If you haven’t, read my last post. This post is about it.
I wrote that post, hit publish without any sort of editing (as I seem to always do on this account). I was listening to this lecture, by Michael Sugrue on Kierkegaard and Kant. He’s really drawing out this distinction Kierkegaard makes between the Faithful man, who does what God says, and the Aestheticc man, who pursues pleasure (hedonic, aesthetic, intellectual, whatever). Sugrue discusses it far more intelligently, and many of my thoughts come almost directly from him, but here is what his lecture made me think.
Last time, I made these statements about the ontology of God, and while I stand behind those statements, I think it’s careful to put them in their right places. I was using them to discuss my wider theology and to refute the way that some evangelicals create a harmful “world-church” dichotomy based not on proximity to divinity, but proximity to church institituion (complicated by the Church being the body of God on earth).
However, my categorisations are not rigorous, they cannot be used to make moral judgements, or statements on the character of God, not really.
There is no true Scotsman. As Kant says, when God appears to Abraham and asks him to kill his son, he should ask, “is this really God?”. Certainly human child sacrifice is not consistent with God’s character, but it doesn’t need to, not under the sort of hyperrationality*, the platonic goodness clause that God operates under (one which is also, I will admit illogical, or perhaps appears to be illogical). Can we determine something’s goodness by how godly it is? or something’s godliness by how good or beautiful it is? Unfortunately, these things all lead to a sort of arbitrary and subjective mess, when you try to justify any particular thing, even sometimes when you try to use the Bible as a standard. Is abortion OK? The Bible never says, in fact God maybe does an abortion (Numbers 5:23)? Is God alright with homosexuality? Years of church tradition say no, but James V Brownson’s book Bible Gender Sexuality presents a compelling argument against it. See the arguments of Calvin and Armenius, of the Catholics, the Protestants, the Orthodox.
Determining “is this God? is this some demon? is this a hallucination, a schizophrenic episode? Is this my own cultural biases? Is this my own wishes and thoughts masquerading as God?” is difficult. When you spend your time trying with such fervent effort to hear something, you will certainly hear something. Whether it is God you hear, that is a whole other question completely.
“Taking the Bible literally” is intellectually dishonest. It assumes a sort of simplicity and singularity that the God presented in the Bible just doesn’t exhibit. There’s a profound arrogance to claiming “God is understandable, and it is my interpretation of this text and all of human history that is not only the true and correct one, but the only honest one anytone could take”.
Even God taken “at face value” is not simple, take trinitarian doctrine. Even if God is not subjective, and the Bible is a purely historical document, any understanding of Him must be incomplete, and thus subjective, a single face of the diamond, filtered through culture and temporality and language and finity of mind.
So you come to a very difficult quetions of “If God is BEautiful, then who is God? And what is Beauty?” These things are linguistic signs mired in (in the terminology of Frege) reference, not the thing itself. “Beauty”, even as I have used it, is slippery, with many meanings, an referring to many things.
So a piece like this is not even a beginning, but an admitting of defeat, surrended to subjectivity, and finity, and surrender to the not-knowing. It is, I admit, cowardly, to say “I don’t know”, but only if you stop trying there. I will keep doing the work, but I cannot make that Hegelian statement, that Geist is now expressing itself in me, and I doubt anyone who says that.
My logic isn’t the sort of logic to justify anything, it’s just as circular as the “world/church” distinction made by evangelicals. However, it’s a sort of baseline upon which you can start other works. It is more of a refuation than a real creation of beliefs, and refuting idiots is always far more easy, and far less useful than thinking something true and sincere.
Sorry about that.
*Hyperrationality, in which God might appear to be irrational or inconsistent, because he is so immense and infinite and temporally unbound, that there are certain mysteries we just can’t understand. Something very convenient to explain different Biblical authors seeming to describe kinda different guys when they talk about God.
