modern.gods

The Kingdom of God

2009-05-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

One of the primary difficulties with trying to establish the "New Testament vision" or the "Scriptural vision" of the kingdom of God (or a variety of other topics) is the authors of the bible were not modern academics. Now I know that is quite obvious, but we must realize the implications of that, particularly with regards to our practice of "clearly defining our terms". Near-mathematical clarity is a primary virtue, especially in the field of systematic theology. But the NT writers were not systematicians, and so we cannot discount the possibility that at one point in the NT the phrase "kingdom of God" means one thing, and at another point it means something rather different.

But would this imply that the NT writers are wrong at some places, that there actually is a single description of the kingdom of God and that they muddle it at some points? And here we find ourselves back in a systematic mode of thinking. It is not a question of the errancy of the text here, but the errancy of the reader. For example, the timing of Jesus cleansing the temple varies in the gospels. Is this an error? The differences are clearly present in the text, but to claim that one of those instances is in error would be to misread what the text is saying. And just as it is futile to try and harmonize some of the chronology of the NT, it may also be futile to fully harmonize the variety of descriptions of the kingdom of God found therein.

Because of the variety of descriptions of the kingdom of God found in the NT, our holistic concept of the kingdom of God is a little fuzzy around the edges, particularly where it comes to time and extension. And I believe this is what the traditional tensions of anabaptist theology: now/not yet, internal/external, are trying to capture. The kingdom of God extends to the ends of the earth and is found in each believer, is among us right now and will come when the city of God descends out of heaven. These are all descriptions of the scope of the kingdom, and all are represented in Scripture. The kingdom is here and there and sometimes everywhere, and the only definite description given in Scripture is that one day the kingdom of God will remain eternally everywhere, as all other kingdoms submit before the throne of God.

The various descriptions of the kingdom of God have one basic thing in common, and that is they are all descriptions of the type of place that God rules. In the NT this is often contrasted, in so many words, with the rule of Caesar. Signs and wonder accompany the kindgom of God, but do not comprise it. The reason they accompany it is because the kindgom of God is an inversal of the worldly order. The blind can see and the deaf can hear. This inversal is also a reversal, a redemption and restoration of creation. It has its antecedent in the people of Israel, a group set aside for the sake of the rest of the world, a social order not corresponding to the neighboring kingdoms.

One of the places where we can find a description of the realm in which God rules is, I believe, the beatitudes. In the world, in Caesar's realm, it is the powerful and the warlike who are in charge. But not so in the kingdom of God; everything is turned on its head. And fortunate for those who are meek and peace-makers, for it is God's kingdom that will have the final say. There is secondarily an ethical component, but it is an ethic of more fully participating in God's realm. The kingdom of God is many things, and it is by a process of reading and listening that we are able to enter in.

The Tragedy of Beauty

2008-12-20T12:49:00.000-08:00

There was a movie that came out a few years ago called "The Last Samurai" about Tom Cruise being brought into the last remaining samurai clan in Japan. Many critics saw it as just a rip-off of "Dances with Wolves", which it was, but there was also there was this underlying theme of the Japanese concept of beauty, mono no aware. Ken Watanabe, the head of the clan, explained this concept to Tom Cruise while describing the blossoms of a cherry tree. They are beautiful because they only bloom once a year for a short while and then die. If you tried to artificially maintain them you would take away what makes them beautiful, their life and their ephemerality.

In the movie, the cherry tree was a metaphor for the beautiful and simple family clan that was dying away in the face of modernity. But this metaphor underlies a more general concept of beauty. The tragedy of beauty is not that it will one day fade away, but that this transcience and fragility is part of the very nature of what makes something beautiful. This is a concept I am currently struggling with, as I have seen many friendships come and go, and I often try to artificially sustain them, thereby destroying the beauty of the relationship. I need to learn to appreciate the temporality of friendships, because this is what makes them worthwhile to begin with. This is a difficult concept to come to terms with.

But how can this fit with an eternal and perfectly beautiful God? I believe that all beauty in this world is a temporary glimpse into the eternal beauty of God. Nothing created lasts forever; we are beautiful because we are fragile creatures, and we die. It is God who is the renewer, and it is God's promise that temporary beauty will come again, and that new friendships will be born, and that we will be given new life after we pass. It is God who raises the sun every morning, and causes the cherry blossoms to bloom every spring.

Logic and the World

2008-11-13T09:32:00.001-08:00

Since returning to the States, I've looked over my blog site and discovered a draft that I never finished, began just over a year ago. It seemed like an interesting topic, so I decided to revive it.

I had a short conversation recently (that is, over a year ago) with some friends about logic and about where it is 'located', in the world, in our minds, or maybe just in the minds of a particular class of educated Western males. Now of course I was was the one to suggest the possibility of the later (not that I even hold it to be true, although some feminist thinkers, such as Andrea Nye, in fact, do) and was immediately harangued for it. It was as if calling someone illogical implied they were irrational!

Now logic, particularly symbolic logic, is a field that has been developed primarily by Western males. But it also claims a universal and atemporal status over everything that could be considered true. The Logical Positivists even claimed that if you couldn't think about something in terms of logical formulae, you weren't actually thinking about anything at all. Certainly if you hold to that view, being illogical is the same as being delusional. When you get down to the bottom of it, is this the only way to think about reality? And if so, why was it male Europeans who figured it out?

Speaking of language games, logic is perhaps most clearly a game. Points of discussion, ideas, people, places, and things all become "predicates" and then are placed within a well-defined grid. These playing pieces are then moved around much like a game of chess, with well-defined rules for what may or may not be done. The problem I see with logic is this act of predication constitutes a break with reality, a reduction of something actual to a term usable by logic. All context and history is shucked off. Once you allow this to happen, of course, the structure of logic in your thought becomes inescapable. And it is impossible to find within logic rules about how things become predicates, because those would need to be predicates themselves.

A quick thought experiment:

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Socrates is mortal.

All men are mortal.
Jesus is a man.
Jesus is mortal?

The first is a pretty standard syllogism, and holds true. The second has exactly the same structure, and effectively the same first two lines. But because the third line is open to debate, that brings into question the statement "Socrates is mortal." Because of an apparent contradiction to the rule, we must clarify the first two lines:

All men who are not also gods are mortal.
Socrates is a man who is not also a god.
Socrates is mortal.

However, because the only thing about being a god that concerns us in this case is immortality, we might as well write the syllogism like this:

All men who are not immortal are mortal

Socrates is a man who is not immortal

Socrates is mortal.

Because there is always a possibility that predicates will need to be expanded, logic can never step outside of its rules to tell us anything about the world. It can only move predicates around in a way that ultimately is only reflexively true.

One further problem with predicates is that the limits of our language provide the limits of our predicates. We can use "snow" in a variety of syllogisms, but in a language with over 20 words for "snow", some of those syllogisms may be false. Logic is, at its best, a tool to analyze our use of language, and at its worst, a tool of Western male imperialism.

Just because it is foolishness to the Greeks, doesn't mean that it is foolishness.

Language Games

2008-05-31T19:24:00.000-07:00

So I was reading MacIntyre on incommensurability and untranslatability, summed up:

"Where two large-scale systems of thought and practice are in radical disagreement...there is and can be no independent standard or measure by appeal to which their rival claims can adjucated, since each has internal to itself its own fundamental standard of judgment. Such systems are incommensurable, and the terms in and by means of which judgment is delivered in each are so specific and idiosyncratic to each that they cannot be translated into the terms of the other without gross distortion."

One need look no further than the U.S.'s politics in the Mid-East to see the ramifications if this were even potentially the case. Even with a likelihood of incommensurability being total, and no possibility of debate succesfully crossing the systems in any meaningful way, we must continue as if this were possible. We must act on the potential that there is something constructive to be gained, because if there is not, it is simply meaningless to go on. MacIntyre believes there is:

"An admission of significant incommensurability and untranslatability in the relations between two opposed systems of thought and practice can be a prologue not only to rational debate, but to that kind of debate from which one party can emerge as undoubtedly rationally superior, if only because exposure to such debate may reveal that one of the contending standpoints fails in its own terms and by its own standards."

I propose that there is one more difficulty in this, and that is that there is no standard way of judging when this situation has actually occured. It's an unprovable claim; while in fact one standpoint may fail in its own terms, this will not be transparent to the other standpoint. One may continue to play the game, as it were, long after the other side has conceded, or even began a different game. It strikes me that this situation, that of language games in general, is much like the game Battleship. You each sit with your pieces arranged on a grid on your side, and a blank grid representing the other player with the same grid system as your own. Once they have placed their pieces, you begin trading shots until you develop an idea of where their pieces are. Assuming their grid is ordered the same as yours, your representation of their grid should match their actual grid, and the game proceeds as normal until a clear winner is established.

But imagine that their grid is labelled differently from yours, and in fact may contain letters and numbers not even on your grid. With only the feedback of hit/miss, play may actually proceed as normal for quite a while, and with different pieces in play, one player may even come to the conclusion that they have won. But what we are left with is two very different grids, and no intrinsic way of telling from either side that something is amiss. Play may progress such that is is inavoidable to conclude that their grid is different, as you start to throw certain hits that come back as misses, but this is never guaranteed (especially given the enourmous grid that we all posses), and you have no way of telling what their grid looks like without recreating it's exact order. One side may concede "loss" given their grid, but this is not obvious given the projected grid on the other side. And it is strange to conclude that the other side somehow brought about this "loss" because it is rationally superior, in fact both of their grids will not make much sense at all. But it was the very act of participating in the debate, and taking what may only be considered 'random' hits, that allowed one side to accept the inadequacy of their system of pieces, and refine or reject it altogether.

Post-Modern Object-Relations Theory

2008-04-13T13:32:00.000-07:00

One critique that I would have of Harry Guntrip's theory of ego, as well as with all object-relations theory, is that it places too much emphasis on the very early mother-child relationship. Certainly, as any parent will attest, a child's personality is in development from the very start. Object-Relations effectively holds the view that if something goes wrong here, you are doomed to a life of ego-failure, but if everything goes well, you develop an iron-clad ego, able to withstand any problem that comes your way. There are several problems with this, not the least of which there are several important personality elements (*cough*sexdrive*cough*) which develop later through biochemical means.

Ego development may be hampered early on, but it may also be hampered or disrupted by later environmental effects. Even with the best mother-child relationship, because of the nature of our individual existence, there is no such thing as an un-failable ego. I imagine that child soldiers, after the symptoms of PTSD are treated, many years from now, will still suffer from regression and ego-splitting problems. Is this because they were all unfortunate enough to have a distant or overbearing mother? Certainly not, at least for the children who were taken at a later age. If one sees PTSD as the sympton of a much deeper ego rift, we may understand the horrors these children have been through as equal or more effecting than the horrors of a distant mother to her baby. Egos with poor resources from poor early relationships may later develop sustenance-giving relationships, and strong early egos later under siege may soon find their resources run dry.

Another problem with classical psychoanalysis is its Eurocentrism. Freud made the mistake of seeing culturally-defined "instincts" as normative for all (pre-cultural) babies. Object-relations theory removes this veneer of instinct, but it still has a purely Western view of mother-child relationship in mind. What about households with several mothers, or villages in which child-rearing is shared equally? Certainly object-relations theory may still hold true in these circumstances, however, the process of ego-development will need reworking if it is to be generally applicable.

One strength of Guntrip's understanding of the ego and regression problems is that it can be, with small adjustments, generalizable to any culture. As ego forms the framework of the personality, but not the content, different cultures, both individualistic and traditional, could have developed in response to the vicissitudes of the ego. Individualism is one way of determining action based on the reality of a fragile ego, strong family hierarchy and honor codes are others.

TBC

"Biblical" Models of Womenhood

2007-08-16T09:42:00.000-07:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070809/ap_on_re/religion_today

Long story short, the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Nashville is establishing an MA in homemaking and "traditional" women's roles. Quoth the president, "We are moving against the tide in order to establish family and gender roles as described in God's word for the home and the family."

The funny thing is, no matter what your cultural or hermeneutical background may be, you would be hard pressed to find any actual examples of this "Biblical model" in the Bible. What sort of families and gender roles does God's word describe? My guess is the the Southern Baptist Convention would abhor any of the actual families in the Bible (let's see, we've got adultery, murder, rape, theft, incest, driving tent-stakes through people's heads, etc.) Sure, there are shining examples of women in the Bible (Ruth and Esther for example), but none of them look like the "Biblical Wife". Even Martha was castigated by Jesus for "staying in the kitchen."

Because the Bible is simultaneously very complex and very influential, the word "Biblical" can easily be abused. If you value the Bible, and you value your own ideas, it is a tempting step to simply add "Biblical" to the front of your ideas to reinforce your whole noetic structure, as well as giving you an air of credibility. It's pretty much the same these days as "research says..."

Dynamic Realism

2007-08-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

I overheard a conversation today with a student who was deeply trouble by a suggestion in class (probably not a strong one) that the stories in the Bible never really happened, but are important because of what they represent. What is the response of someone who believes that the things in the Bible did happen? Is inerrancy the only way (either it did or didn't happen the way it says it does)?

I feel that much of this problem arises from some combination of modernity attaching independent ontological significance to the sort of statement, "E happened", and the romantic notion that there could be some inner quality or essence which may never be revealed by outside action. Together these lead one to the conclusion that true significance comes from an event happening, and the meaning of the event is derivative from this first fact.

Now that we have dissolved ourselves of an ontology based on formal logic, we may more clearly see that there is no such thing as "just an event" that we need to be concerned with. The meaning of an event is the larger sphere of culture and practice, with the particular occasion of the event a smaller subset of that. In other words, the significance of the historical moment of the event is derived from it's role in the greater significance of the event as a meaningful whole. And judging by the grammar of the whole meaning, we can determine how important the local occasion of the event may be.

The focus of events in the Bible are primarily on this greater whole. The significance of the Gospel is that it applies to more than just a 30-mile by 30-year area. Jesus calming the storm is a story about God being greater than the storms of nature and the storms of our heart. There's no point in arguing whether Jesus did it or not if you fail to see the significance of the whole story. However, what's the point in arguing that Jesus calms the storms of nature and soul if he never did?

Take, for example, the 5th of November (V for Vendetta). While the particular facts of the original event are unclear (both then and now), the fact that it happened is a significant part of the grammar of the meaning of the event (remember, remember...). The actual event is significant only due to its greater meaning, but without the event, the greater meaning (and practices) lose coherence.

Contrary to romantic notions, it simply does not make sense to say that "God is love" if God has never done anything that could be considered an act of love. Likewise for redemption, grace, provision, sacrifice, etc. When the Bible describes God "systematically", it uses the language "God, who brought you out of Egypt..." not "God, the deliverer". God is not "The Deliverer of Israel" unless he actually did deliver Israel. There is no religious or spiritual significance (expression of spirituality, etc.) to that most significant event, the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, if God never actually 'did' that. The grammar of most of our practices loses meaning without God's particular action. A Christian spirituality without historical acts of God is nonsensical. As Paul says, if God did not actually raise Jesus from the dead, then my faith is meaningless.

Quantum Mechanics and Top-Down Causation

2007-07-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

The theory of quantum mechanics is no more friendly to top-down causation (a seemingly necessary process for upholding both volition and physicalism) than Newtonian determinism.

First, volition. The notion of free will has become such a burdened term that arguing for its existence requires much more than top-down causation. Volition, on the other hand, is more readily apparent to ourselves. Basically, it is the idea that when I move my hand, I am causing the muscles to contract, etc.; rather than my hand moving because of an ancient series of events, and the thought "I am moving my hand" being drug along after. Top-down causation is the process by which "moving my hand" actually moves my hand.

Within a Newtonian paradigm, there is really no room for top-down causation. Any apparent "TDC" can be dissolved with an appeal to a larger system. A bouncing ball moving "ball particles" can be explained by the history of effects on the individual particles, and moving you hand can be explained by a chain of forces extending outside even your own head. And thus the appeal to quantum mechanics: with the 'wiggle room' they create, there is now more than one possible outcome of a closed system, and so there must be space for volition, right?

The problem is, the model of quantum mechanics is just as immune to manipulation as the Newtonian model. There is no way for a particle to 'choose' to be at one location over another. It is truly and utterly random, not even a chaos theory sort of 'random' (which isn't really random). No level of complexity above the quantum level (including the mind) has any effect on where the particle appears, only that it does.

Schrodinger's box has always been an interesting thought experiment about the absurdities of quantum mechanics when applied to the macro level. (A cat is in a box containing a vial of poison gas, controlled by a quantum switch. Upon observing the box, the poison gas is either released or not released, but it can be either at every possible point of observation, and so the cat is both alive and dead, or alive/dead/alive/dead, or some such thing). If a theory of TDC resorts to activity at the quantum level to explain measurable results at the macro level (the level of hands and such), then we in fact become walking, talking skinner boxes. If volition acts on the quantum level, then that quantum particle affects an electron, which affects an atom, then neuron, and finally muscle to move the whole hand, then the very act of looking at my hand will reveal it to be at any one of all possible positions (of which I have no control over). I will, in fact, have a cloud of 'handness' with varying probabilities of my hand being located in that region at any one time. Slightly counter-intuitive.