Visionary Christian Idealism
Kant’s Three Questions
Near the end of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Kant has a section titled: The Canon of Pure Reason; Of the Ideal of the Highest Good, as a Determining Ground of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason. (B833/A805). All the interests of Kant, with respect to his idea of pure reason, whether speculative or practical, are concentrated in three questions:
- What can I know?
- What ought I to do?
- What may I hope?
The questions are serious and the fact that Kant does not articulate them until the end of his book is evidence of how seriously he regarded them. It is the business of visionary Christian idealism to answer those questions. Our answer to the first question, ‘what can I know?’ begins at a point of departure Kant would not allow: the revelation of God, found in his Word, Holy Scriptures. The highest ends of pure human reason must be connected to something higher still. If we wish to apply our reason to acquiring a vision, we receive first the visions given by God. What Kant would reject by calling speculative, we rely on and call inspired.
This is not a debate which can be resolved by pure human reason, as if reason were a neutral referee or umpire calling balls and strikes. Reason is a combatant, a participant in this intellectual and spiritual conflict. Christian visionaries assert as a first ground of human knowledge that God makes and communicates revelations and visions to us. We are neither limited to sense or empirical data, nor are we limited to the powers of a priori categorical reasoning. But we have no reason to offer for this position, (offering reasons would be self-contradictory), except that God exists and speaks to us. We are not trying to blend reason and revelation. Revelation comes first.
Kant would disavow that we can have knowledge of that which is beyond empirical experience. Although he uses the word ‘knowledge’ in a specialized way, if some cognitive activity is not empirical (derived from our senses) and not a priori, (features of the mind which allow sense data to become experience and then to be processed and synthesized), then Kant would not allow such to be called knowledge or allowed into the halls of pure reason. Nor would he allow the visions we present to be characterized as ‘knowledge.’
When what I call revelation, which is what Kant would call speculative dogmatic illusion, comes into conflict with human reason, one quickly is driven to a question – ‘How do you resolve such a conflict? The philosopher asserts the visionaries’ visions do not exist (‘subsist’ is a word Kant would use) or have no meaning. The visionaries assert not only do their visions exist and subsist, not only do they have ultimate meaning, but their existence is beyond the criticism, reach or understanding of the philosopher. We assert Kant’s conclusions or judgments derived from pure human reasoning are empty. Indeed, where does anyone go with that conceptual mismatch?
Our answer will be: We prove nothing, but we demonstrate everything. And what we demonstrate, which we have from God, subsists. Once entered into cognitive reality, into space and time, memory and consciousness, there visions from God stay. We do not have to move from them one inch. They do not move from us one inch. Our position is safe, secured – yesterday, today and tomorrow. Our visions are free. There is no freedom apart from eternal subsistence, and that is the freedom we have, in our visionary idealism, gifted from God.
Since we are visionaries, we start with our foundational visions. We assert that, in accordance with the grace of God and our faith, that these visions, are true, real, and knowable up to the limits that such experiences impose by their own supernatural characteristics. These foundational visions are the basis and anchor to the project we have of acquiring a vision leading then a series of visions for the present day. These are the visions which start to answer the inquiry, ‘What can I know?’
Isaiah. Isaiah was in the temple when he saw his vision:
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;
The whole earth is full of his glory.
At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. . . .
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying,
“Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
Isaiah 6:1-3, 8
Discussion. Kant asserted that there were pure moral laws which determined a priori (without regard to empirical motives such as personal happiness) what is and what is not to be done. He characterized that as the freedom of a rational being. These moral laws were both imperative and absolute, and hence, necessary. Kant made an unusual appeal to justify this position by appealing to the “moral judgment of every human being if he only tries, to think such a law clearly.” (B834-835/A807-808).
Isaiah presented an astonishing vision in which he saw the Lord. The revelation of the Lord in visible manner was prophetic in itself and pointed toward the incarnation of God in Christ. A supernatural world, involving six-winged seraphs, beyond sense data, beyond empirical investigation or testing, was presented as essential to the overwhelming, astonishing nature of the vision. Their declaration that the Lord Almighty was ‘holy, holy, holy’ was and is the declaration of all the saints, speaking to the mystery and glory of God. The word ‘holy’ connotes and denotes that which is set apart from empirical investigation and testing; we have already moved beyond empiricism. The vision itself stands apart from ‘moral laws’ – the vision may incorporate or reflect or inculcate moral law, but something beyond a law, any type of law, is presented when the Lord Almighty makes an appearance with six-winged angels.
Isaiah’s interaction with the Lord was not a result of the application of a pure moral law. Nor was it something Isaiah could have deduced a priori. The vision of the Lord began something new. The voice of the Lord was heard by Isaiah – whether anyone else in the temple would have heard the voice of the Lord is an open question. The point was that Isaiah heard. The Lord did not promulgate a law or a series of laws. The Lord did not restate the Ten Commandments. The Lord asked two related rhetorical questions: ‘Whom shall I send?’ and ‘Who will go for us?’ The questions were rhetorical because they obviously invited an answer to volunteer from Isaiah. But it was a dialogue – Isaiah was given the opportunity to speak positively, to stay silent, or in the manner of Moses or Jonah, to raise various objections. Isaiah, like Mary, steps right up to the plate: ‘Here am I – send me!’ Isaiah is ready to serve, ready to be sent. Isaiah doesn’t know what the sending entails, what the mission implies, but he begins with a declaration so basic as to be almost ontological: Here am I. In presenting himself as available to the Lord, Isaiah also asserts his fundamental existence, in relation to the Lord.
A feature of the Lord’s two rhetorical questions is that the first is expressed in the singular – ‘Whom shall I send?’. The second rhetorical question is expressed in the plural – ‘And who will go for us?’ God simultaneously acts alone and on behalf of all the angels and saints, the hosts of heaven. ‘Sending’ and ‘going’ are the act of a superior assigning a subordinate duties and a mission. It involves continuing acts of obedience and discipleship by Isaiah; it is not about Isaiah’s self-development, although the development of Isaiah as a person will be a byproduct of his obedience. It does not start with a universal maxim about how Isaiah is to treat others, although that also will be a byproduct of his obedience. Isaiah’s vision, experience and mission cannot be captured by any description of sense data – it was, though, to use Kant’s word – intelligible. The intelligible realm is one where moral laws can be asserted and developed; Kant sharply separated that world from the natural world (“mere nature”).
Kant saw the idealism inherent in the idea of the highest good, entirely distinct from empirical considerations, which he saw as driven by nature in a necessarily inescapable world of physical causes and effects. We may disagree with Kant on how sharply he distinguished the intelligible world from the empirical world, but his sharp distinction clarifies and highlights what we seek as idealists. Being an idealist means you can intelligibly separate and identify an ideal, and use words to do so – the beginning point is not a series of practical steps. The practical steps come later. Kant was looking for the ground of the intelligible world to identify the highest good:
The idea of such an intelligence in which the most perfect moral will, united with the highest blessedness, is the cause of all happiness in the world, as far as this happiness corresponds exactly with one’s morality, that is, the worthiness to be happy, I call the ideal of the highest good. It is therefore, only in the ideal of the highest original good, namely, the ground of an intelligible, that is, moral world. As we are bound by reason necessarily to conceive ourselves as belonging to such a world, although the senses present us with nothing but a world of appearances, we shall have to accept the moral world as being the result of our conduct in the world of sense (in which we see no connection between worthiness and happiness), and therefore as being for us a future world. (B839/A811).
Isaiah, though, directed by the appearing of the Lord, isn’t seeking his personal happiness either. Nor is Isaiah qualifying himself by his moral worthiness for some future happiness. Isaiah’s actions are not directed to himself as a worthy or unworthy end, nor are they (as yet) directed to anyone else. Movement of some sort will be the result of Isaiah’s obedience, but he doesn’t know yet where that movement will take him, to whom, or what will be the consequences or risks of that movement. Whatever the program is, Isaiah doesn’t know it yet. Isaiah entered into an intelligible world because the Lord revealed that world to him in an astonishing way. By posing rhetorical questions, the Lord invited Isaiah in. Isaiah has had, by virtue of an experience which may be reported, an experience so personal it is not capable of being duplicated as a result of any human will. One of the characteristics of deep personal religious experience is that it may be reportable, but it is not repeatable. Isaiah’s personal vision was and is impossible of being tested by any other human being in a laboratory or in a courtroom or by introspection in a philosopher’s study. Isaiah, insofar as we may know him today, has become intelligible himself. To be a visionary is to be intelligible, in an intelligible world. We neither start, nor end, with a rule book or a to-do list. We start with a personal vision which places us in relation to the Lord – we are grounded now in an intelligible world.
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Ezekiel. Ezekiel was among the exiles to Babylon, by the Kebar River, when the heavens were opened for him and he saw deep and brilliant visions of God.
I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north – an immense cloud with flashing lightning and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked four living creatures. In appearance their form was that of a man, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had the hands of a man. All four of them had faces and wings, and their wings touched one another. . . . Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a man, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. . . .
As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn aside as the creatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around. . . .
Spread out above the heads of the living creatures was what looked like an expanse, sparkling like ice and awesome. . . . When the creatures moved, I heard the sound of their wings, like the roar of rushing waters, like the voice of the Almighty.
Above the expanse over their heads was what looked like a throne of sapphire, and high above on the throne was a figure like that of a man. I saw that from what appeared to be his waist up he looked like glowing metal, as if full of fire, and that from there down looked like fire; and brilliant light surrounded him. Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. When I saw it, I fell facedown.
Ezekiel 1:4-18, 22-28.
Discussion. The ‘otherness,’ the immensity, the supernatural shock of Ezekiel’s vision can emphasize, but also obscure the power of his vision. We don’t know what to do with Ezekiel’s vision – we don’t know how to get Ezekiel into the same intellectual room as Immanuel Kant. Visions like Ezekiel’s appear to have no relation to Kant’s a priori transcendental analysis based on metaphysics and pure reason. It would seem that if one exists and carries weight in our cognition of reality, then the other cannot. Ezekiel’s vision reminds us that if we want to be visionary Christian idealists, we have to place a foundation somewhere which answers the question: ‘how do you experience reality?’ It’s a loaded question, a psychological question (rather than being theological or political), but it must be answered. Either the sapphire throne is there or not, but you can’t split the difference. There’s nothing reasonable about Ezekiel’s experience.
Ezekiel’s vision is so beyond our experience it stands as a rebuke and limitation on empiricism generally – whether it’s Kant’s empiricism arising subsequent to a priori transcendental cognitions or the empiricism of Locke or Hume, which (according to them) start all cognitive processing. Ezekiel’s vision is a reminder that normally, the Lord keeps things pretty calm, because otherwise, confronted by such visions frequently, we would simply stand or cower in place, dumbfounded and terrified. But the Lord does not have to present empirical reality in a predictable or rational manner; when such reality stops being predictable and rational, and becomes supernatural to the point of being disorienting, it’s hard to apply the word ‘empirical’ in a useful or meaningful way. Ezekiel’s book has an ultimate point, but it’s not really comprehensible until one reads the Book of Revelation – it’s John’s vision of the Holy City at the end of his book which incorporates and merges Ezekiel’s visions. Ezekiel’s supernatural vision of the Glory of Israel becomes melded into John’s vision of the Eternal City, the Glory of the Seven Churches.
Kant uses the term ‘kingdom of grace’ but he means by it something entirely different than any concept of grace flowing from God. “To view ourselves as belonging to the kingdom of grace, in which all happiness awaits us, except insofar as we have diminished our share in it through our unworthiness of being happy, is a practically necessary idea of reason.” (B837,840/A809/812). All Kant’s ideas are ideas of ‘necessary reason’ – meaning his own. He self-assesses his moral conduct (and his concomitant worthiness of happiness) from his study. He finds as matter of moral reasoning there must be one supreme will, based on his concept of moral unity, so that the “harmony and nature of freedom may never fail.” (B844/A816). But in Kant there is no revelation from a God who speaks or reveals himself; there is no relation with God, only with Kant’s own reason; there is no vision from God; there is no communication with God, who exists only as an idea; and certainly no mystery from God, or any piece of information which today is puzzling but which tomorrow may connect to something larger or higher. Indeed, there is nothing that would ever elevate Kant beyond his own immediate powers of reason. Kant sits in his study, consulting his own reasoning – in his own way, he is just as isolated as any man sitting in a barroom drinking gin all night long. He characterizes this as ‘transcendental theology.’ He asks rhetorically “What use can we make of our understanding, even in respect to experience, if we do not set ends for ourselves? The highest ends, however, are those of morality, and these we can only know by means of pure reason.” (B845/A817).
After Ezekiel saw his visions, which were surely not a product of his powers of reasoning, he saw the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. He fell facedown and he heard the voice of one speaking. “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.” Ezek. 2:1. We should start our discussion from this point. The vision was beyond human powers; Ezekiel’s response was that of raw fear; and he heard someone speaking to him. The form of address was ‘Son of man.’ All through his writings, Ezekiel will be addressed that way by the Lord. Before we even get to the content of the communication (which, like Isaiah’s, is a matter of sending to carry a message), we have a relationship. The nature of the communication identifies who Ezekiel is in relation to the Lord; and not only in relation to the Lord, but in relation to Ezekiel’s fathers, his ancestors, his forebears. Ezekiel did not ‘drop out of the sky’ – there is a history which is invoked, a history of Ezekiel’s people, of his family, his priestly vocation, being referenced. Ezekiel is not sent to the world at large or commissioned to find out a general morality. “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the house of Israel.” Israel has a problem with vile images and detestable idols. “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and given them a heart of flesh.” Ezek. 11:18-19. Ezekiel does not sit in the equivalent of a Babylonian barroom, or in the equivalent of his study, contemplating moral perfection or evaluating his own performance against his own standards. And the Lord has an interest in what a specific group of people (other than Ezekiel personally) are doing.
Kant reasons from his own moral laws to the idea of an independent cause, a deity who is the wise ruler of the world. But for Kant, this is all the result of his own practical reason. “As far as practical reason is entitled to lead us, we shall not look upon actions as obligatory because they are the commands of God, but look upon them as divine commands because we have an inner obligation to follow them. . . . we hold sacred the moral law which reason teaches us from the nature of actions themselves.” (B847/A819). Kant winds up with his idea of God, who never speaks, never commands, never reveals himself, never mystifies or terrifies, never redeems, never forgives, never loves and never sends. What Kant winds up with is “morally legislative reason in the proper conduct of our lives.”
In contrast, Ezekiel has an enormous and mystifying vision of a new temple, (but only after a fierce prophecy against ‘Gog of the land of Magog’), which stretches across the last nine chapters of the prophetic book bearing his name. In his vision of a new temple, Ezekiel will see water coming out from under the threshold of the temple, which becomes ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep, un-crossable in depth. And the Lord has a question (there are no questions and answers from the deity to Kant or vice versa either). “Son of man, do you see this?”
Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing.” Ezek. 47:12.
Ezekiel’s temple-and-river vision is going to lead to, prefigure and connect with the vision of John expressed in the Book of Revelation. It is beyond the power of Ezekiel, exiled in Babylon, to see where the plan of God was going, although Ezekiel’s prophecies were determinedly and repeatedly messianic. It will not be restored until he comes to whom it rightfully belongs; to him I will give it. Ezek. 21:27. What we seek in visionary Christian idealism is like Ezekiel’s temple-and-river vision; that which may be characterized as a prefiguration, a seal, a foreshadowing and foretaste, of that which comes more fully by way of the completed promises of Christ – the one to whom all things ‘rightfully belong.’ All idealism has this characteristic – one set of visions should lead to the next. No true idealism is ever like an oil painting hung in a museum, entirely static. Idealism is dynamic.
There is a kind of permission in Ezekiel, implied by the strength, power, strangeness, otherworldliness of his visions – it is a permission to consider ourselves as part of a nature which isn’t limited to being natural at all. If the world isn’t exactly what we see, as the Lord showed Ezekiel, then we are not exactly what we think. The visions were not only external to Ezekiel; in some sense, by recording and reporting on them, they became internal to Ezekiel – he ate the ‘little scroll’ – the glory of Israel was inside of him. Not inside his stomach or his empirical sense data and the series of reports it generated for his mind instant-by-instant; inside his mind and soul and intelligible being. The visions started him on a different relationship with God. If we want to be visionary idealists, there is no substitute for breaking free from what we see around us. We have to find an intelligible being to be one. The vision may have the effect of being sweet to the taste and sour to the stomach; well, then – okay. But we want the one to whom it belongs to lead us on the journey.
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Daniel. The exiled prophet Daniel, promoted to a position of great influence, had visions at night in Babylon which left him puzzled. Daniel continued to look, to seek God. Then he had this vision, which entailed both an interior experience and an external experience.
Thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took his seat.
His clothing was as white as snow; the hair of his head was white like wool.
His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze.
A river of fire was flowing, coming out from before him.
Thousands upon thousands attended him; ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him.
The court was seated, and the books were opened. . . .
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a Son of Man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14.
Discussion: Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, made observations about metaphysics which are of relevance to us, even as we may reject his theological limitations which are confined always to morality, moral precepts, personal moral intentions – albeit without much regard to utilitarian moral results. Metaphysics consists of transcendental philosophy and the physiology of pure reason. This transcendent physiology has for its object either an inner or an outer connection, both of which transcend every possible experience. The former is the physiology of nature as a whole, that is, transcendental knowledge of the world. The latter refers to the connection of the whole of nature with a being above nature, and is therefor transcendental knowledge of God. (B873-874, A845-846). The limitations Kant artificially imposes on his theological knowledge of God should not blind us to the usefulness of his sharp distinguishable sense of the transcendental, which we will need to contemplate a holy city.
Kant was looking for “complete satisfaction to human reason with regard to those questions which have in all ages, though hitherto in vain, engaged its desire for knowledge.” The foregoing are the final words in his book, although it’s clear he ends with this words, as with an ambivalent hope. Just a few pages earlier he wrote, “I shall inevitably believe in the existence of God and in a future life; and I feel certain that nothing can shake this belief, because all my moral principles would be overthrown at the same time, and I cannot surrender them without becoming hateful in my own eyes.” (B856-857, A828-829). His own elevated moral principles create this earnest theological belief, a moral prince who weeps because he cannot achieve higher ground still; not a naked, wretched thief (like Luther) finding himself deservedly on the wrong end of judgment.
The revelation of Daniel meant little Kant; he would regard it as merely speculative, doctrinal, dogmatic. Kant though, drew his own picture of God that would not contradict in any serious way the first part of Daniel’s vision. Kant’s picture of God is a picture of the first being, the necessary being, the judge of all conduct based on rules of morality, the uncaused first cause, unconditioned yet acting to propel all subsequent contingencies and conditions, the solitary and highest organizing point of both the natural world and the intelligible moral world whose existence could never be proved (or disproved) but whose existence must be assumed for purposes of practical metaphysics. Kant’s theological picture matched up well with Daniel’s vision of God the Father, seated on a throne flaming with fire, convening a court, examining the conduct of countless individuals – the books of their lives and deeds being opened before Him.
The second half of Daniel’s vision has no place at all with Kant. The movement of authority, glory and sovereign power, from the Ancient of Days to the one like a Son of Man, was inconceivable to Kant. How could God give to anyone his position and power? How could God transfer, convey or assign it? To whom would it be given? What would it mean for God to ‘give authority’ – such that all peoples, nations and men of every language would worship this one like a Son of Man? If one like a Son of Man received such power, which had to be unified, unbroken, self-contained, how could one like a Son of Man ever surrender it? To what purpose? And if such movements occurred, how would we know? If Kant asserted that knowledge was already limited to possible experience – “there can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience,” (B1-2) – how would experience or the epistemological inquiry of any of us ever reach Daniel’s vision of this transfer of power? Kant would construct a brick wall he would call pure reason and true knowledge (by which he meant testable, repeatable empirical knowledge) against any messengers bringing Daniel’s vision.
Nor does Daniel’s vision stand alone. The theme of the 5th chapter of the Book of Revelation concerns the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David, who has triumphed and is able to open the scroll and its seven seals. One of Kant’s major themes is that although our knowledge may begin with experience, “it does not follow that it arises from experience.” (B1-2). Empirical knowledge was a compound of sensible impressions and a priori understandings to assemble that experience, which Kant characterized as being conducted by a “faculty of knowledge”. Kant would not allow revelation of any kind into his ‘faculty of knowledge’ – revelation for Kant would simply be a subset of sense data, empirical experience, sense impressions if it had any validity at all – what Kant was after was something that was “absolutely independent of all experience.” (B3). The notion of anyone, Jesus or anyone else, opening the scrolls of the future would have been categorically rejected by Kant. Time was an interior psychological state to Kant, a series of empirical sensations necessary to bring data through a priori metaphysical categories into a personal unity of experience.
Daniel’s heavenly vision is independent of any experience we will ever have; but neither was it an a priori understanding injected into human psychology (Daniel’s or anyone else’s) to process and orient experience. That would be beyond the scope of Kant’s use of intelligible. For our purposes, Daniel’s revelation is where intelligible begins. Revelation is a form of communication. There is no truly useful communication which ever appears in Kant. Not only does he disallow any communication from God in the form of revelation, he essentially treats all elements of the universe as objects which he personally might cognitively process. No one could ever tell Kant anything – at least, not anything meaningful, useful or important. Metaphysics as practiced by Kant was deaf with respect to most surroundings and other people, except for a handful of philosophers to whom he wished to respond. Kant’s position raises an ironic conclusion about possibilities or potentialities – in a universe in which all manner of things are possible and may be conditionally true, it apparently was not possible for a messenger to bring him a message which was simultaneously reliable, true, untestable and unprovable by reason. Although he never said so explicitly, that was a condition that could not exist. Kant’s unwillingness on this point isn’t simply a problem for religious revelation; the very point of poetry is for the poet to tell us something about himself, his interior life, that we could not otherwise know and have no means of testing. Neither Rilke’s poetry or William Burroughs’ novel Naked Lunch would survive Kant’s scrutiny.
However theological or academic this timing problem may appear, as soon as we begin to pursue visionary Christian idealism, the challenge re-appears. Rhetorical questions blossom everywhere. A vision appears. Is this the right vision? Are any visions the right vision, or should the only useful approach be to hunker down defensively? If we have visions of a better way of life among ourselves, believers, shouldn’t such be one of a series of visions, each of which is desirable but each of which gives way to a succeeding vision, better still? If idealistic visions are fantasies, wishful thinking overlaid on a recalcitrant, sin-loving and selfish human race, then the effort is futile. The capacity for improving mankind considered as a whole, even in small steps, matters; so do terms like teleology and eschatology – where are we going; what is our purpose; what does a final state look like; what does even the next interim improvement look like? Those questions cannot be answered unless something changes inside of us in the manner in which we view such hopes or prospects.
Daniel, however, is telling us about a relationship, one between the Father and the Son. In telling us about this relationship, which we could not see for ourselves, Daniel himself is communicating to us. His communication itself changes and conditions the world. Kant found that metaphysics encountered exactly those problems which Daniel was encountering – “These unavoidable problems of pure reason are God, freedom and immortality.” (B7-8). Since no one was permitted to talk to Kant, the problems are indeed elusive of solution. Any conversation directed to Kant was dismissed as dogmatic, not involving the capacity or incapacity of reason. Our vision responds to Daniel’s revelation and then applies changed perceptions about our world, who we are and what is possible and how that affects our relations. Only then does reason operate; reason is fourth.
Any revelation, including Daniel’s, originates outside of ourselves. Revelation treads upon ground upon which empiricism, psychology and introspection never go. Any revelation presented encounters the problem of trustworthiness, reliability and judgment or, to use a more philosophical term, epistemology. How do we know what has been revealed, what we think we know? Is that problem assisted in any way, if, instead of reasoning our way to a personal conclusion, someone writes out a solution and communicates it to us? Some solutions are testable – if someone tells me to follow Route 76 to Citizens Bank park, I can test it out. Must everything be testable? Things count which are not my personal experience or capable of being displayed on a logical truth-table. If the most important and critical knowledge in life – God, freedom, immortality – are beyond either my personal powers of test-giving or my personal experience, what limits may be placed anywhere? If someone tells me the Great Pumpkin commands my obedience every Halloween by huddling in a pumpkin patch and reciting childish invocations, may I reject that? How would I know? Daniel’s vision commands that we stop asking ourselves introspective questions – as Jesus would say, “Ask me.”
Communities sustain a vision. Daniel’s vision did not originate out of a social or historical void – Abraham, Isaac and Jacob led to Moses and an entire community which had a temple, scriptures, a priesthood, laws, promises, prophets, kings, villains, land, borders, enemies, and a carefully-recorded history of triumphs, defeats and an exile. Notwithstanding Kant’s disclaimers, Kant originated from a society as well, of philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke and Hume and the academics who studied and wrote about them. The word ‘millennialism’ in Christian circles has an unsavory reputation – wild, undisciplined, characterized by hysterical proclamations of an immediate end to civilization or the world itself. Millennialism is associated with harsh, final judgments on all those rejecting these pronouncements – but the word ‘millennial’ will have to be rescued if we want to be visionaries of a better set of relations within a community of believers. It might seem that arguing about the connotation of a word is rather academic. The importance of the word resides in a relationship in time; it pertains to when Christ returns to this empirical world, a basic and irreplaceable assertion of the Christian faith. How much better can we make things, before Christ returns?
As a result of local-group prayer or leadership, a vision appears. The capacity is a gift of the Spirit – for improving a local community which is itself only a fraction of the whole. Even apart from mankind generally, with respect to our community, what would improvement in our own relations look like? We begin in revelation to make application to our intra-personal psychology; to be more like Daniel, less like Nebuchadnezzar. Believing communities necessarily draw lines of separation with the world at large. Internally, communities and relations have visions locally, we change locally.
The theological term derived for unreasonably-optimistic (one might say, faith-challenging) eschatological considerations is called ‘postmillennialism’ – the view that things ought to be getting better because Jesus is sovereign, in charge, and making things get better even before he returns. In this system of vocabulary, the ‘millennium’ means a substantially improved state of human affairs. The possibility of any effective idealistic vision relies on an approach substantially in correspondence with postmillennialism. If one thinks every part of human life deteriorates until the end and only then does Christ return, that would look like premillennialism. If one thinks that everything goes on the way it always has – nothing essential ever changes – that would be amillennialism. I can’t say there is no evidence for premillennialism or amillennialism – I can only say that neither seem to ‘move the needle’ anywhere. The disaster of World War I put an end to a belief in naïve social-welfare Christian activism that adopted the language of optimistic postmillennialism but not the faith grounded in miracles of the New Testament or the prophetic power of the Old Testament. After World War I and II, the Apostle Paul’s description of human nature in the 1st chapter of Romans looked pretty accurate and there was little appetite to read further. Without the miraculous, without revelation, without the last chapters of the Book of Revelation and the holy city, we’re not really visionary.
Daniel’s vision looked profoundly toward one like a Son of Man and must be considered postmillennial in its eschatology. Daniel’s vision also ought to change us on the inside. If all peoples, nation, and men of every language are going to worship him, then things have to get better. The wagon train is already moving in the right direction, because it must – whether any of us see it, sense it or reason it to a logical conclusion in our individual lives. God’s decree is independent to the latest pronouncement of the media on the current state of affairs. Seeing better, as in disregarding to some significant extent the current state of affairs, is the business of allowing ourselves to be instructed by Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel. Daniel saw a kingdom which could never be destroyed. It exists ontologically as well as historically. Daniel told us so and Daniel did not drop out of the sky. Kant would receive no messengers – not from Daniel or anyone else. If Kant could not find an answer in his study, consulting his own reason – that answer did not exist. We, however, finally get the news. The scales drop from our eyes. Our first organizational step is to believe Daniel.
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Jesus Transfigured. Jesus took three of his disciples, Peter, James and John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them.
Jesus’ face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus. Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here. If you wish, I will put up three tabernacles, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my Son, whom I love. With him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”
When the disciples heard this, they fell facedown to the ground, terrified. But Jesus came and touched them. “Get up.” He said. “Don’t be afraid.” When they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus.
Matthew 17:2-8.
Discussion. Kant wrote that there were two sources of human knowledge, sensibility and understanding. (B30/A16). He thought they might spring from a common root which is unknown to us – a point to which we will return later. “Objects are given to us through sensibility; and through understanding they are thought.” It did not occur to Kant that there could be another model or method by which sense data or thought comes to us – if we were to perceive someone’s face ‘shining like the sun’ or their clothes becoming ‘white as the light’ – should we trust our sense data, mistrust it, or acknowledge its limitations? If someone reports those observations to us, do we trust them – perhaps they will acknowledge that the language they use is inadequate to the sensations and thoughts they experienced. The issue of sense data, and reporting that data, has its own challenges, but even more challenging is the issue of understanding. Would our understanding of the transfiguration be limited to what Peter, James and John understood at the time? If not, then what changed?
“If our sensibility should contain a priori representations constituting the condition under which objects are given to us, it would belong to transcendental philosophy,” Kant wrote. The three disciples who went up the mountain with Jesus did not have a priori representations about the event of the transfiguration of Jesus; such would not be possible. There was no mental condition under which the ‘object’ of the transfigured Jesus previously existed, categorized or processed. But we, as visionary Christians, searching for a more idealistic state, are deeply interested in a transcendental philosophy, because a transcendental philosophy precedes a transcendental state.
We do not use the word ‘object’ for the appearance of the transfigured Jesus. The word itself is limited, narrow, cramped. We ought to look for those prior conditions of mind which allowed the disciples, if not to understand entirely what they saw, at least to report it with some degree of cognition and recognition. If a stray cat had wandered across the high mountain at that time, I doubt the cat would have seen anything at all; certainly nothing the cat understood. When Kant used the word ‘conditions’ he meant conditions of the mind, and that led Kant to a ‘transcendental doctrine of sensibility’ which he characterized as a ‘transcendental aesthetic.’ It may seem as if there were no connection between Jesus, transfigured, and the appearance of two men long deceased, Moses and Elijah, with the specialized philosophic phrase ‘transcendental aesthetic,’ but we want that connection. Kant was correct in asserting that before you get to any philosophy, you start with perception, cognition, basic mental equipment existing a priori which permits the acquisition of the world around you. A transcendental aesthetic, even one sharply different than what Kant envisioned or characterized, is where we pick up the ball from Daniel’s vision of one ‘like a Son of Man.’ Suitably instructed, we know what we are intended to receive from being invited to the transfiguration, as witnesses to the mountaintop vision of Peter, James and John. The necessary powers of reasoned analysis are given first; albeit for reasons altogether different than Kant’s, we as Christians agree that human reason has its limitations. Unlike Kant, we find revelation to be a guided path beyond those limitations; the transfiguration of Jesus is one of the paradigmatic examples.
“Sensibility alone supplies us with intuitions. These intuitions are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding there arise concepts.” (B33/A19). Kant’s tools are outstanding, but they are all pointed in the wrong direction. The appearance of Christ, transfigured, affected the minds of the disciples and our minds as well in deeper ways than any sensibility or any intuition (no matter how we understand those terms). Prior empirical experience, or the accumulation of such experiences throughout a lifetime, leading to the possibility of further intuitions, does not adequately describe the transfiguration. Christ being transfigured was centered as a spiritual, theological, and ontological event at the pinnacle of human experience of God. Sense data is a means to communicate this event at the point of initiation, but there is no substitute for contemplation of the event throughout a lifetime. Many years later the writings of Peter and John will make reference to this event. The event is so spiritually explosive that we may forget one of its chief purposes, to be applied much later on when our paths seem to draw to dead ends. I have strayed like a lost sheep. Seek your your servant, for I have not forgotten your commandments, is the last verse of the lengthiest Psalm, 119:176, which up until that point appeared to be a model of extended piety. Lost sheep though we may be, we want our intuitions, concepts and understanding to flow from this point of Transfiguration, first supplied to us by means of the sensibilities of Peter, James and John.
Moses and Elijah appear with some obvious observations to draw: no one is dead whom God declares to be alive; dead men can appear wherever and whenever God has a purpose for such appearing and such men are indeed, ‘talking with Jesus’ – their living relationship with the living God is not terminated or suspended by death at all; they stand for the Law and the Prophets and the theological point is that such point to Christ; they will disappear from the vision because there are not three ‘equal’ tabernacles for three great religious figures – there is only Jesus because he subsumes and incorporates all the Law and all the Prophets; Peter in particular needed some guidance in connection with the coming relationship between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant; a bright light appeared because God is making physical or perceptual symbols that are more normally beyond our sense apperceptions; although God’s voice is rarely heard – when it is, God’s voice is of supreme importance. We hear God’s voice in the most definitive and conclusive statement which could ever be imagined: This is my Son, whom I love. With him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”
The full explanation of this event will require time, maturity, reflection, further observations from others, such as the Apostle Paul. The understanding which gives rise to the concept of Christ transfigured is not the act of one single disciple or one particular group of people. It is true though, and Kant is right, that we finally wind up with a concept. The concept of the transfiguration itself has the quality of being ‘undetermined’ – a very peculiar word which, among Kant scholars, has occasioned considerable discussion and debate. “The undetermined object of an empirical intuition is called appearance.” (B33-34/A19-20). A nearly inscrutable sentence, but I want to pick it apart. Christ appearing transfigured is ‘undetermined.’ Whatever the word means in English translation or the German original, its denotation and connotation are appropriate. The transfiguration is beyond our powers of limiting, boxing in, determining. And it connects to the appearance of Moses and Elijah because like them, we certainly are enthusiastic about eternal life in heaven placed securely beyond the powers of death. Luke adds the detail that “they spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem.” Luke 9:31. Moses and Elijah are still interested and engaged in the acts of God and the purpose and fulfillment of Jesus’ ministry. We don’t know what ‘empirical intuitions’ Moses and Elijah had at the transfiguration, another topic which is for us, undetermined.
We have here no object but we do have an appearance which is undetermined. This appearance does not have ‘matter’ in the ordinary sense of the word; but it still appeared to the disciples’ senses and minds and was ordered in their intellects. As otherworldly as it was, it was part of the manifold of appearances which each of them confronted every day. The disciples had the capacity to apprehend the spiritual and supernatural basis of this appearance because such capacities are provided by God, who states categorically “let us make man in our image, our likeness.” The image and likeness of God is pertinent to the soul and the souls of the disciples were in reception of a vision. “The manifold of the appearance can be ordered in certain relations, I call the form of appearance.” The last thing Kant had in mind was the transfiguration, but his words work. When Christ was transfigured before the disciples, a new capacity, a new element of their relation appeared. Kant asserted the form of an appearance “must lie ready for sensations a priori in the mind.” It wouldn’t matter how much instruction you gave to squirrels – they would never get the transfiguration. Our minds are ready for sensations a priori – and the form of those sensations resides intangibly, immaterially but intelligibly, in the soul. Kant held that representations are pure in which there is nothing belonging to sensation; but sensation for the disciples had to be composed of two parts – the soul, already capable of such sensations, and the acts on the mountaintop, which disclosed themselves to their senses. The tools may appear abstract, but if we are really tired of the world created by contemporary cable news, generating viewing audiences by feeding partisan appetites, we’re going to need them.
Pure representations, pure intuitions, compose something Kant called the transcendental aesthetic. Kant meant something both sensible and intelligible; something both transcendental and psychological. There is no need for us to isolate sensibility or to separate it from the understanding – we’re not trying to score philosophical points or win an argument in the faculty lounge. The transfiguration took place over a period of some time (Luke records that the disciples had grown sleepy on the mountaintop) and within space – a mountaintop is a description of an identifiable space in at least three dimensions. The transcendental aesthetic means something else to us. It means we can be connected, at the times and places we live in, through the foreordained will and revelation of God, to something which is theologically sensible, spiritually sensible, and intelligible when considered in the light of God’s purpose in sending Jesus, declared as God’s Son, whom he loves. We need to move mentally.
The conclusion to the passages concerning the transfiguration is essential to Jesus’ ministry. Jesus came and touched them and told them not to be afraid. When they looked up from being terrified, face down on the ground, it was their friend and teacher, Jesus – Jesus, as human and familiar to them as a nursing baby, as a man throwing out a fishing net. The contrast with Ezekiel’s vision is sharp; Ezekiel also fell to the ground in terror in response to the overwhelming nature of the visions which were visited on him. So far, just like the disciples on the mountaintop. But at the end of the disciples’ experience, gentle Jesus, their friend, reaches down to touch them. His tenderness is obvious, unmistakable. Jesus loves us – there is a great deal in this universe beyond us, so far beyond us as to be terrifying – but Jesus comes to us, touches us, comforts us with his physical touch and tells us not to be afraid. His touch is one of love, brother to brother, human to human, friend to friend, and we need no philosophical analysis to understand that. He came to be with us, to be one of us. His point is love.
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The Ascension of Jesus. The Ascension was an act which perfected Jesus’ ministry as our Great High Priest, fulfilled the meaning of the word transcendental, and provides a path for our Christian idealism. The heavenly Temple of God the Father which Jesus entered by means of his ascension through the Holy Spirit, in order to perform his priestly duties of intercession and mediation, was and is vastly greater than any temple built by human hands. As the scripture records, after Jesus’ suffering and resurrection, he showed himself to his disciples over a period of forty days. Jesus then gave some final instructions to the disciples when they asked. The disciples were still thinking about Israel – their thoughts were still centered around local conditions under Roman rule and their personal history as Jews and the outcome for the physical descent of Abraham. Jesus’ answer moved their thinking into another plane and the miraculous physical act of his ascension concluded and emphasized his answer. His answer and ascension poured transcendental idealism into their understandable but limited, narrower platforms of thought.
The disciples were gathered around him. “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus said to them, “it is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
After he said this, he was taken up before the very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going. Suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee, “” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”
Acts 1:3-11.
Discussion. To apply Kant’s transcendental analytic to the ascension of Jesus appears to be so inappropriate as to constitute a deliberate distortion. It would be as if a man found a pair of pliers and then decided to use them to drive nails. Two streams of thought are involved: one of revelation involving the New Testament miracle which concludes Jesus’ interaction with the disciples (which has been a paramount theme throughout the whole New Testament); another stream of thought engaging with obscure metaphysics. The ascension of Jesus is a critical, central, essential miracle – yet it is not often discussed or analyzed; now we are going to want a term like Kant’s transcendental analytic.
This miracle connects with the meeting between Jesus and Mary of Magdala after his resurrection, outside the tomb, which is justly celebrated as one of the most famous, astonishing and heartwarming scenes in the Bible. Mary was weeping, heartbroken, feeling a grief so agonizing it placed her in the posture of a lost child: They have taken my Lord away, and I don’t know where to find him. Jesus called to Mary and revealed himself, simply by stating her name – Mary! Mary hugged Jesus – a hug so long that finally Christ had to gently bring it to a close – and then he alluded directly to his ascension as the sole, single reason why Mary was going to have to loosen her grip. Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Note the physicality of the resurrected Christ. Mary’s gripping of him was driven by her emotions, grief, fear, loss, and not intended to score metaphysical points – but the event presents a metaphysical lesson which is plain and unmistakable. Jesus’ body post-resurrection which would ascend was real, physical and ‘grip-able’. Generally we proceed by a faith we cannot put two physical hands on – Mary was in a position to grasp Jesus with her two physical hands. The event connects very much with Thomas’ post-resurrection interaction with Jesus – one was filled with doubt, the other with grief, but the answer was ‘more than a feeling’ – to borrow from a popular song by the group Boston.
Kant started by explaining the transcendental analytic in his customary inscrutable style: “Transcendental analytic consists in the analysis of all our a priori knowledge into the elements of the pure knowledge of the understanding.” (B89/A64). The ascension of Jesus is surely transcendental; if not in the way Kant meant, certainly in the way the word is customarily used. What is it that makes Jesus’ ascension so inarguably transcendental? First, obviously, God’s defiance of gravity; the description is in the passive tense – Jesus is ‘taken up.’ This happened in the empirical world of the sense data of the disciples – before their very eyes. A cloud hides Jesus from their sight, the implication being that Jesus’ ascension continued upward, like a kite let loose of its string and flying every higher driven by the wind. Whenever Kant uses the word ‘transcendental,’ however, that is exactly what he does not mean: sense data. Moreover, this sense data is of a type no one else, not present at the place and time, can duplicate.
The word ‘transcendental’ works for a one-time miraculous event but it will provide no analytic. We could do without the analytic altogether; millions of Christians have worshiped Christ without the benefit of philosophical analysis. But I want the analytic because it is essential if we are to move together transcendentally as a group. A city means our individual worship melds and blends into something larger, and now we need a structure (a structure which will be Protestant and multifarious as to church organization, premised on Romans ch. 1-8). Kant says the analytic consists in all our a priori knowledge composing the elements of pure knowledge of the understanding. One-time miraculous events appear to defeat a priori knowledge – but that should not be true. The reason an event is miraculous is because we do have a priori knowledge; people, particularly grown men, do not float into the air and disappear from our sight. We knew that even as young children. It is both a priori understanding of our three-dimensional space and time, along with our experience in the world that creates cognition for an event miraculous for believers and disbelieved by incredulous outsiders. If Jesus is ascending, there is a theological point to be made. He is lifting us up, taking us with him, to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’
So we have something here by way of analysis – if the theological and spiritual point is important enough, God will act in ways that are directly contrary to our normal understanding of the three-dimensional world around us. Our a priori knowledge was worth something – by contradicting it so visibly, we learned something. Jesus is ascending and taking us with him. The analytic here is not intended to help us to understand the world better from a metaphysical point of view, which was Kant’s interest. But this analytic sets down a principle that physical reality is bendable to just that degree which God intends – but he does not play jacks or charades with his universe – if it is to be bent, there is a reason, a teaching purpose. The analytic becomes a principle when Jesus’ ascension becomes the means of our ascension, my ascension as well. Overcoming death and ascending spiritually, theologically, morally, ethically, socially, culturally, politically, physically, biologically, ontologically, passionately and compassionately is at the core of this. I was a 16-year old runaway dropping acid on the streets of San Francisco in 1967 – but I am now more. There have been more than physical changes – something more than the biological cells of my body reaching the end of their potential to divide. The grace of God has done something in 57 years.
The analytic brings us to epistemology – this is how we know – Jesus ascended. When Mary hugged Jesus, she knew it was him. She knew as soon as he called her name (not when she saw him and thought he might be the gardener) – his tone, inflexion, vocalization, intonation left no question in her mind – she knew Jesus’ voice, she knew how he said her name. She cried out Rabboni! Even more quickly than Thomas, Mary needed less than a millisecond to know Jesus – people have to be convinced, but what convinces them is not a reasoned argument – Mary, like Thomas, knew her Lord much faster and more surely than that. His one word – her name, was enough. We should adjust the term ‘analytic’ not only to encompass the end product of reasoning through multiple steps to a conclusion, but also to encompass instant recognition. Because it is instant recognition we rely on much more often than reasoned conclusions. When my wife walks in our door, I do not have to reason my way to a conclusion that this is the woman I married in 1984 who bore our four children. But I want to use the word ‘analytic’ for that recognition as well; that is also a feature of our intellects, our knowledge.
Pushing on with Kant’s initial definition of the transcendental analytic, is any of this ‘pure knowledge of the understanding?’ Kant would categorically reject all religious revelation – if that were true, are we really no different than squirrels with high IQs? If Kant is correct, that sense impressions must meet a priori understandings – that one can reason from these a priori understandings to reach metaphysical conclusions which are not conditioned upon empirical data or contingent upon experience – than the same observation and conclusion should obtain with respect to religious communication and revelation. How do we understand any religious revelation, even if we retain doubts? How do we understand any miracle, that if credited it is, in fact, a miracle, except by a priori understandings which may be charitably characterized as ‘pure knowledge.’ If this were all nothing but a brick wall, why would anyone, ever, anywhere, wonder about God? Kant is quite insistent that these types of questions absolutely possess human reason, answerable or not.
As Jesus once rhetorically asked a group of people who had gathered to hear him speak, said in reference to John the Baptist: What did you go out in the desert to see? A reed shaken by the wind? The human mind, debased and misdirected by sin, cannot intuit the truth of God directly absent God’s grace, but that does not imply that cognitive means are non-existent to cognize spiritual content. If the Kingdom of God was forcefully advancing from the days of John the Baptist, and forceful men were laying hold of it – then whatever the term ‘forcefully advancing’ means, it must mean something cognitive, because we only lay hold of that which we at least think we understand and think we value. Matthew 11:7-14. ‘Pure knowledge of understanding’ may overstate the case for the human mind to gain apperceptive possession of the things of God, but even a drug user, flat on his back, may raise his hand into the air and ask God – why is there so much suffering?
Kant wants to make four points about his transcendental analytic:
1 – the concepts are not empirical (that is, driven by experience, which is always contingent, conditional);
2 – the analytic does not belong to intuition or sensibility but to thought and understanding;
3 – the concepts underlying the transcendental analytic are elementary, by which he means simple in the sense of not being capable of being broken down into further subparts or sub-elements;
4 – that there is a complete ‘table of concepts’ which covers the whole field of pure understanding.
(B89-90/A64-65).
As visionary Christians, we can throw out number 4 right away – we are encountering the ascension of Jesus, one of the most important, mystifying and supernatural events in scripture. We are not going to ‘cover the whole field’ with our table of concepts or any such table. Our humility on this point represents a major separation from Kant or anyone else who thinks that human reason can find a complete description to all metaphysics.
We can agree easily with the first point – the ascension of Jesus does not belong to our ordinary world of empirical events and sense data and ordinary experience. There was nothing about the ascension of Jesus which was contingent or conditional. Jesus was taken up – angels were in attendance. The very point here is a non-repeated, non-contingent, unconditioned event. Conceptually this is agreeable to Christian faith; the difficulty is in now finding a path to move closer to our goal.
The second point merits discussion, because sense data certainly played into this event. The disciples saw Jesus in his resurrected form. They saw him taken up bodily. They heard with their ears the statement of the angels – the ‘men in white’ accompanying the vision, which was not intuitive in any ordinary sense of the word. When Kant uses the term intuition he means the interior experience of the presentation of outer data (an ‘object’) which creates an appearance in the human mind. We certainly agree that thought and understanding are essential to grasping the ascension of Jesus – but the question is raised, what part does sensibility play? Is there an analytic which we can derive from this, which will assist us in a visionary future state? If the event were absolutely one-time only, then the event would give us no help in the future at all. The angels seem intent on advising us of the opposite – This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.’ The timing of his return would seem essential; the differences between postmillennial, amillennial and premillennial eschatology are about the timing of that return – about which the angels say nothing. Eschatology matters because it directs our thoughts about the possibilities for the world we live in, pending that return.
Personal experience gives meaning to the word pending. At the time of this writing a presidential election is pending; military action in the middle east is pending; further maneuvers between Russia and Ukraine are pending; a synod in the Catholic Church is pending; autumn is pending; a deposition of my client is pending; my complete retirement as an attorney is pending; the entrance of my grandchildren into first grade is pending. On the globe, over 7 billion people have a similar experience of pending. Billions of young people have the balance of their lives pending. All of us have death pending. After announcing the dreary and visible news that Jesus has been taken from us, the angels have a mysterious but hopeful announcement to make about what is pending. Rather like forlorn characters in a play which might be characterized as absurdist, we now have decisions to make – first about what may be done, and only then about what to do. If the decision about what may be done is forceful and positive and optimistic, trusting enough, we may cease to be absurd and forlorn.
If we are going to make use of Kant’s approach here, then thought and understanding count, even if such thoughts and understandings are partial, not comprehensive. Our analytic is never a closed-end fund, to which no other investors are invited, but always open-ended, not only for the sake of new investors, but more fundamentally, because of the nature of God whose limitless nature is intuited by us and understood. We understand by means of an intuition to which we are gifted, given as part of that initial cognitive equipment we carry with us which makes us human and created in the image of God. The answer to the analytic problem is relational – we don’t have short portable answers to majestic one-time miraculous events, rather we are gifted with faith by God, through Christ. The analytic-derived-from-the-ascension becomes a problem like the ‘complete table of concepts’ problem; if all the answers to any problem depend entirely on us, we are compelled to search them out and find an answer immediately. The analytic to be derived from Jesus’ ascension awaits a further revelation; a future choice among crossing paths. Christ is making intercession for us in heaven, that place to which he ascended. If the ascension implies that Christ brings us with him, it also implies that Christ, firmly placed at the right hand of God, has a permanent priesthood and thus able to save us completely. Christ is interceding for us, so that we may have and make future choices.
Kant asserts the concepts underlying the transcendental analytic are elementary; that is, not composed of simpler elements still. The discussion of what is ‘elementary’ can become highly technical – we can ponder such all the way down to the philosopher Leibniz’ ‘monads’ – but we are not interested in characterizing all reality (if such a thing is possible). We are interested in understanding the ascension of Jesus in such a way that we are assisted in moving toward an idealistic state. Any serious response to Jesus’ ascension acknowledges that it must be simple, in the sense it cannot be subdivided into smaller pieces – it forms a continuous, coherent whole involving Jesus, our resurrected savior, his promise and expectation that he would be ‘taken up’ to heaven, the visible presentation of that as a physical, observable fact to a group of disciples, the rhetorical question of angels directed to those disciples intended to further instruct us, and the theological implications which include our invitation and joinder with ascending Jesus as well as his position as intercessor with the Father.
No part of that ascension can be severed from the whole. There is no way to structure a useful or meaningful sentence which begins ‘the ascension of Jesus is just like X’ – there is no X to satisfy that sentence or conclude it truthfully. Breaking things down into simpler elements misses the point of our efforts altogether – we don’t want to break our idealistic city down into simpler elements, we want to build our city up into more complex elements. We engage in this building project not because there is some abstract, impersonal ‘assembly theory’ let loose inexplicably in the universe; we do so because higher structure, higher calling is the calling of God in Christ. All abstract systems of knowledge fail, are misleading, if they do not start with the living purposes of the living God. Attempting to abstract concepts into their most elemental state, or to define monads, is pointing in the wrong direction. If we pull apart every particle until we find some incorporeal thing called a monad, in God’s universe and in accordance with his will, we could pull apart the monads into smaller, ethereal, ephemeral components still, endlessly. Squirrels are simpler than human beings, and one-celled protozoa are simpler still, but we’re not intellectually or socially interested in going in that direction – and our disinterest has a theological basis: Christ has called us and is going ahead into Galilee.
A Brief Detour into the Psychology of Witnessing a Miracle
Aspiring to a transcendental state means experiencing transcendental acts, miracles, external to oneself. The disciples saw Jesus ascend – that was a miraculous act in this physical world. But our aspirations are deeper than mere observation; our responses to the miraculous are also the channels in which we relate to ourselves individually and to others. Kant uses the term ‘transcendental deduction,’ by which he means a concept completely independent of all experience, yet such concepts can exist a priori to reference what he calls ‘objects,’ meaning anything external. (B118/A85). A transcendental deduction is not acquired through experience (that would be an empirical deduction).
We have no prior experience with either the final state of the holy city described in Revelation chapters 21 and 22; nor do we have experience with any interim state, existing beyond the world we presently live in, and yet postmillennial – that is, so markedly, so substantially improved that we envision such a state, seek to create such a state and seek to live there with others. The very capability of our minds to imagine that which is better is something which exists a priori. So if I can repeat with Martin Luther King, “I have a dream,” I have already made a statement about the possibilities of the human mind in relation to God, others and myself. The power of the mind to formulate transcendental deductions, when conjoined with faith, should not be underestimated. Even a bank robber, languishing in prison, can imagine a better state; for himself or for others. It’s part of the equipment we have, and it is transcendental.
The disciples did not have any prior experience with human beings ascending into heaven, nor would I expect that they imagined it for themselves prior to seeing Jesus ascend. The miraculous, given by God, joins with that prior capability we have of formulating a transcendental deduction. It’s misleading to describe their observation of this miracle as a mere sense impression; the ideas, the concepts, the mental equipment they brought to that observation involved all manner of things they could not see with their eyes (Jesus was hidden in a cloud), but drew initial and tentative conclusions from. Later on, with the application of theological knowledge, more permanent conclusions could be drawn, which we have already cited from the New Testament’s Letter to the Romans and Hebrews. Sometimes you have to think about what you see; the disciples would later make transcendental deductions, even if they didn’t use that terminology. A magic trick is an entertainment which has completed its full purpose if it entertains for a brief period; a miracle is something you think about for a long time. Peter’s conduct in the gospels is impulsive; his letters in the New Testament reflect an older man who has been thinking about things through many seasons and years.
If we are thinking, Kant would ask us ‘well, who is doing this thinking? Who is the ‘I am’ who thinks?’
“It must be possible for the I think to accompany all my representations: for otherwise something would be represented within me that could not be thought at all.” (B132/A97). Kant called this the transcendental unity of self-consciousness. “For the manifold representations given in an intuition would not one and all be my representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness.” (B133/A98). That mysterious sentence gives rise to something called the ‘synthetic unity of apperception.’ We go about our day, adding one representation to another, combining our senses and thoughts into one self-conscious identity – “the thought that the representations given in intuition belong one and all to me” wrote Kant. (B134).
To acquire the target, that is, a substantially better life, a better community, a better city, begins with our own perceptions of not only what is possible – what is dreamed of but not yet experienced – it also relates to what we believe is absolutely our own: our intuitions, our representations of the world reflected in our senses, including my thoughts, ideas, plans, history, the basic act of asserting our identity (my identity) which subsists over time and joins all our memories and character of each of us as individuals. Although it seems too trivial to discuss, for me to join with others in a community also requires that I join together my life, history and thoughts as well into one coherent identity – the ‘I am’ that we (I) assert. We assert that ‘I am’ when we pray to God, when we think and also when we ask our spouses to pass the salt. We want transcendental relationships now that can exist only in the City of God; so we are like cartoon characters which have two vectors sticking out of us; one from our head, pointing to God. And one vector coming from our hearts, pointing to others. And we will have to peel away the world, with its limitations, its assumptions, its structures built on the expectation of conflict, mistrust, grief, death, misgivings, doubts and sin – we can’t peel all that away conducting ourselves in this world, but we can peel it away in our relations with each other. The collection and interaction of individual holy dreams comprises a holy community.
It is a measure of the usefulness of Kant’s writing that he asks us to think about such things, and so we do think of them, even when we are viewing the miracle of Jesus’ ascension. If you see Jesus ascend and I see Jesus ascend, the event is so overpowering that we barely to think to ask – ‘did you see that? Describe what you saw.’ But we also want to unify collectively as a church, as seven churches, what we have seen in the past. When the time comes to envision the future, how we interpret and experience our own internal psychology and our individual perceptions is going to make a difference. If the transcendental city I see and the city you see are different, then the resolution of that difference will often take us back to the most basic identity and psychology of our past history, including (and this is why we are Christians, not secularists), how we experience miracles. The world does not engage in a discussion about how it perceives miracles, because it does so through the lens of incredulity, doubt, skepticism, cynicism, agnosticism. The position of the world is ‘I don’t know, I can’t test it, other people say different things, what’s for lunch?’ Perceiving the miraculous is necessary and irreplaceable for a Christian but that does not mean we each perceive them identically. The discussion is necessary for us; the argument that perceiving miracles (and accepting the witness to them) is not necessary for a Christian is a worldly argument – without miracles, starting with the resurrection of Christ, we are the most deluded, the most pathetic of all peoples – stick figures in a Marxist-Leninist mockudrama. He is risen! – we say, shout it and if necessary scream it. We cross the valley of doubt.
Interior psychology is a necessary detour. If we want a miracle in the future, we ought to talk about how we experienced a miracle in the past. “The synthetic unity of apperception is therefore the highest point to which we must connect all use of the understanding,” Kant wrote (A99). How you individually experienced and then understand a miracle in your life makes a difference; if for no other reason, because it will matter when you and I talk about the future. ‘Unity of apperception’ is a daunting phrase, but it starts us toward a dialogue in prayer with God and a conversation with one another. The necessary conversation moves toward an expressed, imaginable, intelligible end: that transcendental deduction we hold in our minds, being understood, cognizable, but not yet manifested in our experience – the real, yet also ascending City of God.
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Paul. A man named Saul, a fierce enemy and persecutor of the Lord’s disciples, was on his way to Damascus with letters authorizing him to take Christians as prisoners to Jerusalem. On his way to Damascus he had a vision:
Suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul – why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, Lord?’ Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. “Now get up and go into the city. You will be told what you must do.” The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless. They heard the sound but did not see anyone. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. Acts 9:2-8.
Later on, after taking the new name of Paul to reflect his new identity as a disciple of Christ, Paul had another vision and revelation.
I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up into the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know – God knows. And I know that this man – whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows – was caught up to Paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell. 2 Corinthians 12:1-4.
Discussion. “What is required for all experience and for its possibility is understanding,” wrote Kant (B245/A200). Paul’s experience began with a flashing light from heaven. These were sense perceptions and an experience so overwhelming they sent him falling to the ground. The light itself reminds one of the light of Jesus’ transfiguration and the burning bush of Moses which was not consumed. Falling to the ground brings to mind the response of the disciples to the transfiguration event as well as Ezekiel’s response to his opening vision. Paul was vulnerable. We rely on a fairly predictable world of events and sense impressions around us. If anything changes too quickly and too dramatically, we have few alternatives, nor are inclined to do anything, except fall to the ground in fear. In those circumstances we are as shocked and helpless as any insect, picked up by a human hand, which not knowing what else to do, freezes. God did not create us to freeze in fear, but we don’t understand God or our relationship with him, until we understand how vulnerable we are.
Kant continued. “And the first thing that is contributed by it [understanding] is not that it renders the representation of object distinct, but that it renders the representation of an object possible at all.” Calling a blinding appearance of light from heaven an ‘object’ is a problem which I have already identified. It’s doubtful that Kant would allow a revelation from heaven to fall into his definition of the word ‘object,’ although Paul is recording an immediate, powerful set of sense perceptions. It’s not clear that in that first instant of blinding light, Paul could have ‘rendered the representation’ (meaning the impression the event was making in his mind), intelligible at all. Jesus’ interest in Paul and his mental states was not academic; the Lord had plans for Paul, and so Paul received another sense impression – hearing Jesus’ voice. The men around Paul heard the sound but did not see anyone; the implication of hearing a sound is not the same as hearing intelligible words. When Jesus called Peter and Andrew by the Sea of Galilee, the implication is clear that anyone standing nearby would also have heard the words, Come, follow me. Paul will have to make a defense of his ministry at various times on the strength of interactions with Jesus much different than the interactions of Matthew, Mark, Peter, John or James. By implication, Paul will make a defense of his ministry against Immanuel Kant also, and against David Hume, John Locke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a host of other philosophers as well. A defense of divine revelation isn’t only a report and recitation of a non-repeatable event which may elicit curiosity, incredulity or assent; it is an assertion that such events are possible, that they are initiated by God for a purpose, that we are intended to cognize that purpose and act on it.
Jesus asked Paul a question and the question was in intelligible, recognizable human speech, which is (and should be) presented with quotation marks around it. “Saul, Saul – Why do you persecute me?” Jesus repeated the name that Paul had at birth (which makes us think of King Saul persecuting David). Jesus emphasized his close personal knowledge of Paul – repeating his name twice; it suggests the kind of affection that a teacher will have for a student who, although having great potential, has gone astray in his studies. Occasionally when I was in my early teens and doing well in school without expending much effort, a teacher would come to me after class and gently chide me, in something like an affectionate tone of voice, with the suggestion if I tried harder and stopped coasting I would be first in the class, an ambition I did not harbor at the time. Jesus did not really expect an answer to his question from Paul. The answer, if one could ever have been given, would have reflected the ignorance of Christ which was manifested in the question Paul immediately did ask. The veil of ignorance is going to be lifted for Paul and then for others. Lifting that veil of ignorance has been a 2,000 year exercise and goes on still.
Jesus’ question turns the ‘object’ of the appearance of light from heaven into a ‘representation’ in Paul’s mind; it was now an understandable human event. Someone was talking to him, in words he understood. Then Paul asked the single greatest question that any sinful human being has ever asked, the single most important question in the history of intellectual inquiries from man to God: “Who are you, Lord?” We should stop here. The question is too important to pass by, as if we were on a freeway and that question was an exit ramp which we viewed and then sped by. Like the silence in heaven before Jesus opens the 7th seal, we should simply be silent for some period of time to absorb the question as well as the context in which it was made possible. In his earthly ministry Jesus spent considerable effort in answering that question and in particular the Gospel of John records such answers. The answer can be given in a few seconds, but it turns out that is somewhat like paddling around on a little raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean over the Mariana Trench; we are floating on the surface successfully enough, but the water underneath is rather deep. To the answer which will instantly come, angels cry out – three times – “holy!” It was a question in which Paul acknowledged, on behalf of the whole human race, that he really didn’t know. The connotation of such a question is that of someone who, in truth, is confronted by something beyond his ordinary daily experience, religious training, or the guidance of his elders.
The Apostle Paul, steeped in a lifetime of rabbinic study, didn’t know who was speaking to him (although he knew to address him as Lord), had no clue as to what a voice coming from heaven meant and was baffled by an experience which he was barely able to process. Paul asked the most basic question at the beginning of any relationship. Paul’s question is at the heart of the human problem. Paul didn’t know who was speaking to him or the source of the blinding light but reflexively he wanted to find out. If Paul were a student of religion, then by virtue of this revelation he had at least enough information to ask a necessary and critical question. Paul’s question is a stunning conclusion to the problem of misdirected religious studies, which attempt to present answers to nearly everything – admittedly, some very difficult questions – except the one thing, the one person, which (and whom) we need to know. Who are you, Lord? Kant’s ‘necessary being’ made his appearance to Paul.
The answer from God will be at the heart of visionary Christian idealism. “I am Jesus,” came the answer. The ‘representation of the object’ has now been made possible; human intellect, cognition, Kant’s understanding may now be applied to Paul’s experience. If Kant would not accept it, that doesn’t change the usefulness of Kant’s words to help us understand what Paul finally understood. Jesus has announced himself – God has made himself man. If we want to be visionaries, this is the vision that stands as our foundation stone, the bedrock at the bottom of the structure we will want to build. We seek a miraculous vision because we start with a miraculous vision. At some point, we will need to maneuver our understanding of this visionary miracle over to ordinary local relations with others as well as our political, legal, economic, social, artistic and cultural relations. The miracle has to begin at the level of the family, the workplace, the neighborhood and especially our local church. But it will never be the vision of anyone’s favorite cable news channel. The miracle cannot arise from partisan politics or a national bullhorn. The miracle was deeply personal to Paul. It invoked not only his immediate purpose for being on the Damascus Road, but the entire constitution of his learning, life and upbringing. It invoked the basic assumptions he made about walking around in the world with any task in mind; Paul’s immediate purpose was persecution of a despised religious sect, with which God has now identified himself.
Paul wasn’t simply wrong about early Christianity. He was wrong about whether or not anyone, anywhere, gets hit with a bolt of lightning because God wishes to announce himself and provide a new set of instructions. Paul accepted the idea that God issues instructions in a way that Immanuel Kant would not accept, for whom ethics was always an exercise in introspection. Up until the point when Jesus announced himself (and in no uncertain terms), neither Paul or Kant would have accepted the idea of the incarnation – that Jesus is Lord, that the prophets like Isaiah and Daniel were telling us something we needed to know, that we needed to think about. Kant was correct to insist that a priori understandings precede experience and Moses was correct, as was the Apostle John, in declaring that everything arises first from the Word of God; but once we are experienced (one thinks of the Jimi Hendrix song which was a reference only to drugs), then experience gives rise to thought. Thoughts count. Reason and action will follow thought.
Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do. The direct command issued to Paul by Jesus invokes some unmistakable facts. Paul needed to get up! Jesus has the power to level us but that isn’t Jesus’ ultimate goal. The demonstration of his power is made for a higher purpose. At some point we are to get up! – (This is much like accounts in the Gospels in various formulations. ‘Hey you! Get on up! Be encouraged! The Lord is calling! You’re not dead yet!’) Go into the city – other people are involved. Other people need to hear. There’s a city. This directive stands in marked contrast to philosopher Kant – this isn’t about luxuriating in one’s study, immersed in self-inspection, coming to conclusions in a vacuum as if the human experience were limited to self-experience like an individual spider on a web. Kant had great insights; he was also saturated in his own isolated thoughts. When Jesus issued a command to Paul, he was already invoking a relationship and the command entailed a large number of other people. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from the left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city? So asked the Lord of Jonah. One reads the morning newspapers on the internet and comes to the conclusion that it is a sorry, angry world – but Jesus, not being unduly naive about the state of its confusion, sent Paul into it anyway. And it started with that basic jump-starter of a command – Now get up!
To say that this was a shock to Paul is an understatement. For three days he was blind and did not eat or drink. He was in a state of physical shock, mental shock, spiritual shock. Quoting Kant, “Transcendental assertions, on the contrary, claiming insight into what is far beyond the field of possible experience, can never produce their abstract synthesis in any a priori intuition, nor can their flaws be discovered by means of any experience.” (B453/A425). The intellectual premises we have about the world begin to arise even before we begin to crawl. Basic interactions with the world begin very early; by six months infants see things which intrigue them and crawl in that direction. The walls, the floor and the ceiling are supposed to stay put as the infant orients in a stable three-dimensional world. Disorientation alone though, did not produce the results Jesus sought in Paul – Jesus loved Paul, and Paul would experience that love in ways that he did not always describe, even as he was expressing it to others. When he was defending his ministry Paul’s close relationship with Christ was described as the relationship of a servant to a master, or a legal representative or ambassador to those whom he represents – yet there was also about this miraculous event something deeply personal between Paul and the risen Jesus, something much more intense than an abstract synthesis and not always as fully described as one would like, given that Paul’s relationship with Christ never had an earthly footing, but only had a supernatural footing.
Jesus had just made a ‘transcendental assertion’ to Paul – not the way Kant meant it, but the way I mean it. It was indeed an assertion far beyond the field of Paul’s experience. His experience was one ‘advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of his own age and extremely zealous for the traditions of his fathers.’ Gal. 1:14. “As for legalistic righteousness, faultless.” Phil. 3:6. Jesus’ transcendental assertion changed Paul – but there is an emotional underlayment to this relationship which must start with Jesus forgiving Paul for being a persecutor, a violent man bent on a mission of malice toward people whom he did not know and who had never harmed him personally in any way. Although it is not directly narrated anywhere in the New Testament, Paul must have been deeply ashamed by his conduct. Not only was he entirely, blindly wrong about Christ, Christianity and the early Christians, he was violent and rabid in his errors and his actions. Paul never wrote anywhere the words, “I was overwhelmed by shame and self-disgust.” But they would not have been inappropriate. Jesus forgave him. The emotional response to that depth and breadth of forgiveness may become deep and powerful. In Paul’s case, it did so.
I became a Christian because Villanova University made me gather religious credits in self-study to graduate with a Liberal Arts degree after an inconclusive four-year sojourn at San Francisco State; so I read an assigned Catholic writer named Joseph Lortz who delineated Martin Luther and the Reformation conscientiously, in useful context and at length. In reading I grasped both a history and a new set of concepts, reflected in theological language. The language and theological concepts may have been old, 500 years old, but they were still workable. Reading Lortz’ history was rather like going into a coffee house and seeing an unfamiliar game, chess, and then watching fifty or seventy-five games being played, until the nature of the game and the powers of the pieces becomes familiar and workable. Then I read Luther directly, including an introduction to his writing by a man named Dillenberger, and was instructed in the concept of being justified by faith. In a drifting, sinking life, I had found shards of a raft on which to cling. On Luther’s encouragement (‘read it like it was written yesterday as a letter to you, personally’ – my paraphrase) I then read the Gospel of John in a translation into modern, fluent English prepared by Catholic scholars called the Jerusalem Bible.
Jesus declared loudly in that Gospel, twice, in public: “I am the Bread of Life.” When I read it the second time (John 6:48), it was for me, a transcendental assertion. In a moment in an apartment in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania I had deep insight, more than insight, revelation, a vast ontological light source being turned on instantaneously, into what was beyond any possible experience of mine, whether sober or intoxicated. The vision for the Apostle Paul was not produced a priori – it was nowhere to be found at any prior time in his mind or experience. When I believed Jesus’ transcendental assertion – I am the Bread of Life – it was far beyond my prior experiences or my logical inferences; there was no way to reason to such a conclusion, assertion or relation. Christ’s relationship to the world I inhabited, its creation, its purposes, its redemption, did not exist in my mind previously – until his declaration, his Word, announced it. At twenty-nine years of age, I finally got the news.
“Our own transcendental idealism, on the contrary, allows that the objects of our intuition may be real, just as they are intuited in space, and likewise all alterations in time, just as they are represented by inner sense.” (B520/A492).
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Visionary idealism cannot exist in a vacuum; the phrase requires ideas and ideals. The word ‘visionary’ implies a goal intangible today, but an ‘object of our intuition’ which is real and to be realized. Our better world, our millennium, will exist in space and time. I am postmillennial – that is, determined that this world can become closer to the Paradise of Christ. I am opposed to amillennialism (ho-hum, oh well, nothing ever changes) and premillennialism (everything has to go to hell in a handbasket first, the days are so evil we might as well hunker down in a foxhole). If we cannot yet see this better world, we borrow from Kant to start with the unyielding philosophical and theological determination that a better world may be seen. If one vision is limited, another’s will be better. Ontological assertions of possibility and potentiality in this real world of space and time have to be established. The Lord Jesus did not give us this intuition to deceive us. The last two chapters of Revelation are not presented to mock us. To show his servants; look, he is coming with the clouds; I heard behind me; I turned around to see; write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later. All are quotes from the first chapter of the book of Revelation.
Visionary Christian idealism runs into a different type of obstacle, known as Rapture theology. The difficulty with the doctrine of the Rapture is its close connection to what is known as premillennial, pre-tribulation eschatology; for example, see Can We Still Believe in the Rapture?, Hindson & Hitchcock, Harvest House, 2017. The discussion by Hindson and Hitchcock is serious. My vision may be in theoretical conflict, but not in practical conflict with their theology. The book identifies three positive effects of Pretrib Rapture Teaching (p.25-26): such teaching produces holy living; it produces an evangelistic church; and it encourages believers to develop a vision for world missions. The authors are candid in acknowledging that Reformed theology and eschatology are contrary to their views and I am thoroughly in the camp of Reformed-Lutheran (as understood by Luther, not the modern Lutheran/ELCA church) theology. Having said so, and asserting that we may develop and advance transcendental ideals (which is rather the point of dragging Immanuel Kant into the discussion at all), it would be hard to see any practical conflict in their three positive effects and my vision for a better Christian society. Are not the products of my mind under the influence of the Holy Spirit also a feature of the Rapture? If we act on such products of the mind, are we not advancing the Kingdom of Christ in a manner consistent with the word ‘rapture,’ broadly understood? Rhetorical questions, no doubt, which need no immediate answer if our goals on either side of the discussion are so thoroughly conjoined with Christ’s.
There is a conflict which exists between any set of ideals and the real world we live in. The world we live in is continuous; each set of conditions arose as a result of a previous set of conditions. Everything appears as a daily, mundane series of appearances. Transcendental, visionary Christian idealism intends to inject itself, assert itself from the outside of this continuum. Christ’s appearance to Saul on the road to Damascus was shocking, unexpected, outside the scope of his ordinary experience, inexplicable and indecipherable to Saul’s companions. One cannot summon these experiences; they are initiated from above. For some period of time, we accept them as if we were only passive, human sponges for spiritual events and intuitions (Kant’s word). Our helplessness is real, but is not intended to last indefinitely. Indeed, if we were entirely helpless to add to or subtract from such experiences, one might ask why I (or anyone) would bother to write at all. Intuitions lead to representations in the mind, and such lead to reasoned thought, plan and action.
Saul will become Paul. I daresay he spent much time in thought, contemplating a set of initial experiences with Christ that probably were concluded, at least as to their initiating and dramatic form, in less than a week. Later, he will begin his Letter to the Romans with the introductory explanation, Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God. He will go from there to explicate the doctrine of justification by faith, a process which captures the movement of time because faith operates over passages of time. If Paul had no power or agency with respect to what happened on the road to Damascus, that wasn’t the end of the discussion; Jesus had set him apart to grow in faith, to carry the spiritual authority of an apostle. Jesus’ reasons for doing so, choosing Paul and setting him apart, have emerged with enormous power over time – we are all fruits of Paul’s growth in faith – and continue with enormous power now.
Reaching Something New
That enormous power is triggered by our intelligence; by visions which are intelligible. Admittedly, everything we understand is in some way the result or consequence of such things as we understood before. Kant will come to help us here. He uses the word intelligible to mean something more than appropriating new conditions into previous conclusions. The French may say ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’ with some justification, but Kant will insist there is a different path. He footnotes:
*The understanding admits of no condition among appearances that should itself be empirically unconditioned. But if we conceive of an intelligible condition, that is to say, a condition not belonging as a member to a series of appearances, of something conditioned in appearance without in the least interrupting the series of empirical conditions, then such condition could be admitted as empirically unconditioned, without interfering with the empirically continuous regress. (B559/A531).
Kant’s assertion presented above is dense, but the point we want to reach is, basically, new. Kant’s assertion was that we can have no understanding (he uses the word in a limited way) of anything outside the empirical world we live in, where everything is empirically conditioned – conditioned meaning everything exists because something led to it; everything that exists leads to something else, another conditioned condition. I disagree. The Apostle Paul’s conversion is my first exhibit in proof. Paul could not understand this bolt out of the blue; it was beyond his empirical experience – it was not conditioned by anything prior and subject to no intellectual regress or analysis of causes and effects. Only when Jesus spoke, asked him a question, then was Paul’s mind engaged. Jesus’ question from heaven asking the reasons for Paul’s unjustified conduct stimulated Paul’s question in reply. Jesus’ answer to that identity question was central to Paul’s ability to integrate his experience – it is still central to human experience; central to our knowledge of who we are and how we got into this place, this world and time. Paul’s experience on the Damascus Road was not empirically conditioned; it exceeded his understanding, the justification that he carried around as a rational human being for the history, reasons and antecedents of his conduct and future intention and purpose. The persecutor’s analytic regress crashed into the Savior’s revelation. Who are you, Lord? I am Jesus.
Having noted this disagreement with Kant, Kant’s next sentence gets us where we want to go. Our visions are intelligible. Intelligible means that the our visions can be discontinuous with the world and its empirical series of conditions. When we envision a better world, a different world, we don’t have to be limited to a better world which must be connected piece by piece to the disappointing, frustrating, friction-filled, deceptive, violent, dangerous and confused world we live in right now. That doesn’t mean this world gets ‘blown up’ – what it means is that our visionary Christian idealism can exist simultaneously, without being connected in cause-and-effect fashion. We conceive of an intelligible condition – a seriously better world – that (rather like the Amish), simply exists separately. Separation can mean social separation; but it can also mean intellectual separation. We want to separate intellectually.
Visionary idealism isn’t about physical separation; it is about intelligible separation. As Christians we think differently – after thinking, we speak differently, we relate differently. We haven’t interrupted the series of empirical conditions – the world continues to bounce along as it always has. We haven’t ‘interfered with the empirically continuous regress’ (or progress, depending on how one wishes to analyze the chronological direction of events). We are intelligent idealists, who may receive by the grace of God an intelligible Christian vision. Rather than a program, what is needed is a language, a system of thought; we don’t want one or two retail visions of Christian ideals and idealism, what we want is a series of them coming in waves from different sources and different directions in wholesale volumes. Because we are alive in Christ, we want an avalanche of visions.
Whether in the Body or Out of the Body -Caught up to Paradise to hear Inexpressible Things
The passages concerning Paul’s visions and revelations are among the most mysterious in the Bible. The root concept he is dealing with is rapture, but this is rapture in an individual way, and he twice makes the point that it may be a spiritual experience without involving the movement of his body, or he may have been in the body when he was taken up to Paradise, the third heaven. By being ambiguous Paul is also inviting us to be transcendental. Paul discloses it because he is answering those who are challenging his ministry. The theological discussion is important but not critical to a vison for an idealistic community. What is important is that miraculous events exist in a certain context; if Paul didn’t talk about this experience for 14 years, the time came for him to disclose and discuss it. He had a ministry to the Corinthians and the spiritual credentials of Paul were important to his purpose, which included correcting their conduct and guiding their doctrine under circumstances where there was a challenge to his authority to do so.
Our purpose is visionary idealism. Idealism needs ideas which are both structure and tools. It is at this point that a discussion from Kant is helpful, because he provided both useful tools and useful limits to such an inquiry. As I’ve been invoking passages from Critique of Pure Reason throughout this discussion, I’ve been giving the page numbers of the ‘B version’ (1787) and ‘A version’ (1781) of Kant’s book. In part, that’s because I’ve been picking through the Critique rather like a shopper at a big-box store. At this point, I’m going to stop interrupting with specific page references. All the direct quotes as well as the indirect references to the Critique come from one 30-page passage, ponderously titled Transcendental Logic: Transcendental Dialectic. III. Solution of the Cosmological Ideas of Totality in the Derivation of Cosmic Events from Their Causes. Page numbers for this section are B561-593, A533-566 in the Critique. I use the Penguin Classic translation of the Critique, Tr. By Marcus Weigh, 2007, based on the translation by Max Muller. The page numbers of that translation are 463-483.
Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians was a letter of reconciliation. In his first letter to the Church at Corinth, he felt compelled to ‘bring down the hammer’ on conduct that was divisive in the Church, including flagrant sexual misconduct (sexual immorality of a kind which does not even occur among the pagans! – hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his Spirit saved!). The list of sharp exhortations for the Church at Corinth coming from Paul was comprehensive and relentless (One remains hungry, another gets drunk). There’s much more in First Corinthians than rebukes or exhortations, but Paul’s fierce upbraiding would occupy anyone’s attention who cared to remain in the Kingdom of God. After such a letter, Paul wanted to re-unite in love and affection with the Church and Second Corinthians was the result.
But not all the problems were caused by misconduct among the congregants. In the congregation at Corinth there were false teachers, ‘super-apostles’ who were extorting money from the congregation by taking charge to bully people, establishing themselves as authorities by throwing around their spurious spiritual resumes. Money and sex were problems, and what would we know about that? Paul’s conflict with them required a different message. As noted, directly or indirectly, Paul’s credentials were being challenged in comparison to the super-apostles. So we get Paul’s genuine credentials in chapters 11 and 12 of Second Corinthians. Chapter eleven recites his impeccable background as a Jewish Pharisee as well as his physical suffering under persecution. Chapter 12 invokes a mystery; a credential of a different sort which Paul presents under the rubric that he must go on boasting.
I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Paul refers to himself in the third person out of modesty; asserting one’s own spiritual credentials appeared to be bragging, which led directly to divisions in the Church, precisely one of the problems he identified in his first letter. The man is ‘in Christ.’ There were many mystery religions in the Roman Empire in the first century A.D. and no shortage of reported religious experiences. Being in Christ is both a touchstone of Christian orthodoxy and a reference to Jesus in his divinity. I am the vine, you are the branches is the kind of thing Jesus said which would baffle everyone. I can vote for a candidate, read a philosopher or follow a teacher, but it is only Christ whom I can ‘be in.’
Paul’s recitation is an event in real-time – fourteen years prior. He doesn’t identify the place, but given the next description (whether in the body or out of the body) that is understandable. “The causality of appearances depends on condition of time,” Kant wrote. Kant is going to contrast causality arising either from nature or from freedom. We want to pursue that type of freedom which Kant is referencing, but the freedom being presented by Paul has little to do with his freedom. God is acting freely, God is catching Paul up, God is present in the third heaven. Our freedom is the result of God’s free acts. The is the fundamental anchor of the Protestant Reformation and Luther’s theology – God acts in freedom, we receive and respond. Which is why Luther wrote a book called Bondage of the Will. Being ‘caught up’ anywhere doesn’t sound as if Paul thought he were exerting control over any part of this experience. Like Ezekiel experiencing his visions, or the disciples at the Transfiguration of Jesus, or Habakkuk asking his piercing questions of God and then climbing his tower to await his answers, this is the polar opposite of a self-initiating, self-help philosophy.
Having said whose freedom is driving the bus, Kant’s next comments are pertinent. Freedom in its cosmological meaning is the faculty of beginning a state spontaneously. Its causality does not depend on the laws of nature or on another empirical cause determined at some prior time in an endless chain of causes-and-effects. If God acted beyond any cause Paul could perceive or articulate, without any doubt Paul’s visions were not the result of the preceding state of affairs. We who have received the Holy Spirit should be paying attention here. Discontinuous conduct may be initiated by God; even our freedom, once received and internalized, may be a pure transcendent idea which derives nothing necessarily from experience. Reason, Kant argues, can begin to act of itself, without an antecedent cause. It sounds rather academic and abstract, just as Paul’s otherworldly visions are not something we can dial up and duplicate. But Kant believed that this was captured within the practical concept of freedom because that was founded on the transcendental concept of freedom. Practical freedom was the independence of our will from the coercion of the input and cause-and-effect of senses and sense data. In human beings, there is a faculty of self-determination. It starts from God, but we receive this by being ‘in Christ.’
Paul’s vision was not, at the time, a product of self-determination. Its usefulness will appear later. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know – God knows, Paul writes. Bodies are important to Paul. He writes at length, repeatedly, about conduct ‘within the body.’ The Apostle Paul is no gnostic, no promoter of the theory that bodies don’t matter. He begins his Letter to the Romans with a dissertation about the use of the body for purposes of sexuality which is at the core of much intractable conflict today. His denunciation of homosexual conduct is stark, unvarnished and unambiguous. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of the bodies with one another. Paul’s quick sketch of human anthropology in Romans starts with three bold lines: understanding (God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made); conscience (when the Gentiles who do not have the law, do by nature things requires by the law, since they show the requirements are written on their hearts, their consciences); and the body, understood with reference to sexuality, which invokes both the Old Testament as well as ordinary human biology (Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion). The mere reference to such an indignant recitation from Paul will be enough to cause me to be cancelled from the prevailing culture of this day. But Paul is adamant. The mind counts. Conscience counts. The body along with its appurtenances, including its sexual organs and their purposes, counts. Homosexual conduct is immoral and idolatrous.
Declaring what not to do is the work of the Law. The hope, the miraculous hope beyond any possibility of our empirical experience but within the scope of our faith, is the result of the ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul has more to say than just ‘thou shalt not.’ Even Psalm 119 in its length is about more than ‘thou shalt not’ and at the end, looks forward to a redemption initiated by God because we are prone to wandering all over creation in the absence of a rescuing hand. (I have strayed like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands). Paul talks about bodies specifically all through his letters to the Romans, and First and Second Corinthians; the three books form a triplet of instructions about the body. It is to none other than the Corinthians that Paul makes the recipient of his explanation about where we are going with this whole ‘bodies’ discussion, in chapter 15 of his first letter to them.
Someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” Paul has an answer – the body that is sown perishable is raised imperishable. The body is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness. It is raised in power. It is sown a natural body. It is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, got this point too when his powers of speech were returned to him – the people walking in darkness have seen a great light. The law of ‘thou shalt not’ is real and right, but it gives rise to an enormous promise. The law was given to Moses; grace and truth are from Jesus Christ our Lord. The ministry of Christ is intercession and reconciliation; mankind is more than just a depraved and raunchy desperado, but without Christ, depraved and raunchy impulses, amplified by the fear and presence of futility, grief and death, overwhelm our better impulses. When the main character in the movie Leaving Las Vegas, played by Nicolas Cage, goes shopping in a supermarket and fills his shopping cart to the brim with alcohol so he can drink himself to death, the problem isn’t that he is acting irrationally; the problem is that he is not.
This body which we all have is perishable – mine surely is – to be sown in dishonor (referencing death, burial and the repugnance we all feel looking on a corpse, no matter how artfully prepared to look ‘lifelike’ or ‘sleeping’). The body is, as I may testify truthfully, weak, coming unglued, leaking oil, falling apart. It will be changed dramatically and permanently. Paul says nothing of that in his recitation about his visions and revelations in the 12th chapter of 2nd Corinthians. What he does say is that the experience was beyond his power of prior perceptions (intuitions, to use Kant’s term); it was beyond the natural epistemology of which his mind was capable until this revelation occurred. Whether it was an experience in the body or out of the body – he did not know. That is fairly startling in its own right – why didn’t he know? It suggests the scope, the power and the unfamiliarity of his experience; it suggests the inability of his mind to produce appropriate sense data so that he could orient himself. It suggests that the experience, if it were capable of being entirely in the body or entirely out of the body, must have been spiritual as well as overwhelming in the deepest sense of the words. Generally, in the Bible, even when the most astonishing of visions, experiences or miracles are recorded, the person or persons involved know where they are. They may not believe or credit what they are seeing (some very poignant dialogues are recorded with those chosen by God who are initially quite skeptical of their initiating interactions); but if asked, they would identify accurately their locations and their status as occupying their own bodies. If Paul doesn’t know, then we don’t know either. Paul’s statement expresses the power of God to change altogether our perceptions, knowledge and orientation. Paul may have been out of his body, but he still heard and saw that which was in Paradise.
Kant explored the same type of problem from a different direction. Kant believed the causality of our will could freely produce, independently of natural causes, and even contrary to those natural causes, a series of events entirely of itself (that is, discontinuous from any natural cause-and-effect). The suggestion that conditions could arise which had no precedent in time created some logical problems, from which Kant did not shy away, although his discussion revolved around his ultimate tribunal for everything, his human reason. “What happens here is what happens generally in the conflict of reason venturing beyond the limits of possible experience, namely, that the problem is not physiological, but transcendental. The treatment and the solution belong entirely to transcendental philosophy.” Kant concluded that both nature and freedom may simultaneously exist in the world – there is a thoroughgoing connection of all events in the world of sense according to unchangeable natural laws, but intelligible causes are not determined with reference to causality, and so are outside the series of conditions, where ‘condition’ means one condition giving rise to another in an endless, unbreakable stream.
We approach the Holy city of God. We want to break an endless stream of conditions. These conditions never participate and never could participate in intelligible acts of freedom. Paul’s final phrase in this verse – God knows – breaks decisively with Kant, and Locke, and Hume, and rationalism, the Enlightenment, and scientific naturalism. There is a core, a source, a repository of truth, of knowledge, of epistemology which is not deceiving or deceptive, not limited by sense data, not prone to human reasoning on its best day or its worst – God knows. The philosopher Wittgenstein was incorrect in his last proposition in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; we may speak of these things, not because we start with them, but because of Christ’s revelation we end with them – and now we may speak. Paul’s assertion about the omniscience of God is often passed over here as he tells us of experiences beyond our own. I believed, therefore I spoke.
Someone else who made a passing reference to the omniscience of God, whose reference is often also passed over, is the Apostle Peter. At the end of the Gospel of John, John records that Peter decided to go on a fishing trip. Peter has just seen the Son of God crucified and knew him to be raised from the dead. One would think this was pretty important information; other people would probably like to know about such matters. I would be the last man to discourage anyone from a fishing trip, but if that man had news of such magnitude and importance to me, personally, I wish he would outline at least the basic details of what he had observed before he went out trying to scoop up sea bass. Peter was engaging in dereliction of duty and all the disciples were following his lead in this abdication from their responsibilities to tell someone – you know, it’s kind of important. As soon as Jesus appeared, Peter knew he had been abdicating a sacred duty. So Peter went trampling onto the beach, his feet wet from jumping into the surf, probably saturated in guilty feelings. The issue was still open of Peter having denied Jesus three times at the time of Jesus’ arrest as well.
And it is in this context, in which Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” that Peter, who is understandably hurt by the repetition of the question and its obvious point of challenge and rebuke, responds, “Lord, you know all things. You know that I love you.” The context of Peter’s interaction with Jesus is much different than the context of Paul’s visions and revelations, but the epistemology of omniscience is unchanged. God knows whether we are in our right minds, whether we are in our bodies or out of them, whether we love him or not. There is an absolute, immovable anchor to our experiences, our knowledge and our reasoning which results from this. Kant uses an entire palette of terms to describe our interior processing: appearances, cognitions, understanding, intuitions, faculties of thought, reason, experience, sensation, representations, knowledge, judgments, analysis, logic, dialectic, intelligible noumenon and phenomenon, synthesis, determination, concept, deduction, consciousness, the unity of apperception.
Paul asserts that all are grounded first in God. God knows. What God knows in Paul’s case is startling in that the most basic element of self-knowledge – am I in my body, or out of my body? may be beyond us, but God knows. We do not drift forever on a sea of uncertainty, doubt, confusion, panic, bewilderment, despair, resignation, delusion or conjecture. Deception is not our fate. God knows. He is our safe harbor. The caustic reply of Pontius Pilate, ‘What is truth?’ wasn’t intended to be the initiating statement of a philosophic inquiry. Pilate was worldly-wise and yet deluded about the nature of what was going to happen over the next fifty-some days. With all the wisdom of the world there wasn’t a single thing about to happen Pilate was going to understand. He thought the world was all about Roman power; his position in the Roman empire; his power to inflict death; and his willingness to inflict death to placate a noisy populace whose relative passivity it was his job to maintain. Crucified under Pontius Pilate – he didn’t see that coming. We are more than squirrels with high IQs; Pilate couldn’t be expected to understand Jesus’ spiritual nature and mission. But he certainly knew that Jesus was innocent of any charges meriting death; the injustice of declaring a death sentence didn’t bother Pilate, except to engage in some more posturing as he washed his hands – it was all theater, he simply didn’t care. The calculation of worldly power can be colossally, disgracefully blind. Jesus certainly understood the calculus of power. Jesus had purposes Pilate couldn’t see. As the Apostle Paul would tell us, commenting about something so startling it defeated even description – God knows. There is a bedrock to this, this life we lead, after all.
Ask an Odd Question
Simply asking the question am I in my body, or out of my body? tends to undercut the British empiricists, Hume and Locke, with whom Kant was explicitly seeking both to refute and conduct a dialogue. Asking the question tends to confirm Kant’s view, that substantial and necessary cognitive processing occurs before any sense impressions are gathered. Asking the question means that no matter how overwhelming the experience, the Apostle Paul knew who he was, was conscious of personal identity, carried with his self-understanding memory and identity. There is still an ‘I’ there to ask the question, even if only to record an uncertainty which didn’t dissolve into space altogether. Paul suggests there were two options and apparently, two only – in the body, or out of the body. If the Apostle Paul was out of his body, then he had a spiritual body, and that would lead us directly to his discussions in chapter 15 of First Corinthians noted above. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. One suspects that at least part of the driving point of Paul’s visions and revelations was indicated in his famous rebuke to death presented in his First Letter to the Corinthians: Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? Not a natural result or observation, but, in Christ, an intelligible one.
Then the Apostle Paul repeats his point. And I know that this man – whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows – was caught up into Paradise. Repetition can be a method of emphasis. Perhaps Paul repeated himself to simply emphasize the startling and otherworldly nature of his experience. He wants to connect emotionally to the Corinthians and he wants them to feel his experience too, the dazzling uncertainty of the most basic of human facts, now obscured as he was caught up into Paradise. But the passage is short and the repetition is noticeable. Why say it twice? The words suggest things that Paul knows (this man, meaning himself speaking modestly) was caught up into Paradise. Knowledge is powerful, knowledge is certain and reliable, but knowledge is limited. The Apostle Paul was probably not given over much to experiences of intoxication; one suspects from his autobiographical details that he lived a sober life from the time of his early youth. Part of his relationship with God, taught as a Hebrew of the Hebrews, as far as legalistic righteousness, faultless, was that the world stayed put. Like his experience on the Damascus Road, the world was not ‘staying put’ – it was moving around, and it moved around as a result of his relationship with Jesus.
Kant might have been sympathetic. “The human being, however, who knows all the rest of nature only through his senses, knows himself also through mere apperception, and this in action and inner determinations which he cannot regard as impressions of the senses.” Paul knew himself through ‘mere’ apperception (although why apperception should be ‘mere’ isn’t clear; it seems rather powerful in both our experience and Kant’s Critique). Human being are partly a phenomenon, something we sense ourselves and others to be, and partly intelligible, meaning having an existence and capabilities beyond the empirical world (I cannot bring myself to use Kant’s word ‘object’ to describe anything intelligible, much less a human being – maybe its connotation is less offensive and misleading in the original German). What is it that we know through ‘mere apperception?’ – surely ourselves.
But the Apostle Paul was in Paradise. His apperception, the interior sense of being which informs our structuring of experience and relations and surroundings, had to be expanded. If Paul was not even sure he was in his body, whatever he is perceiving, it is unlikely that it came to him through his five senses applied in the ordinary way we think of sense data (although the mind processes this sense data anyway), used to gather and report empirical facts. If we are using the term ‘five senses’ in that sense, then we must mean them capable of discerning that which is spiritual, or ephemeral, or intelligible, or moral, or theological. The five senses took on an expansive definition in Paul’s experience. The experience was reportable, not repeatable.
He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell. There is no expressing the inexpressible. The inexpressible nature of his experience seems to be exactly the point Paul wants to make. But he does not do this to induce the Corinthians to seek an inexpressible experience, as if he were a Zen Buddhist monk seeking to introduce acolytes into an inexpressible appreciation of a universe that, however paradoxical it may be, is rather empty. Paul seems to be doing this to make his point that he was not in the least inferior to the super-apostles, even though I am nothing. Paul poses one of the most poignant questions to appear in scripture to the Corinthians – If I love you more, will you love me less? It is abundantly clear that Paul values this love more than he values experiences. But Paul’s love is never disconnected from the body – and I will be grieved over many who have sinned earlier and have not repented of the impurity, sexual sin and debauchery in which they have indulged. Paul’s enormous love co-exists with the fact that he issues no ‘hall passes’ for misconduct in the body. It may get buried someday in weakness, but in the interim, how it is used matters. It is in his second letter to the Corinthians that Paul notes that we will all appear before Christ to give an account for our deeds done in the body. 2 Cor. 5:10.
Individual conduct, individual experience and the community
Kant wanted to illustrate the regulative principle of reason, and he used an example that fits rather neatly into Paul’s dissertation. Kant uses the example of someone who has told a malicious lie which causes confusion in society. (Sounds rather like the 18th century analogue of what is vehemently denounced these days as ‘fake news’ or ‘hate speech’ or ‘conspiracy theories.’) Then Kant suggested that the investigation of this conduct might disclose that the individual engaged in this bad act might have been the subject of wrong education, bad company, perhaps a natural viciousness, the inability to feel shame, given to frivolity and heedlessness. Nevertheless, notwithstanding all these prior causes and conditions, including his unhappy natural disposition, influencing circumstances, the conduct of his previous history, – the offender is blamed and the blame is founded on the law of reason. Kant asserted that reason is considered as a cause which, independent of every prior empirical condition which could have determined the behavior of the person differently; nevertheless, reason alone, standing completely independent as a cause, imputed the bad conduct, the malicious lie, to the person’s intelligible character. Kant issues no ‘hall passes’ here either. At the moment when he tells the lie, the guilt is entirely his; that is, we regard reason, in spite of all empirical conditions of the act, as completely free, and the act has to be imputed entirely to a default of reason.
Individual conduct, whether right or wrong, is an issue which connects to the idea of community. The community, the church or churches, is in the position of being capable of correcting, or remedying or controlling and redirecting individual wrongful conduct. What is missing from Kant’s discussion is the idea of a community responding to or controlling an individual’s wrongful conduct. The Corinthian Church’s response to wrongful sexual conduct is a concern at the heart of Paul’s letters to them. Whether we can escape or avoid one particular sin is a different question than whether we can permanently escape or avoid all sins. Martin Luther might tell us that, as individuals, we were in bondage to sin, and cannot free ourselves; standing alone, that did not convince Kant. But Luther was talking about ontological states, not specific acts, although such ontological states are reflected in specific acts. The problem with the sale of indulgences, the specific practice condemned in his 95 Theses nailed to the door of a church, was not simply a question of an individual or a few individuals engaged in bad acts. Luther drew attention to the practice of the sale of indulgences because he wanted to initiate or provoke a response from community, from the Catholic Church. Passive, or imputed righteousness, granted and experienced through faith in Christ, is a concept applied by an individual to himself and then to a community of faith – and the community responds to the individual’s act.
Paul’s communication of his experience 14 years previously, where he was caught up to Paradise, whether in the body or out of the body – is also a communication and gift to the community. In defending his ministry and his credentials, Paul communicates enormously to the Corinthians and by conferring his experiences to them, also confers himself. One of the distinctives of current ‘rapture theology’ is that it must happen to everyone in Christ on a certain schedule, at a certain time or in a certain sequence, at one identifiable, simultaneous time. But Paul had a rapture experience as an individual – and then, as an individual, narrating his experience to a group, conferred it on them and so confers it on us. He leaves open the possibility that one or more Corinthians could be raptured then also, as he leaves open the possibility that one or more individuals could be raptured now. The sense of Paul’s famous dissertation on love, found in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians, is that spiritual experiences in the absence of love are empty. Anyone interested in raw, otherworldly experiences for their own sake can buy them from a drug dealer at whatever the going price is. Rapture means more than getting high, even if the phrase is used in its spiritual sense – it means that Paul helped form the community of the church, was himself part of the community of church, had gifts for the community to exchange with the community – which had gifts for him. (See Rom. 1:11 – some spiritual gift to make you strong that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith).
The Apostle Paul then goes on to reference that which man is not permitted to tell. That which man is not permitted to tell, God may tell, and such appears to be the opening passage of the Book of Revelation – The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. But a reading of the Book of Revelation would suggest that it extends in different direction that Paul’s inexpressible things, things a man is not permitted to tell. What Paul does tell us is that it is the third heaven, and that it is Paradise. Those are destinations at which we would like to arrive. Paul’s reference to ‘that which man is not permitted to tell’ is suggestive of the problem of unfamiliar driver attempting to motor from Central Park in New York City to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. One way to do that would be to give our unfamiliar driver a highly detailed map; with each highway, each turn, described carefully. Perhaps our driver could be given a precise schedule indicating how long each segment of the trip should take. We could have a chart and a sequence of events. Another way to assist our unfamiliar driver would be simply to say – ‘Get in, start driving. I’ll be with you and I’ll tell where to turn and where to go. You don’t need any map because I’m sitting here in the navigator’s seat right next to you. It’ll be okay.’ Is it heaven to have a detailed map and a chart and a sequence? Or is it paradise to have an experienced guide, an advisor who is with you for whole trip, sitting in the passenger seat next to you?
If any set of words can be described as intelligible, not empirical, then words like third heaven and Paradise must qualify. We don’t know what cannot be expressed; we have no empirical experience to draw from. What we can do though is to treat freedom as a transcendental idea and allow our reason, informed by faith, enlightened by revelation, to be visionary – to begin a series of conditions that never existed previously, to invoke freedom as a causality which leads not to one program or ideal, but to a never-ending series of programs or ideals, like cascades of pure, clear water flowing down a mountain stream.
Things that man is not permitted to tell brings us to a point which is oddly like and oddly unlike anything Kant would express. Permission is the exercise of legitimate and recognized authority. Kant, even in recognizing a necessary Being or a First Cause, would never recognize any superior being assigning merit or blame or giving permissions to his free conscience acting in accord with the universal moral principles he perceived. The act of Abraham in bringing Isaac to a mountain for sacrifice of the child, merely because a divine being said so, would be completely impossible and repugnant to Kant. In that sense, no one ‘tells Kant what to do.’ The God who does tell us ‘what to do’ is exactly the God the Apostle Paul worships and has always worshipped, even if in an unknowing and blind fashion (who are you, Lord?).
But Kant would draw a firm line as to what reason may know and speak of. That is the point of his entire book – the First Edition of his Critique begins “Our reason has the peculiar fate that . . . it is always troubled by questions which it cannot ignore . . . and which it cannot answer because they transcend the powers of human reason.’ In acknowledging the limits of reason, or the plain directive of God, both Paul and Kant would say – here is a line which may not be crossed. Nor will I attempt to cross it here. Visions may flow down the hills for us, authored and disclosed by the imagination under the power of the Holy Spirit, gloriously free of the prior constraints of history or imposed cultural norms. But they (and we) will respect that which is beyond disclosure. As Job put it, in response to God’s lengthy response to his complaints of injustice and indifference from God: Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. I repent in dust and ashes.
The Apostle Paul is not yet done though and he brings together the two themes which have been central to the problems of the Corinthian church. To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. An altogether astonishing statement. Was the Apostle Paul in danger of becoming conceited? Perhaps – he did believe he had superior religious knowledge which ought to be conveyed to others. He felt that way when he was on the Damascus Road going about the business of persecuting Christians because he believed they had the wrong views. Paul felt that way when he wrote letters to the Church at Corinth, reciting his credentials and invoking his authority, at Rome, at Ephesus, at Galatia, and so on. At one point a high official exclaimed, on hearing Paul’s defense of his beliefs, Your great learning is driving you insane! Paul of course had the perfect reply: I am not insane, most excellent Festus. What I am saying is true and reasonable. Not without some irony do I note that Paul’s defense hinged on the very word which Kant has told us has stringent limitations – reason. Is the Gospel reasonable? Are miraculous visions reasonable? If the existence of God is reasonable, is our existence also reasonable? At some point, reason collides with things which, like Job, we do not understand. Job saw things ‘too wonderful;’ Paul saw things ‘surpassingly great.’ Reason may collide with vision – and if we are to be visionaries, vision needs to win.
The thorn in the flesh cannot be missed. We may not know what the thorn is, but we surely know where the thorn is because we have that same flesh. Problems and issues with that flesh have been introduced by Paul from the beginning of his Letter to the Romans and they cut through every part of his letters to the Corinthians. Paul has one too – join the club. The Lord Jesus, for reasons which may be easier for us to understand than for Paul, responded succinctly to three distinct and heartfelt prayers from Paul to remove this thorn. My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness. Understandably, Paul would like to have the thorn removed, to be that much closer to operating in his spiritual body, the body that might be suitable (or at least closer) to that body which is to be clothed in immortality.
If Paul’s prayers had been answered, if the thorn in the flesh were taken away, Paul may well have thought, with some justification, that he was no longer ‘one of us.’ I labor, we labor, with thorns in the flesh, with our scars, with illnesses, weaknesses, faults and flaws and fears – and sins, which include our own and the sins of others. No doubt we would all like a hall pass out of our situation, at least in part. When Jesus explained to the Apostle Paul why he was going to continue living in the same physical, empirical world we do, first measuring almost everything in our daily lives with reference to the sense data we receive, Jesus was explaining to us too. Cosmological ideas co-exist in the world of the senses, sending data to our weak, vulnerable and mortal bodies.
The revelations made to Paul were surpassingly great. We cannot approach Paul’s surpassingly great revelations – although anytime someone tells death to go packing as Paul did in 1st Corinthians, I’m pretty happy about that. I will gladly assign to Paul adjectives like surpassingly great. Surpassingly great could incorporate the whole series of visions presented by the Apostle John in Revelation. Paul seems to allude to such in his letter Second Thessalonians – that day will not come until the man of sin is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. Paul’s visions might have overlapped with the words in the letter to the Hebrews (which I believe was authored by a Levitical priest close to Paul and part of his circle, familiar with temple rituals from personal experience, but not Paul himself.) You have come to Mount Zion, to thousands and thousands of angels in joyful assembly. If the words are undefined, they are also unlimited. If we cannot have directly Paul’s visions which were surpassingly great, we also are among the baptized, the faithful, the redeemed children of God; and we too may receive, even be captured by, develop and entertain visions which are surpassingly great.
Kant concluded discussion on the Cosmological Idea. “For in this case, an intelligible cause only means the transcendental, and, to us, unknown ground of the possibility of the sensible series in general; and the existence of this ground, as independent of all conditions.” His language may be awkward, at least as translated into English, but his point is not. Intelligible causes are possible to us. They may be unknown, but they are transcendental. They are possible. They are independent of current conditions. We are not enslaved to the empirical reality which confronts us – my senses are not lying, but they do not contain or limit all that my mind is capable of receiving and grasping. The word revelation means exactly that – something not previously known, something revealed. The culture I live in does not contain or limit all that my mind is capable of imagining. The body counts. To the extent that I live in a culture that is obsessed with self-indulgence in the name of self-actualization, especially with sexuality and everything about sex that revolves around organs of the body, I am called and entitled to reject that and head in another direction. If I am rather inept and feeble in my efforts, well, I delight in weaknesses. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
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John. The disciple John, a brother and companion in the suffering and the kingdom, now an old man imprisoned on the island Patmos, had a revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.
On the Lord’s Day I was in the Spirit, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet. . . .
I turned around to see about the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a Son of Man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One. I was dead, and behold I am alive – for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and hell.
Revelation 1:10-18.
The Apostle John had other visions, many visions.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. . .
Then the angel showed me the River of the water of life, as clear as a crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the Tree of Life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Discussion. John begins recording his visions by telling us it was the Lord’s Day. He places his vision in time, but not sequential time, rather, spiritual, theological time. The Lord’s Day, the first day of the week, resurrection day, had replaced the Sabbath Day, the day of rest. (The Lord’s Day is the Lord’s creation – the central fundamental bedrock under which all visions rest is the First Commandment, which underpins the entire Book of Revelation – I am the Lord thy God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Thou shalt have no other gods beside me.) The first reference to time occurs in the first verse of Revelation – to show his servants what must soon take place. There has been discussion over that use of the word “soon;” I am an opponent of the theological doctrine of preterism, for reasons which will appear throughout this discussion. The revelation granted John has application to the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, regardless of when one dates the book. But to attempt to limit the book to that application would be as if one limited the use of arithmetic to balancing one’s checkbook.
Soon – the time is near – the Lord’s Day – the firstborn from the dead – him who was and is and is to come, the Almighty. Such words and concepts dominate the opening passages of Revelation. If discussions about the body cut through much of the Apostle Paul’s writing, discussions about time (and sequence) cut through John’s Revelation. One cannot read Paul’s letters at length without asking the rhetorical question – what should I do with my body? And one cannot read John at length without asking – what will happen next? John wants to tell us what will happen next – but he will make us think about time in a different way than we normally do to understand his answer, which he has as a revelation of Jesus Christ. The preterists are correct in one point – physical acts of ritual sacrifice in a physical temple in Jerusalem by a hereditary priesthood have been eclipsed before we even begin reading in the Book of Revelation. We start afresh – we begin on the Lord’s Day.
What happens next is that we are cleansed. Like children being prepared for a big day at school, a big event in the auditorium, upon rising from our slumbers, in the midst of our excitement and anticipation, as our parents select our clothes for this big day, we are cleansed. The cleansing by our Lord Jesus Christ, out of his blood is foundational to our questions about time and the Lord’s answer. What is unclean or idolatrous meets a brick wall. Only what is cleansed goes forward. Death is static – the succession of impressions and cognitions comes to an end; gets parked in a dead end, like the movie Groundhog Day. A cleansed life is dynamic. The powers-that-be in the secular media may call me names, but it is the powers-that-be which are crashing and burning; Christ calls us up higher and by doing so, calls us to carry on.
Visionary ideals have tended to assume a static human nature and a static social and political context. The picture painted of the current situation by these prior visionary ideals is like an oil painting hanging in a museum; the characters, although depicted realistically or even brilliantly, never move. (Marxism itself, as contemplated by Karl Marx is a good example – on its best day it is hopelessly mired in the past). The aspirational picture the visionary paints is idealized, but not mentally categorized as dynamic; it may be utopia, but it is frozen in place. Cleansing is the continuing work and ministry of our Living Savior Jesus, who ascended to heaven for exactly that reason. We are changing because Christ is changing us. Our world is changing because Christ is Lord and he is changing it by cleansing it – all authority is vested in him, the fundamental position of the eschatology of postmillennialism. The insistent secular-cynical argument (which hovers in the background of idealism like a ghost in the attic and winds up being the argument of the angel of death) is that we are unbreakably shackled to our sense data, incarcerated in our bodies with their mortal natures. We may strive, but we are chained to our flawed characters, surroundings and divisive social and political systems – all we get to do is rattle the chains. The fundamental position of Jesus is that he, the Living God, is the Bread of Life – which is why this is the Lord’s Day and why John recites that timing phrase to set in motion his series of revelatory visions.
John was in the Spirit. John did not receive the Spirit by observing the Law, nor will we, but by believing what he heard and saw. John’s break with the legalistic observations of Old Testament law and practice is complete. Whether John wrote those words before, during or after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D., his point is the same. God has sent the Spirit of the Son into our hearts; I do not mean to characterize our current political or social laws and customs as ‘miserable principles’ – that would be unfair and would fail to recognize that Jesus has been at work for 2,000 years. Our society really is better than the societies which have preceded ours and offers benefits that really matter. Some examples are the printing press (now turned digital), antibiotics for children, my ingenious cardiac pacemaker, and the legal protections and powers I enjoy because of the Constitution I live under. Having said that, we move the ball forward by faith. We will eagerly await through the Spirit, and then develop as it arises, the righteousness for which we hope.
Paul’s expression from Galatians, if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law, has occasioned discussions and disagreements – as Peter noted, Paul’s letters contained some things ‘hard to understand.’ Embracing a dynamic, Christian vision for the future, which incorporates a series of ideals cascading out to us, means that we allow at least some aspect of our present circumstances to take on the characterization that they are weak and miserable principles. We are born by the power of the Spirit, and John was in this Spirit when he heard a loud voice like thunder, telling him to write on a scroll what he saw. It was to be addressed to a set of seven churches which constituted a symbol – the whole set of churches, yesterday, today, tomorrow, pictured with seven golden lampstands. Basic moral principles are not optional – they are essential to how we treat each other. Legalistic formulations may change to address changing circumstances.
I would like to apply some discussion from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to John’s spiritual vision of Jesus which follows in Revelation – the Son of Man. John’s powerful vision overwhelms; in its scope its blazing fire connects to Isaiah’s vision in the Temple, Daniel’s vision, the Transfiguration, and Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus. In his humanity Jesus was humble, rode on a donkey, became tired and slept in a boat. In his spiritual nature, we see the Son of God undimmed, and perhaps have some sense of why demons fled from him, whose face was shining like the sun in all its brilliance. In appreciating this vision, we tend not to think about the metaphysical grounds which John was laying down at the beginning of his visions. John’s visions are so graphic, by turns dazzling and gargantuan, that the little cobblestones of philosophy which are being laid at the same time are missed.
Kant, discussing reason, asserted that reason needed a foundation for the determination of its concepts, by which he meant escaping from a series of conditions each created by a previous condition, an endless chain of cause-and-effect. Kant’s picture is of an indeterminate wheel which never stopped spinning because there was never an unconditioned beginning anywhere. Kant wanted to complete the series of conditions and trace it to its ground. (This discussion tracks pages B612-619/A584-591 of the Critique). Every human being wants to lay at the foundation of his experience something which really exists. Kant argued that unless that foundation was absolutely necessary, then the foundation was without any support and sank into empty space. The ‘something’ which was the foundation had to exist by necessity. “For the contingent exists only under the condition of something else as its cause, and from this the same conclusion leads us on until we reach a cause that is not contingent and that is there unconditionally necessary. This is the argument on which reason founds its advance towards the original being.” If it’s contingent, it can’t be the foundation. One has to find the necessary to exit the spinning wheel of contingency. Kant’s observation is consistent with Paul’s in Romans 1:20 (God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.)
John has presented to us the Original Being – Jesus, divinity incarnate. Note that, as at the Transfiguration, Jesus will place his hand on John and tell him not to be afraid in this introduction to Revelation (Rev. 1:17). Apart from the other problems our physical bodies and personal identities have, visions of such nature are inherently terrifying – like taking a tropical fish out of its aquarium and holding it in one’s hand. Kant cannot grasp in his otherwise admirable philosophic inquiries that the Original, Necessary Being may reach down and touch us, to tell us not to be afraid. Kant saw that reason was compelled along this path, for “that something absolutely necessary must exist is certain, after the first inference. Reason takes the one being that remains for the absolutely necessary being, whether or not its necessity can be comprehended.”
Jesus said in John’s vision I am the First and the Last, I am the Living One. Kant expressed his conclusions in reason as leading to an inference of the necessary being who is at no point and in no respect defective, but is everywhere sufficient as a condition and is most suited for absolute necessity. Kant found that to be the natural course of human reason, albeit unproved and unprovable. By implication, Kant’s observation must move us outside of time and sequencing; otherwise, we are back on the conditional spinning wheel. Jesus expresses his absolute necessity, his unconditioned status, his ontological status outside time or sequencing, by asserting I am the First and the Last, I am the Living One. The philosophical inference and the apostle’s revelation dovetail. We accept an experience which may be instantaneous, composed of complex contents, spiritually illuminating, content which is beyond sense data or reason. If you have read this far, the invitation is extended to you also, by the one who is the First and the Last, the Living One.
Reason Diverted from its Natural Course to that which is Independent of All Condition
Consider John’s otherworldly and intimidating miraculous vision together with Kant’s ‘natural course of human reason.’ We intend to combine wildly disparate elements – a massive fireworks display that presents art – King Lear and Picasso’s Guernica painting in exploding fireballs in the sky, joined with a game of tic-tac-toe we play on our knee with a child. Normally one experiences them separately; we have separate categories in our minds for each – appreciation for great art, and apprehension of logic games like tic-tac-toe. If we want a vision for Christian churches, for human society, then we are going to seek a “concept of that which is independent of all condition.” ((B615/A587). This concept, the vision, may or may not begin as words, but has to leap out of its bondage to present circumstances. Our vision is complex, multi-layered, remembers the past, understands the present and then resolutely goes someplace different. Our future place is ‘unconditioned’ – we shed externals. Jesus instructed John in his vision – Write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later. After our experience we reflect something intentional – which at some point we will write, starts with words reflecting what we have seen, experienced or intuited – and then there will be change, to guide how we relate to each other as we embark on a pilgrimage, a road trip.
Kant, proponent of human reason, made an argument here which demonstrated the un-crossable gap between reason unaided by revelation, and faith inspired by revelation. He acknowledged that the argument for a supreme, necessary being possessed a ‘certain cogency.’ If we have to come to a decision about such a being, then we have to place this being at the original center of unconditioned necessity. If Kant were forced to vote for the absolute unity of complete reality as the original source of all possibility, then Kant would surrender – o, well, I guess God wins. Kant’s own reasoning leads him back to God, but he evades the power of his own argument. Perhaps with good reason; accepting the divinity of Christ is at its core not a reasoned event, because reason can never comprehend the totality of divinity. God is not only bigger than the largest angel; God is qualitatively different from even the largest angel. The human mind can comprehend great distances but ultimately grasping the infinite is a matter of faith.
But wait! Kant says, looking to escape his own logic – maybe we are not yet forced to vote, not compelled to decide! Maybe we can continue waiting, our reason idling like an engine running but not yet engaged in drive, until at some later date we may employ reason to judge such matters – based only on what we know (by ‘know’ Kant means made known to us through a priori reason joined to empirical reality for a synthesis). Perhaps what Kant described as an inference in favor of God (how else do you explain things-in-being?) doesn’t have to be accepted by philosophers committed to their own reason. Kant surveyed the field – “On the contrary, it will be open to us to consider all the other limited beings as equally unconditionally necessary.” (B617/A589). Perhaps what he meant were angels, but it is noteworthy that to avoid conclusions of monotheism and first-and-necessary-cause-creation, Kant was willing to try his imagination on anything. Perhaps other limited yet unconditionally necessary beings, like angels (he doesn’t specify their spiritual allegiances) can help Kant to avoid his own conclusions, his inferences. One cannot help but be reminded of the Apostle John, being twice reminded in the Book of Revelation not to worship angels (Rev. 19:10, 22:9) and the poet Rilke, whose Duino Elegies are so intertwined with angelic beings (Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?). Is Kant being thorough or evasive? How can any being be limited and yet unconditionally necessary? Where would the limitations come from? Who would set them?
This is one of the points where Kant’s Critique sits in such opposition to Luther’s Bondage of the Will. That discussion is beyond the scope of this writing, except to note that what Kant resisted, Luther embraced – the sovereignty of God, beyond any proof or human judgment or experience. The hardening of the Pharoah’s heart, the election of Jacob over Esau, the election presented to the Church at Ephesus, are biblical assertions Luther presented, reading from the Apostle Paul’s letters, which Kant would not accept. Not only God and Christ, not only heaven, not only our spiritual bodies to come, but divine decree, spiritual judgment, atonement, purification, exoneration, death and hell are beyond our present experience and our will. We may suppose or assume or hope our wills to be free, perhaps constrained in ways we cannot understand, but there can be no proof of a free will. A priori reasoning won’t help; empirical data won’t help. Kant was willing to consider that God was, by at least inference, a first, necessary, unconditioned and perfect being, but Kant would never accept that this perfect being predestined Kant’s free and unconstrained will. We as believers are not helpless altogether here, but our help is not of ourselves – we have an elder brother, Jesus, our great High Priest and friend. Jesus is one of us – born of a woman, born under the law, a carpenter by trade, subject to pain and suffering, subject to misunderstanding, jealousy, betrayal, false accusation, punishment and death. Challenged as to his identity after his resurrection, he displays his scars; and yet, scars freely accepted. No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
Supreme Causality, the Natural Bent of Common Understanding
The Book of Revelation is forceful in its assertion – no angel, but Christ only holds the keys of death and hell. Kant was resigned to having some theological conclusions, such as supreme causality, more or less forced on him. Kant saw causation as a relentless taskmaster. “We see things alter, arise and perish; and they, or at least their state, must therefore have a cause. Of every cause, however, which is given in experience, the same question must be asked.” Kant wrote, then would go on to discuss “supreme causality.” After all, it is the “natural bent of the common understanding.” Determinate experience is the ground upon which Kant wished to reside and remain in order to carry out his thought experiments; he was rather like a tropical fish, swimming in an aquarium, which will not leave its aquarium but nevertheless would like to construct a series of thought experiments to measure the world outside its glass walls. Kant struggled to avoid the implications of causation because he did not wish to surrender his reason to revelation or faith. Reason is essential, but the ‘something more’ is also ‘something first’ – that first revelation, God’s announcement of Himself at the burning bush, Jesus’ announcement of himself at the temple, reading Isaiah – which comes to us by faith, gifted from God, which we willingly accept.
Determinate experience is not the measure; Kant disregarded his own tools. He began by telling us about a transcendental a priori reality which made any and every experience possible and which structured all experience prior to any determinations. Transcendental reality cannot be broken into pieces, to explain and justify categories, cognitions and understanding prior to our acquisition of empirical data and allowing it to be intellectually processed as experience in a unitary human identity; but then abandoned as inconvenient once it leads to necessary theological conclusions. Jesus provided the Apostle John with a transcendental vision; John is providing the necessary second half of the transcendental understanding. Transcendental means both that which we rely upon to process any data and that which transcends the limits of empirical experience. There aren’t two (or three) ‘transcendental realities’ – there is only one. When it came time to accept transcendental experiences and a transcendental communication from Christ, which should have been the natural consequence of his own thought, Kant drifted off. Left with inferences he would not follow to conclusions, Kant fell into rueful daydreams of proof-by-human-reason-now-appropriately-limited (to paraphrase Shakespeare’s unpleasant character Iago, admirable evasions) – a critique of pure reason yet still a bubble which could only survive, and even then only for a short time, in Kant’s study in Konigsberg, Germany in the late 18th century.
Transcendental visions are possible, even necessary, not because any philosopher says so, but because Christ says and shows so by giving them. The set of visions we find in the book of Revelation started fresh, not from a causal relationship with anything in John’s empirical experience (although they had previews in the Old Testament prophetic writings). John related that it was the Lord’s Day and he was in the Spirit. For us to start we are required to meet simple criteria: to hear a voice sounding in our ear so loud, it sounds like a trumpet. The trumpet announces the being and existence of the One who is the Supreme Causality, who himself is sufficient for every possible effect and whose single characteristic is all-encompassing perfection. (See B619/A591). Christ, himself the highest cause, is absolutely necessary. We worship Jesus ascending to that highest cause, his Father. I blend Kant’s discussion and the Ascension of Jesus. They blend so well one would think Kant wanted to be a theologian of the church. It is also a demonstration that while resisting the Protestant Reformation, Kant did not abandon it. Kant’s, asserting his own free will, conscience and moral principles, made extended arguments against the thought of Luther and the Reformation; the arguments were themselves demonstrations of the mysterious power of such ideas to capture the deepest intellectual issues possible to man. The thoughtful work of the Reformation continued then and continues now because the visionary experience engages in a type of dialectical conflict with reason, once reason begins searching for God or a first, unconditioned state.
If we fear God we are less concerned to seek proofs for his existence. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace and his voice like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. (Rev. 1:14-17). We need to pause here. This is the first chapter of Revelation. The dialectical discussion begins here, outside of sense data and works us toward a different relationship with the world. This is more than the ‘idea of a highest being.’
Intellectualizing these words is a place to start, but the movement of faith and of daily experience with Christ leads us on a more serious and dynamic itinerary. Kant asserted that the idea of a highest being was merely an idea. If reality were limited to Kant’s study in Konigsberg, there might have been some merit to that proposition. Any one individual’s experience is limited; in Kant’s case, because of the nature of his lifestyle choices as well as the limitations life itself imposes on any one individual, Kant’s experience was limited and narrow. Kant went looking for the possibility of synthetic knowledge only in his own mind and own experience, yet his personal experience was hardly a comprehensive guide. Kant was correct in criticizing the idea of a proof of God’s existence merely by extrapolating from personal intellectual concepts; and his analogy was pointed – one cannot become richer by thinking oneself richer and then penciling in a few zero’s to the balance shown on a monthly checking account statement. Proof of the divine does not work that way any more than a few penciled zero’s do after a checkbook statement balance.
The argument the Apostle John is making is not based on extrapolation from anyone’s experience; John’s revelation intentionally and necessarily partakes of a different intellectual context. Special revelation also means we accept the witness of others under circumstances which give credence to their reliability. We accept the Book of Revelation because it comes to us packaged with the Gospel of John, John’s letters, the Acts of the Apostles, Peter’s adventures, failures, sermon on Pentecost in Jerusalem, his reinstatement and ministry, and the Gospel of Luke, Paul’s letters and speech to the Athenians, the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Mark, the Book of Hebrews and the letters of Jude and James, as well as the Old Testament witnesses of Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Ezekiel and many other writers and prophets. Christianity is not packaged into the study of one philosopher in one place and one time only. Christianity is a historical presentation but much more – a presentation of how things exist, by whom they were made, what end do we have as human beings. A significant element of the Christian presentation is not simply our successes or the conclusions to our reasoning, or investigation, or a recitation of logical arguments, but our failures, our fears, our anxieties, personal histories which recapitulate generations of frustration and defeat, our injuries and our griefs, our nameless dread – all those elements that squirrels, even those with high IQs, do not experience. John Bunyan, the author of Pilgrim’s Progress, began his book with a desperate character asking a desperate question – what must I do to be saved? Existential anxiety is not a subordinate motivation to seek out Christ, it is a paramount one.
Does God speak? It is a central question. When, in John’s vision, Jesus said, I am the Living One, he referred us back to Moses’ encounter with God in the desert, recorded in Exodus –
and if they ask me what is his name, what should I tell them?
I am who I am.
This is what you are to say to the Israelites.
I AM has sent me to you.
_______________
We should pause over that ‘I AM’ – and only after some time, move forward. Christian idealism has a foundation. A new human society frees itself from empirical surroundings on the strength of ‘I AM.’ Our idealism requires intellectual effort and intellectual output; it is not a force in nature. A transcendental reality underlies nature, a reality revealed so that we may form ideas. A community that trusts one another, that is capable of prayer for healing, that is capable of sharing, that exists within the churches and spills out to the world (rather than the world spilling into the church), begins a journey as a set of ideas.
Reading the Bible, relating the concepts we find there to one’s personal experience with God and then forming ideas about the future is our continuing task. There’s no point in being shy about it and no reason to be timid. Do not be afraid, said Jesus. His hand is on us. Ideas make a difference. No empirical barrier will arrest an idea found under the heading – Go! Go into the City! What you have seen, what you have heard, what is now and what will take place later – say it! Put it into practice! The ideas we have in obedience to Christ and in relation to his Word are exactly what will take place later. It is under the authority of Christ by which I may declare that those ideas which I formulate, may be made real.
Kant is misguided on this point – the ideal of the highest being is not limited to being a regulative principle of reason. Human reason does have a basis to seek satisfaction of its need to discover a rule of unity. A rule of unity is systematic and necessary according to universal laws for the explanation of the world. (B647/A619). But the rule of unity starts with the declaration ‘I AM.’ That declaration is not provable and it’s not truly even reasonable, in the sense of being capable of being manipulated within the context of human reason – but God’s declaration ‘I AM’ is a bedrock beyond human reason.
If that were not so, idealism would amount to nothing more than soap bubbles. As Christians we assert the existence of God and Christ whom the Father sent, presented in the Book of Revelation, unlimited by any empirical constraints. Christ directs us not be afraid. We will be given a broad explanation what will take place later. The details are our work assignment. Any plan of human improvement starts when we believe in Christ we can do it. Ideas and idealism may come to us on the wings of a butterfly, but they are mounted on the treads of something more than a tank – a promise from the one, holy, irreplaceable, sovereign God.
Kant’s religious thought first disavowed anything provably real about our ideas of God – and then rhapsodized eloquently along religious lines. Kant wrote that this present world presented to us an immeasurable stage of variety, order, purposiveness and beauty – such that even with the little knowledge which our poor understanding has gathered, our judgment of the whole is lost in speechless but all the more eloquent amazement. (B650/A622)! Further Kant declared, “Roused from every inquisitive indecision as if from a dream, by one glance at the wonders of nature and the majesty of the cosmos, reason soars from height to height until it reaches the highest, from the condition to conditions until it reaches the supreme and unconditioned author of all.” (B652/A624). Religious mystic, take note. But where Kant wanted to go with reason and the limits he perceived on reason differed from what John wrote. John, having visions from God through Jesus Christ, through an angel, had explicit instructions to give the seven churches. The receiving antennae of God’s signal is not human reason. Especially not human reason lodged in the mind of one or a few individuals, but lodged in the collective entirety of the churches, to whom the Spirit speaks.
The main and most important work of the Reformation is ahead. We, the churches, need ideas and we need to believe that our ideas matter. Ideas are real, ideas last – today’s ideas will be tomorrow’s structures. Kant’s Unconditioned Author of All does not sit idle in heaven. There is a great deal of deism in Kant – his postulations implied that God, if he existed at all, wound up the world like an alarm clock; and then, apart from serving as the figurehead of conceptual metaphysical unity, went away so that human reason could take over the field. It would be massive understatement to say that this is not the Biblical message, not the message of our Lord Jesus Christ. There are no resurrections in deism. When John sent messages to each of the seven churches, he did so because the messages mattered and the ideas which resulted then and today from the messages matter.
A Paragraph of Bad Adjectives
The churches’ repentance is going to enable them to withstand persecution; but the point of withstanding persecution is to arrive at and achieve what is presented in words and ideas – a better world, a holy city, a structure of human interaction which is something better. This must be something more than the excuses, friction, conflict, misunderstanding, accusation, disingenuous camouflage, deflection, puffing, sloganeering, distortion, evasion, bellowing, slander, perversion, grotesque tragedy, self-dealing, corruption, greed, ingratitude, intoxication, irresponsibility, barefaced denial of obvious reality and the rest of the disgraceful mess to which we are currently subject. What a parade of horribles – what else could the ultimate end of such a series of adjectives be, but intellectual distress, multiform hatreds, sporadic outbreaks of violence, rebukes and recriminations flying in every direction, cultural demise, political collapse into the most obvious types of snake-oil hucksterism, and spiritual death? Something beautiful was begun, but the end of it is not beautiful at all. Deceit, whether suspected or actual, hovering fears and endemic mistrust are the conclusive characteristics of such a society. In this Babylonian casino, the Angel of Death sweeps up every gambler’s chips at the end of the night.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The linchpin of visionary Christian idealism is here expressed. This is the ground of postmillennialism, the assertion that Christ, being Lord, with all authority vested in him, makes the world new and better, which includes us. Before casting the old world aside on the strength of a series of indictments, however accurate they may be, Kant is going to tell us, in his Protestant-but-not-Protestant, poetically-reverent-yet-deistic sort of way, what is genuinely good about the world we currently inhabit. Kant characterized this as the ‘physico-theological proof’ but that awkward name cannot hide the intelligence he applied to his observations. I provide or restate Kant’s observations (B654/A626) as follows.
1. Everywhere in the world there are clear indications of an arrangement carried out with great wisdom according to a determinate purpose and these indications form a unified whole.
2. This purposive arrangement is foreign to the things themselves and adheres to them only contingently, but what is meant is the opposite of the usual meaning of contingent; what Kant meant is that things could not spontaneously cooperate together toward a determinate final purpose unless they had been selected and designed according to a rational principle based on an underlying idea.
3. There must exist a sublime or wise cause for this unified whole. This cause must be both fecund (fertile, prolific, capable of creation, giving rise to birth and life) and also be an intelligence acting through freedom.
4. The unity of the underlying cause of the existence and organization of this world can be inferred from the unity of the reciprocal relation of the parts. (See Romans 1:20 for the obligation to make this inference).
Kant characterized all this as if it derived from a kind of artistic concept and production, but an art which was superhuman – his word, not mine. So my disparaging litany of barbs, my dismal summary directed toward our world and its admittedly-woeful elements may not be the whole story. Words like wisdom, purpose, sublime, fecund, reciprocal relations, are spread liberally through Kant’s description. As Genesis puts it, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” We are obligated to infer this unity – the physical world is sitting in front of our collective nose – and then called, invited to thought, to imagine more.
The world in its human relations, tragedies, misfires and irritations may be accurately described by a man waking up with a splitting headache and a bad hangover, but that description is not the entire panorama. Kant was too sober and observant to allow it to be so, anymore than he would allow the world to be described as nothing more than the consequences of mentally-organized sense impressions. Kant insisted that human reason acted a priori – before we received any empirical sense data, before we reached any caustic conclusions. The first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Regardless of how cataclysmically we interpret John’s phrase, it remains true that in the passage of time, what was in this world will no longer be our future. Time is an iron wheel. It remains true that we may think – and our thoughts may be directed to the future.
There was no longer any sea. The Mediterranean sea, that giant barrier for John which separated him both from his beloved churches and the Roman world at large while exiled on the island of Patmos, would no longer impose that barrier when the new heaven and new earth arrived. However beautiful we may find the sea on a vacation at a beach resort, it was John’s bars and walls and jailcell. He was no longer in a position to talk to his beloved congregants, his brothers and sisters in the Lord. The waves of the Mediterranean mocked him and told him – ‘You are not powerful. Roman punishments, inflicted for a failure to worship Caesar, the Roman empire, is powerful. Where are you in this world? Where we put you. What is the world? What we make it to be.’ The problem is larger than John’s exile, larger than the Roman Empire. It was Satan’s boast when tempting Jesus in the wilderness – showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and asserting – ‘it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to.’ Satan’s request or demand, like the Roman Empire’s, was direct, central and concise. ‘If you worship me, it will all be yours.’ Jesus’ answer was equally direct, equally concise – Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.
We serve God by thinking – our future is shaped by thought but the first thoughts to inquire of are Christ’s. We think not in opposition to God; in subordination to, in worship of God; points made powerfully by Augustine long ago. John invites us to see. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. We could stop and ask ourselves what is meant by this term ‘seeing’ – but John is relentless. This is a vision, it invoked his senses, he saw, he heard, the voice was loud. Revelation presents an insuperable obstacle to the aspirations and attempts of secular reason. In his section titled Critique of All Theology Based on Speculative Principles of Reason (B659/A631), Kant mentions the word ‘revelation’ once and thereafter avoids any discussion of it. Even the idea of revelation, perhaps apart from morality and moral laws and concomitant discussions of nature and freedom, either repelled Kant or baffled him to the point of silence. He never saw revealed a Holy City. We see it because the words are set down in the last book of the Bible and we received this book as part of a larger system of promises, divine action and human response. One is reminded of Jesus’ parable of the sower – for the word to be fruitful, it has to fall on good soil. John’s recitation of a loud voice appears to match the language of Jesus’ parable – Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop – thirty, sixty or even one hundred times what was sown. (Mk 4:20). ‘Accept’ is not a long word but the structure which follows depends on it. Exterior relations will only change if interior relations do.
Prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. Using Kant’s linguistic and conceptual concepts, it’s worth cataloguing what this statement of revelation is not: it is not theoretical knowledge; it is not absolutely necessary but rather depends entirely on the voluntary grace of God; it is not a thing or an object or something inarticulate in the world, but rather a city, a social organization, a set of relations among men and angels; it is or may be a cause of something which follows, but this bride is not a cause in reference to any existence which has been given in our experience. (See B663/A635). The bride is prepared – obviously by God. The bride is in fact, a bride, marriage itself being the culmination of complex personal relations set among a network of family relations; and the bride being herself a necessary and central element in a marriage, promised but yet incomplete alone, made complete by the presence of the groom. The bride is beautiful, a subjective judgment made possible and meaningful because weddings have witnesses and are events in a community composed of at least two families. Witnesses make observations and have reactions which are often emotional in a community which may be quite large. The bride is dressed for her husband, not dressed for herself. The point is essential.
One of the most fundamental conflicts which occur between Kant’s orientation and his employment of reason and the biblical statement is that Kant is essentially reasoning for himself. He reasons and writes for others who stand individually, philosopher/individualists evaluating the merits of transcendental, synthetic or empirical data coming to each one as an individual. Each person in Kant’s audience is expected to create his own self-pronounced set of idiosyncratic moral laws from the result of personal analysis (a personal transcendental theology emerges from Kant’s moral laws). Kant was engaged in many debates and introspective inquiries, but no marriages. Martin Luther wrote for the church of his day; for that matter, Martin Luther King wrote an emotional and moral appeal to the churches of his day – see his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Kant’s Enlightenment thinking has a deep problem in connecting with other people.
These words from the Book of Revelation would be what Kant would characterize as ‘speculative’ knowledge, but the poverty of his philosophic musings stands in sharp contrast to the rich and emotive language which even a short phrase from this part of scripture presents. The promise of the wedding night isn’t the solution to a puzzle – it is pleasurable intercourse intended to be fruitful, and not simply fruitful for the bride and groom, but for the families from which they were sent to this ceremony. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. John repeats a promise found earlier in the Book of Revelation (7:17). There is no place in Kant’s transcendental theology for transcendental promises; the phrase would be an oxymoron in Kant’s system, the ultimate theological premise of which is that God is never knowable, but may be inferred from moral law. A promise requires a promiser who communicates intelligibly. There is never, in Kant, a communication from God.
There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. This part of God’s promise we cannot get to in this world, so perhaps I should be a little less critical of Kant’s self-imposed limitations. This is the natural limit of postmillennialism as well; we cannot get to the no more death part of the promise by means of making our world better, ideal or even a utopian paradise. Yet I would see a better world, so let us fold the smaller promise, of a better world, into the larger promise of the end of death, grief, mourning, crying and human pain. Kant’s twin arguments – to which I have objected – are that all inferences beyond the limits of human experience are deceptive and groundless, and yet everything grounded in the nature of our experience may have purpose. (B671/A643). There’s no point in arguing with Kant; I find his tools useful for the sake of pursuing our ‘smaller promise’ of a better, visionary, ideal world, more like a wedding ceremony and less like a snake pit. This is where the word ‘Reformation’ should take up the largest mantle and have the greatest continuing ambitions. A mighty fortress is our God, a sword and shield victorious. He breaks the cruel oppressor’s rod and wins salvation glorious.
An angel showed John the river of the water of life, as clear as a crystal, flowing down from the throne of God and of the Lamb, down the middle of the great street of the City. The language is glorious and inspirational, but some piece of this, some bucket or barrel from this river, has to be brought down into our world where it becomes immediately usable. Kant held that reason never refers directly to an object, but only to the understanding and then to its own empirical use. We did not create this concept of a river of life; the question is, how is it then connected to a condition or series of conditions which come into being in our immediate or prospective world. Kant provided a clue here on how to proceed, although his language is dense. Reason has as its object understanding and purposive use. The understanding unites concepts we have; then reason unites the concepts by means of ideas, making a collective unity of these ideas the purpose of our acts, which flow from our understanding. (B672/A644). John’s revelatory language is available to apply our reason to effectuate an immediate purpose. At the core of everything pertaining to God, there has to be trust and good faith.
Trust and good faith are the underlying and necessary characteristics of the greater promise which we can only internalize based on spiritual values beyond experience. To believe our Lord Jesus when he says and sends prophets and apostles to say – no more death, no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain, every tear to be wiped away from our eyes, the old order of things has passed – is a supernatural act of trust. It reflects good faith in promises vastly beyond any experiential verification. This is what Kant would not allow and would describe as senseless or illusory. But it is that larger trust and good faith which will be the unifying, intelligible, noumenal force and adhesive that holds us together in the lesser promise, one accessible to our experience, of a visionary and ideal better world. Our larger trust in God and God’s Word will hold in place our smaller trust. Our smaller trust in each other, will make us different. In the presence and life of communities of trust, we will have different and better lives. The smaller revelation, to see a better way of living spread across a thousand different social, legal, political, economic, cultural relations, relies on the larger Revelation, which comes down out of heaven from God. Trusting people are trustworthy and trust Jesus who promised death will be no more. We identify ourselves as people who trust God’s Word. If that trust were to disappear, relations will end with that set of adjectives applied above in another paragraph of bad news.
That trust anchors all for which we hope. It is the wavelength of light upon which our vision is carried. Kant’s observation that such things can’t be proved and lie outside the powers of reason, is both true – and misses the point. If you could prove the existence of God, if you could prove eternal life, such proofs would be the opposite of trust; they would be the intellectual equivalent of more argument, of ‘bearing the sword,’ a type of irresistible compulsion. That is exactly where we wish not to go. We do not compel each other. The bride and the groom are not compelling each other. The bride and the groom trust each other and through them, so do their families to begin that complex set of relations which are set in motion when two people marry. Wedding ceremonies bring their respective families and friends into a new set of relations with each other. We will drink new wine at that wedding feast and the wine will be called Trust. Do whatever he tells you, said Mary to the servants at the wedding feast at Cana when they ran out of wine. Regardless of whether it was time for Jesus to reveal his ministry or not (a decision that belonged to the relation between God the Father and God the Son which was beyond her and beyond us until manifested by the Holy Spirit), Mary trusted Jesus. Abraham, through whom all nations are to be blessed, trusted the Lord, and it was credited to him as righteousness.
Trust and good faith undergird a free state and are never the ‘bearing of the sword.’ They are never compulsion among adults. When the bride and groom come together, they do so in love and the foundation of that love is trust and good faith. Trust and good faith do not begin with a political program. The aspects of the society and the various roles we hold in it are varied, uncountable and sweeping. It would take another lengthy chapter to begin to describe them in an even local context. Some of the aspects of our changed relations may result in a variety of political programs or suggestions. If we trusted each other in this country, sooner or later we would find our way back to a renewed discussion about Constitutional amendments, powers, limitations and provisions, the Federalist Papers, the administrative state, etc. – and those discussions would be characterized by trust, not anger. But such discussions are only useful in the context of trust. Without trust, we are engaged with that same spiritual conflict which characterizes so much of the Book of Revelation; a conflict of the churches, our churches, our faith, our revelation, our beliefs, our values, our communities, our relations and our hopes, against Babylonian idolatry. One never trusts such idolatry; one never can, and such idolatry will never trust us. We cannot escape a wary stand-off with the world of unbelief at large; without trust, no program is truly effective. We look to a relationship of trust with trustworthy people in more local ways and that vision is intelligible, to use Kant’s word.
What characterized the earliest disciples, those described in the early chapters of Acts was not a political or economic program, not a legal regime change. The economic program they began, holding all goods in common, could not last when the numbers of believers grew too large and geographically dispersed. It was the core value of trust which characterized them, starting with trust in Christ and trust in God’s word. They had trust in promises they did not yet experience and we cannot yet experience, trust in Christ’s return. That trust then flowed into trust into a myriad of relations and roles within many local churches which characterized a Greco – Roman society that, although not as complex or varied as our own, was complex and varied indeed. We can’t and should not attempt to reduce the variety and complexity of our communities and our relations – not to first century simplicity which wasn’t simple at all and not to a pretended simplicity of our world which would be inherently misleading. We can begin a process of identifying who is trustworthy, who share with us the larger promise of the Gospel and with whom we can begin to exchange the lesser promises. Our God is dwelling with us, He lives with us and we live with Him. There is faith in that promise but no proof. We trust our Lord Jesus when he tells us those things, by the revelation which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.
A Vision of Changed Relations
So the vision is Christians trusting each other within our churches, between and among our churches; trust between our pastors and congregants, trust between pastors;
trust in our families between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters;
trust in our neighborhoods and between neighborhoods;
trust for those who provide child care;
trust between teachers and their children and trust between parents for those teachers and their children’s youth group leaders;
trust between the neighborhood and local police and trust by the police of the neighborhood;
trust for and among members of the armed forces, when they go and when they return;
trust between health care providers and their patients and trust of the patients for the health care providers;
trust between our political leaders and the citizens groups they represent;
trust between clients and their lawyers and trusts between those who go to court and the judges who hear their cases;
trust between reporters who provide the news and those who read and absorb the media;
trust between university and college professors and their students and trust between university administrators and student bodies;
trust between artists and writers and those for whom they perform and create and write;
trust among athletes at all levels of competition;
trust between those who manufacture, or sell or market and those who buy or use;
trust between owners and those who labor for them;
trust between those who provide charity and those who need that charity;
trust between those who are strong and healthy and those whose physical condition has become impaired and need assistance;
trust between those who are young and just beginning and those who are coming to the end of their journey;
trust between those who have great assets and those who have few assets;
trust between those who have the personal strength of character to live productive lives and those who are suffering from addictions;
trust by the ministers for those to whom they provide ministry and trust from the ministered;
trust for those who seek for righteousness and those for whom righteousness is still more of a goal than a practice;
trust for the forgiven and trust for the forgiving;
trust for the injured and trust for those assigned the duty of bringing comfort to those injured;
and trust for those engaged in conflict and trust for the contesting parties after the conflict is concluded – one of the most important trusts there can be, to improve and really change our communities and the way we live.
The collection of the foregoing individual trusts constitutes a dynamic manifold; it is collectively intelligible as one unified visionary trust. Trust acts as the ontological ground of our interior, apperceptive cognitive state and as the context for our exterior, experiential relations. Trust entails different and more complex characteristics of our minds and experience than reason. Trust entails the assertion of personal identity to leave our isolated echo chambers to meet and recognize others. In our prayer lives we trust that God knows us individually by name and that our prayers are heard. Trust extends into the spiritual (Kant’s term is noumenal) and empirical world where our senses operate (phenomenal) and in our relations in a community. The point is to get to the Holy City, a spiritual and emotional location filled with people whom we trust and who trust us.
In the absence of trust, in the absence of love for each other, even if we were to receive eternal life and immortal bodies, our mutual relations would be like that in some Hollywood horror movie – a Zombie Apocalypse – in which we lurched eternally at one another consumed with hatred, but incapable of effectuating our violent impulses. There are profound reasons why Christ asks us to embrace love and turn away from sin. The opposite of the Zombie Apocalypse are the ethical and religious instructions found in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew ch. 5-7. Those declarations invite and direct us to leave decisively our phenomenal world and operate in a noumenal world. The movement here is the movement of a whole community, not merely the ethical weight-lifting of a particular individual.
Kant posed three central questions: – what can I know?; – what ought I to do?; – what may I hope? They find answers more complex and complete than his Critique contemplates, because of the trust we have with God and each other. His ‘I’ word is changed to ‘we.’ My list above of changed relations through trust is short and only representative – trust changes people and the relations we have with each other comprehensively, broadly, as individuals and collectively at a deeper level. Trust is the source of a communal vision for the new Christian relations we want in our lives. The early believers experienced hope by trusting in the startling message they heard. That trust in the word preached to them lead them to share everything they owned in common (the point was they trusted in each other, not in schemes of property ownership which tend as they expand to become artificial and unrealistic, and from there to a cascading series of disappointments and conflicts). Our trust in God prepares us to trust each other and to supplement our faith – which is invariably weak in each of us as individuals. We are called to gather, to pray in circles and worship in groups, as we are called to hear, believe and sing (thinking of We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord) – a platform of trust stretching across many arrangements of families, communities and societies.
The Questions Get Answered
This is the source of idealism, which needs an idea and soil into which it is planted. What we may know is the love of Christ made manifest in a life and community we could not achieve as individuals. What ought we do is to trust each other as Christians in forming this community which grows and develops organically. What we may hope for is a society, a community and a complex set of intersecting lives and relations which is really better, not just a little better, than what the world is currently offering, which is simply various flavors of idolatry. The First Commandment is not a logical trick or a logical puzzle. It is the most essential communication from God, which gives rise to a doorway through which we join ourselves to God and to each other. What we may hope for is individual lives which meet our highest aspirations and secure our deepest beliefs. We may hope for lives which avoid and are not subject to natural and inescapable fears which arise from our vulnerability – which may now be spiritually and experientially escaped – raptured – because we trust in God’s Word in a community. Even perishing does not take us out of our community of grace. Believers’ trust is the story of our Christian faith – Jesus who went to the cross trusting his Father in heaven – and the ground upon which the revelatory Wedding Feast of the Lamb is bequeathed and provided to us.
Adeste, fideles! – We the living, the joyful, the exuberant who trust in Christ – our Salvator Aeternus, who through his atoning work guides us into shared and mutual trust in a life that does not disappear into a grave but is resurrected into an eternal gift. Jesus leads us from a Zombie Apocalypse of our own making (and which the world makes for us), into the noumenal world of his Sermon on the Mount.
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