Jordan Hall & The Great Transition

General
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I think this characterization fits orthodox Christianity much more than Gnostic.

Gnosticism is all about knowing for oneself - predicated on the idea that this knowledge is available to you, and you don’t need to take anyone’s word for it. Conventional Christianity/Paulianity has typically included a class of those in the know and those dependent on them for interpretation. You don’t know it to be true for yourself through direct knowledge (Gnosis) - you know it to be true because the correct authority told you so. The correct authority can also be a book; the important thing is, you chose the right authority to believe in.

How can one interpret spreading the Gospel ‘to all the nations’ as anything other than:

“I am enlightened, you aren’t; and that is why you need to accept my teaching as more true than whatever you thought before”.

Perhaps those to whom you are spreading the Gospel may have even better news that you? This doesn’t seem to compute for a mindset based on the idea that one has boughten in to the one, true, religion.

Gnosticism is, of course, predicated on there being those who know and those who don’t. But this is not a prescription of how things should be – it’s a description of how things are. If there’s knowledge, there are those who know and those who don’t. The fundamentally democratic stance is not to deny that this is so, but rather to ensure that knowledge is personal and direct, not taken from an authority.

Perhaps it would help if you defined what you mean by elitism. Of course, the characterization of Gnostics you gave reeks of it, but I haven’t seen anything like that in any Gnostic texts I’ve read.

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My first college level History of Christianity course was in 1978, and I’ve been reading high quality research on this topic off and on ever since. So here I am summarizing, not claiming originality or exhaustiveness. The sense of a sort of elite/anti-elite dialectic in the Church is decently well attested, lately for example by Tom Holland in Dominion. (I got Gemini to draft some examples for me, given that blue books and study carrels did not entirely make it out of 1978! See Gemini’s examples below).

Closer to the specific topic at hand, in (Mack, B. L. (1994). The lost gospel : the book of Q & Christian origins. Harpersanfrancisco.) the thesis is offered that the canonical New Testament itself was compiled by early bishops wishing to justify a church structure featuring governance by bishops. Each of the individual Gospels supported claims to authority by some early Christian community or another. (Different communities, different claims to authority). Books like the Gospel of Thomas did not make the cut because they did not fit the desired narrative. Mack’s interpretation is contestable, of course. New Testament scholarship is all over the place, so pick your flavor!

On a more personal level, I pondered yesterday, what if Jesus indeed was an ethnocentric first century Jew, expecting the restoration of the literal Davidic kingdom, to be accomplished very shortly in historical time by the intensification of specifically Jewish spiritual practice? Moreover, what if he had testy personal interactions with all manner of people who objected to either the substance of his teaching or the manner of his teaching? Beyond that, what if Jesus had no notion of the wider world, no science at all, and no ideas at all about “indigenous wisdom” on the remote continents he never heard of. Does any of that diminish the notion of divine presence in work of Jesus? For me it does not.

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Give examples from the history of Christianity in which reform movements opposed hierarchy in the Church.

Gemini said

Throughout the history of Christianity, reform movements have frequently emerged to challenge the centralized power, wealth, and perceived corruption of the Church hierarchy. These movements often sought a return to “apostolic simplicity,” arguing that the structural mediation of priests and bishops hindered a direct relationship between the believer and God.

1. The Waldensians (12th Century)

Founded by Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant from Lyon who gave away his fortune, the Waldensians (or “Poor Men of Lyon”) directly challenged the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s authority.

  • Anti-Hierarchical Stance: They rejected the exclusive right of the clergy to preach, asserting that any layperson—including women—could preach the Gospel if they lived a life of poverty.

  • Key Beliefs: They denied the validity of sacraments administered by “unworthy” priests and rejected the authority of the Pope and bishops over the individual conscience.

  • Outcome: They were declared heretics at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and faced centuries of persecution, yet they survived as one of the oldest Protestant denominations.

2. The Lollards (14th Century)

Inspired by the teachings of John Wycliffe in England, the Lollards pushed for a radical democratization of faith.

  • Anti-Hierarchical Stance: Wycliffe argued that the “true Church” was the invisible body of those predestined for salvation, not the visible, institutional hierarchy headed by the Pope.

  • The Vernacular Bible: By translating the Bible into English, the Lollards stripped the clergy of their role as the sole interpreters of the Word.

  • Key Beliefs: They attacked the practice of confession to a priest and the doctrine of transubstantiation, which they felt gave priests an “unholy” amount of power over the laity.

3. The Radical Reformation: Anabaptists (16th Century)

While mainstream reformers like Luther and Calvin retained some form of Church structure, the Radical Reformation sought to dismantle it entirely.

  • Anti-Hierarchical Stance: Anabaptists (like the Mennonites and Hutterites) believed in the “priesthood of all believers” in its most literal sense. They viewed the Church as a voluntary community of equals.

  • Separation of Church and State: They rejected the “State-Church” model, arguing that hierarchy was a tool of worldly power rather than spiritual growth.

  • Key Beliefs: They practiced believer’s baptism (rejecting infant baptism), which removed the Church’s power to “claim” individuals before they could make a conscious choice.

4. The Quaker Movement (17th Century)

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), founded by George Fox in England, represents one of the most complete rejections of hierarchy in Christian history.

  • Anti-Hierarchical Stance: They abolished the professional ministry altogether. In traditional Quaker meetings, there was no priest, no liturgy, and no pulpit.

  • The “Inner Light”: Fox taught that every person possessed an “Inner Light” or “Measure of God,” making external hierarchies and formal sacraments unnecessary.

  • Outcome: This radical egalitarianism extended to social issues, leading Quakers to be early advocates for the abolition of slavery and gender equality.

Summary Comparison

Movement Primary Target Replacement Concept
Waldensians Clerical Wealth/Monopoly Apostolic Poverty & Lay Preaching
Lollards Papal Authority Supremacy of Scripture (Vernacular)
Anabaptists State-Church Union Voluntary Community of Believers
Quakers Professional Ministry The “Inner Light” of the Individual

Note: These movements often faced extreme pushback because challenging the hierarchy was viewed not just as a religious error (heresy) but as a threat to the social and political stability of the era.

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Very interesting and informative, thank you Robert! @RobertBunge

As a Quaker myself, you can see where I’m coming from on this :wink:

I guess what I advocate is that people see the totality of Christian movements, not just the few that have achieved some sort of hegemony, often in collaboration with the state. And the movements like the ones cited here are not saying “Christianity got it all wrong, chuck it all out and start again”, but rather “we see you hierarchical churches as contrary to what we understand as the essence of the Christian message as preached and lived by Jesus”.

Of course there is plenty of room for nuance here. It’s probably all too easy to suppose that parts of the New Testament that do not agree with your own position were inserted or edited by forces inimical to the way you see Christianity. But it is not implausible.

On your “what if” questions, well, indeed. Amusingly, my (older) brother has been doing a lot of work, in the company with a few others on academia.edu, looking into the development of Christianity, I’d say from a pretty agnostic, non-spiritual position. I see him as a “speculative” amateur historian, though his speculations are usually pretty plausible. He’s not stupid. See Adrian C Grant — his speculations are remarkably similar … perhaps Jesus started out as a Jewish rebel, who came to see the error of the ways of armed revolt. But for my part, I prefer not to speculate on the history, and rather focus on the inner spiritual significance of the teachings and traditions seen as a whole. I should say, not just “inner”, but also definitely “collective”.

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For sure, and not just the Roman Catholics, who didn’t exactly encourage hoi polloi to read the Bible, but also modern-day evangelicals, who (one might say, arbitrarily) designate some books and preachers as “sound” and less favoured ones “unsound”. Catholics can just preach what they consider to be true doctrine, but evangelical protestants have to cherry-pick their Biblical quotations to suit their belief system; or more usually, get into weird mental gymnastics to reinterpret passages that appear to contradict core beliefs.

But then, in Gnostic traditions, what happens when different people have different intuitions of the direct knowledge that comes to them?

I interpret it as “share you insights freely with as many people as can benefit”. One may perhaps take similar positions around mass vaccinations. People are, we honestly believe, dying unnecessarily because of a lack of vaccines, but still, people should be free to make up their own minds about whether or not to accept them. And if you honestly believe that some ancient tribe will be happier with a Christian (or any other religion for that matter) than their traditional tribal religion, then you should offer it. Offer, but absolutely not to force it on them. Sure, there are difficult cases here as well. Do we consider it fine to continue with human sacrifice, or cannibalism, or even FGM, just because it is traditional? Maybe, just as I see it as vital to ensure protection for conscientious objectors, it is also vital to allow individuals to opt out of any religion, including one that is traditional for them?

I’d like to add, though, the corollary: listen deeply to the insights of others, and be open to changing your belief system consequent on what you hear, and what you experience.

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And just to throw into the mix, my own general position stated simply:

A good belief system (or religion) for you is one that actually helps you to be a better person. The best religion or belief system for you is the one that helps you in the practice of real life to be the best person you can be. And as people are different, so will the belief systems that are good, or best, for them.

Very clearly, that depends on what we see to be “good” and “best”. I don’t see any way of avoiding that. One extra thought: perhaps the “best” belief system for you is the one that best helps your general growth in understanding and ethics — naturally, including your inner development.

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I asked Gemini to expedite my research, but I’m using books and other resources as well. Anyway, see Gemini for in-the-weeds stuff.

My interpretation is of all the gospels, Matthew is the most Jewish and most interested in featuring Jesus as a reformer of specifically Jewish traditions (Luke, by contrast, is mostly writing for gentiles). All of this is muddied by a generalized social context of many Jews living in Greek-speaking diaspora, around the Eastern Mediterranean, under Roman rule (which followed previous Hellenistic and Persian rule). So the contrast between “Greek” and “Jew” was not as stark as one might imagine. The initial hearing of “all nations” likely had places like Syria and Anatolia top of mind - the exact places Paul targeted in his initial mission.

Gemini:

To interpret the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18–20 through the lens of Q Source (Quelle) analysis, one must first look at what is missing rather than what is present.

In biblical scholarship, the Q Source is a hypothesized collection of Jesus’ sayings shared by Matthew and Luke, but absent from Mark. However, the Great Commission presents a unique challenge to this theory because it is largely considered a “Matthean” composition rather than a “Q” document.

1. The Absence of the Commission in Q

The most striking aspect of a Q-centered analysis is that the Great Commission does not exist in Q.

  • Sayings-Based Focus: Q is primarily a collection of Jesus’ teachings and “wisdom” sayings (such as the Beatitudes or the Lord’s Prayer) rather than a narrative of his death and resurrection.

  • The “Q” Ending: Most scholars believe the Q source ended with a promise of the disciples sitting on twelve thrones judging the tribes of Israel, rather than a command to go to “all nations.”

2. Redaction Criticism: Matthew’s Addition

From a Q-perspective, the Great Commission is viewed as Matthean Redaction. This means Matthew took the core “Q” teachings he inherited and added this “Grand Finale” to align with his specific community’s goals.

  • From “Israel Only” to “All Nations”: In earlier parts of Matthew (likely influenced by Q or local tradition), Jesus tells his disciples not to go to the Gentiles (Matthew 10:5).

  • The Shift: By the time we reach Matthew 28:19, the author has shifted the focus from a strictly Jewish mission to a universal one (panta ta ethne).

3. Authority and the “Son of Man”

In Q, Jesus often speaks as the “Son of Man” in a prophetic or future-judgment sense.

  • The Connection: Matthew 28:18 (“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”) echoes the “Son of Man” imagery found in Daniel 7 and parts of Q.

  • The Interpretation: A Q-analyst would see this as Matthew taking the “Q” concept of Jesus’ future authority and “realizing” it in the present moment of the Risen Christ.

4. Comparison of the “Commissioning”

While Q doesn’t have the Great Commission, it does have a Mission Charge (found in Matthew 10 and Luke 10).

Feature Q Mission Charge Matthew’s Great Commission
Scope Restricted (House of Israel) Universal (All Nations)
Method Itinerant, poverty, healing Baptizing and Teaching
Focus Proclaiming the Kingdom is near Observing Jesus’ commands

The Q-View Summary

From the point of view of Q analysis, Matthew 28:18–20 is the moment where the prophetic wisdom of the Q source is transformed into the institutional mission of the early Church. It represents the transition from Jesus as a traveling teacher of Jewish wisdom to Jesus as the cosmic Lord whose “instructions” (the very ones found in the Q source) must now be taught to the entire world.

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Do you mean, how is this resolved? It doesn’t have to be. The Gnostic doesn’t ask what is the true path - each Gnostic is a path unto themselves. Gnostic sects have always co-existed without needing to go to war with one another over interpretations. The assumption there is one ‘right’ way of looking at things, the stakes being infinitely high, creates a world of unending religious violence.

I think this boils down to the question of whether the virus is real and the antidote works. If so, then those who are afflicted don’t need it forcefully applied. One can simply test the antidote and see that it works. But then it would be more like knowing for oneself, i.e. Gnosis.

This is a good summary of what I consider to be a healthy outlook.

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Beyond that, I’m all for seeing the totality of human cultural movements in general! As a purely individual project, that is absurd, of course. But via extreme collective intelligence (leveraging AI and informed human discussants, such as those found here), an asymptotic approach to the hypothetical Big Picture may at least be approachable).

My formal religious affiliation remains Roman Catholic. My practice of that is largely negligent (although I do seem to run into quite a few Jesuit novices at L’Arche). My public devotional practices lately have been inter-religious, sponsored by Bahá’ís, and run along lines rather similar to a Friends meeting. Layman Pascal would call me “shamanoid”. So whatever Spirit is doing with me, it’s very free-range.

Anyway, to get to the heart of the matter, reading Habermas on the distinction between the cosmological (like Plato) and the soteriological (world religions in general) raises essential points. Spoiler alert - it look like Habermas is going to come down on Western “post-metaphysical” thought as soteriological in its structure. This would align nicely with Tom Holland’s insights that anti-Christians like Voltaire maintained an essentially Christian ethic. Smash as many icons as you like. The evangelical mindset runs deeper than that.

This all circles back to parallel discussions here about 2R and “mission”. To me, “mission” implies at the very least teleology, if not soteriology. Habermas shows how Plotinus, even, introduced the notion of a “fall” into his neo-Platonic vision of the One. (Augustine did not weave his theology from whole cloth). In the neo-Platonic system, the wisdom seeker needed to mediate back to unity with the One. But of course, that unity had been lost in the first place through creatureliness. Any number of late Roman gnostic movements would have been fully on board with that, as would have the Christians, roughly speaking. So the need for salvation has been baked into the Western cultural cake for quite a while now. Secularize it, call it “revolution”, call it “GDP”, call it what you like - the point is there is some greater Good just over the horizon and all must heed the call.

2R is just dripping with that sort of thinking. I swim in those waters too! The “mission”, as such, seems rather inchoate at the moment, but that may be integral to its very attractive power.

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Yes … so, shall we settle for the virtue of being open-minded, as we can never see that totality fully? There’s a nice piece of advice from the heart of Quakerism, FWIW: “Spiritual learning continues throughout life, and often in unexpected ways. There is inspiration to be found all around us, in the natural world, in the sciences and arts, in our work and friendships, in our sorrows as well as in our joys. Are you open to new light, from whatever source it may come?”

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Yes indeed! Invites an open, inquisitive and vulnerable look in the mirror. So easy to defend oneself through denial and blame-shifting when it starts to look like Animal Farm, but I’d say, the shameworthy thing is not to look, not to examine; after seeing it and recanting, all is forgiven. (And yes, there is of course a horrible history there, too.)

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Well … I’m not exactly recanting teleology, soteriology, and mission. Just noting cultural deep structures that I do indeed participate in. Of course, awareness of such deep structures its is own sort of deeper structure, which implies a new horizon of available freedom (I’m leaning towards “transpardigmatic” as a label).

I read some more Habermas commentary on Augustine last night … It runs quite parallel to what I gathered from Charles Taylor earlier on the same topic. Although few here would have much interest in Augustine’‘s notions of Adam’s fall, foreordination, the inevitability of sin (for which we are nonetheless culpable), the quasi-biological transmission of that fault from our primal parents in the Garden, and so on … in much subtler ways, 2R (and much of Western culture in general) remains thoroughly Augustinian. The whole ‘inner development work’ thing is about as Augustinian as it gets. Augustine - for the first time in the ancient world - problematized the human subject. Prior to his musings on will, and how will needs divine favor to align with the good, the preconditions for everything from Cartesianism to Romanticism really were not in place. It’s Augustine’s conceptual world, we just live in it.

The alternative was best grasped by Nietzsche. (And best embodied by Hitler). In a scary way, the ersatz “Christians” running the US right now imagine they, of all people, are the ones without sin. So thank you no, I do not “repent” the need to discern telos, the need to embrace mission, the need to acknowledge the limits of will and to consider sources of goodness from beyond a transcendent horizon. I’m just really, really choosy about what “salvation” looks like and whose pulpit I park myself next to!

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:smiling_face_with_sunglasses: No worries @Robert I wasn’t in the least thinking of you as in need of repentence :joy: In any case, I shudder at the thought that anyone would see me as any kind of figure that could say what needed to be recanted.

My point is very very general here, and I guess we would be in broad agreement. It’s only that it’s a really good idea for all of us to look in the mirror, and see if we are reproducing just what we are critical of, by way of the means that we do the critique, or the way we are into any of these things.

I’m not at all excepting myself, either. Rather, I would say that we can help each other, if we are open to it (and I would hope we are, increasingly) to point out any potential internal contradictions that we see in each other’s positions, and kindly! I’m so sorry if you have felt unkindness from my words here above. Kind of Romans 3:32, to do some of my own cherry-picking :wink:

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So, as above, my intention was not in the least to ask you to “repent” — rather, those who stand at street corners declaiming the need for others to repent brings up deep discomfort, as I am allergic to hypocrisy (and welcome anyone to point out if they see me indulging in it). So yes, let’s discern telos, embrace mission, etc. etc.

How can we be choosy in the best way, I wonder? I see several dimensions to this question, among which: what motivates our choosiness? in being choosy, do we pretend that we are choosing for others? are there right and wrong choices, and how could we discern? can we not only choose pulpits, but also choose to abjure pulpits altogether?

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No worries! If I cared about my ego or my tender feelings, I would never post anything at all on the global Internet! (To all you more delicate flowers out there, please log off ASAP!)

How this pertains to the current topic in this thread, I really did experience a “calling” from some transcendent place to write quite a bit on social and theoretical matters. This was entirely out of character for over 20 years of my prior life. I recall a very definite moment of decision - to write, or not to write? That is the question! I subjectively consented to becoming a writer with the only thing that passes for a heartfelt devotional prayer in my subjective world “Thy will be done.”

So I take all this business about “mission” quite personally - and quite impersonally. I see mission as something like the directionality of cosmic energy flow. I take my acceptance of mission as being conceding to the force of irresistible tide. It’s the alignment of “what I love” with “what the world needs”, with the world having rather the larger say in the matter.

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One thought occurs to me here, inspired by Bateson: the meaning of a communication is the response it elicits.

If that is so, then one way of judging these traditions is not merely by asking which layer is earliest, or which text is most “correct,” but by asking what each version actually produces in those who receive it.

On that basis, the issue with orthodoxy is not simply that it may diverge from some earlier sayings-tradition such as Q. It is that, in historical practice, it has very often elicited precisely the response one would expect from an authority-based system: dependence on authorized interpreters, insistence on right belief, missionary certainty, and division between those qualified to teach and those expected to assent.

By contrast, if a teaching elicits direct inquiry, inward verification, and freedom from imposed authority, then whatever one calls that, gnosis or otherwise, it seems to me closer to truth in the only sense that matters: not as something one is told to repeat, but something one can actually know.

So when people ask whether Jesus was really saying this or that, or whether Matthew departs from Q, I think the more revealing question is: what did these forms of the message go on to create? Because that, at least in part, is what they mean.

And if one form reliably produces hierarchy while another opens the possibility of personal knowledge, I know which of the two I would regard with more suspicion.

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I’m in the midst of reading Habermas’s analysis of Augustine of Hippo, and that strikes me as a useful case study because it touches on many of the points you are raising.

Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric and had a fine classical education. Son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, he sampled just about all the philosophical and spiritual options available in his day, most notably Manichaeism, Neo-Platonism, and ultimately, orthodox Christianity. On that level, Augustine was a spiritual seeker, most interested is what you are calling “truth”. The problem Habermas is interested in - which in many ways he picks up straight from Augustine himself - is why did Christianity, with its mystery cult-like rituals of baptism and eucharist, supplant the more rational and intellectually sophisticated pagan philosophical tradition? The answer Augustine arrived at - an answer that Habermas in his end-of-life work generally embraced - is that pagan philosophy became detached from pagan ritual, and ritual, it turns out, has an essential role to play.

Apart of being a spiritual seeker, Augustine eventually become Bishop of Hippo, which in the late Roman context carried all manner of civil and pragmatic implications beyond philosophical or spiritual truth seeking. There was also the question of maintaining social order. Look into the Donatist controversy, for example. Literal murder and mayhem grew out of such theological controversies. Christian “orthodoxy” at the time was established by councils of bishops, convened by the Roman emperor. It had precious little to do with philosophical or spiritual truth seeking. It had everything to do with sorting out who was the boss, who had freedom to say what, who got to kill whom for official state-sponsored reasons. Y N Harari likes to distinguish “knowledge as truth” and “knowledge as power”. Two different things, related only by their common basis in communicative action.

Augustine formed a grand synthesis of all of that, which synthesis continues to have profound implications for Western Civilization - and I would argue, global civilization - into the world today. Augustine did not find neo-Platonism “untrue” in purely philosophical terms. In many ways, he continued to embrace all of it. It’s more like he realized that Christianity, with its embodied rituals and sensual metaphors, resonated on other levels. Pagan philosophy had lost its ability to constitute a full society, including the sensual masses whose spiritual truth seeking was not especially intellectual and whose religious practice was limited to cultic participation pure and simple. Augustine the philosopher tried to show why theology - the intellectual interpretation of the cult - was indeed the superior discipline. His search was not just about truth in the abstract. It was more about finding a center for both the soul and for social leadership, by a personality adrift in choppy waters in both of those dimensions.

OK, so what’s all that got to do with us here now? To paraphrase Augustine, our hearts are restless till they rest in what, exactly? Is it formulas that we seek? Symbols? Rituals? Experiences? The people wandering in the Time Between Worlds will be restless till we rest in …

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Agreed. If there were any people into debating and investigating heresy, that’s what I would have liked to see them motivated by. So, it is a vital question: what are the products of the different branches of different religions?

I would also suggest caution here, mainly due to confirmation bias, echo chambers and propaganda. Not to mention historical cherry-picking! I wonder if the best we can do provisionally is to document how “reliable” (reproducible, etc.) the effects are, not only of different belief systems in themselves, but also the social and organisational structures around them — maybe the institutions can be seen two-sidedly: on the one side they can be seen as the product of the belief system; on the other side they are strong factors in the culture and behaviour of those who live under those institutions.

This seems to me very interesting territory, even though it is hard to perceive anything firmer than speculation.

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What comes up for me straight away is “it varies from person to person”. Several factors involved: personal psychological makeup; personal (particularly childhood) experiences; the surrounding culture; etc. So I back off from trying to say anything about “us”.

Which leads me on to the view that one of the most vital aspects of the culture I would like to see is that there is an explicit and growing awareness of personal differences and the factors which contribute to those. I’m afraid I am totally uninterested in those who have “the one true way”. Not only do people differ from each other in which of their needs are salient; they also change over time — and this is naturally one of the key corollaries of adult development theory, at least in its good aspects. I would go on to say that adult development theory that is applied as if everyone has the same developmental trajectory is sadly mistaken. (One can apply the same thinking to Steiner education, in my view.)

Again, to balance that, I don’t see it as very helpful to cast people adrift to develop according to the whims of each moment in their lives. Give people structure if and when they need it. If they don’t need structure, then scaffolding. If they don’t need scaffolding, then exposure to many different perspectives. Genuine freedom of choice, untarnished by power dynamics, but informed by caring or loving feedback.

I see this as pluralist in some ways, and not in others. But maybe we are all agreed on that?

To answer @RobertBunge more directly, I’d start by saying: let us develop the collective capacity, ability and practice to help each other understand ourselves and others as diverse individuals, even when we express and live a need for conformity, rules, norms, etc. “Brian” (as in “Life of”) can be seen as a step along the way, but certainly not the whole way.

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Yesterday I had a very extended Zoom call with Richard Flyer about his recent book. Buy the Book - by Richard Flyer - Symbiotic Culture . In that call we discussed 2R and this thread specifically, because it all seemed very on point for what Richard and I were circling around.

In the book, Richard uses all sorts of theoretical sounding language like “culture of separation”, “ancient blueprint”, and quite a few religious or philosophical terms, but in conversation, he freely admits that he does not put much weight on any of it. He considers all that terminology placeholders for ideas that local communities really ought to be filling in for themselves. Our conversation turned around questions like “what is the organizing center of community?” Specially, Richard has had specific personal experiences of Jesus Christ (it’s all in the book), and I was wondering how that was landing with his various audiences. (To reference the OP in this current thread - Richard is no Jordan Hall. He got right away my point about so many people in our culture being Calvinist preachers in substance, even if their literal discourse sounds all about “revolution” or “regeneration” or “inner growth” or whatever the cause of the moment is. )

Richard and I were dancing around the whole “religion that is not a religion” thing, or God as emergent, and all the metatheories favored in liminal spaces, and he and I agreed we are both at least slightly askew from all that. The word Richard would really like to use is “transcendent”. I like that one also, but I’m acutely aware any given word can be fetishized and turned into somebody’s brand, so I also generally prefer associated images about wide horizons, or moving through the dark, being surprised or astonished, or some image that feels sensual and experiential more than conceptual. It’s about movement, fundamentally.

Just this morning I was reading a David Krakauer essay about evolutionary emergence and it got me thinking about Brendan Graham Dempsey and related theorists in the transcendent naturalism school. Richard keeps a bit of critical distance from all that. So do I, but in my case that distance is paper thin. What Krakauer was saying about energy, emergence, entropy and so on got me thinking about Augustine and the restless heart. Systems in general move towards energetic quiescence. The goal is to consume energy, metabolize it, and find a sort of angle of repose. For Augustine, “God” of the Hebrew Bible represented a synthetic symbolization of all the many tensions in his self and in his world, so his many theological works can be seen as an energetic emergence in the interests of tension reduction. The problem we face at the moment is our world needs tension reduction even more than Augustine’s collapsing Roman Empire, but “God”, “Jesus”, and “Bible” no longer transcend. These are all pieces in the game, not symbols pointing to anything greater. Or they could point beyond conventional usage, but not without unconventional means.

So my heart is restless until it rests in the organizing attractor of a viable global future. The great Unnamed. Also, I considered just sitting in my chair and saying nothing about any of it. But energy in my heart and guts kept prodding along these lines - “none of of these ideas began with you, none will end with you, just play your part. Let others have their touch on the ball.”

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Beautiful, thank you Bob @RobertBunge ! I do have a lot of time for apophatic, “via negativa” writings. Do you know Belden Lane’s “The Solace of Fierce Landscapes”? You might enjoy it: I did, greatly.