Rules, Risks, & Remedies

I could have posted this on the Atonement thread, but then I wouldn’t be able to have a thread with such a neat title!

I might take me several posts to say this, but I’ll get started while it’s in my head. And I’m nowhere through processing this, but getting it up for review will help.

First, I want to say why I don’t like the ‘debt payment’ analogy of Namaste’s, the one about a father co-signing his son’s car loan and then paying it off when his son defaults (or something like that). Point is, one party agrees to pay the other party’s debt. That’s not an obviously unjust thing to do. The party who had her debt assumed by another is then free. She doesn’t pay the debt. Let me say why I don’t like this analogy and then offer another basic analogy that I want to try to work with.

I basically don’t like the ‘debt’ analogy because in the analogy where God is one party and the sinner is the other party, the ‘debt’ to be paid is (or ought to be) depair and suffering. That’s the consequence we should pay. Christ embraces that despair for us. But whereas in the analogy the person who has her debt paid really doesn’t, really CAN’T, pay any money (since the entire debt was assumed), in real life people on whose behalf Christ pays their debt of despair still experience despair. Something’s wrong with the analogy. Nothing big I suppose. It just doesn’t grab me.

If Christ really ‘pays’ our debt of ‘despair’ like the father pays for the son’s $1,000 debt, then just as the $1,000 is gone and the son pays nothings, so should people pay no despair. Namaste’s point has been that once we take responsibility and own up, we THEN can be free from despair. But this means abandoning the analogy where it counts. The son who has his debt paid for benefits from having to not pay anything whether he acknowledges his wasteful lifestyle or not, whether he’s grateful or not. He could tell his father to go to hell and he’d still existentially benefit from the atonement—he doesn’t pay any money. But people in real life, in spite of having their sin-debt paid for, are STILL in despair. I don’t like the fact that the son can flip his father off, not acknowledge anything, and STILL benefit from the payment. His experiencing the practical effects of the payment aren’t contingent upon his taking responsibility for his wreckless behavior that cost his Dad so much. But in real life our experiencing the practical effects of Christ’s atoning act ARE contingent upon our taking responsibility.

So I’m dumping the debt analogy. Yes it’s got substitution. Yes it’s got the father acting in love at cost to himself on behalf of his son. But it doesn’t require the son to acknowledge anything in order to practically benefit from the payment. My INTP says, “Dump it!”

I like the magnet thing too. It's cool. I love how D's brain works! I'm like "Magnets and spiderwebs?" It does say some important things. I just reeeeeeeally resonate with analogies involving persons, if they can at all be found.

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OK, today I was thinking about semantic domains. [Readers scratch their heads.] I’m trying to find a more biblical analogy. Something that’s already in Scripture and used to make some of the same points we’re trying to make. I thought of ‘covenant’ and would like to explore it a bit.

Why ‘covenant’? Well, think about it. It’s perhaps THE most common way God relates to humans, the most common way of expressing that relationship—‘covenants’. This might not be an accident either. Think about what a ‘covenant’ or ‘agreement’ is. Isn’t it just THE most elemental inter-personal act there is? Two (or more) persons freely agree to relate in certain ways that are meaningfully consequential. That looks to me like just what personal, responsible relationships are.

So let me post this and then jump in with Rules, Risks, & Remedies of the Divine-Human Covenant.

Tom

Creation & Covenant II

The same deep magic (the stuff of triune loving relationality that is the beautiful experience that is God) which specifies freedom as necessary for our loving, and risk as entailed in that freedom, and despair and suffering as the consequence of failure to keep covenant, this same deep magic also specifies that all parties involved in covenants between persons be entered into freely BY the persons involved. Those persons must agree to the conditions and terms, the rules and risks, of the covenant, in our case, the covenant to create sentient creatures and purpose them for loving relationality under the metaphysical constraints of freedom, risk, and moral accountability.

Why? Well, I’m sure I don’t know! But my hunch is something like the above paragraph. I can justly (lovingly?) act in ways that have consequences for others without consulting them IF those consequences result in the person’s best interest. But I cannot (I don’t think) act justly and lovingly put the well-being of others at risk without their consent. That’s a failure of covenant on my part.

So, in creating the world God:

(1) Purposes us for loving relationality,

(2) Concedes the metaphysical requirements (freedom and risk), and

(3) Specifies the consequences of keeping and of failing to keep covenant, then

(4) Signs off on the covenant.

But what about the other party—us? The party at risk. We’re not there to represent ourselves. We’re not there to accept the risks. We’re not there to pledge ourselves to the consequences. But we MUST be there if the covenant is to be legit (I think).

Enter Incarnation. God says, “I’ll be the human signatory.” Huh? How’s that? God’s not a human being. He can’t make the commitment and accept the risks as God. Only human being can do that. Well, that’s essentially what God does when he commits unequivocally to incarnate into human form. This commitment, this pledge God makes to himself, is a necessary requirement for the creation project. God essentially says, “Humans aren’t here to sign off. Fine. I’ll pledge by myself to become a human being. And when I incarnate I’ll then accept the conditions and terms of the covenant.” His word is as good a gold. A human being might as well have been there!

Still in your chair?

I’m saying God could NOT have created us and purposes US for loving relationship with him without first committing to incarnate. THAT’S why the incarnation is in his mind from the get go. It’s essentially God, pledged-God, pledged-incarnate-God, the divine-human one, signing off on the covenant. It was in earnest, a promise. But hey, God can do that. He trusts himself!

OK, what about the risks stipulated in the covenant? A human being has to accept those too.

Enter Cross. Now we see what it means for Christ to be “slain from the foundation of the world.” No need for tricky grammatical ploys about the word “from.” It’s not needed. The same way God pledges himself as incarnate to accept the conditions and terms, God also pledges himself as suffering the consequences for humanity’s breaking the covenant. He knows it’s gonna turn bad, eventually. And it’s not just and loving to risk the well-being of others without their consent. THEY must freely enter covenant.

God enters it on our behalf, as a human being, on the grounds of his pledge to incarnate and suffer.

So, not only must God commit to incarnate as a precondition to creating our sort of world. God must commit to suffer the consequences of our eventual failure to keep covenant as a precondition to creating our sort of world.

In Christ, humanity ACCEPTS the terms and conditions of the covenant. And in Christ humanity SUFFERS the consequences of breaking covenant. But this was all embraced in covenantal terms by God prior to creating in his commitment to incarnate and suffer.

Gotta run. Haven’t really gotten to the 'atonement' yet. Haven’t even thought about it! I just wanted to start over with ONE framework that would take me from creation to redemption to consummation. We’ll see how it goes.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 11/2/2006 8:47:26 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Sahid) : 11/3/2006 12:31:34 AM (GMT-6)

Was gonna write and post Part III, but Sahid sidetracked me!

POW: …maybe we could say that the _consequences_ of our debt is dispair and suffering. The debt being our mortality and our separation from God and the in ability to make life doxological.

Tom: That’s fine. ‘Consequence’ is good.

Sahid: For your metaphor to make sense, we must assume that there are only two parties in question: God and humanity. I don't believe that this is the case.

Tom: There are other sentient beings that are not included in the specific covenant that governs God and humans. Angelic beings for example. They have their own covenant that governs their relationship with God. My point is that covenants that govern relationships have to be entered into freely by all involved (whether 2, 3, 10, or 100). If there are other sentient creatures besides human beings who are purposed as we are for freely chosen loving relations under terms and conditions that stipulate despair as the consequences and atonement as a means of reconciliation—I’m unaware of who they are. Haven’t met any. So far as I know, it’s just God and us humans who relate to one another in this way.

Sahid: First it was "WE must be there," and then it was "A human being...."

Tom: Yes. We must be there. But a human being may act on our behalf. That's what God does precreation by pledging himself to incarnate. HOW a individual may act on behalf of the whole is Part III coming up! Haven’t written it yet, but it’s in my head. Don't worry. You'll be included too!

Sahid: I personally am not confortable with the idea that another person can legitimately subject me to suffering simply because this other person occupies the same metaphysical category as me.

Tom: That’s not what qualifies individuals to act on behalf of wholes. That is, merely “occupying the same metaphysical category” as me doesn’t itself empower another human to act on my behalf. That’s a necessary condition, yes, but not a sufficient condition. Other things have to be in place too.

Part III is coming.

Sahid: Granted, if I'm going to trust anyone with this power, it's Jesus. But at the time when I am hypothetically entrusting him with this power, I don't yet know his character... I don't even exist.

Tom: You are not far from the Kingdom my son.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 11/3/2006 7:21:54 AM (GMT-6)

Creation & Covenant III

Individual Dispositions

Alright then. Think of individuals. What’s a human being? Here’s my stab at it: A human being is a unique, autonomous, and freely self-disposing center of experience possessing the capacities necessary for such self-disposition (that is, reason, volition, emotion, &…what the hell, embodiment). You get the point.

Enough has been said about individual dispositions that I don’t have to restate it all here. Not sure I could if I had to! Basically dispositions are that which mediates between actuality and possibility. We might call them ‘tendencies’, ‘proclivities’, or even ‘attributes’. But ‘attributes’ is a bit too static. We want a word that keeps us grounded in concrete actualities (only actual entities can have dispositions) which at the same time keeps us looking forward to future possibilities, to ‘becoming’ (because that’s what actual entities are always doing, they’re ‘becoming’, they’re in process). ‘Disposition’ fits the bill.

Social Dispositions

Human individuals can and do constitute larger wholes, social groups made up of the individuals that comprise them. Humanity is the largest such group. But you can have smaller groups—Americans, for example. Now, social wholes are held together by more things than I’m sure I understand, but ONE of those things is—dispositions, social dispositions. That’s what makes them ‘organic’ wholes. ‘Organic’ is a good word to describe the cohesiveness behind social identity, acts, and implications. We’re ‘tied’ together. Organic wholes are greater than the sum of their parts—a kind of social ‘self’ that ‘self’ disposes socially, can act, can be held accountable for its actions, etc. We see this work all the time. Groups, organizations, organic wholes are taken to court all the time.

How do wholes act? They act through the individuals that comprise them. The process of ‘socialization’ prepares individual members to take their part in the circle of life. Individuals within the groups couldn’t escape the socializing effects of group dynamics if they wanted to. I’m hopelessly ‘western’ for example. So very much of the social-disposition of American western values has been bred into me—consumerism and individualism, for example. They’re just ‘dispositions’ mind you. So they can be questioned and, under certain circumstances, modified, reformed, or even rejected. But you see THAT is is and HOW it is.

Acting ‘on behalf of’ the whole

Let me just introduce this and then save discussing it for my next post, so we can keep this all in bite-sized chunks. The all-important question is: What about ‘one’ member acting on behalf of the ‘whole’? Before we ask ‘how’ that happens, let’s ask ‘if’ it happens. Sahid may doubt that it even occurs, but I take it to be evidently the case that individuals can and do act in the place of the whole in ways that have implications for the whole AND they can do so ‘justly’. That is, individuals can act on behalf of the whole in ways that ‘justly’ implicate the whole in consequences of either a pleasing and good or an unpleasing and costly nature. If this were not so—our salvation would be quite impossible.

Tom

Maybe I should clarify something before going on. Some of you will object to my idea that God pledges himself to incarnate and in so doing take responsibility as a human for agreeing to the risks entailed upon human by God’s act of creation.

I can appreciate the objection. After all, I did consider the fact that we do sometimes unilaterally expose others to risk and suffering without their consent. We have children for example. And we do so without their consent.

I’m not sure if this really disproves my point, but I’m willing to qualify myself. God can unilaterally create a risky world (risky for us) without getting the express permission of a human being, that is, with human being freely entering into the terms and conditions of the covenant (although I don’t like saying it this way). We might say God covenants with himself (a unilateral covenant) to “do all it takes” to make the project work. But this still involves my essential point, and that is that God has to covenant with himself under the conditions or constraints (whether natural or freely determined) of the project. And THAT, I’m arguing, involves the inevitability of incarnation and suffering as a human being for human beings (and all creation). Apart from this commit to act as God in human form, the project—THIS project—cannot get off the ground. There’s no unilaterally enacting it apart from making this commitment.

Yes, we expose our kids to risks without their consent. But (a) this does involve a certain responsibility that someone must assume, and (b) this responsibility is entailed in the larger agreement God makes with himself with he commits to create. It’s a part of the larger picture. But the more important issue is whether or not we as parents can by our own choice risk the God-individual relationship that God they are purposed for by God. And Namaste and I have already been arguing that we cannot put that at risk. An individual reaches or fails to reach enjoyment and fulfillment in God through they’re own free choices. Parents may unilaterally place their children in some risk, inconsequential risks (the bruises and sufferings of journeying through a fallen world), we may not unilaterally place our children in ultimate risk.

So, I’ll quality: God may unilaterally enact creation under the conditions and terms specified, but not without taking responsibility for doing so, and that means committing to incarnation and suffering as a human being. It’s not human being “standing in” precreationally to “sign-off” on the contract as I described earlier, but it gets at the bilateral nature of God’s choice to create us. He covenants with himself, yes. Call this a unilateral covenant if you want. My point is that the relationship that the covenant/agreement is designed to govern, the relationship God creates us for, is essentially bilateral, and this bilateral dimension essentially defines what creation is and what sort of commitment God makes to it. God unilaterally embraces the bilateral dimensions, if you will, but that necessarily involves incarnation and cross. And it’s this commitment to suffer incarnationally that reconciles even the risks we parents take in having children without their consent.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 11/3/2006 11:38:12 AM (GMT-6)

Jeff: Tom, you have used the word "justly" a bit. Can you define "justly" or "justice?" Or is it a fundamental notion that can't be explained? If the latter, can you think of a synonym for it? I think articulating a theory of the atonement is going to be difficult until we get on the same page as to what justice, accountability, and responsibility mean and entail.

Tom: I’m still figuring this out myself! But what I think I mean is this—freedom is necessary to creaturely enjoyment of personal loving relationality. Where’s there’s this freedom, there’s risk. Where there’s risk, there are by definition consequences (which would be whatever NOT being in personal loving relationships would mean). “Justice” is that metaphysical law which defines and governs the causal relationship between free choice and consequence.

What’s the ontology behind 2 x 2 = 4? What makes 4 the invariable product of 2 x 2? Well, we usually just say “the nature of things” or “the fundamental laws of mathematics.” That’s just the way the universe behaves. As believers, we’ll add perhaps that the universe behaves this way because God is who and what God is. The fundamental laws of math and logic emanate from God. Being what God is, the fundamental laws of logic (law of identity, law of non-contradiction, etc.) follow. Same deal with math, and...

...same deal with relationships between freely disposing centers of experience. There are laws that govern the free and responsible relationships between persons who are disposed to love, to be intimate (to exhange their life with one another in ways that recognize the other's value and celebrate beautiful experience). “Justice” (as I'm using it here) is just that fundamental law causality that obtains wherever free and personal beings stand in relationship to one another. It says “every choice has consequences.”

Tom

Alright, let me plod on…

Acting ‘on behalf of’ the whole

I said the all-important question is: What about ‘one’ member acting on behalf of the ‘whole’? Let’s first agree that individuals act in ways that implicate the whole in the consequences of their choice. Then we’ll talk about ‘how’ this happens.

(A) It happens…

Individuals act on behalf of the wholes they’re a part of all the time. We see it and recognize it every day. A CEO may act on behalf of his company, and “the company” (which is just that ‘organic whole’, that which is its own thing that’s greater than the sum of its parts) is “an entity.” It can be taken to court and be held responsible for its actions.

Ambassadors act on behalf of their countries. The President and Congress act on behalf of “America” and implicate Americans for better or worse in their choices.

(B) How it happens…

How is it that individuals act on behalf of wholes? What grounds the causal relationship that implicates the whole in the act of the one? How is this “just”?

The simple answer might be something like “the individual has the ‘authority’ to do so.” By what authority do individuals act on behalf of wholes? How is such authority obtained by individuals? Can just ‘any’ individual member of an organic whole act on behalf of the whole?

Not ‘any’ individual. We’d all agree that there are certain conditions under which individuals may implicate wholes in their actions. Presidents are ‘elected’. Founders of companies have a certain authority because the company is their creation, they’re the founder and CEO of the organic wholes they create.

What’s going to be important to note is this: When an individual is authorized to act on behalf of the whole, then ‘when the individual acts, the whole acts’, and this isn’t just some platitude or piece of rhetoric. It’s REAL (as we’ll see in the next post) because of the relationship between individual dispositions and social-dispositions (dispositions of ‘organic wholes’).

So it seems that an individual may be authorized to act on behalf of the whole in two ways:

(1) The individuals chose one member and authorize him/her to act on their behalf.

(2) That individual responsible for creating the organic whole (the founder and CEO, the owner, as it were) may act on behalf of the whole provided the action he wishes to take does not violate the conditions and terms of the agreement under which he created the organic whole and under which the individual members function and exist.

Coming up I wanna talk about…

(C) How is Jesus authorized to act on behalf of humanity?

(C) How is Jesus authorized to act on behalf of humanity?

Who empowers, or authorizes, Jesus to act on behalf of the whole (humanity) in ways that justly implicate the whole? Well, it’s not immediately the individual members of the whole who vote Jesus into office. (And individual member’s choice regarding Jesus’ act on her behalf will have some part to play in that individual’s existence, but that’s not where we are right now.) The members of the whole crucified Jesus. That hardly counts as voting him into office.

That leaves us with the only other way Jesus could be authorized to act on behalf of the whole, and that’s by virtue of his being the owner, founder, and CEO of the whole. He created the ‘organic whole’ and under the conditions and terms specified may act on its behalf. This authority to act on our behalf is inherent in his freely choosing to take responsibility for the whole, for where it goes, for what it does, for what it becomes.

This too is analogous to the way CEOs take responsibility for the actions of those who work for him, who are empowered by him to act and choose, even if the employee does something stupid, the CEO takes responsibility. For example, forgetting whether or not he was sincere, after the FEMA responded so poorly in the wake of Katrina, Bush (who’s not a member of FEMA and doesn’t actually drive their trucks or chair their meetings) took responsibility (or should have but didn’t, however the story went). You see the point.

When God, precreation, covenanted with himself (bilaterally!) to embrace creation under the terms of the metaphysical constraints of loving relationality, he then possess authority to ‘act on behalf of’ creation and implicate them in the consequences of his actions.

Back to dispositions…

Check it out. It’s the dispositional realities that make it work. What happens is that Christ is dispositionalized (to make a verb out of it) to act on behalf of the whole. Se when Christ acts, THEN WHOLE acts. Under the metaphysical constraints of loving relationality, the just consequences (despair, suffering, evil) of all the sinful choices of the members of the organic whole are experienced. They’re just experienced by the authorized ONE. And it’s within his right to act on our behalf in such a way. The accountability and justice that I earlier thought was placing atonement in jeopardy actually turn out to be the thing that makes redemption even possible! Justice is satisfied. That is, the covenant is KEPT. There ARE consequences for choices. It’s just that instead of each individual member having to experience alienation and despair, the one authorized to act on their behalf experiences the alienation and despair. And when the ONE acts, the WHOLE acts.

Not finished (I wanted to say more about dispositions), but I gotta run!

Namaste, can you finish this up? I bet you could.

Tom

Post Edited (Violin for God) : 11/3/2006 1:30:21 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (TGB) : 11/4/2006 6:40:45 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (jefscott) : 11/3/2006 7:44:12 PM (GMT-6)

One final post for me…

The ‘objective’ & ‘subjective’ aspects of atonement

The atoning act of Christ effects an objective reconciliation of the outstanding metaphysical debt the WHOLE (naturally) must pay (experience of despair and suffering). The ONE (Christ) acts in love, under the metaphysical constraints of his covenant to create a free loving creation, on behalf of the WHOLE. God was in Christ, Paul says, ‘reconciling himself to the world’. And Christ is authorized to so act by virtue of (a) his being the creator/founder/owner of the WHOLE and (b) his being a member OF the whole who is himself not also in despair and in need of atonement.

Zach, regarding your most recent comments, I think Jeff’s reply says all I’d want to say.

This objective reality is what creates the new community under a new head. It establishes a new social-disposition. But just as we each freely dispose to align ourselves under the social-disposition established and bequeathed us by Adam, so we may now choose to align ourselves under the social-disposition (viz., the new possibilities opened up to us by virtue of the influence of Christ’s one righteous act) established and bequeathed us by Christ.

The objective act established the relational scope or realm where we must choose to come and stand. But we MUST choose to do so. Why? Because the benefit we seek IS a personal loving relationship, and given the metaphysical constraints of the world God created, we have to freely self-dispose. Our individual dispositions are still what they are, and for a good purpose. We now can freely dispose ourselves with regard to the new options, the new realities and influences, the new transformational presence of our new head—Christ.

I guess that’s it. What I’d like to discuss at some point is HOW the subjective appropriation of the objective reality in Christ is accomplished. How does personal, individual transformation take place? It’s a questions about the nuts and bolts of individual relationships.

What happens when two freely self-disposing centers of experience (that is, two ‘persons’—had to say it complicated ‘cause I’m an anal INTP!) freely dispose in relationship to, with respect to, one another? Well, what happens is intimacy. When two persons

We earlier said these relationships are what create social-dispositions. When I choose Christ, when I acknowledge my sin, I allow Christ and the truth about his atoning act to define my existence, that is, I recognize the truth that this act on my behalf is part of the ‘data’ (to use process catgories) that defines my actuality, my perspective on reality. And when that happens Christ becomes part of my present reality, despair is healed, and I’m transformed. Christ personally self-disposes toward me and I self-dispose toward him. Then relational intimacy happens—that is, a real exchange of life, an exchange of thoughts, feelings, and desires. I share MY thoughts, feelings, and desires, I stand naked in the truth of who and what I am. But Christ does the SAME. He stands naked in the truth of his atoning act, the truth of who and what HE is. And in this mutual self-disposing, the truth about Christ’s saving act ‘on my behalf’, justly offered as the authorized representative of all the members of the whole, becomes part of MY unique perspective and experience as I freely choose it.

Life is never the same.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 11/4/2006 12:26:18 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (TGB) : 11/7/2006 7:24:09 AM (GMT-6)