Category — Nature-Freedom Ground Motive

Here is my definition of relevance — knowing the Word and knowing the heart. This means identifying and pressing the antitheses, discerning between the religious ground-motives and those aspects of life that are relative. Identify and press the deep antithesis between the two kinds of men, identify and press the antithesis between the Word and every other worldview. On the other hand, accept truth where you find it, but reject the ground-motives. When minsters start to trade what is absolute (the Word) for what is relative (man’s temporal-aspectual experience), make the relative absolute, or dismiss truth because it is spoken by an enemy, the battle is lost.

“For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart”.
— Hebrews 4:12

The self-designated “Four Horseman” of the New Atheists are tilting at straw-men in regards to Biblical religion. They assume that faith is the central concern of the Christian. They do not identify the critical issue: pre-theoretical commitments, either their own or others’. 

In their assumptions, they elevate “reason” to the place of deity, while they attribute the elevation of faith to the Christian. This latter attribution is a mistake. They would admit that reason is ultimate in their assumption. But, they make the mistake of assuming that the Christian makes the same kind of commitment to an aspect of experience. In this case, faith. This aspect they designate as non-rational, and thus an enemy of any thinking person. It is true, faith is not reason, but difference does not imply antithesis. As an aspect of temporal experience faith exists in the heart of redeemed man in Shalom with all other aspects, including reason. Faith is not central to my existence, even as ethics, aesthetics or economics are not central. They are all equally ultimate in the temporal realm. Reason is one aspect of my experience, not the dictator of it. 

Within the hearts of the N/A, any aspect that is not reason exists in a religious dialectic with all others. They must, given their commitment to “analysis”, live in constant tension with all other aspects of temporal existence, faith being only one of them.

Daniel Dennet , one of the New Atheists, is religiously committed to the Analytical aspect of temporal experience. In issue 70 of Philosophy Now, — an issue devoted to the subject of Utopias— he writes: “Religious allegiance has ramifications too important to be out of bounds to rational inquiry” (24-5). Agreed. Of course, Dennet sees himself on the side of rational inquiry over and against any one with any sort of religious commitment. He assumes that he and his fellow “brights” are themselves above critique, having no religious commitment of their own. This is a deep self-deception on Dennet’s part. For Dennet the denial of any personal religious commitment is a kind of mantra. But, the authority he attributes to the rational process of inquiry is no different in kind than the worship offered by any other human being to an absolute. Religious neutrality is an impossibility. 

Dennet’s religion of Analysis provides a justification for the use of coercive power against any one that might take issue with its premise. Dennet is willing to leave off from rational inquiry and simply “establish a system of compulsory education about the world’s religions for all children of the United States”, because currently religious fanaticism is based on “enforced ignorance of the young”. This compulsory education would “Oblige their elders to inform them about the varieties of religion, and lack of religion, in the world, and [then] they will find it much more difficult to indoctrinate the children under their authority” (25). This would be accomplished through legislation and the sword (”bright senators, representatives and governors”). “Rational inquiry” would become a rare bird indeed. This is Dennet’s Utopian vision for the rest of us: a bare-boned fascism. 

Dennet takes issue with what he perceives as forced education, only to replace it with one that is enforced. His flat view of people and things creates a world in which he has no trouble with managing and controlling others, regardless of their own religious convictions. He is a “bright” and as such has the right to impose his religion on those who are not, using the power of the sword against those who might give him any trouble. The one kind of world that Mr. Dennet does not want is one in which we are free to ignore him and his new “openness”. 

Modernity suggest that the finite, or temporal reality, exists as a mirror of the self, as a means to create states of affectivity, or orders of feeling within the self. “Objective truth”, meaning empirical evidence, exists as a means of ordering and understanding the self. The self of Modernity is encaged by temporal reality. But, man always seeks unity, and as such seeks to simplify reality to a single idea, or substance. In so doing, the mirror becomes a flattened surface, and in turn so does the self. 

William F. Lynch, describing the Modernist perspective, writes: “The univocal mind often poses as the exclusive organizer and interpreter of a highly concrete, pluralistic and individuated world… Its whole temptation is to reduce everything, like and unlike, to a flat community of sameness— all in the name of an intelligibility and type of order that does not and cannot belong to the real world” (Christ and Apollo, p. 122). 

“The univocal man has no respect for reality. He is either contemptuous of it or destroys it, or flattens it— or he refuses to take up responsibility in the face of it. He is the true dogmatist— having a secular effigy of true dogma… The univocal man is not free. He is rigid, unbending, fixed” (ibid).

I can think of no better literary example of this than Javert, and his nemesis, Jean Valjean, as the converse of the univocal mind. 

Modernity is an assumption that men can understand, comprehend in toto, control and manipulate all of human experience. “Science” and its related projects are the means by which this task of “salvation” is to be accomplished.

Post-modernity recognizes the multiplicity and diversity of human experience and concludes that there is no central or higher meaning. The assumption that follows is that any attempt at a singular or certain meaning is futile.

Modernity recognizes “law” within a modal sphere, and absolutizes a single aspectual law as dominating all others. Post-modernity recognizes the diversity of aspects, but assumes a religious dialectic between all aspects, and thus the impossibility of any one “Master-Determiner”. All aspects cancel the others out. Badiou describes the post-modern world as “atonal”. Zizek, following Badiou, characterizes the postmodern mind as “a world of multiplicities lacking a determinate tonality” (In Defense of Lost Causes, 31).

What modernity seems to offer is a singular, certain “answer”, based in the analytical aspect of temporal experience. Modernity, as a project, assumes that empirical evidence provides objective truth. Truth is “out there”, it is possible.

What post-modernity seems to offer is the recognition that experience cannot be reduced to a single, dominating aspect. Post-modernity is a reaction against “the hegemony of scientific discourse” (Defense, 33). Post-modernity appears religiously committed to the sensate or psychical aspect of temporal experience. Foucault’s lifestyle and death are often used as an example of the post-modern life in demonstration. He is the philosopher of bio-politics.

Both assume the autonomy of the mind. Both assume that meaning is dictated by things. Both assume that Being precedes Meaning. The two exist in a religious dialectic, although the two aspects to which they cling are, in reality, relative.

One of the stories circulating through evangelical websites is the Carrie Prejean thing. I have no interest in the story directly, but rather I am interested in the way in which evangelicals are using her as a kind of “proof” of the rightness of their convictions.

This is just confirmation that the evangelical church is mired in modernity: a religious dependence upon “science” as the foundation of faith. As Zizek has written: “Religious fundamentalists are among the most passionate digital hackers, and always prone to combine their religion with the latest findings of science: for them, religious statements and scientific statements belong to the same modality of positive knowledge” (In Defense of Lost Causes, 31).

Prejean is a kind of “specimen” that proves the argument for heterosexual marriage. Forget the fact that Word of God says it plainly already. Here is empirical proof that we have it right. She is a kind of Penthouse Joan of Arc in the minds of evangelical men everywhere (albeit a surgically enhanced Joan). Men, wholly embedded in the image, having no real knowledge of her person, are singing her praises.

As John Gray has said: “Religious fundamentalists see themselves as having remedies for the maladies of the modern world. In reality they are symptoms of the disease they pretend to cure” (ibid, 43).

Propositions on the Religious Ground Motives

1. All public expressions of society (family, church, state, business, etc.) depend upon spiritually dominant (religious ground motives) cultural powers (formative energy).

2. Four religious ground motives have clashed in Western history.

3. Three of these ground motives are internally dualistic. Their discord pushes one’s posture of life to opposite extremes. They contain antithetical absolutes, created out of aspects of temporal experience. 

4. The religious ground motive exists as an antithesis without the possibility of dialectical synthesis. 

5. The correlative aspects of reality are logically mutually exclusive, yet are subject to theoretical dialectic. 

6. The Biblical ground motive is not a doctrine, nor can it be theologically elaborated. It is the central impulse of the human ego in Christ. 

7. The religious dialectic arises when a religious ground motive deifies and so absolutizes, ipso facto, part of created reality (an aspect of our temporal experience). 

8. The religious ground motive based upon an aspect of the temporal order always calls forth the correlative or counterpart of that aspect (i.e. Form/Matter [cultural power; material world, biotic functions]). How are these correlative, as particular counterparts? Why does Matter imply Form? 

9. There is an antithesis between the Creator and the creature.

10. There is an antithesis between the each of the four religious ground motives. Likewise, there is an antithesis between the inner, absolutized poles of the apostate ground motives. 

11. The coherence of temporal reality is found in the heart of man (Roots, 29-32). Apostate man (man in Adam) seeks coherence beginning with temporal reality (being). Man in Christ, seeks coherence in the religious ground motive of the Word-Revelation of the Triune God (meaning). 

12. The religious ground motive is the central impulse of the human heart. It determines the answers, in fact is the answer, to the three basic questions of life: “what is absolute?”; “where does thought begin?”; and, “who am I?” 

The Antithesis

This is the rudimentary stuff of Christian philosophy, and I would hope it would be the rudimentary stuff of Christian ministers. I listen to so many sermons that are simply mixed bags of Hellenic and Roman Catholic thinking, over and against the epistemology of Scripture. The new interest in Calvin has done little to undermine this, but give it fifteen years and there might be some change, at least one would hope. The party at Proclamation Trust excluded, of course. As an aside: Every time I listen to Dick Lucas, I am reminded of what preaching can and should be. Hearing him clarify Romans 1:18-32 is like a drink of cold water in the Outback. Even Reformed folk continue to argue for Natural Law, and make Paul a Thomist, or even an Aristotelean. This is a source of constant personal confusion and social tension within the church. Mr. Lucas lays this perennial error to rest. Onward…

Antithesis is one of those ugly (not euphonic in my opinion) but necessary terms. It’s basic meaning is “opposition” as Dooyeweerd points out. I am using it in the philosophical sense as a complete and total opposition of one premise to another. The old law of non-contradiction: A is not B and vice versa. They may be related to one another, but they are not one another. 

Having said that, there are two kinds of antithesis: Theoretical and Religious. 

In regards to the first, ever since Hegel, it has been assumed that the method of dialectical thought creates a shared platform between two contradictory notions, that two opposed assumptions are somehow malleable into a new singular entity. Every thought is a plastic one that can be easily joined to any other, regardless of their apparent contradiction. This is in fact true in the realm of the theoretical antithesis. The reason for this is that there is a higher absolute that exists behind them. 

Dooyeweerd offers the example of the Hellenic attempt to reconcile motion and rest. These are “logically determined opposites” (Roots, 7). Plato attempted to reconcile the two at the higher level of “being”, that both, “with equal right, are”. This is simply the recognition that logically opposite things exist together in reality. Motion and rest, although opposites are actually correlatives of one another; they exist as mutually supportive. They imply one another although they are mutually exclusive. The dialectic here resolves the contrast that exists between two relative things; they are not in an absolute dichotomy to one another. The synthesis of such relative concepts is a legitimate use of the dialectic method. As Dooyeweerd points out: “When used correctly, the method illustrates that nothing in temporal life is absolute”. (Hence, the wonders of jazz!). 

On the other hand, the Religious antithesis is an absolute. “This antithesis pertains to the relation between the creature and his creator, and thus touches the religious root of all temporal life” (Roots, 8). The term “religious” can be misleading, given the modern understanding of it and its identity with church or personal piety. But the idea that Dooyeweerd intends is this: “…a spiritual force that acts as the absolutely central mainspring of human society. …It is a communal motive… It establishes community” (ibid, 9). It is the very deepest absolute of our personal and corporate existence. 

“The absolute has a right to exist in religion only. Accordingly, a truly religious starting point either claims absoluteness or abolishes itself. It is never merely theoretical, for theory is always relative. The religious starting point penetrates behind theory to the sure, absolute ground of all temporal, and therefore relative, existence. Likewise, the antithesis it poses is absolute” (Roots, 8). 

According to Dooyeweerd there are four that have dominated at various points in history: Matter-Form (Hellenic), Nature-Grace (Roman Catholic), Nature-Freedom (Modern Humanist) and the Creation-Fall-Redemption (Biblical) religious ground motives. Of the four, the first three are “internally dualistic and fragmentary” (Roots, 11). Only the fourth is non-dualistic and inclusive. These four religious ground motives are mutually exclusive as well as absolute. There is no possibility of a synthesis between any two of the four.

I see a re-occurring theme amongst the new generation of church leaders, members and those who identify themselves as “culturally sensitive”: a return to punk rock. One of the interesting things is that it is coming from guys and gals who grew up in the church, but found that they needed some kind of outlet for their adolescent angst. So, they got tattoos, piercings, picked up guitars and started to play music, in emulation of… well, punk rock, or what they perceived to be punk rock. 

What is this at root? I am going to be blunt. It is a rejection of the sovereignly imposed identity of sainthood. It is a search for a unique persona in the fast lane. It is an attempt to become something apart from God’s means of making us into the image of His Son. It is impatience and unbelief. It is gnostic and pagan at it’s very roots. It is a rejection of time and covenantal progress; the ways and means by which God shapes us. It is a fist in the air saying: “I will have it now according to my own pattern”. It is a lie. 

I am speaking as one who was wholly entrenched. I had my ears pierced when I was ten (1979). I had my nose pierced when I was thirteen (1982). I played drums in punk rock bands, opening for the Fartz, Truth Decay, The Wipers, DOA, TSOL, and many more throughout the eighties. I partied with Fang, Tales of Terror and the Melvins. I was there. I was my own little man, I was unique, amidst a crowd of people who were seeking to be unique, and so we were all the same. 

God makes His saints unique, more so than any other people on the planet. The reversal to the aesthetics of punk is simply bizarre and sad, and to support and promote it is to encourage an infantile understanding of life in Christ, although infants are not so stupid. It is the empowerment of immaturity. One cannot maintain an aesthetic that is at odds with the very core of what it means to be a saint. These people have no clue what they are doing: they do not know the faith, and they do not really know what punk rock is or was. If they did, all of this would not even show up on their radar. 

The love of truth and an honest evaluation of the fallen aspect of our existence ought not to be divorced from a love of beauty and goodness as well. Punk rock provides a distorted view of the first and rejects the latter two. Punk rock mocks fallenness as a joke, as a punch-line to a bad song. It laughs at the ruins of our creature-hood, and shows no mercy. It is not just in the lyrics either, it is the whole package. It is wrong-headed to believe that you can extract one aspect, the aesthetic in this case, from a deeply flawed philosophy and somehow avoid implying the flaws of the others. There is little or no good in any of the aspects of punk rock’s religious absolute Freedom. 

All of this sends a confusing message to the person who is asking the serious questions about life: “Who am I?” is a perennial one. If the answer is the same one that can be found outside the church, then what is the point of salvation? If my identity can be self-imposed, if I am defined by nothing but my assertion of self, then why do I need the imposition of Another? The world needs answers. It will not seek them from a church which has nothing truly unique to offer. It can see through the vanity and narcissism of the fad. 

It’s time to grow up.