BoilerplatE
Table of Contents
I've had two great movements or trials in my life, and I am somewhere in the third. My age using Pentatuechal numerology would be something like 103 years old (40 + 40 + 23), but my actual age is about half of that.
My first "40" is the regular one of becoming an adult. Both worldly success and faith have never come easily to me. Doubts about life's significance were compounded by doubts about whether I could ever find a place in this world and whether a meaning-providing religious understanding could approach truth.
The second "40" began when I did the first adult thing in my life and moved away from my hometown university to Utah State University, where I switched majors from Computer Science to Civil Engineering. There was a leap of faith involved. At the beginning of this adventure, none of the prior doubts had reached conclusions. Utah State was filled with trials and tribulations, deadlines, loneliness, self-reflection, the great outdoors, joy, friendship, love, loss, brown bears, self-realization, answered prayer, and finally a durable faith that wasn't as afraid to walk a different path. After taking an extended time at school, as well as some time in the desert - both literally and figuratively - I concluded that the two fields of study that I was kind of good at would be too soul-destroying to have as a career.
I moved to Oregon to start again. I purposely worked jobs that were nothing like my training, working directly with children with special or extended needs. The jobs were enough to live on, but I kept them from being full-time. I fully utilized the off time to recover, think, write, explore, and sort out my place in the world.
Finally, it was time to get a career. Back to school I went to get a teaching certificate in science education. With a career, I married and started a family, which is my current trial/adventure.
Ah yes, labels - useful, but easily misused. Even though I agree with many of the original Protestant criticisms of Catholicism and have been 'churched' among various Baptist denominations, I don't consider myself a Protestant. (Yes, I know Baptists aren't technically protestant.) I have had many thoughtful and positive influences as a reader and subscriber to First Things during the time the Anglican-turned-Catholic Father Richard John Neuhaus was the Editor in Chief (-2009). I would have no problem if my children married reliable, moderately conservative Catholics whose worldview followed in Father Neuhaus' mold.
I do not sit in the Reformed camp either, although I appreciate many in this camp and can agree with much of the basic outlines of Calvinism (but not the whole TULIP). Theologically, (Eastern) Orthodoxy is the most appealing. This is ironic because Orthodox theology has been preserved for so long by such a strong emphasis on tradition, and I can hardly be called a traditionalist. Conservative? Yes. Traditionalist? No.
The label Christian NOS ("Not Otherwise Specified") has the connotation of compromise with it.
Elitist Latitudinarian fits, but doesn't sound right. I hesitate with this label as well due to my commitment to the basic Christian orthodoxy of the original version of the Nicene Creed (ie. without the filioque) and possible future commitment to Orthodoxy (as in Eastern). However humble or broad, any claim of a relationship with God is elitist. However, the type of elitism Jesus taught us is that of the humble servant.
Latitudinarianism is the term most often applied to describe the broad religious convictions of the founders of the United States. The divisiveness of competing sects was largely kept at bay early in this country's history as long as a broadly non-papist version of Christianity was held. Although I don't believe all the invisible church has lived under the sign of the cross, the cross bears the most reliable approach to God. The Latitudinarian term essentially boils down to my agnosticism regarding concrete church structures and my struggles with submission and commitment. Structure is important in a pragmatic-pedagogical sense, and possibly in a historical-spiritual sense, but I have encountered significant hang-ups with every church, and that is not where I spend my modern mind and body. However, with a few minor exceptions, I keep finding I side with the theology and practice of the Orthodox Church against a long-overprescribing Western Christianity.
Perhaps the best label is an Old Testament Christian. Were I Jewish, I would be a Messianic one, but that commitment has never been before me as a possibility. One of the great successes in my studies has been closing the gulf between the perceived God of the Old Testament and the New, and making that durable connection from the Sumerians to the Hebrews to Christ. The Sumerian religion is both proto-Abrahamic and proto-Christian, helping to guide the reading of the Bible from the Sumerian divine words of ME spoken by the unified creative Sumerian triad of gods, through the personification of the ME of destiny in Enki/Ea(/Haia), through the Word of YHWH and Angel of YHWH, through to Jesus.
Philosophically, I have considered the label Stoic Christian Existentialist. The starting point of Ancient Stoicism is the presupposition of the Logos, the universal order. The 'stoic' part also directs and corrects the 'existentialist' part, as Existentialism is so often used as an excuse to do away with all knowledge claims. I seek to put knowledge in its proper place by bracketing it within its degree of certainty. Doing away with knowledge smacks of going back to the garden, which we can't do, or forward to annihilation, which I hope any reader of this would say we shouldn't do. Finally, my attitude towards many things in life can also be described as stoic.
Although many great Christians in history have been influenced by Stoicism, they have hesitated with its overall materialistic outlook. That is where Existentialism comes in. The word 'exist' comes to us from the Latin (although it could have just as easily come from Greek) and literally means "to stand out." In everyday usage, the word is used to talk about concrete things - like books, chairs, and hammers - and concrete actions - open, sit, and hammer. More abstract ideas like "GK Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874" or "Energy is related to mass by the equation E=mc2" can be applied to concrete objects, so we call them objective relationships or facts. We usually don't talk about abstract ideas 'existing', but say they are part of reality. Reality includes the universal order or ground of all being, all that exists (ie. "stands out"), and the relationships between them.
Although that is how Western language works and how most scientists and mathematicians would like to leave it, objectivity does not happen cleanly. The identification of blobs of matter as "book", "table", and "hammer" is not determined by a completely objective relationship, but by acts of will and purpose. The 'book' and 'hammer' are common conventions based on hypothetical or ideal function and purpose. A book is a book because it is ideally meant to be read. If I were to use it as a hammer and never read it, I would still refer to it as a book, because of the currency of the ideal. For myself, however, I may both see it and use it as a hammer. The way someone sees, feels, and the actions they choose are said to be subjective.
Subjective and objective truths are thought of as opposites, but they are necessarily intermixed in knowledge in a way similar to kinetic and potential energy. Even in the stodgiest mathematics and science, where objectivity is supposed to rule, subjective truths are required. Before our computer-based age, subjective truths were called metaphysics; now it is called metadata, meta- being the Greek prefix meaning "about", "after", "beside", "with" or "among".
Biology forces our hand to objectively identify things that are inherently suited for a purpose - a teleology. A human heart has the purpose of pumping blood to the lungs, along with other purposes, not all of which have been or perhaps can be enumerated. We can definitely say when the heart stops working and when it is not working correctly. While we consider the human heart separately as an organ and often attribute to it one function, it is integrated into an organism - a Kantian Whole. That organism is part of a population that reproduces through males and females, and that population is functionally part of an ecology, and functionally suited to an environment. All of life is full of functional meaning. This has uncomfortably forced the sciences away from positivism and a purely physics-based approach. Frankly, many scientists who recognize this keep it on the down low.
I am agnostic about the Gaia Hypothesis, but in principle, one can see the Earth as an organism in the greater organism of the solar system, in the greater organism of the galaxy, in the greater organism of the universe, in God. There is potentially an integrated functional meaning all the way down and all the way up, and that means there is ultimate meaning. As with functional meaning, ultimate meaning exists independent of our knowledge or acknowledgment.
The brand of existentialism I have in mind is that of the "Father of Existentialism," Soren Kierkegaard, and not necessarily that which followed. To this "Danish Socrates", the universal Logos is somewhat neglected by his opposition to the arrogant, all-encompassing system of Hegel. Hegel had made out that the arch of history was knowable through his logic (ie. Logos) based 'historical dialectic'. Eventually, the historical dialectic would lead to a Godly culture precisely because the Logos is God. Kierkegaard asserts that God is more than Logos; therefore, God cannot be known in any meaningful way through logic alone. There is no getting around it - a relationship is required, and the nature of the relationship between an insignificant human and the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe means this relationship is more than a little unequal. Kierkegaard nails it when he (among others) has us surrender to God our own pursuits of individuality in infinite resignation, and receive back an individuality crafted by God for God.
I won't pretend that I've done that, but I've dabbled enough and received back enough to know that it's true.
We can never trust a scientific model as being the absolute truth or an absolute reality. However good models of science may be about making predictions and supplying a kind of explanation about the world, the philosophy and history of science have shown they are always supersedable and superseded. The glib determinism built on Newtonian mechanics is gone. Modern physics has explained space, which is the most literal 'no-thing', as if it were something. Previously independent time and space have been conjoined together into spacetime. Mass - that quintessential measurement of stuff - is being abolished in quantum mechanics. Light is seen as both a wave and a particle, depending on how the looking is done. What we take for granted as 'existing' in our everyday world becomes utterly foreign at the microscopic scale. Add in Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger's Cat, and the least that can be said is that mankind does not have a firm grasp on what properly exists and what it means to be.
And yet the Logos has not been harmed by any of it.
Most of the hard sciences appear to be converging on explanations that are becoming increasingly verisimilar and are improving at making more precise and accurate predictions. They deserve to be trusted within their competencies. The soft sciences are a mixed bag, replicating at a low rate and becoming increasingly convoluted without adding utility or improving predictions. Particularly poor are the social sciences, with experimental studies replicating less than half the time, and many instances of fraud, incompetence, and political capture. Against the claims of many science boosters, it is not obvious that the soft sciences are better than the historical/legal method, which merely constructs conclusions from the evidence available. It is not obvious that the social sciences are better than relatively unprejudiced stereotypes from nonscientists.