Metaphors for the Divine

People have been trying to understand the Divine pretty much for as long as there have been people. Christians, in particular, have the impossible task of wrapping their minds around our conception of who God is. While it is not possible for us to fully comprehend God, we are required to try, and it is hardly correct to say we know nothing about Him or His character. Naturally, being human beings, and therefore demonstrably fallen regardless of the ethical schema one is using, our first attempt to grok God comes out as projection. That is, we make God basically a bigger and more powerful version of ourselves. Sometimes we take this a step further and make ourselves God :-) When you think about it, this is our first cut of a mental model of another mind, be it a mind or The Mind. In a lot of cases, projection works really well, as in when we ourselves are fairly neurotypical and we're interacting with someone who is similar and also neurotypical. We assume they'd want what we'd want in their position. A programmer might view this as instantiating a copy of their own mind inside the other person's body and circumstances and using that instance to predict how the other person feels and how they will react. Unfortunately for them, most programmers are NOT neurotypical. Worse, many of them do not realize how deeply non-neurotypical they actually are. Needless to say, on the other side of the relation, God is most assuredly not neurotypical. We know this from His writings and our own interactions with Him.



So what do we do? Well, like in our own human relationships, we try to build some sort of a mental model of the other person. We do this based on our own experience and folk psychology and what others have told us. If your model inputs are pretty good, your success will in general be pretty good. In short, we construct a metaphor for the other person. Hopefully we realize that the metaphor isn't the other person, but rather a useful construct for understanding that person.



Christians have been at this metaphor construction business with respect to God for an awfully long time. The Gospels, for instance, are full of them. The first one is God as Father.

This metaphor is one of the best ones, IMO, and perfectly adequate for almost all purely ordinary theological purposes (i.e., what does God expect of me, how should I try to relate to Him, and how does He feel about me?). It doesn't help much when one attempts to understand why God made a world that He knew would fall, or what is His purpose in allowing evil or pain, but for most people, most of the time, it does the job. Why does a father love his son? Having recent experience with a very small son of my own, I can simply answer, because he is mine. A programmer would say that the son inherits some fraction of the father's love for himself, as well as some fraction of his love for the mother. The impulse is biological, and strong, I do not have a choice as to whether to love him or not, I simply do because that is the sort of creature I am. The little boy has a strong nonrational claim on my loyalties and my affection, even when he is being difficult. I first encountered this with my older brother's children, and I was honestly somewhat taken aback by it despite it being significantly attenuated from the feelings I experience with my own son.



The Father metaphor fits the narrative of the Old Testament very well, with Israel continually following the misbehavior->oppression->suffering->repentance->deliverance-Misbehavior cycle. As time goes on, they started frequently skipping the repentance stage. How does God feel about that? His actions are very consistent with those of a good father, trying to bring about the best for his children. He suffers when He must chastise and discipline. Frequently in the latter part of the book of judges, He delivers them, not because they repented, but because He simply could not bear to see their suffering any more. One could say this is a very human feeling, or conversely, that when we feel this it is a very divine one. We are after all, in His image, although we are fallen. What does a father want from his son? In general they want to love their son, and to be loved and obeyed in return. They desire that their son realize his potential and live a good and moral life. Many fathers want other things, but I think most want at least those. But God is far more than merely a father. When one considers the problems of evil and pain, we find ourselves reaching for another metaphor. I'll talk about some more of these metaphors in my next post.

Rational economic man, marriage, and assorted social institutions

Rational economic man, that construct beloved of many economics textbook authors, is hardly a superhero. Indeed, a nontrivial fraction of the population behaving as him can seriously weaken a number of our social institutions.

For instance, imagine that rational economic man is getting up in years and wants to leave his estate to his heirs, but to avoid all estate taxes and the like. Normally, we don't allow this, imposing a rather stern estate tax on large estates. But rational economic man is clever, and gives not a damn for any transcendent properties of our institutions. So he strategically divorces his wife, strategically marries his granddaughter in law with a clever prenuptial agreement, and then divorces her to remarry his former wife while his grandaughter in law remarries his grandson. Trampling of course all over the spirit of marriage, but transferring an arbitrary portion of his estate to his grandkids and dodging all the clever barriers society has deemed fit to place in his way. Rational economic man can also make use of the institution of marriage to transfer citizenship (in India, for instance, such is generally valued at around 100k in their marriage markets), to enjoy privilege against having to testify against one's spouse, and as a general way of transferring assets beyond the limits of the gift tax without creating a taxable event. He can also use it to confer his health plan to a spouse and their children for primarily financial reasons (generally health plans do not expect that spouses and children will be adversely selected...but rational economic man will certainly do that). To top it off, he can also arrange to game the Social Security system after his death by transferring his benefits to a vastly younger woman.

But rational economic man is just getting started. During the real estate boom, he purchased a house valued at 400,000 dollars, taking out a standard 30 year mortgage in a non-recourse state (California of course). Owing to the housing market collapse, his house is now valued at 200,000. Rational economic man therefore stops bothering to send his mortgage checks (which he can still easily afford, as he is RATIONAL economic man, and did not take a mortgage that he couldn't afford). He knows that it'll be upwards of a year before he is foreclosed upon, and might even accept a principal reduction (to 200,000) if such was offered by the lender. He's quite the ruthless borrower. He knows that inside 7 years any damage to his credit rating will be effaced, and rationally values the 200k (and the 12-18 months of rent-free living) more than it. In essence, he treats the non-recourse option on mortgages in his state like a put option on the property that he purchased. Want to know what happens when lots of people take this position? Just wait, you'll see. Non-recourse mortgages, bankruptcy forgiveness after 7 years, and a number of other laws were put in place to avoid putting the genuinely needy into debt slavery as a result of bad luck or mishap. They won't survive a lot of people gaming the system and the rest of us feeling like suckers for playing by the spirit of the rules. Previously, social sanction, shared values, and mild social ostracism limited the gaming of such systems, but one can presently seriously question whether there actually IS an overall society now, and certainly whether it shares values. With corporations and banks freely defaulting whenever it is profitable to do so, and frequently being bailed out by the government, it is very hard to argue that the little guy should still be required to play according to the spirit of the rules...to stay cricket, so to speak.

So where am I going with all this? The common thread is the desacralization of our social institutions---marriage, lending, and the like. We have put in place a number of refinements to our rules regarding these institutions that have the effect of shielding most people from a number of onerous hardships. For instance, we wouldn't feel right about holding Joe in debt bondage indefinitely when his life takes a turn out of the book of Job. Our bankruptcy laws, for instance, go back to the tradition of Jubilees described in the Old Testament. Our rules surrounding marriage are based on a presumption of a transcendent quality in said relationship. We would all be poorer if we had to drop all of the privileges of marriage and of borrowers in general that could not be sustained in the presence of the Rational Economic Men. So clearly we need to avoid taking actions and setting policies that encourage this desacralization. This is, IMO, one of the strongest arguments against extending marriage to gay couples. It is also a pretty strong argument against no-fault divorce.

Alternatively, we can dump the notion of the income tax and the estate tax in general, opting to raise money in some fashion that doesn't care about the particular economic unions that exist in the society as a whole, probably a consumption tax. We would also have to make significant revisions to our immigration law and make pretty much all loans full-recourse (in addition to returning to the days of at least 10% down so the borrower has 'skin in the game'). We would also have to seriously evaluate the bankruptcy laws and most likely make them far more punitive in general. To invert the words of Bush the First, we would have to establish a meaner, harsher society.

Sola Scriptura or Solo Scriptura?

I self-identify myself as a Protestant, and, in theory I agree with Sola Scriptura---the belief that Scripture is sufficient guide to what Christians should believe on things which are actually salient to Christianity. When the Holy Spirit moves to enable the full comprehension of what Scripture means, this works quite well. Unfortunately, this far too often seems not to be the case, and I find myself in sympathy with the more Catholic position that church tradition should be given a far greater weight.

I suppose one simply has to reflect that on many issues with theological significance, most of the church is presently at serious variance with the unseen church---that is the communion of saints reaching back to around 30 AD. Further, most Christians place far higher weight on current opinion then on the opinion prevalent in say, 100 AD, 500 AD, or 1500 AD. Further, one has to admit that Protestantism itself has schismed over and over again, to the point of being a frequent source of humor. It would seem that the Spirit animating many interpretations of Scripture is not in fact the Holy Spirit but a decidedly more malevolent one, or sometimes, perhaps no Spirit at all but simply a desire to find an interpretation that does not require the reader to be out of step with his peers and his age.

What can we do about this? Should we beg readmission to the Catholic Church, with it's more centralized approach to scriptural interpretation? Should we just pray harder? I can't answer either of those questions for myself, much less for any reader who happens to have dropped by for whatever reason. All I can suggest is this:

We must accept that our predecessors in the Church were at least as Christian as we are, in the aggregate. We must furthermore accept that they succeeded in spreading at least the knowledge of the Gospel to at least as great of a degree as we have. Furthermore, they have generally had a degree of understanding of the Bible at least as great as the average possessed by Christians today (a brief examination of the surveys of knowledge of Christians of the doctrines and beliefs of their faith will reveal this is a fairly low bar to meet). In many cases, they are far closer to the social circumstances in which the Bible was written and are closer to the source material than we were. For instance, how many of us have ANY concept of what living in a low-surplus society is like? Or what the accomodations needed to make such societies work actually are? I suspect that only a few modern Christians, likely those who have lived in very poor places of the world during long term missions have any grasp of this at all---and even then, they generally always had the option to move back---such privation was not a permanent state of affairs.
Given these premises, I would suggest this to anyone inclined to make pronouncement about how the Bible says that Christians should behave today.
Honestly answer the question, how would orthodox Christians from AD 500, 1000, 1500, 1750, and 1900 answer your question? If they all, or most all, agree with your position, you are probably right. Certainly each era has its errors, but as C.S. Lewis famously pointed out, they usually aren't the SAME errors. If most or all of them would disagree with you, the burden of proving that YOU aren't the heretic is pretty large. Smart as you might be, you probably aren't smarter than the collected wisdom and practice of your religion, and if you accept the premises of your religion at all, you must recognize that you are 'running on corrupted hardware' as the folks over at overcomingbias are fond of pointing out (in our neck of the woods, we call it original sin or total depravity, or simply failing to be a Pelagian heretic :-).
So let's take a hard case---slavery. Both Old and New Testaments talk quite a bit about it, probably because it was a fairly common part of the experience of a large fraction of the population. It isn't presented as an ineffibly evil institution in either Testament. Paul, in his letters to a slave and his master, doesn't even say the master should free the slave to the master. Yet in the 1700s, the church started moving strongly in the direction of condemning slavery and we take it totally for granted now that slavery is contrary to Christianity.
Why is this? Were the Christians who accepted slavery, serfdom and similar instruments of bondage wrong for nearly 1700 years?

I would argue that the key to understanding this lies in understanding the low surplus human society's condition. We are obscenely richer than anyone born before the 1700s. In a low surplus society, you simply can't afford to do a lot of things we take for granted now. In fact, you might not even be able to feed everyone. So what, in such a society, do you do with your screwups, idiots, and people who just can't fend for themselves? Your minor criminals that you can't afford to incarcerate and feed, your prisoners of war? The most merciful answer to that question is often bond-servitude, be it slavery, serfdom, indentured servitude, or the like. Christianity was not designed to only work in high surplus societies like our own, but in any society that God or Man might decide to inflict on us. Therefore it emphasizes that such servitude carries reciprocal obligations on the part of both master and slave (refer to Paul's various letters and the laws regulating slavery in the Old Testament). So why did it become considered an evil thing in the 1700s? Well, for that I suggest heading down to your local gym. Find yourself a fancy exercise bike or treadmill---one with a calorie consumption meter that will display in watts. You'll find that producing 150 watts is quite taxing, and the 6-7 hours that would be required to squeeze 1 Kilowatt-hour out of you very fatiguing indeed. Congratulations---you've just produced about 12 cents worth of power. This should drive home just how rich in terms of the power at our command we've become since the Industrial Revolution and the widespread availability of fossil fuels. Christians in the 1700s recognized that the amount of wealth available to society HAD FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED as a result. Furthermore, Christians recognized that they had always been obliged to be as charitable as they could afford to be, and no more, and that said obligation had just enlarged along with their purses. Therefore they argued that society should no longer permit slavery.

Of course they didn't express it in many cases in exactly those terms, but it is telling that the timing is so close. Slavery generally ended in heavily Christian countries about as soon as society could afford to end it. Regretably, most abolitionists in the US didn't phrase their arguments in these terms. Had they done so, slavery might have ended in the US via a buyout similar to that in Brazil instead of via the bloodiest war in American history.

On fostering 'diversity' in churches

There has been a fair bit of talk on the notion of megachurches fostering 'racial transcendence' (most recently on http:\\www.onestdv.blogspot.com). Here's my take on the diversity issue as it relates to churches.

Different styles of churches for different sorts of people are very important, in my opinion.People need a church where they can feel as if they are a valued part of the community---a little platoon or company of the body of Christ.People differ a LOT on the expressive style of their worship. Everything from silent and contemplative to exhuberant and 'Spirit-Filled'...people with one style DO NOT feel comfortable when they're in an area dominated by an opposing style. Guess what else, different races have different distributions of preferred worship styles---they differ on everything else in terms of the distribution, why should this surprise anyone? Left to their own devices, the extraverts in a population similar to the US will tend to run roughshod over the introverts as well. Churches have their own personalities, and necessarily so. A number of denominations and churches have made themselves into places where introverts are quite at home, by suppressing the ability of the extraverts to dominate the social scene of the church and by attracting a disproportionate share of introverts relative to the population as a whole. My wife, for instance, absolutely can't stand the Pentecostal style of worship, whereas I'm indifferent to mildly friendly to it. Neither of us are at all tolerant of the notion that all cultures are of equal value, excepting White American and European culture, which is evil. Churches are frankly one of the last bastions of free association in the Western World. I get very angry when people try to browbeat churches into 'integrating'. My take is that good churches are open to whoever has a desire to go, and if they want to become part of the community, they'll stay. To go out of one's way to bring 'diversity' to a particular church absent a clear calling from God is, IMO, wrong.