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?

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 ☼

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…)

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…)

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?

Below are my archived responses to Tony Jones’ question: “What Do Emergence and Pentecostalism Have to Learn from One Another?”. I encourage all to visit that thread on his blog.

It has been said that those who’ve done the best at evangelizing have not always done as well at catechizing and vice versa. While there is danger in overgeneralization, there is often some insight we can gain. To the extent catechesis fosters re-cognition, evangelization fosters real-ization. The first movement is propositional, evidential, rational, presuppositional, moral and practical and the next is existential, experiential and robustly relational. The distinction is between seeing the path and walking it, between conceptual map-making and participatory imagination.

Both the emerging church conversation and pentecostalism do seem, in my view, responses to a modernist rationalism. Interestingly, my own reflections on these matters have not so much dealt with the emergent and pentecostal as recent phenomena via a vis the postmodern critique, but have employed a postmodern (postfoundational) approach to bring together emergence as a useful heuristic device as has been appropriated in the hard and human sciences, in general, and a pentecostal perspective as gathered from the Biblical narrative re: the implications of the Incarnation & Pentecost. So, there are two contexts that interest me, one being an overarching narrative and the other a specific historical event.

Regarding the recent phenomena, to some extent, pentecostalism has better instilled first fervor and a fully realized first naivete. Emergence has perhaps better served as a vehicle for 2nd naivete. This works much like the Zen formulation of first, there is a mountain (pre-critically), then there is no mountain (critically), then there is (post-critical). It might be rendered: first there is a premodernist essentialism (naive realism & enchantment), then there is a modernist nominalism (nonrealism & disenchantment), then there is a constructive postmodernism (critical realism & re-enchantment).

Emergent and pentecostal perspectives, held together in a creative tension, provide an answer to modernist excesses that have led to a/theological nonrealism, moral relativism and practical nihilism, as well as sterile scholastic rationalisms and Wittgensteinian fideisms. Taken together, we get a more holistic theological anthropology that mines all of the value to be realized from our pre-modern, modern and postmodern experiences without the need to cut out and invalidate large swaths of our Christian tradition.

We do not want to lose our “First, there is a mountain”-encounter of Pentecost and the fire of first fervor gifted by our participatory, analogical imagination, nor do we want to lose the “Then there is no mountain-recognition” provided by our conceptual map-making and dialectical imagination, as we move into the reappropriation of “Then there is” and we realize through our 2nd naivete and pneumatological imagination that everything that’s old is new again, as we see the original realities come alive in inculturated forms that reveal that the Good News is as fresh and vibrant and relevant to humankind as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

I have seen some in their Pentecostal experience get rather stuck in a pre-critical first naivete. I have encountered some who, from an Emergent stance, have gotten stuck in a radically deconstructive nonrealism, what some have called Evangellyfish, washed up on postmodern shores, unable to get fully back into the swim. Those who severely critique both movements are generally describing these elements of Pentecostalism and emergence, which are mere caricatures of what these movements are and can become as they exploit the creative tension that they offer each other in ongoing and ever-fruitful mutual critique.

We have enjoyed the fruits, in interreligious dialogue, as our rather exclusivistic ecclesiocentrisms have slowly yielded on the ecumenical front to a more inclusivistic Christocentrism. Without forsaking our own Christocentric stances, we might foster an even more fruitful interreligious dialogue by opening same with a pneumatological inclusivism. Pentecostals & Charismatics have led the way on such mutual understanding within Christianity, sharing our experience of Spirit. This may be the model for advancing dialogue and understanding between the Great Traditions, too? Pentecostals might have some suggestions for a way forward.

Pentecostals also have something to offer regarding emergence, human anthropology, epistemology and the science and religion dialogue. Counterintuitive on the surface? Scroll down to this list of articles in the Dec 2008 Zygon: Pentecostal Voices in the Theology-Science Conversation .

Finally, I’m sure most have at least heard of the distinction between our dialectical and analogical imaginations. Amos Yong has made some proposals regarding the pneumatological imagination and the difference it can make in one’s approach to reality. My own panSEMIOentheism, what I call a radical emergence, is grounded in my experience in the Charismatic Renewal in the 70’s.

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.

Below, I will employ a Strategic Plan paradigm to characterize and organize the emerging church conversation employing what might, at first, appear to be characteristically Catholic categories. In doing so, I hope to emphasize how this conversation proceeds more from a consideration of questions rather than answers, practices rather than conclusions, methods rather than systems.

While there is certainly an implicit assumption that one will take from these conversations some best practices, which will then be integrated into some otherwise disparate ecclesial systems, we hope to show how such approaches as descriptive science, normative philosophy, evaluative culture and interpretive religion can be methodologically autonomous even while, at the same time, being axiologically integral, which is to say that each method is necessary, none alone sufficient, in every human value-realization.

For example, put more plainly, how can we answer the normative question How does one best acquire or avoid that? without first answering the descriptive question What is that? much less the evaluative question What’s that to us? (I say to “us” rather than “me” in recognition of our radically social nature). And we dare not ignore our interpretive grand narratives, which, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse, contextualize all of these questions with their (often implicit, very often unconscious even) answers to the question How does all of this re-ligate or tie-back together?

Before laying out a Cathlimergent approach, I want to build a conceptual bridge to the approaches taken by many of our Protestant sisters and brothers. Dialogue about prescriptive realities is very much dependent on fair and accurate descriptive representations (avoiding unnecessary strawmen and ad hominems). When it comes to good scholarship and civil discourse, few have gone about it better than the author of Deep Church, Jim Belcher,  so I will employ his categories in our bridge-building effort.

To wit, when Jim —

prescribes Deep Truth in response to a captivity to Enlightenment rationalism he’s breaking open our category of normative philosophy;
prescribes Deep Preaching in response to ineffective preaching he’s breaking open our category of orthodoxy vis a  vis boundary establishment and defense;
prescribes Deep Evangelism in response to an overemphasis on belief before belonging he’s breaking open our category of orthodoxy vis a vis inclusivism and boundary negotiation;
prescribes Deep Worship in response to uncontextualized worship he’s breaking open our category of orthopathy;
prescribes Deep Gospel in response to a narrow view of salvation he’s breaking open our category of orthopraxy in relationship to orthodoxy;
prescribes Deep Ecclesiology in response to weak ecclesiology he’s breaking open our category of orthocommunio vis a vis church as institution and tradition;
prescribes Deep Culture in response to tribalism he’s breaking open our category of orthocommunio vis a vis church as organism, in the world, transcending boundaries to permeate and improve the temporal order by being tribal not tribalistic (cf. Rohr).

The emerging church conversation is lyrical in a sense as a pattern presents that reveals a fugue-like interplay of boundary establishment, boundary defense, boundary negotiation and boundary transcendence.

Does everyone come out singing the same lyrics even if we all seem to be humming the same melody? Of course not! But there’s a not too distant drumbeat that has us all marching, sometimes swiftly with little hindrance, often bumbling and stumbling, to the same beat and beckoning us into a banquet hall where the banner over us all is love.

To some extent, boundary establishment is largely a discursive, descriptive enterprise where orthodoxy enjoys its moment and has its say; it describes such as our essential creeds,  theological anthropology and social ontology (marriage, children, family, institutions, etc). Boundary defense is a normative enterprise where orthopraxy exerts its influence in loving and compassionate action ordered to the end of orthocommunio or authentic unity in community, where we realize our telic aim of boundary transcendence.

None of these boundary dynamics enjoy any efficacy in and of themselves, however, apart from the boundary negotiation that occurs in orthopathy, where our desires, themselves, are first shaped and formed by liturgy, whether of the mall, the marketplace or Eucharist. (I cannot more highly recommend Jamie Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom, in this regard.)

Liturgy, then, nurturing our nondual, contemplative stance, enjoys an epistemic primacy in the fugal movement of orthopathic, orthodoxic, orthopraxic and orthocommunal moments. This is to recognize that sacrament and song and psalmody and story-telling and gathering for bread-breaking came first in our tradition, our ecclesial phylogeny, so to speak, and that it remains first, even now, in each of our lives, our spiritual ontogeny, in other words, as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny in religion as well as biology and every other emergent reality.

A question that begs regarding this exercise is if we are primarily about finding questions, exploring methods and exchanging practices, where might the theoretical rubber hit the road in next proposing concrete ecclesial changes?

Where I hope to take my questions and concerns is here:

American Catholic Council

The outline below is meant to be comprehensive but not exhaustive. In each category are sample strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities and sample resources. It is intended as a catalyst for constructive conversation and a guideline for dialogue, a conceptual bridge-builder or heuristic device. It is expected that you will engage this outline, perhaps even suggesting an entirely different paradigm, certainly adding different strengths, weaknesses, threats, opportunities and resources, raising new questions and concerns, breaking open new categories.

I’m a retired Bank CEO so thought, immediately, that this resembles strategic planning. A spiritual director might look and see a prayer ladder of lectio, meditatio,  operatio, contemplatio. A social media consultant might see a P2P platform or a viral meme. A conflict resolution mediator might see (Greg, what DO you see?) … What, then, do YOU see?

So, Catholics and nonCatholics, alike, please join us at Cathlimergent!

What’s Up? wussup? or WOTS up?: the Emerging Church Conversation as Strategic Planning Exercise (Risk Management)

EXTERNAL OPPORTUNITIES & THREATS

Axiological Visions as amplification of risks (through beliefs) ordered toward augmentation of value thru:

DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE (a cosmological methodology) asking What’s that?

Threats:
Scientism

Opportunities:
Technological Advance
Dualistic, problem-solving approach

Resources:
The Cosmic Adventure: Science, Religion and the Quest for Purpose by John F. Haught

Institute on Religion in an Age of Science

Metanexus

Zygon Center for Religion and Science

EVALUATIVE CULTURE (an axiological methodology) asking What’s that to us?

Threats:
Practical Nihilism
Consumerism
Narcissism

Opportunities:
Story-telling
Music & Dramatic Arts

Resources:

Inter Mirifica, Decree On the Means of Social Communication, 1963.

Gaudium et Spes, Pastoral Constitution On the Church In the Modern World,1965.

Ad Gentes, Decree On the Mission Activity of the Church, 1965.

NORMATIVE PHILOSOPHY (a cosmological methodology) asking How do we acquire or avoid that?

Threats:
Enlightenment Rationalism – naïve realism
Radically Deconstructive Postmodernism

Opportunities:
Critical Realisms thru weak foundationalism and nonfoundational (fallibilism) & postfoundational epistemologies
Semiotic Realism

Resources:
Donald L. Gelpi, S.J.

Centre of Theology and Philosophy

INTERPRETIVE RELIGION & IDEOLOGY (an axiological methodology) asking How does all of this re-ligate or tie-back together?

Threats:
Religious Fundamentalism
Enlightenment Fundamentalism
Colonialism
Paternalism

Opportunities:
Ecumenism
Inter-religious & Inter-ideological Dialogue

Resources:
Dialogue Institute

Ecumene

David Group International

Francis X. Clooney, S.J.

Innerexplorations

Dignitatis Humanae, Declaration On Religious Freedom, 1965.

Monastic Interreligious Dialogue

INTERNAL STRENGTHS & WEAKNESSES

Religion as a further amplification of risk ordered toward the further augmentation of value thru:

ORTHODOXY & TRUTH ARTICULATED IN CREED (DOGMA) or boundary establishment

Weaknesses:
Dogmatism
Ecclesiocentric Exclusivism

Strengths:
Pneumatocentric Vision
Christocentric Inclusivism
Theocentric Inclusivism
Honest Jesus Scholarship (cf. Rohr)

Resources:
Dei Verbum, Dogmatic Constitution On Divine Revelation, 1965.

Fides et Ratio

Gravissimum Educationis, Declaration On Christian Education, 1965.

Unitatis Redintegratio, Decree on Ecumenism, 1964.

Orientalium Ecclesiarum, Decree On the Catholic Churches of the Eastern Rite,1964.

Nostra Aetate, Declaration On the Relation Of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, 1965.

ORTHOPATHY & BEAUTY CELEBRATED & CULTIVATED (CULT / RITUAL) IN LITURGY or boundary negotiation

Weaknesses:
Ritualism
Dualistic Approach
Traditionalism

Strengths:
Retrieval, Renewal, Revival of Tradition
Contemplative Stance
Nonduality

Resources:
Center for Action and Contemplation

Fors Clavigera (Jamie Smith)

Brother David Steindl-Rast

Christian Nonduality

Cynthia Bourgeault

Contemplative Outreach

Worship Blog

The Website of Unknowing

Shalomplace

Sacrosanctum concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, 1963.

ORTHOPRAXY & GOODNESS PRESERVED IN CODE (LAW) or boundary defense

Weaknesses:
Legalism

Strengths:
Social Justice

Resources:
Religion Online – Social Issues

Sojourners

Center for Action and Contemplation

ORTHOCOMMUNIO & UNITY ENJOYED IN FELLOWSHIP or boundary transcendence

Weaknesses:

Institutionalism, Heirarchicalism,Patriarchalism, Sexism

Strengths:

Magisterial Reform
Democratization
Organic Growth
Noninstitutional Vehicles

Resources:
Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution On the Church, 1964.

Christus Dominus, Decree Concerning the Pastoral Office of Bishops In the Church, 1965.

Perfectae Caritatis, Decree On Renewal of Religious Life, 1965.

Optatam Totius, Decree On Priestly Training, 1965.

Presbyterorum Ordinis, Decree On the Ministry and Life of Priests, 1965.

Apostolicam Actuositatem, Decree On the Apostolate of the Laity, 1965.

GENERAL RESOURCES

Brian D. McLaren

Commonweal

Emergent Village

Emerging Women

Per Caritatem

Phyllis Tickle

Post Christian

Radical Emergence

Transmillenial

Zoecarnate

Anglimergent

Boulder Integral

Catholica

Emerging Church Portal (international)

Phyllis Tickle

Taming the Wolf

Thomas Merton Center

Virtual Chapel

We must remain mindful of an important distinction re: so-called common views, does one mean a view commonly held by academics & theologians or that held by the majority of persons no matter their education. That will be in play, below. Another critical distinction is that between the Catholic hierarchy or magisterial teaching office (a/k/a Rome) versus mainstream theologians versus even what the faithful (sensus fidelium) actually believe and practice.

Perhaps the most critical distinction in play, however, is that between more progressive and more traditional believers. At the extreme, progressives have a tendency, it seems, to treat what might really be essential or core as accidental or peripheral. For their part, ultra-traditionalists have a tendency to treat what might really be accidental or peripheral as essential or core.

A question that begs, then, is what could one possibly mean by the qualifier REALLY core or peripheral. While it is true that, in addition to Scripture & Tradition, Faith & Reason, Mysticism & Experience, Catholics have another leg to our stool called the Magisterium or hierarchical teaching office, in THEORY the Magisterium is NOT structured as a TOP-DOWN reality, although IN PRACTICE, that dynamic does seem to be in effect, at least in part, because their’s is a “temporal” power of the purse and of juridical authority that very much controls the destiny of many people’s lives vis a vis their expression of and experience of church. Being less abstract: 1) women cannot be ordained 2) some priests must remain celibate 3) some politicians get visibly interdicted at the communion rail 4) some ex-priests cannot teach in a parochial school because they weren’t laicized via a formal dispensation 5) some divorced and remarried teachers, similarly, are turned away from church employment because they did not obtain a marriage annulment.

In theory though, the Magisterium is only supposed to articulate the faith and morals that it has faithfully, diligently and dutifully observed via an active listening process, whereby it has discerned, BOTTOM-UP, what has already been received through the aid of the Holy Spirit by the Faithful, the sensus fidelium. In other words, the universal church asks: What is the sense of the faithful? And the Magisterium, speaking on our behalf, should respond with what the church, broadly conceived, has properly gathered and practiced via scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Let’s just say that many of us recognize that, just like with scriptural exegesis and interpreting God’s Word, this process of interpreting the sensus fidelium and articulating its beliefs is a tad more problematical than many, including those both in the hierarchy and the laity, seem able to imagine.

What do I think is going on?

Catholic progressives, both Roman and Anglican, are more closely related hermeneutically to each other than they are to their coreligionists in their respective denominations. Same thing with our traditionalist brothers and sisters. Increasingly, I have found that progressive Roman and Anglican catholics have a GREAT deal in common with much of liberal Protestantism and the emerging church conversation(s). This is to say that we are in large agreement regarding essentials vs accidentals, core vs peripheral beliefs. I am in much more agreement with the Anglican approach to moral doctrine, church disciplines and church polity than I am with my own Roman tradition, but these are not essentials in my view, while our creeds, our sacraments, our liturgical traditions and incarnational outlooks are. Otherwise, out of personal integrity, I’d have to offer myself up in the recent prisoner swap (yes, that’s a euphemism for a recent impolitic event).

What makes one distinctly catholic?

It is not atonement theory. Most Franciscans, following Scotus, don’t buy into the notion that the incarnation was a divine initiative in response to some earthly felix culpa.

It’s not Greek metaphysics. Even the hierarchy is clear in that science and philosophy are autonomous from faith. While theological discourse will employ inculturated language in articulating beliefs, it is no more tied to this or that metaphysical concept than it is tied to a particular language. It simply translates the essentials of the faith into this or that idiom. I am heavily invested in the American pragmatist tradition (Peirce, less so James, much less so Dewey) and the best parts of our Transcendentalist tradition (Josiah Royce) and don’t do substance metaphysics or Thomism, so my (meta)metaphysical constructs are going to be nondual vis a vis a triadic semiotic. Rome doesn’t publish catechisms in this idiom, only a group of folks who belong to the John Courtney Murray Society at Berkeley find it engaging (best I can tell, anyway; I’m not an academic and I do not get around much).

I could go on dismissing what is not essential and trying to overcome stereotypes, which we have earned, but …

Essentially, the catholic outlook on created reality is radically incarnational, rejects moral depravity, sees all of creation as intrinsically good even if flawed, sees created realities mediating the God-encounter & is thus sacramental. Catholicism embraces faith and reason (fides et ratio) but rejects any conflation of science, philosophy and faith, viewing these approaches to reality as methodologically autonomous, hence rejecting fideism and scientism. Essential dogma is contained in the creeds with other stuff up for grabs, although controversy surrounds the only two so-called infallible pronouncements ever articulated, the Assumption and Immaculate Conception, which is more vs less problematical depending on how one conceives so-called “original” sin. There is the matter of the Petrine Ministry, but that, too, could be more narrowly or broadly conceived (e.g. creeping infallibilism).

Finally, coming full circle back to the aim of this thread, there is the question of whether or not there can even be such a thing as a Christian Philosophy or a Theological Anthropology or a Religious Epistemology. And my answer, and I’m pretty sure the orthodox Catholic answer, is no. Anthropology is science. Epistemology is philosophy. Metaphysics belong to various philosophical schools.

Do people articulate anthropologies, epistemologies, metaphysics and philosophies that would be incompatible with faith? Of course, but that’s because they are doing bad anthropology, bad epistemology, bad metaphysics and bad philosophy, in ways that don’t employ philosophical rigor and can’t withstand philosophical scrutiny. Do believers articulate scientific and philosophical perspectives derived from their religious stances? Sure, but that’s because they’re doing bad science and bad philosophy. In other words, category errors are not uncommon.

From the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, yesterday, 19 November 2009:

Therefore the major question that remains is whether in the light of that depth of agreement the issues that still divide us have the same weight – issues about authority in the Church, about primacy (especially the unique position of the pope), and the relations between the local churches and the universal church in making decisions (about matters like the ordination of women, for instance).  Are they theological questions in the same sense as the bigger issues on which there is already clear agreement?  And if they are, how exactly is it that they make a difference to our basic understanding of salvation and communion?  But if they are not, why do they still stand in the way of fullervisible unity?  Can there, for example, be a model of unity as a communion of churches which have different attitudes to how the papal primacy is expressed?

The central question is whether and how we can properly tell the difference between ’second order’ and ‘first order’ issues. When so very much agreement has been firmly established in first-order matters about the identity and mission of the Church, is it really justifiable to treat other issues as equally vital for its health and integrity?”

This discussion continues below >>> (more…)

In the John Keats poem, Ode On A Grecian Urn, we hear: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” I see what he was driving at but that doesn’t withstand philosophical scrutiny.

I believe it was Thomas Merton who noted that truth often comes flying in on the wings of beauty and goodness. Let me set forth how this might indeed be so.

In epistemology, the competing schools have included 1) correspondence theory 2) virtue epistemology 3) coherence theory and 4) community of inquiry (semiotic theory).

In aesthetics, the competing schools have included 1) formalism & essentialism 2) mimesis & imitationalism 3) emotionalism & expressivism and 4) agency & instrumentalism.

In ethics, the competing schools have included 1) deontological ethics 2) virtue or aretaic ethics 3) contractarian ethics and 4) teleological or consequentialist ethics.

In natural theology, the “proofs” have included the 1) ontological 2) cosmological 3) axiological and 4) teleological.

In religion, our approaches include 1) creed or dogma 2) cult or ritual 3) code or law and 4) community or fellowship.

In religion, our apologetics have included the 1) evidential 2) rational 3) presuppositional and 4) existential.

In science, our approaches include the 1) empirical 2) logical 3) practical and 4) relational and peer review.

The pattern that seems to inevitably emerge in most human enterprises seems to be a matrix that includes, on one axis, the values of 1) truth 2) beauty 3) goodness 4) unity, and, on the other axis, the different approaches to those values of the 1) objective 2) subjective 3) intraobjective 4) intersubjective.

Put differently, there seems to be a 1) descriptive 2) interpretive 3) normative and 4) evaluative moment in every type of  human value-realization. This is to suggest that every human value-realization involves 1) a description of a given reality  2) an evaluation of that reality’s significance to the individual, but even more so to the community 3) norms regarding how to best acquire or avoid that reality and 4) an interpretation of how it all re-ligates or ties-back-together. What seems to have happened in almost every academic discipline regarding various human endeavors or human value-realization is that these integrally-related moments, each which is methodologically autonomous, have been variously overemphasized at the expense of the other moments such that methods have been inflated into systems, approaches into schools, practices into conclusions.

To avoid this confusion, this conflation of methods and systems, we can draw some helpful distinctions.

The descriptive, the objective, the empirical, the evidential, the creedal, the ontological, the deontological, the formalist, the essential – all derive from a fundamental presupposition that reality is intelligible and include other such basic notions as the existence of other minds over against solipsism, as various first principles such as noncontradiction and excluded middle and other epistemic stances toward reality which cannot be proved but without which knowledge itself would not be possible. Taken together, the categories represent a correspondence theory of truth, including a metaphysical realism.

The postmodern critique did not challenge correspondence theory or metaphysical realism, a radically deconstructive postmodernism did that but was not successful, theoretically, which is not to say that we do not see a practical nihilism playing out in various aspects of postmodernity. It is to recognize that, as a system or school or conclusion, radical deconstruction was philosophically bankrupt and intrinsically incoherent.

The evaluative, the intersubjective, the relational, the existential, community and fellowship – all represent the end for which we exist and the unity and intimacy to which we aspire, hence comprise the desired consequences, the instrumental purpose of our agency, the very telos of our existence.

The normative, the intraobjective, the practical, the law, the contractarian, the prudential, the axiological, the emotional even – all represent the means by which we aspire to attain our end. Implicit in these means is the fundamental presupposition that the normative inheres in the descriptive, that epistemology is inherently normative, that our approaches to reality, even if not strictly logically-related, even if otherwise methodologically autonomous, are intellectually-related, more specifically, axiologically-integral. This coherence is not a “theory” of truth but a “test” of truth and includes, if not a robust, at least, a rudimentary moral realism and an extrinsic reward mechanism, pragmatic utility.

The interpretive, the subjective, the logical, the rational, the ritual, the cosmological, beauty for beauty’s sake, virtue for virtue’s sake – all represent the intrinsically rewarding dynamics of pure play, of art, of symmetry, elegance, parsimony, simplicity, of pattern dancing with paradox, of order mingling with chaos, of chance teasing necessity, of the systematic emerging from the random and similar fugues in reality. Like utility and coherence, such realities as symmetry, parsimony and elegance are not robustly truth-conducive but are, instead, more weakly truth-indicative. What is useful or beautiful will not necessarily be true, but since what is true is useful and beautiful, we have some probabilistic indication that a reality that is pragmatic and beautiful is certainly more likely to be true than other alternatives. Such is pragmatism, properly conceived, which has no relationship to the corrosive pragmatic so-called theory of truth, which most folks suitably deride.

Thus it is that I have derived my heuristic that the normative mediates between the descriptive and the interpretive to effect the evaluative in a probabilistic, fallibilistic manner, the probable prescinding from the necessary in the speculative grammar of my meta-metaphysic.

When it comes to adjudicating between otherwise equiplausible interpretive systems, such as religions and ideologies, I apply an equiplausibility principle, which chooses what is the most beautiful, the most good (life-giving) and the most unitive (relationship-enhancing) as likely being the most true. Ergo, Jesus.

One may wish to take a look at my related essay, Getting to Is from Ought, to see how one can ground one’s moral realism in God in a manner that is philosophically rigorous but also pluralistically aware.