I Really Sympathize

HT: SMBC

The Hitchens Brothers

Great interview. Perhaps they ought to settle their family issues before they write more.

An Ancient Existentialism

I am regularly encouraged by Father Stephen and this time about the theology of being which has persisted from the early church throughout Orthodox theology, and in a slightly mutated form liberal Protestantism.

The modern movement of secular thought has been to move existence into an independent and self-defining realm, relegating God and religion to a specialized interest of those who find themselves religiously minded. This is the death of religion – or rather a religion of death.

Since the empiricism of Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” existence has been thought of as an entirely individual and private matter. There is no ground in which objectivist/modern philosophy operates. And the good philosophers recognize this nihilism and lament their loss (see Stanely Rosen, The Limits of Analysis). Bad philosophers stand on their empiricism and thus declare that only those facts have spoken and all things really are meaningless. But anyone who lives a life knows differently.

The philosophical problem is that any ground of existence must begin as a speculative assertion. And that assertion comes through a meaning-laden intuition. All of these methods and angles are routinely decried as misleading and false by modern philosophy under the guise that they don’t fit the methods. Well, of course they don’t fit the empiricist framework when they aren’t operating by those rules. Anyone who finds a home in the ancient philosophy and theology of platonist/metaphysical philosophers will find themselves outside the pale. I know I feel that. Father Stephen calls that Orthodox theology goes further, however, because it is based not only on metaphysics, God as the Ground of all Being (which Tillich echoes), but that this God is love and being is communion – all insights gained through revelation. Therefore Orthodox theology seeks…

…a mode of being that is not self-centered nor self-defined, but that is centered in the Other and defined by communion. Sin is removed from its confines of legalism and mere ethics and placed at the very center and character of existence itself. Sin is a movement towards non-being.

With this understanding we can see how Kierkegaardian ‘angst’ plays into being. Angst is the manifestation of non-being, of sin. Unfortunately we are using all these modern terms and philosophers to talk about this when the Church has had thinkers saying this from the very beginning. And they were saying it without the constraints and imposition of modern philosophical thought. I know that should I get back to school, this is what I will be studying.

More Than Textual

In case you were thinking that cases of theology and critical study can be solved only by looking at the printed text, think again. Christianity must be looked at socially, not literally. Get out of your boxes.

HTML Forms

OK I must rant on this. With the rise of incredibly interactive pages HTML Forms are becoming a serious problem for. Maybe I am just doing it wrong, but the fact that forms must contain their inputs is starting to get to me. This becomes especially true when tools such as JQuery plugin AjaxForm is used to make life easier. Browsers mangle the POST data when you put a form inside a form. Meanwhile CSS layout is still heavily dependent on source order. It creates a maelstrom effect when you want a specific look, some data is interactive, and some is ultimately POST’ed normally.

Proposal

<form name="formname"></form>
<input type="..." belongs="formname">

And the browser treats it as if it was contained normally. Because forms are rarely ever necessary to be containers. They are rarely styled. They are purely interactive. Thoughts? Anyone?

Rally to Restore Sanity

The idea is brilliant. Jon Stewart is brilliant and has been on his game for a long time. I realized two things while watching the show.

First, I am not surprised by the outrage on all sides of the political and moral spectrum. As I posted yesteday if we are paying attention to what is going on it makes sense. The “facts” are all the same. Unemployment is high, senators are doing an awful job, no one trusts the government, and Wall St just wants to make more money. Each of these fringe groups are giving their own interpretation – what these facts mean – thus creating a platform of belief. Even having a “scientific worldview” means nothing in this context. Because analytics (science) cannot offer interpretations it can only point out facts. The fact that unemployment is a certain number means nothing to analytics, to science. It means something to us as humans because people aren’t making money to feed themselves and their families and that will have larger repercussions.

The reason all these groups (Tea Party, Libertarian, etc) are popping up is because there is no meaning, no values in the current systems. And as the current systems and institutions are all guided by modernist objectivist thought – I have to agree with them. In the religious sphere this also applies. The same reason is Why younger evangelical Christians are moving to the Catholic Church. Their shallow evangelicalism is based on arbitrary values and methods which are unfounded with historic orthodox Christianity. So they’ve sought meaning elsewhere.

Once it is recognized that modern objectivist thought (the current of thought pushing science and analytics) offers no meaning, no interpretation, no values (nihilism) that current of thought will cease to drive our societies and institutions. This conclusion has already been reached in philosophy – hence the rise of post-modernism. Unfortunately for this movement it is largely a reaction which enables each and every individual to “discover” their own meaning and value largely untethered by any community or restraint. I see a decided lack of responsibility within post-modern strain of thought: as valuable as it is for showing the lack of modern thought. Post-modern thought is the necessary conclusion of modernism. Wall St’s actions of greed is entirely understandable, just as the Tea Party is in a post-modern construct. This is why it is important to know the history of thought, philosophy.

The retort to these groups is not: “But these are facts, just listen to the facts.” They are not operating in a scientific/modern/objectivist world devoid of meaning. You cannot assault a worldview from the outside. Very few people are capable of seeing the world they live in, let alone able to think from a different one to witness the differences. People choose a worldview because it makes the best sense of the evidence to them, it corresponds to their values. The way to retort is to see what they value and enter into a dialogue. Just being able to have the dialogue is a victory.

And the second thing I learned: Bill Clinton still has his mojo.

Why Fascinating?

I am sure that some people are wondering what the hell I am talking about on here, why I am talking about it and why it matters at all. Time for me to fess up then.

Ideas are Always Applicable

I write here about theology, philosophy, and biblical scholarship. But all of that content relates to your every day life. “Philosophy” is the one study that every living person does daily. It is the process of figuring out what the hell is going on. So when you don’t have a clue, feel a part of the group – that is what we’re here to do. When you are relating to your significant other, friends, employers, you are taking a part in this complex mix of intuition, meaning, and value.

Learn How To Think

Everything I post here I want you to learn something from. Learn how to think better. Learn the patterns that pop up across history. Learn how to think speculatively, that is, all of the possibilities beyond “critical” thinking could ever open to you. Get in touch with how we got here. Only by knowing how we got to think point can you possibly begin to know what is going on in the world – and what is happening to you. As I wrote before:

In my view Theology is the study of life according to a story. To keep theology in the academy is to be reflective on that life lived. To have others ask why, and to ask others why. To remain open and connected to others is incredibly important – otherwise stagnation and further fragmentation occurs. The realization that we all live according to some belief and story (that is inherently unproven and presumed) is massive

This is why I write what I write. In theology, the fight between faith and science, and religion in society I see the best (and worst) exemplars of how to think about life and the world. I truly believe that if more people (people of faith included!) read philosophy and theology and thought deeply past the modernism, objectivism, and naturalism born of “the enlightenment” which begot nihilism, that we would finally be able to see one another as ourselves, and treat the world humanely.

Smacked in the Face

Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
Matthew 13:52

That verse has an entirely brand new meaning to me today. Amazing that I could never understand it before, but only now in this place. Ah, illumination.

Bird’s List

I have been sitting on this link to Michael Bird for a while now but I really do love this list of things about the historical Jesus.

First, the notion that Jesus was unconcerned with theology, or that to find a historical Jesus we must remove all theology is ludicrous. It would be tantamount to saying that to understand Jackson Pollack we must remove all artistic references to be positively sure that we are only talking about Pollack. What is left when you’ve removed what that person is chiefly interested in? Not much.

I will just quote another one of Bird’s statements which is in lock step with that:

The task of the Gospels is to narrate the gospel of Jesus as part of Israel’s history and religious literature and in light of the church’s witness to Jesus and worship of Jesus.

The gospels plainly attempt to do just that. So, to deny them any ability to do so based on other-worldly criterion is a waste of time. You might as well look for gold in a coal mine.

I have to agree wholeheartedly with his conclusions:

a. The historical Jesus is not the presupposition to a New Testament Theology, rather, it is the prolegomena to a theology of the Tetraevangelium.

Without the first Word there are no gospels, and that first Word must be spoken first. Only then may other words and theologies be put forth – the four gospels.

The historical Jesus is the attempt to explain why there was a church with four Gospels in the first place.

Jesus can never be less than that figure. He exists unequivocally as the causality for the Church. Any attempt to understand him as not being that catalyst is woefully ignoring the evidence.

Bankrupt and Evolution

I am really intrigued by Michael Dowd’s essay which contends that “Biblical Christianity” is bankrupt. He argues largely on the basis of their hermeneutic and uses science primarily as his tool. I agree that the hermeneutics of “Biblical Christianity” are inherently flawed and have not produced valuable insight the Church has not seen before. It is certainly one reason I am no longer a fundamentalist. There are far more beneficial ways to look at the world, God, and the Scriptures – ways in which the Church has been doing it for thirteen hundred years before this biblical literalism came along in the 1970s. But, I do have to take Dowd to task on certain points:

• His application of scientism (that is the method of knowing which science purports as the only way of knowing) to other areas not contained within science is incredibly false. This is the error of our age – and it is the same error which “Biblical Christianity” makes. They play by the scientism where “objective” “evidence” is the rule of law. If Dowd was well connected with philosophy he would understand the incredible bait and switch that has happened in this materialistic worldview (something I write about often here). Unfortunately there is no way to be “objective”, and the categorical imperative is woefully unsupportable as a measuring rod for humans. If the only way to know anything was according to the rules of scientism we would know far less than we ought. In fact, the overwhelming majority of “what we know” does not come by the rules of scientism, however we’ve been rationalizing it to ourselves that we do know them according to those rules.
• His quote of Aquinas is woefully inadequate for his argument. It can’t be marshaled in favor of his argument because of what Aquinas is doing. Aquinas is making the classic first-mover/uncaused-causer argument in his Summa. Aquinas is not making a naturalist statement about creation – he is making a theological and philosophical statement about creation. And Aquinas is upending the first thirteen hundred years of neo-Platonic Christian theology in the process. He claims that they are the ones that have made the mistake (even though Bonaventure makes a similar, albeit importantly different, first-causer argument centuries earlier).
• When talking about a literary passage he argues it is an interpretation. Without question the entirety of Scripture is an interpretation. Just like the entirety of written history is an interpretation. Just like the entirety of every literary work (this blog entry, Dowd’s blog entry) is an interpretation. According to scientism, interpretations must be removed and sifted through to find the “facts” behind them. But in this entire enterprise we are actually not after facts. Dowd doesn’t write to find the facts. The facts are the sun is up there combusting away. We are down here milling around. The earth is spinning. People die, and people are born. The question we are all here asking is “What does all that mean?” or “How am I to interpret this?”. The question is not “What is happenening?”. We can all essentially see what is happening.
• Therefore when Dowd is talking about “Life as It Really Is” he is not talking about the facts. We can all understand the basics of the facts. When the Egyptians called on Ra the Sun God it was not because they were confused about how things worked. It was a deeply entrenched interpretation which structured their world and society. That was “Life as It Really Is” to them. For Dowd, scientism is “Life as It Really Is”. Unfortunately, science cannot and can never offer an interpretation. Analysis can never offer meaning. Dowd is talking about the “fact” of evolution and therefore interprets that to mean that, in some way or another, “If God is the creator, then God is the process of evolution.” That is an interpretation, not a fact. And one which all of Christians (ignoring the “Biblical” ones) disagree with.
• In all points Dowd is picking on the lowest forms of Biblical Christianity, a strawman. He has placed caricatures of many dogmatic points out there. This is a familiar tactic borrowed from the New Athiests. I am only reminded of the tounge-in-cheek remarks of the Bad Vicar @ 1:22-1:50
  

In my view, “Biblical Christianity” is also bankrupt. Not because it doesn’t adopt the presumptions and methods of scientism (which are wholly unwarranted within matters of faith and meaning) but because it does an incredibly poor job of understanding Scripture, representing the Christianity it has inherited, and integrating with the wider world.

Evolution to my mind is actually an incredibly strong point against the scientism “objectivity” which philosophically has degenerated into nihilism. Because evolution values life. All organisms are geared to live (current evolutionary theory is being attacked on the premise that “survival of the fittest” is not quite how it works). Evolution “knows” something much greater than all the scientific interpretive grids have allowed it to. It knows that life has intrinsic value and meaning and should continue on. No single philosophical interpretive grid has any statement affirming that, largely because it cannot. Philosophy is rigidly stuck within Kant’s method of knowing and therefore cannot affirm any humanity or meaning.