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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?

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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…)

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This reflection was evoked by a post at the Jesus Creed, Faith & the Future.

My primary interests have long been formative and contemplative spirituality, inter-religious dialogue and the interface of science and religion. My spiritual formation was primarily Roman Catholic in the Charismatic Renewal circa 1970 at Loyola in New Orleans. My outlook is both radically incarnational and radically pneumatological.

While there is much in tradition to conserve, there has been a tendency in much of the North American pentecostal experience toward fundamentalism and, in the RC charismatic tradition, this has played out as a solum magisterium, curiously analogous to the sola scriptura of our Protestant fundamentalist counterparts. MANY RC charismatic youth of the 70’s, a very evident majority of my friends, traded-in their Catholicism for other Pentecostal groups. In some cases, maybe moreso due to personality and temperament, they kept their authoritarian inclinations (trading institution for text, so to speak). In many cases, they remained good, independent critical thinkers and self-critical at that. I remain deeply sympathetic to their longing for a less muted, less muffled, more robustly experiential encounter of God in their lives and remain in great solidarity with them, cherishing our long-standing friendships and mutual love of God. The Spirit that holds us together is stronger than any of our hermeneutical differences.

An honest self-description would label me a member of the loyal opposition where our hierarchy is concerned. In my view, it was derailed by a sterile, scholastic and rationalistic metaphysics and has been slow to get back on track; this largely accounts for its being out of touch with the sensus fidelium on many issues related to gender and sex regarding both moral doctrine and church discipline and otherwise out of touch regarding church polity. I’d join the Episcopal Church tomorrow if I considered such doctrine, discipline and polity essential rather than accidental. For its part, the ECUSA seems like it would benefit from a better organized teaching office (if only we RCs could more narrowly conceive the petrine ministry and better nuance its primacy, I wonder what could happen re: Christian unity). Well, denominations are the means and not the End.

Modern semiotic science has reaffirmed a role for telos, hence formal and final causations, although minimalistically conceived. Without going into detail, we now recognize that otherwise tacit dimensions can remain ineluctably unobtrusive while still utterly efficacious. By analogy, my own theology of nature (not natural theology), fired perhaps by what my friend Amos Yong calls a pneumatological imagination, sees a robust telic dimension of reality, which is to say that I affirm a highly nuanced panentheism. My own panentheism doesn’t aspire to locate divine causal joints or to describe cosmological realities (as others do & I see them being a tad misguided) but is much more ontologically vague and tends to axiological realities (our ultimate concerns & semiotic meanings). The practical upshot is that, semiotically, I can imagine the Spirit, gently but efficaciously, influencing reality from its cosmic origins through its telic destinies, drawing us all together in ways no eye has seen nor ear heard nor heart conceived.

I suppose this is to suggest that I think it is enough for us to focus on our phenomenological experiences and value-realizations and THAT we have thus been gifted and less important to concern ourselves with describing, in metaphysical parlance, just HOW this is so (e.g. one philosophy of mind vs another). This is also to say that I do not see a whole lot to be gained from fretting over one conception of the soul versus another (nonreductive physicalist vs Cartesian dualist vs Aristotelian hylomorphism) or even over such distinctions as natural versus supernatural (which, in my view, very often may have more to do with differences in degrees of realization of our God-encounter and less to do with differences in origin, natural vs supernatural). Another upshot of my approach is that it moreso resonates with the view of atonement held by Scotus and the Franciscans than with the classical views that see the Incarnation as a response to some felix culpa, which is to say that I imagine that God chose an intimate involvement in creation from the very start.

I see the Spirit everywhere, meeting each of us where we are and gently coaxing us to take the next good step. It’s almost scandalous where the Spirit seems willing to blow and on whom! I see the Spirit at work in creation and enabling and encouraging us as co-creators. I see the Spirit at work in all of the Great Traditions and in each of our denominations and in others who lack explicit faith (while, at the same time, suspecting that degrees of realization of our God-encounter vary widely and fare better in certain environs). I think the Spirit moves us toward a type of balance that transcends our own notions of moderation in that we are drawn by the Spirit more toward a reality of completeness than toward that of perfection (as classically-described). The Spirit in us makes up for what is lacking in others vis a vis its own indwelling and in others makes up for what is lacking in us.

As my all-time favorite singing group, the Dameans, sang in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II:

Spirit move when You will, where You will, how You will. Spirit of God’s love now move within me.

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