I stand with Riley Gaines. Normally this website is a vehicle for me to present topics I think are something more than the politics of the day. I avoid snarky exchanges, commentary that will be old by next week. I present my Christian poetry, themed by the Book of Revelation. I present poetry from a prisoner, Darryl Blackwell. I comment on issues pertinent to Christian faith or ministry in prisons. My poetry involves theology, eschatology, philosophy. This website has no commercial application – does not trade in conflict. I have enough conflict in my day-to-day duties as an attorney – there’s no need to create more here. But plain speech is not picking a fight. Riley Gaines says there are two genders. I agree. That moral, theological and biological view is entirely supported by the Bible. The Bible is a good advocate for itself. I don’t always have to run to defend it.
What has happened because of the attacks on, the suppression of Riley Gaines’ speech, affected me more than most of the issues which bounce around on the media for a few weeks and then disappear. She was threatened and assaulted at San Francisco State University. The ‘apology’ issued by the administration there dripped with hypocrisy, was saturated in a barely-concealed congratulatory note for the people who assaulted her and for the ‘security personnel’ which stood around and watched it happen.
I took it personally because I spent four years at San Francisco State, 1969-1973. I did not graduate from there, but every course I ever took on writing or film-making or creative arts, I took there. Some of that is reflected in my writing now. I know those halls well. This is not the place for my colorful memoirs, but when Riley Gaines was persecuted at San Francisco State, and the administration’s thinly-veiled glee about that was naked and intended to be plain, I was angry. But – okay – if I’m going to write about lasting issues, you have to let the day’s cruelty, wickedness and dishonesty slide. Otherwise I would never write about anything that seemed to me more important, more lasting.
This morning I read that Riley Gaines has been canceled at Penn State University. This, after the University’s leadership gave astonishing speeches, dripping in hypocrisy, about freedom of speech. I was born in Philadelphia, resident physically and spiritually here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This, my state, was founded by a charter granted to William Penn, a Quaker who was persecuted and jailed for his own Quaker beliefs along with many others. You would think, of any state in this union, that fundamental principles of freedom of speech would be honored in Pennsylvania – here, freedom of speech for unpopular ideas would be taken seriously. You would think here in Pennsylvania we would get conduct from the powers-that-be respecting this principle – not dishonest, posturing speeches about freedom of speech while suppression of speech and spurious cancellations run amok – for Riley Gaines or anyone else. What a price we pay for political correctness.
Anyway, here I vent. I stand with you, Riley Gaines and with you, Moms for Liberty. May God bless your work. May God bless your speech and your witness. And if William Penn were here to express his views, I feel confident I know what his opinion would be as well.
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Postscript
After writing the foregoing post, on November 20, 2023, a guest essay appeared in the New York Times titled ‘Why I am a Liberal’ by Cass Sunstein, a law professor at Harvard and well-known author on Constitutional law. Professor Sunstein provided 34 sets of claims about liberalism in its defense. His essay is to be commended because he scrupulously avoided partisan rhetoric in his presentation and made a serious effort to correctly and accurately summarize what he understood to be liberalism. Responding to all 34 sets of claims would be beyond the scope of my post here, but his first claim is fairly broad and inclusive of all his points, so I will quote it in full:
1. Liberals believe in six things: freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy. They believe not only in democracy, understood to require accountability to the people, but also in deliberative democracy, an approach that combines a commitment to reason-giving in the public sphere with the commitment to accountability.
Applied to the censorship and cancellation of Riley Gaines, her treatment, either at San Francisco State or at Penn State, falls short. She was not accorded the freedom to express her views. The reason is self-evidently because the transgender and LGBT community objected vehemently. They believed that the expression of her views represented a personal threat to them and apparently that view was shared by the administration of both universities. Partisan politics is the obvious explanation for this, since as a single woman, unarmed, the idea that her speech constituted a physical threat to anyone is absurd.
The issue of human rights is apparently ambiguous. Does the phrase mean the human rights of Riley Gaines, or of the transgender and LGBT students objecting, or of the various students who may have been interested in hearing her speak, or the students who objected to her speech but did not demonstrate? The phrase ‘human rights’ has a wonderful ring, but once partisan conflict emerges, then the application of the phrase becomes controversial and subjective.
The foregoing comments apply equally to the notion of pluralism. Whose pluralism? Is it pluralistic to include and incorporate LGBT students, or Bible-believing Christians? The notion of pluralism on university campuses has fallen into disrepute, since the word now means a certain political orientation and outlook and excludes those who vehemently disagree, typically Christians or conservatives. The word has become a parody of itself – it means ‘anyone but a Bible-believing Christian’ or ‘anyone but a Trump voter’ or ‘anyone but a Republican’ or even, more disturbingly and recently, ‘anyone – unless you have the wrong views about the conflict in Gaza.’
The word ‘security’ has an obvious application to Riley Gaines, since her security was visibly and openly threatened when she appeared to speak at San Francisco State. More generally, the term is pliable in the extreme. Security from crime? From illegal immigration? From gun violence? From infection from a communicable disease? From tampering with an election? From alleged misinformation, disinformation or hate speech? How about security from having bad things said that hurt your feelings or make you feel threatened? It’s not a term which helps much in a real debate, as soon as the discussion moves beyond platitudes. I guess we’re all in favor of security but what that means varies wildly from speaker to speaker and group to group.
Sunstein’s phrase, ‘the rule of law’ is more helpful. Although laws and their impact are debatable, that debate generally takes place in a highly-defined arena called a courtroom, accompanied by professional advocates called attorneys, worked out with detailed rules of procedure under the supervision of a judge, usually associated with rights of review and appeal to higher courts. We may not agree with the results of a particular legal procedure, Roe v. Wade or Dobbs being obvious examples (for one group of advocates or another), but at least we’re talking about roughly the same things in roughly the same way. To the extent that belief in the rule of law is a fundamental liberal norm, I agree. I think Riley Gaines would agree also and hopefully, even the people who threatened her at San Francisco State, at least in their calmer moments, would agree. The problem with Riley Gaines at San Francisco State wasn’t simply unruly undergraduates – the problem was an administration fundamentally unconcerned about the rule of law as applied to the safety of Riley Gaines, a speaker presenting unpopular views.
The word ‘democracy’ is obviously a loaded term, so ambiguous and flexible and subjective that it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean, often in contrast with whatever a particular speaker feels does not represent ‘democracy.’ The phrase is used by the world’s most notorious dictators and most repressive regimes. It simply isn’t helpful in a discussion, except in such an abstract way we could use the word as a synonym for ‘fair’ or ‘just’ or ‘right.’ Everybody believes in such words – one person thinks democracy means she can get an abortion locally at any time in her pregnancy, another thinks it entitles him to mount .50 caliber machine guns on his pickup truck.
Sunstein uses the phrase ‘accountability to the people.’ Immediately we are going to have some problem about determining who ‘the people’ are. But if we decide that ‘the people’ means everyone qualified to vote, that avoids some of the more subjective and partisan uses of the term. Sunstein’s use of the term accountability is a little unclear – does he mean the rule of law, or something more than that? Does he mean the ordinary political process of candidates running for office, or does he mean something more than that? Would a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court be an example of ‘accountability to the people’ – or does the Court’s decision only count as being accountable if the decision comes out the right way (meaning, the outcome we desire).
Perhaps accountability to the people means reasonable communication with the press and the media. What if the press and media are highly partisan? If an official or a candidate is falsely accused of collusion with a foreign power, with the connivance of the media, what would the phrase ‘accountability to the people’ mean? Sunstein uses the word ‘accountability’ twice in his first claim about liberalism. He seems to believe that this is essential to the defense of liberalism – and all reasonable people are generally in favor of the idea of accountability – but if what he means is justifying oneself to one particular wing or another of a political party, or justifying oneself to one particular set of partisan reporters, or one particular set of university professors, or one particular interest group – then I have a problem with the word. I like to think of myself as being a person who is accountable, but I have some vehement disagreements with some folks on the political spectrum. Did I stop being accountable? To whom do we account? To whom did Martin Luther King account? To whom did Martin Luther account?
Sunstein uses the term ‘deliberative democracy’ and although he doesn’t define it, I think I can guess what he means. Deliberation is a word which is joined with another concept he emphasizes, that of giving reasons in the public domain. Our Declaration of Independence begins with a declaration to the effect that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that the new nation should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. The Declaration is a written statement by a group of colonies, soon to identify themselves as states, declaring a new form of government, not a declaration by disparate individuals promoting individualism, personal agency or an “anti-caste principle.”
Reason-giving in the public sphere counts, but this brings us to the very point of the controversy. If I object to the transgender agenda, I have a reason: there are two biological genders. If I object to abortion, I have a reason: infants in the womb, beginning at conception, are children and deserve to be protected. If I endorse traditional sexual morality, I have a reason – it is both consistent with my religious values and consistent with a stable society. I think liberalism as it is actually practiced in the United States in 2023, and advocated for, is much narrower, and much more reliant on questionable and arbitrary values, than anything I would characterize as ‘American republicanism,’ promoted by Abraham Lincoln.
The heart of the problem is that Professor Sunstein’s claims about liberalism, presented in his guest essay, are vastly broader and more undefined than what is actually presented in the real world of political life today; in actuality, Sunstein depends on the idea that we’ll all know what he ‘really means.’ It never means Donald Trump, it never means Evangelical Christianity, it never means opposition on moral grounds to the LGBT agenda, it never means opposition to abortion on demand. It never means that the faculty of universities are going to be selected on a politics-neutral basis – it always means that the selection of faculty will be done after a review of the DEI credentials and assertions, to ‘weed out’ the undesirables.
Those undesirables, those deplorables, the bitter-clingers, would be people like me. It would seem that a commitment to individual dignity would require the defense of Riley Gaines’ rights and my own – but as we see, not so much. And when I oppose the licentiousness, the childish self-indulgence of this age, on the basis of both revealed religion and common sense, I believe I am telling history to “Go!” – As in, “Go forward, carry on.” In fact, I don’t think liberals (as liberalism is actually practiced today in the United States) are on the right side of history at all. No one is more determined to look backward, to the grand old days of JFK and Camelot and the political constituencies and activism of the 1960’s than today’s contemporary liberals. I was very much part of the 1960’s (noted elsewhere on this blog), but the 1960’s and their political alliances and their self-congratulatory heroics are gone.
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Visionary Christian Idealism
Prologue
Visionary Christian idealism springs from both the vision and the aspiration toward a free state, our state, existing in relation to God. Our vision is not grounded in constitutional analysis or political philosophy. This free state is grounded in Christian faith, in visionary idealism derived from the Bible, including the miracles of the Old Testament and the message of the New Testament. One strand of philosophy underlying this vision is derived from Kant’s transcendental idealism, its useful tools redirected in service to the Christian church. The dialectic of Kant, applied to the Bible, concluding with the last two chapters of the Book of Revelation, guides this exploration, seeking to express a different structure for our social relations. Those are relations among and within the ‘seven churches,’ starting with the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. The vision is ours. With all its conflicts and confusion the journey is ours. The idealism given by God which pushes us forward is ours – and the Holy City, presented as the conclusion of the Bible, with its invitation to the faithful and its barriers to faithless entry, is ours too. Political philosophy and even constitutional analysis may be added at the end, but never at the beginning.
Starting with Theology
The irreducible core of our theology is the first eight chapters of the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans. That is the irreducible theological core of Martin Luther’s writings, and John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion as well. Without attempting to resolve each difference of opinion, those are our ‘two witnesses’ who give testimony to the world. Conflict with the world is unavoidable and essential. The first chapters of Romans give the ontology of the Christian vision – how we exist, how all things exist, on what ground we stand, what is the source of our authority, what relations do we have with each other. The first chapters of Romans give our epistemology as well – how do we know what we know; why we are justified in moving beyond the evidence of our senses; justified in moving even beyond our powers of reason, without falling into into a swirling mudbank of chimera, doubt and confusion. The soul, having been fed on faith, may anchor in a mighty fortress, its ontological footing and its epistemological communications secured. As Luther would say (indeed, sing), deriving from first principles of theology – we are given a gift, a sword and shield victorious – with both social and visionary outcomes in view. These are not neutral or bland outcomes, they represent a dramatically better way to live. Christian visionary idealism is not shackled to mild improvements.
The fundamental dialectic is the conflict between Jacob and Esau, between the seven churches and Babylon idolatry. We don’t escape that conflict, that necessary dialectic, with social programs or theological arguments or political regimes. When we receive the Holy Spirit, we become, as it were, little Jacobs – we are necessarily involved, whether we wish it or not, with our unbelieving brother Esau. ‘Go make disciples’ Jesus told us and he never said anything he didn’t mean. There is no avoiding either the directive from Jesus or the conflict. Separation and conflict are central to the Book of Revelation. That separation and conflict are the necessary conditions through which seven churches repent, reform and regather until as they approach their goal, they travel together as a camp.
Our pilgrimage advances in opposition. If we cannot see the whole path, we have a vision of the Holy City at the end. Our transcendental idealism is not glued to an impossible individualism which necessarily ends in personal death. The end of the road for Enlightenment self-actualization is grim (but not without having created some useful tools). Our Christian idealism is joined to God, ascending, ever ascending, with Jesus, whose life is a permanent ontological state, not a temporary accident. We are joined with many others because the question – how then, should we live? – isn’t resolved until we love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. We have to live by faith and our neighbors have to live by faith for this to work. Nothing works if we are being stalked around our world by the angel of death, like teenage victims in a Hollywood horror movie. Jesus’ resurrection and ascension are at the core of the core of our faith and this transcendental vision. “I am the Bread of Life” said Jesus, loudly, twice, in a public place. He absolutely meant it, and we get an everlasting city at the end of our journey.
The Security of a Free State
There is a community of faith which apprehends this vision. That community of faith at some point has to express itself politically. Although I said this vision does not entail constitutional analysis, there is a line of constitutional law cases which are instructive to this presentation, although for reasons secondary to the Supreme Court’s analysis. Those are cases like Heller and Bruen, having to do with the 2nd Amendment and the various disputes over its application and regulatory limits. The legal analysis presented by the court in those cases reaches back much further than the enactment of our Constitution and touches on issues pertinent and necessary to developing the ideal of ‘the security of a free state.’ It may not seem so at first blush, but 1st Amendment rights of religious freedom and political liberty are connected necessarily to 2nd Amendment concepts of self-defense, which the lengthy historical analysis in those cases discloses. To the extent we separate the two ideas of rights we assert are inalienable, we do so carefully, as if we were separating Siamese twins through surgery. An ideal community has rights and obligations of self-definition and self-defense. It entails a principle or method of security, with recognizable definition of its membership and presenting a means of safe passage in and voluntary passage out – no matter how broadly or spiritually the term ‘self-defense’ is employed.
If we are called to an ideal community which separates itself in some manner from the world, sober questions are posed, which imply political organization and shared spiritual belief. Who enters? How do they organize? Who has legal rights and what are they? How do they – either free states or individuals – exert such rights? From where do such legal rights originate? Does the Originator (whether speaking of us, or of our rights) have an opinion, a purpose or a goal? What powers and limitations are supplied to, or imposed on any free state with respect to interactions with its own free citizens? How does a free, ideal community interact with the world – its laws, its passions, its fears – its violence? The underlying rationale of much analysis, understandably, given the lamentable history of the human race, is that the state and the individual are more or less constantly at one another’s throats. Each side has to be on perpetual guard, as if two dangerous criminals were incarcerated with each other in a small cell – each eyeing the other warily.
Suppose many people were trustworthy Christians? Not a few, but universally, or nearly so, within the body politic? The familiar intellectual and theoretical model of frail human character collapsing under the weight of the temptation of power, should differ. One thinks of Daniel’s prayer, which checks excessive optimism. Yet, if we are free, if faithful, our laws, our social, political and legal relations, should be different. If today we are collectively at war with Babylonian idolatry, and the scriptures declare this is a more-or-less permanent state of affairs, could there be an association of societies whose laws differed markedly from a larger society? Imagine seven different churches in Pennsylvania, differing from each other in various significant ways, yet more or less each equally immune from the surrounding civil society and its laws. The promise at the end of the Book of Revelation is about more than immunity or separation from an incorrigible surrounding society – it entails both protection from entry by the wicked and a new set of relations among the redeemed.
In the phrase ‘security of a free state,’ we generally think of security as security from physical harm, from assault, from the imposition of tyranny, from the reduction or elimination of personal rights. We think of police, often assembled in large numbers, of courts and judges, of lawyers and prisons, of state and national guards, of our military forces with its planes and ships and missiles. Necessarily, that is the world we inhabit. We wind up having relations with each other tailored along those lines. Our legislative bodies pass legislation with that world in mind. If we have debates over the extent of the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms and the right of the state to regulate such conduct, we have that debate in the context of the proximity of death, of assault, of self-protection from lawless conduct. Discussion of legal/political forms we might consider adopting takes place awash in a sea of the threat of crime or hostile entry. The ‘sea of threat’ provides the unchallenged source of evidence for argument from either direction, from both the assertors and deniers of the right to bear arms untrammeled by government regulation.
Advocating for some spiritual state appears to be childish or naïve. If one takes a random walk through neighborhoods in almost any large American city, especially at night, the penalty for being naïve can be severe. An understandable despair at improving any of this sets in. Yet there we have, sitting unshakeable, the Word of the God with its vibrant, visionary testimony of the Holy City, its imagery and graphic symbols larger than life, demanding attention like a flashing enormous billboard. So I want to revisit that phrase, the ‘security of a free state.’ Being realistic in this world means acknowledging the enforcing sword of the state – and Jacob needs to be realistic about Esau’s intentions and animosity – but it also means the words of the Savior, applied to a spiritual regime whose advent he never tired of announcing. An angel came into our world to sit outside an emptied tomb to ask ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?– and made that realistic too. Security must be realistic or its not secure at all – but there is nothing unrealistic about a transcendental idealism. Spiritual, moral, ethical values exist – and if we turn our back on them, all we get is a society of spiders. It’s okay, I guess (at least we live with it in the absence of a better alternative), until a bigger spider shows up on our web.
Internalizing the Law
Extreme views of human nature are not the most realistic. When a new spider comes onto my web, in the process of evaluating this stranger entering my world, I would like to hear about both – how he loves Jesus – and how he reads the first eight chapters of Romans. Then I will feel confident that he has internalized the Law. I won’t have to keep my sword at the ready. It doesn’t help to love Jesus unless one also internalizes the Law, as it doesn’t help to internalize the Law and hate the life that Jesus represents and conveys. We carry the Law around inside of us so that we may live peaceably with each other as we mutually worship God, whose being, existence and power have no limitations at all. I could begin at this point to speak of the holiness of God, our rock, our staff, the melody of the beguiling flute we hear in the distance – but I might never reach my chief points at all. Like any band of pilgrims, we need to move along in the presence and with the assistance of each other.
To respond to the question, then, how are you different? takes us back to the 13th Chapter of Romans, the bearing of the sword by the state, and the 2nd Amendment. We are different because, with respect to each other, we have voluntarily disarmed. The pledge is not pacifism or Gandhi-style passive, non-violent resistance. Violent lawlessness in the world (and lawlessness is always of the world) is to be met with violence directed and controlled by the state, as necessary. To fail to act to arrest violent lawlessness is to collaborate with, encourage and reward such violence. But we are disarmed with respect to each other – on political or theological disagreement, there is no remedy and no enforcement, except a patient waiting on the judgment of God. To employ a weapon on a theological adversary, on a Christian political adversary, is to be asked by stern angels to leave the holy city.
No one is burned at the stake, not now, not tomorrow, not for any reason. That is exactly what our transcendental idealism transcends. The application of Christian principles to the world is something Jesus directs and commands – but the application of Christian principles suggests the possibilities of Christian disagreement. The application of legal force may be necessary to adjudicate and enforce the law, but that cannot happen in the Holy City – if it does, it is the Holy City no more, but has moved to float above us. The state existing in this world cannot be disarmed – its very purpose is to keep peace by keeping a sword. A free Christian state may exist within and above that state, distinguished by faith and by the absence of force, made secure spiritually by the Word of God. That faith – and that surrender of weapons of force with respect to each other – is all that is necessary and all that is possible for this visionary state, our free state, to remain spiritual and free.
The Sword and the Flame
We rely on the distinction made between religious and secular authority in John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, not because we are primarily concerned with the orderly conduct of the worldly state as he was. But because we are engaged with the conduct of our transcendental Christian state and our conduct within it. Here, self-defense is never required. Because we are alive, and that life may not be taken away from us, we are not trapped like flies in amber in a particular political configuration – we may experience a series of succeeding political configurations. The world is going through its own dialectic in the conflict between the churches and idolatry.
We are experiencing our own more peaceful, more blessed dialectic – a range of relations as a result of our presence in a transcendental spiritual free state, where God is worshipped and our Lord Jesus, still bearing his purifying wounds, is our King. The security of the world is premised on things which may be shaken – money, weaponry, power. Our security is premised on that which is unshakeable, the Spirit of Holiness, given by God, secured by Christ. Concealed carry means something different for us in a transcendental state – we conceal, yet carry, the Holy Spirit.
One of the criticisms of any philosophy or practice derived first from a religious revelation is that it leaves the door wide open for fanaticism. That was Kant’s criticism of Locke (fairly or unfairly, implying that any application of concepts beyond direct sense experience was unbounded, undisciplined, unsafe). Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Martyrs Mirror reflect hundreds of experiences of cruel religious persecutions over issues of which no one has direct, sense experience: particularly, is Christ’s presence real or symbolic in the Eucharist? Of course this mysterious question was a symbol or code for a host of disputed theological and political issues and forms of social organization – nevertheless, that was often used as the very point of the angry dispute – do you believe Christ is really present in the Host? – which, upon an incorrect response, would then lead to someone being interrogated, tortured on the rack and ultimately burned at the stake.
So this is the very point of disarming ourselves with respect to each other. The perception of what is fanatical and what is a critical point of theology may well differ in the mind of each beholder. But neither do we carry weapons to make our points, nor do we employ our organized social groupings to enact laws which imply the application of law and force to enforce our points. This is why the Quaker experience is important and why I self-consciously write from the state of Pennsylvania – not because I like Quaker theology, which lacks the cross, the purifying blood, the resurrection and the ascension – but because I don’t. This is why we should offer a reasonable truce to the Islamic community – not because I think Allah is God, but because I don’t. We do not fail to organize – the seven churches are profoundly organized, although that organization is only disclosed at the end – but we organize without guns or scaffolds or stakes to burn heretics. The heretics will go away. The towers of Babylon always fall – the cracks in their structure were decreed by God before the beginning of time.
Essential to this argument is the premise that whatever structure is developed, we, the living, can change it. We are not ghosts, trapped on the astral plane. Our relations may be dynamic, may move as the Spirit moves, as experience teaches, as the intellect operates, as love deepens. We’re supposed to be getting smarter here, because our Lord Jesus wants us to get smarter. There isn’t one right answer, except Christ himself. So our discipleship is moving in relation to our cognitions of objects, of noumena and phenomena, of judgments and determinations, of intellectual systems, but never moving in being fixed on Christ.
Depending on how things are going, I may treat Calvinists or Catholics differently (as they may so treat me) – we may organize and dialogue differently across passages of time – but we all stand in relation to God and hence cannot lose our relation to each other. The soul always stands in relation to God. So somewhere, albeit around the bend and currently invisible, our souls must also stand in some relation with each other. Whatever the flame of God may be at a particular time, it is never again to be used to burn heretics at the stake. Visionary idealism finds one flame – that one which burned in the desert, never consuming the bush, which Moses went to investigate.
My Hippy Love Bus
We start with relationships. If the central problem of metaphysics is to show how it is possible for concepts of understanding to apply to objects of human experience, then we object to the word ‘objects’ and substitute for it the word ‘relationships’ with its attendant implications. The Apostle Paul began his letter to the Romans by describing his relationships – Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle. His description of relationships is essential to understanding – not only the gospel, but Christian metaphysics generally, which includes a direction and a goal. The gospel God promised beforehand through his prophets – regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David and who through the Spirit of Holiness was declared to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. If we’re trying to get somewhere visionary, and there’s a group of us, we’ll need a bus.
When I use Kant’s term transcendental idealism, I am taking it far afield from what Kant meant. Kant’s writing entails a set of metaphysical, linguistic concepts and tools – he provided an admirable toolbox. If a Kant scholar were to accuse me of redirecting and converting his vocabulary and concepts, so as to constitute intellectual distortion, rather than present an explanation or defense, I would have to admit: ‘Your Venerated Scholarship, guilty as charged.’ Before I go further, allow me to present a list of Kantian terms useful to the task. Like Old Testament genealogies, this may be boring to read, but like those genealogies, they are essential to understanding how we travel to our goal.
After Kant’s transcendental ideas, ideals and idealism, we find a transcendental schema; transcendental categories; transcendental cognitions; transcendental intuitions; transcendental appearances; a transcendental manifold; transcendental concepts; transcendental conditions of synthetic unity; a transcendental aesthetic; a transcendental analytic; transcendental logic; transcendental judgments; a transcendental deduction; transcendental understanding; transcendental imagination; transcendental synthesis; transcendental determinations; transcendental apperception; the unity of transcendental apperception; transcendental objects; figurative synthesis; a transcendental dialectic; transcendental axioms; transcendental analogies of experience; transcendental anticipations; examples of transcendental amphiboly; transcendental paralogisms; transcendental antimonies; transcendental illusions and transcendental proofs; transcendental problems; transcendental doctrines; transcendental freedom; transcendental reflection, transcendental noumena, principles which are surely transcendental and transcendental deliberation.
Kant was concerned with responding to British empiricists like Dave Hume and John Locke and ultimately, the extent and limits one could expect with ‘pure reason.’ Notwithstanding the difference between his concerns and our aspirations, he developed a comprehensive vocabulary for a certain type of intellectual task – a task he perceived as fixed, stationary, the starting place for a true metaphysics. Shameless as a cat burglar, I appropriate his thoughts to construct something dynamic, in motion, fueled for travel, not to establish a beginning, but to reach a destination.
The destination is like the best poetry, a combined effort of both the Author in providing John’s visionary, apocalyptic language to initiate – and we, the readers, tasked to internalize those images to respond. We bring our experiences to bear in relations which are vertical to God and horizontal to others, making the complete poem. Many Rivers to Cross sang Jimmy Cliff describing his emotions and his feelings of loss at being distanced, not connected to others or any destination at a deep, personal level. We too have rivers to cross – with our own imprinted experiences and strong emotions, contributed to the Spirit’s poetical city. With a partially-borrowed transcendental framework for our travel, more connected than Jimmy Cliff was yet with all his poignant feeling, we share our crossings.
Calling out a swirling neon-painted love bus as a vehicle for a transcendental trip is whimsical. But it is suited to a journey which is metaphysical in part, spiritual in part, theological in part, eschatological in part, prophetic in part, political in part, forensic in part, symbolic in part, communal in part, marital in part, psychological in part, literal in part, gathering the strongest of emotions and, taken together, regenerative and permanent before God in all parts. The City is a statement, a declaration of Jesus’ ontological power, an assertion of the Savior’s will, not whimsical or flimsy at all. That ontological power, conferred out of his grace, makes our love bus sturdier than it looks.
We will be moving, whether we will it or not. There really is no standing still. The idea of a necessary motion impelled by God is also found in Luther’s Bondage of the Will – God drives all creation and creatures forward, especially mankind, carried along by God’s own action according to the nature of His Omnipotence – God permits his creatures no holiday from his divine working which puts in motion and moves all, from saints to devils – Luther’s way of making his points about God’s preemptive actions in moving all human conduct, including the acts of the will. (Page 227, Cole tr. Summit 1976).
Whether we have free will with respect to God’s immutable foreknowledge is a question which occupied 16th century theologians. We are more concerned today with political configurations – without asking ourselves (at least not asking very hard) whether such configurations matter, whether the configurations we think we desire will result in the society and relations we want, whether we know that we can make such configurations so permanent and so superior that they cannot be easily reversed. We are not inclined to credit the belief that God is driving events to any announced, knowable end. With respect to our future, we have become a nation of day-traders.
The question posed of how we know things, including those eternal things we long to know which human reason insistently strives for – and know we know them, whether things be metaphysical conclusions, philosophic judgments, logical proofs, spiritual ideas and expectations of existence beyond death, others generally we find occupying the world with us, personal relationships or even raw sense impressions and data, seems rather self-absorbed. Metaphysics can seem that way – the isolated professor in his study, contemplating abstract proofs to which few are privy. How we know we are relating to others, how we know we are traveling somewhere and not just ‘spinning our wheels’ is not merely self-absorbed. My goals and concerns are different than Kant’s – yet he also was concerned with not just spinning our wheels in circular metaphysical speculation. He thought pure reason was the answer, properly limited and constrained to what is knowable which he characterized as a Critique of Pure Reason. I think the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is the answer – the entire gospel. But Kant’s toolbox helps – it helps us to picture transcendental ideas, connect them to build transcendental relations, working from the interior of the mind out. We may start out being self-absorbed, but we don’t end that way.
The book of Revelation presents a city at its conclusion and it is a transcendental city. Cities are inherently public and visible. Cities involve many people in a multitude of relations; we tend not to think of cities or the term ‘city’ in terms of individual psychology or personal cognition (although part of Plato’s analysis in ‘The Republic’ employs analogies with individual psychology). The promise and prophecy of Revelation is a Holy City and a Transcendental City, not without certain hazardous conditions to endure and surmount, not without a difficult journey to arrive. If such a city is to exist, then it must ultimately exist publicly, it must come to be and exist in this our real world, within our real space and time. If this city is to exist, it exists in my interior psychology as well. Jesus made this point emphatically. He meant the apocalyptic vision of Revelation, which he summarized on the Mount of Olives, to add to his point and deepen it, not contradict it. The kingdom of God does not come visibly, nor will people say, ‘Here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ – because the kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:20-21. So this city lays within us and without us, external and subject to actions by others, observable, something one waits for, travels to the meeting place for – yet simultaneously introspective to us. Jesus announced a kingdom manifested psychologically within our interior lives and manifested socially in others. It is a transcendental ideal.
I already added one more ‘transcendental’ to my list of borrowed word-tools above – transcendental relations. That term will drop us into our hippy love bus (to which you are invited, perhaps a ragged and lonely hitchhiker – always room for one more inside). Later we will want another linguistic and metaphysical tool, which one should think of rather the way one thinks of a river – a succession of transcendental passages of time, without limitation or end. The river changes always, changes constantly, but stops flowing, never – reflecting succeeding changes in our psychology as well as our relations. This transcendental river of time feeds the leaves of the Holy Tree, which are intended for the healing of the nations. Healing entails ontological motion and a spiritual and ethical purpose and goal. Healing must invoke teleology – our purposed end as part of God’s creation is health, not sickness – the word already implies transcendental principles leading to an intentional and communal end.
The first relationship is our relationship with God. This relationship necessitates a relationship of the soul – a real relation, yet it does not involve sense impressions. The soul’s relationship with God exists within measurable space and time and beyond measurable time or space. Our space and time exist as created by God, which the Apostle Paul addressed a little later in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans: What may be known about God has been made plain. Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made. Rom. 1:19-20. The creation of the world is not only a physical and psychological event, but it is a spiritual and theological event. The inquiry as to how we categorize and internalize such multiform creation is important and implicates the action of the soul. As the deer pants for water, so my soul pants for you, says the Psalmist. The soul organizes the personality and captures the unity of apperception, but is not limited to it or limited to rational categories – even if such are a priori of any sense data, since the soul has a transcendent relation with God. Indeed, the soul could not escape that transcendent relation.
I need to add something here about revelation (in the broad sense), conversion (as in religious conversion) and cognition. “A concept comprising a synthesis is to be considered empty, and refers to no object, if this synthesis does not pertain to experience.” So said Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, (A220/B267), but he was wrong. Revelation (again, the broad sense of the word) is a concept God has. This revelation comes in a word – the divine Word. (In the beginning the Word was with God and was God). The Greek word is logos. We have no means to find such Word or even know it exists; our impulses to find it are real (not empty), but they are also vague, confused, circular, futile. Once the Word, the revelation, is given, then it becomes a cognition. It is added to our experience – it is more than added, it transforms our understanding of our past experience and transforms our future experience. Revelation transforms our future cognition. We see things differently. When we speak of a transcendent relation of the soul, the soul seeks such transcendent relation – even without words it senses its own transcendent nature – which hopes to transform our understanding and interpretation of the past. Conversion means I have received and accepted Christ as transcendental, eternal Savior and my cognitions are now reflective of transcendent values. The conceptual barriers which the personal prospect of death imposes are overcome. My past, present and future experience has changed, has been and will be synthesized in a different way, but not due to any concept that I ever had. The concept came from God. From the point of view of my soul, I was poverty-stricken, empty. God filled me.
Transcendental Wheels for my Bus, Selected from a Table
A bus is about motion in time, passengers, a destination – a bus ride implies relationships. Some instructions or design plans are appropriate. Noah received instruction from God on how to build the Ark before anyone or any animal boarded. Other people are always central; they are required to even get to transcendental relations. The theological term for such relations would be postmillennial, because Christ already has all power and all authority; the millennium may proceed wherever he situates himself. These relations imply movement and movement implies wheels.
Kant presented a Table of Categories in his Critique. Consistent with my method, I want to shape and round Kant’s Categories as if they were plastic to be molded, mount them on axles and roll forward in contact with that which might be categorized as grounded idealism. The meaning of idealism here is metaphysical, not visionary, social or political. These are psychological qualities of the mind engaged in acquiring and cataloguing experiences, existing so that we can use words like I think or I believe. Part of this entails experiencing ourselves as a unity – each of us a unified intelligent creature of God using the word ‘I’ and capturing by that our entire, experiential, spiritual and moral past. Part of this entails recognizing others in the same way. Kant would declare such psychological qualities to have an a priori existence in our minds, enabling our interior experience and the way we necessarily conceptualize and present it. These are qualities which characterize and undergird external relationships as well. We are perceived as well as perceive. Hagar saw what was happening to her and her child, which was the result of the actions of Abraham and Sarah as well as the physical reality with which she was confronted, but God saw her.
Kant would ascribe the existence and necessity of these metaphysical categories (or qualities or potentialities, to use some other terminology) to Kant’s inexplicably-arising unity of individual apperception; or perhaps to the central role of transcendental reason in structuring experience and reality within individualized, psychological space and time; or to an unconditioned state or cause which can never be reached by tracing backward regressively through a series of a series of conditions which each further condition a new set of conditions. I ascribe them to the fact that man is made in the transcendental image of God. We use these categories to get somewhere.
Unity, Plurality, Totality: The City of God is one unified transcendent body – the Body of Christ. There is a plurality of people, saints, us, residing, living within it. Although the totality of the City is known to God, we can never know the totality, because it includes those who do not yet exist, but are known to Christ, himself acting within and beyond time. Because we cannot get outside of time or experience the future until it happens, the totality of the population of the City is transcendental. Our experience of time and change are successive; God’s is transcendental and incorporates all three categories above, comprehensively in terms of the City, locally in terms of my efforts, my wheels.
Reality, Negation and Limitation: The City of God is real. God has so declared in his Word and his Word stands forever. Whatever our limitations are in approaching the City, it stands, shimmering in reality. Negation is that which Satan initiates to oppose Christ, to destroy the seven churches and the saints, to assault the ‘woman clothed with the sun and her offspring,’ to attempt in folly to suborn Christ Jesus to worship him. That attempt ends in the 20th chapter of Revelation, a burning lake of fire designed for Satan and his angels. “Fear God, who can destroy both body and soul in hell,” Jesus said. Limitation is that quality which operates through time for us to develop and extend our relationship with God and with others, to expand our knowledge from a limited platform to a more extensive platform. Our relations in this world are limited, but they develop on the bus. If we sit next to each other, we can talk. You can point out some things to me through the window, and I can do the same.
Inherence and Subsistence: The quality of eternal life inheres in God, in Christ made known to us, in the City, and through faith and grace, in us. The gift of God is eternal life and that life, always dependent on God, inheres in us. Our soul has true subsistence. It has eternality because it was given such by God, and it subsists because the judgment which might destroy it has no longer any place, having been entirely satisfied by Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross. When we ride the bus, even our bus acquires, because of its destination, qualities of inherence and subsistence. Our wheels are good – they won’t fall off.
Causality and Dependence, Necessity and Contingency: God calls and causes all things to come into being. We are entirely dependent on God. Christ calls us to be his disciples. This causes us to repent, to change, to move, to follow. The cause of life is presented by Christ in an otherwise death-blasted world, and so causes us to change how we feel and what we think and especially, how we relate to others. We’re not stuck in a dying world, like sad aliens in a horrible science-fiction movie. We are living brothers and sisters, having been caused by Chris to be dependent on him, but in our dependency, getting out of the vast charnel pit that existence would otherwise signify. By dependence on God, the wreckage becomes a living vehicle. God by his power moves all things, but for us, dependent on God, the bus moves through churches and from and with churches, to a City.
Whether this is necessary or contingent may be answered decisively in the sense that God’s Will is always necessary and necessarily true; what is unknown is when such Will is going to be effectuated. Whether the timing of this is contingent or predestined remains a legitimate mystery; discussed at length, without being conclusively resolved, in chapters 9 through 11 of Romans. Who resists his will? is one of the verses within that set of passages of the Bible. How will they hear, unless a preacher is sent? Is another such verse in the same set of passages.
Community: Purified and redeemed by Christ, we subsist with each other in a community. The passengers on my little bus ride comprise a community. Our local church, any one church is a community. The collection of seven churches of Revelation is a community. The Holy City is a community. We exist simultaneously, we exist in conscious relation with each other – the community exists to worship God, to praise and enjoy Him forever. The community exists as a set of relationships which is greater than the sum of its parts because the community as we experience it is in motion. The very term mandates interior, psychological two-way recognitions.
Possibility and Impossibility, Existence and Non-Existence: Everything is possible to God. Nothing is impossible to God. God calls even that which does not exist, into existence. “God quickens the dead and calls those things which are not, as though they were.” Rom. 4:17. We exist. Motion toward God may not have existed, but it does now. Fellowship together toward a different set of relations with each other may not have existed, but it does (or may do so) now. If the City exists above us now, it will descend to us – God has so promised – and if the highway to the City does not yet exist, it will. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. We are not ontologically, theologically or politically trapped. If we may develop a concept of a new set of relations, then the concept is possible. And so we have something to talk about – our relations begin with communication. But not communication in a vacuum or stalled, lost or at stasis. Communications on a planned bus-ride, savoring of some fragrance of its ultimate destination – implying shared purposes, shared direction, shared transcendental goal, our shared Savior. God’s grace inherently presents and represents the potentiality of our movements.
(As an addendum to the foregoing, by way of rhetorical observation and question, I note the following. I continue to substitute the word and concept of ‘relationships’ for the word ‘objects’ in my use of philosophic-metaphysical language. My rhetorical questions are : Why are objects so important? Why aren’t relationships inherently more important than objects? Why is the concept of a triangle, simply because it inheres of some mathematical qualities, more important than a relation with God or others? Reading commentaries about Kant is an endless immersion in language about objects, appearances, representations, things which may or may not exist or whose existence may or may not be provable. Which is a more complex, important relationship – a relationship with a bowling ball, or a relationship with another human being? Relationships need not appear solely within the narrow constraints of space or time as Kant would assert; such a position binds all his objects in a whirling orbit around his own perceptions and consciousness. If we are concerned about proving the existence of an external world, or the reliability of our perceptions of that world, where should our attentions begin?)
Security on the Bus
The concept of security still matters. This is our shared hippy love bus. No one is assaulted on the bus. No one is thrown off the bus. If people don’t really belong on the bus, sooner or later they’ll get off. Our security is in our motion. People who intend harm, who have ulterior motives, will not be satisfied with our relations on the bus and will not be happy about our direction. Even moving slowly in the direction of holiness, an inch a day, will be enough to cause the unholy to exit. Our fears may be phenomenal (that is, a matter of sense data, not imaginary) or noumenal (anxiety intensely felt, yet having no basis in any sense data, having no anchor in the real, sensible world). But without dealing with the concept of fear, of our vulnerability, which is real, not imagined, our movements are stymied. There is no magic wand we possess to make death, failure or fear go away as far as our sense data is concerned. We are gifted by God with faith and as that faith grows, the negative-yet-real aspects of life soften and dissolve, but given the dissolution of our bodies with the passage of time, that faith has to be transcendent.
The set of relations we would like to achieve are characterized by the Beatitudes, by the Sermon on the Mount. But to get to that set of relations among ourselves, we will need to move, an inch a day. The relations are transcendent because they rely on a security of existence which we acquire over time as our underlying trust in God grows. The growth of trust in God are the axles, the movement of the bus. We do it together, or it doesn’t move at all. No wheel goes anywhere unless the axles go too. The love and kindness implied by Jesus’ teachings are not easily or quickly acquired and putting them in practice can not be an exercise in solitary piety.
Underlying this is the view that love requires real communications, and real communications require real security. While our interior minds and psychology are still distracted by the basic vulnerability we are captured by in this mortal world of mortal life, we are still always defending or protecting or hiding or running or gesturing or evading in some spiritual, psychological sense. We make speeches so people will hear that we exist. The point of the bus ride is that we no longer have to assert that we exist. Our existence is a transcendental truth – it cannot be defeated because it is the gift of God in Christ. As time goes and we believe that, then we will begin to communicate with each in order to hear each other and understand (even if we don’t agree!), not simply to assert loudly, trying to convince ourselves, that death has not eaten up our lives yet. Security from death has to be a two-way street; dead people don’t talk, dead people don’t listen, the dead don’t understand and no longer care. The community has to be secured and that means all the connecting threads within the community are secured. The bus ride is safe.
Your Scars and My Scars
Your scars and my scars are transcendental and epistemological. When Jesus appeared to Thomas after his resurrection, Jesus identified himself to Thomas by means of his scars – the way Thomas knew it was really him, really Jesus. Jesus’ scars transcended his death and resurrection – in his resurrection body, those scars still appeared. Thomas could see them – Thomas could put his finger into one of the scars. Jesus had a real, physical, resurrected, transcendental body. So will we.
While we are waiting for this promised resurrected, transcendent body, we have something to talk about on the bus, among ourselves, distinct from what we might see beyond and outside the window glass. You will know me better when you see my scars and I will know you better when I see yours. Human suffering is not trivial, is not to be ignored. Human suffering is not a distraction from the ‘real story’ – human suffering, starting with Christ’s, is the initial chapter of the real story. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
We talk about metaphysical philosophy for a reason – to build a vehicle which will move us to a place of entire, transcendent unity. The unity of apperception arranging and enabling human experience in accordance with metaphysical categories matters. But the point of beginning is not my perception of an object. We do not begin with objects, appearances, representations, intuitions, cognitions, judgments, understandings, or a mental apparatus to apprehend or gather particular appearances of objects into a manifold (organized structure of sense data.) Whether those objects are noumenal or phenomenal, whether our perceptions imply one object in two aspects, or two separate objects, one of which is unknowable – all of this is subordinated to a greater, more important, more transcendent knowledge. Because Christ’s suffering is foundational, our suffering is as well. The manifold is not a manifold of appearances of objects, but a manifold of relationships with the living. Man was not made for metaphysical concepts. The concepts were made for man.
We start with relationships and like the Apostle Paul introducing himself as he began his letter to the Romans, those relations exist in a context of surrounding understandings and history. We explore those relationships by showing each other our wounds, our history as well as the cognitive and intellectual conclusions we have reached. God has given us the interior mental and emotional equipment to appreciate suffering in a manner which is bi-lateral, two-way. To think that the tools to appreciate human suffering mean that the tools are more important than the suffering, is to confuse the scalpel with the patient. The patient is more important.
Kant’s metaphysics should be stood on its head – one should start with the people, beginning with Jesus. Then we ought to work outward to those tools, metaphysical, theological, spiritual, emotional, cognitive – the whole array of categories of perception and mental organization – which allow us to know God and know each other. That will be the topic of conversation, the recognition implied by our cognitions, the conclusions reached in our judgments, the results and limitations of our reasoning, as we inch our way toward holiness. We exist in God’s universe and there is no limit to the degree to which cognized appearances, rational inferences or deductions, or underlying powers of perception and interior organization of experience may be stripped away to some new layer capable of being described -there is always another level underneath that. All those activities, isolated without purpose, border on mere introspection. Reality is never a matter of mere introspection, never simply an exercise in stripping back layer after layer of perception and mental organization until we reach some indivisible point, call it the unity of apperception, then declare victory and abandon the field.
Rather, we apply our intelligence and direct our movements to a revealed yet visionary end which captures both mystical and rational elements. Non in legendo sed intelligendo leges consistunt – the Law consists not in being read, but in being understood – a Latin maxim perhaps to be attributed to Cicero. In our use the meaning of the Law should be understood in its broadest terms and significance, expressing God’s Word as to its revealed ends and almost-inexpressible ideals as well as its relations, ethics, directives and philosophy. Metaphysical philosophy counts – that’s why we still read Aristotle and Plato – and it contributes to a transcendental understanding of the City God presents, which is both a place appearing in space and time and a consciousness which we may carry onto a bus for relations among ourselves and in ministry to others. If in our hippy love bus, as volunteers we attend to prison ministry, we will carry the City with us. We understand where we are going. We understand why.
Let’s Start Something New
To do something new, I have to make up a word – several in fact. Words like transcendental or freedom or reason are used in such different ways as to be almost formlessly broad. And I want my words to work and to mean approximately the same thing in three different areas of discussion: Within Empirical Reality (sense data and impressions), the world we live in, which includes generally, the church in all its presentations as well as the nations and various social and language groupings; Outside Empirical Reality, where space and time are no longer limitations and we can have abstract discussions about logical forms of thought and metaphysical relations as well as discussions about the interior processing of human experience, which is both cognitive and psychological; and in Very Specific Circumstances, like loading a bus of volunteers from a particular church to go conduct prison ministry with an identifiable group of prisoners at a specific time and location under the supervision of the administration of a particular prison on a particular day. If we want to arrive at a transcendental city, we have to find a map to move along three planes of discussion in parallel.
If I were writing in German, I could string nouns together until I got to the full concepts I wanted. But this is English, so I’ll provide a full-length concatenated word and then a shorthand word for it. God’s Will-Revelation-Word-Spirit-Reason-our responding faith-understanding- will-reason-freedom is my combination word, but I can’t keep dragging that around in every paragraph, so I’ll just shorten it to ‘freedom’ or ‘reason.’ At the risk of butchering words like ‘freedom,’ and ‘reason’ which mean something starkly different in theology, in political philosophy and metaphysical philosophy, I’m going to start using these words as blithely as a hippy blowing massive soap bubbles at a love-in.
Meant in the way I have just identified, we want to apply words like freedom and reason within empirical reality, outside empirical reality and in some very specific ministry activities. What we do in our specifics will be new because we are relating it at all three levels, both with respect to those we minister to and those we minister with. Even using words like ‘minister’ or ‘ministry’ implies that all sorts of choices have already been made – we are Christians, we do Christ’s work at Christ’s direction, which we know because of Christ’s Word. We intend and expect, as we do Christ’s work, to arrive at Christ’s City with those others, with whom and to whom we minister. Our visionary Christian idealism shows up in this world like a sign pointing to the next.
This will save the trouble of constantly substituting my use and meaning of freedom, reason and will for the use Kant makes of them, because once the substitution is made and understood, he has something of value to contribute to our journey. Every beginning is in time, said Kant (B550/A522); notwithstanding the eternal nature of God’s Word, we insert an ignition key and begin now, this morning. I keep injecting Kant into this discussion because he spent a lot of time explaining what we would normally regard as exterior phenomena like space and time, asserting them to be interior phenomena. Whether we agree with him on that point or not, we have to change how we relate to each other and that begins with changing how we relate to our own experience of the world we live in. Jesus said love your neighbor as you love yourself – we don’t think a lot usually about the second half of that directive, but to start something new, we should do so. Then we can begin with a new idealism which is transcendent – we start by transcending ourselves.
We should be intelligent. An intelligible condition means something that is not the result of a previous (and apparently unlimited) series of natural causes-and-effects, as rigid in their own way as links in a chain. Intelligible means we stop asking Did I feel it? and start asking Can I think it? As long as we know what the word freedom means, we can be free to start thinking intelligently. Our starting decision is intelligible; it results from our act of freedom, reason and will. It should be obvious that this is not a predetermined physics experiment like billiard balls bouncing around a pool table energetically, but never once making up their own minds about what their speed, direction or ultimate resting place will be – but having said that it should be obvious, the implied reasoning and intellectual posture of modern physics has more of an effect on our thinking than we realize. The answer to changed relations is not technology, not a better computer chip, although I admire the way the one installed in my cardiac pacemaker works. We could not invent an eternal destination which is a holy city from above, and it is not the result of cause-and-effect. But once presented, we have reason to go there, and if we have the will, the freedom to do so. Our journey and map to this goal did not have to previously exist; we have the power to act independently of the past – a reversal, an annihilation of causality’s grim iron hands, resulting from our freedom and resulting in further freedom-in-relation.
A causality of linked experiences depends on the conditions of time. Freedom means beginning a state of affairs spontaneously, and this type of freedom is characterized as transcendental. Kant declared that there was no antecedent first cause available to examination by human reason because he did not believe his reason could be simultaneously reliable, intelligible, adequately equipped, and also completely separated from God or theological assertion, to attain to the proof or demonstration of an unconditioned state. Our first antecedent cause derives from God’s Will, but God’s Will does not exist as a result of a prior cause nor do we labor blindly to prove the existence of God or a first cause – we cheerfully admit that these are the fundamental elements of faith. We do not float in the air, lonely ghosts looking for reasons in the sky – we relate to our Lord Jesus, who first sought us, and then to each other. It’s Jesus who ascends into the sky – we only have to follow him. But that following is transcendental, we now have arrived at a place to begin in freedom. Now idealism works.
God gives us today good reason to begin. Transcendental freedom means the possibility of freedom independent of the coercion or limitations of the past. We have the freedom to disconnect from the past if we have reason to do so and a direction which leads to a destination – hence the word intelligible – a key going forward. Our decision to journey is intelligible; our bus ride is intelligible; our relations with each other on the bus are intelligible; our destination, Jerusalem-from-Above, is the source and root of an intelligible reason to move from the dreary (or at least unsatisfactory and temporary) ground we inhabit now. Our transcendental city is both noumenal and phenomenal (knowable). We know it by rendering the Word of God into our experiences, and then crafting from there a plan which is intelligible and communicating that to others. We are never merely engaged in introspection. We engage in original action – we may cause it, because we are free to think it, to reason it, to will it. Freedom does not arise from a connection of sense-data or causal natural or historical appearances. This freedom is a response to God’s Word. Our reason frames itself an order or plan of its own, entailing relationships which are adapted to conditions according to its own ideas. As Kant would tell us, It is at least possible that reason possess causality. (B577/A549).
Prayers beget visions. Visions beget plans.
If the vision is to be large, then the prayers which give rise to such visions must be large. The intellect can grasp the world in at least large, theoretical measures – but the intellect also has to control its irritation when a recalcitrant and perverse world makes a whole series of progressively more self-destructive choices. What I desire is mercy, not sacrifice, Jesus said. To engage in mercy is to stand in relation to others. Relations entail understanding – not necessarily agreement or endorsement – and relations are a two-way street. If I understand why you drink gin in a barroom all night long, you should understand why I object. There are no hall passes – our conduct together stands in a set of relations. That includes sexuality – no one’s sexuality exists in a bubble. If I understand your conduct or inclinations, you understand why I may object. If someone wishes to fly a flag, mutual understanding implies that the content of the flag may be something I object to, as well as the practice of flag-flying. To borrow again from Kant: Everywhere in the world there are clear indications of an arrangement carried out with great wisdom according to a determinate purpose . . . there exists therefor a sublime and wise cause, an intelligence acting through freedom. (B654/A626). In response to the argument this is how I feel, this is my experience – I will respond, great wisdom has acted with a determinate purpose, an intelligence acts and reveals himself through freedom. As Jesus put it, I am the light of the world. When Jesus declares who he is, he puts himself in a relationship.
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