Aesthetic Judgment and Persuasion (Wittgenstein)

19 Tuesday May 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Persuasion, Uncategorized

Tags

Aesthetics, perspective, Persuasion, Rhetoric, Wittgenstein, Worldview

In a 1983 article published in Crítica, Richard Shusterman examples Wittgenstein’s doctrine indeterminacy in aesthetic value and the work of critical evaluation. At first, this may seem rather remote from the matter of persuasion, but Shusterman rightly notes that the work of a critic (literary, musical, dramatic) is a work of persuasive rhetoric. In fact, Shusterman notes a passage in Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations where he equates the nature of legal argument with the rhetorical procedure of a critic. As a lawyer, I can affirm correctness of Wittgenstein on this point.
Briefly, Shusterman notes three ways in which an aesthetic judgment is indeterminate.
Perhaps under the pressure from natural sciences and their seeming claim to indisputable truth, objective and eternal as a sort of sight of Platonic Forms, non-physical sciences beginning in the 19th century often sought to stylize themselves along “scientific” lines. Theology and literary criticism were taken up as sciences (in the sense of chemistry or physics).
A movement was made to formalize aesthetics in terms of deductive and inductive argument. If you have ever seen Dead Poets Society, the introduction from the beginning of the poetry book on how to graph the quality of a poem – which the new literature teacher has the students tear from their book – is a perfect example.
Wittgenstein critiques such deductive and inductive evaluations of art on the ground that the necessary grounds for evaluation have a degree of flux (Shusterman calls this “radical indeterminacy”, but I think he overshoots the mark; there is however a relative indeterminacy without question).

First, the basic concepts of balance and beauty do not have hard edges. Second, the work of the critic depends upon what sort of question the critic is asking (Wittgenstein’s concept of “game”). Thus, a critic who considers Hamlet psychological or the emotive or the political or metaphysical work will come to different conclusions. (Merrill Tenney’s book on Galatians is an example of how to perform this sort of critical evaluation. I also just realized that I have lent this book to someone and now I can’t find my copy.) Third, evaluations of beauty and art take place in a larger cultural context.
When we come to the contemporary period (granted Shusterman is writing 40 years ago; but the situation is even more extreme at present than then), the cultural context does not provide a universal scheme in which we can make a deductively valid and sound argument: who can say whether the premises are true.
What then does a literary critic do in such an environment? The critic cannot present “a nice knock-down argument for you.”
The critic’s work in this environment is thus to bring you to see the work from a particular point of view:

Validity is success, success in inducing the desired perception of the work, if not the desired critical verdict. He held that ‘aesthetic discussions were like discussion in a court of law’, where the goal and criterion of success is that ‘what you say will appeal to the judge.’ Elsewhere, Wittgenstein suggests that the criterion for adequacy of argument and correctness of explanation is acceptance or satisfaction. ‘The answer in these cases is the one that satisfied you.’ ‘That explanation is the right one which clicks,’ and is accepted by the interlocutor; ‘if he didn’t agree, this wouldn’t be the explanation.’

Richard Shusterman, “Aesthetic Argument and Perceptual Persuasion,” Critica 15, no. 45 (Dec. 1983): 51-74.
There is an important point: a deductive or inductive argument is not persuasive in some manner abstracted from the person who hears the argument. A deductive argument only works if it persuades the hearer in the direction intended by the speaker (it is possible that the deductive argument merely annoys the hearer and you have merely persuaded him to dislike you).
Thus, the work of the critic is to bring you see the artwork from a particular perspective: I seek to have you understand this poem, this painting as I do. When you see it as I see it, my literary criticism has been “worked.”
If anything, legal persuasion falls into this category even more than literary criticism. The lawyer seeks to bring the court to see the world from the perspective of the client.
Wittgenstein also notes that science functions in a similar manner:

Wittgenstein in fact suggests that such persuasion is also present in science. For instance, it underlies our firm and ready acceptance of the theories of Darwin and Freud, even when the grounds for their doctrines were in strictly logical terms of confirmation ‘extremely thin.’ We have been largely persuaded by the attraction of looking at things the way these theories present them.

Subsequent research into things such as confirmation bias only strengthen this insight. The strength of an argument – even a scientific argument – ultimately lies in the fact that it persuades: it causes one to see the world from a particular point of view.
Shusterman goes to offer a correction to those who take Wittgenstein further than is warranted. While literary criticism may be to bring you see a work from a particular perspective (and thus perhaps is the intended – and not always successful — end of all argument), that does not mean that deductive and inductive arguments are illegitimate.
Since arguments exist in the context of “conventions”, the “conventions” may permit or even dictate the use of deductive or inductive aesthetic judgment. Thus, “logical” arguments are not wrong even in the case of aesthetics. They just may not be effective (as determined by the intent of the one making the argument).

Finally, this understanding of persuasion as seeing the world from a particular perspective helps explain why certain ideas will be particularly difficult to change. When we ask someone to give up a certain perspective, they must not only give up the particular idea under review, they also must give up their conclusions on all of the world as seen from that perspective. Certain ideas form the context and basis for a worldview.

It is one thing to change a window on the second floor; it is quite another to tear our the foundation on the entire high-rise.

What is Worship?

10 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Sin, Soteriology, Thesis, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Culture, Hope, religion, salvation, Thesis, Worldview, Worship

I have been trying to find a definition which captures the concept of worship when it expands out into “normal” activities. Without question, our relationship to various “idols” — sports idols, music idols, the famous, the beautiful, the powerful can constitute worship. A college football looks like worship.

But there is also the worship of the mall (James K.A. Smith’s first chapter in Desiring the Kingdom is brilliant on this point). How do we capture work as worship? And how do we distinguish appropriate human action is appropriate and not as sinful worship? How do I go to a football game or a concert and not “worship” the performer?

This is still tentative:

Every worldview — even if it is inarticulate — grapples with the “wrong” in the world, the way it is not supposed to be. The most thoughtless person still struggles against something wrong. There is some Fall, some Sin which haunts us all — even if we don’t think of it in “religious” terms.

There is a solution to that something wrong: If you will, there is Sin and there is Salvation.

The object of worship is that thing, person, whatever, which the human worshiper believes will resolve the “what is wrong with the world” problem. It might be the outcome of political election or new shoes.

The act of worship is that set of actions and affections which seek to obtain the benefit of the object hoped in.

There may be more than one object of worship necessary to resolve the problem as understood by the human worshipper.

Seen in this way, not all worship will entail distinctly “religious” means. The act of worship is fit to the object of worship.

“Religious” acts of worship take place where the object of worship is principally spiritual.

However, where the objet of worship is a material object the practice of worship will not appear to be “religious”. If it is an objection and action which is common to a particular culture, it will appear “normal” and be largely invisible.

Why Creation Matters

08 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Albert Mohler, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Albert Mohler, Creation, Culture, Thesis, Worldview

Every single worldview has to start by answering the most basic question of all. Why is there something rather than nothing? Nothing would need no explanation; the existence of something does. Every single worldview that human beings have ever conceived or understood has to answer this question. The Christian worldview begins with the Christian doctrine of creation, which begins the very text of Scripture,
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Everything in Scripture follows, and everything in the development of the Christian biblical worldview also follows from that very first axiom, the axiom of creation. Every alternative worldview has to answer the question in its own way. Now one interesting historical note is that it took centuries for any alternative worldview to arise in Western civilization as a rival to the Christian biblical worldview. There simply was no other alternative. That changed, particularly in the 19th century, with the arrival of Charles Darwin, Darwinism, and the theory of evolution. That allowed the development of a non-Christian, non-biblical worldview, an alternative worldview that was established in the axiom of materialism—that is that all that exists is that which is matter—naturalism, meaning that there has to be purely naturalistic explanations for all phenomena, and of course now we have the doctrine of evolution as one of the central doctrines of orthodoxy among the modern secular elites. We also have to note that every worldview moves from one question to another. The Christian worldview, like every other worldview, has to move from why is there something rather than nothing, which Christianity answers with the doctrine of creation, to what’s gone wrong with the world, which is where the Christian worldview answers with the doctrine of the fall and the doctrine of sin.
The next question is, can anything be done to rescue? And that is where the Christian doctrine of redemption, the doctrine of atonement through the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ to the whole doctrine of salvation, plays such a central role. And then every worldview has to answer the question, where is all of this going? That is the Christian doctrine of eschatology. A secular worldview, any secular worldview, or any other alternative worldview, has to answer those same questions; and the answer to that question, the very first question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” actually, as we shall see, determines all the rest. It sets the trajectory for every other answer to all those other inescapable questions.

Albert Mohler

Church and a Hostile State: 1 Peter 2:13-17.2

12 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in 1 Peter, Apologetics, Francis Schaeffer, N.T. Wright

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

A Christian Manifesto, “The New Testament and the ‘state’, ”, Douglas Harnick, Francis Schaeffer, Humanism, Michael Ruse, N. T. Wright, Worldview

Some longer pieces: Schaeffer, Wright, Harnick

A Christian Manifesto, Francis Schaeffer

Schaeffer writing in 1981 looked at the change in the culture, law, politics that had taken place during the 20^th Century and wrote, “each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much larger problem” (423). The shift took place at the level of worldview, the effects ran through the rest of society.

He lays a great deal of the trouble on the failure of the Christian Church to have a comprehensive view of spirituality, “True spirituality covers all of reality” (424). When non-Christians read that sentence, they quickly think that Schaeffer is calling for a theocracy. He adamantly did not:

First, we must make definite that we are in no way talking about any kind of theocracy. Let me say that with great emphasis….we must continually emphasize the fact that we are not talking about some kind, or any kind of theocracy. 485

The particular battle Schaeffer saw pitted the Enlightenment (and its children up to the present) versus a Christian worldview. It is important to understand Schaeffer means and does not mean.[1]

Schaeffer is not contesting reason, logic or science. However, those holding a different viewpoint may very mean some slightly different things about such matters.

The Christian worldview understands human beings to be deliberated created persons, made in the image of God. As such, their life has meaning and purpose. Since the universe is the result of God’s action, the universe is necessarily intelligible. Since God is a God of order we should expect and do find a high degree of regularity in the function of the universe. Thus, the universe and human beings are reasonable, subject to logical examination, capable of comprehension (thus, subject to “scientific” inquiry).

Indeed, when one denies the aspects of a Christian worldview, reason, logic and science become intellectually incoherent (see, for example, Poythress, Redeeming Science). Schaeffer explains the effect:

Since their concept of man is mistaken, their concept of society and of law is a mistake, and they no sufficient base for either for society or law.

They have reduced Man to even less than his natural finiteness by seeing him only as a complex arrangement of molecules, made complex by blind chance. Instead of seeing him as something great who is significant even in his sinning, they see Man in his essence only as an intrinsically competitive animal …. (428)

Michael Ruse said something similar in an essay when asking what a living organism is for:

So what’s a Stegosaur for? We can ask what adaptive function the plates on its back served, as good Darwinian scientists. But the beast itself? It’s not for anything, it just is — in all its decorative, mysterious, plant-munching glory.

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/does-life-have-a-purpose/ Now, “glory” is an interesting word, due to its relationship to meaning and purpose as described in the Bible. Ruse, being a very smart man, probably intended the allusion. In any event, Ruse has to say that something is or is not. Which forms an interesting basis for law, politics and conduct.

Schaeffer puts these two worldviews, Enlightenment Humanism and Christianity into the focus of a religious conflict – both are questions about what life means. (Ruse discusses whether humanism is a religion here, http://www.aeonmagazine.com/world-views/michael-ruse-humanism-religion/).

Before we go further, I think that it beyond cavil that one’s understanding of the nature of humanity will necessarily effect one’s view of law and politics. For example, the many public debates of sexual ethics presuppose arguments about one is and what sexuality is for. If a human being is matter in motion, then physical sensation – I suppose – -is a good enough reason for saying it’s okay. Particularly if the only “good” (it is bizarre to speak of a “good” in a context where meaning is unavailable) is I like it or I don’t.

The Christian argument about sexual ethics rests on a fundamental different platform, that is, there are values and considerations beyond physical sensation and those values are more morally significant than nerve endings and brain chemicals (however pleasant and desirable such brain chemicals may be).

The dominant culture of the West now (Schaeffer was watching the tide sweep more quickly than it had) may be put thus:

We live in a secularized society and in a secularized, sociological law. By sociological law we mean law that has no fixed base but law in which a group of people decides what is sociological good for society in a given a moment (437).

Now, it is fair to say, that those operating within this worldview look at other positions and would say, You’re doing the same thing. Your position is as arbitrary as mine. The trouble here is that such a position leads only to tyranny. Since there is no “right” position from which to argue, we end up with power as being the ultimate determinant:

The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon an entire population (442).

This is the strange problem of the indeterminacy of language. If even the words can put to any use, then all that is left is force because violence refuses to be relativized. One is either dead or not.

Schaeffer faults the Christian church for taking on the Enlightenment dichotomy of public and private, which ended in a Platonic retreat of the Christian church into a purely other worldliness (451).

N.T. Wright (who seems to occupy a different political space than Schaeffer) explains the matter thus:

The problem should be clear to anyone who knows the world of the first century—or for that matter any century until the eighteenth, and any country outside so-called Western civilization. It is simply this: the implicit split between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ is a rank anachronism, and we read it into the NT only if we wish not to hear anything the NT is saying, not only about what we call ‘the state’ but about a great many other things as well. No first-century Jew (and no twentieth-century Arab, or Pole, or Sri Lankan) could imagine that the worship of their god and the organization of human society were matters that related only at a tangent. If we are to hear what the NT has to say on what we call ‘the state’, we must be prepared to put our categories back into the melting-pot and have them stirred around a little. We cannot read a few ‘timeless truths’ about the ‘state’ off the surface of the NT and hope to escape with our world view unscathed. Hence the revision of the title of this article, and the inverted commas around the suspect word, which belongs precisely in the eighteenth century. What would a first-century Jew or Christian have made of the modern notion of ‘state’? Not a lot, I suspect.

N. T. Wright, “The New Testament and the ‘state’,” Themelios: Volume 16, No. 1, October/November 1990 (1990): 11.

As Schaeffer seeks to understand the Christian response, he begins with the proposition that God comes before the State, “God has ordained the state as a delegated authority; it is not autonomous” (468). Since the State has a limited scope, the State can become illegitimate as an authority, “The bottom line is that at a certain point there is simply not only the right, but the duty, to disobey the state” (469).

Relying largely on Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex (the law is king), Schaeffer sets out a three tiered response to the state overstepping, 1) defend oneself, likely by protest; 2) flee; 3) “force, if necessary, to defend oneself” (475. It is the third point that a Christian pacifist would reject):

It follows from Rutherford’s thesis that citizen’s have a moral obligation to resist unjust and tyrannical government. While we must always be subject to the office of the magistrate, we are not to be subject to the man in that office who commands that which is contrary to the Bible (474).

Now the greatest weight must be upon disobedience short of force. Indeed, any Christian would necessarily concede that at some point the government must be rejected when it comes to the matter of sin:

18 So they called them and charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. 19 But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, 20 for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” 21 And when they had further threatened them, they let them go, finding no way to punish them, because of the people, for all were praising God for what had happened. Acts 4:18–21 (ESV)

Schaeffer writes, “If there is no final place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous [from God], and as such, it has been put in the place of the Living God….And that point is exactly where the early Christians performed their acts of civil disobedience even when it cost them their lives” (491).

In the end, Schaeffer commends to Christians the responsibility of interacting on the level of politics and law. The Christian life cannot be wholly abstracted from the “real world”.

N.T. Wright (The New Testament and the State), makes a very similar point about how we must read the NT accounts. As quoted above, a First Century Jew would have no idea what we are talking about in secluding religion from the rest of life.

Wright explains that the Jews were not looking for a Kingdom of God in some ethereal realm, but rather a God who ruled in time and space:

First-century Jews had a slogan which encapsulated their aspiration for a new order in which Israel would be liberated. Their God, already sovereign of the world de jure, would become so de facto. The rightful King would become King indeed (12).

Wright argues that when Jesus spoke he was not just speaking “spiritual” or “political” but comprehensively. When one looks to Jesus’ life, one cannot simply say that Jesus avoided all politics – he moved in a through a very politically charged environment.

Jesus, I have argued elsewhere, believed two things which gave him an interpretative grid for understanding his own vocation as leading to a violent and untimely death.13 First, he believed himself called to announce to Israel that her present way of life, whose focal point was resistance against Rome and whose greatest symbol was the temple, was heading in exactly the wrong direction. Down that road lay ruin—the wrath of Rome, the wrath of God. Second, he believed himself called to take Israel’s destiny upon himself, to be Israel-in-God’s-plan. What happens as the story reaches its climax, and Jesus sits on the Mount of Olives looking across at the temple, and beyond it to an ugly hill just outside the city wall to the west, is that the two beliefs fuse into one. He will be Israel—by taking Israel’s destiny, her ruin, her destruction, the devastation of the temple, on to himself. He will be the point where the exile reaches its climax, as the pagan authorities execute Israel’s rightful King. Only so can the kingdom come on earth (in socio-political reality) as it is in heaven (in the perfect will and plan of the Father). From this perspective, to say that Jesus’ death itself was a ‘political’ act cannot be to divorce it (against the grain of all first-century Judaism) from its ‘theological’ implications. On the cross politics and religion, as well as love and justice and a host of other abstractions, meet and merge. Only from the perspective of the cross, shattering as it was to Jesus’ followers then as it should be now, can any view of politics, and hence of the ‘state’, claim to be Christian.

N. T. Wright, “The New Testament and the ‘state’,” Themelios: Volume 16, No. 1, October/November 1990 (1990): 13. Thus, when Jesus tells Pilate “my kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), Jesus means that his kingdom is rooted and grounded in this world – but rather has it authority from elsewhere.

The solution here is not the abolition of the contrary powers in the world (which manifest themselves in various real life social structures) but in the reconciliation of these powers to God in Jesus Christ. The confrontation with those powers “will inevitably produce trouble for the announcer.”

Now we must realize, that these powers were defeated

They include the idols by whose worship humans are reinforced in prejudice about race, gender, class. They include the ‘forces’, as we would call them, which operate through the Herods and Pilates of this world, so that sometimes it is impossible to tell whether Paul is actually referring to the human agents of power or the powers that work through human agents, or, more likely, both (1 Cor. 2:8). They thus include the ‘forces’ that put Jesus to death, and that were thereby duped, shown to have overreached themselves, defeated and led away in the divine triumphal procession (Col. 2:14f.).

N. T. Wright, “The New Testament and the ‘state’,” Themelios: Volume 16, No. 1, October/November 1990 (1990): 14.

However, the final completion of God’s work is not yet complete. Our position is still betwixt and between. Therefore, we must live within a civil order which is maintained in part by a government. And while the government has a God-appointed role, the government is not absolute. “Submission” cannot mean unquestioned obedience. It does mean confrontation of evil and the proclamation of Christ. It may the “powers” will seek to or even kill us:

Among these ways will be, I think, a full outworking of the implications of Philippians 2:10–11. If it is true that the church is called to announce to the world that Jesus Christ is Lord, then there will be times when the world will find this distinctly uncomfortable. The powers that be will need reminding of their responsibility, more often perhaps as the Western world moves more and more into its post-Christian phase, where, even when churchgoing remains strong, it is mixed with a variety of idolatries too large to be noticed by those who hold them, and where human rulers are more likely to acknowledge the rule of this or that ‘force’ than the rule of the creator. And if the church attempts this task of reminding, of calling the powers to account for their stewardship, it will face the same charges, and perhaps the same fate, as its Lord. It is at that point that decisions have to be made in all earnestness, at that point that idolatry exacts its price. But it is here, I think, that the NT’s picture of the gospel and the world of political life finds one at least of its contemporary echoes.

N. T. Wright, “The New Testament and the ‘state’,” Themelios: Volume 16, No. 1, October/November 1990 (1990): 16.

Harnick in fascinating commentary on1 Peter (if nothing else, he constantly makes me think), notes that the worldly powers described by Peter are not perfect mirrors of God’s will. Peter refers to these people with the phrase “the ignorance of foolish people” (1 Peter 2:15). Harnick picks up on Peter’s reference to the Christian being “free”:

Peter calls us to a way of life and a political practice that operate completely beneath and simultaneously completely beyond their rule.

He goes onto speak of the Church’s revolutionary power:

But the true revolutionary power of the church does not consist in its ability to be an effective power in the world, to bring about changes in history, whether in collusion with or in opposition to existing power. Its revolutionary sociopolitical power lies rather in its union with, imitation of, and testimony to the crucified sovereign who has already invaded the world and wrought the decisive revolution, the reconciliation of the world.

Thus, when we live in the world, we do not need to concern ourselves with the Emperor’s agenda. We are in obedience to the Lord, not to the emperor — even when in submission to the emperor. “Its meaning is that men have encountered God, and are thereby compelled to leave the judgment to Him.”

Harnick, following Yoder, sees this is a “revolutionary subordination” – and that Bonhoeffer compromised in the plot to kill Hitler.

[1] An necessary element of Schaeffer’s thinking is that only by positing a creating God and a human soul can any space be made for freedom and democracy. Indeed, democracy presupposes a moral equivalence in value for all human beings such that the vote of A matters as much as the vote of B. It becomes impossible to ground that proposition in world where “What is is right.”

This Side of Truth

05 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dylan Thomas, Helmut Thielicke, Jesus, judgment, Literature, love, Luke 15, Monism, poem, Poetry, Presuppositional apologetics, Prodigal Son, Revelation 21, This Side of Truth, truth, Worldview

This is an example of a how a Christian may read and think through the matter of art. I use a poem by Dylan Thomas, This Side of Truth, because I find Thomas one of the most extraordinary of English speaking poets.

First, the poem. Read it aloud – Thomas loves words, their sound and rhythm – the way in which thoughts trip upon another, and cadence (a near confusion of sound and meter, like a great driver racing along a mountain cliff) which suggests something more dread and dark than can be said otherwise. In Thomas, even blue eye, a six year old, the wind and sea, the sun, moon and stars are dusted with death and judgment.

(for Llewelyn)

This side of the truth,
You may not see, my son,
King of your blue eyes
In the blinding country of youth,
That all is undone,
Under the unminding skies,
Of innocence and guilt
Before you move to make
One gesture of the heart or head,
Is gathered and spilt
Into the winding dark
Like the dust of the dead.

Good and bad, two ways
Of moving about your death
By the grinding sea,
King of your heart in the blind days,
Blow away like breath,
Go crying through you and me
And the souls of all men
Into the innocent
Dark, and the guilty dark, and good
Death, and bad death, and then
In the last element
Fly like the stars’ blood

Like the sun’s tears,
Like the moon’s seed, rubbish
And fire, the flying rant
Of the sky, king of your six years.
And the wicked wish,
Down the beginning of plants
And animals and birds,
Water and Light, the earth and sky,
Is cast before you move,
And all your deeds and words,
Each truth, each lie,
Die in unjudging love.

Now, some brief considerations:

Paul, in his epistle to the Romans, launches into his presentation of the problem of life and its solution with the words,

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools,23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Romans 1:18-25

Paul, among other points, argues that human beings lie under judgment (“the wrath of God”) and thus seek to still their conscience by suppressing that truth. Having been built to worship, human beings turn that worship rightly owed to God to that which God creates. In such an explanation, even the most over materialist “worships” the creature by giving hydrogen atoms the capacity to create — if left alone long enough.

Thomas in this poem seeks nothing more than to suppress the thought of judgment. Now one could argue that Thomas is merely seeking to suppress a culturally manufactured dread (Thomas grew up in an at least nominally “Christian” world). But to do this, Thomas must first presume the God he rejects.

He begins with “truth” and ends the poem with “love”. Now, “truth” cannot had yet — “This side of truth”, since truth is future. Love at the end does not judge (“unjudging love”). Such ideas fall apart when he attempts to tie them to “good” and “bad” — indeed, the poem in the middle is an argument that both hands are mere illusion. The things which appear to be good and bad will be “undone”. That the skies are “unminding”.

There is the silly level of tension — plainly the argument of the poem, that all will resolve into a unjudging “truth” undermines the concept of truth itself. Truth is not necessarily not “false”. And yes, there is the claim that there is a higher register where such things resolve.

No one actually believes this.

Even in Hindu India, the people rightly are in arms about a crisis of rape. Yet, if there were no truth, no judgment, then shouldn’t they celebrate the evil? Shouldn’t we ignore maniacs who murder children or barbarians who enslave the weak of sex slaves?

Thomas presuppose a moral universe — love, truth, good, evil, love, hate before he can seek away around judgment. Thomas does not want to reject meaning, only his own judgment.

Thomas write the poem in a tone that plainly evinces love — and yet he seeks to reject the existence of love by rejecting the fact of truth. As a Christian I must admit to the horror of evil, but I hold that in tension with the fact of judgment and reward.

3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” 5 And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
6 And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. 7 The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. 8 But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”

Revelation 21:3-8.

Were Thomas’s son to be murdered, Thomas’s poem would acquit the villain – yet Thomas would know the murder to be evil.

What then lies behind the poem? Death. The fear of death. Thomas touches upon the inability to stand before the Judge. Thomas prays for the nonsense of an “unjudging love” when what he needs is a Merciful Love. There are two ways to avoid judgment — lawlessness, anarchy and evil unchecked, or (2) mercy. Thomas does not want the first, but needs his own sin to pass unjudged. What Thomas truly needs is mercy.

I cannot promise a blue eyes six year old boy that the world has no meaning and that love will ignore evil. I can promise him that the Father gave his Son so that my son could be redeemed from wrath and made a son:

11 And he said, “There was a man who had two sons.12 And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them. 13 Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. 14 And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. 15 So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs.16 And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.
17 “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! 18 I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. 19 I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”‘ 20 And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. 21 And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ 22 But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. 23 And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. 24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.

Luke 15:11-24. I love Thomas’s poetry. My heart breaks for his son as I think of my own. But the promise of mercy from the Father in the Son overwhelms all:

But Jesus wants to show us that this is not the case and that we shall be given a complete liberation. “You are right,” he says, “you are lost, if you look only to yourselves. Who is there who has not lied, murdered, committed adultery? Who does not have this possibility lurking in his heart? You are right when you give yourself up as lost. But look, now something has happened that has nothing to do with your attitudes at all, something that is simply given to you. Now the kingdom of God is among you, now the father’s house is wide open. And I-I am the door, I am the way, I am the life, I am the hand of the Father. He who sees me sees the Father. And what do you see when you see me? You see one who came to you down in the depths where you could never rise to the heights. You see that God ‘so’ loved the world that he delivered me, his Son, to these depths, that it cost him something to help you, that it cost the very agony of God, that God had to do something contrary to his own being to deal with your sin, to recognize the chasm between you and himself and yet bridge it over. All this you see when you look at me!”