Whole, Part or Not?

Over on Undeception, Steve reacts to a Focus on the Family video in which one Del Tackett paints a picture of Creation inside a box and God existing completely outside the box, poking his finger in to move things along. Steve's reaction is to consider panentheism as a better possible model of God's relation to the universe. (For the uninitiated, panentheism claims that the universe is a part of God but that God extends infinitely beyond its confines as opposed to pantheism which claims that God and the universe and co-equal or that God is animating spirit of the universe).

Now I am reluctant to attack Christians directly. I don't want to be THAT kind of atheist. However, The Outsider Test can be a powerful tool to refining our thinking. I seem to have anointed myself The Outsider Test Crusader! Or is it the Hyphenated Avenger (See below)? In either case, if the job comes with a cape, I'll take it :)

As The Outsider, I must say that discussion of pantheism, panentheism and outside-the-boxism strikes me as an angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin discussion. While the selected view point may make sense of an individual's definition of God's nature, the matter is as immune to examination as invisible angels doing the hokey-pokey. Each theory produces the same set of results: the sun comes up and goes down, humans do bad things to each other, cries for deliverance from an indifferent universe rise up to the heavens. The position from which the creator hears these cries seems to have no impact on his or her or its response. Is there even a God? That is a separate question but spinning these bizzaro theories in order to save a concept based on personal preference and vapor makes you look irrelevant at best and kooky at worst.

Just to prove that I hold myself to the Outsider Test, I plan to give Tackett's critique of Carl Sagan's box - "The cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be." - a good think today.

Than are Dreamt of in Your Metaphysics

My problem with philosophers who sit so secure in the belief that they have a superior source of truth is that their output almost never has to face the test of actual reality.

I chuckled reading this story related by Carl Sagan in Demon Haunted World:

At a dinner many decades ago, the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to the toast, "To physics and metaphysics." By "metaphysics," people then meant something like philosophy, or truths you could recognize just by thinking about them. They could also have included pseudoscience.

Wood answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it seems to make. He consults the scientific literature. The more he reads, the more promising the idea becomes. Thus prepared, he goes to the laboratory and devises an experiment to test it. The experiment is painstaking. Many
possibilities are checked. The accuracy of measurement is refined, the error bars reduced. He lets the chips fall where they may. He is devoted only to what the experiment teaches. At the end of all this work, through careful experimentation, the idea is found to be worthless. So the physicist discards it, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded as he raised his glass high, is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

(Read last night in Demon Haunted World but got text from Textuality)

The Blue Parakeet: Chap 3->Chap 5

In Chapter 3 of The Blue Parakeet , Scot McKnight lists out different ways that people read the Bible and, guess what? His way is the best! :) I suppose his slices are as good as anyone's. I liked his take on the distortion of a Daily Blessings Calendar and musings on a proposed "Wrath of God Calendar of Warnings".

Things pick up steam in Chapter 4. Here McKnight starts digging holes. First off I have to say that his concept of "wiki-story" seems really awkward to me. The Wikipedia to which he compares the books of the Bible is a collaboration of authors creating a unity. McKnight's wiki-stories are re-tellings of the same story (if I understand him). It would as if each Wikipedia contributor wrote a whole new article each time. Wiki authors may tussle over a subject but ultimately must collaborate. Wiki-story authors can ignore each other, take potshots or compete. The analogy doesn't bring anything to his point.

Chapter 5 attempts to map out the single story of the entire collection of books that make up the Christian Bible. Earlier in The Blue Parakeet, I appreciated the author's admonition that we must read each book as its own story. Unfortunately, the way we must read each story is circumscribed by a framework that is imposed from outside. When McKnight trumpeted reading the Bible along with Tradition, I got suspicious. My suspicions were justified. It just so happens the meaning of the Bible is... conservative evangelical theology! Surprised? We learn in this chapter (pg 77) that Jesus died to pay for our sins. I was hoping for insight and I got Substitutionary Atonement. What's more, McKnight informs us that the arch of the Bible is all about Oneness. We are treated to lines like this:

After splitting Adam into Ish [man] and Ishah [woman], God brings them back together in "One Flesh." [pg 70]

I suppose all the polygamy in the Old Testament is just a great big mistake that will be rectified in time for Mark 10:2 Oneness is slathered so thickly on the Bible that one wants to go read it cover-to-cover just to reassure oneself that the real Bible is still under there. I just feel that there is so much going on in each book of the Bible, so much behind each verse that boiling it down to such a pithy theme does violence to the many human lives presenting themselves to us across the millennia. I learned the word "noumena" from Carl Sagan, the deep wonder at a thing that is transcendant from everyday life. When I read Paul's letters or the Book of Job, I sense the gulf of time and share a oneness with those authors. When Scot McKnight wraps a thousand pages up with a nice, evangelical bow, I feel a loss.

I imagine Dr McKnight would say that he feels a sense of wonder when he reads each of his wiki-stories. Perhaps he even gets some of the flavor of wonder that I do. I fear, however, that his tether to Tradition keeps him close enough to Jesus that he is unable to explore the deeper shadows hinted at in each writing, the shadows where one encounters human nature unvarnished by theme or theology. Pity, really.

My overall take thus far would be:

• If we read the Bible along with Tradition and all we get out is a traditional view of the Bible, why am I reading this book instead of attended the Episcopal Church?
• If we are supposed to apply "that was then and this is now" liberally in order to justify ignoring the commandments that no longer fit our way of life, how are we better off than the people who get there Bible verses from calendars? Those who actually read I Kings end up in the same place.

My Sunday School class was reading 1 Corinthians' verses on divorce and marriage. We really struggled with how to deal with these and similar teachings and I hoped that this book would help put things in perspective. It doesn't sem to be moving in that direction. Let's see if it can redeem itself...