Status Updates From Bulwarks of Unbelief: Athei...

Now what? Love your neighbor.
“When confronting others, we speak to kings.” 273

Ends on Lewis’s quote “there are no ordinary people” from The Weight of Glory.

God is “not interested in maximal clarity” because it doesn’t fix the problem of our corrupted will. 265

“It is good that God would ask us to… mature… through trust despite life’s suffering” which includes felt divine absence.

He permits “his people to hit the bottom, but not without shepherding them to the conclusion that God (by himself) is enough, sans all, to satisfy human longings.“ 268

Going forward, we need more dialogue about how “Christian claims illuminate common reality.” Persuasion, not louder assertion. 261

Succumbing to materialism often feels like submitting to reality, like “courageous love for truth” (263) but is really “capitulation”. (269)

“Inasmuch as we achieve some good but fail to discover the Christ, we have missed the point of history. We have missed life (John 17:3). It is not that these things are not good. It is that they are all relative.” 246

“Mission shows the power of Christ” and “the most ordinary participation” in it is “love of neighbor.” 248

Excellent connection to Scriptural truth and then careful application.

As a culture coming-of-age, we have the opportunity “to stand critically within one’s heritage” and freely choose what to do with it. 238

“God’s speech makes history,” not simply correcting a world that got out of hand. 238

“What passes through the historical flame of modernity are nevertheless the essential things of God and his word.” 241

“Christianity is the original universalism.” 244

236
Bonhoeffer on “coming back home”:
“the only way is that of Matt. 18:3, i.e. through repentance, through ultimate honesty. And we cannot be honest unless we recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur ["as if God did not exist"]. And this is just what we do recognize— before God!”

234
“If modern Protestants fail to relate to humans as involved in the same… human project, they will perhaps… [miss] their own subtle idols (reducing the Christian faith to a functionally private modern identity) and also fail to come to grips with the Christian claim that Christ is the Desire (and the telos) of the nations (Hag 2:7).”

223
Can we regain “the feeling that one is a part of a local, national, and global (not to mention cosmic) economy— extended out… as concentric circles of home.”

228
On historical alienation
“The God-drained universe is a universe of futural disorientation.”

230
Bavinck says we need to be asking: “What might God be up to?”

“The person-person and even person-self relation is always prior to the person-techne relationship in order of being.”

Earthly Kingdom

For the community:
“Cultivation of a culture of persuasion” in which we individually and collectively refrain from manipulating others.

Essentially respecting freedom of the conscience.

Earthly Kingdom/External Forum

For the individual
1) direct participation with the world
2) means of grace
3) “generous hospitality— a difficult-to-achieve lifestyle that leaves space for others to interfere and that contains the boldness to interfere in the lives of others” and which requires “commitment and strategy.”

Practical response: Luther’s Two Kingdoms: “perfectly free lord of all and perfectly dutiful servant of all.”

Heavenly Kingdom/Internal Forum
We must remember:
1) God as Actus Purus (Aquinas)
2) Primal freedom of man
3) Man’s abuse of freedom
4) God as Pro Me (Luther)— we need (and have reason to hope in) divine condescension and help.

Three difficult aspects of modernity:
1) Stolen dominion and the disappearance of “the commons”.
2) Technology takes on a life of its own and is inextricable from our mode of life.
3) “Alienation from history”, no “sense of belonging to and participating” in it.

Dealing practically with modernity: two ditches

Tye conservative camp (e.g. Wendell Berry) “idealize… the past, risks ingratitude for many present goods, and… [has] an immature relation to the unbounded.”

The liberal camp (e.g. Ray Kurzweil) miss “some goods that risk being lost and… [has] an immature relation to… limits.”

Each ditch is a “refusal to be mature.”

Excellent critiques!

This should not give us a feeling of “superiority of the state of humanity prior to modern technoculture” which would “fail to properly evaluate modern atheism or (crucially) ancient religion and culture.” Rather, we have “an opportunity to shape a future that could not have been attained without going through this stage…”

Gratitude for our day and age, reminds me of Eve in Exile.

Heidegger’s explanation of presence and absence is lacking something.
That is the distinction between “I/not-I” and “subject/object” presence.
“This circumvents Heidegger's deconstruction of Western theology.”

“God is not an ontic being who creates more ontic beings… but is a pure act of absolute communication… the ‘Logos’.”

In our modern culture:
We relate to the world primarily by means of our will.
“Men become machines.”
“Men become movies.”
Film teaches us a certain kind of reality or presence of things.
Words are “a more primal mode of attunement to the world.”

6) Humanity has gained an “ability to control” rather than simply to “predict the alleged agencies of the cosmos”. As I go about my day, the world feels like it is “a world for me”.

7)These foundational shifts created a new environment in which we get a different “sense of the divine in relationship to nature and to the city” than people did before modern times.

3)The city became “an icon of human activity” rather than the orderly dominion of the gods.
4)Nature was sentimentalized, especially by Romantics.
5)The city “threatens to swallow even the personalism of the countryside”.
All of this makes modern culture a possibility, but #6 makes it “all but inevitable”.

The modern era is comparable to early adulthood or “juvenility”. To explain this “epistemic and ultimately existential shift”, we need to understand 7 points.
1)After the HRE fell, the city became centered around “human flourishing” more than around religion.
2)Bacon’s scientific method changed “humanity’s posture toward nature” from Aristotelian “inner potency” to its function.

The ancients viewed the world as “series of individuated experiences, scenes, trusts, and fears”, like a young child but the medievals had more of a “theoretical sense of the whole” but including a level of “mystery” as we feel in late childhood.

But in the modern era, we’ve had a fundamental shift in understanding essential reality and in our posture toward it. “World of things” vs “actors”

Compared to medievals, “our universe… is less mapped out but more ordinary… and controlled (rather than vulnerable).”

“The mere act of looking up was far more wonder producing than it is for us— even though their picture was neater.”

The Greeks also discussed the world as a unified subject.

But “in neither the Hebrew nor the Greek tradition do we witness the loss of the felt agency of the cosmos.”

“While the world was theoretically and theologically mapped out,” it was still full of “immediate mystery.”

(Tracing the roots of our objectified/mechanical view of the world is helping me to discern what exactly to change in my life.)

4)”In the beginning” introduces a linear history. Ancient histories merely gave a “prehistory of a city or temple.”
5) All of humanity, not one king, is made in the image of God and given stewardship over Creation.
6) “The separation of God from chaos” and putting “pure actuality over the chaos of potentiality.”

We can trace the cracks in ancient “primal unboundedness” back to both the Hebrew Scriptures and Greek philosophers.

Hebrew Scriptures showed
1) The whole earth is God’s temple in a sense, implying “structural order to all of creation.”
2) God created ex nihilo.
3) He is “outside the unbounded and able to render it to nothing.”

For Max Weber, the modern mentality destroys “not the divine as such, but rather any tacit sense of the unpredictability and incalculability of the divine.”

“Divine and mechanical agency have a zero-sum relationship.”

The modern sense of divine absence involved losing the overwhelming sense of the chaos of the world as well as the sense of communication with the world.

“In this sense, just as men were technology to the gods, so the gods were also a sort of technology to humanity – a latent power, harnessed through liturgy, for human ends.”

“Humanity's calling was to cultivate whatever sustains and perpetuates flourishing life.”

“Existence for the ancients was predominantly conceived in terms of func-tions, that is, in their life-producing and life-sustaining activities.”

“The center of reality was the city, which was not the farthest thing removed from nature (as we moderns commonly think of it) but rather its felt telos.”

For us, technology is what nature was too many generations of our ancestors.

Consequently, everything outside of technique is rendered invisible by its ceasing, to be a matter of care, concern, and potential engagement to us.