Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a teacher, a former pastor, and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Kansas with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has practicing tae kwon do and pondering the mysteries of light.
Last week, I introduced an idea that I’ve been working with that we are living in disordered times. This is probably not a terribly amazing revelation for anyone out there. The world is in chaos. We see and feel it daily. In so many areas of our lives, things just seem off.
This week, I want to try to hone in on what I think the root of this disordering is, and (very briefly) how it came about. My hope is that by naming it, we might be able to regain some agency and intention in the midst of chaos, even if we can’t fully reorder things.
So here we go. I apologize if this gets deep.
I believe that our feelings of chaos and disorder ultimately stem from a lack of coherence between our understanding of what is true and real, and our actual experience of the world. That’s a big statement. Let me try to break it down.
How we define reality is pretty important. The language we use, the concepts we allow, and the concepts we reject all come together to form our picture of reality. And our picture of reality is always incomplete. No one language, no one culture, no one metaphysical perspective can fully encapsulate all of Reality. But I believe that some languages and some cultures and some metaphysical perspectives do a better job of offering a coherent view of Reality than others. As modern, Western Americans, our default concepts and language about what is real and true do not do this. When it really comes down to it, I believe that the root of our present disorder comes from the emaciated language and concepts we have to define and describe Reality. And how this language is far removed from our actual lived experience of Reality.
This is difficult, not because it is so complicated, but because it is so familiar. The difficulty we face is in stepping back from the situation far enough to be able to see things clearly. It is like trying to see the shape of the lens that we have have always looked through. Like trying to measure the prescription of your glasses while still wearing them. We are so accustomed to the way in which we have learned to see reality that it will take a certain amount of effort to become aware of the biases we hold.
Let me give you an example to try and flesh out the problem as I see it.
Observation 1: We live on the third planet from the sun, which is at the center of our solar system. This solar system consists of eight planets that move around the sun on the same plane. The order of these planets is Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Beyond Neptune is Pluto and the rest of the Kuyper Belt. Each planet rotates around its own axis while it revolves around the sun and many of the planets have moons.
Observation 2: I saw a sunset recently that was absolutely beautiful.
Consider the differences in these observations. The first is considered to be objectively true, which means that is true for everyone always, regardless of your background, culture, or beliefs. The second is considered to be subjectively true, which means that it is only true for you, but it wouldn’t necessarily be true for anyone else.
Now consider this: The shape of the solar system is a truth you have learned from an authority. It actually contradicts your immediate experience of the world, which suggests that the sun and the stars move around the earth. However, your experience of a beautiful sunset is something you have personally experienced yourself. No authority is needed to validate it.
So we find ourselves in a situation where objective truth, like the shape of the solar system, is something that comes from an authority and may or may not cohere with our experience. Our experience can only offer subjective, personal truth. Which means that our experiences become less real than the things that authorities tell us.
At first glance, it would seem that the problem here is that authorities are defining reality against our real lived experiences, but I think it is more complicated than that. For there have been times when the shape of reality was held by the authorities of Church and State and things were well ordered and coherent. (For example, in the Medieval Age. See C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image for more on the Medieval ordering of reality.) I think it is probably unavoidable for authority to be the primary wielder of reality. The problem that we are facing today is that the authoritative view of reality seems to have no place for humanity, or no space for human experience.
I’ve come to hate the popular saying that has been floating around lately, “Science is Real.” And that isn’t because I’m anti-science. I have a degree in physics and one in engineering. I love science. But I’m also well aware that science only sees part of Reality. It sees that parts that can be quantified, the parts that can be examined and studied with the technological tools that science itself has developed. Science has become one of our most trusted authorities on what is real, but it can’t see everything.
In fact, many of our most important experiences are nonsense, or even non-existence, to science. The beauty of a sunset, the value of friendship, the meaning of a hug, the desire to pursue something at great cost to oneself, none of these things can be studied by science. Which slowly begins to mean that none of these things are truly real in any objective sense. They are just part of our own personal subjective experience.
It is beyond the purview of science to explain the meaning, the value, the beauty, the goodness, the love that we experience everyday in this world. And because science is our most fundamentally agreed upon authority, these everyday experiences become dis-integrated from the actual real world, and they become simply our own personal realities. Which means that it is only by pure coincidence that someone else might also consider the same sunset beautiful. So we end up living lives separated both from what is objectively real and from the lives of other people. It is like we are each walking around the world wrapped in a bubble of our own personal experiences, but with no framework that allows those experiences to have any meaning or connection outside that bubble. We are dis-integrated from the whole.
While science, and a scientific mode of thinking, form our dominant authority on what is real, it isn’t the only authority. The Church has been an authority for many of us as well. And here we see the same dynamic going on: the reality we are presented with is not easily integrated with our lived experience.
My wife is a hospital chaplain. She regularly encounters religious people (in our context this primarily means Christians and often Evangelical Christians) who are facing loss or grief or pain of some kind. And frequently, these religious people have little to no capacity to name or acknowledge the reality of their pain and grief and loss. I would suggest that this is because that the authoritative view of reality that many churches offer does not have much space for these real human experiences.
God is sovereign, all powerful, and good. These are standard affirmations of Christian theology that undergird many sermons and teachings. But they aren’t easy to hold together. Because if God is all powerful then things happen because God wills them to. And if God wills something to happen then it can’t be bad, because God is good. So what happens when you find yourself in a hospital facing a diagnosis of cancer, for example? Your authoritative view of reality demands that this diagnosis is good. How could it be anything else?
Often my wife sees this perspective in the (religious) friends and family that visit a sick or dying person in the hospital. Their authoritative view of reality does not have space for the grief and pain and loss they are experiencing so they deny the reality in front of them and double-down on religious platitudes. “God works all things for good.” “God needed her more than we did.” “Death has been swallowed up in victory.” “Christians must be joyful in all circumstance.” What else could a person say if their whole theological view of reality is that God is in control, Christ has conquered the grave, and Christians don’t mourn like the pagans do?
Again we find that our lived experience is not easily integrated into the authoritative framework of reality that we have been taught.
So what are we to do about this? I see two extremes alive in our world. On the one hand, we have authorities who are grasping for control, manipulating people, and doing everything they can to define reality along their own terms. This is true in politics and in churches. On the other hand, we have individuals who insist on defining aspects of reality for themselves and more and more people accepting these definitions so that the only objective reality is that everyone’s reality is subjective.
There has to be a better way, some via media, between these extremes. While I don’t have any hope of reordering the cosmos, I do believe that we can find some agency and intention within the chaos. So in the next posts I want to look at some specific issues that indicate our disordered times, and suggest some new language that might help us navigate these times more faithfully.
If you want to dig into the ideas in this post more I would suggest the following sources.
Paul Tyson, Returning to Reality
Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
The following theological/philosophical terms and ideas are essential to this conversation as they are part of our default way of viewing the world and/or God.
The idea that a sunset’s beauty is something we assign to it is related to Nominalism.
Realism would say that the beauty exists objectively somewhere and is transmitted to us through the sunset. Thus, our experience of beauty is objectively real.
The idea that God’s power and will are His core attributes is called Voluntarism.
Before this theological “advance” love was God’s essential attribute. So pain and suffering weren’t part of God’s unquestionable will, but rather, because He is love, God, through Christ, suffers with us.
In Voluntarism, God’s freedom is unrestrained by anything. And we are subject to that infinite freedom. But Love is different. Love requires the beloved to have freedom to respond in love. That freedom opens the possibility for pain and suffering.
Instrumentalism - The idea that things are valuable and real only in as much as they are useful to us (often economically or politically).
Materialism - The idea that Nature exists only of material and there is nothing beyond Nature. Matter and energy are all that are really real.
Reductionism - An object is the sum of its (material) parts, nothing more. All of Nature can be reduced to the random movement of subatomic particles.