christiannonduality.com Blog

Why Brian McLaren’s Greco-Roman Narrative is NOT a caricature of modernistic aspects of our religious traditions:

St. Bernard described a developmental trajectory for our relationship with God: 1) love of self for sake of self 2) love of God for sake of self 3) love of God for sake of God and 4) love of self for sake of God.

Thomas Merton described a similar trajectory in our stages of humanization, socialization and transformation. Humanization and socialization help form what he called our False Self. Transformation forms our True Self.

Richard Rohr draws a distinction between our problem-solving, dualistic mindsets and our nondual, contemplative stance toward reality.

Such distinctions describe the faith journeys of all of our great traditions with their various exoteric and esoteric aspects.

The exoteric dimension engages reality in a more propositional way. That is to suggest that it engages reality with empirical, rational, moral and practical methods. It establishes and defends boundaries. When it encounters paradox, it makes an attempt to resolve, dissolve or evade it. It provides answers to many of our most fundamental questions.

The esoteric dimension engages reality in a more participatory and imaginative way. That is to suggest that it engages reality from a more personal, relational perspective. It negotiates and transcends boundaries. When it encounters the paradox in life’s deepest mysteries, as they impact our most profound values, most cherished longings, most insistent urges and most ultimate concerns, it exploits this paradox by nurturing its creative tensions. It abides in trust and ponders life’s ultimate questions with awe, reverence and love.

One might say that the more exoteric aspects of our traditions provide us with the answers to the question of why we should love God, which is to say, for the sake of self. These answers form in us an enlightened self-interest. Early on our journey, our faith is thus more clear but tentative.

The more esoteric aspects of our traditions provide us with the answer to the question of why God loves us, which is to say, because we are fashioned in His image and likeness. This answer transforms us and puts us in touch with our True Self. Later on our journey, our faith is thus more obscure but certain.

The later stages of Bernardian love do not negate the earlier. Our True Self does not annihilate our False Self. Our nondual, contemplative stance goes beyond but not without our problem-solving dualistic mindset. The earlier stages of our journey are necessary but simply not sufficient. They are especially insufficient when our goal is a growth in relationship, in intimacy, whether with people or with God.

Our Greco-Roman Narrative, in very many ways, has everything to do with our love of self for sake of self and love of God for sake of self. It is all about our humanization and socialization. It very much engages our problem-solving, dualistic mindsets with their empirical, rational, moral and practical methods. It very clearly establishes and steadfastly defends all sorts of boundaries. When it encounters paradox, it makes every attempt to resolve, dissolve or evade it. More than anything, this narrative makes an attempt to provide answers toward the end of comprehensively describing and exhaustively norming our engagements with reality. This narrative largely comprises the grand storyline of modern science, philosophy and classical liberal politics. This is a storyline with a great many successes but no too few failures. Some of these failures were of epic proportion and were well chronicled in the writings of Walker Percy, who keenly diagnosed our postmodern malaise.

I have already drawn parallels to McLaren and Percy. See, for example:
Everything That’s Old is New Again – this (McLaren’s “New” Christianity) is truly an old time religion and also the more fleshed-out, tongue-partly-in-cheek version: A New Kind of Christianity? McLaren didn’t make this up. It’s worse than that!.

The parallel I wish to offer here is that McLaren’s invitation simply mirrors that of St. Bernard, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, Walker Percy and many others in our Christian tradition and, indeed, that of the mystics of all of the Great Traditions. This is an invitation to engage not only the more exoteric but also the more esoteric dimensions of our tradition. And this will have everything to do with our love of God for sake of God and love of self for sake of God! It is all about our transformation and True Self! It will very much engage our nondual, contemplative stance toward reality with its robustly personal and deeply relational approach! When it encounters the paradox in life’s deepest mysteries, it nurtures its creative tensions in abiding trust. With an open mind it negotiates all sorts of boundaries, with an open heart transcends them and with open arms welcomes the marginalized! This is the storyline of creation, liberation and reconciliation. THIS is our story! THIS is our song!

Now, clearly, McLaren’s Greco-Roman Narrative does not describe the best our tradition has had to offer when its exoteric and esoteric dimensions have been properly integrated. Clearly, this integration has indeed been preserved in varying degrees and transmitted to varying extents by manifold and diverse elements of our tradition. To deny this would indeed be a caricaturization. But this is not what I see McLaren doing. Instead, what I take away from his critique is the same lament that’s been heralded in our prophetic tradition since the days of old: God is offering us SO much more! But way too many of us are settling for so much less! That is to say that we need to go deeper and to better integrate the exoteric and esoteric dimensions of our religion.

The challenge, as I discern it, is for our institutional structures and non-institutional vehicles to better foster ongoing intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious development and conversion (cf. Lonergan & Donald Gelpi). As created co-creators, our work is to foster True Self-realization and authentic transformation of individuals and society, liberating and reconciling all.

Yes, progress has been made.

But, if anyone imagines that the critiques of modernistic religion by such as Thomas Merton and Walker Percy, now Richard Rohr and Brain McLaren, are mere caricatures, where MOST religious practitioners are concerned, they are incredibly naive. (Keep in mind, no one is judging the disposition of anyone’s soul; this is a conversation regarding developmental stages of the journey.) Are we robustly engaging our esoteric dimensions? Rather, do we bog down in the exoteric and render our religion, then, moralistic, legalistic, ritualistic, rationalistic? Take a look around. Listen to the rhetoric – not just in the pews, but – from our pulpits! What are we mostly talking about? What best describes our predominant way of engaging our God?

Send article as PDF to

See my story: Christian Nonduality – Postmodern Conservative Catholic Pentecostal

John Sobert Sylvest will not be tweeting, blogging or FB peeping this Lent but will be checking e-mail infrequently. Have a holy time ✝ See you at Sonrise ☼

Send article as PDF to

Emerson said that God arrives when the half-gods depart. Dennett has spent recent years tilting at the windmills of half-gods and imagines himself as Don Quixote. The fact of the matter is that I am largely in agreement with Dennett in that ALL of the gods he’s been dispatching are not worthy of anyone’s belief.

To some extent, it is a matter of two ships passing in the night. We all inhabit elaborate tautologies wherein our syllogistic conclusions are often hidden in the very terms we employ in our premises. So, the first problem will always be the proper disambiguation of terms.

If we do employ the same terms, then I think believers must concede that science, philosophy and culture, without religion, can realize truth, beauty and goodness in abundance, even. (At least this is a fundamental premise of anyone who holds a radically incarnational view. Life is good. Living a good and moral life is transparent to human reason.) So, it is not like religion even introduces a new horizon of concern vis a vis values. Values are already in place. Science, then, is descriptive. Philosophy is normative. Culture is evaluative.

Religion introduces a question re: truth, beauty and goodness. Even abundance. That question is: Might there be more? Might there be superabundance? Then, in an effort to augment these values, it amplifies the epistemic and existential risks we have already taken (such as in our falsifiable science, provisional closures in philosophy) by venturing forth to further wager with faith, hope and love. We then cash out the pragmatic value of these wagers by seeing if we have indeed fostered human growth: intellectually, affectively, morally, socio-politically and religiously.

There is no question that the life of religious faith, hope and love is riskier. That’s why it is called FAITH and HOPE. No one is being intellectually dishonest, here. No one is claiming that the Object of our worship can be empirically measured, logically demonstrated or practically proved. We are not saying that our cosmology of descriptive science, normative philosophy or evaluative culture differs one iota from Dennett’s such that WHAT we see when we engage reality is going to be any different. (If someone put a gun to my head, I’d say consciousness is an emergent phenomenon vis a vis a nonreductive physicalism. But I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep if it were wholly reductive. My bets are on a physicalist account of the soul but, if it ended up being a radically Cartesian dualism, it wouldn’t bother me a bit.)

We do say that HOW we see this cosmology through an axiology, or via our religious interpretive axis, does differ when we imagine that reality has more in store than meets the eye and when we participate together with others in this imaginative vision. While we don’t adjudicate our claims, finally, evidentially, it doesn’t mean there is no evidence. While we do not demonstrate them conclusively, rationally, it doesn’t mean that we have no good reasons.

Dennett will point out that all of this behavior has adaptive significance. Who would not disagree with this rather trivial grasp of the obvious?

His tautology quits processing reality at this point. No problem.

Ours does not.

He might invoke Occam’s Razor. But one can only wield that weapon when one has already achieved explanatory adequacy and is choosing between two equally good explanations. Last time I checked, we have no Theory of Everything and, furthermore, it has just recently dawned on Hawking what others of us have known for decades, which is that Godel-like constraints (incompleteness theorems) will apply to any and all closed formal symbol systems aspiring to a TOE. It is, ergo, a stalemate.

The only enduring question where the 4 Horsemen are concerned is whether or not they are familiar with the work of Judith Martin?!?

There is a fundamental misunderstanding if anyone thinks people like Phil, Jack Haught, Joe Bracken et al are making religion look scientific or are conflating the autonomous methodologies of science and theology. What they are doing is what is called a Theology of Nature which begins within the faith. It is very much akin to St. Francis’ hymns to nature and to the parables of nature found in scripture even though it is employing analogies and metaphors that are derived from the theory of evolution, speculative cosmology and the heuristic of emergence, for example. In this regard, they are not only not doing science, they are not even doing philosophy or what might be considered a natural theology.

When these gentlemen do begin within philosophy, a natural philosophy or natural theology, their excursion is brief and for the purpose of disambiguating concepts, clarifying categories, formulating arguments or, in other words, framing up valid questions, which we might consider to be reality’s “limit questions.” They do not then aspire to answer these questions such as through formal syllogistic reasoning as if there could be proofs for God’s existence or final explanations for reality. All a philosophy of nature demonstrates is the reasonableness of our limit questions, questions which cohere with our ultimate concerns.

Contrastingly, this is precisely where Dennett et al go astray in that they do claim to have answered such limit questions and to have eliminated the ultimate as a matter of concern. In doing so, it is Dennett who has conflated the otherwise autonomous methods of science and philosophy in what is known as a scientism, a label Dawkins apparently accepts but which Dennett claims is but a caricature of his naturalism, which is not philosophical but, rather, methodological (or so he protested to Jack Haught, when they last debated). This leaves a question left begging, however, for Dennett, which is that – if he is truly a methodological naturalist, then, – doesn’t that mean that, vis a vis reality’s limit questions, he must either remain, in principle, agnostic or otherwise transparently admit that his position, at bottom, is essentially one of faith, which is what Phil would also admit?

The only thing that Dennett will typically counter is that he goes no further than his empirical science and rationalist philosophy warrant, which he manifestly has!

What he must admit is that his is a type of faith, too, and that it is warranted. He might also claim that his position has more warrant than that of a believer in God. And our counter might be that our stance, epistemically, is indeed riskier, but that, existentially, this amplification of risks has huge rewards in terms of augmented human values; this value-augmentation is, itself, truth-indicative. And we must reassert, here, that our stance does not refer to the caricatures of belief that Dennett habitually engages as strawgods.

And thus would commence a whole other debate regarding the nature of justification and warrant.

But I doubt seriously Dennett can escape the tautology he’s trapped in, which ironically, is the same mindset that snares his fundamentalist counterparts. By conflating philosophy and science, both the religious fundamentalists and Enlightenment fundamentalists are committing HUGE category errors and, ergo, represent the obverse sides of the same epistemic coin — fideism and scientism — neither which has a purchase on reality.

Most of all, I really feel sorry for their poor horses …

Their riders are giving horse manure a bad name.

Below is a relevant Tweet Archive:

pdclayton7

Okay, so a New Atheist and a Christian Theologian walk into a bar… thoughts on the Tues. debate with Dan Dennett at http://ow.ly/17mNf 8:49 PM Feb 14th

@pdclayton7 Dennett told Jack Haught he’s NOT scientistic but a methodological naturalist. He’s agnostic, not atheistic, re: cosmic origins? 10:31 PM Feb 12th from web in reply to pdclayton7

@pdclayton7 Wim Drees’ critique http://bit.ly/9vy00P keeps gods out of gaps, which is fine; but doesn’t it validate our limit questions? 11:28 PM Feb 12th from web in reply to pdclayton7

@pdclayton7 Does Dennett lose sleep b/c Popperian falsification & solipsism are not falsifiable or b/c logical positivism is incoherent? 11:32 PM Feb 12th from web in reply to pdclayton7

@pdclayton7 re: God, world’s BRIGHTest philosophers tender Scottish verdict = unproven & not dis/proved. Do Dan’s peers think he’s bright? 11:36 PM Feb 12th from web in reply to pdclayton7

@Cathlimergent — Thanks for the great suggestions — I’ll keep you posted! — Philip

Below is a bibliography I put together the first time I lost interest in Dan Dennett’s work. Click below to continue >>>

(more…)

Send article as PDF to

I will cut to the chase, folks. I’ve read most everything Brian McLaren’s written. Most recently, A New Kind of Christianity. And, while I don’t go looking for them, it’s hard to ignore McLaren’s detractors, whose chief complaint has been that, when it comes to Christianity, he’s not just coloring outside the lines, he’s actually making stuff up!

Now, being very familiar with his body of work and having slowly discerned just what this so-called heretic has been up to, I’m afraid the problem with McLaren is really worse than one might first imagine. It seems that few of his critics are even remotely aware of a rather disturbing pattern in his writings, speeches and blogging, a pattern that most egregiously rises to the surface in his answering of the Ten Questions that are Transforming the Faith, which is the subtitle of A New Kind of Christianity.

The not so plain fact of the matter is that Brian McLaren manifestly ain’t making all this stuff up. I say “not so plain” because, even when I tell you what’s really going on, I’m going to have to rather carefully make my case below. The plain deal is, gentle reader, that McLaren ain’t fabricating a danged thang. He stole all this stuff!

You heard me right. This ain’t McLaren’s work.

Now, I can already imagine what you Emergent loyalists are thinking and can even empathize with how you must feel. I’ve been there before. My Sweet Lord! It was 1976. No, this ain’t no exclamation invoking God in vain. I’m talking, rather, about the first solo Beatles single to hit number one. George Harrison wrote My Sweet Lord in December 1969. A US District Court judge in New York ruled in 1976 that Harrison had subconsciously infringed on the copyright of The Chiffons, who had recorded He’s So Fine. So, that’s all I’m saying about McLaren. While he didn’t manufacture his version of Christianity out of thin air, as his detractors claim, it is quite possible that he lifted a good bit of his material, some mindfully, some inadvertently, straight out of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Fortunately, for McLaren, no royalties are due because the Holy Spirit doesn’t go around charging folks with copyright infringements. If no one picked up on this before, well, that’s likely due to the fact that much of the material that McLaren has, shall we say, re-articulated, is found in the more esoteric (not to be confused with heterodox) aspects of the tradition.

Further below, I commence a rather rigorous and technical analysis of the McLaren case. Before I do that, let me direct you to some materials that are much more accessible and intended for a general audience. Click on the link, below, to access 20 Good Online Resources to Help You Understand Brian McLaren’s new book: A New Kind of Christianity —>

(more…)

Send article as PDF to

Discovering What You Already Know but maybe didn’t realize you knew it

1 ) What about hell?

It’s a necessary theoretical construct. But it should only be used to console people who find a relationship with God positively repugnant. We need to comfort them with the notion that God would not coerce anyone into a relationship with Her. Otherwise, for all practical purposes, forget about it.

2 ) What about religion? Is it necessary?

A religion is an axis of interpretation, an interpretive stance or axiology, around which our cosmology spins. Our cosmology is necessary to realize truth, beauty and goodness and, in that regard, it is also sufficient. Religion, then, is not necessary. One can live an abundant life without it. One can realize truth, beauty and goodness without religion. For example, many say they are spiritual but not religious; they are not being disingenuous.

3 ) What do you mean by “our” cosmology? I thought there were as many cosmologies as there were religions?

Cosmology represents the relationship between science, culture and philosophy. Science is a descriptive method that asks: What is that? Culture, an evaluative stance, asks: What is that to us? Philosophy is a normative method that asks: How do we best acquire or avoid that?

Now, humankind celebrates this cosmological reality in many diverse and beautiful ways. But this story of the cosmos and our place in it is not really up for grabs. It’s Everybody’s Story. We are stardust. We are golden. But we’re not necessarily making our way back to the garden (although that’s a rather popular interpretive stance). Our cosmological knowledge has advanced slowly but it does advance inexorably. It includes both cosmic and biological evolution, for example, and the paradigm of emergence.

4 ) How does religion fit in? If there’s no hell (for all practical purposes) and an abundant life of truth, beauty and goodness already available to us, what’s left for religion to do?

Religion looks at cosmological reality and asks: How does all of this tie-back together or re-ligate? Put more simply, it looks at life’s truth, beauty and goodness and asks: Is there, perhaps, more?

Religion, then, is our pursuit of superabundance. To the extent that life is a journey, we aspire to travel even more swiftly and with less hindrance toward truth, beauty and goodness. Religion seeks to augment these value-realizations by amplifying the risks we have  already taken in science, culture and philosophy. Religion amplifies these risks through faith, hope and love and realizes these augmented values in creed, cult and code. In creed, we articulate truth in doctrine and dogma. In cult, we cultivate beauty in liturgy, ritual and practices. In code, we preserve goodness in law and disciplines. And this new law, by the way, is love. And its justice is known as mercy. And its methods are not coercive; they’re nonviolent. (Where nonviolence is concerned, I often think of Polanyi’s tacit dimension or of how in semiotic science and Baldwinian evolution there can be a downward causation without any violation of physical causal closure. Such forms of non-energetic or formal causation can be ineluctably unobtrusive while, at the same time, utterly efficacious. This provides a great analog for the gentle, yet powerful, influence of the Spirit on all of creation, always coaxing but never coercive. If it’s any consolation to our human passions, Jesus suggests that our nonviolent responses are experienced by our detractors like the heaping of burning coals upon their heads. ) Above all, we enjoy our unitive fellowship in community. A community (koinonia) of peace or grand shalom, where we find – not perfection – but wholeness.

5 ) If everyone is, so to speak, saved vis a vis any conception of hell and all religions are about the task of aspiring to superabundance, then why all the fuss about, for example, an insidious indifferentism, a facile syncretism or false irenicism regarding different religions?

Well, we are not indifferent in that we want to give God the greatest possible glory, ad majorem Dei gloriam. So, while it is one great image to conceive of us all there together in Eternity, lighting up the firmament to our fullest capacity, fired up by the very glory of God, it might otherwise be a somewhat sobering thought to also imagine that many of us will have escaped as through a fire with our little 40 watt bulbs while folks like Mother Teresa shine forth as a blazing helios. We can believe, in my view, that every trace of human goodness, every beginning of a smile, will be eternalized. Each moment of our lives is ripe for eternalization or will be burned off as ever to be forgotten chaff.

But, far more than any fanciful contemplation of our eternal state, we are not indifferent because not all are equally able to enjoy and realize life’s truth, beauty and goodness, life’s intrinsically good and potentially abundant nature. And, yes, I affirm life’s beauty and goodness and abundance, unconditionally, very much aware of some rather significant cosmic irony, not indifferent to the immensity of human pain, the enormity of human suffering. And, while I haven’t ignored some of those French existentialists (Camus and Sartre), I have paid more attention to their Russian counterparts (Dostoevsky).

I do believe that it is when we awaken to our solidarity that compassion will ensue. So, it seems like we would want to aspire to practice such a religion as would best foster human development and growth: intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious. We want to get religion as right as we can in order to help as many as possible to run life’s race more swiftly and with less hindrance, sharing and enjoying life’s abundance. We seek enlightenment for ourselves, even, out of compassion for our fellow wo/men who would otherwise have to suffer our unenlightened selves.

It may be too early on humankind’s journey to successfully discern which religions are best fostering such growth and conversion, but these are criteria about which we should care very deeply. We need to dialogue deeply and with great humility. I will say this: Religions that get away from Everybody’s Story and tinker wily nilly with cosmology are indeed out to lunch. Cosmology is not something one can just make up; it’s comprised of autonomous methodologies, like science and philosophy.

6 ) Where, then, does the Incarnation fit in?

Well, it is about at-ONE-ment but not, in my view (or that of Scotus and the Franciscans), a penal, substitutionary atonement. In other words, it was not occasioned by some felix culpa (happy fault) as if in response to some grand ontological rupture located in the past. Rather, it was in the divine cards from the cosmic get-go, this, God-is-with-us, Emmanuel. It has more to do with a Teilhardian-like teleological striving oriented toward the future. Most concretely, it’s all about a profound intimacy with a deeply caring Lover. It’s a dance, perichoresis.

7 ) What, then, about soteriology and eschatology?

Well, I’m with all the existentialists in recognizing that we are in a predicament of sorts. But I’m also with those who affirm a radically incarnational view, which sees us as co-creators in an unfinished universe, hence the moaning and groaning in this grand act of giving birth. I suppose I could join the theodicists and suggests that, surely, there must’ve been a better way! But I’ve finally quit beating my head against that wall just because it felt good when I stopped and have decided to just put my shoulder to the plow and plant a few seeds for the Kingdom.

Eternity is not something that happens before or after time. It is an atemporal and thoroughly NOW thing! As has been said, it’s heaven all the way to heaven, hell all the way to hell. Heavenly thoughts that are of no earthly significance will not be realized in eternity because by not being now here they’ll end up being no-where. The truth of religion is found in a soteriology that measures its success in terms of how well we are fostering an eschatological realism grounded in conversion (Lonergan’s) and compassion (leading to diakonia, service), NOW.

8 ) What about God-talk, metaphysics and such?

There is a type of God-talk that begins with cosmology. We could call that philosophical or natural theology. I am a metaphysical realist, even regarding God-concepts. Here we clarify categories, disambiguate vague concepts, frame up questions and formulate arguments. Here we affirm the reasonableness of our questions. This is not unimportant. But it is woefully insufficient for a number of reasons, like the excess of meaning we are dealing with, for example and to say the least. With Peirce, however, after forming the argument and asking the question, we then stop! We don’t pretend to have answered the questions and we don’t proceed with God-proofs via syllogistic argumentation, which Peirce considered a fetish (and I agree).

There is another type of God-talk that proceeds from within the faith. We call that a theology of nature.  Here we wax metaphorical with our analogical imaginations. All metaphors eventually collapse of course, but it is my belief that those drawn in fidelity to our cosmology are going to be the most resilient because our analogs will be better, our tautologies more taut.

Of course, there are other descriptors for God-talk, such as kataphatic and apophatic, both aspiring to increase our descriptive accuracy of God, the former through positive affirmations and the latter through negations. These categories apply to both natural theology and a theology of nature. Most God-talk is going to come from our theology of nature. We can exhaust what can be known from the perspective of natural theology in a single afternoon’s parlor sitting. The currency of natural theology is the affirmation: Good question! This does not mean, however, that the lingua franca of a theology of nature is going to therefore be: Good answer! A theology of nature traffics, instead, in iconography. It brings us to value-realizations via a more nondual, contemplative stance toward reality. The chief caveat emptor where icons are concerned is their elevation into idols. In this regard, our 21st Century religion could use a huge therapeutic  dose of ancient apophatic mysticism to ensure that our icons do not become idols.

Another good distinction between natural theology and a theology of nature is that the former is philosophical and engages our problem-solving dualistic mindset while the latter is robustly relational and nondual. Even some of the best theologies of nature, like Jack Haught’s aesthetic teleology and Joe Bracken’s divine matrix, with all of their sophisticated references to the biological and cosmological sciences, are poetic ventures, metaphorical adventures, much more akin to St. Francis’ hymns to nature than, for example, Gödel’s modal ontological argument.

9 ) What do you make of institutional religion and such approaches as involve clerical and hierarchical models?

Well, for starters, we shouldn’t confuse means and ends. And, once we’ve identified the means, we shouldn’t so quickly insist that they are the only means. The Spirit, it seems, is well capable of work-arounds?

Even the hierarchical structures I’m familiar with are conceived in a way that gives primacy to bottom-up dynamics. In other words, in theory, the top-down dynamic is a dissemination of what’s been received from below, not a de novo fabrication emanating from above. When a hierarchy, on occasion, loses this integral relationship or integrity, it is in a state of ex-communication, a reality that travels a two-way street.

10 ) What about interreligious dialogue?

We have made progress in moving from our exclusivistic ecclesiocentrisms to a more inclusivistic Christocentrism. I think our next good step is a pneumatological inclusivism, which needn’t bracket our Christology but should lead, at least, with the Spirit.

Those of us with a radically incarnational view of reality can affirm the Spirit at work in science, philosophy and culture and can recognize the truth, beauty and goodness realized on the human journey, which is pervasively graced. And we can recognize the value-realizations that have been augmented by our great religious traditions, affirming the efficacies and recognizing the inefficacies in their attempts to foster intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious growth, development and conversion. We need to dialogue regarding what we’re getting right and what we’re getting wrong — not preoccupied with heavenly destinations, but — in order to give God the greatest possible glory and in order to compassionately console and help others to travel more swiftly and with less hindrance on life’s journey, realizing life’s deepest values and greatest goods.

Footnote: Walker Percy spoke of Kierkegaard’s On the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle:

Like the readings that mean most to you, what it did was confirm something I suspected but that it took Søren Kierkegaard to put into words: that what the greatest geniuses in science, literature, art and philosophy utter are sentences which convey truths sub specie aeternitatis, that is to say, sentences which can be confirmed by appropriate methods and by anyone, anywhere, any time. But only the apostle can utter sentences which can be accepted on the authority of the apostle, that is , his credentials, sobriety, trustworthiness as a newsbearer. These sentences convey not knowledge sub specie aeternitatis but news.

The Art of Fiction XCVII: Walker Percy by Zoltan Abadi-Nagi/1986.

This reiterates the distinction between our cosmology as knowledge sub specie aeternitatis and our axiology as Good News.

Click on the Questions symbol above to meet Bill & Jacki Dahl, whom I “met” via Ron Cole!

Bill & Jacki Dahl

Send article as PDF to

This Post is a Syncroblog. Join our Syncroblogathon by blogging on the question:

“What does it mean to express faith, hope, and love in the 21st Century (or postmodern world)?”

And then cross-reference the following links in your post:

Mike Morrell – Faith. Hope. And Love. (A Syncroblog)

Jeff Goins – Faith, Hope, and Love in the 21st Century: A Manifesto?

John Sylvest – I’ve Already Got Truth, Beauty, & Goodness! Why Bother with Faith, Hope & Love?

Matt Snyder – Faith, Hope, and Love: Expressed in Simplicity

To answer this most concretely —

We should amplify the risks we took when we moved from our exclusivistic ecclesiocentrisms to a more inclusivistic Christocentricism by exploring a robust pneumatological inclusivism in our interreligious dialogue. Put simply, we should take more risks in our faith outlook by being more open regarding where we  expect to find the Spirit at work in our world, for example, among other peoples, in both sacred and secular settings, thereby augmenting the value to be realized from a broader ecumenism.

We should amplify the risks we’ve already taken liturgically being more open to how it is the Spirit can form our desires, recognizing that we can fruitfully adopt the spiritual technology of other religions, such as certain asceticisms, disciplines and practices, without necessarily adopting their conclusions, thus augmenting the value to be mined from desiring the Kingdom above all else and being sensitive to its less visible manifestations.

We should amplify the risks involved in our dualistic, problem-solving mind, with its empirical, rational, practical and moral approach to reality to engage reality more holistically and integrally with our nondual mind and its contemplative stance thus augmenting the value of relationship to God, others, the environment and even self.

We should amplify the risks involved in our moral ventures by moving beyond our legalistic approach to moral realities in society to a more social justice-oriented approach, striving less for a theocratic and coercive moral statism and more for the establishment of the Kingdom via our successful  institutionalization of the corporal works of mercy, thus augmenting the value to be mined on behalf of those who’ve been marginalized.

We should amplify the risks involved in conducting a more scientifically rigorous Biblical exegesis, unafraid of historical-critical methods, literary criticism and honest Jesus scholarship, thus augmenting the value of the Good News for all people of the world through enhanced reliability, credibility and authoritativeness.

We should amplify the risks involved in ministering to the world through noninstitutional vehicles, affirming them as partners and mining the value they create in the ecclesiological models they afford us, egalitarian models that are free of clericalism, paternalism, hierarchicalism, colonialism, parochialism, sexism, institutionalism and so on, thereby augmenting the value to be realized from a more dutiful engagement of the Sensus Fidelium.

Be Not Afraid. Take risks for God’s sake!

For those interested in the theological development of the above-described Risk-based Approach to Value-Realization:

Faith, hope and love are adventures in that they involve risk or what Pascal called a wager. And it is a grand cosmic adventure in which we are invited to participate as we unconditionally assent to the proposition that the pursuits of truth, beauty and goodness are their own reward. This quest, itself, becomes our grail. This journey becomes our destination.

As we observe this 13.7 billion year old universe, notwithstanding humankind’s cumulative advances in science, philosophy, culture and religion, questions still beg regarding the initial, boundary and limit conditions of the cosmos. There is, however, an overarching narrative that begins to address these questions. It is the story of Emergence.

Emergence gifts the universe with an increasing complexity as its novel structures and properties present the beauty that surrounds us. It is a complexity, however, that is willing to run the risk of disintegration. The greater the number of bifurcations and permutations involved in any given system, the more fragile. And, the more fragile, the more beautiful. Put most simply, an emergent cosmos amplifies risk and thus augments beauty.

These are realities we can understand without the benefit of special divine revelation. A descriptive human science queries reality asking: What is that? Our evaluative human culture inquires: What’s that to us? And our normative human philosophy then aspires to answer the ensuing question: How do we best acquire or avoid that?

The answers we have derived for these perennial questions take the form of truth, beauty and goodness. And while each individual asks these questions everyday, as radically social animals, these values are realized in community. Because we are radically finite, hence needy,  we form communities of value-realizers. Thus we talk about the scientific community, philosophic community, cultural community and so on. Each such community, in its pursuit of value, in its own way, embarks on a risk-taking adventure, amplifying risks in order to augment our human value-realizations of truth, beauty and goodness.

The scientist, for her part, ventures forth with hypotheses that are inherently falsifiable by design. The philosopher, for his part, articulates a provisional closure, which is represented as this school or that. Human culture has been a veritable laboratory, wherein our falsifiable sciences and provisional philosophies have played out as anthropological explorations, as we know, sometimes to humankind’s utmost benefit but, all to often, to humanity’s everlasting dismay.

Before we introduce competing meta-narratives, or axes of interpretation of reality, we already observe our communities of value-realization in pursuit of the intrinsically rewarding values of truth, beauty and goodness. And we observe science, philosophy and culture harvesting these values in abundance in what is an inherently spiritual quest. Before our interpretive narratives (religions) are introduced, our descriptive, evaluative and normative narratives are in place, as a cosmology, amplifying risks and thereby augmenting our value-realizations. In this regard, they might very well be considered both necessary and sufficient.  Still, as the ultimate value-realizer, our species might naturally wonder: Is there, perhaps, more?

In our distinctly human way, most of us not only wonder but also pursue more truth, more beauty and more goodness, than is already realizable by science, culture and philosophy. In so doing, we ask: How does all of that tie-together? And this re-ligation query is a distinctly religious question. It is, then, our axiology.

Now, if science, culture and philosophy, each in their own way, comprise a  risk-venture in pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness, amplifying our epistemic, normative and evaluative risks toward the end of augmenting these intrinsically rewarding values, then what inheres in the very fabric of the religious quest is a further amplification of risks. These amplified risks are nothing less, then, than faith, hope and love.

It is no accident, then, that the world’s literature has ubiquitously employed the journey, the quest, the adventure as its root metaphor for the religious quest and that its preferred allegory has been an erotic love that risks all for the sake of all.

We’ve come a long way in this presentation without addressing the postmodern influence on our 21st Century expressions of faith, hope and love. And if you’ve hung in here with me thus far, know that we’re now on the threshold of describing the postmodern prescription for what has ailed our modernistic religious quest.

The chief problem with the modernistic approach to the religious quest  is that it lost touch with the essential risk-taking nature of faith, hope and love. Perhaps due to our natural human anxiety to banish all mystery, perhaps due to our rather feeble ability to tolerate ambiguity, and perhaps due to our insatiable need to either resolve, dissolve or evade all paradox, humanity has largely surrendered to a neurotically-induced hubris that imagines that all mystery has thus been comprehended, all ambiguity has thus been eliminated and all paradox is subject to either synthetic resolution, perspectival dissolution or practical evasion.

The practical upshot of such hubris is that we begin to imagine that there are no risks to undertake, much less amplify, no further values to pursue, much less augment, no quests to launch, no journeys on which to embark. Life, then, is no longer an adventure.

The chief malady of such a malaise is that an insidious ennui settles over us. It’s not so much that we think we have all the right answers, which is bad enough, but that we imagine that we even have all the right questions. Our science devolves into scientism. Our culture caves into a practical nihilism. Our philosophies decay into a sterile rationalism. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether our planet will go out with a silent ecological whimper or a fiery nuclear holocaust. Our religion, for its part, gets hyper-eschatological with heavenly notions that are of little earthly use. A once enchanted world becomes inhabited with terribly disenchanted denizens.

Modernism, in its pretense, bottled up the elixir of risk and offered us instead a vile concoction that it mistook for some type of truth serum, a formula with all the answers, which diluted any risk. It’s ingredients included a fideism, which walled itself in to a house of language game mirrors claiming immunity for religion to cultural critique. It also mixed in an inordinate amount of theological nonrealism due to a hyper-active dialectical imagination that approached God as not only wholly incomprehensible (which He is), but as not even partly intelligible (which She is). It suggested that no reasons could be given for religious belief as if all reasons necessarily derived from empirical and rational argumentation with their informative propositions and epistemic warrants, when, so much of human reasoning, instead, is prudential and moral with performative significance and normative justification. Put much more simply, modernism overemphasized reasons of the head and relegated reasons of the heart to history’s propositional dustbin.

A radically deconstructive postmodernism, in one of philosophy’s most tragic ironies, ends up being nothing more than a hypermodernistic outlook, with great hubris putting a priori limits on human knowledge … except, well, for one singular exception, which would be the limits they refuse to place on their own anthropology. In their caricature of all human communication as language games, the Wittgensteinian fideists misappropriate Wittgenstein as they saw off the epistemological limbs wherein their own ontological eggs are nested. In their anxiety to annihilate metaphysics, both the social construction theorists and the scientistic cabal do away with the very analogia that fuel both highly theoretical science and speculative cosmology. This is just as insidious as the tautologies that were inhabited by those who bought into Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and others, whose anthropological conclusions were buried in their reductionistic premises and hidden in their cynical definitions.

None of this is to deny that we do not all inhabit elaborate tautologies with their various circular references, causal disjunctions, infinite regressions and question begging. It is to suggest that not all tautologies are equally taut and that we can and should attempt to adjudicate between them based on such anthropological metrics as provided by Lonergan’s conversions (expanded by Gelpi): intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious. And this is not to claim that such sociologic metrics are readily available or easily interpretable but, come on folks, some religious cohorts are rather transparently dysfunctional, wouldn’t ya say? And judging different approaches to faith by employing such pragmatic criteria is admittedly not robustly truth-conducive but it is certainly reasonable to imagine that it is truth-indicative. Our inability to finally discriminate between all religious approaches, some which end up being quite equiplausible, even if not equiprobable, does not make our approach moot; rather, it makes it problematical. It does not mean that we do not have reasons (and very good reasons, at that) to embrace one faith approach and to eschew another; it only means that those reasons will not be universally compelling.

Faith, hope and love in the 21st Century will look like an adventure. It will look like a risk-filled adventure where believers run the cosmic risk of disintegration in self-emptying kenotic love. Like Pip in Great Expectations, we will embark on a search for our Benefactor. Like Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, we will be a people of hope, always looking in expectant anticipation for what’s around the river’s bend. Like the cosmos, itself, and with the grand Cosmic Adventurer, we will actively participate, not without some moaning and groaning, in the great act of giving birth.

Faith, hope and love in the 21st Century will look a lot more like that time of enchantment in the early days of Christianity, when the apostles and disciples and closest confidants of Jesus, Himself, took great risks in following Him. It will look a lot less like that self-righteous certitude of fundamentalistic religion, scientistic philosophy or even, ironically, a social constructionist nonrealism. These are, in the end, very pessimistic anthropologies whether gnostic or agnostic. We simply cannot a priori know how knowable or unknowable reality will turn out to be. In makes a lot more sense to believe that, as we progressively enhance our modeling power of reality, albeit in a very fallibilist way, our concepts and constructs and categories are making some of our tautologies much more taut vis a vis reality writ large. And this includes our God-concepts, which, in-principle, must be inherently vague. If there is a grand telic design and we actively participate in same, there is every good reason to hypothesize that the inexorable advance of human knowledge gifts us with a more coherent outlook on both proximate and ultimate reality. To the extent we understand reality better, the analogs we apply to ultimate reality will improve.

This is not to deny that such analogs will invoke an infinite number of dissimilarities over against the similarities they will reveal. It is to affirm that those similarities, however meager, have profound existential import because they pertain to a VERY BIG reality, indeed. Over against any radically positive theology (kataphasis) of the gnostics, fundamentalists and rationalists, and over against any radically negative theology (apophasis) of the agnostics, nonrealists and fideists, a postmodern theology eschews both an epistemic hubris and an excessive epistemic humility in favor of a Goldilocks approach that is just right, an epistemic holism with an integral approach to reality.

In our postmodern milieu, science, culture, philosophy and religion are intertwined. When one advances, they all advance. When one regresses, they all regress. This is not to say that they are not otherwise autonomous methodologies. A postmodern theology recognizes and affirms this autonomy. It is to say that these approaches to reality are integrally-related in every human value-realization. They are, then, methodologically-autonomous but axiologically-integral. Enhanced modeling power of reality, whether in science, culture, philosophy or religion, translates into an enhanced modeling power of reality writ large. We best not set these value-pursuits over against or in competition.

A modernist rationalism is a failed risk-management technique, attempting to domesticate this risk and ameliorate its adventuresome nature. A modernist fideism is a failed risk-elimination technique, attempting to immunize faith from critique by reducing it to mere expression. Only a constructive postmodern approach can successfully retrieve, revive and renew our sense of adventure, enchantment and risk-taking, inviting us anew to journey on a quest for a grail worthy of our ineradicable human aspirations for more, a LOT more!

Thus we amplify our risk in our pursuit of truth into a faith, often articulated in creed; in our pursuit of beauty into a hope, often celebrated in the cultivation of liturgy and ritual; in our pursuit of goodness in love, often preserved in our codes and laws; in our pursuit of community, often enjoyed in our fellowship and unity of believers. Thus humankind augments truth, beauty, goodness and unity in creed, cult, code and community. Thus we participate in the grand cosmic adventure, amplifying risks and thereby augmenting values, courageously running the risk of disintegration as God’s fragile, but beautiful creatures.

Footnote: A Relevant Ping-Back from Mike Morrell’s Zoecarnate: ‘All Will Be Well’ – Polyanna Platitude or Responsible Mystical Theodicy?

Send article as PDF to

The dialectical imagination (think Barth and apophasis) and analogical imagination (think catholic and kataphasis) are best held in a creative tension where neither drowns the other. Wittgenstein correctly affirmed the methodological autonomy of science, philosophy and religion, but a Wittgensteinian fideism fails to recognize that these different horizons of human concern are axiologically integral, which is to suggest that they mutually influence each other.

Whether we employ a language game paradigm or an ontology with a chosen root metaphor, these human endeavors, while not logically-related, are very much intellectually-related. And this is to further suggest that religion is not merely expressive but also interpretive and to further recognize that it is not immune to cultural criticism employing prudential, pragmatic and practical criteria, which in themselves are at least weakly inferential or truth-indicative even if not robustly inferential and truth-conducive.

The dialectical imagination enjoys a certain primacy in God-talk and it critiques the analogical imagination in that, where God is concerned, we employ the weakest of analogies in metaphor, which express dissimilarities that differ infinitely vis a vis any similarities they may otherwise invoke.

The analogical imagination critiques the dialectical insofar as the exclusively dialectical would so distance God in a radical apophaticism as would render all God-talk incomprehensible and suggests that, however meager our metaphorical knowledge, it is precisely because we are grappling with a reality on the order of an infinitude that such knowledge becomes increasingly significant to us who, as radically finite creatures, greet such knowledge recognizing that it has profound existential import to us in our human condition.

This is to say, then, while our dialectical approach properly invokes God’s utter incomprehensibility, our analogical approach affirms His infinite intelligibility. God dwells in ineluctable mystery and it would drown us if we tried to drink it all in, but we can taste and see His goodness in drops because He is not wholly unintelligible. It is a false dichotomy, indeed, that juxtaposes a choice between incomprehensibility and a final theory of everything. Rather, we move slowly but inexorably in our partial apprehensions and with our fallibilist provisional closures regarding ultimate reality, closures that do not aspire to the level of robust theory but, instead, to the presentation of a rather vague heuristic.

A radical apophaticism and hyper-active dialectical imagination quickly devolve into  such a theological nonrealism as will cut large swaths out of our Christian tradition, leading finally to insidious metaphysical and moral nonrealisms, too, which support nothing, in the end, but a practical nihilism and sad cynicism. This is existentialism, to be sure, but not of the Christian variety. It is Sartre and Camus and not Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard.

In science and philosophy, we evaluate paradox and attempt to resolve it dialectically in synthesis, or to dissolve it perspectivally via paradigm shift, or to even evade it practically, such as by ignoring it. When it comes to life’s most ultimate concerns and deepest mysteries, any attempts to resolve, dissolve or evade paradox are futile. What we do rather, such as where God-talk is involved, is we exploit paradox, transformatively, nurturing the creative tensions that present in the mutual critique, for example, between our dialectical and analogical imaginations.

While it is certainly true that our existential move into faith involves an unconditional assent, quite often it will be pragmatic arguments that lead us to the ocean’s edge and prudential criteria that will inspire our leap, where we discover the buoyancy of faith. And we will be thus tempted by the psalmist to taste and see the goodness of the Lord. And sometimes our human predicament will make us feel as if we’re about to drown. But when Jesus knew for certain, only drowning men could see Him, he said all men shall be sailors, then, until the sea shall free them (Leonard Cohen). So, our life of faith will very much require us to many times praise the Lord, anyway.

And so we believe with a certain resiliency despite life’s tragedies. And we nurture God’s analogical goodness in a creative tension with His infinitely dissimilar dialectical goodness, exploiting the paradox transformatively, neither banishing the mystery with our ill-conceived aspirations to an exhaustive theodicy nor refraining from our frail theodicies, which, in the end, must properly retain the element of mystery.

Love is not a syllogism. God is not an argument. But incomprehensibility and unintelligibility are two radically different semiotic realities. A deeply compassionate pastoral sensitivity will help us to hold our God-analogs loosely without letting go of our apophatic dialectic and to nurture the creative tension in the paradox presented by natural evil in a world created by, yes, a good God, as we suffer with God and transform our suffering co-creatively.

Only a puerile iconoclasm inspired by a seriously misguided theological nonrealism would try to snatch these consoling God-analogs, however simplistic, out of a suffering world’s hands. Cajoling people with the distinctions of theo-esoterica in an attempt to dispossess them of the exoteric apprehensions of their God is at best an exercise in pedantry and at worst may leave others feeling not edified but bullied. Finally, it’s just plain philosophically indefensible to resolve such paradox in a wholly dialectical manner.

Note: In applying scholastic notations like possible, plausible, probable, certain, uncertain, improbable, implausible and impossible to arguments and propositions regarding our ultimate concerns, while it may be true that we are at most dealing with equiplausible or equiprobable propositions and while it may also be true that the lex dubia non obligat axiom applies, meaning one has no obligation in conscience, it is manifestly not true that one can find no reasons to assent to one proposition rather than another, especially employing pragmatic criteria and prudential & relational (trust) arguments, which also happen to have normative epistemic force as truth-indicative criteria. Such existential moves might be transrational or suprarational or super-reasonable, but they need not be irrational or arational or without reason.

Send article as PDF to

Rev. Bosco Peters blogs this week: There’s Probably No God?

He describes a situation:

New Zealand is following other countries in having an “atheist bus campaign”. Atheists are raising $NZ10,000 to mimic the UK campaign and place “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” on several buses in major New Zealand cities.

But then Rev. Peters suggests:

Rather than fear, or tut-tut, this campaign, I welcome the opportunity for some serious dialogue.

I agree with his suggestion and offer my comment below. Please click on the photo, above, to visit Liturgy.com and to read his excellent post and comments.

It is true that the “New” atheists engage but a caricature of authentic belief. And they, in turn, offer us naught but a caricature of a more philosophically rigorous atheism.

Those of us who subscribe to a radically incarnational view of reality certainly want to affirm that humankind can indeed be good for goodness’ sake. We can and do pursue truth, beauty, goodness and unity because such a pursuit is its own reward. Of course, we also view our existential orientations to these intrinsically rewarding values as transcendental imperatives. We believe that humans can recognize and realize these values without the benefit of special divine revelation. So, we acknowledge the possibility of an implicit faith even as we maintain that, with an explicit faith, believers can move more swiftly and with less hindrance toward these values on life’s transformative journey.

I enjoy natural theology, metaphysics and philosophy but acknowledge that beyond our evidential, rational and presuppositional arguments, which, at the most, establish the reasonableness of faith, it is our existential experience of God that gifts us with a confident assurance in the things we hope for. Beyond our abstract speculative formulations and cognitive propositions, it is our participatory imagination that best engages reality, not just religiously but also scientifically and philosophically and relationally. This imagination is shaped and formed by liturgies of the mall, the marketplace, the stadium and our worship, where we learn (and finally decide) to most desire one Kingdom or another.

So, we do not even want to deny that one can live a life of abundance and realize life’s great values without an explicit belief in God (even as we have our own faith-based interpretations of why this may be so and Who makes this possible). Neither would we deny, however, that a life of faith is a life of SUPERabundance, enabling us to journey more swiftly and with less hindrance along The Way.

This discussion continues at this link>>> (more…)

Send article as PDF to

In the old thomist tradition, distinctions were drawn between an essentialist or idealist interpretation and application of Gospel norms and an existentialist or realist interpretation and application of them. This distinction is necessary because we live in a tension where we are undeniably realizing the Kingdom now even as we, as created co-creators, join all of creation in the labor and groaning of the act of giving birth to an ever more full Kingdom realization.

The essentialist understanding seizes upon the efficacies of the Spirit’s help and the Word, itself, proclaimed and lived by faithful witnesses. The existentialist understanding recognizes our human frailty due to our radical finitude and sinfulness and so makes allowances knowing humankind will yet fall short of Gospel ideals. One would not want to say that the essentialist approach is theoretical and the existentialist practical, because one would not want to discourage any courageous persons from living out the Gospel, radically, as prophetic witnesses and lovers of God and all. We can say that the existentialist approach is pastoral, however, looking with compassion and understanding on us in our human condition, helping us to do the best we can.

Concretely, then, for example, this tradition affirms both pacifism and just war principles as legitimate expressions of Gospel ideals. While I am not a pacifist, myself, I am in deep solidarity with and very much supportive of my pacifist sisters and brothers in my denomination and in other traditions. I would not want to live in a world without their voice of prophetic protest and without the witness of their lives. Your sharing of your personal experience with these tensions was depthful and generous.

With respect to the law, the same distinctions apply, I think. Those who eschew any active and coercive legal and political engagements can also serve as authentic voices of prophetic protest and witnesses to the reality of the Kingdom, now among us and yet to come more fully. From a pastoral perspective, consistent with an incarnational outlook, we can also legitimately seek to permeate and improve the temporal order. I am thankful that our US founders integrated religion into the public square, strengthening its influence through nonestablishment and free exercise provisions. This was a healthy response to Enlightenment principles, healthier than the Enlightenment fundamentalism of the Continental experience, where religion was marginalized by secularistic forces.

So, I’m for a robust engagement of religious and metaphysical perspectives in the public square. That’s not what’s wrong per se with the approach of the Manhattan Declaration drafters, in particular, and many on the Religious Right, in general. Where they go wrong, in my view, is two fold: 1) They too often fail to translate their moral stances into a language that would give their moral intuitions a normative impetus for other groups of believers and even unbelievers. 2) They too often give jurisprudential considerations short shrift, emphasizing form over substance, paying too little heed to whether a law will, in actuality, be efficacious and bring about its desired aim, especially in a pluralistic society where demographics reveal a proposed law as not only unenforceable but possibly even counterproductive.

There is a related problem, which is that the failure to successfully translate some religiously-derived moral intuitions results from the fact that certain of those intuitions are philosophically and anthropologically indefensible.

More discussion follows here>>> (more…)

Send article as PDF to

At Jesus Creed, there is a discussion about The Stem Cell Challenge, which evoked my response below.

The Catholic Church does not have a position on ensoulment. Rather, the position is that, for all practical purposes, from the moment of conception, human life is to be treated with all the dignity of a human person. The Catholic teaching office addresses, in different ways, the sanctity of human nature, human life and human persons, and does not recognize a parvity of matter regarding offenses against same. This means that it views all offenses against human nature, life and persons as very grave matter.

Most people (most US Catholics, included) do draw distinctions in the relative gravity of such moral realities. The moral objects of the generative aspects of life (e.g. birth control, masturbation, erotic behaviors) are not deemed equal in significance to those of incipient human life, itself (e.g. abortifacients, embryonic stem cells, cloning, in vitro fertilization). Apparently, for many (most?) people, the moral status of the embryo increases as it advances through gestation from incipient through sentient to sapient human life, such that any human values in competition with the moral value of the embryo (e.g. medical research, life of the mother) must become increasingly more significant if one is to justify its destruction.

The physicalist conception of the soul does not eliminate metaphysics; it advances yet another metaphysical hypothesis. Whether one employs a substance, process or some other root metaphor in one’s metaphysical approach, one will encounter the classical sorite paradox, which asks when an aggregate of individual grains of sand becomes a heap of sand. This paradox results from our conceptual confusion between efficient causation (adding grains of sand, in other words, the gestation process) and logical causation (defining a heap, in other words, a human person).

The substance approach doesn’t square with our moral intuitions because its essentialism (overemphasis on logical causation) cannot account for the changing moral status of the embryo, which most people seem to – not unreasonably – impute. The process approach is equally unsatisfying because its nominalism (overemphasis on efficient causation) is dismissive of our most deeply felt epistemic and moral sensibilities regarding a person’s very identity, in which one’s personhood is grounded, even as a member of Homo sapiens, much less, as an imago Dei.

I mentioned Charles Hartshorne’s concept of nonstrict identity based on asymmetric temporal relations (in another context on another thread) and it has some bearing, here. The practical upshot of this concept is that a human organism’s past, but not its future, comprises its identity, which basically means that, once ensouled, personhood perdures with all of its necessary and sufficient conditions (notwithstanding a lack of certain traits and characteristics such as in sleep and coma) until death.

The collective moral intuitions that seem to ground the apparent consensus regarding the increasing moral status of the embryo as gestation advances, I strongly suspect, do not derive from most people’s metaphysical presuppositions and postures. Instead, they derive more holistically from a constellation of irrational, pre-rational, nonrational, rational and supra-rational dispositions, which honor, even if only implicitly, ethical approaches that are somewhat aretaic (virtue), somewhat deontological, somewhat consequentialist (teleological), somewhat authoritarian & traditional & scriptural, somewhat contractarian and so on. For the most part, then, they are not apposite to formal argumentation with its clearly disambiguated and rigorously defined concepts, apodictic certainties and moral verities, but are more so an assortment of informal arguments, inclinations and dispositions that gift us with probabilistic notions and deeply felt epistemic, aesthetic and moral sensibilities.

We must prescind from our robustly metaphysical approach to a more vague phenomenological perspective, then, which embraces a semiotic realism, while, at the same time avoiding the mutual unintelligibility, incommensurability and occlusivity of the old substance-process, essentialism-nominalism conundrum and associated paradoxes. This is to say that we are realizing values, making meaning and attaining, albeit fallibly, absolute moral truths. We have been gifted by scripture and tradition, reason and experience, with basic moral precepts, profound anthropological truths and theological insights. Beyond the most basic of precepts, however, we need to come together in charity and dialogue to wrestle with some very thorny bioethical issues, remaining open to divine guidance and civil public discourse, wherein the Spirit moves.

Some of the most compelling arguments, then, in the public square, can indeed come from slippery slope appeals and reductio ad absurdum arguments, notwithstanding that they are otherwise considered logical fallacies in formal arguments. We do not enjoy, in my view, the luxury of indubitable formal arguments with apodictic certainties. Metaphysics, in the end, are neither irrelevant nor unimportant, but they are only one rational appeal among many others and, for manifold reasons, generally lack sufficient normative impetus because they are otherwise so descriptively elusive. Some of the most compelling arguments in the public square can come from nonbelievers, even, secularists like Nat Hentoff and Charles Krauthammer.

One can read an excellent consideration of the topic at hand as articulated by Dr. Krauthammer at the following link, which has similar statements by many others on the Bioethics Commission appointed by Bush: Human Cloning and Human Dignity: An Ethical Inquiry – Statement of Dr. Krauthammer

It is for reasons such as those given by Dr. Krauthammer and others, as well as deference to the arguments advanced by the teaching office of my church and other conservative Christian leaders, that I believe that human life is sacred and deserves respect from its inception, requiring compelling reasons when one wants to manipulate it or interfere with it, even therapeutically.

In my view, for all practical purposes, human life should be treated with the dignity of a human person well before the origins of sapience and, absent the most serious consideration and very compelling reasons, should still be considered inviolable well before the origins of sentience. As for the earliest days and weeks following conception, it is difficult to advance a formal metaphysical or theological argument, or even to make a more informal appeal, based on ensoulment or personhood. Still, regarding this early post-conception period, any such considerations and deliberations, in my view, if too casual, could have a morally corrosive effect and so deserve our utmost moral circumspection and dutiful deliberation.

This discussion, now regarding soul & resurrection, continues here >>> (more…)

Send article as PDF to