christiannonduality.com Blog

I am posting in reverse chronological order, latest conversation here at the top.

13 April 2010 from That Soul Sort Narrative #3 at the Jesus Creed

In #62 dopderbeck asks:”You’re Roman Catholic, and my take on what you’ve said in various places is that you’re not a deeply radical Catholic ala Mary Daly or ala radical Marxist liberation theology. (True?) You reference Boff but you also reference Lonergan. Interestingly enough, Lonergan’s critical realist theological method is popular among many evangelicals these days. So, I don’t see you at least in this thread talking about a “new” kind of Christianity. I see you talking about strands of contemporary Catholic theology that reside within the broad stream of the Christian Tradition and in particular within the Catholic Tradition.”

I abhor the co-opting of the Good News by political ideology. Marxist. Neoconservative. You name it.

I don’t consider myself radical in the pejorative sense of the word but in the best sense of being rooted. I’ve been a charismatic for 40 years, baptized in the Spirit not long after the Dusquesne Weekend (which launched the worldwide renewal in Roman Catholicism) when, in our family’s living room, prayers were said and hands were laid upon me by one of the students who attended that retreat.

As I mentioned on the first thread, I just took Brian’s book title as hyperbole and the 6LN as heuristic. As strategic rhetorical devices, I thought they were provocative. I didn’t take them literally. When I read ANKoC, my initial reviews were titled: “Everything That’s Old is New Again – this (McLaren’s ‘New’ Christianity) is truly an old time religion” and a more tongue-in-cheek: “A New Kind of Christianity? McLaren didn’t make this up. It’s worse than that! He stole it! (you know, from the Franciscans and their ilk).”

I believe the Holy Spirit has been active in all of the Great Traditions and also humankind’s indigenous religions. I believe that morality is wholly transparent to human reason, even without the benefit of special divine revelation. How we are to behave is thus old news, not what Jesus was mostly about, except that He invited us to quit being so dang minimalistic in our views of justice and to try exceeding such imperatives with this radically new idea of His: Mercy. The Good News more so gifted us with the truth that we are called to an intimate trust relationship with a very loving God, Who longed for that relationship with each and everyone of us from all eternity and for all eternity.

I believe that the symbol systems of other traditions are truth-laden. I do not ground this belief in a kantian-like transcendental thomism (e.g. Rahner, Lonergan) which employs a theological anthropology that is a tad too optimistic, in my view. Instead, I ground my belief in a Lonergan-like approach as would be amended by the insights of Peirce’s semeiotic science. I believe that Christianity best fosters what we might call the Lonerganian conversions, so to speak, allowing one to move more swiftly and with less hindrance on the journey to salvation. I broadly conceive soteriology pretty much consistent with most of the nuances that have been teased out in this thread. I believe we are called to permeate and improve the temporal order, establishing social justice in a manner consistent with Gospel imperatives.

I share the Good News – not out of fear for others’ souls, but rather – out of compassion for all of humankind with whom I experience a profound solidarity. I believe so earnestly in the manifold and multiform efficacies of the incarnation that I have always nourished a deeply held and cherished belief in the possibility that all humans will eventually enjoy some form of eternal beatitude. I raised my children with the belief that some form of eternal alienation from God must remain a theoretical possibility (only because God would not violate our freedom and coerce a relationship) but that I cannot otherwise imagine that it is a practical probability. As such, I told them that hell is a theological concept that should enjoy a much more esoteric status and not quite as much exoteric prominence as it has. Put simply, I told them to forget about it.

I reject any notion of penal substitutionary atonement but embrace such an at-one-ment as was envisioned by Scotus and the Francsicans, which is to say that I believe that the incarnation was always going to happen, so-called felix culpa or not.

All of the above stances pretty much enjoy the status of minority reports in my tradition but they are neither new nor heterodox.

I resonate with Brian, theologically. But he’s also made some sociologic claims, which are empirical, about what people have been taught and what they believe. People can reasonably agree to disagree about his hypothesis. Questions will nonetheless persist: Why is there so much polarization and demonization in our country and around the world? Increasing incivility in the public square? These are important questions. What hangs in the balance might be our planet and civilization as they go out in either a nuclear bang or an ecological whimper.

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Are the liberation themes that shape the vision of Brian McLaren ideological or theological? subverting or incarnating the Gospel?

Liberation must primarily be interpreted in terms of a freedom gifted by grace, a gift that frees us from the slavery of sin which robs people of their dignity. This slavery is certainly experienced as marginalization and oppression in our socio-economic-politico-cultural sphere but in its most “radical” form it is experienced as a slavery to sin, where other forms of slavery find their “root.” How do we distinguish, though, between an authentic theology of liberation as rooted in the correctly interpreted Word of God and an ideology of liberation that corrupts the essential Gospel message?

As Christians with a robust pneumatology, we believe that the Holy Spirit is the source of all renewal and that God is the Lord of all history. Our Gospel ecclesiology professes faith in a Kingdom begun here on earth in the Church, but takes account (with science, even) that this earth will pass away. Our eschatology professes faith in a Kingdom not of this world, where we have no lasting dwelling. In our soteriology, while we recognize with Lonergan that human conversions grow us as individuals – intellectually, affectively, morally, socially & religiously – from image to likeness, at the same time, we do not identify the Kingdom’s growth with progress in science, culture and philosophy. We grow, rather, as Brian described, via Bernardian love, from love of self to sake of self to love of God for sake of self, to love of God for sake of God and love of self for sake of God. And it is this same Spirit-inspired love, which is animated by our faith in Christ’s riches and hope in things eternal, that concerns us with social justice in the welfare of all who inhabit this temporal earthly city, where we seek to permeate and improve our temporal order with a preferential option for the poor and the young.

With a radically incarnational view, human dignity is grounded in the individual and celebrated in community. This, in turn, grounds the subsidiarity principle, which holds individual liberty in a creative tension with socialization processes, all ordered toward the common good. Still, both social justice and injustice is located in the hearts of people, where God indwells, and not in the structures of institutions, whether social, economic, political, cultural or even religious. It is thus an ideological -not a theological- vision that is reflexively and partisanly biased, whether for or against, regarding socialization processes. Charles S. Peirce was correct, I believe, in suggesting that we should speculate boldly regarding theoretical matters but should proceed cautiously and tentatively in our vital (or practical) affairs. Thus we find the Church, I believe, properly biased toward tradition and our prudential judgment properly biased toward a conservative approach. This honors our belief that the Spirit has been active in our world among its people. But such biases toward the traditional and conservative are not, at the same time, absolutes. They are, instead, weakly truth-indicative and not robustly truth-conducive. As Brian has suggested, our institutions thus conserve the past fruits of the Spirit, while our movements are the vehicle for present novel works of God among His people. Brian has described certain sociological and psychological patterns that emerge as institutions and movements interact. There is a certain irony in the fact that the dynamics Brian has described somewhat mirror Scott’s own account of the psychology of conversion.

There is another irony here in any charge that Brian’s vision has been shaped by liberation themes. Are we saying ideologically shaped or theologically shaped? Let me explain.

Another way to interpret Brian’s critique of the 6LN is to look at it as a charge that an authentic theology has been corrupted by a partisan ideology. In essence, he is suggesting that a certain cohort of Christianity has allowed ideological elements of a particular socio-economic-politico-cultural sphere to corrupt the essential theological message of the Gospel.

It is important to note that he is NOT arguing against an inculturation of the Gospel as it might have otherwise profitably assimilated Hellenic philosophy and Roman culture, for example, to Western civilization’s true edification. Rather, he is protesting a subversion of Gospel imperatives by certain ideological absolutes that were propagated as viral memes within those societies.

That’s the irony here insofar as Brian has similarly been charged, to quoque, with a subversion of Gospel values by a liberation ideology. I would counter that Brian has not embraced a subversive liberation ideology but has articulated a sound theology of liberation, as systematically consistent with his other Franciscan sensibilities ( see Leonardo Boff’s Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor) and wholly in line with my brief sketch above. As Brian put it to me, for the gospel to incarnate into a culture is very different from a culture co-opting the gospel.

There are ways, in my view, to hold a nuanced particularism in a creative tension with a nuanced religious pluralism. So, too, we hold in tension the Kingdom now and to come. We can also better nuance what the early fathers called apokatastasis as a legitimate hope for universal salvation, affirming, as a theological necessity, the belief that God leaves us free and would not coerce us into an eternal relationship. Finally, a great deal of our God-encounter is mediated via our participatory and imaginative engagement of symbol systems, which we inhabit existentially (or not). This is where I locate most of my resonance with the Evangelical approach. So much of the disagreement is articulated in a conceptual form that, sometimes, tends to overemphasize the more propositional aspects of our belief system. Those are not unimportant but, if we do not pay heed to all that we share vis a vis our participatory imaginative engagements, I think we risk despairing of a deeper unity, losing sight of all that we do have in common, like the riches that we share in Christ and the hopes we share for things eternal.

We can reasonably expect that all of us will be more or less influenced by our socio-economic-politico-cultural milieu, sometimes allowing it to subvert the Gospel in our lives, but hopefully, most of the time fostering the Gospel’s incarnation into our culture. Which cohorts have allowed the Gospel to be co-opted for how long and to what extent makes for quite a discussion. The sociological and psychological dynamics that might be involved are very interesting and the ones discussed in this context seem pretty intuitive even, providing a rough composite mapping of what many of us have encountered over the years, generally speaking. It is with some peril, however, that we apply such diagnostics to any given person in particular. For one thing, such analyses can be facile. For another, we do need to be sensitive to such a framing and description of another person. Which groups of people believe what, however, do lend themselves to sociologic analysis. No need to trade anecdotes; see

Many Americans Say Other Faiths Can Lead to Eternal Life

Christianity has always had its “minority reports” & successful marriages of the exoteric to the esoteric, which have preserved its essential message & core praxes, but it’s more than a little disingenuous to deny the role that Brian’s 6LN has played in that part (the largest) of the tradition that Merton would describe as being far more about socializing people & much less about transforming them. The Emerging Church will likely similarly be salt & leaven & not likely ever the whole loaf. As for who’s saved … if you have to ask …

God invites us beyond socialization to transformation, but how far one travels is His business. You, my friends, are good enough and beautiful enough, to me! (Not to deny that certain of you may have to have your behavior coercively interdicted from time to time for the common good.)

In That Soul-Sort Narrative 1, Scott McKnight critiques Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity. Below is my response:

ANKOC did not, in my view, describe mainline Christianity, which is muddling along fairly well as the pilgrim church it is. So, the very title of the book amounts to hyperbole. Extrapolating from that rhetorical strategy to the 6 line narrative, one might suspect hyperbole, again, oversimplification. No author, in that amount of space, likely ambitions a robustly explanatory account. All one can reasonably hope to accomplish is to offer a rather vague heuristic device, a skeletal outline of conceptual placeholders, to get a good conversation going. So, even where fundamentalism is concerned (the book’s real over-against), it will only be able to map that trajectory very roughly. And it did map fairly well.

Certainly the Gospel narrative was implicitly read into his philosophical account or should have been by any who properly received McLaren’s critique within – not apart from – the overall context provided both in the remainder of the book as well as his entire body of work, taken as a whole. There is an efficacy in McLaren’s abstracting the philosophical presuppositions from the Gospel narrative as he did. Such an abstraction reveals in starker relief how theological concepts, categories and even conclusions can be impacted, for better or worse, by one’s philosophical approach.

There can be no doubt that an impoverished epistemology and sterile metaphysics, or even bad science, can lead to some very poor theology. How we integrate the autonomous methods of science and philosophy with religion will affect our theology, pneumatology, Christology, anthropology, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology. That’s one of the practical take-aways of McLaren’s message. He may not have precisely determined exactly HOW so much of Christianity is outright failing in this integration (whether via Greek, Roman, Continental or Eastern influences or even Rorty’s vulgar pragmatism) but McLaren’s diagnosis THAT it is failing in many sectors is no caricature. And I find McLaren’s prescriptions right-on!

follow-up comment:

@dopderbeck #115 asked: “But what I’m unclear about in reading your book is the extent to which (if at all) you’re borrowing from process theology. I hear echoes of Moltmann in what you’re saying (and I like Moltmann to a certain degree) but I also seem to hear echoes of Whitehead. … This is my main concern at this point: is God still the Triune God who is “other” than creation? This isn’t a rhetorical challenge. I genuinely was left a little unsure from the book. If so, and if the world is still sin-scarred, and if Jesus is still uniquely as the second person of the Trinity the savior from the scars of sin — then I’d ask how the narrative you want to offer is so different from that of the broad historic Christian Tradition (as you so paint the outlines of that tradition, say, in A Generous Orthodoxy)? <<<

I’m not sure if Brian will be dropping back in but I do recall that he’s expressed an appreciation for Jack Haught’s work, such as in God After Darwin. While Jack’s approach is distinctly whiteheadian, unlike others who appropriate Whitehead for the purposes of doing a natural theology, Jack begins, rather, from a stance within the faith and thus articulates, instead, a theology of nature, which is confessional and very explicitly related to his own high Christology. Beyond that, Brian would have to say how much more he resonates with Jack or would distance himself from some of his views.

Of course, Jack is Catholic and views creation from a radically incarnational perspective, which is to say that creatures are good but wounded. This is not a theological anthropology of total depravity. Regarding the concept of original sin, not all Catholics buy into the “majority report” that the incarnation was occasioned in response to some felix culpa as some grand cosmic repair job for some great ontological rupture that happened in the past. Instead, some, like Jack, follow Scotus and the Franciscans in believing that the Incarnation was in the divine cards from the cosmic get-go and that we are moaning and groaning in one great act of giving birth in a grand teleological striving oriented toward the future. This view would not in any way challenge the salvific efficacy of the incarnation. Such views remain Christocentric and profusely pneumatological even as they trade in exclusivistic outlooks for a more inclusivistic stance regarding the salvation of nonChristians and even nonbelievers. Such an approach does not conceive God in classical fullness of being terms but, rather, asymmetrically (cf. Robert C. Neville). This is not the rather conventional “creation as broken symmetry” conception.

Hi, all – I was going to reply to 115, and then I realized that John Sylvest in 120 said exactly what I would have said, but more intelligently and articulately.

John knows that my intellectual and theological outlook was deeply influenced by my engagement with Walker Percy, where I imbibed a lot of Catholic creation-as-sacrament thinking.

So – rather than radically separating God from creation the way that some do, and rather than conflating God with creation as others do, I see God in loving, dynamic, unbreakable relation with creation – both as its faithful creator, and as the one who has entered and embraced creation through incarnation.

Interestingly, I get on a plane in a couple hours to spend the weekend with Fr. Richard Rohr who continues to extend the tradition of St. Francis and Duns Scotus, where this incarnational, sacramental view of creation has been most celebrated.

115 asked another great question. Is my view really so different? Why not just improve the traditional narrative and speak of a refreshed or renewed old kind of Christianity?

I think that the negative response to the book seen among some here and many elsewhere suggests that my view is pretty different, but not simply for the reasons many people jump to.

I think the differences become clearer when you tease out the social, political, and ecological implications of the traditional narrative and the alternative I’m exploring.

I think that when you divide the world in two – the saved us who are God’s beloved people of light versus the damned them who are Satan’s people of darkness – you unleash a pandora’s box of trouble. The saved and the lost are, in this view, ontologically different and will be so for eternity. You can’t get much more different than that!

This kind of social dualism is complicit in, I think, exactly the non-Christ-like violence we’ve seen in “Christian” history, from anti-Semitism in the past to anti-Palestinianism in the present, from the enslavement of Africans to the genocide of Native Peoples in the past to the vilification of gay people and the second-class status of women in many churches today, from the Crusades to the Iraq War (not to make these pairings morally equivalent).

It’s very easy for white and male Christians to minimize this, but if you really listen to our Jewish and Palestinian neighbors, our Native American friends, our neighbors in the third world, our non-heterosexual-male and non-white neighbors, and if you look back over history from their viewpoint, you get a feeling for what this has meant to them. I get the feeling from reading many of the comments here and elsewhere that I’m seeing the response of privileged people who have never tried to see the world from the position of “the other” much before. I believe we “Western Christians” have a profound ethical responsibility in a post-Holocaust and post-colonial world to face the possibility that our narrative has been flawed … in hopes that our next two thousand years will be better than our first.

Some, when they begin to see the impact on our us-versus-them narrative in the past, leave the faith entirely. I understand why they do this – not simply as a “falling away” from faith, but as an ethical decision not to ally themselves with an oppressive and violent narrative. But I remain passionately committed to Jesus and his gospel, and I think this narrative has been unfaithful to Jesus. So I’m seeking to be more faithful to Jesus and his gospel while fulfilling what I (as a white male Christian with all the privileges that come with that status) have come to see as my ethical responsibility.

In my view, what is so absolutely radical and beautiful in Jesus (among many other things), is that he proclaims and embodies not a narrative of “us versus them,” or “us instead of them,” or “us over them,” but rather “us on behalf of them,” or “us sacrificing and even dying for them,” or better yet, “some of us for all of us.” But that’s the topic of a future book.

dopderbeck (#128) wrote: “I think the question of whether sin was an “ontological rupture” is one of the key questions on which I’m regrettably going to have to differ here. It certainly is not necessary to elide the ontological consequences of sin in order to incorporate the findings of mainstream science. Yes, there was no “literal” paradaisical state — young earth creationism and so on is a failure. But ontology is much, much more than merely the material. The narrative of Haught and of other process / panentheistic theologies seems to me thoroughly compromised by modernity’s cramped ontology.”

I’m not sure we differ on your first point. I set forth a theory of incarnation, not a recharacterization of the nature of sin.

We may not differ on your second point either. I resonate with Neville’s critique of process theology. I call my own theology of nature a pan-SEMIO-entheism. I wholly agree with what Brian said so beautifully:

“So – rather than radically separating God from creation the way that some do, and rather than conflating God with creation as others do, I see God in loving, dynamic, unbreakable relation with creation – both as its faithful creator, and as the one who has entered and embraced creation through incarnation.”

My approach prescinds from any robustly metaphysical description to a much more vague phenomenological perspective. In advancing a view THAT creation and Creator are intimately in relationship, I positively eschew any appeal, whether to substance or process approaches, that ambitions a description of HOW. The SEMIO in my pansemioentheism designates my attempt to recover and reemphasize the notion that profound religious symbols can grip people and engage them with the Ultimate.

To be clear, when I say prescind from metaphysical description, I personally subscribe to a metaphysical agnosticism even while I defend such a metaphysical realism as would affirm anyone’s right to “do ontology” as long as it proceeds hypothetically and with a contrite fallibilism. My own theological perspective does not see Christianity inextricably intertwined with any particular ontology, for example, vis a vis the nature of the soul, a philosophy of mind, a design inference, super/naturalism, contra-causal free will and so on. For example, in my view, an essential Christianity needn’t resolve in favor of a robustly Cartesian ghost-in-a-machine vs a nonreductive physicalist account of the im/mortal soul. What could be less “cramped” than that?

As for Haught’s narrative, an aesthetic teleology, perhaps you did not grasp (or do not buy) my distinction between natural theology and a theology of nature? Jack, in his own words, eschews any

“attempt on the part of finite humans to grasp the infinite and incomprehensible God in rational or scientific terms. These arguments diminish the mystery of God, seeking to bring it under the control of the limited human mind. For religious reasons, therefore, we should be grateful to Darwinians for helping us get rid of the pretentiousness of natural theology.”

A natural theology can be, as you say, “thoroughly compromised by modernity’s cramped ontology.” However, a theology of nature belongs to the genre of poetry, not ontology. A theology of nature is analogical and metaphorical, to be sure, like much of science and metaphysics, but it is mostly lyrical. It’s like St. Francis’ hymns to nature, like the metaphors of the psalmists, like the allegories of the Bible but brought up to date with modern references to nature. One could say that “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” is a cramped ontology but that would be a category error because it’s a hymn not an ontology.

In my view, the problem with radical fundamentalisms, whether the sola scriptura variety of Protestantism, the solum magisterium of my own Catholicism, or even that of a radical Islamism, is essentially epistemological. It may very well be that our people are being taught and evangelized by those who are trained as critical realists (of whatever school) but that so many of the faithful are receiving these teachings as naive realists, who employ a folk-psychological understanding that is incapable of processing what are critical nuances.

Brian mentioned the late Walker Percy, my fellow Louisianian, whom we both loved. Percy’s novels and essays articulate, in an engaging and accessible way, the insights of Charles Sanders Peirce, perhaps the greatest American philosopher, who was also largely inspired by John Duns Scotus. Robert Cummings Neville, whom I mentioned above, has been similarly inspired by Peirce and his semeiotic realism. Neville’s Realism in Religion: a Pragmatist’s Perspective (SUNY Press 2009) well chronicles what he calls “liberal theology as a near miss” and well critiques the neo-liberalisms of the Whiteheadians as “still near misses.” None of this means that he finds Barthianism attractive, either. I employ what I call my Peircean-Nevillean Integral Axiological Epistemology in an exploration of my own pentecostal sensibilities, which could hardly abide with a cramped ontology!

I hope we can continue to vigorously explore these critical naunces without too cursorily or facilely applying our different sort-narratives, whatever their philosophic origins, to decide who’s in and who’s out. I suppose that’s a tall order once considering how Christianity has splintered into SO MANY denominations. It WOULD be a RADICALLY NEW kind of Christianity that would thus cease and desist from such sorting and over-against engagement! I think that’s what Brian really hopes for. I know I do.

dopderbeck (#135) asked: “But is it ‘dynamic’ in that God’s essential nature changes and develops as creation changes and develops? And is it ‘unbreakable’ in that creation and God are ‘part of’ each other?”

Semeiotic realists (e.g. Peirce, Percy, Neville) view essentialism and nominalism as the obverse sides of an epistemic dualism that will generally extend, respectively, to either a substance or process metaphysic, neither which cashes out much value for science. They thus launch a critique of process approaches because of their nominalism. Neville argues against another flaw in process theology as an instance of a theological conception of God as a determinate entity and suggests that the ground for determinateness in reality is not being but the act of creation, creatio ex nihilo.

At any rate, there is a parsing required for any who aspire to articulate a panentheism (I don’t because I cannot imagine how) and it speaks directly to the questions you raised. There are indeed some who subscribe to a panen-theism, which sees God as part of all things but more than the sum of all things; others speak of a pan-entheism, which sees God indwelling in all things. Only the latter parsing would be considered orthodox per our Nicene formulations. But it’s precisely because of all of the problematics aforementioned that I prescind to a panSEMIOentheism and reject both essentialistic and nominalistic categories, substance and process approaches.

Of course, again, Brian can speak for himself (but he’s in Albuquerque for a few days), but what I affirm in Jack Haught’s theology of nature is its radically incarnational approach and its robustly analogical imagination. This is a kataphatic affirmation that can balance an overly dialectical imagination and such a radical apophaticism as would suggest that God is not only wholly incomprehensible but cannot even be partly apprehended. I do know that Brian has also shown some interest in the work Amos Yong has done regarding what Amos has called the pneumatological imagination, which may well have profound significance for interreligious dialogue. (Amos is my collaborator-mentor in articulating an integral axiological epistemology.) All of this resonates, too, with Jamie Smith’s views on our participatory imaginations. I’m sure that none of us subscribe to every detail of the others’ perspectives but we can recognize and affirm what we have in common and advance our understanding where we differ!

My Part of a Recent Exchange with Brian:

I’ve been scratching my head questioning how I could interpret your thrust as grounded in and consistent with what I see as a long (and continuous) semiotic tradition in Christianity, dating back to the early church fathers, running through the medieval church and influencing our postmodern outlook (e.g. Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scottus Eriugena, John Duns Scotus, John of St. Thomas /Poinsot, Charles Sanders Peirce, Walker Percy, Robert Cummings Neville, Amos Yong), while others imagine you’re simply reiterating old liberal and neoliberal arguments. You’re much closer to being a medieval Franciscan!

I can only reckon that it was my foreknowledge of our kinship with Walker Percy that innoculated me against that rather insidious viral meme that paints you as the reincarnate Adolf von Harnack.

You wrote: “We want to try reading the Bible frontward for a while, to let it be a Jewish story that, through Jesus, opens to include all humanity. We believe it is time to firmly escort the Greco-Roman reframing of the biblical narrative to the door …” (pg 45 ANKoC)

Are you lamenting inculturation? Are you advocating an idealized Semitic Christianity? Are you exalting the Semitic imagination with its mytho-poetic-practical mind and thoroughly denigrating Hellensitic rationality?

I do not see any of this in what you said in ANKoC or elsewhere! That would be so un-Peircean of you!

It seems that some are confusing your argument against a subversion of the Gospels by Hellenic philosophy and Roman culture for a position that, instead, eschews any Christian assimilation of Hellenic philosophy via an inculturation process. For the life of me, I cannot see how anyone could ever imagine that one, with as broad an ecumenical vision as yours, would ever argue against inculturation. Clearly, rather, both from the specific case that you argued in ANKoC and the context provided by your extensive written oeuvre, which is radically integral, you are objecting to a particular “SUBVERSION BY” and not, rather, to the general “ASSIMILATION OF” Greek philosophy and Roman culture.

You inventory the subversions (e.g. the epistemological, ontological and social dualisms coupled with an a prioristic, rationalistic, apodictic certainty). You employ the assimilations (e.g. abductive experience, biblical exegesis, religious pluralism, biological evolution, Wesleyan quadrilateral). Makes sense to me.

Finally, I wouldn’t apologize for using hyperbole and vague heuristics as rhetorical strategies, whether in the title of the book or the description of the soul-sort narrative. This book is accomplishing far more via its stimulation of vigorous (and occasionally erudite) conversation than you could have possibly imagined.

Enjoy your Franciscan immersion this weekend,
John

post script:

By the way, to the extent just exactly who is buying what version of Christianity is an empirical sociologic question that others can debate anecodotally ’til they’re blue in the face, the latest Pew Forum data reveal even a recent backward trend re: exclusivity among many Americans, perhaps reflecting increasing polarizations (dualistic thinking & social structures):

Many Americans Say Other Faiths Can Lead to Eternal Life

I’m afraid all protestations to the contrary re: your 6LN, at least in most of Evangelical Protestantism, you have the problem nailed. It reminds me of the old saw that those who excuse themselves thus accuse themselves. I’m afraid that some are, as the Bard put it, protesting a little too much.

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I consider Brian’s responses privileged and will leave it to him to publish them or not. But I know he won’t mind me sharing this one nugget, that says it all in a nutshell regarding subversion by and assimilation of a culture:

For the gospel to incarnate into a culture is very different from a culture coopting the gospel.

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Join our Inter-faith, Inter-religious & Ecumenical explorations of emergence dynamics at Ecumergent.org and on Facebook’s Ecumergent Group

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Per the Pneumatological Imagination, because there is one Spirit, Who is Holy:

1 ) In each of the great traditions, the esoteric and mystical will present in terms of:

a) some form of  critical realism in their axiological epistemologies

b) a critical scriptural scholarship

c) a nondual, contemplative stance toward reality

d) social justice component in their eschatological realism

e) an eternal now awareness permeating their temporal milieu

f) an institutionally marginalized yet still efficacious voice of prophetic protest

g) a solidarity with and preferential option for the marginalized

h) a deep compassion ensuing from an awakening to a profound solidarity

i) broadly inclusivistic and ecumenical sensibility

j) emergent, novel structures that are radically egalitarian

2 ) Esoteric experimentation and mystical realization can be pragmatically cashed out in terms of a growth in human authenticity. That is to say that they will result in conversion, growth and development in our intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and religious spheres of existence.

3 ) Counterintuitively to many, humankind’s aspirations to inter-religious unity would proceed more swiftly and with less hindrance — not first by unitive strivings on the exoteric plane of religious reality via some putative reconcilement of otherwise disparate mythic elements vis a vis our cognitive propositions between our traditions, but rather —  by better fostering greater degrees of esoteric experimentation and mystical realization vis a vis our participatory imaginations within our traditions.  This is to suggest that, transformatively, the performative enjoys primacy over —but not autonomy from — the informative. Good News, then, enjoys a primacy over good knowledge.

In other words, to better understand the cause of our shared fruits, we need to look more at the esoteric and mystical, which lie below-ground in our common roots, and less at the exoteric and mythical, which diverge above ground in our different shoots.

Note: tetradic — employing categories like truth|beauty|goodness|unity and orthodoxy|orthopathy|orthopraxy|orthocommunio and creed|cult|code|community and descriptive|evaluative|normative|interpretive and science|culture|philosophy|religion and theoretic|heuristic|semiotic|dogmatic and objective|subjective|intraobjective|intersubjective

The above is a companion piece to this post:

10 Emerging Church Questions: Discovering What You Already Know but maybe didn’t realize you knew it (Walker Percy-ism)

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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.

In Dialogue with the Great Traditions

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.

A Movement Toward Praxis?

A movement toward praxis might be one of the value-added takeaways for any who resonate with this speculative account. Such a movement is embedded in every aspect of this hermeneutical spiral.

Peirce leads one away from what can often become an endless and fruitless cycle of abductive hypothesizing and deductive clarifying, such as can happen with a sterile scholastic metaphysic, by leading one always back to inductive testing. Indeed, one will there enjoy a recovery of the measure of concrete reality; but this is only a recovery of logical import. Such a pragmatic turn is but a test of truth; it is merely informative.

Neville’s axiological turn leads us to a recovery of the measure of that which has vital import, which is performative. Lonergan’s conversions provide us the categories through which we recover the measure of this Peircean-Nevillean axiological epistemology in terms of the transformative.

In Merton’s encounter with the East and his excursus on humanization, socialization and transformation, one can see these pragmatic and axiological turns playing out in categories that correspond to a naturalistic, evolutionary epistemology that then extends to an existential phenomenology. Phenomenologically, any robust description of the human species will require a radically social ontology. This is because Homo sapiens is not merely social but, singularly, the symbolic species (Terry Deacon).

Merton was known for his emphasis on the relational and situated the human in a tetradic relationship to self, other, world and God. To robustly describe the distinctly human experience, any authentic social, hence participatory, ontology must break open such categories as self, other, world and horizon. It must also provide a semeiotic account that recognizes the telic dimension of this experience. One does not yet encounter, here, telos in the classical sense or transcendence as a theological notion. One is grappling, rather, with a minimalist telos and a minimalist transcendence. One has crossed the threshold of spirituality when gazing over this philosophic horizon of human concern (Daniel Helminiak) but not in any robustly pneumatological sense (Amos Yong).

If philosophy and theology are both confessional exercises, what will characterize the theological turn to telos, transcendence and pneumatology, all robustly conceived?

This question brings us full circle back to the creative tension that presents between the speculative and practical, between justification of beliefs and critical engagements of praxis, between our exoteric mythical accounts and our esoteric mystical experimentations, and even between radical fundamentalisms (including Enlightenment narratives) and radically deconstructive postmodernisms (such as Rorty’s vulgar pragmatism).

Our postmodern milieu has had believers searching for an apologetic to articulate what it is that the common folk of all religious traditions, in every culture and age, have always known in their bones. This has been a difficult search because the philosophers of religion, at every so-called “turn,” have repeatedly buried this apologetic by variously misrepresenting it in many different forms of rationalism, evidentialism, fideism, presuppositionalism, existentialism and perspectivalism.

For philosophers of religion, there has been, then, a rather frantic attempt to recover a measure of certainty, which was lost with the demise of various foundationalisms, by establishing some type of epistemic parity between, for example, the beliefs of science, culture, philosophy and religion. It will be the nature of the strategy employed in any given argument for epistemic parity that will distinguish one apologetic from the next.

Certainly, one must attend to the validity and soundness of the reason, the quantity and quality of the evidence, the nature of the leaps, the  basicality of the presuppositions, the existential actionability of the options and the integral relations of the perspectives. However, as we sort through our various scientific, cultural, philosophical and religious beliefs, it is too facile a notion to suggest that their epistemic playing field has quite simply been leveled by the postmodern critique such that, for example, one can merely claim that these beliefs are all confessional (and unapologetically so) or all basic (and properly so).

We have already demonstrated, in our consideration of the Peircean semeiotic, that rationality is robustly participatory and imaginative and not merely conceptual and cognitive. From our axiological epistemology, we have gathered that it is value-oriented but horizon-situated, thus establishing both a minimalist telos and transcendence over against any facile charge of an unmitigated nihilism in secular approaches to reality. This is to recognize that the human condition offers an abundance of value-realizations, juxtaposed though they may be with the cosmic irony of its value-frustrations.

How, then, do we evade the charges of either rationalism or fideism? Our axiological epistemology aspires to value-realization and thus to epistemic virtue. Any epistemic parity we enjoy vis a vis our various scientific, cultural (social, political, economic), philosophical and religious beliefs will derive from a shared virtue (when they meet such criteria, of course, which they can but often do not). We must otherwise concede that, even when equally virtuous (being neither unreasonable nor unwarranted), not all beliefs entail the same amount of epistemic risk, hence the perceived (and undeniable) epistemic disparity. This is not to suggest that any increased risks will necessarily take our hermeneutical spiral out of its otherwise virtuous epistemic cycle; rather, we look to each risk-amplification for some concomitant value-augmentation. It is this epistemic maneuver, then, that characterizes any theological (or atheological) turn. Such augmentations of value become cultural data (anthropological, psychological, social, political and economic).

Thus would go any apologetic which recommends the theological turn in terms of risk-amplifications and value-augmentations. Thus we’d describe the movement from a minimalist telos, transcendence and spirituality as a participatory phenomenology and ontology would conceptually map them onto reality with a much more robustly telic, transcendent and pneumatological imagination in play. The cultural data of just such a hermeneutic (the ubiquity of which makes me want to equate it with an open-hearted common sense) has universally been sought after and variously conceived in terms of gifts (risk-amplification encouragement) and fruits (value-augmentations) of a spirit. It is not only the task of the comparative theologian, then, but that of cultural anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, historians, economists and even political scientists, to discover and discern when and where and whether (or not) it is the Spirit, whom we call Holy.

Below are the methodological presuppositions that situate my outlook as articulated above.

This is the precis for a theological anthropology that seems to be coming together in an emerging postmodern pentecostal theology. One day I may be inspired to substantiate these claims.  They describe, in part, what I believe might best correspond, cross-culturally and inter-religiously, to what Professor Amos Yong calls the pneumatological imagination.

Note: tetradic — employing categories like truth|beauty|goodness|unity and orthodoxy|orthopathy|orthopraxy|orthocommunio and creed|cult|code|community and descriptive|evaluative|normative|interpretive and science|culture|philosophy|religion and theoretic|heuristic|semiotic|dogmatic and objective|subjective|intraobjective | intersubjective

In Dialogue With Ken Wilber

The most important take-away from what I am trying to say is that our different perspectives (subjective, intersubjective, intraobjective & objective) and methods (descriptive, normative, evaluative & interpretive) or disciplines (science, philosophy, culture & religion or even empirical, rational, moral-practical, relational) are methodologically-autonomous but axiologically-integral. In some sense, this seems to differ from what Wilber has said at times about, for example, the trans-rational. His work is very highly nuanced and he does, after all, say AQAL. However,  what seems to come across, for all practical purposes, is that Wilber is saying that these perspectives are both methodologically-autonomous and axiologically-autonomous.

The difference in what we are saying boils down to my suggesting that each of these perspectives (methods, disciplines or approaches) is necessary but none, alone, sufficient in every human value-realization. Wilber seems to be saying that each perspective is both necessary and sufficient, now for this value-realization, now for that. That said, I’m not suggesting that mine is a devastating critique. I do think there are important differences that deserve high nuance and that have great import, for example, in our religion and science dialogue.

I suppose we could say that, when I am using the word integral, I mean all quadrants, all levels, all the time. This is to say, then, that the trans-rational does well to go beyond the rational but has nothing to say to us when it goes without it. What I want to very much affirm is the value in listening to, during every human value-realization (think truth, beauty, goodness and unity), our pre-rational, non-rational, rational, trans-rational (maybe even irrational) voices, allowing them to mutually critique each other. What I positively want to avoid is giving any one of these voices the last word, which would not be an authentic trans-rational approach, but would be, instead, arational.

In other words, authentic integrality does not come from our willingness to give each perspective its say about reality, now this voice for that value-realization, now that voice for another value-realization. Integrality employs a harmonic symphony of voices in every value-realization, all quadrants, all levels, all the time (AQALAT).

Of course, this requires nuance because we do recognize that, as we move from one value-realization to the next, certain of our perspectives or voices will enjoy a certain primacy as it steps up to the microphone and others take their place in the chorus waiting for the conductor to to signal a pause or crescendo or what have you. For example, in apophatic, contemplative silence, other voices may be muted but any value-realization from that nondual moment will necessarily ensue from its place in the choral arrangement in relationship to other voices or moments, even if they occupy, in that instant, a rather tacit dimension. Tacit dimensionality plays a prominent role in semiotic science, as I like to say, ineluctably unobtrusive but utterly efficacious. A person formed in an Eastern tradition may be present to a moment of apophasis with an interiority that will receive its flow like a cliff receives water in a cascading waterfall while a westerner may experience the same moment with an interiority shaped like a winding riverbed. Different efficacies might thus ensue from these different semiotic sea-scapes (however otherwise tacit).

On one hand, I have never worried much about not having an audience because most of what I have written is a defense of common sense and a subversion from within of sterile philosophies and metaphysics. In other words, I think your average Joe and Mary are at least mostly unconsciously competent, which is sometimes more poignantly beautiful than the self-inflated conscious-competents. On the other hand, the average person is thus susceptible to being radicalized precisely because they depart from common sense to inhabit these elaborate tautologies which they then cannot escape, unable to JOTS [jump outside their systems] of apodictic certainty. They do not need a LOT of hermeneutical help, only to be encouraged that their original native state of doubt even in faith is their salvation, that their ability to tolerate ambiguity and live with paradox is their true glory (ortho-doxy). It’s the only thing that can save our species: Healthy doubt, Therapeutic uncertainty.

In Dialogue With Gadamer

Cynthia R. Nielsen, at Per Caritatem writes:

“In a sense, the C major triad is both a one and a many-it is a C major triad and thus has an integral unity of meaning; yet, it is a many because of its intimate connection to and function within the symphony itself-that place where it lives and moves and has its being.  The dialectical self-cancelling movement occurs due to the fact that as the C major triad emerges from the background of the whole, it must “cancel” part of itself (the whole) in order to do so.  (This sounds very Heideggerian, which is no surprise given the latter’s influence on Gadamer).  Yet, to avoid mis-interpretation, it must not become completely severed from the whole, lest in a very real sense it die.  If this is a correct understanding of Gadamer on this point, there are some interesting Christian connections to be made.”

In Dialogue With Walker Percy

1 ) I suppose all we’ve really done in saying that the descriptive, interpretive and normative are methodologically autonomous but axiologically integral is that we have affirmed, with Peirce, that a descriptive, inductive science and an interpretive, abductive metaphysic and a normative, deductive philosophy are irreducibly triadic (Walker Percy’s Delta Factor).  This is not unrelated to Walker Percy’s consideration of the various antinomies of science and philosophy vis a vis culture in that the source of antinomy lies in the limitations of the methods, themselves. Thus the need for mutual critique and meta-critique. Thus our recognition of manifold and multiform dynamics: teleological, perspectival, methodological, developmental, paradoxical and integral. Think here, too, of Percy’s treatment of the irreducible character of intersubjectivity.

2 ) And, perhaps, with Neville, our affirmation of the evaluative (culture) is but the application of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, a recognition of the end to which the triad is ordered, teleologically.

3 ) Our distinctions between the theoretic, heuristic, semiotic (Walker Percy’s protocol statements) and dogmatic thus recognize degrees of pragmatic realization in the cashing out of values from our various conceptualizations.

4 ) Our distinctions between semantical, ontological and epistemic vagueness are recognitions of the fallible nature of semiosis.

5 ) Our suggestion that usefulness, beauty, goodness, elegance, parsimony, symmetry, facility and other aesthetic, pragmatic and ethical sensibilities (including, then, various pre-rational, nonrational and supra-or trans-rational approaches) can serve as truth-indicative signs is but a recognition of the probabilistic nature of semiosis as we reason, retroductively, from predicates back to putative subjects, for example, very often from effects to causes (and such known, or even unknown, subjects or causes to which only those predicates or effects could be proper). This is also to recognize that deductive, inductive and abductive inferences get progressively weaker even as we recognize that they’re all we’ve got to work with.

6 ) Our equiplausibility principle recognizes this probabilistic nature of semiosis and affirms such distinctions as between information and news (Walker Percy’s Message in a Bottle) or informative and performative knowledge, affirming that our solutions to many of life’s paradoxes, ironies and questions are not so much theoretical as they are practical in that they provide us with existentially actionable knowledge, employing more so our participatory imagination than our propositional (conceptual map-making) cognition.

7 ) Finally, we step back from metaphysics, with Percy prescinding entirely from final ontological constructions as befits an empirical science, and approaching existential realities solely in light of an empirical finding – the uniquely human symbolic transformation (Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism).

In Dialogue With Reformed Epistemology & Radical Orthodoxy

This is really an outline for a book. But it also reflects an attempt on my part to identify exactly what it is that I am trying to offer to postmodern theological discourse. Of course I have rejected foundationalism but I am also rejecting the “solution” offered by Reformed epistemology. I am deeply sympathetic to Radical Orthodoxy  and its aim to mediate between faith and reason but am offering what I think is an indispensable corrective.

Too many in RO seem to be saying that philosophy, metaphysics and theology are integrally-related methodologically and thereby overcome any insidious dualisms with their claim that all approaches are at bottom confessional. Their intuition that all of these approaches to reality have confessional elements is spot on but these approaches to reality remain, indeed and nevertheless, methodologically autonomous. If these approaches stay out of each others’ way, it is not because they’ve been methodologically conflated, it’s because they are asking distinctly different questions, employing distinctly different commitments, all as explicated in our own heuristic. RO is correct in that these approaches are integrally-related. Our corrective is that this integral relationship is axiological and not methodological.

All put another way, we do want to affirm faith and reason while avoiding fideism and rationalism. The Reformed strategy reclassifies faith as a basic presupposition, immunizing it from an autonomous philosophy. RO’s strategy reclassifies faith AS reason so fideism and rationalism dissolve in a categorial disappearing act.

If, in the first instance, a belief in God is basic (and supposedly properly so, at that) and, in the next, all presuppositional beliefs are confessional (and unapologetically so, at that), both fideism and rationalism indeed disappear and, along with them, so do philosophy and metaphysics and, along with them, any lingua franca for conducting interreligious dialogue and, further, any autonomous methodology for adjudicating between competing truth claims.

Our axiological epistemology employs another strategy to overcome both fideism and rationalism a) affirming the confessional nature of our methods via a contrite fallibilism and b) integrally-relating the distinct approaches to reality axiologically but c) maintaining the methodological autonomy of those approaches. Unlike the Reformed strategy, we do not redefine the essential nature of different types of belief but do otherwise distinguish them vis a vis epistemic risks. Unlike the RO strategy, we do not invoke epistemic parity between different types of belief vis a vis their different risk profiles but we do recognize and affirm an epistemic parity vis a vis their shared epistemic virtues. Faith remains. Reason remains. Philosophy remains. Metaphysics remains. Because all play an indispensable role in every human value-realization, fides et ratio are preserved and fideism and rationalism are thus avoided. (Essay for another day: John Duns Scotus is the wrong theological whipping boy for RO!)

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Wim Drees defines theology as a cosmology plus an axiology. Drees notes that, and serious emergentists might pay special attention, the discontinuity in emergent reality threatens the unity of the sciences. Because laws, themselves, emerge, we are on thin theoretical ice when speculating metaphysically re: the nature of primal reality, causal joints for divine prerogatives, and so on.

While cosmological and axiological approaches are integrally-related, they are methodologically autonomous. Cosmology answers the questions 1) Is that a fact? (descriptively) and 2) How do I best acquire/avoid that? (normatively). Daniel Helminiak, a Lonergan protege, would describe these as positivist and philosophic activities and rightly affirms, in my view, the philosophic as spiritual quest.

Even if one concedes, for argument’s sake, our ability to travel from the descriptive to the prescriptive, given to normative, is to ought (and Mortimer Adler well-demonstrates that we can get from an is to an ought) still, due to our universal human condition, wherein we are all, for the most part, similarly situated, even if our reasoning differs for certain precepts & would be theoretically relativistic, still, from a practical perspective our precepts are going to be remarkably consistent.

The practical upshot of all of this is that cosmology, thus narrowly conceived, is truly Everybody’s Story, which is to say we really shouldn’t go around wily-nily just making this stuff up because it isn’t really negotiable but is given.

Axiology answers the questions 3) What’s it to me? (evaluatively) and 4) How’s all this tie-together? (interpretively). Here we are dealing with human value-realizations, their definitions and prioritization, and with religion. The reason we even have such a category as interpretation results from our radical human finitude. It is not that we don’t affirm such a metaphysical realism as recognizes the validity and soundness of a putative best interpretative “vision of the whole,” but that, at this stage of humankind’s journey, it is exceedingly problematical to fallibly discern and adjudicate between competing interpretations, especially as they fit into elaborate tautologies, all which are variously taut in their grasp of reality.

In some sense, our cosmology comprises the propositional aspect of our metanarratives (aspiring to successful and robust descriptions with indications of correspondence) and our axiology comprises the narrative aspect (aspiring to vague but successful references with invitations to particpate). The postmodern critique does not instill incredulity toward our metanarratives per se; rather, it takes note of how every narrative aspect of our metanarratives is rooted in myth (yes, including scientism no less than fideism).  Analogous to Gödel‘s incompleteness theorems, we cannot prove our system’s axioms within the system (evidentially, rationally, presuppositionally or propositionally), itself, but this does not mean that we cannot taste and see (existentially, as recommended by Ignatius, the Psalmist & enlightened speculative cosmologists …) the truth of those axioms, which we would necessarily express – not formally, but – through narrative, story, myth.

This framework establishes a certain amount of epistemic parity between worldviews and religions, which then get authenticated by how well they institutionalize conversions: intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious and adjudicated with an equiplausibility principle, which looks for life-giving and relationship-enhancing criteria when choosing between otherwise ambiguous courses of action. We can also remain on the lookout for Gospel norms like a language of descent or “downward mobility” and a prophetic element (self-criticism). So, we do draw distinctions between a theory of truth and a test of truth and we do recognize that some aspects of reality are best grasped through correspondence while other aspects grasp us through participation.

One lesson we take away is that our reliance on myth reveals that reality overflows our ability to process it, that creation, Creator and people present unfathomable depth dimensions that no encounter can capture or exhaust. If in our cosmologies, with their empirical, logical and practical foci, it is very much our intent to get the right answers, when it comes to our axiologies, with their relational foci, then, our quest is to get the right questions (Whom does the grail serve?).

Our fundamental trust in uncertain reality requires no apologetic, then, and fashioning one is as futile as explaining why we love our Beloved in empirical, logical and practical terms (as if only extrinsically rewarding). Embodiments of truth, beauty, goodness and unity are their own rewards (intrinsically); they grasp us and possess us as we participate in these values with our existential orientations to these transcendental imperatives. As we distinguish between wants and needs, real and acquired desires, lesser and higher goods, our axiologies orient and dispose us to the higher goods, which we can enjoy without measure, and properly dispose us to the created goods that we really need in moderation and not in a disordered (John of the Cross) or inordinate (Ignatius) way.

Our cosmology, which is scientific and philosophic, descriptive and normative, also includes our essentially spiritual quest, which is shaped by the positivist and normative sciences and addresses the orthopraxes of our ethical and moral strivings as well as those ascetical practices and disciplines that enhance awareness, including certain meditative practices, many which come from the East and are not inextricably bound to any religion or worldview (hence some are indeed spiritual without being religious, explicitly anyway). In our cosmology, we better come to grips with our empirical, logical and practical foci of concern and foster intellectual, moral and social conversions.

Our axiology, which is interpretive and evaluative, goes beyond but not without our cosmology and is shaped by our religious myths and liturgical celebrations, which address the orthopathos of our prayer and worship, public and private, forming and reinforcing our aspirations and hopes, answering the question “What’s it to me?” in a manner that is properly ordered, truly fitting and proper, which is to say, Eucharistically. There is no worldview or metanarrative without either an implicit or explicit axiology that is integrally related to one’s cosmology (so we’d best tend to an explicit axiology in a consciously-competent manner). In fact, in addition to their methodological autonomy, our axiologies enjoy a primacy in relation to our cosmologies, although otherwise axiologically-integrated.  It is our orthopathos that mediates between our orthodoxy and orthopraxis to effect an authentic orthocommunio. If our unitive strivings come up short, whether geopolitically or in our primary communities and families, we might look at our prayer lives for, if we invoke, it is only because we have been convoked. In our axiology, we better come to grips with our relational foci of concern, where our value-realizations are trust, assent, fidelity, loyalty, faith, hope, love, eros, philia, agape and so on and we better foster affective and religious conversions.

We do our best to discern where Lonergan’s conversions have been institutionalized, looking to see which interpretive approach best fosters ongoing intellectual, affective, moral and social growth and development, leading to human authenticity. But we’re clearly in more negotiable territory here with discourse dominated more by dogmatic (non-negotiated) and heuristic (still-in-negotiation) concepts, this contrasted to cosmological discourse, which has more theoretic (negotiated in community) concepts and semiotic concepts (non-negotiable b/c meaning, itself, is invested in them).

In defining what my own Radical Emergence approach would be about, then, I see it as an axiological vision of the whole. In such a metanarrative, cosmology is left to the positivist, empirical scientific methodologies, and to the philosophic, normative sciences. Religion, an interpretive endeavor, is constrained by the positivist & normative sciences, and employs a different & autonomous methodology (myth and liturgy), even though integrally-related to the other methodologies in every value-realization. To be clear, by “integrally-related,” I am suggesting that a cosmology presupposes an axiology and vice versa, that our descriptive, normative, interpretive and evaluative foci of human concern presuppose each other.

As an axiological endeavor, the Emerging Church would foster the intentional evolution of the interpretive and evaluative aspects of human value-realizations, which would enhance (and transvalue), also, our cosmological modeling power without interfering with its autonomous methodologies (faith illuminating understanding). Over against both scientism and fideism, the Emerging Church would not conflate or compromise the autonomous methodologies of science, philosophy and religion, of descriptive, normative and interpretive endeavors, but would integrate them axiologically.

What would intentional evolution address? Nothing less than creed, cult, code and community (institutionalized), which are deconstructible, as semiotic realities ordered toward truth, beauty, goodness and unity, which are not deconstructible. How would it address them? Through the amplification of epistemic risks as ordered toward the augmentation of human value-realizations.

Less abstractly and more concretely, how does one amplify epistemic risks? Understanding yields to faith, memory to hope, will to love and alienation to community.

More programatically, what route do I advocate? A Radical Emergence, rooted in the orthopathos and orthodoxy of tradition, as articulated and valued by some in the Radical Orthodoxy movement, and open to the orthopraxes and orthocommunio of the future, as articulated and valued by some in the Emerging Church conversation.

Specifically, one efficacious route to ecclesial and personal transformation is the surrender to the contemplative stance, the 3rd Eye seeing, of nonduality, which is what http://christiannonduality.com/ is all about.

Update on 06 Sept 2009 -See Tom Roberts “In Search of the Emerging Church” the contemplative tradition grounds emerging Christianity

Emerging Church Pillars:

I orthodoxy = honest Jesus scholarship

II orthopraxy = peace & social justice

III orthopathy = contemplative tradition, nonduality

IV orthocommunio = noninstitutional vehicles (complementary & happily on the side)

There are rather clear archetypal themes playing out in our cosmologies and axiologies, likely related to brain development and individuation processes.

A cosmology engages mostly our left-brain (thinking function of the left frontal cortex & sensing function of the left posterior convexity) as the normative and descriptive aspects of value-realization alternately establish and defend boundaries; we encounter the King-Queen and Warrior-Maiden with their light and dark (shadow) attributes as expressed in the journeys of the spirit and the body, primarily through a language of ascent.

An axiology engages mostly our right-brain (intuiting function of the right frontal cortex & feeling function of the right posterior convexity) as the interpretive and evaluative aspects of value-realization alternately negotiate (e.g. reconciliation of opposites, harnessing the power of paradox) and transcend boundaries; we encounter the Crone-Magician and Mother-Lover with their light and dark attributes as expressed in the journeys of the soul and the other (Thou), primarily through a language of descent.

Our propositional cosmologies and participatory axiologies seem to best foster transformation when, beyond our passive reception of them as stories about others, we actively engage the archetypal energies of their mythic dimensions with a contemplation ordered toward action, and also, when in addition to our rather natural expectations, they include 1) a priestly voice that sings of the intrinsic beauty to be celebrated  in seemingly repugnant realities 2) a prophetic voice that is robustly self-critical when speaking the truth 3) a kingly voice that articulates a bias for the bottom, expressing both a privileging of the marginalized and a principle of subsidiarity when preserving goodness 4) a motherly voice that, seeing and calling all as her children, draws every person into her circle of compassion and mercy with no trace of exclusion, only a vision of unity.

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In Economics at the Jesus Creed: Michael Kruse 6 today’s discussion asks What is wealth?

Kruse clarifies: I’m asking that since economic value of goods and labor is determined by utility, yet as Christians we know there is more than economic value in life, what should be our response.

These issues are framed up and explained very well.

In my own tradition, we affirm a metaphysical realism (we can descriptively adduce enough of what has been given, what is, to realize life’s most important values) and a moral realism (we can normatively reason from an is to an ought, from the descriptive to the prescriptive, from what’s given to what’s normative, from fact to value). More and more, however, we have moved from the apodictic certainties of an a prioristic rationalism to the more provisional closures of a contrite fallibilism.

While we recognize such distinctions as between deontological, teleological, aretaic, contractarian, utilitarian, pragmatic and consequentialistic approaches to moral realities, such as between real and apparent goods, lesser and higher goods, extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, we also affirm a political realism, which recognizes our radical human finitude as we practice the art of the possible, politics. From a metaphysical perspective, ontology, in many ways, remains highly speculative. It follows then that, morally, our deontology, in many cases, will remain somewhat tentative. This is to acknowledge that our journey from is to ought, given to normative, will often be more than a tad problematical. One response has thus been pastoral sensitivity.

In matters of war and peace, this pastoral sensitivity can simultaneously affirm both pacifism and just war principles as acceptable responses to Gospel imperatives. The just war tradition represents an accommodation to the universal human condition. On smaller scales, such as in our families and religious communities, from each according to their ability and to each according to their need has worked well. On larger scales, this communal approach breaks down. What we sanction in our social encyclicals is carefully crafted to accommodate our radical human finitude while advocating Gospel imperatives. Such accommodations are strategic and represent a negotiation of seemingly intractable political realities and not, rather, a negotiation of religious realities.

When we do take recourse in the pragmatic, we do so strategically, not philosophically. Sometimes, we take strategic recourse in the pragmatic, theoretically, because it is truth-indicative and thus increases our confidence in a proposition probabilistically. Sometimes, we take strategic recourse in the pragmatic, practically, not because we are negotiating our principles but because we are negotiating difficult social, economic, political and cultural realities.

Below, I am archiving my contribution to the above-referenced BeliefNet thread:

This is an excellent discussion, well-framed and explained.

I would like to introduce a distinction that seems to be in play here. Pragmatic approaches can superficially resemble each other, strategically, even when coming from widely different perspectives, philosophically.

As Christians, our interpretive stance toward reality presupposes both metaphysical and moral realisms. Oversimplified, we do believe that one can journey from an is to an ought, a fact to a value, the given to the normative, the descriptive to the prescriptive. While our descriptions of reality are problematical because we are radically finite, while we in no way fully comprehend reality, we do know enough through our partial apprehension of reality to derive from it significant values in terms of truth, beauty, goodness and unity. Still, because of our radical finitude, we must be concerned also with the art of the possible, the political, and this calls for a political realism, which takes into account what can be some rather harsh and seemingly intractable social, economic, political and cultural realities.

In my RC tradition, our social encyclicals pay heed to metaphysical, moral and political realisms. When we do take a “pragmatic turn,” we do so strategically and not philosophically. For the Christian, while the pragmatic can serve as a “test” of truth, never is it considered a “theory” of truth; while it can serve as a “strategy,” never does it serve as a “principle.” Theoretically, if the pragmatic is truth-indicative, then, strategically, it can increase our confidence in a proposition probabilistically even if it is not otherwise truth-conducive. Practically, if we encounter difficult socioeconomic and political realities, then, strategically, we can defensibly take recourse in pragmatic solutions as we try to successfully negotiate these realities, partially advancing our Gospel cause, without in any way negotiating our principles.

What I am suggesting is that there can be a superficial resemblance between our Christian responses and otherwise secular approaches as we accommodate ourselves to difficult social, economic, political and cultural realities while, at the same time, trying to permeate and improve the temporal order with our eternal perspective. As many grapple with our somewhat universal human condition and turn to the pragmatic, philosophically, Christians will often seek recourse in the pragmatic, also, but only strategically. Our response can thus be distinguished as one of pastoral sensitivity and not a worldly capitulation. Thus it is, for example, that in matters of war and peace, this pastoral sensitivity can simultaneously affirm both pacifism and  just war principles as acceptable responses to Gospel imperatives. Thus it is that, in our families and religious communities, we can affirm an approach that says “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need” even as we recognize that, on larger scales, this communal approach rapidly breaks down. This break down requires a pastoral sensitivity via a strategic accommodation, which should not be confused with a philosophical negotiation.

While there may very well be certain “pragmatic” prescriptions that seem to inhere in Michael’s descriptions of certain social and economic realities, from the interpretive stance of our Christian worldview, such pragmatic responses need not be considered philosophical capitulations but, instead, can be viewed as strategic accommodations. Such accommodations are born of our radical human finitude and articulated by a pastoral sensitivity, as situated in metaphysical (critical), moral and political realisms. These realisms operate best under ideal circumstances and, all things being equal, provide our proper bias positions and default responses (like subsidiarity & pacifism). Our circumstances are seldom ideal and, unfortunately, all things are decidedly not equal.

What we all do in response may look exactly the same; why we do it may drastically differ. How, then, do we differentiate our Gospel-brand in the marketplace of ideas? For one thing, we should articulate our principles and state why we advocate one approach versus another. For another, at our earliest opportunity, circumstances permitting and resources affording, we should move assertively to change strategies in an effort to conform more and more to our Gospel-ideals as salt for the earth and light for the world.

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