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Yesterday night I went to a square dance, and then hung out with some friends and some new acquaintances. I had some thoughts, the last of which I wish to elaborate here.
I was thinking about a similarity between dance and martial arts, both as kinds of kything, and then... connected. Not intensely, but in a relaxed manner. I was in a newer sense able to be at peace with not being in the bard's awen -- enjoying the ordinary as just the ordinary. I was thinking in part about how, in Kuk Sool, I was comfortable bowing to the instructor and other students, but not to the picture of the Kuk Sa Bo Nim (grandmaster), because bowing is to me an act so close to worship that it is fitting to bestow on a man but not anything lesser. And then --
The major debates are over an issue of substance. The Calvinist-Arminian debate exists not only because the Scriptures reflect a mystery not easily captured in models, but also because the question of how the sovereignty of God relates to free will is a big enough question to hold a debate over. Both sides know it's important; that's why there are two sides engaged in the discussion. The question of the relationship of faith and works is another area which is debated because both sides recognize it to be a matter of importance. (On that point, I regard it as beautiful and fitting that The Cost of Discipleship, one of the 20th century's greatest books about works, was written by the Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and that The Ragamuffin Gospel, perhaps a lesser work, but none the less a powerful inspirational classic about grace, was written by the Catholic Brennan Manning.)
Along these lines, I think that the question of whether or not men may be called gods concerns a big enough matter that it is surprising it is not a matter of debate. There is a terrible truth, a deep magic (to borrow a Narnian image) that we are not gods, that it is blasphemy to arrogate to ourselves the title of divinity. There is a more terrible truth, a deeper magic, that we are not only gods but more than gods, and that we shall become greater still than we are now. If you take and compare a weak believer -- an alcoholic living on the street, someone who doesn't go to church because he feels ashamed to be there, but who loves Jesus, whose eyes will tear up if you begin talking with him about Jesus -- and compare him with the beings the Norsemen or the Greeks worshipped as God, the failing, weak, marginal believer is to me more majestic and more worthy of worship. In him is the Holy Spirit; in him is submission to the will of God; in him is in a sense something deeper than virtue, important as virtue may be. It is not just the Marines of the Army of God -- those glowing saints whom we read about, and think we can never measure up to -- who are godlike. It is, in a catholic sense, every man and woman of God, those whose faith is far weaker than ours as well as those whose faith is far stronger, who is a god and (invisibly to eyes this side of Heaven, usually) is wrapped in a glory that paganism never thought to give to its gods and goddesses.
I cannot in good conscience give the Sanskrit greeting Namaste, "I bow to the divine spirit in you." We are not God, and we fall into trouble to think that we are -- and yet the Scriptures contain so many things that I would think blasphemous if they were found in any other source. We are made in the image, likeness, and glory of God. We are invited to be his sons and daughters. We will judge angels. We are invited (Ephesians 6:11-17) to enter spiritual warfare wearing, among other things, the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation -- that is, the armor worn by God (Isaiah 59:17). We have been chosen to share in the divine nature.
I believe C.S. Lewis addresses this basic insight in The Weight of Glory, although I haven't read it recently. Each person is on the way to becoming either a being a godlike creature whom, if you saw now, you would be sorely tempted to worship, or else a horror such as you never encountered in your worst nightmares. Lewis wasn't sure whether a person should think as much as possible about his own glory, but it can scarcely hurt to think as much as possible about his neighbor's glory.
Worship is the supreme love reserved to God alone, but man as the image of God may be given a second love that is the image of worship.
This area is addressed more fully in A Dream of Light.
It often happens that people's beliefs concerning a question can be placed along a continuum. One example of this may be the question of who may legitimately be addressed as "Father," in light of Jesus' words about "Call no one on earth your father" etc. People wishing to persuade you to shift in their direction may point out an extreme position in the opposite direction as a means of softening you up to slide away from that extreme -- such as when a Catholic, after talking about hyperbole, asks what you are going to call your literal father. After reacting to the extreme pointed out -- and realizing that you do legitimately call your earthly father 'Father' -- the natural tendency is to slide a couple of notches closer to the position being advocated, namely "It is OK to address ecclesiastical authorities as 'Father'." That is a temptation to be resisted. It is in some sense true that "no one on earth" does not refer to one's earthly father, but even hyperbole is a means of emphasizing something important -- and it is difficult to me at least to believe that the obvious exceptions to "no one on earth" include all pastors. The context speaks directly about what ecclesiastical authorities may be called -- if ecclesiastical authorities are included among obvious exceptions, it is hard to tell exactly what the point of saying that was. Perhaps Jesus was exaggerating, but what important point was he exaggerating, if the exceptions include the most direct and obvious point of application?
Reacting an extreme position is often a stepping stone to an unnecessary shift. Reacting the position of "Do not even call your earthly father 'Father'" softens people up to say "I guess Jesus didn't really mean absolutely no one when he said 'Call no one on earth your father'," and mean by it, "When Jesus said 'Call no one on earth your father,' he wasn't referring to ecclesiastical authorities."
The story of the boy who cried wolf has something to do with warnings and legal contracts.
Implicit in a warning message is a claim of "This message says something important and non-obvious about a real danger to sensible use." After reading a certain number of warnings and finding them superfluous, people's trust has been violated. They don't believe warnings are worth reading. And they aren't -- usually.
An analogous, but related principle seems to apply in legal contracts. When you have to agree to a license agreement to download free software, and there are several pages of legalese -- like the warning, the contract has lost fair claim to be read by the person signing it.
"A cheap car is rare. That which is rare is expensive. A cheap car is expensive." There are limitations on what can be done by taking reasonable-sounding propositions and working from them logically. The proposition can be basically true -- and lead, through a logical argument, to a false conclusion. (I know of at least one person who does not engage in philosophical speculation because of this.) This is not always true -- there are cases where logical development from given statements can bring forth highly accurate contents -- but care must be taken in logical development from approximate wordings. Sometimes it is hard to tell when words mean something approximately, and when they mean something exactly. In exegesis, I wonder if at least some of our debates stem from reading as exact words which were meant to be read approximately -- perhaps partially because it is easy to equate taking a text seriously with reading it exactly -- and so we go to as approximate of a reading as we need to to satify some texts, but have debates because we can only give certain other texts a literal reading.
On the note of exegesis, I wish to also record that it is bad practice to take some convenient set of Bible verses, those whose literal construal leads most easily to your position, and magnify them along the lines that lead to your position, and then explain away those verses which are problematic to your interpretation. God inspired and meant one as much as another; it is better to say, "I don't understand how it all fits together," or "Such-and-such is as much sense as I can make out of it," than to magnify some verses and raze others. There is a certain bad odor -- of contrived explanations, of explaining things away -- that is free of logical contradiction, but which signals the presence of bad exegesis. It's kind of like an announcement of a stunning new discovery that shatters old theological dogmas (as in the beginning of Jesus de Montreal) -- even before logical eyes can see exactly what is wrong here, an experienced nose can smell that something is awry.
The past few days have been a fertile time for musings. I can't remember everything that I thought, but there is one that I have been thinking about that I do wish to write down.
The best way I see to introduce it is by asking if TCKs (third culture kids -- to oversimplify, people who have grown up with substantial exposure to multiple cultures, where their parents' culture was different from the culture of the surrounding people) have a culture, and giving a provocative answer of "No, at least not in the sense that most of the world's people have a culture." The world's majority, people who have one culture, have a space for culture, and TCKs also have that space, and also have something in that space, but that something is not a culture.
I'm hesitant to give a definition of culture, because definitions are finite and tend to take a life of their own, but one facet of culture is that it is something shared by a community, and shaped by that community, rising out of it. There is something that TCKs share, even a TCK community of sorts, but TCKs did not come to what they had by being immersed in it as a culture when they grew up. What they have in place of a culture may draw on two or more cultures, but it is not itself a culture.
I was trying to think of what to call this genus of which culture is a species, these things that can occupy the space which is in most people occupied by a culture, and I came across a couple of terms which are conceptually related but not identical to it: worldview and personality, as well as metaculture (a concept which I do not wish to describe in detail here, beyond saying that where a person in culture fits into and naturally breathes a culture, a person in metaculture is able to shift and move between cultures, and does not occupy a culture in the same way -- is never in a culture so completely as to not see how else it could be), are related, but not the same. Without having a name, I would like to summarize the concept by saying that culture is a species of the genus of things which occupy the space normally occupied by culture.
Being a TCK can provide a person with something else in the place of a culture; so can exceptional intelligence, and possibly some of mental illness/neurological disorders. I think there are other kinds of differences capable of causing this as well; mental illness is relatively well-documented as a kind of difference that has a significant darkside; differences that do not have significant darksides would not seem to draw the same exploration as differences that cause significant problems for the people that bear them. What I realized is that I have something else in the place of a culture. I thought about writing a document about what that something else is, but am waiting on that for now, until some intuitions are more clear.
One question which may be useful as a rule of thumb for whether a person has a culture or something else in that place is, "When he changes something in the culture, does he change from within or change from without?" in a sense related to the distinction introduced by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man. There is a difference between the person who uses materials inside the box to fumblingly try to think outside the box, and the person who uses materials outside the box to fumblingly try to think inside the box.
One logician I've read was arguing for game theoretical semantics, where a statement under examination is considered to represent a game, and one player is the Verifier, and the other is the Falsifier. The statement is considered to be true if the Verifier has a winning strategy, and False if the Falsifier has a winning strategy. It is possible for a game not to have a winning strategy on either side, and the logician argued from this that there may therefore be statements which are neither true nor false. (This struck me as an example of bad logic -- you have a terrain and a standard map, and you suggest using another map, and point out that the second map has a property which the first map did not, concluding that the terrain might have the property indicated on the second map.) If one pursued those lines, though, the definition of a game can be loosened so that a game can at least potentially be won by both parties. This would correspond to games which (in some instances) could have a winning strategy for both Verifier and Falsifier, and statements which were neither true nor false. "This statement is false" could be the canonical simple example of a game which had neither a winning strategy for Verifier nor a winning strategy for Falsifier (a statement which is neither true nor false), and "This statement is true" the example of a statement which has winning strategies for both Verifier and Falsifier (a statement which is both true and false).
Christianity is a broad thing; individual believers may own the whole, but they live in a niche. Celibacy and married life both belong to all believers, but a believer will inhabit only one of those possibilities. This phenomenon (another instance is different spiritual gifts -- no gift is common to all believers) is a part of what is meant by catholicity -- the whole faith is to be believed by all believers, even though not every detail will come to play in every believer's life. It is like a culture -- it takes a village to transmit a culture, because a culture belongs to all its members, but it is larger than any single member's role in it.
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