Sylvest manuscript 2011

Johnboy Sylvest manuscript © 2011

INTRODUCTION

After they had both heard the Gospel preached by the missionary bishop Paulinus, an
advisor of King Edwin of Northumberland said to him:

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is
unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at
supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst,
whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one
door, and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm;
but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the
dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space,
but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this
new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.1

Like King Edwin and his council of elders, who among us has not been warmed by life‘s
goodness, fed by its truth, inspired by its beauty? Even then, who has not also poignantly
experienced the wintry storms of life‘s poverty in so many different forms, the hunger
pangs of our ignorance regarding life‘s ultimate concerns and the always swift flight of
life‘s beauty from our sight? Prompting all of us to ask whether there might be more?

To the extent that human life has always been an ongoing quest in pursuit of such
value-realizations as truth, beauty, goodness, unity and mercy, life‘s unavoidable
value-frustrations have given rise to many questions with clear existential imperatives.
What is that? Describe it. What is that to us? Evaluate it. How might we best acquire (or
avoid) that? Norm it. Might there be more? Interpret all of that!

Thus it is that humanity‘s perennial value-pursuits have given rise to life‘s many different
methods --- descriptive sciences, evaluative cultures, normative philosophies and
interpretive religions --- each autonomous, all necessary, none alone sufficient, for every
value-realization. The value-pursuits of truth, beauty and goodness, in a context of
freedom, comprise an essential axiology, or interpretive axis, presupposed even by an
evolutionary epistemology.2

Beyond this essential axiology, humankind has embarked on many different religious
quests. That is also to say, we have adopted many different interpretive stances toward

1
Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, L.C. Jane's 1903 Temple
Classics translation, introduction by Vida D. Scudder, (London: J.M. Dent; New York
E.P. Dutton, 1910)
2
For a compelling example of such an account, see Goodenough, Ursula and Terrence
W. Deacon. 2003. "From Biology to Consciousness to Morality." Zygon: Journal of
Religion and Science 38 (December): 801-819.


reality. The primary religious quest pursues truth, beauty and goodness, in a context of
freedom, through a basic cosmology via a participatory imagination, which is
respectively engaged with historical, socio-cultural and economic concerns in a political
context (freedom presenting in degrees). Beyond this cosmology, though certainly not
without its perspective, a theological imagination then respectively engages these same
concerns through creed, cult-community and code, in a context open to transcendence
(what we might call an ―outside assist‖). A more distinctly pneumatological imagination
divines, again respectively, more precisely how it is that we are thus oriented,
empowered-sanctified and healed, in a context of being saved. The Christological
imagination then breaks open these categories of human concern and divine interactivity
elaborating various approaches to eschatology, ecclesiology-theological anthropology
and sacramentology within a context of soteriology-political theology. In no way
necessarily mutually exclusive, these various imaginative engagements of reality reflect
the urgency of our existential concerns with their forced and vital natures as each
interrogates reality, once again, with that question born of our most insistent longings ---
might there be more?

While we will aspire to describe here some significant measure of the sought after unity
between traditions through this account of humanity‘s common methods and shared
values, at the same time, this should in no way be mistaken for any facile syncretism,
false irenicism or insidious indifferentism, for we will not be at all suggesting that every
such engagement of humanity‘s forced and vital concerns is also, necessarily, a live
option.3

Still, what we may discover in this excursus is that, while many of our great and even
indigenous traditions can not in the final analysis be fully live options, theoretically, in
that they appeal to putative descriptions and norms that are on their face incompatible,
they otherwise will have to be considered so, nonetheless, for all practical purposes,
because it is just too early on humankind‘s journey to imagine that we can successfully
adjudicate between all such disparate approaches. This is also to suggest that not all
affirmations of religious plurality will be grounded the same way, methodologically,
which is to say that some approaches may remain live options only because we remain
ignorant, while others may be live options, indeed, because they reflect merely a
legitimate plurality of aesthetical expression, which is otherwise ordered toward the same
truth and goodness, and a bona fide diversity of ministry, though otherwise enjoying a
great unity of mission. Finally, in none of this will we be saying that it is too early on
humankind‘s journey to successfully adjudicate between at least some disparate
approaches, especially where it is patently obvious that a growth in human authenticity is
being either wondrously fostered or miserably thwarted by this or that religious cohort.
Of course, many approaches will lie between these extremes and will thus serve us,
because they are, as they say, good enough, even if not optimal. The quest thus perdures!

What we hope to offer in this collaborative exercise is an axiological vision of the whole

3
Cf. The Will to Believe by William James. An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of
Yale and Brown Universities. Published in the New World, June, 1896.


of reality that will assist all those who aspire to foster a growth in human authenticity in
the members of their faith community. This vision, we hope, will also offer a meaningful
contextualization of the Good News of Jesus Christ, one that answers humankind‘s quest
--- not only for more, but --- for superabundance, pressed down, shaken together, running
over, poured into our laps.

About Our Triads and Tetrads

From whence and whither the Fourthness of our tetradic arrangement of phenomenology,
axiology, epistemology and theology, as well as the tetrads nested within them (i.e. the
triad within each immanent frame plus a fourth element of transcendence) ? Is it a
Platonic artifact? Certainly it makes no a priori claim on our metaphysics? Perhaps it
simply mirrors the functions of the human brain quadrants as inventoried by our Jungian
intuitions? Clearly, in semiotics, it reduces to the irreducible Thirdness of Peirce's modal
ontology of the possible, actual and necessary, as inspired by an axiology of truth, beauty
and goodness, as modeled by an epistemology of icon, index and symbol?

We have presented a tetradic architectonic within which we have framed our triadic
phenomenology, trialectical axiology, trialogical epistemology and trinitarian theology,
each situated in both immanent and transcendent frames. In one sense, perhaps implicit in
our transcendent frames, we are simply recognizing reality's depth dimensions as reality
confronts us, respectively, with ontological vagueness, axiological frustration, epistemic
indeterminacy and hermeneutical interpretation. In another sense, our radical finitude and
fallibility leave us perennially wanting, always probing for something more. But is there
necessarily more?

We have characterized our descriptive sciences, evaluative cultures and normative
philosophies as interrogations of reality, respectively asking: What is that? What is that to
us? How can we, therefore, best acquire (or avoid) that? And we have recognized
interpretive religion as a quest asking: Is there more where that came from? And such
ultimate concerns, correspond to, in the case of what we would like to acquire, our
fondest existential hopes, and in the case of what we would like to avoid, our worst
existential fears. As they say, we thus hope vaguely and dread precisely. Merton
describes these existential crises in terms of continuity (not mincing words, here, we all
fear death in its many forms) and creativity (we all want to somehow matter and make a
difference).

In our view, it is precisely continuity and creativity that hold the key as we try to break
open the portal of Fourthness to transcendentally gaze beyond our immanent frame. If
reality is in any manner either pervasively triadic or tetradic, this does not necessarily
entail our eschewal of such dyadic conceptions as we use to describe such polar realities,
for example, as true and false (principle of noncontradiction), either- or (principle of
excluded middle), this not that (haecceity, Peirce's nondescriptive reference), faith and
doubt, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, right and wrong. But we will discuss later how
such First Principles as noncontradiction and excluded middle will either hold or fold in
each modal category of the possible, actual and necessary, particularly noting how


metaphysical necessity often yields to probability in the Peircean category of Thirdness
(which relates to laws, axioms, regularities and such). It is especially in this category of
Thirdness that we can bring into sharp relief the tensions between pattern and paradox,
symmetry and asymmetry, order and chaos, random and systematic, chance and
necessity, vague and specific, determinate and indeterminate, and, finally, Merton's
concerns with continuity and discontinuity, creativity and insignificance.

Might there be a root metaphor that would best capture Thirdness, Fourthness and all of
the above-described polarities, dynamisms and tensions? And that might also unitively
reframe the dichotomy of immanence and transcendence, presenting a single polar reality
to be realized in measures of degrees?

The best such metaphor, in our view, would be that of freedom, the deprivation of which
we often describe as coercion, the dynamism of which we recognize as the political4,
broadly conceived.

In our triadic phenomenology, determinate reality issues forth (ex nihilo) precisely as
necessity kenotically prescinds to probability as the Creator shrinks to "free" new
actualities from the realm of possibility. In our trialectical teleology, we grow in human
authenticity (humanization is divinization is our theosis) precisely through a progressive
realization of freedom via ongoing intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical and
religious conversions. Lord Acton has clarified our confusion regarding this authentic
human freedom, which, per his counsel, we should not misinterpret as a license to
do what we merely want, but as the liberty, rather, to do what we simply must. Freedom
realized down a path toward necessity? How dramatically ironic!

Again, we encounter the utterly paradoxical but clearly efficacious kenotic dynamic of
self-emptying as we co-creatively participate in our own shrinking (imago Dei) to free up
novel realities from the realm of possibility in a reality framed by an aesthetic teleology,
which realizes value precisely through the shedding of monotony and appropriation of
novelty as our will is surrendered only to be transformed into a will that is free, indeed.
The paradox lies in our striving to participate in the perichoretic dance of the Ens
Necessarium, Who, necessarily, only loves, but with a love that issues forth from an utter
fullness of freedom.

In becoming a prisoner of love, paradoxically, we are thus transformed and realize
authentic freedom. Perhaps this is what Maritain5 recognized as la dialectique immanente
du premier acte de liberté (the immanent dialectic of the first act of freedom).

In our trialogical epistemology, we amplify the epistemic risks we've already taken in our
descriptive sciences, evaluative cultures and normative philosophies in order to augment
our human value-realizations through an interpretive surrender that expands our horizons

4
See Yong‘s In the Days of Caesar – Pentecostalism and Political Theology, Wm. B.
Eeerdmans Piublishing Co. 2010.
5
Jacques Maritain, Raisons et raisons 1947


of concern thus freeing us up to realize new possibilities. Our trinitarian theology
precisely addresses our most insistent human longings and most urgent existential
concerns, again, inviting a paradoxical surrender to manifold assists coming to us from
beyond (Patrology) , beside (Christology) and within (Pneumatology) and promising to
thereby set us free, indeed, in a word, saving us. In another irony, perhaps few understand
this as well as those who are marginalized socially, economically, culturally, politically
and even religiously, or who are otherwise radically in touch with our radical poverty in
our dependence on God. As Richard Rohr suggests, there are generally two routes to
transformation – suffering and mysticism.

In other words, we don‘t enter the monastery or undertake a life of prayer to make us
better human beings — rather, we urgently and in crisis and seriously and radically
place the utter dependency and abject poverty of our selves (which are nevertheless
good) at God‘s disposal in order to be dramatically rescued. Thomas Merton

Pericean Thirdness, now conceived as necessity, next conceived as probability, might be
reconceived in terms of reality's realization of various degrees of freedom, always
paradoxically gifted through surrender. As a single polar reality, both our immanent and
transcendent frames recognize it, even if in unfathomably different measures, as we
participate in freedom in a way that is, at once, indeterminately transcendent, vaguely
immanent, proleptically realized and always mediated, whether theologically,
axiologically or semiotically. Fourthness thus conceptually reduces to that aspect
of Thirdness which we experience as horizon, thirdness itself corresponding to various
degrees of freedom in a reality that sometimes appears nearly wholly determined, while
at other times very much free, at least within what we might otherwise imagine to be
reality‘s initial, boundary and limit conditions.

It is further interesting to note that emergence, itself, relies on information loss (mistakes
even) in each introduction of novelty, in a teleodynamic process of alternating forgetting
and remembering (anamnesis) that we‘ll explore later. It is no accident, then, that
strategic sacrifice and surrender recur as a central motif in so many of our world‘s
phenomenologies and theologies.

About Our Pathways

In the East, a distinction is drawn between the ―way of the baby monkey‖ and the ―way of
the kitten,‖ the first way describing that of the ascetics in pursuit of Enlightenment,
Knowledge and Wisdom, the second that of Devotion. The metaphorical implications are
that there is more effort on the part of the baby monkey, which must actively cling tightly
to its parent in getting transported around, while, as we are all aware, the kitten is
passively transported by the nape of its neck in its mother‘s teeth. I offer another
distinction, which is the ―way of the baby goose,‖ implying an imprinted following of the
parent or an imitation of Action. Finally, we might consider the ―way of the baby
martin,‖ which is familiar to any who‘ve observed the parents knocking a fledgling off of
the Purple Martin House that it might thereby learn to fly, the implication here describing


the Way of the Cross via formative, reformative and transformative suffering.

If these are different path-ways, perhaps roughly corresponding to creed, cult, code and
community in our great traditions, where do they ultimately lead?

We will explore, herein, how they are all ordered toward a unitive Life in the Spirit and
are animated via Lonergan‘s conversions (intellectual, affective, moral, social and
religious) by the very same Spirit.

One of the richest reflections on the contemplative life is in Merton‘s __New Seeds of
Contemplation__, especially in the preface and first three chapters, which reflect on what
contemplation is and is not and what the true self and false self are.

We will engage Merton‘s formative spirituality at some length, but concise summary
would be that,
1) for our true self, our joy is found in God‘s glory;
2) our will is oriented to God‘s love;
3) the work of our journey is to co-create with God our identity through and with
and in God;
4) that we may become wholly in His image, holy in His image;
5) when we do have our memory, understanding and will integrated and
holistically
operative, we experience our true self but
6) this co-creation of our identity and this surrender of our memory,
understanding and will
to faith, hope and love are effected through theological virtue gifted by the Spirit by an
elevation of nature through grace and transmutation of experience through grace and not
by a perfection of the natural order by our natural efforts, which is to say
7) we are in need of salvation to overcome both death and sin and the most
fundamental vocational call we answer is
8 ) to be saved and then
9) transformed.

An Ecumenical Pneumatological Ecclesiology

A new generation of pentecostal scholars has entered into a credible dialogue with
modern science, modern philosophy and modern theology. These approaches have
profound implications for ecclesiology. What is emerging is nothing less than an
ecumenical pneumatological ecclesiology.6 It criticizes our Western approach, which is
largely discursive theology. It emphasizes that Life in the Spirit is also an experience.

6
The Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh by Amos Yong (2005 Baker Academic).


They believe that our coming Christendom will be radically pluralistic, centered not in
Rome or Canterbury but variously in Seoul, Beijing, Singapore, Bombay, Lagos, Rio,
Sao Paulo and Mexico City. The emphases in dialogue will be: 1) postmodern theology
that hears the voices of the marginalized 2) postpatriarchal theology 3)
postfoundationalist theology that values methodological pluralism 4) postcolonial
theology that privileges local traditions, languages and practices 5) posthierarchical that
embraces dialogical and democratic processes 6) post-Cartesian theology that gives
recognition to the inductive, lived, existential and nondual character of reflection
alongside deductive, propositional, more abstract and dualistic forms of theologizing 7)
post-Western and post-European theology open to engaging the multiple religious,
cultural and philosophical voices of Asian traditions and spiritualities.

A pneumatological approach to revelation will then be 1) transcendental – Spirit
breaks thru human condition from beyond ourselves 2) historical 3) contextual,
concerned with real lives, real histories, real societies 4) personal, both interpersonal and
intersubjective 5) transformational 6) communal 7) a verb not just a noun 8 )
progressive & dynamic Spirit calls us to interpret, respond and act 9) marked by love,
an unmistakable criterion for discernment 10) received by humble faith seeking
understanding 11) propositional and resisting our fallen interpretations 12)
eschatological.

Getting from Is to Ought

Our descriptive sciences and normative philosophies, in many ways, respectively, grapple
with the "is" and "ought" of reality. Beyond the most general of norms (that is also to say
within the constraints of the initial, boundary and limit conditions of reality's givens), our
evaluative cultures will then otherwise enjoy and employ (co-creatively) the freedom
we've been given, which we celebrate through a wonderful diversity of ministry and
beautiful plurality of expression, historically, socially, economically and politically.

Historical tensions forever push and pull us between an uncertain future and unforgiving
past. But we continuously manage to get oriented and reoriented nonetheless.

Social tensions have human dignity always precariously perched between individual
autonomy and institutional necessity. But subsidiarity principles, when in play, will often
enlighten and empower such decisions.

Cultural tensions result from choices we must make between competing values. But we
usually imagine that we and our choices can, perhaps, be sanctioned, maybe even
sanctified.


We inevitably experience economic tensions as we fail in our willingness to distinguish
between wants and needs and our ability to match needs with goods and services. But
healing, in all sorts of ways, keeps coming our way.

We experience political tensions (broadly conceived) precisely because reality presents
us with both coercion and freedom. But we always imagine that we can be saved,
somehow, from reality's manifold and multiform coercions.
How is it that humanity continues to be oriented, empowered – sanctified, healed and
saved albeit in ways that are variously (more and less) efficacious?
Might these be tantalizingly proleptic (value-)realizations of reality's enticingly telic
dimensions, which gently coax (and sometimes impolitically cajole) us along on what
seems to be a journey, on what undeniably is an adventure?7
One compelling hypothesis is that, in many of our Great Traditions our interpretive
religions have gifted us with a pneumatological imagination, which discerns a Spirit
active in every aspect of our lives, broadening our horizons of concern beyond ---

the starkly historical to the remarkably eschatological (orienting us);
the simply social to the robustly ecclesiological (empowering us);
a merely cultural to a fully theological anthropology (sanctifying us);
the mercilessly economic to the mercifully sacramental (healing us). and
the nakedly political to the compassionately soteriological (saving us);

This Spirit, Who is holy, has broken open our philosophies with the novel questions
posed (although not answered) by our natural theologies and enlivened our sciences with
an evocative poetry inspired by our theologies of nature.

The reality of the Incarnation, Jesus, then further reveals how we are being:
1) oriented, as the historical tension between past and future has been transcended
by One Who broke into our now from eternity --- not to transfix our gaze on the
utterly beyond, but --- to infinitely transvalue the significance of our fragile,
temporal existence (cf. the Lukan gospel narrative);
2) empowered, as the social tension between individuals and institutions has been
transcended by One Who promised to be present where two or more are gathered

7
Our essential axiology and basic cosmology already recognize a minimalist telos at
play in reality, prior to the more robustly telic dimension suggested by our
pneumatological imagination. Modern semiotic science has room for both the formal and
final causations as analogs to those of a classical aristotelian metaphysics. Obviously, an
emergentist perspective, which would admit such causations and telos, need not violate
physical causal closure. But neither would a more robustly telic dimension that is
operative at the level of primal reality in its initial, boundary and limit conditions.
Scientific methods, which are empirical and probabilistic, relying on falsification, would
not, in principle, measure such improbable proleptic realizations, which otherwise get
recorded as inexplicable anomalies.


in His Name and affirmed an even more radical solidarity in establishing --- not
an earthly realm, but --- a Kingdom wherein belonging (community) and desiring
(cult-ivation) enjoy a clear primacy over (even if not a complete autonomy from)
behaving (code) and believing (creed) (cf. Sylvest & Yong's Contemplative
Phenomenology, 2010 );
3) sanctified, as the cultural tension between competing (and extrinsic) values has
been transcended by One Who invites us to savor the intrinsically valuable
approaches of faith, hope and love in the pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness (cf.
the Lukan narrative, Acts);
4) healed, as the economic tension between our needs and our means has been
transcended by One Who, by initiating us all into a grand solidarity, has ushered
in a compassion (that inevitably ensues from any awareness of our oneness)
whereby a love begun in the Kingdom, now, will get perfected as it more fully
comes to realization, eternally (cf. the Our Father); and
5) saved, as the political tension between reality's coercions and freedoms has been
transcended by One Who deemed even equality with God as nothing at which one
should grasp (cf. also the Magnificat); saved, as the political tension between
reality's coercions and freedoms has been transcended by One Who deemed even
equality with God as nothing at which one should grasp (cf. also the Magnificat);
The tensions we experience present in many ways and are not confined to those
inventoried and fleshed out above regarding our evaluative and interpretive methods. Our
descriptive sciences and normative philosophies have their own tensions and paradoxes,
some which we are able to dissolve such as through perspectival and paradigm shifts,
some which we can successfully resolve dialectically such as through an Hegelian-like
approach, some which we simply evade by ignoring, at least, for all practical purposes,
and some which we discover can be maintained in a creative tension to our utmost
edification. We cannot know a priori which paradoxes will thus submit to which strategy.
Neither can we a priori know when it is that our knowledge is being thwarted only
temporarily due to methodological constraints or permanently due to some type of
in-principle ontological occulting.

What we do know is that reality presents us with values, affords us methods and provides
us perspectives. It is a story of rewards, risks and relationships. Many of our
value-augmentations precisely derive from strategic risk-amplifications. But rewards do
not come from risk, alone; rather, they result from properly managed risk. Risk
management involves a knowledge of reality‘s relationships, both its functional
(objective) and personal (subjective) relationships. To the extent that much of reality is
indeterminate and that certain of its relationships are not specifiable, it suggests that
many of reality‘s relationships are interobjective, whereby we somehow recognize that
there are various effects proper to no known causes even though we can in no way get at
how this might be so due to an interobjective indeterminacy, which hints at some type of
duality or degree of ontological discontinuity . However, a great deal of reality is indeed
determinate and specifiable, even if sometimes in varying degrees of epistemic
determinacy and ontological vagueness, and we have been able to establish both that
there are certain effects as well as how they are caused because such relationships derive
from a type of intraobjective identity, affirming a nondual aspect to many of reality‘s


functional relationships. Humankind‘s greatest value-realizations are intersubjective,
relationships between persons. And the quality of these relationships, often measured in
degrees of intersubjective intimacy, is very much determined by one‘s relationship to self
or one‘s intrasubjective integrity.

The histories of philosophy and religion are littered with one school after another that
over- or under-emphasized some method, value or perspective (or some risk, reward or
relationship) in a fetish-like manner. This includes many of philosophy‘s so-called turns
and many of religion‘s schisms as well as all manner of insidious –isms, which we
needn‘t inventory here. We can affirm this – that methods precede systems. And we do
accept that epistemology models ontology. However, to the extent we affirm only a
fallibilist epistemology, any ontology will therefore be more than a tad tentative and any
modeling power will be, shall we say, weak. Our deontologies, then, should be as modest
as our ontologies are tentative. We are not at all suggesting that one should not take
epistemic risks for these risk-amplifications are indispensable to our
value-augmentations. We do, however, aspire to properly adjudicate between those
options that are indeed live vis a vis epistemic virtue and those that fall prey to either an
excess hubris or humility, respectively, the excesses of modernity (e.g. both
Enlightenment and religious fundamentalisms) or of any radically deconstructive
postmodernism (e.g. vulgar Rortyism).

Any God-concept, suitably predicated apophatically, will take into account this
interobjective indeterminacy. God‘s determinate nature, revealed in creation and
amplified in special revelation, presents in a creative tension between some type of
intraobjective identity, for our autonomy can only be quasi-, and some type of
intersubjective intimacy, for this love has been revealed. Our own relationships to God,
others and creation require a proper relationship to self or intraobjective integrity. All of
these relationships can be cultivated through various ascetic displines and spiritual
practices. These are addressed more fully, below, under Formative Spirituality.

What does it mean to express faith, hope, and love in the 21st Century (or
Post-postmodern world)?

We should amplify the risks we took when we moved from our exclusivistic
ecclesiocentrisms to a more inclusivistic Christocentricism by exploring a robust
pneumatological inclusivism in our interreligious dialogue. Put simply, we should take
more risks in our faith outlook by being more open regarding where we expect to find the
Spirit at work in our world, for example, among other peoples, in both sacred and secular
settings, thereby augmenting the value to be realized from a broader ecumenism.

We should amplify the risks we‘ve already taken liturgically being more open to how it is
the Spirit can form our desires, recognizing that we can fruitfully adopt the spiritual
technology of other religions, such as certain asceticisms, disciplines and practices,
without necessarily adopting their conclusions, thus augmenting the value to be mined
from desiring the Kingdom above all else and being sensitive to its less visible


manifestations.

We should amplify the risks involved in our dualistic, problem-solving mind, with its
empirical, rational, practical and moral approach to reality to engage reality more
holistically and integrally with our nondual mind and its contemplative stance thus
augmenting the value of relationship to God, others, the environment and even self.

We should amplify the risks involved in our moral ventures by moving beyond our
legalistic approach to moral realities in society to a more social justice oriented
approach, striving less for a theocratic and coercive moral statism and more for the
establishment of the Kingdom via our successful institutionalization of the corporal
works of mercy, thus augmenting the value to be mined on behalf of those who‘ve been
marginalized.

We should amplify the risks involved in conducting a more scientifically rigorous
Biblical exegesis, unafraid of historical-critical methods, literary criticism and honest
Jesus scholarship, thus augmenting the value of the Good News for all people of the
world through enhanced reliability, credibility and authoritativeness.

We should amplify the risks involved in ministering to the world through
noninstitutional vehicles, affirming them as partners and mining the value they create in
the ecclesiological models they afford us, egalitarian models that are free of clericalism,
paternalism, hierarchicalism, colonialism, parochialism, sexism, institutionalism and so
on, thereby augmenting the value to be realized from a more dutiful engagement of the
Sensus Fidelium.

The Risk-based Approach to Value-Realization

Faith, hope and love are adventures in that they involve risk or what Pascal called a
wager. And it is a grand cosmic adventure in which we are invited to participate as we
unconditionally assent to the proposition that the pursuits of truth, beauty and goodness
are their own reward. This quest, itself, becomes our grail. This journey becomes our
destination.

As we observe this 13.7 billion year old universe, notwithstanding humankind‘s
cumulative advances in science, philosophy, culture and religion, questions still beg
regarding the initial, boundary and limit conditions of the cosmos. There is, however, an
overarching narrative that begins to address these questions. It is the story of Emergence.

Emergence gifts the universe with an increasing complexity as its novel structures and
properties present the beauty that surrounds us. It is a complexity, however, that is
willing to run the risk of disintegration. The greater the number of bifurcations and
permutations involved in any given system, the more fragile. And, the more fragile, the
more beautiful. Put most simply, an emergent cosmos amplifies risk and thus augments
beauty.


These are realities we can understand without the benefit of special divine revelation. We
have explored how: A descriptive human science queries reality asking: What is that?
Our evaluative human culture inquires: What‘s that to us? And our normative human
philosophy then aspires to answer the ensuing question: How do we best acquire or avoid
that?

The answers we have derived for these perennial questions take the form of truth, beauty
and goodness.

And while each individual asks these questions everyday, as radically social animals,
these values are realized in community. Because we are radically finite, hence
needy, we form communities of value-realizers. Thus we talk about the scientific
community, philosophic community, cultural community and so on. Each such
community, in its pursuit of value, in its own way, embarks on a risk-taking adventure,
amplifying risks in order to augment our human value-realizations of truth, beauty and
goodness.

The scientist, for her part, ventures forth with hypotheses that are inherently falsifiable by
design. The philosopher, for his part, articulates a provisional closure, which is
represented as this school or that. Human culture has been a veritable laboratory, wherein
our falsifiable sciences and provisional philosophies have played out as anthropological
explorations, as we know, sometimes to humankind‘s utmost benefit but, all to often, to
humanity‘s everlasting dismay.

Before we introduce competing meta-narratives, or axes of interpretation of reality, we
already observe our communities of value-realization in pursuit of the intrinsically
rewarding values of truth, beauty and goodness. And we observe science, philosophy and
culture harvesting these values in abundance in what is an inherently spiritual quest.
Before our interpretive narratives (religions) are introduced, our descriptive, evaluative
and normative narratives are in place, as a cosmology, amplifying risks and thereby
augmenting our value-realizations. In this regard, they might very well be considered
both necessary and sufficient.

Still, as the ultimate value-realizer, our species might naturally wonder: Is there,
perhaps, more?

In our distinctly human way, most of us not only wonder but also pursue more truth,
more beauty and more goodness, than is already realizable by science, culture and
philosophy. In so doing, we ask: How does all of that tie-together? And this re-ligation
query is a distinctly religious question. It is, then, the interpretive aspect of our axiology.

Now, if science, culture and philosophy, each in their own way, comprise a risk-venture
in pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness, amplifying our epistemic, normative and
evaluative risks toward the end of augmenting these intrinsically rewarding values, then
what inheres in the very fabric of the religious quest is a further amplification of risks.
These amplified risks are nothing less, then, than faith, hope and love.


It is no accident, then, that the world‘s literature has ubiquitously employed the journey,
the quest, the adventure as its root metaphor for the religious quest and that its preferred
allegory has been an erotic love that risks all for the sake of all.

We‘ve come a long way in this presentation without addressing the postmodern influence
on our 21st Century expressions of faith, hope and love. And if you‘ve hung in here with
me thus far, know that we‘re now on the threshold of describing the postmodern
prescription for what has ailed our modernistic religious quest.

The chief problem with the modernistic approach to the religious quest is that it lost
touch with the essential risk-taking nature of faith, hope and love. Perhaps due to our
natural human anxiety to banish all mystery, perhaps due to our rather feeble ability to
tolerate ambiguity, and perhaps due to our insatiable need to either resolve, dissolve or
evade all paradox, humanity has largely surrendered to a neurotically-induced hubris that
imagines that all mystery has thus been comprehended, all ambiguity has thus been
eliminated and all paradox is subject to either synthetic resolution, perspectival
dissolution or practical evasion.

The practical upshot of such hubris is that we begin to imagine that there are no risks to
undertake, much less amplify, no further values to pursue, much less augment, no quests
to launch, no journeys on which to embark. Life, then, is no longer an adventure.

The chief malady of such a malaise is that an insidious ennui settles over us. It‘s not so
much that we think we have all the right answers, which is bad enough, but that we
imagine that we even have all the right questions. Our science devolves into scientism.
Our culture caves into a practical nihilism. Our philosophies decay into a sterile
rationalism. The only thing that remains to be seen is whether our planet will go out with
a silent ecological whimper or a fiery nuclear holocaust.

Our religion, for its part, gets hyper-eschatological with heavenly notions that are of little
earthly use. A once enchanted world becomes inhabited with terribly disenchanted
denizens.

Modernism, in its pretense, bottled up the elixir of risk and offered us instead a vile
concoction that it mistook for some type of truth serum, a formula with all the answers,
which diluted any risk. It‘s ingredients included a fideism, which walled itself in to a
house of language game mirrors claiming immunity for religion to cultural critique. It
also mixed in an inordinate amount of theological nonrealism due to a hyper-active
dialectical imagination that approached God as not only wholly incomprehensible (which
He is), but as not even partly intelligible (which She is). It suggested that no reasons
could be given for religious belief as if all reasons necessarily derived from empirical and
rational argumentation with their informative propositions and epistemic warrants, when,
so much of human reasoning, instead, is prudential and moral with performative
significance and normative justification.


Put much more simply, modernism overemphasized reasons of the head and relegated
reasons of the heart to history‘s propositional dustbin.

A radically deconstructive postmodernism, in one of philosophy‘s most tragic ironies,
ends up being nothing more than a hypermodernistic outlook, with great hubris putting a
priori limits on human knowledge … except, well, for one singular exception, which
would be the limits they refuse to place on their own anthropology. In their caricature of
all human communication as language games, the Wittgensteinian fideists misappropriate
Wittgenstein as they saw off the epistemological limbs wherein their own ontological
eggs are nested. In their anxiety to annihilate metaphysics, both the social construction
theorists and the scientistic cabal do away with the very analogia that fuel both highly
theoretical science and speculative cosmology. This is just as insidious as the tautologies
that were inhabited by those who bought into Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and
others, whose anthropological conclusions were buried in their reductionistic premises
and hidden in their cynical definitions.

None of this is to deny that we do not all inhabit elaborate tautologies with their various
circular references, causal disjunctions, infinite regressions and question begging. It is to
suggest that not all tautologies are equally taut and that we can and should attempt to
adjudicate between them based on such anthropological metrics as provided by
Lonergan‘s conversions (expanded by Gelpi): intellectual, affective, moral, sociopolitical
and religious.

And this is not to claim that such sociologic metrics are readily available or easily
interpretable but, come on folks, some religious cohorts are rather transparently
dysfunctional, wouldn‘t you say? And judging different approaches to faith by employing
such pragmatic criteria is admittedly not robustly truth-conducive but it is certainly
reasonable to imagine that it is truth-indicative. Our inability to finally discriminate
between all religious approaches, some which end up being quite equiplausible, even if
not equiprobable, does not make our approach moot; rather, it makes it problematical. It
does not mean that we do not have reasons (and very good reasons, at that) to embrace
one faith approach and to eschew another; it only means that those reasons will not be
universally compelling.

Faith, hope and love in the 21st Century will look like an adventure. It will look like a
risk-filled adventure where believers run the cosmic risk of disintegration in
self-emptying kenotic love. Like Pip in Great Expectations, we will embark on a search
for our Benefactor. Like Mark Twain‘s Huckleberry Finn, we will be a people of hope,
always looking in expectant anticipation for what‘s around the river‘s bend. Like the
cosmos, itself, and with the grand Cosmic Adventurer, we will actively participate, not
without some moaning and groaning, in the great act of giving birth.

Faith, hope and love in the 21st Century will look a lot more like that time of
enchantment in the early days of Christianity, when the apostles and disciples and closest
confidants of Jesus, Himself, took great risks in following Him. It will look a lot less like
that self-righteous certitude of fundamentalistic religion, scientistic philosophy or even,


ironically, a social constructionist nonrealism. These are, in the end, very pessimistic
anthropologies whether gnostic or agnostic. We simply cannot a priori know how
knowable or unknowable reality will turn out to be.

It makes a lot more sense to believe that, as we progressively enhance our modeling
power of reality, albeit in a very fallibilist way, our concepts and constructs and
categories are making some of our tautologies much more taut vis a vis reality writ large.
And this includes our God-concepts, which, in-principle, must be inherently vague. If
there is a grand telic design and we actively participate in same, there is every good
reason to hypothesize that the inexorable advance of human knowledge gifts us with a
more coherent outlook on both proximate and ultimate reality. To the extent we
understand reality better, the analogs we apply to ultimate reality will improve. This is
not to deny that such analogs will invoke an infinite number of dissimilarities over
against the similarities they will reveal. It is to affirm that those similarities, however
meager, have profound existential import because they pertain to a VERY BIG reality,
indeed.

Over against any radically positive theology (kataphasis) of the gnostics, fundamentalists
and rationalists, and over against any radically negative theology (apophasis) of the
agnostics, nonrealists and fideists, a postmodern theology eschews both an epistemic
hubris and an excessive epistemic humility in favor of a Goldilocks approach that is just
right, an epistemic holism with an integral approach to reality.

In our postmodern milieu, science, culture, philosophy and religion are intertwined.
When one advances, they all advance. When one regresses, they all regress. This is not to
say that they are not otherwise autonomous methodologies. A postmodern theology
recognizes and affirms this autonomy. It is to say that these approaches to reality are
integrally-related in every human value-realization. They are, then,
methodologically-autonomous but axiologically-integral.

Enhanced modeling power of reality, whether in science, culture, philosophy or religion,
translates into an enhanced modeling power of reality writ large. We best not set these
value-pursuits over against or in competition.

A modernist rationalism is a failed risk-management technique, attempting to
domesticate this risk and ameliorate its adventuresome nature. A modernist fideism is a
failed risk-elimination technique, attempting to immunize faith from critique by reducing
it to mere expression. Only a constructive postmodern approach can successfully
retrieve, revive and renew our sense of adventure, enchantment and risk-taking, inviting
us anew to journey on a quest for a grail worthy of our ineradicable human aspirations for
more, a LOT more!

Thus we amplify our risk in our pursuit of truth into a faith, often articulated in creed; in
our pursuit of beauty into a hope, often celebrated in the cultivation of liturgy and ritual;
in our pursuit of goodness in love, often preserved in our codes and laws; in our pursuit
of community, often enjoyed in our fellowship and unity of believers. Thus humankind


augments truth, beauty, goodness and unity in creed, cult, code and community. Thus
we participate in the grand cosmic adventure, amplifying risks and thereby augmenting
values, courageously running the risk of disintegration as God‘s fragile, but beautiful
creatures.

Retrieval, Revival and Renewal Dynamics

While propositional or theoretical or creedal aspects of a movement are not unimportant,
there seems to be a much greater emphasis on the primacy of the participatory and
practical and experiential aspects. Thus questions of ecclesiology and pneumatology, or
how to be church and respond in the Spirit, are being answered existentially in the way
we live and move and have our being. One could not better describe our 20th Century
church-emergent.

To the extent theological breakthroughs occur, there are no new discoveries in
anthropology, soteriology, Christology and eschatology, providing new propositions
about what it means to be human, what is wrong with humanity and how to fix it, Who
Jesus is and why our hopes are fixed on Him.

Rather, there are rediscoveries of the truths long articulated in our creeds, of the beauties
well cultivated in our celebrations of liturgy and ritual, of the goodness well preserved in
God‘s laws and of the fellowship long enjoyed in our communities. There are corrections
in various over- and under-emphases as we then eschew any decay (seemingly inevitable
& recurring) of dogma into dogmatism, ritual into ritualism, law into legalism &
moralism, and institution into institutionalism. The latest iteration of our church-emergent
precisely emulates such retrieval, revival and renewal dynamics.

And there is a reawakened nurturance of creative tensions as we re-cognize that life‘s
deepest paradoxes remain ours to exploit, transformatively, and will not otherwise yield
to our attempts to resolve (dialectically thru synthesis), dissolve (perspectivally thru
paradigm shifts) or evade (practically by ignoring) them, reductively, as happens with
life‘s lesser paradoxes of science, philosophy and metaphysics. Our world remains
enchanted and needs re-enchantment, on an ongoing basis it seems, but only in our stance
toward reality and not in Nature, Herself, which is enchanted through and through!

When it comes to life‘s most important questions, then, the church-emergent du jour
precisely resists the fundamentalistic, rationalistic, reductionistic strategies of dualistic
problem-solving and nurtures a robustly nondual contemplative stance toward our
ultimate concerns.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are
exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes,
which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo. … … Take away paradox
from the thinker and you have a professor. ~ Soren Kierkegaard

To the extent our anthropologies, soteriologies, Christologies and eschatologies do get


rearticulated propositionally, there does seem to be an ongoing and ever-growing
universalizing tendency (an ecumenical and inclusivistic catholicity) to affirm the
radically egalitarian nature of the Good News as we better come to realize — over
against our own marginalizations, hierarchicalisms, colonialisms, patriarchicalisms,
clericalisms, sexisms, ecclesiocentrisms, exclusivisms, traditionalisms, institutionalisms,
gnosticisms and, finally, even movementisms — that, sooner or later, the Gospel‘s
preferential option for the poor will be consolation for every last one of us. To paraphrase
Pogo: ―We have met the poor and they are us.‖

So, as the Spirit moves when He wills, where She wills, how They will, may the Spirit of
God‘s love, now, move within me and you and all. That‘s the fugal movement that
perdures even as other movements, most assuredly, do come and go. When we look
carefully at what is going on, what we call emergent, in one sense, might be the
re-emergence of a reality that, inevitably, gets submerged, time and again. It‘s a
reignition and conflagration of a Fire lit long ago.

Emergence also has a more generic sense and, in that sense, is inextricably associated
with novelty, a reality that will not go away for those of us who buy into telos, an
inexorable movement built into the very fabric of creation. What seems radically new is
humankind‘s conscious appropriation of emergentist dynamics and how they possess an
autopoietic (self organizing, for better or worse) trait, which is to say that we now know
we can harness some evolutionary impulses and possibly kedge forward8 with a more
consciously competent emergence, shaping and forming9, as co-creators10 the unfolding
of the Kingdom that we desire (Ps. 37:4). Conversely, we ignore this dynamic and
forsake this movement at our own peril.

The Nature of Our Theological Convergences

To the extent our discussion often primarily involves a consideration of methods,
practices and experiences and not, rather, belief systems, conclusions and propositions,
and given our conversation‘s postfoundational orientation, what emerges will not always
be in the form of arguments in the strict sense. Instead, we are discovering a convergence
that is more so of nonpropositional nature.

This is to say that this convergence does not articulate, for example, a new narrative arch
of a distinctly descriptive, normative or speculative nature, which would be a
cosmological enterprise. Rather, this convergence has an axiological trajectory, which is
to say that it fosters a harmonic resonance of an evaluative, interpretive or existential
nature.

Interpretively, we are coming away with a deepened sense of solidarity. Evaluatively, we
share a profound sense of compassion. We share, then, a great unity of mission even as

8
cf Mike Morrell & Frank Spencer‘s website – need url
9
cf. Jamie Smith‘s ―Desiring the Kingdom‖) need citation
10
cf. Phil Hefner


we recognize our diversity of ministry and acknowledge our plurality of belief systems.

What emerges, then, is not so much a convergence of metanarratives but, instead, of
meta-perspectives. It is a convergence of perspectives that conditions HOW we will first
see and experience reality, so to speak, desiring the Kingdom, and not of narratives
setting forth WHAT we will eventually think about reality in order to somehow argue
and prove the Kingdom.

A lot of people, who remain immersed in dualistic mindsets with their problem-solving
orientation to all of reality, have a difficult time evaluating such conversations. For so
many, apologetics is primarily evidential, rational and presuppositional, proceeding with
empirical, logical, practical and moral reasoning. And, by all means, this approach to
reality is indispensable and necessary. When it comes to life‘s deepest mysteries, more
ultimate concerns and most significant value-realizations, however, we must go beyond
this dualistic approach and engage reality with a more nondual, contemplative stance.

So, when we speak of a convergence in our conversation, we are not suggesting a novel
set of concepts and categories. Neither should one look for a specific political agenda. It
is not a convergence of moral reasoning, such that emergent folk will all necessarily
share the same positions on one moral reality or another. Even regarding cosmological
matters, we are not suggesting a convergence of views regarding such things as
philosophy of mind, theological anthropology, divine interactions and so on.

A distinctly nonpropositional convergence of shared practice and shared experience, of a
deepened sense of solidarity and heightened sense of compassion, will very much
condition our approach to environmental & social justice, ecclesiology, worship and
Jesus. Notice how these are not primarily propositional realities but are, first and
foremost, relational realities. We are not first preoccupied with getting answers right as if
we were mostly dealing with ideas. This convergence is not about getting the correct
relationships between ideas, whether through a harmony of reasons or even intuitions.
This is about realizing the right relationships between humankind and God,
ourselves and one another, ourselves and nature and even our relationship to our
own self.

This harmonic convergence, then, is like a symphony of many instruments, each with its
own sound and timbre, all playing together in the same key, in harmony and to the
rhythm of the same Drum. This is not to deny, however, that to the extent that we are
conditioned, shaped and formed by a convergence of nonpropositional influences, that it
will not eventually transvalue our more propositional approaches, effecting their
convergence also. It will. But that requires a great deal of patience.

Beyond socialization, we are opening ourselves up to ongoing transformation and a deep
desiring of the Kingdom. We experience a deep desiring for environmental and social
justice in solidarity with and compassion for humankind and our cosmos. Ever more
identified with Jesus and His deep desiring of communion with the Father, we long for
the coming of the Cosmic Christ. Our ecclesiology is more ecumenical and egalitarian as


we go beyond institutional structures (and not necessarily without them) seeking
authentic community in manifold and multiform ways, wherever two or more can gather
in His Name. Our worship becomes the practice of the Presence of God as we seek an
abiding relationship with Him – not Whom we possess, but – Who possesses us.

In solidarity and sharing this same deep desiring, we may otherwise differ in HOW we
see justice playing out morally, practically and politically, in HOW we see the Kingdom
unfolding eschatologically and metaphysically. And we can abide with these differences
because of our deep humility and deep love for one another, encouraging and forgiving
one another, sharing a vision THAT in the Kingdom all may be well, all will be well, all
shall be well and we will know that all manner of things shall be well.

Our conversation, then, is less about positions and more about dispositions, about being
disposed to a Deep Awareness, Deep Solidarity, Deep Compassion, Deep Humility, Deep
Worship, Deep Justice, Deep Ecology and Deep Community. That these realities will play
out in our lives we are confidently assured. How they will play out is something we
explore in humility and civility with all people of goodwill. Ours is foremost a shared
axiology, interpretively and evaluatively, of what we deeply desire and deeply value.

We share practices that shape, form, cultivate and celebrate these desires and values. We
believe that, one day, this will lead also to a shared cosmology, descriptively and
normatively, consistent with the best science and best philosophy.

―Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you
desire.‖ Thomas Merton

Triadic Phenomenology – Relationships: Word, Community & Spirit

Economic Trinity & Immanent Ontological Frame

Intraobjective Identity as Word

Science – the physical

Science vs Natural Theology vs Theology of Nature

We should aspire to be clear regarding this project or the other regarding whether or not
one is doing science, philosophy or theology. And we mustn‘t forget religion! And if one
is talking about ALL of these spheres of human concern, in which sphere do they begin
their conversation? and, in which do they end up?

Except for the classical ―proofs‖ by Aquinas and Anselm, and CS Peirce‘s ―Neglected
Argument for the Reality of God,‖ and the Modal Ontological Arguments as crafted by
Godel and Hartshorne only to be lately and greatly improved by Christopher McHugh,
we wouldn't consider much of what is going on, nowadays, to be natural theology or a
natural philosophy of God. There is just not THAT much that one can say, in our view,


about God, using philosophy as a starting point, at least not when methodologically
restricting one‘s musings to the rubrics of formal argumentation. The same is true for any
other notions regarding ―ultimate‖ or ―primal‖ reality, using either philosophy or science
as a starting point. All anyone thus establishes is a modicum of epistemological parity
with alternate worldviews, i.e. elaborate tautologies.

Don‘t get us wrong. We are not at all dismissive of these enterprises, which demonstrate
the reasonableness of faith (or, for those of you who consider this too strong, that it is not
unreasonable or is, for what it‘s worth, as reasonable as other interpretive stances vis a
vis their Scottish verdicts). For some, they have been indispensable parts of our journeys.
For most, though, we‘ve been told they don‘t matter very much. And we trust what they
report. Still, some say that they‘ve enjoyed many fruitful dialogues with many
nonbelievers who do seek such apologetics and have thereby grown in mutual respect and
understanding and self-understanding.

Worldviews, thankfully, are not mere formal arguments. They represent deeply and
profoundly experienced existential orientations and ultimate concerns. And, if they are
authentically re-ligious, they ―tie life‘s experiences back together‖ and heal us that we
may survive and grow us that we may thrive. If we are not experiencing both healing and
growth, both broadly conceived, well, that‘s what the Prophets are for! They remind us
that we are to be about the actualization of value.

The interface between science and theology is not terribly interesting, philosophically,
unless our project is to disambiguate their definitions. If it remains interesting, even early
in the 21st century, it is only because so many scientistic and fideistic apologists are
arguing past each other, precisely because they‘ve neglected the work of philosophical
disambiguation, which understandably can be difficult subject matter.

Unlike philosophy (natural theology) and science, wherein we bracket, best we can, our
theology, in a theology of nature we start with God and see His presence in all things
and hear Her siren song from all places! From a different explanatory stance, we break
out in analogy and metaphor, poetry and song, allegory and parable, joke and koan, story
and dance, ritual and sacrament! And we speak of trail dust and stardust, quarks and
supernovae, maidens and sailors, the Cosmic Adventure (John Haught) and the Divine
Matrix (Joseph Bracken), leaping whitetails and creeping lizards, bright indwelling
presence and luminous dark nights,
hope and love and faith …

The Implications of a Semiotic Theological Anthropology for the Interaction
Between Science and Religion

Some Traditional Distinctions

The human mind has been described in many different ways over the years by
psychologists, philosophers, theologians and others. In psychology, it has been described
in both structural and functional terms, both by its parts and by their activities.


Psychology coursework typically combines sensation with perception, emotion with
motivation, learning with memory, personality with development. There are Jungian
terms like sensing, intuiting, thinking, feeling, perceiving and judging and Freudian terms
like ego, id and superego. Philosophers have drawn a distinction between the brain and
the mind. Most recognize distinctions like conscious, subconscious and unconscious.
Neuroscientists describe a neuronal network that is distributed throughout the body.
Theologians speak of memory, understanding and will. A host of other terms come to
mind, like cognitive, affective, instinctual, inferential, noninferential, empirical, logical,
practical and relational. One might also find the categories normative, descriptive,
interpretive and evaluative helpful.

In philosophy, there is a branch of study called epistemology, which is concerned with
how it is that we know what we know and just what it is that we might know, when we
say we know something. In theology, belief has been justified as evidential, when based
on evidence, rational, when based on reason, presuppositional, when based on
inescapable suppositions, and existential, when based on ultimate concerns. In
psychology, different developmental theorists have studied human growth. The best
known are probably Piaget (cognitive), Erikson (personality), Kohlberg (moral) and
Fowler (faith). Lonergan, as a systematic theologian, described growth in terms of
intellectual, moral and religious conversions to which Gelpi has added affective and
social conversions. Normatively, Lonergan gave us the famous transcendental
imperatives: Be attentive! Be intelligent! Be reasonable! Be responsible! Be in love!

For every distinction listed above, there are further distinctions. We need not treat all of
these nuances; however, just for example, let‘s further examine human inference. Peirce,
the founder of American pragmatism, described three types of inference, all which
presuppose the others, from the strongest form to the weakest, as deductive, inductive and
abductive inference. Generally speaking, one might think of deductive inference in
association with formal logical argumentation. Inductive inference is most often
associated with the scientific method. Abductive inference might best be thought of as
hypothesizing. Abduction is, then, informal argumentation and its ―methods‖ are quite
often what might otherwise be known as logical fallacies in formal argumentation. This
does not mean that it should be readily dismissed for this is how we do most of our
critical thinking, which is to say, fallibilistically. For example, so often, with only very
limited information, we necessarily find ourselves reasoning backwards (retro-ductively)
from known predicates (or properties) of a reality to unknown subjects (of various
classes, sets or subsets). We find ourselves venturing guesses as to what reality or type of
reality we may have encountered and employing analogies in our references to and
descriptions of such realities, when we otherwise cannot determine (epistemically) or
specify (ontologically) this reality versus another. Sometimes, we wonder if this or that
reality is novel, even? It is through such alternating conjecture and criticism, then, or
what Popper called falsification, that much of human knowledge has advanced. This is
not to say that knowledge has not also advanced, on occasion, through various leaps and
bounds, or what Kuhn called paradigm shifts.

Another pivotal distinction is that between a theory of truth and a test of truth. For our


purposes, a conventional understanding of truth will suffice in place of any otherwise
elaborately nuanced theory. A test of truth is a process that helps us navigate toward the
truth while not otherwise constituting the truth in and of itself. A truth-conducive process,
like deductive inference and formal argumentation, navigates us more or less directly
toward the truth. A truth-indicative process, like abductive inference, navigates us
indirectly by, at least, raising the probability that we are approaching the truth. As the
weakest form of inference, abduction needs to be bolstered by repeated testing, which is
to say, inductively. Beyond these rather simple, straightforward rubrics for human
knowledge-advances, there are long histories and many competing schools in philosophy
and theology and their interactions have not always been dialogical and irenic. At the risk
of oversimplifying all things epistemological, we suggest that much of the confusion has
been rooted in dualistic thinking which has viewed reality rather facilely in either-or and
all or nothing terms, too often viewing what are mere distinctions as full blown
dichotomies, too often mistaking partial truths for the whole truth, and too often
absolutizing perspectives that are indeed relative to one‘s frame of reference. In theology,
there is a word for such thinking, heresy. In philosophy, there is an adjectival suffix,
-istic.

Some Additional Distinctions

Sociologically and linguistically, we would like to introduce some additional
distinctions11 that are based on whether or not our concepts have been negotiated
(accepted into general use, more or less) by the wider pluralistic community. Those that
have been thus negotiated have theoretic status. Those still-in-negotiation are heuristic
devices or conceptual placeholders. Dogmatic concepts are employed within
communities of belief but have not been negotiated by the wider pluralistic community,
more broadly conceived. Semiotic concepts are those presuppositional notions without
which meaning and communication would not even be possible.

Toward a Philosophical Anthropology

Our purpose, thus far, has been to introduce enough categories and distinctions to provide
each different member of what might be a rather diverse audience some handles with
which to grasp our meaning and intent as it relates to our philosophical anthropology.
Foundational to any theological proposal, one must have a philosophical anthropology, a
perspective on humankind‘s psychological make-up that is grounded in good biological
science and sound evolutionary epistemology. The history of philosophy has been
characterized by one overemphasis after another, which is to say one – istic perspective
after another, whether the empiricistic, rationalistic, positivistic, idealistic or pragmatistic.
Its history might best be summed up as the struggle between the more static essentialistic
and substantialistic approaches and the more dynamical nominalistic and process-like
approaches, which are but the obverse sides of the same coin of an otherwise
epistemically and ontologically bankrupt dualistic realm, which transacts in a
philosophical currency that has no practical cash value for most of us who get along quite

11
Sylvest & Yong 2010


well with good old common sense. The history of theology, which takes philosophy as its
handmaiden, necessarily fares no better as its approaches can alternately be similarly
described as evidentialistic, rationalistic, fideistic and pietistic. One might justifiably
wonder if, down through the centuries, an epistemic fetish is all one could be expected to
come away with after a formal academic engagement of these disciplines.

Perhaps that‘s what those in the modern scientistic cabal must think? No doubt, that‘s
what the radically deconstructive postmodernists must imagine with their nihilistic bent?
Do the arationally gnostic mysterians have the only mindset that can transcend these
otherwise mutually unintelligible epistemic stances and totally incommensurable
ontological approaches?

Because of their overly facile dyadic approaches, neither an essentialism nor a
nominalism, neither a substance nor a process approach, can account for the novelty we
encounter in reality. Our known categories of givens include the primitives (like space,
time, mass & energy), forces (like electromagnetism, gravity, strong & weak nuclear) and
axioms (like the laws of thermodynamics & quantum mechanics). While it may be too
early on humankind‘s journey for us to epistemically determine with any ontological
precision the exact nature of such novelty in terms of our known theoretic givens, our
inability to robustly describe this novelty does not mean that we can not otherwise
successfully refer to it with good heuristic devices. To be clear, the novelties we are
dealing with include those involved in the Big Bang and its earliest moments, the origin
of life and the dawn of human consciousness.

The question that should be begging for our readers, now, is just what is the most
successful way to refer to reality, phenomenologically, even if we cannot otherwise
robustly describe it, metaphysically? What concepts and categories can we most
profitably employ and what rubrics for relating them would be most fruitful in their
application?

What can we reasonably aspire to say about reality without saying more than we know
about such realities as the origins of life or human consciousness or even the cosmos,
itself?

It is beyond the scope of this consideration to set forth the details of our own
philosophical journeys through these questions to our present provisional closures, but
with a great deal of enthusiasm we can recommend the approach of the American
pragmatist, Charles Sanders Peirce, as it has been employed and articulated by the
biological anthropologist, Terrence Deacon12, and the systematic theologian, Donald
Gelpi, S.J.. While we will not unfold the arguments of these scholars in any detail, neither
would we want our enthusiasm to be mistaken for an academic pretension to either a full
understanding of their work or a comprehensive grasp of its implications.

Deacon, for his part, employs an emergentist heuristic, which has also been well

12
Deacon‘s Symbolic Species


articulated by, and on several occasions even co-authored with, Ursula Goodenough, a
prominent cell biologist and popular author at the interface of science and religion.
Deacon and Goodenough are very circumspect in not telling what are otherwise
untellable tales, as they comprehensively refer to many different natural phenomena
without exhaustively describing them. In their popular writings, they take one on a
cosmic journey where properties, even reality‘s laws, are seen to emerge, first
thermodynamically, as mere shape interactions, then morphodynamically, as shape
interactions playing out over time, and finally teleodynamically, as a consequence of
shape, time and information. These orders of emergence refer to progressively higher
orders of regularities, which are causal configurations. For all science can tell,
teleodynamics, or 3rd order emergence, as Deacon and Goodenough say, define the onset
of telos on this planet and, for all we now know, the universe. They go on to develop a
correspondence between the human virtues of compassion, fair-mindedness, care and
reverence with the inherited pro-social capacities of empathy, strategic reciprocity,
nurturance and hierarchy, suggesting various symbolic accessions and syntheses whereby
our otherwise innate groundings are complexified and transfigured into uniquely human
capacities. In our view, this is hypothetically consonant with Gelpi‘s Peircean-nuanced
definitions of selves as autonomous functioning tendencies (think higher order
regularities and telos) and of human persons as selves capable of conversion (think of
Gelpi‘s Lonerganian account of conversion).

In any case, the human capacities for virtue can be realized both intuitively and
imaginatively as well as rationally and inferentially. Because humans are finite and learn
fallibilistically, each human value-realization attempt leads to an uncertain outcome,
which is to recognize that it requires a wager or risk. As such, the augmentation of
human value-realizations must be successfully managed through various risk
amplification and risk attenuation strategies, which is to further recognize that we must
be able to cash out the practical value of our concepts and risk amplification-attenuation
strategies in what is our perennial pursuit of goodness, radically finite as we are. Thus it
is that many fallacies of formal argumentation are employed in everyday common sense
leading us fallibly but probabilistically toward value-realizations.

For example, if it is true, we believe that it is also beautiful and useful, leading us to
various attraction or avoidance strategies in our value-realization pursuits. While the
converse, if it is beautiful or useful, then it is also true, is not necessarily true, still, we do
raise the probability of something being true in our recognition that it is either beautiful
or useful because if something is neither beautiful nor useful then the possibility of it
being true is nil. Thus it is in science that we employ Occam‘s Razor and other
truth-indicative criteria like simplicity, elegance, parsimony and symmetry. Thus it is in
theology that orthopraxis grounds orthodoxy. Our existential orientations toward truth,
beauty and goodness, which are innately grounded in our inherited pro-social capacities,
get transfigured into the theological imperatives of faith, hope and love as a human
value-augmentation strategy requiring the amplification of the epistemic risks already
entailed in the normative sciences of logic, aesthetics and ethics. In our religious
communities, truth is thus articulated in creed, beauty celebrated in cult or ritual, and
goodness preserved in code. Such is the nature of the Kierkegaardian leap and of the


Pascalian wager.

Questions That Beg – Toward a Theological Anthropology

Our emergentist account, appropriately modest in its description of thermodynamics,
morphodynamics and teleodynamics, leaves profound existential questions begging,
questions which leave all in wonder and awe, many in reverential silence, and many more
musing imaginatively about what we would refer to as the proto-dynamics that gave rise
to and the eschato-dynamics that might ensue from this emergent reality we have
encountered. Some employ a root metaphor, like being or experience, to elaborate a
speculative metaphysic. Others dwell in analogical imaginations, inchoately relating to
ultimate reality through robust metaphors and sweeping metanarratives. While our own
Peircean-informed sensibilities do not ambition a metaphysic (and we feel there is no
attempt better than Gelpi‘s own triadic construct of experience), they are suggestive of a
pneumatologically informed theology of nature, precisely derived from an analogy that
one might draw between the Peircean telos, as minimalistically conceived in Deacon‘s
teleodynamics, and the work of the Spirit, as broadly conceived in all of humankind‘s
great traditions and most native religions, also.

Our proposal is that what humankind relates to as an ineluctably unobtrusive but utterly
efficacious tacit dimension comprised of a matrix of dynamical formal causal relations
would, from an hierarchical perspective, correspond to a divine telic dimension, much
like the interpenetrating causative fields of John Haught‘s process approach and aesthetic
teleology, much like Joseph Bracken‘s Divine Matrix. We would point out that this
conception is not an attempt to facilely blend otherwise incommensurate approaches, for
example the Whiteheadian process versus Gelpi‘s Peircean account, and we do recognize
and endorse the efficacies of the triadic over the classically dyadic (even di-polar)
accounts. Rather, from a phenomenological perspective, we are invoking vaguely
referential analogs as heuristic devices or conceptual placeholders, recognizing that
metaphors and analogies are not, in and of themselves, system-bound. In other words, our
robustly pneumatological imaginations are relating our triadic and social human
experiences of phenomenal reality, with all of its many different patterns and regularities,
to what we consider putative divine supremacies. We are not otherwise attempting, in the
least, to account for manifold and multiform continuities and discontinuities between
different orders of reality. We do believe that any who ambition a metaphysic must both
account for divine alterity as well as differentiate the moral status of the human from
other selves and creatures. All of this is to suggest that, because of the pervasive ubiquity
in the use of the concept of Spirit down through the ages and still across the face of the
Earth, arguably it meets the criterion of enjoying theoretic status contrasted with the
dogmatic status of so many other theological concepts. In this regard, we might affirm
with Radical Orthodoxy that, over against any notion that there exists a secular society
writ large, as abstracted and reified by a militant but not truly regnant nihilism, our planet
is inhabited, rather, by a pneumatologically-informed but broadly pluralistic community.
With the Reformed epistemologists, we might affirm that being-in-love in the Spirit is a
necessary and sufficient epistemic risk amplification for any who‘d aspire to most
robustly (superabundantly) augment human value-realizations beyond those inherited as


pro-social biases and transfigured (abundantly, to be sure) into our authentically human
moral virtues.

The Relations of Science and Religion

What are the implications of this theological anthropology for the interaction between
science and religion, viewing reality pansemioentheistically, employing the epistemic
categories of the normative, descriptive, interpretive and evaluative and characterizing
our concepts as semiotic, theoretic, heuristic and dogmatic?

To the extent that we map science as a descriptive enterprise and religion as an
interpretive enterprise and affirm them as autonomous methodologies but still
integrally-related in every human value-realization, there can be no talk of conflict, as
reigns in the scientism of the Enlightenment fundamentalists and the literalism of the
various religious fundamentalists. Our axiological perspectivalism with its explicit
integralism speaks of a model of interaction that coincides with Ian Barbour‘s
Integration, John Polkinghorne‘s Assimilation, John Haught‘s Confirmation and Ted
Peter‘s Hypothetical Consonance (and Ethical Overlap).

In some sense, the very basis of a semiotic approach is grounded in the need for
informational interpretation, a need that derives from the radical finitude of creatures, a
need that plays out in our fallibilistic methodologies and heavy reliance on the weaker
forms of inference, both abduction and induction, such as in the back-door philosophy of
Popperian falsification and the informal argumentation that predominates, even mostly
comprises, our common sense. The implication is, then, that absent this finitude and
given a virtual omniscience, descriptively, and omnipotence, evaluatively, the normative
sciences would consist of only aesthetics and ethics, logic would be obviated and the
descriptive and interpretive would be a distinction without a difference, which might
describe, in fact, an idealized eschatological epistemology whereby humankind as a
community of inquiry has attained to the truth. At any rate, to be sure, that is manifestly
not the case, presently.

One practical upshot of this situation is that there need be no Two-Language Theory as
discussed by Peters or Two-Language System as described by Peacocke, at least from our
idealized theoretical perspective; however, from a practical perspective, science and
religion will seemingly traffic in two languages because, if for no other reason, the latter
is dominated by dogmatic and heuristic conceptions, the former by semiotic and theoretic
conceptions. These need not be conceived as two languages, from a strictly linguistic
perspective, but might better be conceived as two vocabularies that are slowly merging.

There is another reason for religion‘s expanded vocabulary, though, but that derives from
the fact that it has additional concerns (e.g. interpersonal) that are of no special interest to
a purely scientific quest or merely descriptive enterprise. It is in that vein that one might
invoke what Barbour and Polkinghorne have called Independence and Haught has
described as Contrast. Willem Drees has developed a schema that more explicitly


recognizes that religion has additional elements than the merely cognitive-propositional
as much of religion‘s content rests on both religious experience and tradition.

At this point, one might recognize that the various categories that have been employed
for the interaction between science and religion are not all mutually exclusive. The
categories we employ in our axiological perspectivalism are methodologically-
autonomous but epistemically related and this noetic reality is affirmed whenever a
scientist normatively invokes Occam ‘s razor, parsimony, symmetry, elegance or other
aesthetic criteria to adjudicate between competing hypotheses. Thus it is that, whenever
any methodologically autonomous realms do not fully overlap, but only partially overlap,
and are placed in what Haught calls Contact, we would urge what Barbour and
Polkinghorne suggest as Dialogue.

Anticipations

From the standpoint of interreligious dialogue, this hermeneutical circle of the normative,
descriptive, interpretive and evaluative might be interpreted in terms of orthopathy,
orthodoxy, orthopraxis, orthocommunio, each as an aspect of a religious interpretation
which presupposes the other aspects. From a practical perspective, these distinctions are
critical because they imply, for example, that the orthopathic aspects of our spiritual
―technologies‖ – by which we refer to the various spiritual disciplines, practices,
asceticisms and devotions, for example – are not (necessarily) inextricably bound to any
given doctrinal insights. Thus we would expect continued fruitful interreligious
engagements such as have already been realized between Christianity and Zen, for
example, and would encourage further orthopathic dialogue and exchange. Most
theologians already recognize this dynamic, prudentially speaking, in their willingness to
abstract orthopraxes – or moral and practical aspects – out of their doctrinal contexts in
other traditions. Also, metaphorical and analogical language (ananoetic knowledge) is not
system-bound, so our depth encounters of reality can be enriched by our interreligious
ananoetic interchanges, which can provide common ground to explore together our
theologies of nature, especially from a pneumatological perspective. We believe this
approach can help prepare an ever more fertile ground for interreligious dialogue as our
orthopathic, orthopraxic and ananoetic exchanges prepare the way to a much sought after
unity even as we continue our search to discursively identify the commonalities in our
otherwise diverse and pluralistic belief systems.

We can discuss the philosophic focus of human concern in terms of the normative
sciences. These sciences, in their mediation of our interpretive and descriptive foci will,
in the final analysis, always come up short in rationally demonstrating and empirically
proving our competing worldviews and metaphysics. We do want to ensure, normatively,
that any of our competing systems at least minimalistically gift us with sufficient
modeling power of reality such that we can establish an epistemic parity with other
systems. Once we have established a modicum of equiplausibility or equiprobability, we
might then invoke a type of equiplausibility principle to guide us in our existential
choices. And such a principle can (should) adhere to normative guidelines for informal


reasoning based on our abductive and retroductive inferential modes, which are
presupposed in our triadic inferential dynamism along with induction and deduction.
Here we reason from predicates and properties back to subjects and essences (nonstrict
identities) in order to gain a probabilistic edge over otherwise arbitrary decision-making
and prudential judgment. Thus we invoke parsimony, simplicity, elegance, beauty,
symmetry, utility, goodness and other aesthetical and ethical and logical existential
orientations, advancing notions like Pascal's Wager, for example, and taking courage to
leap with Kierkegaard. And it is here that we would propose that these philosophic norms
transist into theological virtue, which we propose might be understood in terms of the
amplification of risks toward the augmentation of value. As we gather from Haught's
Cosmic Adventure and aesthetic teleology, the more fragile the more beautiful. And, as
we know from nonequilibrium thermodynamics, the greater the number of bifurcations
and permutations in a structure's composition, the more fragile ---because it runs a greater
risk of disintegration--- hence, the more beautiful. So, the leap, the wager, from a
philosophic epistemic virtue to a theological virtue, from logic and aesthetics and ethics
to faith and hope and love, is an amplification of risk (kenosis as risk of disintegration)
toward the augmentation of value, an increase in truth, beauty and goodness, mediated by
creed, cult and code in community, both a philosophical community of inquiry and a
theological community of lovers.

We are not, in any manner, suggesting that we believe that this is what many, or even
most, people are doing consciously. This is how we conceive the underlying
dynamism for common sense as practiced by humanity, whether consciously or not,
competently or not.

Our affinity for Peirce comes from our appreciation of his pragmatic logic and theory of
meaning and affirmation of metaphysics as a valid but fallible enterprise. Beyond that,
we otherwise sympathize with the analytical approaches and the advocates of common
sense and any other approaches that incorporate some type of fallibilism or critical
realism. And beyond that, we really are not looking for additional epistemological or
methodological rigor other than that practiced by conventional science and that enjoyed
in colloquial usage (including the "leap" of faith) and subject to linguistic analysis.

It is our simple thesis that most people are competent in their interactions with reality
because we have evolved that way. That is a tautology, to be sure. But it is a taut one,
empirically. Peirce is exactly right in his use of the analogy of a cable with many strands
or filaments to explain human knowledge. The reason most people are competent is that
they have enough strands. We are also fallible, because no one has them all.

Epistemology searches for an eschatological ideal that would account for every strand
and epistemologists argue about the attributes of differently-stranded cables. Good for
them. But these arguments, in my view, reach a point of diminishing returns where, for
all practical purposes, the differences in their positions become so nuanced as not to be
relevant to me vis a vis my value-realization pursuits.

Ontologists, for their part, argue about how high they have rope-climbed these cables and


what vista they have taken in, cosmologically, or how low they have descended into the
deepest structures of matter to discern reality's microstructures. Their arguments, too,
reach a point of diminishing returns vis a vis my value-realizations.

Although there is no theoretical constraint on how high or low humankind can travel,
hoisting itself on its epistemic cables, for all practical purposes, our radical finitude limits
our horizons vis a vis humanity's ultimate concerns. And this, then, places us in deep
sympathy with Wittgenstein, Pascal, James, Kierkegaard et al with my qualifying proviso
being that faith takes us beyond but not without reason, which is to recognize that we do
need different strands to construct our cables and that some cables are indeed better than
others. Which strands are necessary and how many of them are sufficient is
Problematical. What would make for the ideal cable is highly problematical. We think it
is fair, then, to talk in terms of adequacy, abundance and superabundance (or degrees of
participation, if you will) when it comes to epistemic cables vis a vis value-realizations.
We might think, for example, of Lonergan's transcendental imperatives: Be attentive,
empirically. Be intelligent, semantically, such as in our naming exercises, critically
examining our referents, concepts and terms as they variously describe or refer to
realities. Be reasonable, logically, whether in formal or informal argumentation,
especially employing common sense. Be responsible, prudentially, in our practical and
moral deliberations and judgments and in our analyses of actionable norms, guided by
equiplausibility principles. Be in love, affectively, relationally interacting with reality
guided, orthopathically, by authentic aesthetic sensibilities and a grammar of trust, proper
assent, dutiful fidelity, a felt sense of solidarity expressed in compassion and by
being-in-love (storge, philia, eros and agape).

Now, one of our central contentions is that a philosophical anthropology that does not
recognize and affirm a human exceptionalism is not empirically demonstrable and
therefore not philosophically defensible. Further we contend that such a philosophical
anthropology does not necessarily derive from a Peircean-informed perspective, neither
from a religious nor a secular outlook. For example, we largely resonate with Ursula
Goodenough and Terry Deacon, who have set forth what we interpret as a naturalistic
account of human exceptionalism. However one defines the epistemic filaments that
comprise the human cable of knowledge per the Peircean metaphor, epistemology is the
study of which of the filaments are necessary and how many of them are sufficient.
Beyond the necessary and sufficient, epistemologists also want to know what mix might
be epistemically optimal.

Presumably, because of our finitude, we are all operating suboptimally, some merely
satisficing, minimalistically, others variously enjoying epistemic abundance and
superabundance. One doesn't have to be a self-aware, consciously-competent
epistemologist to realize human values because human common sense evolved as fast
and frugal heuristics that probabilistically guide us toward knowledge, sometimes
unawares. People with the requisite common sense are enjoying epistemic efficacies from
these probabilistic heuristics. The normative and evaluative mediation of human
knowledge-advances and value-realizations are grounded in these probabilistic heuristics
and can be rendered, in fact, in terms of informal argumentation based on retroductive


abductions that reason (backwards) from predicates to subjects, or, we might say, from
various properties to various modal realities. (If it is elegant, it is true. If it is useful, it is
true.) That is why Occam's Razor works, sometimes. That's how and why parsimony,
symmetry, elegance, simplicity and utility work, sometimes.

The epistemic efficacies, or gnosiological significance, of the logical and aesthetical and
ethical sciences, or of truth and beauty and goodness, derive from the fast and frugal
heuristics of an ecological rationality gifted by natural selection. When these heuristics
are modeled like informal arguments, their fallibile and probabilistic nature is plain to
see. Because we are fallible, our value-realizations involve risk-ventures. Risk ventures
involve risk-management. The amplification of risks, within reasonable norms,
augments human value-realizations. Like all other epistemic risk-taking,
risk-amplification toward the end of value-augmentation is normed probabilistically and
can be guided by equiplausibility (or even equiprobability) principles, which might
suggest, for example, that one is acting within one's epistemic rights, only when one's
risk-ventures are life-giving and relationship-enhancing.

The concepts and terms employed in our various belief systems can be categorized as
semiotic (if nonnegotiable, cross-culturally), theoretic (if negotiated), heuristic (if
still-in-negotiation) and dogmatic (if non-negotiated). One's belief system, even when
articulated with dogmatic and heuristic concepts and terms (in addition to the requisite
semiotic and theoretic ones), enjoys epistemic parity with competing perspectives as
long as one is acting within one's epistemic rights as guided by the actionable norms
derived from acceptable equiplausibility principles, which have been established in a,
more or less, pluralistic community. One's beliefs enjoy epistemic warrant in a
community of value-realizers when one establishes epistemic parity with competing
systems, acts within one's epistemic rights and articulates those beliefs using only
semiotic and theoretic concepts and terms. A community's acceptance of actionable
norms and establishment of semiotic and theoretic terms and concepts is, itself, a
truth-indicative, probabilitistic (hence, still fallible) guide to optimal value-realization.

The creeds, cults and codes of religious communities thus represent existential
risk-ventures, Pascalian wagers and Kierkegaardian leaps, that go beyond (but certainly
must not go without) the philosophic risk-taking of the normative sciences of the wider
pluralistic community in a risk-amplification ordered toward optimal augmentation of
human value-realizations of truth, beauty, goodness and unity. Which communities enjoy
epistemic parity with competing interpretive systems and meet the criteria of acting
within their epistemic rights? Which do not? Those are sociologic transactions, the
currency of which is the pragmatic cashing out of values, not as a theory of truth
(truth-conducively, as they say) per se but as a darned good test of truth
(truth-indicatively).

We consider ourselves minimalist realists, fallibilists. We draw our inspiration from
Peirce's pragmatism (or pragmaticism). Theologically, then, the only thing we need in our
epistemic suite to do the God-encounter is our common sense and a receptive heart. The
existentialists and reformed epistemologists think all we need is that receptive heart. The

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