Theology along Three Axes

Theology is stretched across a frame of three sides. Let me illustrate, using election:

1. Theological ideas consist coordinately along three axes: a horizontal (neighbor, X, abscissa), a vertical (God, Y, ordinate), and a Z-axis (eschatology, Z, applicate).
2. The doctrine of creation gives pride of place to the vertical axis.
3. Soteriology, because it is a branch of theology, exists along these three coordinates.
4. Y: with the Reformed tradition, I assert the mystery of divine election under the lordship of the Spirit and the inability of human beings to savingly believe of themselves.
5. X: There is no salvation without ethics / faith without works is dead. A person's "heart, soul, mind, and strength" is necessary for saving faith to exist.
6. Z: The salvation of individuals and of all things may begin in history but it always on the move to its apotheosis in the next age. Jesus's liberating act results in a dim-but-restored, imaging priesthood today that will be John's image of the worshipping church triumphant tomorrow.

Methods I Use to Jumpstart Creative Thinking

Over the years, there are a couple of techniques I've used to kick my thinking over into different lanes, which is my definition of creativity. There is nothing new under the sun, so no one is truly creative in the novum sense. What we are creative about is mixing up what is already there. The demands of daily life, of limited resources, and of mediocre expectations combine to keep us thinking safely in the ruts that work. (They may not be optimal, but they work.) Creativity runs outside the lines. Here are a few ways of making that happen, in no particular order:

Adjust your abstraction. You can take anything and adjust between concreteness/quiddity and abstraction. These are called levels of construal, where concrete is low construal and metaphysics is high construal. Picking up crafts for your kid's Sunday School class is low construal. Carrying on the pedagogical tasks of instructing the young in the faith is high construal. The same act can be viewed along either, but high construal provides a motivation and an awareness of purpose that low construal does not, and low construal carries the energy of movement and activity in a way that high construal does not. So, adjust your abstraction.

You already know. (Das weisst du doch!) Ninety-nine percent of the time, we do not express or act or communicate or own-up-to what we already know. My wife calls this "working at the top of your intelligence." That is true, but it isn't all of it. We are always playing games like we don't know things when we do. We just do not want to be honest about whatever it is. Just today, for example, I was in a meeting and someone suggested we look into whether shorter marketing copy is better. We already know that. The paper we need to research. The repair we need to make. The question we need to ask so-and-so. Often, we already know. We can already write that paper, make that repair, and we already know what so-and-so would say. We just are afraid to act. You already know what to do. You already know what you want to do. You have it already mapped out, listed out, and sorted in your head. You are just afraid to admit it for some reason.

A friend of mine has another way of putting this. He says we need to learn to call experts. And by this he doesn't mean other people, but ourselves. He tells the story about a motorcycle repair he was doing, and he could not get something to work. So, he stepped back and imagined that he was a motorcycle repair expert who had been called in. He looked at the bike in front of him through the imaginary eyes of this expert, and he was able to make the repair. He already knew how to do it, but he needed to find a way to unlock that and act. I think of him sometimes and tell myself, "Ok, take the next hour and act like you are brilliant."

Trace the margins and find the best solution. Whatever a problem is, someone else in some other field of humanity (or nature itself) has already found an elegant solution. You think that because you are working in a new technology or because your problem is complex that this cannot be the case, but I assure you it is. There are only a handful of real problems. Like Plato's ideas, they infest nearly everything. Likewise, there are only twenty years worth of problems and these just get recycled over and over again in every field and endeavor. So, whatever it is that you are working on, abstract out the problem so that only the bones of the outline are there. Then, when you have simplified it so that it is almost a template or a shape, like a cut-out moon or octagon or star, look around and see if that pattern exists in other fields. I especially look to fields that have been around for thousands of years. Ask farmers and fishermen, ask weavers and cooks and storytellers and dancers. Ask the insects in the yard or the trees growing beside the walls. There is a good chance that if you will seek and wait, you'll find as elegant a solution as any you would have come up with after expensive trial-and-error.

Incidentally, this inability to discover new problems is frustrating and sad. Most people think there are a lot of problems, but there aren't. When you investigate the coolest programming language or scientific discoveries, they are mostly moving pieces around on the same board but with different jargon. Most businesses talk like they want to be innovative--they don't. Most systems talk a good talk, but they like things the way they are. Real experimentation is alien to human homeostasis along every dimension. We kill prophets and ridicule artists in their lifetimes. Most of the time, I just let myself sleep in the ebb and flow. But sometimes, I wake up. I feel the infinite possibilities of things shimmering underneath every atom and second. And I hunger to get with others and tackle creative problems. But I do not know who these others are, and I do not know what those problems could be. And so, befuddled and unable to act practically from my temporary lucidity, I am sad for a bit, and then it passes. I suspect the problem is a class problem, and that were I not working-class (basically), I might know what to do or have the means to do or at least to stay in that place until I do know what to do. But I don't and it is best to get on with things.

Get in front of a whiteboard (or whatever does the same). There is something about standing there with a marker in your hand and writing that opens up the mind. Wrestle in a different medium. Get your muscles involved. Muscles have memory. They can work problems out. The anecdotal and experimental data on walking and thinking is legion. Let your body help.

Sit with it. People do not appreciate the value of simply sitting with a problem. Bundle it up in the front of your head, and then toss it to the back and let your subconcious masticate on it for a while. Get some good sleep. Go about your life. But, be ready. When your subconscious is done, it will throw back some kind of an answer, and you'd better be prepared to record it somehow. Pull the car over. Record it on your phone. Borrow a pen in a restaurant. Whatever. And get it all out because it will not make sense to you partially when you come back and look at it in the morning. You have to get it all out--every weird and funny idea about it, because only the whole thing has value. And then, honestly, it may only be ridiculous, but it may not be. It is the subconscious after all. What can you expect!

Throw Out the Easy Stuff. When considering any real problem, the first few solutions you think of are probably junk. Where solutions are easy, there are no problems. You obviously have a problem, so distrust easy solutions.

Get clear on details. Building from the last point, quick fixes that pop easily to mind or when you are tempted to wonder why people don't just solve using x because isn't it so obvious are signs you need to dig into the details. Creativity requires a clear grasp of the details. Creativity is not an escape from reality; it is a different way of framing what is there. Get curious about everything. The process of acquiring insight stirs up curiosity. Sometimes, though, you'll need to stir the pot with willpower. If your curiosity fails, come at it a new way. But ride that curiosity to clarity.

Go Fish in the Desert. Try applying your hypothesis to an unrelated example. Have fun blowing it up and taking it apart. Take something away; discover what is necessary and what is not. Sometimes changing the color of the background makes things pop.

Patterns are like garden tomatoes. They are like curry, like garlic

One of my favorite shows ever is Netflix's documentary series Chef's Table. I love watching shows about people who love something and tell you why. But the cinematography, the settings, the personalities, the food, and the deep humanity of cooking finds in this show a new high. Yes, it can get repetitive. There is a common direction between farm and consumption. But there is one thing that gets me every time, and that is the loving attention of each chef to ingredients. Perhaps it is salt or pork or almonds--featured chefs have gone through a process of understanding and valuing each ingredient. I love that. I'm fascinated by what happens when human beings give over their deepest attention. I love ἡσυχίᾳ.

So, I was thinking about this today in relationship to theology. In the discipline of theology, there is a lot to know. There is a reason why the old universities saved theology for last. That's what it requires. Theologians have to be historians, literature professors, quasi-scientists, philosophers, psychologists, ethicists, Biblical scholars, linguists, economists, political scientists, researchers, teachers, writers (and sometimes public speakers), and keep up with their fellow theologians all at the same time. Theology needs it all, and there is never enough. It is necessary to dive down many times and to stay down as long as possible. In theology, the Baptists finally get their wish and the submerged must be saturated through-and-through. It is necessary--along with the comorbid guilt and frustration. Nevertheless, there is a time to put it aside. That is what I am feeling.

What I want to do is follow those chefs back into the ingredients. I want to pluck a blueberry from a bush or pull a carrot from my own earth. And I have been noodling around with Christopher Alexander's pattern language ideas, his and others, because I think this is the way to do this. That is the way to pull the ingredients up out of the crazy kitchen of tradition and argument and give each one my deepest attention. I want to get to know them, be schooled by them, let them pull me into the conversation they are having, into the tradition, and not the other way round. I do not want to use them; I want to spend time with them, to love them. It is part of the working out of the transition from the practice of theology as a profession in the academy to the practice of theology as craft. It is part of ad fontes.

For a while, I have been struggling to understand how to build a pattern language. I've not been sure exactly what constitutes a pattern. Is a pattern the solution to a problem or is a pattern a theme or idea? Are the themes and ideas that make up a discipline in reality solutions to problems that come up in the practice of that discipline (in which case they trace how that discipline is practiced)? I have not been sure. And this hesitancy around what is and is not a pattern has slowed me down. But I am starting to overcome the either/or and say the ideas of a discipline are also its solutions to underlying problems. Patterns are like tomatoes, curry, and garlic, and they are solutions to necessary problems (Acts 10:13).

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Epilogue: It occurs to me this evening that I still act as beholden to the academy when there is no reason to be. I do not need its permission. There is no need to beg a tenure committee. There is no need to hock my wares, desperate in a frayed suit at the yearly AAR paid for by money scraped from months of the family food budget. There is a discipline to well-formed scholarship that should be obeyed. Discipline is important, yes. So, giving a respectful nod, I feel free now to follow my muse (cf. Purgatorio I.1-84).

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"Emmanuel Mounier describes the notion of environment poetically. The environment is not everything that surrounds us. It is only that which may become our experience and possesses the power of incarnation.

“Precisely that winding road transforming proximity into incarnation turns the whole human environment, from bodily fluids and blood to the starry heavens above our heads, into the living body of our life. Anything that has not been experienced this way has not yet become a human environment.”

"So things, stars, people must become my body in order to exist for me.

The same holds for poetry."

~ Anna Kamienska from In that Great River: A Notebook

What does in-fraction mean? (first try)

Two people have asked me recently what in-fraction means. I'm flattered and blush to have chosen so enigmatic a title. I understood it in my gut long before it made any sense through the work. And lately I have been thinking of writing a post to define what in-fraction means. That is what this post is about.

When I started in-fraction on March 17, 2005, I explained that the title is a synthesis of two dissimilar words. In liturgical use, the fraction is the point of the Eucharistic service in which the celebrant breaks the host into pieces, representing the broken body of Jesus. Though the bread is broken, communal unity is front and center (οἱ γὰρ πάντες ἐκ τοῦ ἑνὸς ἄρτου μετέχομεν; 1 Cor. 10.17). People come to the same rail and eat the one life-giving bread. No such unity attends the word infraction. That word means a rude violation. It is a broken bone that never heals right. In-fraction, I said, holds these two words together. It is about entropy's undoing in the breaking of the broken man.

Now, when something is broken, like a window or a serving plate, there is nothing to do but to kneel down and collect up the pieces (Lk 15.8). My project pantomimes this very act. Here, I always lift an illustration from Gospel studies. The implicit theology of each Gospel is described as coming from below or from above. John's Gospel, for example, exemplifies a theology from above. Jesus is so divine that he barely touches the ground. He is the incarnate Son, the second person of the Trinity, glowing with divine action, who was before all things. Contrast that with Mark's Gospel. In Mark, Jesus's humanity is at the fore. Jesus is very much a second-temple Jewish prophet embedded in a people in a culture and acting at a certain moment in history. In-fraction is like the latter, an exercise from below. And I don't find this surprising. I am a Protestant after all.

Protestant theology is characteristically from below. Martin Luther's criticism of the Roman Catholic scholastic theology of his day was that it tried to climb a ladder and view the naked God (deus nudus), a tendency he called a theology of glory (theologus gloriae). A theology of glory seeks God in reason, in being moral, in private revelation. Luther said his would be a theology of the cross (theologus crucis). The Jews of Jesus's day were lost in fantasies of glory. Their "one as a son of man" was to come on the clouds without suffering, like Baal of old (Dan. 7.13). But the truth and glory of God was revealed in the death and resurrection of the Suffering Servant, a man. So, God is revealed to all in the broken body of his son on the tree as properly witnessed by the apostles and prophets. We sum this up by saying that we find God in his word and sacraments. And in-fraction attempts to be such a theology of the cross.

In his Heidelburg Disputations, Luther said, "A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is." I bundle this with the Reformation principle of "to the sources" and the Enlightenment turn to observation rather than metaphysics. The arc "from below" becomes an affirmation of the cosmos and reason in their proper spheres. The theologians of glory see "the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man" (Luther) which leads to the God of the Philosophers, to Schleiermacher, to New Thought, and to be guilty of Feuerbach's projection. But the point is not to deny matter or reason, as the fundamentalists do, but to affirm these in their proper spheres.

Our time is a child of the Enlightenment. Science governs the public square. And science has disenchanted the world. A great deal of evangelical theology ignores this. It attempts to remain in an enchanted universe by building walled gardens. This is a Gnostic move away from matter, the body, beauty, and reason and toward sentimentality, tribal community, spectacle, and emotion. Secret gardens breed private revelation and virtual worlds. Such a move is anathema to proper theology.

Beginning from below, theology confesses, with the ancient creeds, that it pleased God that the Son became incarnate as a real human man. His body is a real body. And that body assumes a kinship with the created cosmos. As science tells us, we are all made of stars. The body of Jesus demands we confess that matter is real and good. And matter can hope, for what is assumed is atoned for, paraphrasing Gregory of Nazianzus. For the Christian, science is no enemy. Not that this is a new affirmation. Theology has always confessed two sources of revelation: scripture and the created world (mirroring the two-natures of Jesus, its proper Adam). In Reformation theology, the former, through Calvin's spectacles, is for salvation and the latter for praise. Revealed and natural theology are both productions of the same God.

Now, it is true that science disenchanted the world. But that disenchantment is but an extension of the iconoclastic affect of Christianity on the pagan pantheon of Rome. I welcome the acid bath of scientific skepticism as thought welcomes new understanding. The process of seeing--of contemplation--is a process of disenchantment, of disillusionment. That is how we come to contextualize knowledge properly. And apart from disenchantment, theology cannot discover the beautiful thing: that sacraments are the world's proper re-enchantment. When lamps are extinguished, the stars do shine. Thinking on whatever topic done on in-fraction must move in a common direction. All must go forward and kneel at the eucharistic rail ad fontes. So, too, science goes forward to the altar or it is no proper science.

Science, like all human things, must be properly handled. Human things are distorted by the noetic effects of sin. Unredeemed human beings make their tools into idols. And, in our day, science unbrackets it naturalism, forgets its creator, and sets up its gospel of scientism and its proponents as a priestly class. It abstracts itself away from things as they are and is lost to its own enchantment. It, too, must be disenchanted in order to properly see. Science should regain its place as a human tool working to garden a world made in God's creative providence (Gen. 1.28).

This from below principle suggests, where this blog approaches aesthetics, a similar approach to art. A movement from below calls the artist (the arts) away from groping around in pure subjectivity, in phantasie, in enchantment. The arts are freed to the contemplation of things as they are "in the light of Easter" (Balthasar). They are restored to their natural theology. The cross frees the arts for praise.

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You haven't talked about the move from the individual
 to the community as a basic datum re: existential to
 political. Nor did you discuss narrative (synchronic;
 eschatological) over systematic (asynchronic; atemporal).
 Nor did you discuss historical-grammatical exegesis
 versus, say, the fourfold use. All of these emphases
 are woven through the blog and are part of this same,
 common direction, which I can sum up as my attempt to
 act as a theologian of the cross. Oh, and what about
 the direction of aesthetics from gathered ascetic
 contemplation of the concrete quiddity of things that
 naturally contextualises and moves up to contemplation
 of things in light of their creator, coram deo,
 (imagism, phenomenology, Balthasar) versus the scattered
 uncontextual, meaninglessness of subjectivity, the
 aesthetic imago-impossible godlessness explored
  by Baudrillard?

Indeed, you actually should rewrite, for the central
 symbol here is the incarnate Jesus, not a series of
 abstract arguments from historical theology.

Theology as craft

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

I have degrees. What did I learn?

I have spent. What did I buy?

I have read. What did it profit?

I should know better, and yet have so often regressed.

I should be a teacher, but do footnotes teach?

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

doing theology as one might keep a scrapbook

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

scrap of notes from April 2005

For the sake of memory and chronology, here's what I'm working on right now.

First, I'm very slowly beginning to read the early twentieth century French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941). I'm digitizing an introductory monograph of his for inclusion in Project Gutenberg. Bergson's works were published in French just before the turn of the century and, up until WWI, he was a world-star of academia. A 1913 announcement that Bergson would be lecturing caused the New York's Times Square's first traffic jam. Indeed, Bergson is experiencing a renaissance in phenomenology circles, and especially among film theorists such as Gilles Deleuze. French thinkers as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Lévinas acknowledge his influence on their thought. There is something in him about the image and its permanence through change. I don't know enough to even know why I want to know. I'm just following the tip of my nose and seeing where it all goes.

Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, is beautiful! He is to the twentieth century what Kant and Hegel are to the nineteenth. I'm teasing apart the eleventh edition of his 1929 address "Was ist Metaphysik?" In eight or nine pages, he overthrows the Enlightenment projects "certainty" and announces the hermeneutical nature of theology up to the present day. Marvelous! In that one essay--as fundamental as Renee Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy--Heidegger cracks the solid wall of modernism and opens a space for the suspicion-of-supicion called postmodernism. It is really exciting, but slow going. I only have a few minutes a day to devote to the few pages a day I can cover. And it is not uncommon to review.

Additionally I'm discovering what I believe could be the beginning of my first pursued publication/article. The theme is the nakedness of Christ. I believe that research will show that Christ was crucified naked, yet the Gospels do not directly mention this, nor does any treatment in art or film of which I am aware. Being the second Adam, there is something here, a parallel to the innocent nudity of our first parents. And, note that he appears clothed after the resurrection. Paul, too, talks about our present nakedness and a longing to be clothed. Nakedness in the OT is always bad, connected to adultery (idolatry), but it seems that there is a change in that--a restoration of it. And this theme can easily branch out into discussions of the human gaze, our own embodiedness (and shame), even philosophically there is a motive of conceal/reveal; known/unknown; there is something about the difference between voyeurism and the gaze of love. I mentioned to L/ the other day, thinking about this, that Jesus's nakedness (for I am assuming at this point, albeit prematurely, that he was naked on the cross) was the nakedness of a groom who presents his body lovingly to his bride, whereas the world sees through the eyes of humiliation and rejection. It quakes with fear at the exposure of its own nakedness. [A later addition: this would also figure into media studies where people reveal and conceal themselves through media.]

I'm also playing with ideas about a unique method for writing theology modeled on the improvisational community-making methods of jazz. As in music composition, I would like to propose a fundamental motive and build my paper out of its development just as if it were a musical composition. I want to think of theology from the perspective of the liberal arts, rather than syllogistically like a math problem or taking a cue from Quintillian's rhetoric. I want it to welcome, receive, and serve as a vehicle for the opening up and uncovering of human being-ness (there's the Heidegger.) We should read a theological text as much like a work of art or a musical score as a "logical argument." People are not argued into the Kingdom as much as they are drawn as the Spirit opens their eyes to the beauty of the gospel. In that case, the choice is obvious. It is the choice for oneself as one was created to be, and the giving up of fantasies about personal divinity.

Anyway, as soon as I'm done with this review, I'm going to get back into Greek during the day and devote next Tuesday to beginning the Biblical/exegetical historical-critical research on the nakedness of Christ. Since the gospels do not say (they turn away, really, viewing the crucifixion with their eyes shut to a large extent), I have to be able to build a pretty solid case if I'm going to rest an entire argument on the nakedness of Jesus. As to why this theme comes to me--this theme of the nakedness of Christ--I have no idea. It just bubbled up two or three weeks ago.

See, my heart says that I'm tired of reading secondary sources. I need to stop "throat clearing" as Dr. Lim calls it, and pick up my own pen, whether I'm totally ready or not. I will even go so far as to say I'm "called" to this, like a missionary is called overseas. It burns away in my mind and my heart night and day, and even obstructs my reading: "Why are you reading this? This is not your work. Why are you following this argument? It is not your argument. It is time, time to find out who you are. What do you have to say for yourself? It is time: do it now, before you become forever lost to yourself and become a parrot and a servant of the ideas that others are having. You will be forever reading, forever questioning, but arriving nowhere. You will be growing, but to where? From where? What is your offering? What do you bring? Do you even have your own questions any longer? Do it now."

Definitions

Please note the following definitions:

Fraction. (frac·tion, n.) In liturgical use, the breaking of the host into three parts, which symbolizes the breaking of the flesh of the Son at his passion. The rite includes, (a) the Lord's Prayer, (b) summoning of the faithful to partake in the bread of life, (c) tearing of the bread into one cup symbolizing the unity of the holy community.

Infraction. (in·frac·tion, n.) (1) The act or an instance of infringing; a violation. syn. breach. (2) A bone fracture, especially one without displacement.

In-Fraction. (in·frac·tion, n.) The impossible possibility of synthesis between the previous definitions.

For more, see What does in-fraction mean?.