Jürgen Moltmann's Man: Summary : Author's Preface & Chapter 1

Author's Preface

Moltmann begins his book Man with a statement of intent. He means to "portray what it is to be human." But what is man? "Nothing less is meant by the key-word `man'," he writes, "than the public history of men's questioning and seeking, of their failures and humiliations."

But when do we start asking such questions? Where are the answers found, and how can they be evaluated? How can he hope to even begin such a task, especially since there is not place of objectivity since he himself is a man? Such presumption, he continues, is worth it because he, "sees in God the worth of the question-able being which we all are, and therefore sees theology as providing the theme for anthropology."[1]

Moltmann says that it is important to "explore ways for man to become man," because humanity itself is changed by its coming into self-knowledge. [2] There is a value, he says, in the questioning; this against temptations to skepticism. The questioning relationship between God and man, a relationship of such closeness that, "a book about `Man' will inevitably slip into being a book about God," means skeptical limitations are undone. It "makes much open to question which we regard as unquestionable and obvious, and much else again full of hope which we regard as hopeless.[3]

Chapter 1: What is man?

Who are we? Where do I stand myself?

The question “Who am I?” arises from every encounter a human being has with the exterior world, and indeed, from even his own consciousness. He must ask the question, for he must live, yet there is no ‘getting behind’ the self for proper observation. The answer dwells, then, in hypothetical infinity. Yet, if it wasn’t so, then the self would die, for “as we experience being human, we experience it as a question, as freedom and as openness.” Being human, then, “is an experiment in which we ourselves are taking part and are at risk”(2).  Observation will give no answer. At the same time, there can be no direct encounter. The solution cannot be sought through a total unveiling of the mystery of who we are. Rather, it exists upon a balance between mystery and revelation; “between the fundamental self-questioning of man and the answer by means of which he takes control of himself”(3).  The self is a limit and an openness, both of which must be respected.

This is true socially, politically, historically as well as individually.[4] Historical answers, especially when they are temporally successful, offer both a useful basis for social life and openness toward future fulfillment. Even in this context, however, no real answer to the question “Who am I?” can find a solution. Yet, there is an avenue available through comparison with others.

A. The question arises from the comparison of man with the animals

Biological anthropology begins when the question “Who am I?” is sought by comparison of human beings with animal life. Such a comparison leads to one certain result: human beings are strangers in the world.[5] Unlike the environmental and instinctive ‘fit’ animals display, human beings are a species displaced upon the globe. “His task,” writes Moltmann, “is to find what his nature is”(5). Education is how human beings live in their environment, and that is the source of imagination, creativity, culture and, above all, language. “He is in a very real sense both a creator and the creation of his language. He catches in the net of language a world which is open to him and overflowing with stimuli”(7).[6] Through reason, and through action, human beings set themselves apart from the animal world for freedom.[7] Still, the question is not exhausted, but moves on to other comparisons.

B. The question arises from the comparison of men with other men

Cultural anthropology begins when the question “Who am I?” is sought by comparison of human beings with one another in the context of families, tribes, and nations.  Moltmann contrasts two historical strategies in which human beings have sought to live together.

The first strategy is derived from the belief in common innate ideas of the reason.  This idea, this humanitas - the likeness and unity of all people on the basis of a common nature – contrasts with an anxious ethnocentrism that pits one against another.  Unfortunately, humanitas came to divide people into the educated citizen and the unrefined barbarian; the pantheist and the polytheist.[8]

The second arises from the Judeo-Christian belief in one God, maker and judge of all people.  “The expectation of the coming kingdom of God unites all the individual destinies of men and the histories of the nations into a common world history.”(9)  Though it has taken many centuries to see anything approaching a common history, this strategy for unity has always had one significant advantage: the inclusion of difference underneath the umbrella of future history.  Not homogenous but pluralistic community.

Enlightenment anthropology combined these two strategies and produced the constitutions of modern states.  Such constitutions described human beings not as they were, but, instead presented, “a challenge, and a concrete expression of Utopia.”(10) Their visions of hope and freedom have charmed the whole world, and become dreams not easily forgotten.[9]

There is no doubt that cultures are different and historically conditioned.  Cultural anthropology studies them, then, in the discipline of ethnology.  It can also, however, attempt to advance, to humanize human kind.  This desire, humanitas, is a messianic hope for the fulfillment of humanity’s humanity.  Taken together, “it belongs fundamentally to man’s nature that he both is man [ethnology] and has to be man [humanitas]”(11).[10]

Cultural anthropology’s answer to the question “What is Man?” is culture, defined as the soul’s attempts to understand itself.  Through transitory cultural images which arise from out of an inner, amorphous, “creative germ-cell” and vary across history and geography, humanity “attempts constantly to complete itself.”  This desire, culture, attempts to close up (limit) the openness of biological incompleteness.  To the origin of this openness, this incompleteness, cultural anthropology cannot speak.  The question is not exhausted, but moves on to other comparisons.

C. The question arises from the comparison of man with the divine

Religious anthropologies such as those found in theology, metaphysics and poetry arise from religious statements about the fate and destiny of humanity.  “In the presence of the gods man recognizes his own non-divinity, his lowliness, and his earthiness”(12).  Here, however, the question, “What is man?” takes on a new context.  Here it is understood as a question asked of human beings by God.  It is not a question human beings ask, but one that is posed by the experience of suffering.  People are put into question here like they are in no other sphere.  “Here the question ‘What is man?’ can no longer be answered objectively with reference to his soul, his deficiencies, or his creative power.  It becomes concentrated into the person question, ‘Who am I, my God, before you?’”(14)  Against such mystery, humanity hopes for revelation which is a hope for the answer of the self.  “It is only in the coming of God himself, who endlessly puts this life in question, that the revelation of the secret of man can be hoped for”(15).[11]  It is the depth of the heart, with its subsequent existential crisis, that begets religious anthropology.  Still, religious anthropology is not specific to Christianity.  To ask about Christian anthropology is to go still further.  For the Christian, the question is still not exhausted.

D. Ecce Homo! Behold the man!

For the Christian, the question, “What is man?  Who am I?” arises not from a comparison with animals, with other men, or even with the numinous, but out of a call, “at the point at which man in his life is charged with something impossible by the call of God.”  “The divine calls, which demands of him a new being, places him at an insuperable distance from himself, and involves him in a change of identity.”(16)  In short, the Bible does not answer the existential question, but gives meaning to existence by opening up the future through the promise of a God who goes with and before.  People ask about limitations, God’s presence offers infinite possibilities.  Jesus Christ is the figure of this new way forward.  Christ is true God and true man, into his future goes all human questioning.  Jesus’ identification with the outcast, with the non-human, makes them human.  His is a humanization of all people.  “In this crucified Jesus men have again and again been able to see themselves in the course of history”(19).  The crucified Christ unifies all people, because all are the same under the knife-edge of suffering.  “God became man in order out of proud and unfortunate gods to make real men.” (Luther)  “Christian anthropology is an anthropology of the crucified Lord”(20).  It does not overcome other forms of anthropology, nor is overcome.  It is the challenge for liberation cast up against all form of safe pretence, deceit and deception.  It is the rescue of humanity from man.

Go to to chapter two.

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[1] Moltmann, then, is not an empiricist. He agrees with Heidegger’s criticism of objectivity. The escape from the solipsistic tradition of radical doubt and skepticism began when Descartes attempted to remove all a priori and replace them with the cogito and ended in Meditation 3 when he made God (logos) foundational for knowledge again. Kant had the same problem, albeit in a far more sophisticated manner. After brilliantly codifying his categories, he could never answer the question of how it is possible for one who is subject to the categories to step outside them, to transcend them, in order to describe them? Heidegger, following Husserl’s phenomenological lead, brushes aside the attempt and regains Plato’s original insight: the philosopher is one who contemplates the relations of the higher forms. Except, for Heidegger, there is no world of the forms. Instead, he sets about exploring the existential structures of Da-Sein, which is not the absolute ego vs. the world, I-It, but the transitive self in a field of relatedness. Furthermore, from the perspective of human beings “thrown” into the world, God is the only non-subjective point, I-Thou.

[2] How is humanity changed?

[3] [Thom] I couldn't help but contrast this with Calvin's Institutes 1.1, in which Calvin says that wisdom consists entirely of two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves. I wonder, though, at Calvin’s sentence, "it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we [human beings] possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone." Moltmann does not reflect such a metaphysic. When Moltmann treats of human being-ness it is examined upon its own bottom and not against the negative spaces of God. Yet, both men come to the same, hopeful end (God the Creator), as Calvin writes, “Every person, therefore, on coming to the knowledge of himself, is not only urged to seek God, but is also led as by the hand to find him.” (1.1.1) A final question: Does Moltmann interrogate anthropology to discover God or to discover the quality of life before God? Hopefully, the answers should present themselves as the theologian begins to answer the question, "Why do human beings question their own humanity?"

[Alan] It does seem that his anthropology starts from below rather than, like Calvin's, from above. But I do wonder if he is fully consistent with his premises. Moltmann makes the crucified Lord the critical criterion for his theology, but it seems in Man the cross is at best a challenge rather than determinative of his conclusions. (Am I correct in assuming that his chapter on the anthropology of the crucified Lord comes last?) [Furthermore, there is a strong resemblance to] Karl Rahner's theological anthropology. For instance, Rahner writes the following about the transcendent structure of knowledge:

"In spite of the finiteness of his system man is always present to himself in his entirety. He can place everything in question. In his openness to everything and anything, whatever can come to expression can be at least a question to him. In the fact that he affirms the possibility of a merely finite horizon of questioning, this possibility is already surpassed, and man shows himself to be a being with an infinite horizon. In the fact that he experiences his finiteness radically, he reaches beyond this finiteness and experiences himself as a transcendent being, as spirit. The infinite horizon of human questioning is experienced as a horizon which recedes further and further the more answers man can discover.” (Foundations, pp 31-32)

[As in Moltmann, t]here is limited openness to everything (the infinite) in how humans constantly question reality to grow in knowledge. Rahner later will assert that the infinite horizon is God, that the structure of transcendental experiences masks the natural revelation of God (p 170) and that philosophical proofs for the existence of God are merely secondary thematizations of a more basic transcendental experience (pp 68-71). I wonder how much of Rahner does Moltmann explicitly cite? And perhaps more interesting is how much of Rahner is hidden in Moltmann's thought?

[4] Cf. JM member Mike Gibson, “The church, then, corresponds to the reality of Christ’s resurrection, whereby the resurrection as the reality of the future, and as the beginning of the resurrection and new creation, means that the church herself is an echo of the resurrection, a community of those living in the beginning of the resurrection of the dead.” draft chapter. “The Redemption of Time in the Church of the Risen Christ” pp. 12ff. available in the /Files section by permission of the author.

[5] Existentialist ideas of “Alienation.”

[6] Culture in general and language in particular are tools used to further the quest for self-realization.

[7] Karl Rahner understands freedom as fundamental power to decide about and actualize the self.

[8] Moltmann describes the Western humanitas tradition as a category of law in the lecture “Who is Man?” In this lecture, he says that the adoption of the idealism of humanitas has led to “humanitistic suicide caused by despair resulting from man’s impossible dream. And since the bourgeoisie has been the bearer of that ideal humanism for 200 years, we may also talk then of a self-destruction of the bourgeoisie.” Human Identity in Christian Faith Raymond Fred West Memorial Lectures on Immortality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974): 2, 5. The two positions, humanitas as gospel-openness and humanitas as law seem at odds, and, as of this note, I’m not sure how to reconcile them. Some investigation as to whether he treats humanitas in God for a Secular Society would be helpful.

[9] “Bloch's practice of ideological criticism discerns emancipatory utopian dimensions even in ideological products, ferreting out those aspects that might be useful for radical theory and practice.” Douglas Kellner, “Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique,” Illusions [e-zine] accessed February 9, 2004. cf. Kellner and Harry O’Hara, “Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch,” New German Critique 9 (Fall 1976). Ernst Bloch. The Spirit of Utopia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. “Since Christian ideology .. always defined what was best in the human social structure, as the embodiment of what the concept of utopia means as the "Kingdom of God" on earth, a recapturing and re-creation of Eden itself as social form, any political ideology that advocates motion toward the "best" necessarily can be, even must be, defined as Christian at some level of its articulation. The classless state of pure democracy in Marxian ideology cannot be distinguished effectively from what anyone else would call the re-creation of the Garden of Eden in purely political and social forms.” Frederick Martin, “Ernst Bloch: ‘The Spirit of Utopia’,” [article on-line] accessed February 9, 2004.

[10] Ethnology as limit; humanitas as openness.

[11] Rahner’s “self-transcending being.”

A Note from Class: Getting Past Hard Listening

Several hundred years ago in the West, human beings decided to start over. Some say Nicolaus Copernicus is to blame. Copernicus was the sixteenth-century Polish astronomer who discovered that the earth swings around the sun. When he published his ideas in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), people were shocked! Everything they'd assumed to be fixed and solid now moved--everything. It blew people's minds. It terrified them. But it excited them too. "What else are we mistaken about?" they asked. And they decided to find out.

They thought a lot about how we know things, and they came up with a rule for knowledge: What we know, they said, we know through the senses and the mind.

So what you know comes from your senses: taste, touch, sight, smell, hearing. (So the next time you're nose is stuffy with a cold, what you're really having is a knowledge problem.) Your senses act as collectors. Your mind picks through what they collect and remembers or discards. Together, they assemble the experiences and facts that live inside your head.

From this, let's say two things:

1. Their rule for knowledge is handy for most things, yet flawed in a small-but-wildly-unfortunate manner that maybe we'll get into later.
2. There is far more information constantly sliding by than our senses can ever collect or our minds notice (just ask Harold Edgerton).

So, what would happen if we focused in on one of our senses, say, hearing? And that is exactly where the trouble begins.

Our culture favors speech and action. It can even find listening a waste of time. And so we have never been taught to listen; we don't know how. When was the last time you truly listened to anything--listened until something was deeply asked of you?

Compounding the problem, new things are uncomfortable. We won't know what to do with what we hear. We may feel shut out, if we feel anything at all. Everyone is talking in another language (sometimes quite literally), and we feel excluded. It is uncomfortable.

Here are a few thoughts about uncomfortable listening.

Principle One: Expect Revulsion, but Press On.

Your ear has an age. It can be naive, and it can mature. And people tend to like music that matches the maturity of their ears. Children only eat a few things at a little table; adults enjoy many different dishes on a wider table. Yet, growth is uncomfortable. So expect to feel disoriented and maybe even bored the first time you hear a piece of music that isn't what you're used to. It has happened to me that what I once hated I grew to love. So press on, and don't believe your first impressions.

Principle Two: Passive Exposure

It is a funny thing about the mind, it is so curious that it will listen even when we aren't listening. Use this to your advantage. Play some new music in the background, but pay no attention to it. Let it exist almost out of hearing. And slowly, ever so slowly, it will slip into your mind. You will discover it in your dreams. You will catch yourself humming it. The mind can't ignore it, you see. Your ear will mature into it, and you may have enriched the rest of your life. (This principle works well when learning a new language, by the way.) It takes time, but it works.

Principle Three: Choose Quality Cuts

Let's say you want to know more about jazz. You've heard about it but don't know where to begin. Use that fabulous tool called the Internet, pull up a list of the "ten best" or "five most important." Use those to train your uneducated ear on the best diet that you can find. Don't waste your time randomly listening. The best sets you up for the rest.

Principle Four: Fill in the Blanks

Thanks to the Internet, we can look up information about performers, composers, and individual songs or pieces of music. We can translate foreign words. We can fill in the blanks as we learn something new. Make sure to fill in the blanks.

Principle Five: Music is Always Better Live

If at all possible, expose yourself to live music. Every kind of music--even music that you don't like--is toe-tapping fantastic when performed live by living people. Live music makes for a rich life. Make time for it.

And here is what this is about: this year, aside from our usual (and frankly more important) discussions about the Bible, we are going to listen. Together and privately, we are going to listen to music--to sacred music. And by this I mean music that is connected in some way to the Bible.

Exactly what this means is something I'll explain on Sunday morning. I look forward to seeing you there.

Coming along after MacIntyre's After Virtue

So I just finished Alasdiar MacIntyre's seminal book of ethics After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007; third edition) for the fourth time. Some chapters I have read many times more. I read this book because I kept hearing about it. It showed up in radio interviews, in monographs, in footnotes, and finally, one day, in my hand when I had the funds available to buy it.

Thankfully, MacIntyre's prose is easy to read. Even when he digs into the weeds of a problem, he has a storyteller's gait. Now, he does assume a lot of background reading in ethical thought. A passing knowledge of Immanuel Kant, early-Enlightenment ideological history, and a willingness not to be scared off by Greek letters is helpful. And it probably wouldn't hurt to be familiar with Aristotle's Ethics. Though these many interlocutors don't have to be kin, it helps if they are not strangers. But a beginner should not despair. MacIntyre is engaging and even eloquent. His enthusiasm will get anyone over the more difficult material. So why, then, the multiple reads? And why blog through this book?

It is because After Virtue plays its melody on at least two staves. The surface of his argument is broadly political. It is a book about the history of debates about ethics since the Enlightenment. But it is also a work of religious interrogation. One feels that what's at stake is ecclesial survival. Somehow MacIntrye has written about the doctrine of the church under the very nose of political philosophy.

In order to try and follow MacIntrye's argument, I'm going to try to summarize, restate, and blog my way through. And, to be honest, I'm not sure why. Why this book? I ask. I don't know. There is just something about it that says now is the time to think about these questions. There is something about it that pushes the boundaries of my own project.

1. The Post-Apocalyptic Beginning

MacIntyre begins with: "Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe." Imagine that all knowledge and culture are consumed and scattered to destruction. And now imagine that, perhaps hundreds of years later, as human beings finally survive and regroup, people begin digging up the forgotten past. Much like the Renaissance discovery of the ancients, bits and pieces that survived would be assembled and examined. And they would be stitched together, though without understanding: pieces of textbooks, notes from experiments, instruments and tables and articles and machines. All of it would be pushed together in order to make sense of it. And so a new science would be born. But not one that understands the old. It may reference it, use its terms or formulas, but everything is inconsistent and bespoke. That, he says, is the state of ethics today.

There was a catastrophe, which he will later say is the Enlightenment project, and ethics was destroyed. Contemporary systems cobble together bits from the past. Their inconsistencies mean they will eventually fail. "We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expression. But we have . . . lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality." (2)

The reason we don't see this moral catastrophe is time. None of us were alive in earlier ages that enjoyed a shared, moral language. We don't know anything but simulacra. And the tools that we use to think with, the tools of science, were invented by the makers of the simulacra. They are not fit to know and describe better alternatives. MacIntyre knows that proving there was such a catastrophe and offering a way of overcoming it is a large order. And "if it is true, we are all already in a state so disastrous that there are no large remedies for it." Nevertheless, he urges his reader to eschew pessimism "in order to survive in these hard times." (5)

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In chapters to come, MacIntyre will offer some proof of the catastrophe--like the heat maps of background radiation leftover from the Big Bang. He will also demonstrate the fragility of the dressings that  supposedly bind our private and public morals.

And here is the second reading. The first reading is to follow him into the examining room of public ethical philosophy. The second, however, is to see his subject not as secular but as sacred. For I find his words most potent there. Something has gone very, very wrong in the church--in all of her parts. There is something that is deeply disjointed and cracked. We are in a state so disastrous that there are no large remedies for it. And I ask myself how are we to survive in these hard times.

Please note that all footnotes are from the paperback third edition of his book. And, also, that his tendency to split sentences and omit commas from introductory phrases is everywhere.

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A Note from Class: Baptism's Old Testament backgrounds

Give thanks to the Lord for he is good,
for his steadfast love endures forever;

to him who by understanding made the heavens,
to him who spread out the earth above the waters,
to him who divided the Red Sea in two,
and made Israel pass through the midst of it;

it is he who rescued us from all our foes,
he who gives food to all,
for his steadfast love endures forever.
(Psalm 136 ESV)

Over the last several weeks, we have been diving deep into the Old Testament background of baptism. We started knee-deep in the muddy water of the Jordan River with John the Baptist, and, diving down as far down as we could, we felt the squishy, dark silt of creation at the bottom.

Do you recall the symbols we looked at?

• The black water of chaos
• The authoritative word of God
• The birdlike (dove-like) wind-wings of the Spirit blowing back the waters, making order from chaos
• The dry land appearing
• A change from one thing to another

Moving forward through the great story of the Bible, we found those symbols again and again. We found them in Noah's ark. We found them in the Exodus of Israel from the slavery of Egypt, and we saw them again as Israel crossed the Jordan River into the land God promised.

Israel became a people when the crossed those waters: the Red Sea and the Jordan. They left Egypt terrified as escaped slaves, but they walked onto the opposite bank of the Jordan River a unified, hopeful people.

John's baptism was a call to redo that. John was saying "Come to the Jordan again. Go into the water confessing your sins and come out of the water true Israelites again."

"But after me," said John,"is one more powerful than I who will baptize you with the Spirit and with fire." Just as Israel crossed the Red Sea from Egypt into the wilderness and then crossed the Jordan from the wilderness into the promised land, so there were two crossings to make: John's, "a baptism of repentance," and Jesus's, "a baptism of the Spirit." One leap on two legs.

Three of the gospels record Jesus's baptism.

"In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:9-11 ESV)

All of our symbols are there, even the dry land. Theologians for hundreds of years have equated the body of Jesus with the emergence of the dry land of a new creation.

For you see, what we are talking about is creation: the creation of the earth; a second creation with Noah; a re-creation of a royal people from base slavery; and, through Jesus's life, death, and resurrection, a new creation. "According to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells" (2 Peter 3:13 ESV).

Baptism = creation. To go into the water is to go back into chaos and death. To come out is to be created anew (resurrection). "Jesus rises from the waters, and a drowned world rises with him." ~ Gregory of Nazianzus.

Baptism is an act of God accomplished in the power-working of the Spirit according to his word.

So consider your baptisms, friends. You have gone into the water. And, with Christ, in the power of the Spirit, you have come out. You were slaves to sin and to the powers of this age. But now you are delivered onto the dry land of the promised land, you are citizens of the Kingdom of God.

Listen in on the apostle Paul as he talks about this with the Christian community of the Roman town of Colossae:

"Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all." (Colossians 3:5-11 ESV)

And finally, I quote the German reformer Martin Luther, "A Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism once begun and ever to be continued."

Remember your baptism, friends. Remember your baptism. "For his steadfast love endures forever."

I can't believe I forgot this, but it is so important!

Community.

Creation is a plural thing. The Israelites walked as a people into the promised land. We are baptized into the body of Christ, that is, into the church--a community. (The root word "church" is the Greek word for a community of people, εκκλησια.)

This is why baptism has throughout church history been the sign (sacrament) that joined people to the church.

Justin Martyr, a church father who lived in Judea in AD 100-165, described baptism in the early church:

"Those who believe what we teach is true and who give assurance of their ability to live according to that teaching are taught to ask God’s forgiveness for their sins by prayer and fasting, and we pray and fast with them. We then lead them to a place where there is water and they are reborn in the same way as we were reborn; that is to say, they are washed in the water in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the whole universe, of our Savior Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit."

Baptism creates community: it restores the one baptized to fellowship with the community of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and it joins the one baptized to fellowship with the community of the church, the people of God.

A Note From Class: We Are Made in the Image of the God Who Speaks

Dear friends,

Thinking about language has left us in quite the pickle.

We know that language is messy. It struggles to describe human experiences and ideas. It is unfit to describe God. How, then can we talk about or to God? Can we trust anyone who says that they speak for God? And does using language about God make us idolators?

It seems like we've tied ourselves up in a Gordian knot. We are locked in a large and lonely room. (Or a very small and private room if we think of the room of our minds, the movie between our ears.)

Let me pause here for a moment.

I can't exaggerate how true it is that this large and lonely room is the situation of our world. Western civilization, our civilization, has been locked inside for hundreds of years. I'm not exaggerating or being dramatic.

You see, it denies everything that cannot be measured. With a ruler in one hand and a calculator in the other, it judges everything. And so, after judging so much for so long, it is now unwilling to know anything. Our best scientists are on record today admitting that we could be living in computer simulation for all we know. We may not even exist! How depressing. How meaningless. And it affects everything. As scripture says

"For although [human beings] knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles." (Romans 1:21-23 NIV)

In case you missed it, that last part means that human beings traded knowing God for the worship of idols that they make.

But, I am not here to write about that. I'm here to write about our rescue. Because, you see, God does not leave us in the lonely room.

You see, our God is our creator. God made everything. What this means is that he made the universe and its laws and its times. He also made human beings. He made them to live in it, to govern it, and to worship him as his representatives to everything else it.

And how did he make it all? The scriptures tell us that God spoke it into being. Now don't think of God using a human language, like Hebrew or French or Spanish. The language is poetic. What it is getting at is that there is a deep reason, a wisdom, underneath everything, and that human beings are made as part of that wisdom and made to know that wisdom.

Isn't it weird that two-legged mammals on a little, blue planet developed mathematics and logic that allows them to understand how atoms and subatomic particles, black holes and distant galaxies work? We don't just wander confused around our neighborhoods. Instead, we developed a fantastic tool to study our universe. It is called science. And it really works!

How do we do that? How can our brain make sense of distant planets and galaxies?

It can because we are made in the image of God, in Latin the imago Dei /ee-MAH-go DAY-ee/. And so the reason and logic and wisdom of the creator that knits our universe together is something we can understand because we're part of it all--and that includes language. Our God is a speaking God. And so, human beings, made in his image, may speak with confidence. God put language into the world and called it good (Gen 2:20).

So using language about God or with God does not make us idolators: that is what language is for! Indeed, using language to pray and worship God is its highest and truest use. When we do that, we're doing what we, of all that is made, are created to do (Psalm 150). Not only can we use language, we are made and commanded to do so. Human beings were made to be priests of creation speaking praise on behalf of all things--from stars to mollusks to amoeba to rocks and trees and vines--and displaying to all as well what our God is like, calling all creation to its proper worship.

There's more to say here, but until next time: "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!"

Rambling Toward a Dogma of Forgetting

"In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting." ~ William James

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” ~ Milan Kundera

"As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103.12)

We tend to automatically think of God's omniscience, but what if forgetting is as important to consider under the doctrine of God?

What if the Spirit's ordering of creation is simultaneously an act of ordering chaos and forgetting it?

If being is remembering, then is non-being forgetting? Do righteousness and unrighteousness forget in the same way? Is forgetting analogous to non-being? Is what is forgotten no more, or simply an inactive memory? If the former, then how can we do history, either our culture's or our own? What is our moral relationship to history?

What if forgetting is as important a spiritual discipline as is remembering? Is forgetting a practice of holiness? Do we image God in forgetting? And in wielding forgetfulness, are we turning nonbeing away from its sinful nothingness and redeeming it into a holy thing?

What if forgetting reminds all things that they are mortal and created? Forgetting as memento mori.

Does love forget all things?

A Note From Class: Pilgrimage to Parnassus

Dear Friends,

In Green Hills there is a bookstore named Parnassus Books. You should visit it some time. Each book is hand-chosen by the store owners, and they invite authors to come and read aloud from their books. Parnassus has style.

Parnassus also has several owners. One of them acts as store spokesperson, the nerdy-famous author Anne Patchette.

Patchette wasn't always well known or successful. "My first stories and novels," she said, "were no more capable of supporting me than my dog." But success did eventually find her. And it is a good thing, because it is near impossible to start a bookstore (or any other business) without money.

As spokesperson, Patchette does interviews about her work and the bookstore. And, being a writer, she is often asked about writing. Here is something she said about writing a novel:

For me it’s like this: I make up a novel in my head. This is the happiest time in the arc of my writing process. The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling. . . . This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.

And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing — all the color, the light and movement — is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.

This is a bold confession! Here is Anne Patchette, successful writer, disappointed with words. As she said, for all their usefulness, words can't communicate the "piercing color" of imagination. Words pin ideas to a page. They "run over a butterfly with an SUV." It sounds painful.

So why do writers do this? How can they bear seeing their beautiful ideas killed dead by words over and over again? Why do they do it?

I mention Patchette's writer’s frustration to recall again our trouble with words. We must use them, but they are only tools. And though a beautiful tool—for language is beautiful—they are no match for the real. But they are all we have.

In my last post, I talked about how this poses a problem for god talk. If Patchette can’t trust language not to kill her imagination, how can we use language to talk about God? If God is "of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature" like Patchette's imagination, then isn’t it wrongheaded to do god talk at all? Wouldn’t we be running over a butterfly with an SUV? And what about people who do this for a living? Are they butterfly murderers every one?

Let me ask one more question--a new question: Is it morally wrong to use words to talk about God? I mean, there is a word for taking a tool and setting it up between you and God. That word is idolatry.

Do we use words like some use gold or stone or wood and make a god out of them and pray to that god?

Yikes! god talk may be not only silly but dangerous!

Idolatry is a big topic in the Bible. Read it and you run into idolatry a lot. For example, right at the beginning of the Ten Commandments: "You shall not make for yourself an idol." (Exodus 20:4).

Or, (and this is one of my favorites) we hear the prophet Isaiah /eye-ZAY-uh/ openly making fun of idolaters. Put on your best "I'm making fun of you" voice and read this:

The carpenter measures with a line and makes an outline with a marker; he roughs it out with chisels and marks it with compasses.

He shapes it in human form, human form in all its glory, that it may dwell in a shrine.

He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak.

Some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread. But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it.

Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill. He also warms himself and says, “Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.”

From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships. He prays to it and says, “Save me! You are my god!”

No one stops to think, no one has the knowledge or understanding to say, “Half of it I used for fuel; I even baked bread over its coals, I roasted meat and I ate. Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left? Shall I bow down to a block of wood?" (Isaiah 44:13-19)

Isaiah's sarcasm always makes me laugh—though I doubt his hearers thought he was funny.

Yet are we them? Instead of wood, do we build gods of words? Do we make a god out of our ideas of what God should be like? Do we project our ideas onto the clouds and "bow down”?

I think we certainly can do that. Yes, we human beings can make idols of anything, including from the ideas in our heads. As the Swiss pastor John Calvin said, "The human heart is an idol factory."

So what are we to do, we creatures of words? Can we talk of God or to God? Should we? Can we pray and be sure we are praying not to our imagination-god but to the living One? Can we pray "Our Father"?

I'm afraid we've worked ourselves into a tiny, dark box with no holes here, all alone with ourselves.

Why I Like the Filioque

I like the filioque. There is no question that it is a sixth-century addition to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. (It was officially adopted by the church of Rome in the eleventh century.) Nor do I dispute its tragic contribution to the Great Schism between East and West. Nevertheless, I think it better reflects scripture. I think it serves as an important soteriological stopgap against mystical efforts to obtain salvation through private, pneumatic theosis. And I think that it tilts the creed in the direction of soteriology and away from a kind of pure metaphysics. In other words, the creed is a statement about God's saving plan, not a blueprint of his godself. It's trinitarian structure is economic rather than immanent. The creed is not a theology of glory, but a theology of the cross. I'll explain these briefly in greater detail.

First, I like the filioque because it better reflects scripture. I say better because I am comparing to the admittedly older version of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed which said simply of the Spirit that he proceeds from the Father (τὸ ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον). Luke-Acts teaches that the Spirit could not indwell the church until the risen Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father and is glorified. Pentecost is a royal announcement and a Joel-invoking outpouring of Spirit new-creation power upon all flesh until he comes. It is the risen Son that pours the Spirit out upon his people. And the Spirit that he pours out is not its own but mediates the Son; Paul goes so far as to call the Spirit the Spirit of Christ (πνεῦμα Χριστοῦ).

Second, I think that the filioque closes the door on a second door of salvation, namely the mystical pursuit of theosis by means of the Spirit alone. If the Spirit proceeds to the church from the Father alone, then there is an avenue to the Father apart from the redemptive work of the Son. As I read it, the Spirit is always working through the Son toward theosis with the Father. And to say that one can work without the other is to tip the scales into either modalism or tri-theism. Moreover, Neo-Platonic contemplation has been part of the tradition of the church since Origen wrote in Alexandria. We still have Mount Athos today. We still have the pneumatic-centrist fervor of pentecostalism, and the "still, small voice" private revelation of American evangelicalism. So lest we give ground to an old temptation, I appreciate the stopgap that the filioque affords.

And third, I think the filioque reminds us that revelation is soteriological not metaphysics. As I said, the creeds are not theologies of glory but theologies of the cross. It is not ours to climb up and behold the naked God. The addition of the filioque to the creed, to my mind, is a necessary soteriological correction. But, then again, I like my christology at the center. And this leads to my last point.

My last point is about Trinitarian theology itself. My understanding is that one of the most important ways of differentiating the persons of the Trinity is by their origins. The Father is uncreate. The Son is eternally begotten. The Spirit is eternally aspirated from the Father. The Son and the Spirit eternally proceed from the Father, but not in the same way.

Therefore, if we remove the filioque, aren't we muddying the waters? If we remove it from the creed, then no differentiation is made about origin. (This is assuming the creed is a metaphysical statement, even though as I said, I don't see it that way.) The loss of clarity is at least unhelpful. Why would we want to do that? Indeed, why not amend the creed again to be more specific about origins?

I'm not a fan off innovation, or of keeping theology modern for modernity's sake. Nevertheless, for these few reasons, I like what the filioque is doing. Let's not be too hasty to throw it out.

Thoreau's Prophetic Myopia

A recent article by Kathryn Shulz in the New Yorker, "Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau's Moral Myopia" has some great things to say about self-styled prophets and prophecy. I quote the following:

"One may reach good ends by bad means, and Thoreau did. ‘Not a particle of respect had he to the opinions of any man or body of men, but homage solely to the truth itself,’ Emerson wrote of Thoreau. He meant it as praise, but the trouble with that position—and the deepest of all the troubles disturbing the waters of ‘Walden’—is that it assumes that Thoreau had some better way of discerning the truth than other people did.

"Thoreau, for one, did assume that. Like his fellow-transcendentalists, he was suspicious of tradition and institutions, and regarded personal intuition and direct revelation as superior foundations for both spiritual and secular beliefs. Unlike his fellow-transcendentalists, he also regarded his own particular intuitions and revelations as superior to those of other people. ‘Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men,’ he wrote in ‘Walden,’ ‘it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I am conscious of; as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded.’

"Claiming special guidance by the gods is the posture of the prophet: of one who believes himself in possession of revealed truth and therefore entitled—even obliged—to enlighten others. Thoreau, comfortable with that posture, sneered at those who were not. (‘They don’t want to have any prophets born into their families—damn them!’) But prophecy makes for poor political philosophy, for at least two reasons.

"The first concerns the problem of fallibility. [Here Schulz addresses Civil Disobedience and the claim of conscience. But what if society is right and one’s conscience is wrong? How can you decide between them? This requires some standard of governance beyond private conscience.] It is the point of democracy to adjudicate among such conflicting claims through some means other than fiat or force, but Thoreau was not interested in that process.

"Nor was he interested in subjecting his claims to logical scrutiny. And this is the second problem with basing one’s beliefs on personal intuition and direct revelation: it justifies the substitution of anecdote and authority for evidence and reason. The result, in ‘Walden,’ is an unnavigable thicket of contradiction and caprice. . . . To reject all certainties but one’s own is the behavior of a zealot; to issue contradictory decrees based on private whim is that of a despot. . . . [Thoreau is a man whose spirit resembles no one but] Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, elitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. . . . [‘Walden’ is] a book about how to live that says next to nothing about how to live with other people."

Poland's Cardinal Wyszyński on [Savage] Capitalism

"A new religion: money and wealth. Its dogmas: unlimited economic freedom, free competition, the division of capital and labor, its mercenaries are the laws of supply and demand and price mechanisms. Its morality: the lack of any moral superiority of human capital and labor or good production. Profits are its only good deeds. Its altars: a great plant, machinery, tools, cartels, syndicates, banks, where greed is satisfied by the price of human life. The final goal: blessed be the rich. Be rich at all costs, whoever can, and as soon as they can! This is the god of this world, a hurried capitalism. From now on all the world will encounter will be associated with that system because ‘abyss calls to abyss.'" ~ Polish Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński

A Note From Class: Can We Say Anything About God?

Dear Friends,

Based on your correspondence since my last post, clearly, we have a lot to talk about.

In our last class, you wanted to talk about several things: (1) the scroll and the codex, (2) Egyptian deities, (3) the New Testament as a collection or cabinet of books--and we started learning those books in order, and (4) genre.

These may seem quite scattered, but I assure you that they are not. These and other subjects join hands around the same center, which is the triune God revealed in the prophetic word, the Bible ("He has spoken through the prophets"). Like servants attending a king seated in his throne room, some are lowly workers while others are important judges and generals. Yet they all look toward the same face.

I've attached a photo of a leaf from one of the earliest bits of the New Testament that we have. It is the opening page of the letter (epistle) of 2 Corinthians (Corinthians B in the photo). You can tell that it was part of a codex because you can see the holes from the woven binding on the left-hand side of the page. You can also see that the "paper" is made of pressed papyrus leaves, as the stringy vegetable bits hang out where the page has been ripped or has gone missing.

It is part of the rich store of pages (and sometimes whole copies) from the Bible that have come down to us from cultures and languages all over the world. Together, they tell us something about the Our we talked about: the Our of "Our Father." We do not pray alone, nor are we the first to do so. We join untold numbers of others--a great family--who are invited to address God as Father.

Remember how I said C. S. Lewis described the church "spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners"? Or notice how John of Patmos describes the church in his vision, "Behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, 'Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!'" (That whole reference is worth looking up, Revelation 7.9-17.)

That is the beautiful and forever fellowship that we are about. But such visions are certainly not what we see with our eyes.

Going back to C. S. Lewis again, the "terrible army" spectacle of the church is invisible to us. As Lewis, in his book The Screwtape Letters, has a senior devil say:

It is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbors whom he has hitherto avoided.

Interestingly enough, we are running parallel with the problem we talked about in my last post to you: the problem of knowing a word but not knowing its meaning. The church, says Lewis, looks like the face of the local grocer and the people one has so far avoided, even while it is really that innumerable multitude that no one can number.

Things are rarely what they seem to be on the outside. A boring, tired teacher at your school turns out to be a lover of the mystery of math who felt called as a young woman to help kids see that beautiful thing that she sees. That wrinkled, bad-breath-afflicted uncle in your family that no one talks to once took on German tanks and infantry in the Battle of the Bulge. Or, scientifically speaking, things--you, me, rocks, trees--are mostly made of empty space. We're all, from the perspective of the Earth's axis, standing sideways.

Language both helps us and harms us in solving problems like this. We use language to describe nouns and verbs like tear and tear. But the bare words don't tell us which one is salty with grief. Language has its limits--and homonyms like light, letter, book, and duck demonstrate that. And what about cleave? Are we chopping something into pieces or joining together till death do us part? We must use language, but we can't always trust it.

So consider the theological problem of language. Poets, authors, explorers, and scientists may struggle to find just the right word for the right thing. But what if that thing is by definition indescribable? What if that thing is a person and more than person? What if we want to talk about God?

People are so free to talk about God. They run everywhere saying this and that about God and no one gives it a thought. We hear it so much--and especially in the south--that we get used to it. But this is a real problem. Severe even.

How can a creature talk about a creator? How can the limited talk about what is, by nature, unlimited? How can mortals grasp the immortal? Do you get what I'm saying here?

Skipping ahead: nevertheless, we do it. We talk about God. So given that, how do we know we're saying anything true? What gives us the confidence to say things about God using a thirteenth-century language like English and then act like we've done something? I hope you are getting this.

Let's get even more practical. Ministers--think of the ones you know--have jobs that require them to say things about God and on God's behalf. How can they do this? How do we know they aren't lying? How do they know they aren't misrepresenting God? And why should we listen to them? It stands to reason that everyone the world over who claims to speak for God isn't telling the truth. Someone is lying or self-deluded. So how do we know whom to listen to and whom to ignore?

The Greeks struggled with this problem. One of their solutions was to imagine their gods as human beings but bigger. Their gods, like Zeus and Hera, Poseidon and Aphrodite, argued and squabbled like superhuman babies.

It was a solution that didn't fly for long, even for the Greeks. Philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle, along with other educated people of their time, made fun of this kind of thinking. "You can't just blow human beings up like big balloons and say you've made a god!" they said.

Closer to our time, a German atheist named Ludwig Feuerbach said that Christians do the same thing. He said the God of the Bible is but the outward projection of human desires upon the clouds. We, like little children, imagine the parent or friend that we want and call it god. Of course, he used fancy, nineteenth-century language: "In the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature."

Certainly, atheism is a popular answer in our day to the problem of talking about God, "god talk" for short. Atheism takes a big pair of scissors and cuts any notion of God or gods or the supernatural or transcendence completely away. No more "gods" means no more god talk problem. Now then, what's for lunch?

But, I'm going on too long. Allow me one more subject: genre (pronounced /JHAN-ruh/). Whenever we take in information, we have to first figure out what genre we're working with. If we are going to listen to orchestral music, then we expect woodwinds and stringed instruments and forms like the sonata and the waltz. If electronica, then samplers and mixers and a laser-light show. I like going to the movies to see films in certain genres, like superhero movies or science fiction.

When we are in a certain genre, we expect certain things and not other things. In a comic book, I expect Iron Man. I do not expect the periodic table of elements, though the latter makes sense in a chemistry textbook.

Figuring out what sorts of ideas or actions (e.g. car chases, ghosts, tables of dates) go with each genre is important. It helps us know how to make sense of what is going on. It makes communication clear. The phrase "home run" is meaningless outside of the genre of baseball.

The New Testament, as I said, is a big cabinet of books, as is the whole Bible. Not all of those books are written in the same genre. Acts is a history, but James is not; James is a good, Jewish sermon. Hebrews is also a sermon. Revelation is a fancy genre called apocalyptic. (More on that another time.) Paul's writings, which make up most of the New Testament, are epistles, that is letters. The gospels are not history like Acts is.

Knowing the genre of something, be it some written text, a movie, a song, or any kind of communication, is almost as important for understanding as is knowing the language it is written or spoken in. Genre is important!

Okay, then: I've raised some big questions in this epistle and given few answers. I do have answers, yes. But knowing, trusting, and following Jesus isn't a matter of checking the right boxes. So we will get around to some answers, but me giving you answers doesn't make you better disciples. Nor does having questions--often deep and difficult questions--and carrying those questions around for years and years make you less true disciples of Jesus and beloved sons and heirs of God.

How else do you get wisdom? Why does the Bible encourage us again and again to seek it, to quest for it, to dig and wrestle and search for wisdom? It wouldn't do this if wisdom were easy, or if the goal of being a Christian is to be a questionless drone.

My sons, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, Turning your ears to wisdom and applying your hearts to understanding, And if you call out for insight and cry out for understanding, And if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for buried treasure, Then you will understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom, and from his mouth comes knowledge and understanding. (Proverbs 2:1ff)

In the next letter, I hope to do more on the Lord's Prayer, and I hope to have St. Theresa of Avila help me do it.

A Note From Class: Hallowed

Dear Friends,

Last week we began our class saying the Lord's Prayer, also called the "Our Father" and, in Latin, the Pater Noster /PAY-ter NAHS-ter/. (Please note that I list various names and the Latin name because you do sometimes run into them, and it is helpful to know that they all refer to the same thing.)

We discovered that there are words in the Lord's Prayer that need defining. And this makes sense because anytime you step into a new or special community, and the church is certainly that, you'll run into new clusters of words. In school, for example, when you start learning a new subject, you will see that there are always new words to learn.

A friend of mine, nervous because he was a new teacher, once asked me if he thought his students were learning anything. I asked him, "Are their vocabularies changing?" New words give us better tools for understanding and talking about our ideas. That is why new ideas and new words usually go together.

Now that I think about it, though, there is a more common issue that arises concerning new words. Sometimes new words are old words. What I mean is that we have learned a word--perhaps we heard someone use it, or we read it somewhere--but it is an empty container for us: we don't actually know what the word really means.

The twentieth century author George Orwell had a few strong things to say about this sort of thing, which we are all guilty of. He said it is "ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish" and that a sloppy understanding and use of words "makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." Or, like a good cook might say, good ingredients make for good food; bad ingredients, not so much.

It is the work of a lifetime to pay attention to words. It is like exploring a vast, underground cave. Sometimes you wriggle through a hole and come out into awe and beauty. Other times, things can be boring or unpleasant, or even dark and scary.

So the word before us is the word hallowed as in "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name."

The first use of hallowed as we know it occurs before the twelfth century. Before that, going back into Old English and other Germanic languages, we find words like halgian, heiligen, and halagon, to make holy, to honor, to set aside as special or for a special purpose. Behind those words are Greek and Hebrew words: the Hebrew word is quodesh /koe-DESH/ and the Greek word is hagios /AH-yee-ohs/. These words refer to generally the same idea, the idea of separateness. Something or someone is separated out, made special, and set apart for some role or task.

In Irish legend, the hero Tuatha de Danaan possessed four treasures which were called hallowed or holy. These treasures were the Spear of Lugh, the Stone of Fal, the Sword of light, and the Dagda's Cauldron. They were set apart as special.

In the Harry Potter world, three objects, the Cloak of Invisibility, the Resurrection Stone, and the Elder Wand are called hallowed because they are objects that are very special and set apart in that world.

All Hallows Eve, from which we get Halloween, uses the word hallow, because it has to do with the saints, or those who are set apart as special examples to us of what it can look like to live a life in pursuit of and saturated with God.

So when we pray the Lord's Prayer, we are asking God to do something--to hallow his name. That means we are asking him, by his power working in the world, to set apart and make special his name, that is his reputation and authority. We ask God to make his name respected and honored in our world, just as it is in heaven. This is one of three things we ask God to do right in the first part of the prayer in a sequence that brings together God's heaven and our everyday earth.

Remember, we are asking God to do it. This is not something we can do. It is a request, such as one might make to a king or to an important figure or, more normally, to a parent.

And how does he do it? By putting his name in the throats of men and women from all nations who together will hallow it. This includes we who are praying this prayer. So let's be careful that as we pray for God to hallow his name, we are hallowing it as well in our hearts and in our lives.

A Really Bad English Version of the Joint Declaration of German Protestant Churches on the Refugee Crisis

The following is a Google Translate version of a six-point declaration issued and signed September 14, 2015, by the German Protestant churches.

"How precious is your steadfast love, O God, that human children have trust in the shadow of your wings!" (Psalm 36.8)

1. God loves all his creatures and gives them food , livelihood, and housing on this earth. We note with concern that millions of people are denied these good gifts of God by hunger, persecution, oppression, and violence. Many of them are on the run, and stand at the gates of Europe and Germany. To welcome these and to grant them those things that God has allotted to all is a commandment of humanity and, for us, a commandment of Christian responsibility.

2. People are at the center of all efforts. Many people worldwide are on the run. The great challenge for each individual is to do what is just. In desperation and in mortal danger, people go on the run. It is humanitarian duty to do everything possible for people who are obviously in distress, whether at sea or on land. Police must act against inhuman traffickers and mafia-like structures within and outside Europe. Indeed, the largest barrier that stops asylum-seekers is legal access routes to Europe. We therefore call for legal means for Asylum seekers and for an open discussions on immigration law in order to establish new, open immigration routes for people looking for work and a better life.

3. Our society is facing a major challenge, but our forces are large . We are grateful for the diversity of help: from volunteers and professionals, help from the church, civil society, government, and politics. These demonstrate a welcoming culture and display an unprecedented commitment to ensure the rapid and decent reception and accommodation of refugees. We thank all wholeheartedly! With decisiveness we oppose all forms of xenophobia, hatred, or racism and are against everything a misanthropic attitude supports or makes acceptable. Worry and fear of exposure must be taken seriously, but we should not indulge misanthropic moods.

4. As a church, we help to create this society. Therefore, we advocate and practice a welcoming culture. And we make integration a central task of our communities and institutions.

5. With concern we see the background and causes of refugee movements: climate change, wars, persecution, the collapse of states, violence, extreme poverty. And our society does not escape, because we are global. We trade globally. We participate in arms sales. And, last but not least, we are deeply implicated by a lifestyle that uses the earth's resources. It is time to reverse this unjust situation.

6. Here in Germany, we are especially aware of our history. We know what a gift it is to find help and open doors in time of need. Without the aid, which comes from our hearts as well, we would not be in a position today to help others. As church leaders, we wish to commit ourselves with all Europe to act together to fulfill our humanitarian obligations.

In the knowledge that people have found refuge under God's wings, we bring the plight of all people in our prayers to God and ask Him for strength for the tasks that lie ahead.

[signatures]

Make Room for Beauty (Beauty Makes a Man)

Make room for beauty. It is not something we typically do. There are many reasons for this. We all lead busy lives from Tiger cubs on up to the oldest adult. We are distracted. And we are over-advertised. There are too many fireworks, too many explosions. And increasingly it is all simulated.

So I want to address all you men for a moment, whether you are one or are going to be one, and say this: Many voices tell us that manhood has no place for beauty. But is that true? Let's ask a few men:

Listen to Apollo 14 moonwalker Ed Mitchel describing what it is like to see the earth-rise from the moon:

"Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home.

Or let's hear from President Teddy Roosevelt, a soldier and a bullfighter among other things, writing from a ranch in the American southwest:

"Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses, when the lengthening shadows had at last merged into one and the faint after-glow of the red sunset filled the west."

And in another place he says, "Wild flowers should be enjoyed unplucked where they grow."

And finally, a word from the nineteenth-century Yosemite explorer and naturalist John Miur:

"All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains, on the sea or land or down among the crystals of waves or high in a balloon in the sky; through all the climates, hot or cold, storms and calms, everywhere and always we are in God's eternal beauty and love."

These men, men who knew risk and hardship, living, working, acting men, are overcome by beauty, and especially the beauty of the natural world.

And with them, I urge you to make room for beauty in your lives. Why?

Because (1) Beauty opens the soul

When we are caught--arrested--by beauty "when lengthening shadows merge into one and a red sunset fills the west," we see things in new ways. Our soul is widened. We suddenly see ourselves, with all of our busy things, as small. We are hushed about ourselves. Humbled.

Simultaneously, we see the horizons of our lives and those of our friends in a new light. Where once was ugliness or hatred or ignorance, we begin to see flowers growing. We approach all in a new way, remembering that "wild flowers should be enjoyed unplucked where they grow."

Why else should we make room for beauty?

Because (2) beauty begets beauty.

You don't go away from beauty unchanged, but altered. Beauty doesn't step into the same man twice. It baptizes our hearts. It leaves our lesser man behind and makes us greater.

It is interesting to me that if you look at any skill or tool or invention that people have made, it grows more beautiful over time. Consider a simple hammer, manufactured and available for a few dollars from a store. We began with flint stones worked and chiseled, but stones nonetheless. Now we have hammers shaped and manufactured from hard-steel and fit for their purpose. It is the smallest example of what is everywhere around us. We take in beauty and we give it back in what we do and make.

Now a final reason we should make room for beauty.

We should make room for beauty because (3) beauty makes room for God.

Again to quote John Miur,

"No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening--still all is Beauty!"

Beauty is not God, but it has often been the doorkeeper to God's house. And if we are honest with ourselves about our hearts and our lives, we crave admittance. The Boy Scout Law and the Scout Oath mention reverence for God for a reason. Could it be because beauty is not unmanly, but, rather, because making room for Beauty--and for God--makes a man.

Could it be because beauty is not unmanly, but, because making room for Beauty--and for God--makes a man.

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Address delivered September 12, 2015, for the Cub Scouts of Pack 125 at Cedars of Lebanon State Park.

Creation, soteriology, and the "problem" of the two Adams

I am not concerned with the problem of a first Adam. The fact is, we have no idea what creatio ex nihilo is (see also Karl Jaspers on Creation). We, as the created, only know creatio ex materia. Resurrection is the same way. We think we know what it is, but we really have no more idea than we do about creation. We only know the result, the what, but not the how. We know that resurrection is not reanimation and creation is not reworking some pliable, neutral, and everlasting material. God is not a thing among things, but we are.

Similarly, why does evolution present a problem? God creates from nothing, an act that does not preclude an infinity of changing somethings. The universe may stretch back into the forever, expanding and changing, hissing and sparking out world after world like a firecracker held in the dark. This is not a problem: an infinity of changing somethings is not a from nothing. Evolution is just a closer view of some long length of something. Flesh may change, but it does not create flesh from nothing at all.

I tend to think that evolution is soteriological gift. It tells us that human beings are a piece with all of creation--that we are of the same stuff as everthing else. It tells us that the human being, the imago Dei, Jesus, assumed all flesh and so redeemed all flesh: soteriology is ecology; ecology, soteriology. In the resurrected flesh of Jesus all creation hopes. The us among whom God tabernacled includes the rocks that cry out and the trees that clap their hands.

Finally, for the sake of further thinking (and this is very speculative now), I would like to consider the existence of Adam and Even in parallel with the election of God.[1] Even as Jesus set himself apart, so his people are set apart in him. The imago Dei becomes, then, something graciously received from and through and because of Jesus. Adam and Eve become the beginning of those people in time, the first of the elect and also representatives of elect humanity to come. Therefore, perhaps the language of "fall" is unhelpful. Humanity is made good, but still vulnerable. (I'm thinking of the language of Augustine and human creation in a state of innocence.) Elected humanity can then be made perfect in him ("Be perfect because he is perfect."), though as gold is purified through fire.

Note also the interesting, tri-fold distinction of God's creating activity outlined in Mark Harris's The Nature of Creation. Harris understands the creation texts in scripture to describe the relationship of God with the world. Creation out of nothing, creatio ex nihilo, is “best expressed as a statement of God’s transcendence.” Continuous creation, creatio continua, “is most clearly an expression of God’s immanence.” God is in intimate relationship with humans and the rest of creation. Creation from the old, creatio ex vetere, (Harris's innovative addition) “is fundamentally a descriptive term for God’s redemptive activity in creation (186). Creation from the old is clearly connected with the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrected body is in a discernible continuity with the pre-death body plus something new as well: “more than the resuscitation of a corpse.” Still, Harris sees examples of creation from the old in other texts and situations also.

These three aspects of creation are simplifications and should not be separated rigorously.

God’s work of creation ex nihilo, continua, and ex vetere are not three different actions, but one creative action, while at the same time they point to the diversity of the unitary God. It is no accident that this is reminiscent of Trinitarian language of God – three in one and one in three – for it was through observations such as these, of God’s diverse work in the theatres of creation and redemption, that the three persons of the Trinity came to be recognized and distinguished as such. But the three categories of creative work are not to be identified with the three persons of the Trinity; rather it is distinctions such as these that have been important in the development of Trinitarian thinking. (187)

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[1] Note this abstract of Joshua M. Mortiz "Are Hominins Special? Human Origins as the Image and Likeness of God" Theology and Science (19: 2020), 537-551. "The recent discovery of a number of non-human hominin species who, as language, technology, and culture-bearing beings, lived both before and as contemporaries with early anatomically modern humans, has raised a number of problems with the notion of humans as evolutionarily unique. These discoveries have also raised issues regarding the concept of human uniqueness that has long played a central role within key interpretations of the hominin fossil record and has also provided the key lens through which many theologians have interpreted the meaning of humans as the “image and likeness of God” (imago Dei). I suggest that the best way to understand the imago Dei in light of human origins and hominid diversity is the early Jewish and early Christian concept of historical or biblical election."

Sometimes All You Need is Permission

Sometimes all you need is permission. You have done the hard work. You have asked the questions and assembled the data. But, for some reason, concluding remains elusive. Maybe what is missing is permission.

Permission came for me in the words of Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. In the March edition of First Things, Hart wrote a column entitled "Reason's Faith" critiquing smug rationalism. And with it he helped me own the pieces of a puzzle I've been working on for ten years (a process attested in the history of this blog).

Hart's point is that the sharp divide between reason (ratio) and faith (fidei) is a modern experiment gone wrong. He calls the division a "tarnished relic of the seventeenth century." And its result remakes human reason as a faculty divorced from all assumption "dispassionate and disinterested." But this is wrong.

"All reasoning," says Hart, "begins from a venture of trust whose truthfulness can be ascertained only at the end of the sequence of postulates and predicates and judgment to which it gives rise." As I read this, I think of David Hume taking arrogant reason to task for too closely wedding cause and effect. Hart goes on to say why he can make this assertion.

Every assertion he says assumes a metaphysic in which the mind and the world connect and are true to one another. Enlightenment reason cannot boast this connection.

The materialist by force of will ignores his own assumptions, choosing to focus instead on the practical utility of every question. Who cares why it works. It works. And that it works becomes the all in all. The context from which the question arises eventually ceases to be noticed. Consider this comment from physical chemist Dr. Peter Coveney: "In modern biology and medicine today you would find most people not even trying to think in theoretical terms. . . What we call "Baconian theory' says, don't worry about a theoretical underpinning, just make observations, collect data, and interrogate the data." Hart calls this a true fideism. "The unyielding rationalist turns out to be the most irrational fideist of all: one who believes in reason even though there cannot possibly be any reason for that belief." With Bacon, Descartes project is similarly framed. The self is trusted to posit reality from its own foundations, an attempt at faith from below. It was only a short path to rational idealism, to Hegel, and the nihilism of postmodernity. "Without that original trust, that spiritual commitment, reason is not reason at all, but the purest irrationality."

The worldview that preceded the Enlightenment, the Medieval mind, was more integrated. It could wed mind and world and so posit truth because, behind mind and world it understood the unity and oneness by the one God.

Hart's critique of ascendant reason looks not only to the assumed metaphysic, but also appeals to natural selection. This is a move I've written about before, in that case employed by Alvin Plantinga. I think it is a devastating critique. It is simply this: if the human mind evolves, then how can we trust it to guarantee knowledge? Put another way: how can we trust reason if it is but another evolved faculty?

This is where I think theistic evolution is another fancy way of saying God made the world. The Medieval mind understood that God's unity was necessary to secure truth as the product of particulars embedded in a cosmos. The theist post-Darwin has to evoke God's triune plurality as well to ground mission, action, change--eschatology.

So then, I've had all of these pieces scattered around, but the confidence to finally--once and for all--to put them together was lacking. No longer. I'm willing to say that reason and faith are one because God's logos made the world in wisdom. I'm willing to suffer the charge of fideism and supernaturalism and the suspicion of anti-intellectualism or just plain naivete.

See also:

• Tweaking Methodological Naturalism
• Evolution, Providence, and the Political
• Evolution: Three Faithful Responses

Three ways physicists understand the physical universe

"Ten years after Einstein completed his theories, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger invented quantum mechanics, describing the behavior of atoms and light-quanta in a radically different way. Experiments confirmed that quantum mechanics gives a true picture of atomic processes that Einstein’s theories could not explain. Niels Bohr worked out a philosophy, generally known as the Copenhagen interpretation, to explain quantum mechanics. I prefer to call it the dualistic philosophy, since it describes the universe as consisting of two layers. The first layer is the classical world of Einstein, with objects that are directly observable but no longer predictable. They have become unpredictable because they are driven by events in the second layer that we cannot see. The second layer is the quantum world, with states that are not directly observable but obey simple laws. For example, the laws of the second layer decree that every particle travels along every possible path with a probability that depends in a simple way on the path.

"The two layers are connected by probabilistic rules, so that the quantum state of an object tells us only the probabilities that it will do various things. The dualistic philosophy allows us to divide our knowledge of nature into facts and probabilities. Observation of the first layer gives us facts about what happened in the past, but only gives us probabilities about what may happen in the future. The future is uncertain because the processes in the second layer are unobservable. The power and the beauty of quantum mechanics arise from the fact that the physical laws in the second layer are precisely linear.

"All points in a linear theory are equal, and a linear space has perfect symmetry about any of its points. As a result of the linearity of the laws, the second layer possesses a wealth of marvelous symmetries that are only partially visible in the first layer. For example, in the first layer, symmetries between space and time are only partly visible. In daily life, we do not mix up inches with seconds or miles with days. In the second layer, as the result of Paul Dirac’s elegant equation describing the quantum behavior of the electron, the mixing of space with time in the electron’s movements would be clearly visible. But we do not live in the second layer, and so the mixing is hidden from us.

"The dualistic philosophy gives a natural frame for the new sciences of particle physics and relativistic cosmology that emerged in the twentieth century after Einstein and Bohr were dead. The new sciences are dominated by mathematical symmetries that are exact in the second layer and approximate in the first layer. The dualistic philosophy seems to me to represent accurately our present state of knowledge. It says that the classical world and the quantum world are both real, but the way they fit together is not yet completely understood. The dualistic philosophy is flexible enough to accept unexpected discoveries and conceptual revolutions.

"Now, eighty years after the dualistic philosophy was invented by Bohr, it is generally regarded by the younger generation of physicists as obsolete. The younger generation mostly rejects duality and accepts what I call the quantum-only philosophy. The quantum-only philosophy says that the classical world is an illusion and only the quantum world exists. The concept of a classical world arose because the effects of quantum mechanics are rapidly erased by a phenomenon known as decoherence. Decoherence hides the quantum world by destroying rapidly the waves arising from quantum effects. After the waves have disappeared, whatever is left obeys classical laws and looks like a classical world. According to the quantum-only philosophy, the marvelous harmony of Einstein’s classical universe is only an approximation, valid when quantum waves happen to be small enough to be neglected.

"To summarize the present situation, there are three ways to understand philosophically our observations of the physical universe. The classical philosophy of Einstein has everything in a single layer obeying classical laws, with quantum processes unexplained. The quantum-only philosophy has included everything in a single layer obeying quantum laws, with the astonishing solidity and uniqueness of the classical illusion unexplained. The dualistic philosophy gives reality impartially to the classical vision of Einstein and to the quantum vision of Bohr, with the details of the connection between the two layers unexplained. All three philosophies are tenable, and all three are incomplete. I prefer the dualistic philosophy because I give equal weight to the insights of Einstein and Bohr. I do not believe that the celestial harmonies discovered by Einstein are an accidental illusion."

Excerpt from Freeman Dyson, "Einstein as a Jew and a Philosopher" NYRB May 7, 2015. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/may/07/albert-einstein-jew-and-philosopher/ Accessed May 17, 2015.

meaning = structure / structure = meaning

Take a second to read this paragraph. (Yes, I know it is hard and that there are no images or movies associated.)

"The structure of a compound sentence sends certain messages to readers, no matter how you fill in the blanks. First, it tells readers that the sentence contains two relatively important ideas, each one deserving its own independent clause. Second, it tells readers that these two ideas are approximately equal in importance, since they are balanced as a pair. And third, it alerts readers to the relationship between the two ideas, depending on the connector. For example, and suggests that the two ideas are being added together, but indicates that they are being contrasted, and or tells us that they are alternatives. A semicolon suggests balance between two similar or sharply contrasting statements." (Diana Hacker and Betty Renshaw, Writing With a Voice, 2nd ed. Scott, Foresman, 1989)

Meaning dictates sentence structure. That's why it is important.

Meaning dictates structure. Structure tells you how the author understood his or her message.

Meaning dictates structure. So when you figure out what something means, you'd better not emphasize something that the structure deemphasizing (e.g. no taking your main idea from a dependent clause).

Meaning dictates structure.

Meaning dictates structure.

Find the structure; find the meaning.

Erich Przywara, Analogical Deliverer

I read with excitement First Things magazine's January 27, 2015 article about Erich Przywara's analogia entis today. The article by Stephen Webb is clearly written and includes as solid a description of Przywara's metaphysical insight as I have read. "Przywara," he says, "finds the formula for the analogical foundation of the Catholic Church in the Fourth Lateran Council's 1215 decree that, 'One cannot note any similarity between Creator and creature, however great, without being compelled to note an even greater dissimilarity between them.' . . . The 'ever greater,' for Przywara, signifies an ongoing, never complete, and always expanding process. The analogy of being is not an analogy of inequality, as if God and creation could be compared even if only for the purpose of demonstrating how dissimilar they are. Instead, [it] denotes a dynamic disproportionality, so that whatever characteristics we attribute to God must be continually dis/qualified on the basis of a difference that has no limit or end."

As I read it, what Przywara has done is to locate a basis for speaking philosophically about God outside of metaphor. Instead of metaphor, which I identify (perhaps incorrectly) here with the approach of natural theology (in that metaphor compares without discrimination), Przywara chooses analogy as his metaphysical foundation because, as a kind of argumentation (rather than a figure of speech) it is careful to discriminate.

Okay. So let me try and make some sense of what I'm babbling about here. The point is pretty esoteric. It has to do with theological language and the general problem of talking about God at all. I won't elaborate on that now. Nevertheless, the question is whether metaphor is a suitable device for talking about God. Listen, we can't name God and godself directly. There is no one-to-one relationship that would make our language even closely suitable. So god talk has to be rhetorical in nature. It has to be a function of moving from the known to the unknown. And this relationship is not going to be explicit, but implicit, so simile is out and metaphor is in. Unfortunately, metaphor is still not up to the job. And this is where I need to define metaphor more clearly.

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which an implied, implicit, or even a hidden comparison is made between two different things that are poles apart from each other but nevertheless have one or more characteristics in common. In other words, a resemblance of two contradictory or different objects is made based on some common characteristics. Its comparison is implicit or hidden, not explicit as in a simile. We speak, write, and think in metaphors.

A metaphor works by taking a primary subject and applying it to a secondary subject, with the primary likened to the secondary. A metaphor suggests some point of comparison between primary and secondary subjects, so that the primary subject is seen differently in a new light (e.g. my heart is an open book). Thanks to the metaphor, our understanding of the primary subject (called the tenor) is enriched and expanded in some way by the second (the vehicle). And, again, this is accomplished by bringing to light some hidden connection between them, even a hiddenness that is superficial or vague. Yes, sometimes the connection between primary and secondary is very hard to work out. But this is done on purpose in that audiences find pleasure in the working out of the the thing.

Theologically speaking, then, the problem is the relationship between primary and secondary. Theologically, the primary is always God, because God is what theologians are about, and the secondary is always nature, whether phusis, the natural world, or anthropos, the human world. Is there a direct one-to-one here, even if hidden? Can I say something like "God's wisdom is far higher than human wisdom" and mean the same thing by wisdom? Is it the same word for the same thing, different only in degree, or the same word for different things? And if the latter, how do I talk about this?

Przywara says I can talk about this using analogy. By using analogy, we commit comparison but it is an open sin. We know that there is a gulf between the two; that wisdom is the same word for two incomparable things. Nevertheless, analogy allows us to confess the truth and boldly commit the error--a kind of rheotorical simul iustis et peccator.

Now why an analogy can do this, I am not sure. Technically, an analogy is an argument whereas simile and metaphor are rhetorical figures of speech. All three are involved in comparison, but the latter are short, equative moves, whereas the former is a longer worked-out system of connections. Because analogies are built logically and by means of argumentation, anything that is not connected is openly unconnected. Therefore, analogy always leaves open the door of dissimilarity. Metaphors are not interested in leaving that door open. Metaphors gesture at truth through some connection but do not simultaneously work to remind the reader that primary and secondary subjects are as different as they are similar.

So because analogy is more transparent in scope, it provides a clearer foundation for theological discourse. At least I think this is what is being said.

I need to do more reading of this in historical dogmatics, and particularly in Aquinas. Przywara is in dialogue with Aquinas on this, and a quick Google search suggests this thing called "Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of analogy."

the goodness of a creature is different from the goodness of God insofar as the divine goodness is universal and good in itself whereas created goodnesses are particular and good only by reference to something else (secundum aliquid). We see the divine goodness or truth in particular good or true things in the same way we see an exemplar in something derived from the exemplar. This example asserts something important of the participation of creatures in God: the form of “good,” “true,” “being,” etc. which creatures receive from God is not the same as God. For God is being, good, etc. per essentiam, whereas creatures only possess these forms per participationem by reference to God.

Let me quote at length here from the Summa Theologica q13a5:

whatever is predicated of various things under the same name but not in the same sense, is predicated equivocally. But no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures; for instance, wisdom in creatures is a quality, but not in God. Now a different genus changes an essence, since the genus is part of the definition; and the same applies to other things. Therefore whatever is said of God and of creatures is predicated equivocally.

Further, God is more distant from creatures than any creatures are from each other. But the distance of some creatures makes any univocal predication of them impossible, as in the case of those things which are not in the same genus. Therefore much less can anything be predicated univocally of God and creatures; and so only equivocal predication can be applied to them.

I answer that, univocal predication is impossible between God and creatures. The reason of this is that every effect which is not an adequate result of the power of the efficient cause, receives the similitude of the agent not in its full degree, but in a measure that falls short, so that what is divided and multiplied in the effects resides in the agent simply, and in the same manner; as for example the sun by exercise of its one power produces manifold and various forms in all inferior things. In the same way, as said in the preceding article, all perfections existing in creatures divided and multiplied, pre-exist in God unitedly. Thus when any term expressing perfection is applied to a creature, it signifies that perfection distinct in idea from other perfections; as, for instance, by the term "wise" applied to man, we signify some perfection distinct from a man's essence, and distinct from his power and existence, and from all similar things; whereas when we apply to it God, we do not mean to signify anything distinct from His essence, or power, or existence. Thus also this term "wise" applied to man in some degree circumscribes and comprehends the thing signified; whereas this is not the case when it is applied to God; but it leaves the thing signified as incomprehended, and as exceeding the signification of the name. Hence it is evident that this term "wise" is not applied in the same way to God and to man. The same rule applies to other terms. Hence no name is predicated univocally of God and of creatures.

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.

What Jody is After

So jumping right in for the initiated: What is Jody after? What is his point? (And i may have to lump my cousin into it as well.)

Examining his statements carefully, here's my restatement. He'll have to tell me if I'm off the mark or not.

Jody cares because he wants liturgy to matter.

He says that the liturgy matters because we are material beings who worship. Worship requires a grammar because it communicates meaning. This grammar is not meaningless, but communicates the values of its culture--the church, the family of God. The church is the family that God has called into being, he says, and it is the subsequent sacrament of the first sacrament, Christ.

This grammar isn’t concerned with what things are. It is a passive sentence that tells the story of an active God. It is concerned with what things are for. In the performance of its grammar the community confesses God’s acts and interprets what they mean to itself. Misconfessing this at the very least spoils the message and at most is blasphemous!

The words and prayers of the church are traditions that affect real change. Blessing is a way the grammar sets something apart to be what it is for. Ordination is a way the grammar sets someone apart to play a role in the corporate performance. And there is also a reordering of the thing's identity, where identity is ontologically dependent upon use.

In baptism and ordination, this ontological change is called an indelible mark, which changes the individual to reorient them toward Christ. It doesn't mean they are super-people, but it is a testimony to the activity of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit and the incarnation make all of this more than a (Wittgensteinian) parlor game. The incarnation, because matter is rightfully part of the divine plan. It is useful and necessary. The Spirit, because it affects creation of world and word and so gives direction and structure to the community itself. (This last paragraph is a muddled mess of theological gobbledygook.)

At this point, Jody gestures toward "the power of language to reorient and redefine." We're both boxing at Wittgenstein's speech-acts now.

At any rate, I think he’s hearing me say that liturgy does not matter. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the liturgy is a family custom, and like all family customs, it occasionally does things that are a little crazy--but that’s okay.

I'll add more to this post--this is just half-written. It is a draft to get something out there.

Give up the myth of human progress?

“Clearly science and technology have put extraordinary knowledge and power at the command of beings who come into the world with the same brains and mental faculties as humans born 5,000 years ago. Any victory over our species’ destructive tendencies will likewise have to come from institutional and cultural development. We know what humans are capable of: in the wrong circumstances and with the wrong formation, they can behave monstrously. The hope for progress can consist only in the belief that there is some form of collective human life in which the capacity for barbarism will rarely find expression, and in which humans’ creative and cooperative potential can be realized without hindrance. [John] Gray regards such hope as utopian, but it can be supported both by experience and by reflection. Moral and political progress is inevitably more difficult than scientific progress, since it cannot occur in the minds of a few experts but must be realized in the collective lives of millions; but it does happen. Experience shows that some societies are much more decent than others, and that in fits and starts, cruelty, oppression and discrimination have become on balance less acceptable over time.” Thomas Nagel. NYT. 7/5/13.

In this quote, Thomas Nagel defends the myth of human progress. And I wonder, reading it, whether the holocaust is not made more horrible by its deep challenge to this myth. The German people were (and still are) shining examples of the best of Western civilization--and evil still took and used them without interference to accomplish in reality the things that only exist in our unspoken nightmares.

I've been thinking off and on about this myth of human progress. I love this myth. Believing it gives my life and my own civilization meaning and purpose. I am at the crest of thousands of years of progress. I am better than my forebears. And those who come after will be better, happier, and healthier than me. Their children would be geniuses to my age. And yet, lets face it, this is a thoroughly secular eschatology bound on a highly selective reading of the facts.

In short, the Judeo-Christian worldview should have none of it. It is a kind of antichrist. One of those lies that hold down the truth.

On the other hand, can someone just give up the myth of human progress? Can someone simply rewire the operating system they imbibed with their mother's milk?