Pattern Language: Obedience

PATTERN: Obedience (19)

Even as God Leads Out (81), the Son follows. The pericoretic dance requires an obedient answer. There is a "Let there be" and a "so there was." The Son willingly, lovingly obeys (Phil 2). And in his incarnation, all of creation is taken up. His obedient response becomes the model for every created thing. We are not the makers of providence, but its willing participants. And freedom is not the bondage of infinite choice but wisdom's happy response. "I hasten and do not tarry to keep your commandments (Ps 119.60).

Category

Christology * Ethics * Natural Theology

Related Cards

God leads out (81) * Every action a reaction (82) * kenosis (4) * providence (54) * imago Dei (6) * choice (45) * freedom (53) * decently and in order (71) * faith (76) * work (77) * mission (34)

Penciling in a gesture toward providence, determinism, and liberty

What follows is embarrassing in its lack of precision. Let's call it what it is: sloppy. As a matter of fact, it is so bad that I've edited it four times since the original publish. So come back and check it later and it will probably (hopefully) be better. Nevertheless, William Hasker's little survey of metaphysics keeps me blurting out what I think about his subjects. And today, his subject is the impassible way between determinism and libertarianism. (Libertarianism here is not to be confused with the quasi-economic position assumed by many of the Rand-loving, conservative, twenty-something males that I know. It is, rather, a technical term for what is popularly called free will.)

A Reformed Protestant, I begin every thought in this area with a confession of God's providence, for "he himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together (συνεστηκεν)" so that "he sustains (φερων) all things by his powerful word" (Col 1.17; Heb 1.3b NRSV). "The will of God," said Augustine, "is the necessity of all things." Not only, but the first, stated pattern of my theological pattern language is simply, God leads out.[1] But this beginning throws me and similar theists into a certain bind. I like the way Hasker sums it up:

It is quite clear that the doctrine of predestination entails determinism: specifically, theological determinism. God has effectively determined everything that shall happen, and no creature has the power to act otherwise than God has decreed. It is clear, furthermore, that the theological determinist, at least if he is a Christian, must be a soft determinist, for the view that humans are responsible for their actions is central to Christian belief. Thus one has the very difficult problem . . . of explaining how a person is responsible for his actions when he was unable to act otherwise. And there is the additional problem of explaining how God himself is not responsible for human wrongdoing, even though it is God's decrees which necessitate that the wrongdoing occurs. (51)

So the Christian may confess providence, which is a scripture-affirming thing to do, yet providence creates fundamental ethical problems on the human and divine sides. This is why the free will question is unavoidable even if it tires you--as it does me. If humans do not have free will, can they be held responsible for wrongdoing? Is there meaning to human action? Should we trust or value or include as evidence the experience we all have of decision making? Is there a way to avoid Calvin's abhorrent second predestination of the wicked to destruction which, it can and has been argued, makes God unjust, the author of evil, and responsible for the suffering of innocents?[6]

I am not going to discuss the divine side of the equation, but I am going to talk about the rest.[5] Taking up the first question: I believe that people do act with a kind of qualified freedom (a soft libertarianism.) We are embedded (thrown) into layer upon layer of historical and cultural context, and these deeply shape who we are as actors (see the card "Every Action a Reaction.") Because all human beings are made in the image of God, they can freely act within the bounds of nature, and those actions are meaningful--even moral actions--in their context (though compromised). By God's grace, the imago can be restored, which gives greater agency to human beings. Jesus's freedom is, in renewed humanity, proleptically restored, now and now-yet. The regenerate, therefore, begin a struggle for freedom illuminated by God's eschatological promise in Christ to the church. I expect this struggle will continue as long as people do. Human beings, no matter how free, will only ever reflect the freedom of God.

Going back to the conflict between determinism and libertarianism, I think the frame of reference makes a big difference in understanding. If one is looking out of human eyes, actions are messy but still, in a way, free. But if one imagines oneself into a divine state, determined providence seems only natural. The thing is, human beings think about things from both angles, theory and praxis, the vertical and the horizontal, theology proper and ethics. We cannot eliminate one. We must, instead, choose which we will emphasize.

To the problem of settling these two perspectives, God's timelessness comes to the rescue (though it too, Hasker says, is qualified and disputed).[2] Because God is timeless, tensed words like now, tomorrow, yesterday, or talk of the future or past do not apply. As Hasker says, God "believes things timelessly, entirely out side our time sequence . . . And what it is that God timelessly believes depends, in part, on what I will freely choose to do tomorrow morning." (55) God's timelessness allows for human free action. And it tells us that providence must effect itself in a manner much different than the two-dimensional before-then-after of Aristotelian sufficient causation. Something like what I'm getting at I find in this bit from Reformed theologian Paul Helm:

"In creating, God does not add to his reality. The creation does not distend God’s boundaries, for he has no bounds. So thinking of God as if has he has boundaries would be inconceivable. The contrast between God’s ways and ours is not one of degree, but one of kind. For this reason the decree of God may be considered as the eternal aspect of his mind."

To summarize: I take my cue from physics which, at present, talks out of both sides of its mouth. It affirms Einstein's standard model, and it affirms the quantum. The two are irreconcilable. Nevertheless, we affirm them and use them properly depending on our need. Using the analogy, I think the human mind is incapable of reconciling determinism and libertarian free will. But the nature of thought makes one favor one or the other. I favor determinism. I'm a determinist that simultaneously affirms a qualified or soft libertarian free will. The latter is made possible because God is timeless. His tenselessness creates a horizon in which tense can exist.[3] Yes, I shamelessly use two different grammars according to whether the subject is theology proper or ethics. So the Spirit regenerates AND people should repent and believe.[4]

But perhaps some one will say, If all that the Father gives, and whomsoever He shall draw, comes unto You, if none can come unto You except it be given him from above, then those to whom the Father gives not are free from any blame or charges. These are mere words and pretenses. For we require our own deliberate choice also, because whether we will be taught is a matter of choice, and also whether we will believe. (John Chrysostom.Homily 45 on the Gospel of John, Jn. 6.37)

There is another way, of course: the way of the process theologians and the panentheists. Going that way, God limits himself, opening up a space of some kind (logical or spiritual or metaphysical or metaphorical) from which his divine power is removed. That process they call creation, and in it, evil and choice have their temporary arena.

And, finally, meandering to an end, allow me to say this about discussions of providence and free will or, if you like, determinism and libertarianism. A friend today asked me whether this wasn't majoring on the minors. I don't think he knows how much I dislike the whole of it myself. I would much rather talk about other aspects of dogma. Nevertheless, I said to him that though there is no ultimate resolution to these questions in our present state, they have persisted and will persist as long as thinking and confessing persist. And joining in that argument means laboring alongside some of the best minds humanity has ever produced. It is a labor they found valuable because it connects so many other portions of real thinking and living. And shouldn't we, with the life and the minds given to us, be part of this human work? I would look askance at someone who beginning at the door of thought did not eventually arrive at this chamber. And I would doubt the abilities of anyone who found a way to move further in without discomfort at the choice they had to make. Either choice means pain and ongoing discomfort and shouldering the unreasonableness of reason.

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[1] "God leads out" does not suggest the lure-theory of the process theologians but a kind of strong pull where the future and the God of the future providentially pull all things to their appointed end. Another way of saying this is that the doctrine of creation is not a static doctrine but an ongoing one. The creation is not yet in the state to which its creator desired it. It is advancing toward that state according to his providence and promises.

[2] Scientific discussion of the non-locality of quantum entanglement suggests that time is not part of the infrastructure of reality but is its result. The engine of reality must work outside of space-time. And the non-locality/non-temporality of quantum events, then, means that there is no need to wait for any cause to produce any state.

[3] It occurred to me at some point that I was thinking of providence as either (a) an organizing force of matter or events in space-time or (b) as a soteriological act whereby God saves sinners. What I haven't considered is that providence provides a horizon of meaning. Because of providence, truth, justice, and beauty have a horizon from which they derive significance. Tracing the philosophy, here: Charles Taylor has usefully distinguished between self-referentiality of content and manner. Self-referentiality of content sees nothing in discourse except the self and its desires. Self-referentiality of manner recognizes a horizon against which the self finds significance. (Ethics of Authenticity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991], 81-82.) In Michael Polanyi's terms, the self-referential is subsidiary to the focus of education: the pursuit of justice and truth. (Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962], 55-57). // this copied from Hasker pp 490-491n64.

[4] It is of vital importance to remember Luther's warning that a peek at God's determinism is not supposed to give the Christian a window into guessing at reality. Instead, it is meant to provide comfort to the believer that God is well able to do what he has promised to do. Luther strongly urged those interested in this "arrived doctrine" to run from the metaphysical temptation. Providence, he said, falls under soteriology and needs to stay there. Consider, in the spirit of this idea, the following:

"When its content is not specifically defined in relationship to the incarnation of the Jewish human being Jesus of Nazareth, the doctrine of providence becomes vulnerable to ideological colonization. Reflection on providence, therefore, must proceed in light of the fact that there is only ever one divine Subject of the doctrine: the particular God revealed in the covenant with Israel and the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Providence is not primarily about abstract concepts like omnipotence, sovereignty, or causality, but about how the God who brought Israel out of slavery in Egypt, became a Jewish human being, and was crucified and resurrected continues to be in an active relationship to creation. Contemporary reflection on the doctrine of providence begins by affirming that God never acts otherwise than God has acted in Israel and Jesus. Theological accounts of providence must fix their vision on the concrete particularity of Jesus Christ. (Matt R. Jantzen,God, Race, and History: Liberating Providence (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), pp. 145–146)

[5] I am going to copy this insight that someone named Nick Prendes-Brizuela wrote on a theology forum regarding Molinism and middle knowledge.

My main contention with Molinism and mere Molinism is the foundation of the theological belief that God's knowledge of counterfactuals (the Would Be's of reality) stem from God's middle knowledge. It seems to me that God knows all the counterfactuals based in his natural and free knowledge rather than this invention of middle knowledge in the 16th century. In other words, I believe that God's knowledge of counterfactuals stems from his intimate knowledge of his creation and what they would do in any given circumstance. Middle knowledge by definition states that God's knowledge of counterfactuals isn't due to his intimate knowledge of his creation, but instead middle knowledge states that God knows the counterfactuals of his creation based upon their possible actions prior to God's decision to create. I do not believe that middle knowledge is required for God to know all counterfactuals."

Middle knowledge is independent of the divine will. That is absurd because how can something be or do apart from the divine will? Arminius doesn't answer how free will etc can exist, and neither does Molinus.

[6] Arminians say yes and argue for an understanding of God's eternal exhaustive foreknowledge as the only alternative that leaves genuine human freedom, called libertarian freedom, intact.

Augustine's De Magistro Suggests Your Project is Meaningful

The way down from Wonderland station through Boston and into Harvard Yard takes an hour or more. And, on a cold day as it was in the winter of 1999, the winter before my daughter was born, it seeps into the soul. You can shrug on a coat with your books. It helps. But when you are pushing thirty and grasping for the empty matches of an academic career, you bring the cold in with you. At least it keeps you awake.

My memory is as clear as the daylight. I walk up from the screeching yellow darkness of the Red Line into Harvard Square. People are everywhere. If you are lucky, the church bells will be going--reminding you of time; calling you to prayer. I am grateful just to be there hurrying through Harvard Square and belonging--if only obliquely, but still belonging. I take a right past the mess hall and go down a block. Parked cars, utility trucks, cracked sidewalk, a moonscape of unmelted ice and pitted footprints. It turn left along the back of the library and into the divinity school. It is always a shock that no one throws me out.

I was bound for my professor's office, Dr. Philip Clayton. Third floor. I have no idea why I needed to see him. He was teaching the early Enlightenment: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Schleiermacher, Lessing, Tillich, and a few others. When I reached his office, he was busy with a graduate student. So I waited. But the door was open, and Herr Clayton had warmed to his subject.

"I do want you," he said--his voice suggesting he was taking pains to make himself as clear as possible, "to read, understand, and discuss what I am teaching you. But I would rather help you to discover your own project." The student, a young woman by her voice, said something. She sounded halting and confused. "Yes," he assured her, "I think your work has been good. But in the paper you are working on, I'd like to see you find the edges of what you are about. What are your questions? If I can help you discover those, then I have done what I set out to do." She spoke again, and I strained to pick out her words.

And somewhere between her evident confusion and his probing encouragement, I realized I was hearing myself. Whatever it was I’d come for, it no longer mattered. This was the better thing. I was that young graduate student, trying so hard to do what was expected. And he, a world-class scholar, a protégé of Wolfhart Pannenberg, who was today guest-lecturing at Harvard and would, tomorrow, assume some higher star, he was saying that all the books are but window-dressing and windmills for a better way that Clayton called “your project.”

Do I have a project? What is my project? “If I can help you find the edges of what you are about,” he said.

As providence always seems to do, the right book came along: the Westminster edition of Augustine’s earlier writings. (It was already in my backpack.) It is a collection of eight essays beginning with his soliloquies and including his more famous work De Libero Arbitrio (On Free Will). I already had begun reading the second essay, “The Teacher” (in Latin De Magistro or, if you like, the Maestro.)

You may not know it, but Augustine had a son named Adeodatus. He loved his son very much. If you know where to look, there are passages that crackle with paternal pride. The early material of the Confessions, for example, are modeled from his impressions of Adeodatus’s babyhood. “So I have been told, and I believe it on the strength of what we see other babies doing . . . Little by little I began to notice where I was, and I would try to make my wishes known to those who might satisfy them; but I was frustrated in this, because my desires were inside me, while other people were outside and could by no effort of understanding enter my mind. So I tossed about” (1.8). Like all fathers, Augustine bragged about how capable and smart his son was, smarter even than himself, he said. Yet, Adeodatus only lived into his early twenties.

I don’t know if it was years after his death or if the manuscript had been written earlier when Adeodatus was still alive. But in its present form, De Magistro is Augustine’s love letter to his son in the form of a Platonic dialogue. He and his sixteen-year-old son are talking together. Together they pursue the truth. See how smart he is, you can feel Augustine saying. See how he leads and pulls ahead.

The two of them are on about speech. About words as signs and the signified, and whether words can convey anything worth knowing. Knowledge and teaching require words. But words themselves mean nothing. It is the signified, the things in the world, that are the content. A man knows what the word “walking” means when he observes someone walking. So “the sign is learned from knowing the thing.” Meaning is discovered by the senses, not by knowing a word.

Ah, but what about inner objects? So instead of a stone or a bird, what if the object is a mental proof, figure, or insight? Here the senses cannot go. Such things are looked “upon directly in the inner light of truth which illumines the inner man.” There, some other force stamps things as true or false. Some other light allows individuals whose minds are completely separate from each other to nevertheless agree on what is true and what is false. This seal of the truth, says Augustine, is provided by the magistro, the teacher. My hearer is “taught not by my words but by the things themselves which inwardly God has made manifest to him.” A person can hear and understand words—and Augustine even grants that the hearer can assume that the words heard come from the mind of the speaker. But, are the words true?

“When the teachers have expounded by means of words all the disciplines which they profess to teach, the disciplines also of virtue and wisdom, then their pupils take thought within themselves whether what they have been told is true, looking to the inward truth, that is to say, so far as they are able. In this way they learn.”

That inner judgment, the sentence of truth or falsehood by which one learns, this, Augustine says, is the inner teacher. “Now we should not only believe but also begin to understand how truly it is written by divine authority that we are to call no one on earth our teacher, for One is our teacher who is in heaven.”

Augustine having finished his speech, Adeodatus gets the last word. “I have learned,” he says, “that in order to know the truth of what is spoken, I must be taught by him who dwells within and gives me counsel about words spoken externally in the ear. By his favour I shall love him the more ardently the more I advance in learning.”

Since that day sitting outside Dr. Clayton’s office, his encouragement has stayed with me. Discover your project. Find out where the edges of your questions occur. Learn them. Follow them.

Nevertheless, it was Augustine that provided the why. It was Augustine that made the project meaningful. Because Augustine gestured with his words toward the source of that project: the inner teacher, God. Or, if you like, the indwelling God, the Holy Spirit.

My apologies for moving so quickly. This is running very long. Let me say it like this: Is the intellectual life meaningful? Is its pursuit, its inner dialogue, its question and discovery and question, worthwhile?

Augustine says, yes. He says it is not a foolish exercise, this finding your project. He gives it a name. Not that he calls it this, but this is what it is: sanctification. The pursuit of a disciple. magister adest et vocat te.

Synchronicity, Symbols and the Christian

Carl Jung's theory of synchronicity, published in his 1952 paper "Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle", postulates that the "meaningful coincidences" that occur in every human life should be understood as something more than random coincendence. Rather they point beyond themselves to reveal a realm of ordered, a-causal meaning parallel to, or outside of, the realm of causality. Synchronous events hint at a unity underlying psyche and matter, a unity of existence that Jung called the unus mundus. They are flashes of insight into the deep structure of life, tying together chains of events into meaningful cross-connections. As such, their investigation suggests a way of tapping into the archetypal psychological forms that together make up the collective unconscious of the human species. This knowledge prior to conciousness exists, he postulated, as a kind of foreknowledge encoded genetically or otherwise into all human beings.

Jung found support for his idea in the Tao, the I Ching, and J.P. Rhine's investigations into ESP. He also noted recent advances in physics, which demonstrated that the iron-clad law of cause-and-effect, the very basis of all natural law, is porus. In other words, that statistics and probability, rather than Newtonian certainty underlie all natural process. In the present day, however, Jung's synchronicity has been preached most effectively by the late Joseph Campbell of Star Wars fame.

Joseph Campbell equated Jung's collective unconcious archetypes with myth. Campbell said "[Myth] puts you in touch with a plane of reference that goes past your mind and into your very being, into your very gut. The ultimate mystery of being and nonbeing transcends all categories of knowledge and thought." Campbell understood myth to be encoded in the symbolic-systems that make up all religions, modern or ancient. "It's a natural thing," he said, "but that's the whole problem with Western religion. All of the symbols are interpreted as if they were historical references. They're not." Campbell described a symbols as, "a sign that points past itself to a ground of meaning and being that is one with the consciousness of the beholder." He went on to say, "What you're learning in myth is about yourself as part of the being of the world." Indeed, Campbell instructs meaning-seekers to re-discover the transcendet, spiritual dimension which these symbols reveal, to decode the symbols, to go on a "grail quest." In doing so, one "would discover the very essence of your own being, so you're resting on it and you know it. The function of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of "Aha! Yes. I know what it is, it's myself." This is what it's all about, and then you feel a kind of centering, centering, centering all the time. And whatever you do can be discussed in relationship to this ground of truth." As he said, "No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. It's a shame to waste those by doing what someone else has done." Campbell's view ultimately leads to a total deconstruction of propositional religious truth, as he said, "By getting to know your own impulse system and its images and the things you really are living for, and then to get support for - you might say - universalizing and grounding this personal mythology, you can find support in the other mythologies of mankind."

To summarize Campbell's program, Joseph Campbell taught the responsiblity of each person to live their lives based on transcendent insights derived from rivers of deep-human wisdom, a wisdom encoded collectively in human mythmaking and story-telling, and which is made available in symbols collected within the world's stories and religious texts and rituals. Becoming aware of the deeper "spiritual" text in which your life participates and actualizing this in your choices is the way to wholeness and to becoming a truly authentic human being living out of "the mystery of their own being."

So, how far is this from Carl Jung's synchronicity? The synchronicitous event, like Campbell's symbol, reveals levels of unconcious meaning encoded biologically or otherwise (Campbell emphasized text & ritiual over biological/genetic) in the human species. Like Campbell, Jung understood these events as possiblities of orientation toward a deep, mysterious unity of existence, a spiritus mundi or oversoul which grounds all the living.

In my mind this is exactly the platonic/stoic gospel of cosmic harmony, whereby the wise orient their lives into harmony with the rhythmns of nature and cosmos and thus correctly participate in the unity of all things. The two systems of meaning-making are remarkably similar, though Jung is more scientific in his approach.

Similarly, it is common practice in at lease the evangelical subculture to structure one's life according to the often-difficult-to-interpret insights garnered from God-directed moments of synchronicty uniquely shaped by God (the sender) to be meaningful against the context of each person's (the intended receiver's) personality, influences, and background. The legitimacy of this process is garnered from three sources: the doctrine of providence, instances of interpretation of dreams recorded in the Bible, and anecdotal evidence, typically good-results which have accompanied personal obedience to the revelation given. (I'm going to coin a name for these instances, and call them revelati.)

In my opinion, none of these proofs support the inclusion of revelati in the Christian hermeneutical circle. And, as a matter of fact, I believe dependence on them may even leave one open to the charge of divination.

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Mystery of Matter: Carl Jung's Synchronicity "synchronicity" Skeptics Dictionary Mythic Reflections, Interview with Joseph Campbell