Challenging my own view

I think it’s important to challenge your own views, to reevaluate, to double back and make sure that you read the signposts right. I’m not sure that this practice is most important; you can’t discredit the merits of ‘sticking to your guns’ or, ‘just going with it.’ But wonderful things happen in the realm of ideas, with an evaluative mindset. Going to that place in my mind where I can throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks--there’s something to that.

So a couple days ago, I laid out an argument about God-in-time, and said that if God willingly subjected himself to any one, human, conceptual framework like that of time, we ought to worship that as god and not God. Because that thing or that person or that idea would be over God, and thus it would be God. Does that make sense? Take, for example, the idea of goodness. If God decided, in the counsel of his divine will, to submit to ‘goodness’ as his highest aim in creating the universe, and like an architect, he used goodness as his blueprint in all of his creative endeavors, wouldn’t goodness be an ethic higher than godliness, because it is the ethic to which God himself submits?

But the sticking point--the thing I’ve really been thinking about a lot lately--is this idea of willing submission. Hear Paul’s words in Philippians 2:

Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death--even to death on a cross.

Do you see it? The idea of willing submission is there. He was and is God, but that’s not an idea that he even ever really entertained. Instead, he willingly submitted both to God and to his human captors, who ultimately put him to death. Willing submission. Now, it stands to reason that if Christ the God-man could do it, surely the Father could as well.

But to what or to whom does God himself submit? I think, to continue with this idea that all creation needed a blueprint, God willingly submitted himself to the three-fold meta-ethic of truth, goodness, and beauty. Surely, there’s nothing at all higher than those three. But then, I think, maybe there’s nothing at all but those three. You might bristle at that idea. You might bring up incredible evils like the holocaust, and say, if truth, goodness, and beauty are all that is, how is something as awful as a mass genocide true, good, or beautiful? But the better question is, why do we all, universally, acknowledge that that was so evil? In other words, if truth, goodness, and beauty aren’t the three, coequal governing principles in all reality, we have no moral basis for labeling the holocaust evil.

And events like the holocaust were--are--evil. Awful. Dreadful. I pray that mankind never again falls to that level of wickedness. I pray that, never again, will we ever see such atrocities. I just think that the only way we’re able to acknowledge the wickedness of that event is because we have, in all of us, this vested interest in all things true, good, and beautiful.

Why those three? Why not let one governing principle inform all of creation? Well, it seems to me that the pursuit of truth ends in empiricism, the pursuit of goodness ends in rationalism, and the pursuit of beauty ends in transcendentalism, and all of those -isms have their own flaws and failings. Truth is the normative: ‘Thou shalt not.’ It’s fact-based and all evident. It’s raw data at work. But there are plenty of things which are true, for which truth itself can’t account. Like the truth of logic: A can’t be both A and non-A at once. We assume such truths in order to work our scientific method.

Goodness is situational: ‘You’ve heard it said ________, but I say unto you ________.’ If the normative has us fasting on the Sabbath day, the situational would let us glean heads of wheat to satiate our hunger. Like Jesus told his disciples. Goodness provides an ethical, behavioral outlet or justification for moral quandaries. “He stole bread. Stealing is always wrong.” “Yes, but the bakers conspired to start selling their bread for $7,500 a loaf.” That’s a silly example off the top of my head, but God knows there are so many situations which warrant the breaking of even our most universal laws. Last night I watched a documentary about a child who had been abused all her life. She grew up imprisoned in a basement room, seldom seeing the light of the sun. She killed her captor--her mother. For her crime, she received a lighter prison sentence, because, while killing is always wrong, this girl had a nearly perfectly valid reason for doing what she had done. She was escaping an oppressor.

It’s only by holding truth (the normative) and goodness (the situational) in tension, letting the two work against one another, that we’re able to navigate such complex matters. But there’s a third. Beauty, the experiential, has a say, too. The truth of raw data doesn’t move us like the experience of raw pain, and the lawlessness of pure evil doesn’t motivate us like the ugliness of human suffering. We have to become offended. The same spirit which arrests you at the moment you view something magnificent, like the Great Smoky Mountains, is the spirit which compels you, when you truly experience a hardship or a loss. Such experiences take us out of the thinking mind (normative) and out of the perceiving, rationalizing mind (situational) and land us squarely in the whacky Willy Wonka world of the feeling mind, where right is left and down is up and nothing makes any sense, but it’s all too real. If you haven’t suffered, you don’t know the absurdity of it. Like Camus said, that man stands face-to-face with the irrational.

Our conception of beauty lends existential, feeling weight to our perceptions of reality.

I can think of no higher ethics than these. And... I see Trinity in them: The Father gives the Law; the Son rewrites it; the Spirit binds us all in love and unity with the Father and the Son. We see the three in Genesis 1 and John 1. The Creator creates according to pattern; the Word of Creation provides reason and imbues meaning; the Spirit, the ruach-elohim navigates the chaos inherent in any act of creating.

I sense that I’m not articulating this well. For a much, much richer explanation of all of this, I suggest Doctrine of the Knowledge of God by John M. Frame. It’s an epistemological primer for Christians which lays out all of this in wonderful detail and color. I’m going to keep giving this some thought, today, and perhaps there will be more blog posts about it all soon.

Willing submission. To whom, or by what, do you think and act?