of Jesus Christ," which he later describes as being "caught up into the messianic suffering of God in Jesus Christ" (190). Jesus calls his people to live powerless and yet available to the world, as he did and does yet. Jesus is, as Bonhoeffer says elsewhere, "a man for others." This is to live as a blessing. "We have received God's blessing in happiness and in suffering. Yet those who have been blessed can do nothing but pass on this blessing; indeed, they must be a blessing wherever they are."

I hope this post has made a good outline of Bonhoeffer's cultural diagnosis of Western culture, his world come of age. And I hope it has suggested the kind of people and church that Bonhoeffer believes must live in such a world if they would be Christ's. I had hoped to make comments about how Bonhoeffer's points inform my own project and suggest themes that Bonhoeffer may have continued to develop had he lived. This will have to wait.

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[1] Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls this state which is impervious to religious appeal the "buffered self."

[2] Analogous to discussions of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment, or the loss of an enchanted universe. On this blog, note the following blog posts: (1) Charles Taylor's ideological diagnosis of modernity, and (2) my description of the enchanted and disenchanted universe.

[3] Pope Benedict's used this Latin clause in an address to the Pontifical Council on Culture: "New information technologies [and] globalization has [sic] often also resulted in disseminating in all cultures many of the materialistic and individualistic elements of the West. The formula "Etsi Deus non daretur" is increasingly becoming a way of living that originates in a sort of “arrogance” of reason – a reality nonetheless created and loved by God – that deems itself self-sufficient and closes itself to contemplation and the quest for a superior Truth."

[4] In an earlier letter, Bonhoeffer compared human lives to Bach fuges whose motives are fragmentary but, in God's providence, are made into a whole.

Pattern Language: Death Begets Growth

Pattern: Death Begets Growth (85)

Jesus said, "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (Jn 12:14 ESV). What we hope for, must die. We must surrender over that which we love best.

"Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of a nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine." ~ H.J. Iwand

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Working Notes

This is a mess of a card as it stands. As it is, some nut job will kill themselves or another out of hope and love. More work in this pattern is necessary, for when does it apply? To what degree? And how can we trust ourselves or our destroyer?

Furthermore, this card really means the theologia crucis. It is really about negative theology and God's hiddenness. I think I'm gesturing at the eventual card here, but not really hitting the mark. And I really don't like this title. It sounds like a vegetative nature religion rather than a confession of Jesus. Jesus's death and resurrection have nothing to do with natural events.

Pattern Language: Opening a Closed Circle

Pattern: Opening a Closed Circle: 83

We are confronted by a closed circle, with the hidden city, with the high garden wall, and with coldness of heart. What is on the other side? And how can we ask? As Socrates says in the Meno, "A man cannot inquire either about that which he knows or about that which he does not know. For if he knows, he has no need to enquire, and if not, he cannot, for he does not know the very subject about which he is to inquire." Plato's puzzle is about knowledge, but the circle is wider still. For example,

"Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient believes," said Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Nachfolge).

"A Christian is an utterly free man, lord of all, subject to none; A Christian is an utterly dutiful man, servant of all, subject to all," said Martin Luther (De Libertate Christiana).

"Which comes first," asked the young Augustine, "to call upon you or to praise you? To know you or to call upon you? Must we know you before we can call upon you? Anyone who invokes what is still unknown may be making a mistake" (Confessiones 1.1).

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Working Notes

I'm still working hard on completing even the first draft of this card. The circle problem is a problem of discipleship, of how one becomes another thing. It is a kind of miracle. It is ontological. It is election. What is the difference between it and creation? Is this card soteriology? Note the quote from Emerson's "Circles": "Everything looks permanent until its secret is known." And Dave Eggers has an essay called "The Circle" about corporate totalitarianism. Note also C. S. Lewis's lecture "The Inner Ring" and its implications for judgment. cf. my response.

I was reading an excerpt from Francis Schaeffer's He is There and He Is Not Silent:

"Let us return again to the personal-infinite. On the side of God’s infinity, there is a complete chasm between God on one side and man, the animal, the flower, and the machine on the other. On the side of God’s infinity, He stands alone. He is the absolute other. He is, in His infinity, contrary to all else. He is differentiated from all else because only He is infinite. He is the Creator; all else was created. He is infinite; all else is finite. All else is brought forth by creation; so all else is dependent and only He is independent. This is absolute on the side of His infinity. Therefore, concerning God’s infinity, man is as separated from God as is the atom or any other machine-portion of the universe.

"But on the side of God being personal, the chasm is between man and the animal, the plant, and the machine. Why? Because man was made in the image of God. This is not just 'doctrine.' It is not dogma that needs just to be repeated as a proper doctrinal statement. This is really down in the warp and woof of the whole problem. Man is made in the image of God; therefore, on the side of the fact that God is a personal God the chasm stands not between God and man, but between man and all else. But on the side of God’s infinity, man is as separated from God as the atom or any other finite of the universe. So we have the answer to man’s being finite and yet personal."

Reading this, I saw that creation also falls under the question raised by this card. This card does represent a fundamental theological problem: the problem of how something comes from nothing. It is the crossing of the infinite qualitative distinction between not being and being, between Godself and the world of matter, between being a man born blind and receiving one's sight, between being dead and alive.

Pattern Language: Every Action is Reaction

PATTERN: Every Action is Reaction: 82

An end is governed by its beginning, and creation its creator. No action is an island, but is, in truth, reaction.

And because God is personal--that is, moral--reaction is a moral act. Stones testify to their fitness to the divine will. Times and seasons progress along their established ways. The natural world is borne along, green and flowering, by the progressive action of God's intent.

Human knowing too is reaction. We know in response to that in which we are thrown (Geworfenheit).

Persons alien to God's promise are not alone. Even where violent, dismissive, or agnostic, their acts (reactions) are framed still by the divine actor; God is not far away. "For in him we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17.28).

But the Christian has the best response, for their reaction is obedience. And that obedience is not born of force, fear, obligation, or automation. It is born of gratitude; it is born of love reciprocated. It is their appropriate hesed.

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Metaphysics * Theology

Related Cards

Obedience (19) * Faithfulness (18) * Creation (31) * Time (40) * Choice (45) * Work (77) * Personal Relationship (80) * Wisdom (49) *

Working Notes

It seems to me that I'm trying to shove things clumsily together here. Natural theology; Heidegger's idea of thrownness, which is at least an epistemology--and in my thinking is a way to knowing-in-community thinking rather than individualism; the hesed of covenental fealty and obedience; and even an ontology of a sort with Ekhart. What am I trying to do in this card? I need to either abstract it out further or figure out exactly what it is doing. What problem is it solving? What pattern is it describing? The determinism of this card is all pervasive. Even violent disobedience conforms in result to the divine will.

Pattern Language: God leads out

PATTERN: God leads out (81)

God leads out. All else is response. From the creatio ex nihilo of the cosmos to the covenant with Abraham to the redeeming of the cosmos to the gift of the Spirit to the coming judgment, all of it would not and cannot be apart from God's beginning of it. This leading out is metaphysical (God as the Unmoved Mover), ethical (God's logos defining the basic categories of good and evil), soteriological (the missio Dei acts according to the agreed desire of the triune persons), and practical (the Christian lives upon the path of God's promises; the Christian prays the Lord's prayer and so asks that God affect his divine will).

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Related Cards

Creation (31) * Grace (26) * Mission (34) * Law (37) * The Spiral/Recapitulation (42) * Election (43) * Promise (51) * Revelation (52) * Covenant (60) * Adoption (70) * Judgment (50) * Freedom (53) * Incarnation (81) * Faith (76) * Blessing (2) * Love (56)

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Karl Barth: [God] wills and posits the creature neither out of caprice nor necessity, but because he has loved it from eternity, because he wills to demonstrate his love for it, and because he wills, not to limit his glory by its existence and being, but to reveal and manifest it in his own co-existence with it. . . . there cannot follow from the creature's own existence and being an immanent determination of its goal or purpose, or a claim to any right, meaning or dignity of its existence and nature accruing to it except as a gift" (CD: III/1.95).

Exploring pattern relationships: Community and Election

To move forward, my pattern language needs relationships. Where patterns are indexed to other patterns, meaning can be made. Apart from connection, what can be done? Below are my first two examples. One is built from *Community and the other from *Election.

Couple of comments: (a) Making relationships reveals holes. The *Election diagram is missing *Grace, for example. (b) Laying cards out like this begs some kind of method that identifies which idea is the spoke, which are antonyms or synonyms, which are higher-level or lower-level relationships, etc. (c) I don't think I understand what a pattern really is.

What is a pattern? Is it a recurring move or strategy or theme? For example, is *God the Father a pattern? What about *Water? What about *Christology?

And how many patterns is too many? Does a language need to be small enough to hold it all in one's mind, or, because patterns are indexed, can it be much larger? Does a large number of patterns suggest sloppy repetitiveness? Is too few not useful?

Finally, I have two ideas about an overall schema or index. I keep thinking about the divine economy and the Trinity and such. I keep thinking about the threefold liturgical confession: "Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again!"

I keep thinking about theological moves and movements. And so I have been toying with the following dramatic scheme:

• creation/introduction/recognition
• identification/empathy
• kenotic service
• gracious restoration
• glorious presentation.

But, then again, maybe the classic divisions such as Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, etc. are just as good.

Notes on pattern making: June 22, 2017

• “No pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns within which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it. This is a fundamental view of the world.” ~ Christopher Alexander
• "Are you paying attention to Alexander’s more recent view that the use of patterns indiscriminately was a bit haphazard. He developed a process for how patterns should unfold in time – a process of structure-preserving transformation. That’s in the four volume The Nature of Order (especially vol 2)." ~ comment by fourcultures
• "Part of what I like about this pattern language is that it includes organizations and resources for each pattern, raising the possibility that a pattern language could be used as an organizing tool (where do I fit? who do I depend on and need to collaborate with? who depends on me?) or as a guide for curriculum development (a student would major in a pattern; but understand well the patterns connected to their specialty plus the “whole” modeled by the pattern language)." ~ comment by Tom Atlee
• "I think of a pattern as 'a design element'—-something we need to attend to when consciously creating a healthy whole (of whatever the pattern language is about). Another way I think about it is as a 'need' of a healthy system. A major test of a pattern is whether we can manifest it in many ways." ~ Ibid.
• "The [Liberating Voices (MIT Press, 2008)] pattern language begins with the most general patterns (“Theory”) and proceeds to the most specific (“Tactics”). Each pattern is a template for research as well as action and is linked to other patterns, thus forming a single coherent whole." ~ from the marketing blurb
• "A lot of the papers that are labeled a pattern language are not. For example, Coplien's process patterns are true, valuable, and important. But they are not a pattern language. There are too many holes. A pattern language has to be complete in some sense. There are various States of a pattern, starting from fledgling or proto-pattern and going up all the way to be part of a pattern society or group of collaborating patterns within a pattern language." ~ Ali Arsanjani
• "A pattern has defined fields, including Context, Problem, Forces, and Solution. A pattern is used in a certain design Context, and considers a recurring design Problem in this context. It focuses on the Forces which confront the designer, before describing a Solution--a proposed approach to the situation which resolves the tensions among forces." ~ M. Mahemoff
• "The expertise is in the language." ~ CA
• We extract meaning from chaos by spotting patterns. It is the signal in the noise.

Here is a "how to do it" series of instructions about creating pattern languages by a guy named Ward Cunningham:

1) Pick a whole area, not just one idea. I like subject matter that is practical but seldom explored in a text book. You know, the kind of stuff you have to learn from your colleagues on the job. The discussion on the "patterns" list got me thinking about checking data.

2) Make a list of all the little things you have learned through the years about the area. Imagine that your kid brother has just taken responsibility for this area on his first big job. You're getting together this weekend. What are you going to tell him. Make a list.

3) Cast each item on your list as a solution. I like to write a sentence with "therefore" in the middle. You will have to think a little deeper here to figure out the forces that bear on your solutions. It's ok to speculate. I find this to be a rewarding activity since I often find new reason for what I do.

4a) Now write each item as a Pattern. I've come to favor a four paragraph form where the second paragraph ends with the pivotal "therefore:". This is a good time to flip through Alexander's Pattern Language. I feel my work has always improved when I more closely mimic his style. I'm just now learning to make the first and last paragraphs carry weight. These are the ones that link a pattern with others in the language.

4b) Organize your patterns into sections. Write a little introduction to each section that lists each pattern by name. You may find you need to adjust your linking paragraphs as you study the higher level structure of your patterns. Try to keep 4a and 4b fluid as you write. As you become more familiar with your patterns you may find that they organize themselves.

5) Now write an introduction to your pattern language that hints at the forces you will be addressing.

The Public Sphere Project is using the web to annotate each of the 136 patterns that make up their Liberating Voices project.

The already existing division of theology into academic, systematic, biblical, and practical theology (maybe even including mystical theology) may be the discovery of a vertically organizing framework in existence in the discipline itself.

Oyvind Holmstad blogging on pattern languages offers this helpful way of making patterns:

Identifying any type of pattern follows the same criteria in architecture as in hardware or software.

1. A repeating solution to the same or similar set of problems, discovered by independent researchers and users at different times.

2. More or less universal solution across distinct topical applications, rather than being heavily dependent upon local and specific conditions.

3. That makes a pattern a simple general statement that addresses only one of many aspects of a complex system. Part of the pattern methodology is to isolate factors of complex situations so as to solve each one in an independent manner if possible.

4. A pattern may be discovered or "mined" by "excavating" successful practices developed by trial-and-error already in use, but which are not consciously treated as a pattern by those who use it. A successful pattern is already in use somewhere, perhaps not everywhere, but it does not represent a utopian or untried situation. Nor does it represent someone’s opinion of what "should" occur.

5. A pattern must have a higher level of abstraction that makes it useful on a more general level, otherwise we are overwhelmed with solutions that are too specific, and thus useless for any other situation. A pattern will have an essential area of vagueness that guarantees its universality. – Nikos A. Salingaros

Here's a gnarl of quotations from CA: "The patterns are patterns of action, and the action will not happen unless the patterns are felt, and created, and maintained by the people whose action goes into the patterns . . . patterns operate upon the whole : they are not parts, which can be added – but relationships, which get imposed upon the previous ones, in order to make more detail, more structure, and more substance – so the substance of the building emerges gradually . . the whole emerges. You are able to do this only when you no longer fear that nothing will happen, and you can therefore afford to let go of your images. because the gaps get filled, the small things that are wrong and gradually corrected, and finally, the whole is so smooth and relaxed, that it will seem as though it had been forever. It has no roughness about it, it simply lies there stretched out in time. Architects sometimes say that in order to design a building, you must have “an image” to start with, so as to give coherence and order to the whole. But you can never create a natural thing in this state of mind. If you have an idea – and try to add the patterns to it, the idea controls, distorts, makes artificial, the work which the patterns themselves are trying to do in your mind. Instead you must start with nothing in your mind. You are able to do this only when you no longer fear that nothing will happen, and you can therefore afford to let go of your images. ~ CA assorted quotations.

A pattern language is composed by a number of elements called patterns. Each pattern is written in a certain format. Although there are several types of format, it definitely contains name of the pattern, problem and its solution, and it may also contain context to apply the pattern, force as a premise that cause the problem, and related patterns. Such patterns are often organized into a catalogue. ~ Takashi Iba

Patterns identify a problem and suggest a core solution. Each pattern is connected to a larger and a smaller pattern.

"Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem in such a way that you can use that solution a million times over without ever doing it the same way twice." (CA)

"A design pattern systematically names, motivates, and explains a general design that addresses a recurring design problem in object-oriented systems. It describes the problem, the solution, when to apply the solution, and its consequences. It also gives implementation hints and examples. The solution is a general arrangement of objects and classes that solve the problem. The solution is customized and implemented to solve the problem in a particular context." (DesignPatterns Book)

At the heart of every pattern is a design problem.

Patterns must have the property of emergence, meaning that a pattern must suggest or infer its embedded system.

"The structures of a pattern are not themselves solutions, but they generate solutions. Patterns that work this way are called generative patterns. A generative pattern is a means of letting the problem resolve itself over time. . . . A pattern language not only tells us the rules for arrangement but shows us how to construct arrangements--as many as we want--which satisfy the rules." ~ CA

A query to a pattern language listerv yielded the following from a man named Peter K.

My question was, "How does one use pattern languages?" Peter's response defines as much as answers. But he does, still, add a bit to my understanding of how to use the medium. He writes,

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A pattern language collects and presents a body of wisdom from a community of practice in small, friendly pieces that are directly and easily applied to a given situation. The pieces are joined in a number of ways for easy navigation and browsing between the pieces, and to make it easier to comprehend the body of knowledge as a whole. The pieces are friendly and beautiful so they are soothing, enjoyable, and engaging for people to peruse.

(I purposely borrowed "small pieces" and "joined" from David Weinberger's pattern name, "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," which he uses for the Internet itself.)

It is similar to a cookbook, although more interconnected.

It has similarities to an encyclopedia, but favors practice and application rather than minute and comprehensive detail.

It has similarities to a fake book in music, but transmits more theme and application (knowledge and wisdom) rather than melody and rhythm (data).

It has similarities to the Talmud, but pattern languages are (or have been, at least) constructed as a smaller, constrained whole at a point in time, rather than accretively over centuries or millennia.

Pattern languages are particularly good for transmitting knowledge and wisdom of practitioners within and between communities of practice. They are good for individual or group reflection, inspiration, and application to immediate implementation.

Conversely, pattern languages are not a narrative; they do not tell a story of the application of the patterns.

(Stories -- narratives -- are the primary way people exchange plans and experiences.)

Nor are pattern languages meant to contain all of the context a student of a practice would need to learn the craft. A pattern language is a reference for practitioners or practitioners-to-be; it is not a learning guide for students.

(Practice is best learned by doing, under mentorship of an experienced practitioner, anyway.)

Notes on pattern-making: June 21, 2017

I've been continuing to read and learn what I can about pattern languages. My questions are: How do I identify a pattern? What is the difference between a taxonomy and a language? How many patterns are too many? What do I want to do with this thing?

Luck for me, some research on these very questions exists on the web for anyone willing to do the reading and to tolerate the jargon of other disciplines. What follows is a disorderly brain dump of notes that I have taken so far.

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"While individual patterns are useful on their own, they are more powerful when three are used in combination."

To start the process, an initial design problem is chosen and the designer applies one or more related patterns to solve the problem. The process continues as the designer considers additional problems that arise from the requirements and constraints of the project. Additional patterns are applied until the designer is satisfied that all design problems have been adequately addressed through the application of patterns. Alexander's descriptive framework for outlining a pattern included a pattern name, a statement of the problem underlying the pattern, the context in which the problem occurs, one or more solutions to the problem, and any related information that might aid others in connecting the pattern with other related patterns.

as new patterns were generated, previously written patterns were revised in order to clarify any new relationships that were discovered to exist between the patterns.

patterns are considered mature as they explain their topic and suggest ways of encouraging the quality without a name to a greater degree.

The mere fact that Alexander used the descriptive phrase “the quality without a name” to name the quality he wished to describe is somewhat ironic, and this may confuse some readers. After all, if it does not have a name, can it really exist? However, readers should understand that Alexander used that phrase in part to emphasize the precise nature of the phenomenon and remind the reader that when they experience this quality they may have difficulty communicating the entire experience through individual words. Nevertheless, even though it may be difficult to describe this quality and to understand it intellectually, it should be remembered that Alexander claimed this quality is real and that it can be readily identified by asking the simple question of whether or not the artifact, event, or experience feels good.

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The emphasis that practitioners have placed on Alexander's "quality without a name" has been a surprise. Alexander used this quality as a telos or target by which to judge the fitness of his entire project. And others have done the same after taking time to describe what this quality may be in their discipline. Their attention to this detail makes me ask whether I also shouldn't describe a quality for my own project.

My instincts gestures toward a kind of religious depth. Perhaps this is akin to what Schleiermacher meant by a "feeling of absolute dependence." This is the kind of thing William James is getting at in his famous lectures, or that his peers, the Transcendentalists, meant by the Oversoul. This is the sort of company that yanks me to a stop. Awe toward a transcendental mood is a false positive. So, I think that I will go a different route and call it "worship." The "quality without a name" my pattern language is aiming at is demarcated at this point by the word worship.

Moving on, I wonder if orthodoxy is a descriptor that means that certain patterns are present (or absent) in a matrix? And I wonder if the Trinity works as a kind of meta pattern or organizing principles that acts as a heuristic to the whole. In other words, if your pattern organizes itself according to a trinitarian heuristic, then you are working within the bounds of orthodoxy.

Asking after the transition from bare taxonomy to pattern language, the turned corner of difference seems to be organization along x, y axes. The x are related cards. The y is meta-relationships, both up into the abstract and down into the particular. I picture at least two levels and perhaps three. And so, I have to ask what my abstract index layer will look like. How complex will it be? How complex must it be to cover the field? And what qualifies a topic to exist at this level? Is this a simple matter of writing Father, Son, and Spirit on three cards and going for it? Or, will these meta principles be much more abstract, such as "being poured out"?

Finally, the question of what to do with this tool is slowly answering itself as work progresses. Here are three applications that I've been thinking of:

• opening doors. A theological pattern language will help an individual or group think theologically. So, say a Sunday School group is reading about the baptism of Jesus and the teacher, before the class discusses the passage, lays out the following pre-chosen cards creation, mission, and chaos. I can see the members of that group using those cards to more easily enter into a theological discussion of that text at a level that is deeper than where they may have gone during the course of a normal morning.
• mapping systems. I could see a student reading the first chapter of Augustine's Confessions and using the cards to map out topics as Augustine discusses them. Moreover, by laying out the cards in a tree or a circle or some other relationship and by using the meta-levels encoded into the cards themselves, the reader makes a map of Augustine's treatment. He or she might begin to play around with the organization, asking which are more or less important. And also, by looking at the relationships written on the cards, the reader might discover the third use that I could see this tool providing, namely
• outlining what's missing. Thanks to the relationships encoded in the language itself, the cards could be used to highlight what is missing in a work that is being read or in one's own thinking. Thus, the language serves to aid and broaden one's own theological thinking.

The degree to which especially the last two aids will work depends largely on how an infinite number of cards may be properly reduced to a fit number of patterns, not ideas. I suppose, if the cards were indexed to their own web pages, as group works has done, any amount of information could be associated with a card. One could, for example, make a list of the theologians who best address a particular pattern and where they do so.

Finally, I need to remember that patterns are responses to problems, where a problem is a common problem in a field. To describe a problem is to describe when a particular pattern is applied. Consider listing potential solutions as well.

"The purpose of a pattern language is to change people's habits or help them form new habits, to generate patterns of habits of actions for certain situations.." says Takashi Iba. "We must mine habits that create desirable results and write them as patterns that describe what action is good for a certain situation. Alexander points out that a person who performs an act of design does not think from scratch, but instead uses various rules of thumb that they have gained from experience."

First steps toward a theological pattern language

I sat down this afternoon with a deck of 3x5" cards and began writing a topic on each one. I didn't have a method of any sort. I wrote down themes that seemed ubiquitous and necessary. The work went faster than expected. After an hour, my table was covered with over a hundred cards. So what now?

To be honest, I have no idea what I am doing. Once every concept is written down that I can come up with, once I have two or three hundred cards in my hand, what then? How can I take a subjective list of topics and move them toward being a pattern language of their own? And how do I know what this would be? What is the use of something like this? Why am I doing this?

There are two clues on the group work's website that may help. One of these is an activity, and one comes from the orientation guide included in their kit. The activity is called the "pattern grab exercise." Here's how it works:

Setup

Option 1: Lay out all the cards in a spiral or other pattern on a table where they are readable by the whole group.

Option 2: Select a subset of cards to work with and lay these out. You could use a method like "Strengths / Growing Edges Circle" to make the selection

Instructions

1) Have a participant describe an upcoming agenda item / event which they are facilitating, including the history and context of the item / event, and the goals.

1A) As the participant describes the item / event, the rest of the group picks up cards that they feel are important to consider in the design of the process for the item / event

2) Popcorn-style, participants read out a card they selected, describe how they feel it relates, and the group briefly discusses ways that this could be worked into the process design.

This can be done in-depth for as few as one items, or more rapidly for many, depending on whether the goal is process design or training. The cards are laid in a circle

Here is the other clue from their orientation guide. The cards in their deck are divided into nine meta-categories. And those categories can be used to structure the use of the deck itself. And I'm thinking, "How different is this from the way we use the creeds to structure theological thinking?"

So what am I after? Here is my thinking. I am not a professional theologian, and I will never be a professional theologian. And yet I cannot seem to leave it behind. So I've had to peel away the habits of thinking that go along with academic theology. And I have had to ask how theology can fit in my hand. And the models I keep coming to are art and cooking--not argument.

There is another barrier too: my brain. I do not remember details or recall details very well. My brain works in larger patterns and relationships. It works in shapes. And, though I work very hard, it does not run as fast as those of my friends who fit in the academy. I have ADD. Maybe that is it. Whatever the case, for me to do theology, it has to fit my brain as well as my hand. And this means a slower approach, or at least a different one.

And then, about two years ago, I learned about Christopher Alexander and pattern languages. Patterns that work together to create a way of talking about and passing on the fundamentals of a discipline. Patterns that can be used like a chef uses ingredients to plate a meal or an artist uses colors to make a painting. Can this work with theology? Can this tool allow me to use the emotional kaleidoscope in my head to do things with my years of theological training? I certainly hope so.

And so I made one card after the next. Again, I'm not sure where to go from here. But I'm willing to work into the tool, to let the tool and I become comfortable together. It took Alexander seven years to write his book. It took group works two to write their deck. It may take a while. But I am eager to see how it comes out.

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For further thought, here is a link to group work's beginner's orientation. There are excellent ideas here about how to begin to structure and use even a pattern language that is in process.

Identifying patterns and pattern languages

I have a growing interest in something called pattern languages. Begun in architecture through the work of architect Christopher Alexander and his book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, pattern languages were quickly taken up by software programmers and mathematicians. These kept the idea alive until it gradually seeped into other disciplines.

An excellent example of this is Group Works and their GroupWorks deck, a deck of cards--patterns--that are used in facilitating meetings and social gatherings.

Group Works has a definition of what makes a pattern that I quite like, and I have lifted it wholesale from their website. They call it the Hallmarks List, and it is as follows:

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The following list of questions are here to help guide the pattern writing and editing process. While it’s not required that every pattern necessarily be able to answer yes to every question on this list, these are hallmarks that have been noted across many of the patterns.

Does it further the goals of the project?

• Support purpose-driven design
• Deepen the skills of those who serve as group process guides
• Serve as a resource for those who are teaching others
• Increase process literacy among people who are users of process(es)

Does it point us toward “the quality that has no name”? Does it describe a feature that shows up repeatedly in group processes (link is external) that result in “deepening, connection, and a fulfillment of purpose”?

Does it feel resonant? Is it evocative? Does my gut respond to this with a sense of recognition?

Does it happen across methods/approaches? Is it a common piece underlying multiple methodologies? This is like stacking functions in permaculture, where one element contributes to many yields.

Can it take a large variety of forms? "Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice."--A Pattern Language

Is it fractal? That is, does it show up at more than one scale (such as within one item of a meeting and again within the meeting as a whole)?

Is it a distinct creature? That is, once grasped, it stands out as its own thing, coherent, and not merely a result of other aspects of process. While it may take a while to first “see” a pattern, its essential “shape” should be easy to recall once understood. Is it unifying? It may bring together what previously seemed like separate aspects of group process.

Does it describe an action that can be consciously undertaken by convenors and/or participants? Rather than, for instance, a dynamic to be passively observed. Does knowledge of this pattern increase the skill of practitioners?

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For more information

Reading and Websites

Nikos A. Salingaros. The Structure of Pattern Languages. Architectural Research Quarterly volume 4 (2000) pages 149-161.

group works. What is a pattern language?

Christopher Alexander's website.

Ola Möller. Pattern languages and Generative Codes. MethodKit.com.

Design Matrix. Anatomy of a Pattern Language.

Dan Greening. How to Read and Write Pattern Languages.

Werner Ulrich. A review of The Art of Observation: Understanding Pattern Languages. (Journal of Research Practice Volume 2, Issue 1, Article R1, 2006).

Michael Mahemoff* & Lorraine J. Johnston. "Usability Pattern Languages: the "Language" Aspect"

Michael T. Patterns Are Not Building Blocks.

Takashi Iba. “The Future of Pattern Language: Soft Social Infrastructure to Allow Freedom of Creation in the Creative Society” Slideshare. Published Oct 27, 2018.

YouTube Videos

"Spaces for the Soul:A documentary about the Architect, Mathematician Christopher Alexander" https://youtu.be/nWSDT2wdth4

John Athayd. "The Timeless Way of Building" (lecture w slides) https://youtu.be/3AltRFXviK4

Takashi Iba. "Pattern Language 3.0, vol.1: Introduction" https://youtu.be/oOigtdwvpvM

Peter Bane. Presenting on pattern languages at the North American Permaculture Convergence 2014: https://youtu.be/SSnmEEnjbmY

Claudina Sarahe. "Deconstructing Web Systems; or, a Pattern Language for Web Development." https://youtu.be/RXuB3Ti368o

Phaedra Taylor, "Open and Unafraid Prayer Cards." For sale by the Rabbit Room, these fifteen, full-color, 4x6 laminated cards are designed to "provide help to individuals, families, small groups and communities who wish to pray in light of the Book of Psalms." It isn't technically a pattern language, as there is no index, but the similarity is unmistakable. I am most interested in the suggestions for how the cards might be used. The cards serve as a heuristic device, setting boundaries that elevate and govern in this case the activity of prayer.

Group Work's Instructions for Pattern Writing.

The Ministry of Testing's TestSphere pattern language about test engineering.

Patterns of Everyday Care: A toolkit to help notice and design for the subtle, everyday ways people care for one another in online communities.

Excerpts from Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan exists in a phenomenological framework, but one to which work, government, and the pragmatic have been applied. His is a political phenomenology.

All technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.

The use of any kind of medium or extension of man alters the patterns of interdependence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses. It is the framework itself that changes with new technology, and not just the picture within the frame. The content of one medium is always another medium. The principle factors in media impact on existing social forms are acceleration and disruption. An increase of power or speed in any kind of grouping of any components whatever is itself a disruption that causes a change of organization. Any new medium, by its acceleration, disrupts the lives and investments of whole communities. All means of interchange and of human interassociation tend to improve by acceleration. Speed, in turn, accentuates problems of form and structure, because established social morays are built on slower foundations. New speed and power are never compatible with existing special and social arrangements. Every extension or acceleration effects new configurations in the over-all situation at once. Every technology creates new stresses and needs in the human beings who have engendered it. The new need and the new technological response are born of our embrace of the already existing technology—a ceaseless process. And yet, eventually, a speed-up in communications always enables a central authority to extend its operations to more distant margins. Before electricity, the increase of speed divided function, social classes, and knowledge. With electricity, however, all that is reversed. The world becomes flat. Our electric extensions of ourselves simply by-pass space and time, and create problems of human involvement and organization for which there is no precedent.

All media is a force for decentralization and pluralism. Centralism of organization is based on the continuous, visual, lineal structuring that arises from phonetic literacy. Print asks for the isolated and stripped-down visual faculty, not for the unified sensorium. Print brought in the taste for exact measurement and repeatability that we now associate with science and mathematics. The electric age rejects mechanical solutions of uniformity and social homogenization in favor of uniqueness and diversity.

A cool medium, whether the spoken word or the manuscript or TV, leaves much more for the listener or user to do than a hot medium. If the medium is of high definition, participation is low. If the medium is of low intensity, the participation is high . . . . The book form is unsuited to involved presentation. The electric dynamic is one of public participation in creativity. We react to the world as a whole.

The city, as a form of the body politic, responds to new pressures and irritations by resourceful new extensions—always in the effort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and homeostasis.

Militarism is the main route of technological education and acceleration for lagging areas.

Any technology gradually creates a totally new human environment. Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes. Yet, human beings are never aware of the ground rules of their environmental systems or cultures. To the student of media, it is difficult to explain the human indifference to social effects of these radical forces. The new environment reprocesses the old one, elevating it to an art form. And this is what people are aware of: only of the “content” or the old environment, not the new paradigm created by the change in technology. Few have been willing to study the personal and social effects of media apart from its “content.” A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. Once a new technology comes into a social milieu it cannot cease to permeate that milieu until every institution is saturated. There are psychic and social implications of each and every technological extension of man. Except for light, all other media come in pairs, with one acting as the content of the other, obscuring the operation of both. Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. The content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves or by any new technology. It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The development of writing and the visual organization of life made possible the discovery of individualism, introspection, and so on. The phonetic alphabet alone is the technology that has been the means of creating “civilized man”--the separate individuals equal before a written code of law. Separateness of the individual, continuity of space and of time, and uniformity of codes are the prime marks of literate and civilized societies. The phonetic alphabet [was] the technology that made possible the visible and uniform fragmentation of time. . . . it is the source of Western mechanism. Print presented an image of repeatable precision that inspired totally new forms of extending social energies . . .breaking the individual out of the traditional group while providing a model of how to add individual to individual in massive agglomeration of power. All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information. Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force. . . our Western lives seem to native cultures to be one long series of preparations for living.

The mosaic form. Mosaic form means not a detached “point of view,” but participation in process. The mosaic is the mode of the corporate or collective image and commands deep participation. This participation is communal rather than private, inclusive rather than exclusive. The mosaic is not uniform, continuous, or repetitive. It is discontinuous, skew, and nonlineal, like the tactual TV image. To the sense of touch, all things are sudden, counter, original, spare, strange. The mosaic form demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being, as does the sense of touch.

The hybrid or the meeting of two media is a moment of truth and revelation from which new form is born. The moment of the meeting of media is a moment of freedom and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them on our senses. For those parts of ourselves that we thrust out into the form of new invention are attempts to counter or neutralize collective pressures and irritations. But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit.

Any extension, whether of skin, hand, or foot, affects the whole psychic and social complex. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. [Ethical demands] can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media. Our private and corporate lives have become information processes because we have put our central nervous systems outside us in electric technology. The computer promises by technology a Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity. The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured person emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society.

To act without reacting, involvement, is the peculiar advantage of Western literate man.

There is nothing linear or sequential about the total field of awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness. Hume demonstrated that causality is added to phenomenology. We add the sequence.

The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude—a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being.

[This book] explores the contours of our own extended beings in our technologies, seeking the principle of intelligibility in each of them. In the full confidence that it is possible to win an understanding of these forms that will bring them into orderly service.

Myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is the contraction or implosion of any process and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes. The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness. This man is the artist. And art, like games . . . and like media of communication, has the power to impose its own assumptions by setting the human community into new relationships and postures.

Specialist learning in higher education proceeds by ignoring interrelationships; for such complex awareness slows down the achieving of expertness.

The development of writing and the visual organization of life made possible the discovery of individualism, introspection, and so on. The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured person emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society. Our private and corporate lives have become information processes because we have put our central nervous systems outside us in electric technology.

Just as writing is an extension and separation of our most neutral and objective sense, the sense of sight, number is an extension and separation of our most intimate and interrelating activity, our sense of touch. Perhaps touch is not just skin contact with things, but the very life of things in the mind?

Putting the doctrine of Revelation under Pneumatology

Putting the doctrine of revelation underneath Pneumatology does a couple of other things.

(1) It says that the doctrine of the Trinity governs the doctrine of revelation

(2) It says that we know God only as revealed in Christ through the Holy Spirit

(3) It says that the doctrine of revelation is better entitled the “doctrine of God’s self revelation”

(4) It says that the purpose of revelation is to bring one into fellowship with the triune God

(4.1) That said, it isn’t just to inform the mind or direct the will.

(4.2) I think, too, that this connects with the thread of Pneumatology that sees the Spirit as the Spirit of Wisdom; so this gets into the whole idea of wisdom literature, Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, etc.

(5) It says that metaphysical naturalism or classic deism are wrong

(6) It says that trying to discover a “proof for the existence of God” outside of revelation is ridiculous. Such proofs would never produce a Trinity anyway.

(7) It grafts the doctrine of revelation onto the renewing/re-creating work of the Spirit—which is fundamentally eschatological.

(8) It asks interesting questions about how to read the Bible and about the connection between written word, spoken word, and lived experience—in other words, it gets some head scratching going about hermeneutics.

(9) It places the category of revelation, including the Scriptures, into the category of gift. 

MacIntyre Chapter Two: Moral Disagreement Today

Chapter Two: Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism

Summary in the First Part

“The hypothesis which I wish to advance,” begins Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal work After Virtue, “is that in the actual world which we inhabit, the language of morality is in . . . a state of grave disorder” (2) Moral grammar still exists, he says, but in Disney-esque imitation. “The language and the appearances of morality persist even though the integral substance [has been] fragmented and . . . destroyed” (5). It is a profound claim, coming as it does after several hundred years of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment moral thinking. And yet “we are in a state so disastrous that there are no large remedies for it” (Ibid). If he is correct, then no one alive today has lived within a moral system that isn’t an imitation. If he is correct, then the guideposts of our personal and political lives could easily be misaligned or wrong--or evil. MacIntyre has made a big claim, and the believing of it is going to require big proof. But where to begin? MacIntyre chooses to trace the source from its effects.

Modern political discourse--dialogue in the give-and-take of our public square--is difficult for any democracy. It should be difficult. But what we discover in the last half-century are habitual problems that never resolve. They fester like sores on the state. Many call them incurable, but MacIntyre disagrees. And he dissects them as carefully as a scientist.

What he discovers is that these habitual and seemingly interminable debates have three characteristics. First, the arguments are reasonable and legitimate, but their products are of different kinds. Everybody’s logic works, but one talks rights while another talks universality; one talks equality, another, liberty. Second, arguments claim to be impersonal and reasonable and are presented that way. He outlines a relationship here between two kinds of moral appeals: one that depends on the personal context of the appeal and one that is impersonal and a-contextual, and so applies to everyone. The former would be, for example, a request “Do this.” And the context of the request is that I’m your parent or your boss. There is a context that gives force to the request. These habitual arguments sever any connection between the address and the context of the one addressed. Their criteria of acceptance is impersonal. Third, every qualifying debate has a pedigree. Arguments come out of traditions woven from a complex history of dialogue. You can’t simply jettison history for the sake of a solution.

“All those various concepts which inform our moral discourse were originally at home in larger totalities of theory and practice in which they enjoyed a role and function supplied by contexts of which they have now been deprived.” (10)

Now these three characteristics do not quite mix. The first characteristic is already problematic. The conclusions to competing-yet-valid arguments differ in kind, so how do we judge a victor? Our society has no way of doing so. We are left in a no-man’s-land of unreason. There is only the “clash of antagonistic wills” in a forever screaming match that shouts in public and in the uncertainty of our hearts. The second characteristic of these arguments, when combined with the first, further complicates. The second always appeals to the impersonal and the reasonable. But we’ve just seen that the first has no impersonal and reasonable way of sorting it all out. Therefore, the impersonal thing is just a show, a masquerade of reasonability. MacIntyre wonders why.

“What is it about rational argument which is so important that it is the nearly universal appearance assumed by those who engage in moral conflict? Does not this suggest that the practice of moral argument in our culture expresses at least an aspiration to be or to become rational in this area of our lives?” (9,10)  

Finally, with the third characteristic, we confront pluralism. Pluralism is praised. But what do we mean by pluralism? Is it “an ordered dialogue of intersecting viewpoints” or “an unharmonious melange of ill-assorted fragments”? He suspects the latter.

And so, having parsed out the elements of the debates that shape our public and private lives, MacIntyre asks how this data squares up with his initial hypothesis and finds that it squares up well. The language of morality has changed. We should be able to map this change and examine some earlier and different moral milieu. It is not going to be easy. The academic curriculum has long divided philosophy from history and treated philosophers like a-historic specimens on a petri dish. We should beware lest we make the same mistake going forward. But can there be a forward?

“You can go no further,” comes a voice. “It is impossible. For moral arguments--all moral arguments--are and always must be irresolvable.” (Here, as best as I can understand, MacIntyre has summoned a foil, much as a speaker will address “some might say” arguments in a speech after an important point has been made.) For now and for all times, for here and for everywhere, moral disagreements have no resolution. There is no going forward. And the voice is right, there is no going forward--not until this objection is defeated. And MacIntyre knows the name of its champion: emotivism.

MacIntrye, After Virtue: Preface and Chapter One

MacIntye, After Virtue: Outline of Chapter Two

Jürgen Moltmann's Man: Summary: Chapter 3b

Chapter 3: Images of man and experiments

D. The life of dialogue

In a world saturated with technology’s whirring activity, human beings and their problems and situations – love, suffering, death – leave technicians speechless.  Human beings, after all, are so awash with mass-sensations that they no longer experience life.  Thus they nurse a deep anxiety.

Historically, the Enlightenment labored to produce an ‘I’ fit to lord over the world of things.  For Descartes and others, freedom’s expression was a resounding ‘I.’  But the ‘I’ cannot exist on its own without loneliness. Feuerbach, addressing this very problem, wrote, “The nature of man is contained only in community in the unity of man – a unity which however rests upon the reality of the distinction of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’.” (80)  It was a move mirrored in new evaluations of language where life does not make language, but is rather made by it.  The ‘I-Thou’ of language is the basis of self-consciousness and community with others.  Thus, subjectivity is intersubjectivity.

Martin Buber’s work I and Thou brought further clarified the linguistic element of human relations.  Buber created a continuum of possible human relationships, with the I-Thou on one side and the I-It on the other.  The ‘I’ of the latter is a subject who perceives and acts.  The ‘I’ of the latter pair is an ‘I’ who hears and dialogues.  It is a useful continuum when considering humanity within the roaring power of technological life.

The I-it, which asks of human beings, “What?” is absolutely disjunctive to the I-Thou, which asks of human beings, “Who?”  Technological life, which treats human beings as consumers, or numbers, producers, or liabilities, cannot comprehend the human life which mediates the whole being in an encounter with actual living.  Furthermore, within the Thou one may come to themselves and, now whole speak wholly. The I, on the other hand, offers relentless experiential dissection.

Buber developed an entire philosophy of religion from his linguistic personalism.  “In the ultimate grounds of our linguistic and spiritual life, God is the true ‘Thou’ to the true and enduring ‘I’ of man. . . . And if anyone avoids the names for the unnameable, because they are all misused, and addresses with his whole being the ‘Thou’ of his life, it is God that he addresses.” (83)  As well, the Thou, he said, was accessible only in the Thou of one’s neighbor.  Community, then, is the new-and-forever after locus of divine visitation.

Moltmann, though enthusiastic about Buber’s insights, asks if perhaps the ‘It’ has not been misunderstood.  He asks about the community of work, the everyday community, the life with others that is more concrete than the small, oath-bound communities of Buber’s vision.  Community, he say, requires “a common material agency and reliable institutions” the “necessary and good incarnations of the human into real life.” (84)  Modern society, he says, cannot be humanized through personalization.

“It is not possible directly to repersonalize relationships which have been divided up for a rational purpose. . . . The ‘life of dialogue’ can easily lead to a romantic flight from the reality of scientific and technological civilization.  Then it loses its humanizing and healing powers and survives in a petty corner for the criticism of culture.” (85)

Furthermore, he says, industrialization, instead of depersonalizing life, has allowed it the freedom to dialogue.  Thus, in condemning the technopolis of the I-It, Buber’s personalistic protest cuts away at the floor beneath it.  What is good about the community of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ is that it reminds human beings of their own humanity with one another.  That, he says, should inform social and political work in the modern world.  “Men will then take to themselves the sorrow of a reality which is constantly alienated and materializing, and see the future under the image of its alteration so that it can be characterized as a human society.” (86)

E. The irony of the "man without qualities"

Rootlessness characterizes the order of the day in an industrial society.  For many, there is no ultimate realization of a universal human society.  Yet, irony has become a way forward for some; the irony of the ‘man without qualities.’

Ralf Dahrendorf, in his essay "Homo Sociologicus," described a model of human expression, a sociological model.  In this model, human beings both describe themselves and are described by a matrix of social roles: parent, child, teacher, citizen, bird watcher, female.  Indeed, there is no other way of describing who someone is, whether someone else or yourself, outside of these relationships.  These do not have to do with who someone is, however, but only what they do.  They are societal descriptions in which someone lives, descriptions that are horizons of the possible, each one molding the subject to the shape of a different expectation; a German professor and a farm laborer live on disparate tracks. Social roles are the process of socialization, molding the man and introducing him to the society of his peers.

Social roles bring dangers with them.  Their role play separates the human person into personalities, inner and outer in a division which begs the question: “Is [one] identical with the echo which his personal life has made among other people?” (88)  There is the danger too of so becoming one’s role that there is no humanity left save what is proscribed.[1] Again, as relationships multiply one upon the other, the self becomes a juggling act which, in critical cases, could result in a split of the personality itself.  Each role, each expectation, brings with it different claims.  In a whirl of competing demands, can one even speak of an ‘I’ at peace with itself and the world?  Moltmann asks, “Where is he a man, and where is he free to be man?  Or does he just not appear as himself and as ‘man’ in the functional activity of this pluralistic society? (90)  So is there a subject at all?

There is hope for a subject if passive imagination is considered.  To the clingy aggregate of social roles there is always one untouched addition.  This one addition, this passive imagination, allows a detachment, an even laughable point of view by which to critique all the other demanding selves.  This one addition is the free possibility of being different.  “By means of self-irony man can look out from the reality of his life and reflect, keep his negative independence from everything and toy with the quite different possibilities that he has.” (93)  So free and open can this ironic man without qualities be that Moltmann draws a line between it and Marx’s total man.  Both, he says, look beyond constricting societal walls to bare hills of human possibility.

Yet, Moltmann also warns this passive ironic of romantic dangers.  She struggles to acquire greater possibilities, but knows she can never belong to any of the roles which she acquires.  She develops an experimental attitude toward life and “lives the delusion that the thousand possibilities … are worth more than the one reality.” (93)  The external world, the real world, slides away within the foggy disconnect.  “This fascination is paid for … by  an increasing inability to identify oneself and to become flesh in practical life, and to love.” (94)  With no real place to stand, the passive ironic ironically is swept along by the active forces, plans and expectations against which irony was chosen in the first place.

Moltmann sets another contextual warning.  This time against a form of Christian identity.  He describes this identity as such:

If radical contextualization is what it is to be human, then how can one live from and in God?  If a man is but the result of his social relationships, then how can we understand him when,

“the transcendent God calls him and he receives the call of the word of God and trusts it, he releases himself at the same time from the enclosedness of the world and becomes free of the powers and laws of the world.  He becomes free of the mirror of his social activities and can stand over against himself.  He is then no longer the result of his social circumstances, but becomes Son of God and Lord of the World (Gogarten).” (95)

The creature of God lives in a different world than Dahrendorf’s homo sociologicus.  Roles do not define, but become tools which may be owned without owning.  They are no longer laws from jealous gods but simply roles; they are secularized.  The real does not dominate.  At the same time, the inner self is made sacred because it receives itself from God.  There is a place to stand outside the roles, a place for possibility.  Freedom is granted to the inner self so that there is no longer the cacophonous demands of society but, instead, the silent place of one’s decision.  Chiding Bultmann’s free decision of faith, Moltmann retorts, “The freedom of faith is indeed always specific in decisions, but decisions do not turn into decisiveness.” (96)  The problem with this point of decision which stands between the cut made between God and the world (for in the solitary, sacred place before God one takes refuge from the social demands of the secular) is that nothing gets done by it.  There is no inner ability in its position to make decisive choices.  There is no human incarnation for the sake of others.  Social reality is not changed.  It is a “Utopia of the negative.”  “This form of belief is always in danger of changing into the romantic attitude of the beautiful soul, which like a butterfly moving from flower to flower dashes past reality from one decision to another, without really and effectively taking corporate reality seriously.” (96) The passive ironic, untouched because she is without qualities even as she lives in a world of qualities, is aesthetically attractive.  But, as Moltmann concludes the segment, it arises from the experience of social powerlessness.

F. The adventurous heart

One option in the face of life’s increasing complexity is raw and direct action.  Instead of the patient labor of maintaining community networks upon networks; instead of political decisions made more and more obscure as awareness of the layered contexts are understood; instead of these, Alexander’s sword of naked decision is drawn from its sheath (Scheide) and with it the clarity of action (Entscheidung).

“Critically Utopian thought builds upon the relationships of the present which have become opaque the objective counter-image of a liberated-harmonious society. . . . Self critical scepticism withdraws from an oppressive social reality into the inner secret of the man without qualities, to satisfy those possibilities in unreality.  There is yet a third way, from multiplicity to simplicity, the mover from the thousand possibilities to the one necessary reality, which is the naked decision.” (97)

It is not the purpose of acting but that one has acted that clarifies.  In the teeth of battle, decisions are elementary, friend and foe are clearly manifest.  Moltmann identifies “the struggle for the existence of the nation” – war –with this very desire.  On the level of nation state, political and social factions, melt away and unify under the banner of patriotism.  Such decisiveness, says Moltmann, explains why facism held such attraction, despite having no plan of its own other than to act.

The will to power grants unity to the individual as well.  In the commitment to arms, all the manifold demands, roles and divisions of the self stitch together.  Existence is one, a fulcrum between the scales of living and dying.  “Deliverance from the uncertainty in which one does not know what one is there fore, lies in total self-sacrifice.” (100)

The best preparation for a life of self-sacrifice is the destruction of humanistic education.  Contempt today for the ‘ivory tower’ universities, the desire of some to hitch the intellect to a certain powerful politic, or even the wholesale embrace of anarchy: all of these, he says, is a treason of intellect against intellect.

Politically, such a life is paved by abolishing parliamentary procedure and bureaucratic process.  The Utopia of the bourgeoisie “consists  in the hope that one could transmute the decisive battle into a continuous parliamentary debate, and put it off by delay.  The opposite to discussion is dictatorship…” (101)  In times of war, there is no need for congressional debates, but only kill or be-killed.  The dictatorship offers seductively a simple, naked decision.  Therefore, dictatorships thrive in existential politics.

Just as the longing for decision is met by secular categories of friend and enemy, that same longing is met by ideas of apocalypse in religious sects and churches.  In the looming shadow of the end, faith is the absolute decision made on the basis of an absolute call; both, notes Moltmann, beyond verification by any objective standard.  “One can only take an attitude to them without reference to reasons and proofs.” (103)  Faith is the ultimate risk, a leap without evidence.  “It is not the credibility of its object that is evidence for [faith], but one’s own decisive commitment, in which man comes to himself.” (103)  Yet, he asks, without a credible object, does one really have the Christian faith?

Brushing away complexity, responsibility and the political and social demands of responsible human living by means of violence and the act only brushes them away.  It does not balance the need for society.  Furthermore, the very thing that makes decisiveness so decisive is its context against the daily background of complexity.  Without needs, demands, and deadlines, there is no way of talking about decision.  The two are related in a negative circularity.

The same circularity appears in religious faith.  The existential leap, too, is only an antithesis against the thesis of the church of historic confession and liturgical and missiological praxis.  The existential leap has no real substance of its own; inexpressibility is no foundation.  “Christian faith is indissolubly linked with historical recollection of the Christ-event and with eschatological hope in the future of Christ, and so is itself a historical decision.” (104)  The call of the gospel does not bow him to crisis in a last day, but, rather, “opens to him new possibilities of altering himself and his circumstances.  It puts him in the time of love, which trusts in the possibility of conversion of the ‘enemy’, because it hopes in him, and therefore does not kill or damn him, but tries to help him to life.” (104)  Neither Modern society nor the Christian faith will find a solution in the naked friend-foe decision.  Rather, both should adhere to the better way, loving and rational dialogue with others.

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[1] Heidegger’s Das-Man

See: Man: Chapter 3a

See Man: Chapter 2

See Man: Chapter 1