christiannonduality.com Blog

10 historical developments propelling Emerging Christianity

Excerpted from 14 | THE TABLET | 6 February 2010 :

The emerging Christianity movement – Richard Rohr

∙  recovery of  contemplative tradition (Thomas Merton)

∙ critical biblical scholarship on a broad ecumenical level

∙ new global sense of Christianity

∙ new ability to distinguish the essentials from the incidentals in church practice & teaching

∙ broad awareness that Jesus was teaching  peacemaking, simplicity, love of Creation

∙ concerned with healing and transformation of persons & society on earth as it is to be in heaven

∙ charismatic movement, experiential Christianity & a more Trinitarian theology

∙ developing spirituality & theology of non-violence

∙ new structures of community and solidarity

∙ non-dualistic thinking: a non-oppositional, contemplative mind and heart

Join our conversation at Cathlimergent !

Send article as PDF to

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 >>>

Read the rest of this entry »

Send article as PDF to

This is an abridged review.

In a New Kind of Christianity, there is a thread in Brian McLaren’s overall thrust that might escape the notice of the casual reader. That thread combines linguistic and semiotic approaches that can get very technical and which are very highly nuanced. I cannot even begin to unpack this observation in the space provided here. But think in terms of subjects and predicates, verbs and tenses, literal and figurative, icons and symbols, intentions and meanings, literary genres and parts of speech. And think about such as the senses of Scripture, literary criticism and historical-critical exegesis.

While McLaren well describes the impact of the history of philosophy as it informs (forms, deforms & misinforms) our religious beliefs and practices, also embedded in both the history of philosophy and the history of Christianity are prominent linguistic and semiotic themes that ask probing questions about “how it is that we know what we know when we say we know something” and “what it is that we mean when we say something now this way or now that to this audience or that.”

To that extent, McLaren is squarely in the middle of what I like to call Christianity’s semiotic tradition. I will not aspire to explicate that case here but I would suggest, for any interested in this angle, that one might explore, for example, whether casually via wikipedia or more depthfully via books, the thoughts of the Kabbalah (Jewish) and Plotinus (Neoplatonist), Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scottus Eriugena, John Duns Scotus and John of St. Thomas (Poinsot), Charles Sanders Peirce and Walker Percy. I flesh this thesis out here: http://bit.ly/aQV2mS

McLaren is clearly not suggesting that we abandon our creeds, rituals, laws and communities! In so many words, rather, what I hear him saying is: If we have articulated truth in creed, we take care not to let our dogma devolve into dogmatism. If we have cultivated beauty in the celebration of cult and liturgy, we dare not let it decay into ritualism. If we have preserved goodness in code and discipline and law, we eschew their degeneration into legalism. If we have enjoyed fellowship in community, we avoid at all costs any decadent institutionalism.

In my words, not McLaren’s, his survey of philosophy and theology is an inventory of different types of extremism. His critique is not aimed at our core beliefs but targets, instead, some peripheral tangents. Some really tangential extremes that go too far via idle speculation, on one hand, or too far with affective or emotional expressivism, on the other. And, he tends to the balance that needs to be struck between our positive, metaphorical affirmations about God (kataphatic, via positiva) and that language which increases the accuracy of our God descriptions – ahem, or should I say, rather, God references – through negation (apophatic, via negativa).

What McLaren retrieves, revives and renews is a balance that has always been maintained at the center of our tradition. That is to say, then, again in my words, that there has never been anything inherent in our Christian religion that would, in principle, necessarily lend itself to such extremes as rationalism (an overemphasis on the speculative and kataphatic), encratism (an overemphasis on the speculative and apophatic), quietism (an overemphasis on the affective and apophatic) or pietism, including an insufficiently nuanced fideism (an overemphasis on the affective and kataphatic). Again, McLaren is square in the middle of our tradition, along with such apophatic influences in Christianity that drew – not only from Gospel and Pauline narratives, but – from Jewish and neoplatonic influences, then continuing through our early church fathers through Pseudo-Dionysius and medievals like Meister Eckhart and Duns Scotus, all the way down to one of McLaren’s favorite novelists, Walker Percy.

Finally, McLaren’s theory of Incarnation, in my view, sits squarely in the middle of the Franciscan tradition of Duns Scotus, which may be what one would consider a “minority report” in my own Roman Catholicism, but is clearly nothing that would be considered, oh my, heterodox. McLaren’s so-called “New” Christianity is going to be new in the sense that, where most modernists are concerned, it is novel vis a vis the extreme rationalism and fundamentalism “gifted” us by modernity and which pervades our approach to ultimate reality. But, in another sense (see how this works?), there has been a long-established, even if somewhat esoteric, tradition in Christianity that has always served as a corrective and saving remnant. McLaren’s approach is, in that regard, Olde Time Religion, which is, as they say, good enough for me!

Below are some of my redacted comments in response to various Amazon reviewers.

+++

The continuity lies in a shared epistemology, which has anthropological implications. One can share another’s seamless garment of life ethos, even share the exact same epistemic justifications, ontological grounding and deontological conclusions while rejecting the other’s practical approaches and political strategies.

+++

JPD, you missed my point. I can’t even recall what McLaren’s specific views are re: the complex moral reality of abortion. My point was that whatever those views are vis a vis Percy’s own views they are not dispositive of the larger issue, which was that there is a continuity in their pericean-derived epistemology, which is a constructive postmodern approach. This is an approach I consider superior to either a modernist rationalism or a radical deconstructionism, which has everything to do with McLaren’s critique of the misapplication of the Greco-Roman narrative. PERIOD. Any extrapolations beyond that are your strawmen, not mine.

In other words, your logic is flawed if you think you can always reason backwards from one’s practical approach to an issue, or from one’s political strategy regarding an issue, to what one’s moral stance must necessarily be regarding that issue, much less what one’s metaphysical stance or even epistemology of choice would be. This is to say, to make it plainer for you, that McLaren and Percy don’t have to agree on everything else in order to share an epistemic outlook. Using that line of logic, I’m surprised you didn’t offer an even more trivial graps of the obvious, which is that Percy was a Catholic, while McLaren is not (although that is apparently a point of contention for many of his fundamentalistic detractors, and, perhaps, they are not entirely offbase).

There is much too facile an application of concepts in this thread for there to be any meaningful discourse, e.g. liberal and postmodernist. Your unnuanced use of the word “postmodernists” as if it were a blanket pejorative falls into the same category of offense (tarring too many people w/the same brush) of which you accused McLaren re: neoconservatives.

Tu quoque.

+++

RE: Brian McLaren has put his finger on a problem–the ontotheological critique of western Christendom by Nietzsche and others–but unfortunately he doesn’t have either the chops or the perspective to address it even adequately, let alone cogently.

Yes, Brian sees problems with metaphysics. And this particular response reveals some of those problems. One can still hold to metaphysical and moral realisms while, at the same time, recognizing that they are fallible, falsifiable hypotheses. One practical upshot of this is that our deontologies should be considered at least as tentative as our ontologies are speculative. A modernistic rationalism, then, “gifts” people with a wholly unwarranted apodictic certainty that results in an untenable epistemic hubris. It is this type of approach to reality that gets all worked up over the notions offered in a nietzschean nihilism, a sophistic solipsism or humean critiques of induction and common sense notions of causality. Human knowledge doesn’t advance solely through formal syllogistic reasoning and abstractions. We do away with such silliness through an informal reductio ad absurdum, which is to say that we evade such stupidity by ignoring it, for all practical purposes, and not, rather, by formal refutation (or building another castle in the air a la Kant). At any rate, there are constructive postmodern approaches that are superior to both the classical foundational epistemologies with their naive realism and the radically deconstructive forms of postmodernism. One that comes to mind is the semiotic realism of Charles Sanders Peirce, whose work largely influenced the great Catholic novelist, Walker Percy, who, in turn, has had a profound influence on Brian McLaren. The above-critique of McLaren was facile and too cursorily dismissive. His peircean-derived perspective is most adequate to the task and affirms both metaphysical and moral realisms, which is to say, does not at all correspond to the caricature other commentators have made of McLaren’s epistemic stance by equating it with a vulgar postmodernism. This ain’t high octane. It’s high vitriol.

Speaking of First Things, I am pleased to see its sponsorship of a postmodern conservatism. As for McLaren’s discussion of the neoconservative approach, it seems to me that he was critiquing it as a political philosophy, which is to say, as a matter of practical judgment, which is methodologically distinct from our moral calculus and religious beliefs. Some people mistake political ideology and religion (and most certainly not readers of FT).

+++

This whole notion of Brian’s reinventing Christianity as if what he’s proposing is wholly new or even heterodox is being WAY overblown! His theory of Incarnation very much resonates with that of Duns Scotus and the Franciscans, who believed that Jesus’ coming was not occasioned by any human felix culpa (oh, happy fault!) in response to a need for a grand cosmic repair job for some ontological rupture located in some vividly-imagined past. Rather, the Incarnation was in the divine cards from the cosmic get-go as a teleological striving oriented toward the future and we are active participants as created co-creators. This also resonates with the teilhardian and whiteheadian perspectives of process theology. These would be considered “minority views” of atonement even in Catholicism but they are clearly not heterodox, except, perhaps, to fundamentalistic Biblical inerrantists, who consider a penal, substitutionary atonement as the only acceptable narrative.

+++

Bravo, Michael. And, let’s hear it for Scripture AND Tradition AND Reason AND Experience! Enough of this fundamentalistic sola scriptura and solum magisterium and away with the modernistic rationalism and vulgar postmodern deconstructionism. McLaren offers a robustly constructive postmodern critique and not this strawman caricature-bogeyman of epistemic and moral relativism at which so many continue to take cheap rhetorical shots. Thankfully, at least they know not to be fooled by relativism. Sadly, they too cursorily dismiss McLaren’s stance because they miss the nuance and mistake it for something it is not.

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 —>

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Thomas Merton in Disputed Questions writes of the thirteenth century Carmelite hermits that they “initiated something quite original and unique: a loose-knit community of hermits with an informal, occasional apostolate … their life was left free and informal so that they could do anything that conformed to their ideal of solitude and free submission to the Holy Spirit.”

Send article as PDF to

It’s not WHAT you see of life when you come to N’awlins; it’s HOW you see life!

I was born here. I still live here. And I don’t leave often. Why the hell should I? Anybody with common sense and a half a heart wishes they lived here, too, especially after watching us on TV the past few weeks!

Lemme ‘xplain how we see life.

We ain’t pollyannas, mind ya, but … we’re easy like a Sunday …

Take that statue in the Cathedral. Look on dat lady-saint’s face and stare into it but good. Now, you told me whether that’s pain you see dere or some type o’ really good pleasure. Ya can’t do it, no? One moment it’s as if she’s in dem dere – what dey call ‘em? never seen it for myself, oh, yeah – trows of orgasmic ecstasy, poo-yie-yie!  But in the very next instant, just tilt you little head to da side a bit and, mon cher, you could swear she was at the Rock ‘n Bowl on South Carrollton and had just dropped a bowling ball on her used-to-be-good foot.

Yep. One day it’s Mardi Gras. The next day it’s Lent. Dat’s N’awlins. Jes sayin’.

No one can tell us here in N’awlins ’bout famine & feast, agony & ecstasy or tragedy & comedy. Just read some of that highfalutin fiction by our own Walker Percy ’bout how we hold it all together, both predicament & sacrament.

Ain’t nobody here gonna quote you Job. Ain’t nobody gonna take the blame on hisself. And, fer sure, dere ain’t no fool preacher blaming life’s crap on the devil. We got our own wisdom tradition that’s hard to trace ‘xactly but our indians, blacks and creoles pretty much got it figured out dat Joc-a-mo has got something to do with it. Now, ‘gain, Joc-amo ain’t the devil and he ain’t even necessarily your enemy. He’s just a jester is all, not one to be figured out, just one to be dealt with. We reckon that, if God’s got plans, dem designs are kinda whatcha might call loose or easy. God, the Really Big Easy, makes a move. We make a move. Joc-a-mo makes a move. Some moves work out, like when Elvis gets the girl. And some, like dem world class biotches, Betsy and Katrina? What can I say? Sometimes, it’s like dropping bowling balls on both yo’ feet, which is to say, it don’t work out too well, n’est pas?

But here in N’awlins, there ain’t no bitching and moaning.

We just sing, instead. Through the yellow fever and malaria, fire and flood, the Battle of New Orleans, first we ask Our Lady to pray with us for prompt succoring and next we sing:

Talkin ’bout
Hey now, Hey now
Iko Iko ah-nay
Joc-a-mo-fee-no-ah-nah-nay
Joc-a-mo-fee-nah-nay
enòn enòn
Aìku Aìku nde
Jacouman Fi na ida – n – de
Jacouman Fi na dè

And that roughly translates into:
God is watching
Jacouman causes it; we will be emancipated
Jacouman urges it; we will wait

And sometimes we wait a very long time.

It’s called patience. Look it up. It’s a virtue.

And it doesn’t mean we sit on our asses. We keep working hard.

And when our backs are against the Superdome wall, whether for Katrina or the NFL Playoffs, still we sing:

Good for your bod-y
And it’s good for your soul
I said hey, hey hey hey
Hey pocky-a-way
I said hey, hey hey hey
Tuway pakyway
T’ouwais bas q’ouwais
Hou tendais

And that roughly translates into:
I’ll kill you if you don’t get out the way!

And the proper response to N’awlins would be:
Entendez!

And that roughly translates into:
I hear ya!

Now, don’t get us wrong. We mean kill ya metaphorically, which is to say, in a nice kinda way!

With red beans & rice, creole gumbo and our boys, the Saints.  Bless You, Boys!

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