The Dangers of Frameworks

The investor William Buffett warns us to “beware of geeks bearing formulas” and it is good advice for a keeper of companies, seeing as even the most mechanical of businesses runs by the complex, organic mechanisms of human minds and human relationships. Business is more biological than mathematical and more psychological than either.

Similarly, certain dangers lurk in the very notion of a rational framework which I hope to mitigate though they cannot be destroyed. To begin with, it is important to realize that a framework is a technology, although a metaphysical one and cleverly disguised. Just as language itself is a technological means of communication, knowledge retention, and expression, so a framework is a rational technology to assist us in the apprehension of certain truths.

The danger inherent in a rational framework is the same inherent in any technology: that in reducing actual complex, interpenetrated phenomena to a discreet set of articulations for the sake of comprehensibility, we risk oversimplifying our understanding of the phenomenon itself. It is in this way that we have come to the astounding and comical conviction that intelligence is not only definable, but can even be objectively tested and assigned a discreet number.

However, it is not the technology’s fault, and technology can do a lot of good. As long as we are conscious that it we are looking through a technology’s distortions, it can help us to apprehend the actual truth of the matter. Forget for a moment that what we are seeing is not the entity itself, though, and we are in for trouble. As long as we are aware we are looking through binoculars, they can help us see farther. But if we mistake our extended and yet distorted frame for the real thing, we are likely to stumble over what is right in front of us.

And so, with these caveats and disclaimers publicly posted, here is a framework for thinking about human culture:

An Image-Bearing World

The cosmos began somewhere. Some say it began with God, others that it began with the Big Bang, some postulate that the two may not be incompatible. I am not going to argue here for one, the other or both, but merely point out a particularity with origins.

If something comes from something else, then it stands to reason that the resultant something is merely a subset or reconstitution of the original something. In other words, if the cosmos began with the Big Bang, then everything we experience (human culture included) must be merely a recapitulation of that singular event. If this is not so – if certain elements of reality cannot be traced back – then our theory of origin is too narrow.

Given this, if one assumes the Christian hypothesis that reality began with an act of creation, then it follows that all of reality (human culture included) must be merely a recapitulation of God’s singular personality. In other words, creation bears God’s image.

Of course, we could have just read the first few chapters of Genesis to gather the same thing, but I believe, firstly, that it is useful to see the logic of origins running in lockstep with the scriptural account and, secondly, that we have (often and unaccountably) limited our Christian understanding of image bearing to humans rather than extending it to the natural realm. The reason for this, on the surface, is probably that the scriptures speak specially of the man and the woman being made “in the image of God”, whereas the creation is never spoken of in these terms.

However, I do not believe the special designation of image bearer given to the man and woman excludes the possibility of a general designation for the rest of creation. In the first place, how could it? If creation did not get its substance from God’s image (his likeness and character) then where did it get it? nature, in other words, reflects something, so if not God, then what? One might argue that this is not the same as image bearing, and if by that, one means that the way humans reflect God is unique, then such a position has merit. However, if one means by such a statement that human’s display God’s character while nature does not, then one must explain what or who’s character nature displays. One would also have to explain the many places later in scripture which speak of the natural world reflecting attributes of God’s character.

Rather, the natural world bears the likeness of God in the same vein (although not to the extent) which humanity does. Both humanity and nature bear the imprint of their origins. Both are a recapitulation of God’s character. But man and woman are also special. They not only bear an image, they create an image as well. They are to reshape, rename, and redesign nature after their likeness. They are to coordinate mind and body and combine reason and matter until the whole creation is filled with their creations.

Additionally, just as nature is blessed to multiply and expand, so too is the human race. Adam and Eve were not to be alone for long. The race of their children constituted not only a multiplication of image-bearing faces, but also a multiplication of image-bearing imaginations resulting in new and novel combinations.

The whole arrangement is rather like a kaleidoscope, the input of light and color resulting in a million recombinant designs. And like a kaleidoscope in constant motion, or like the ripples on a calm pond, the image is intended to expand and recapitulate through all eternity. It is as if the creation at the beginning is a portrait to which the growing intricacy of nature and the iterative progress of human culture is forever adding detail and refinements. The physicists tell us that the universe is expanding. If this is true, then it is a fitting picture, for neither a static cosmos nor a static human culture would form a just likeness to God. It is, perhaps, by this expansive motion that a finite world best reflects an infinite being.

Cultural Reflection

This being the case, the first element in our framework is an understanding that human culture (with all its miscellaneous strangeness and magic) is a reflection of God’s image just as a tree is, just as a human baby is.

One might say that human culture is the extrapolation of humanness. Put another way, human culture is the image of God animated. The acting out of image bearing is part of the burden which the bearing entails. Human culture expands the image of God and in the process makes us more human than before.

We can see this more clearly in a couple of examples. In the beginning, God created sound and wood. He also created man and woman and instructed them to cultivate the sound and wood so that it would bear fruit. The result, after much experimentation and false starts, is Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. One senses as one listens that the composition makes sound more itself. One might also say that the creation and appreciation of such a work makes us more ourselves – more completely human.

Similarly, the mathematics which enable us to postulate an expanding universe are the extrapolation of Adam’s original project of naming the animals. After the animals, we named other things as well, not only naming instances, but naming generalities, such that the name for one animal next to another animal was “two” and both of those animals next to a brook were “three” (adding the abstraction “things” to the lexicon in the process). Extending this cultivation of rationality has led to relativity, black holes, quantum theory, and a new understanding of time. It is easy to see downsides to all of this, but it is even easier to see that were we to roll back all of this fractal expansion from the act of naming, we would be erasing humanness along with its abuses.

The Abuses of Image-Bearing

It is plain to all but the most dim-witted of observers that the progress of human culture has not been without its setbacks. The only real debate, it would seem, revolves around what causes the setbacks and what to do about them.

The modern secular position (if I can attempt an amalgamation of many separate voices) is that our essential problem is one of insufficient knowledge. As far back as Socrates, we’ve had the idea that knowledge and virtue are inseparable if not one and the same thing. The picture the modern world paints is one of science, technology, and the arts progressing in lockstep with morality, happiness, and human fulfillment. The problems of culture, then, are simply because we are new to the task. As we get more practice at the dance, we will step on each other’s toes less frequently. The grave danger, by such logic, is that we may regress to a more primitive level of knowledge through a failure of education or a capitulation to religious sentiment.

I have dealt with the question of human progress in detail elsewhere, so I will not fully restate the case here. Let it suffice to point out two essential difficulties with this perspective:

Firstly, as long as humans compose the jury by which human progress is adjudicated, then we will tend to acquit our contemporary selves while convicting our forbearers. In this way, we are bound to measure progress linearly (from past to future) because we are the ones closest to the future. We may, of course, be right, but all those who could dispute the claim (the citizens of past ages representing our co-defendants) have long since been executed. “Proves our point” we say.

Secondly and more importantly, the school of thought which says cultural problems stem from insufficient knowledge ignores the troubling relationship between increasing external knowledge and decreasing internal knowledge – knowledge of the self. As Nietzsche put it, “as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers”. One could add that we are in fact less knowledgeable of ourselves after thousands of years of human inquiry than we have ever been. The reason, as I have noted elsewhere, is that the transcendent stance of rational and artistic objectivity leads us outside ourselves, causing our advancement in human culture to atrophy our own self-knowledge. The basic posture of the modern man and woman standing astride the monuments of human cultural growth is one of self-consciousness and insecurity.

This insecurity is, I believe, better explained by the Christian hypothesis, which says that, far from insufficient knowledge being the problem, it was actually an inappropriate kind of knowledge which caused the original mishap. When humanity reached for the tree, they were reaching for a knowledge which would enable them to be like God, knowing (and judging) good and evil for themselves rather than acknowledging God as the source of their knowledge and being. The fall was in fact an attempt to become gods and recreate the world after our own image. By asserting our independence, humanity was attempting to redirect the mirror of the world so as to bypass God and reflect the self.

In this way, every aspect of human culture (even our so-called progress) can be seen as a form of rebellion – or to use the language of the scriptures: idolatry. Instead of work reflecting the creativity of God in creation, we redirect our labors to reflect our own self-interest. Instead of sexuality reflecting the unity and diversity of the Godhead, we talk of sexual preference and sexual fulfillment – a bipartite act centered on the singularity of the self. Instead of theology reflecting our creator, our theology after the fall reflects the biases and preferences of its human authors. Instead of art recapitulating the creator’s beauty and truth, we work diligently to divest it of both – to display it nakedly to the world and thereby assert our ownership and mastery.

The result of all this is a rotation of idols, and at the swirling center of this pagan orgy is the idol of the self. Each artifact of culture serves fallen humanity as both a little god to whom we bow as well as a little worshipper, bowing to the desires of the self. We bow to the calf and use the calf as a servant to our mirthful self-interest.

It is in this way that the growth in human culture has been paralleled by a growing alienation of the self from its place within that culture. The more we exalt ourselves to a place of godlike transcendence over matter, thought, and human relationships, the more we separate ourselves from the ordinary human enjoyment of such things. Thus the peculiar predicament of the self in the twenty-first century – increasing daily in knowledge, power, and psychological estrangement.

Another way of talking about all of this is simply to speak of a breakdown in morality. Even outside Christian circles it is generally acknowledged that morality centers on the golden rule: on doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, loving one’s neighbor as oneself, or (in short) being unselfish. Christianity adds as a prefix to all this a selfless love of God, but the attitude is the same: morality maintains an open, outward-facing posture while immorality is inward-facing.

The fall, in short, involved an attempt by our forbearers to turn the world upside down from its original purpose so as to serve the selfish ends of a new, very human, deity. The results surround us.

Unsuccessful Rebellion

We have, of course, made a mess of things, but what is perhaps even more amazing than our errors is that we have not made more of them and that the ones we have made have not caused more extensive damage. It’s astounding, in a way, that we can see current and past cultures – rife with cyclical wars, genocide, racism, bigotry, and cruelty – culminating in the construction of a stable of weapons capable of making such cruelty ubiquitous and yet still see truth in the strokes of the artist, beauty in the formulations of the mathematician, and goodness in both as they care for their children. Human culture is both unaccountably wonderful and unaccountably monstrous in equal measures. If culture is progress, then it is a bizarre and heartless sort of progress but if it is mere degeneracy, then it is it is beautiful as it burns.

I believe the root of this paradox can be unearthed by comparing the nature of an image-bearing world with the nature of humanity’s rebellion. If, indeed, it was God who created the world then it was he who stamped it with his character and this stamp would not be so easily erased or redirected. Humanity, by its rebellion, might have turned every stone so that they now revolved around the newly-inaugurated deity of self, but this would merely constitute a sort of vandalism, not a complete reformation. For the man and the woman to have been entirely successful in their coup, they would have had to remake the world from scratch, reflecting only the imprint of a new race of gods. As it was, they had to make do with the materials they had on hand. It must have been irksome until they grew accustomed to such debasement – rather like starving and ill-clad Confederate troops raiding Union supply depots or anti-western militants finding nothing but American flags to serve as blankets.

The rebellion was unsuccessful, cursed from day one with a lack of proper munitions and materiel – what we could scrape together consisting entirely of what we could pilfer from the enemy’s own extensive stores. We have persisted in our self-absorbed cause, but by building with the enemy’s elements and in the enemy’s mediums, we have succeeded only in furthering his original design – scattering, spreading, and expanding the image of God where we intended only our own. It has been infuriating and unavoidable, seeing what we had to work with.

This, then, explains how it is that we often reach the state of external exaltation simultaneous with one of internal despondency, why the smartest and richest and strongest among us are often psychologically the most precarious and vulnerable. The greatness we have built for ourselves refuses to serve us because it is stamped with another’s likeness. The greater we grow and the more voraciously we consume praise from our environment, the more our environment revolts and refuses our pleading demands. We are, as it were, asking cats to act like dogs; they may have been created to serve, but not us.

A Twisted World

All of this leads us to the conclusion that we are living in a twisted world, as if the preceding paragraphs were necessary for such a commonplace. However, understanding that human culture is both good and evil simultaneously is important to our understanding of how to address the part which is evil. Culture is twisted and grotesquely so, but it is not irreparably broken; it can be pried and prodded back into alignment although it will require more than our strength to do so.

This understanding is particularly important to the Christian community, who have often been the first to snuff out the smoldering wicks and bruised reeds of human cultural activities in the name of moral integrity. However, this rigid stance often belies a certain blindness to our own twistedness, as if the effects of the fall had stopped like a spent flood at the doorstep of the church rather than sweeping through every orifice and vestibule.

In addition to glossing over the stains on even the most sanctified of vessels, a stark separation between those elements of culture which the church deems good and those deemed evil belittles the image of God displayed in the whole construct as well as in its parts.

Part of the evil of the fall, in fact, consists in our tendency to separate what God has joined. Just as we attempt (unsuccessfully) to sever elements of creation from their image-bearing function, so also, we are constantly making petty distinction between two conjoined truths and creating a warm, moist, and fertile ecosystem for growing evil in the interstitial spaces. Christians, through the years, have been responsible for many such cavities even as they brandished the bone saw and warned of gangrene. One thinks of the pious southern landowner drawing a fine racial distinction even as he decries with moral outrage the Northern violations of his God-given liberty and threatens secession. Perhaps a careful reevaluation of the prior distinction could have prevented the subsequent rupture.

The task of the Christian within culture, therefore, is one of integration and orientation rather than dissection, repairing torn ligaments between connected truths and aligning contorted joints into their rightful position with the whole being. There may be times when amputation is indeed the appropriate metaphor. It is, after all, better to enter heaven lame. However, while a flicker remains of life and health and the image of the creator, we are to tend and nurse it lest we contribute to the distorting and dismembering effects of rebellion through our own attempts at fealty.

What this looks like in practice is that the Christian is an advocate and sponsor to each part of human culture, but her advocacy and interest elicits her insistence on cultural wholeness. At first, such a description reeks of bias, and certainly any Christian’s particular application of cultural advocacy will itself contain its share of distortions. However, due to the influence of God’s original image stubbornly persisting through many attempts at displacement, the Christian’s particular demands of culture need not feel like a violation or debasement of the activity the Christian is seeking to redeem.

For instance, the Christian position affirms sexuality and likens the human pleasures of sex to the divine pleasure of Jesus himself as he embraces the church whom he has won. Sex, according to the Christian way of thinking, is a transcendent experience, clothing physical sensation and biological function with spiritual significance. However, because of the significance of sexuality, because of its great worth and reflective meaning, one is not to separate sexuality from love. To go further, once the Christian has linked sex with love (a joint our culture certainly sees as preferable if not indispensable) love is then joined with its indispensable corollary: sacrifice. If love, says the Christian, does not involve giving oneself, then it is not love but only lust. It is but a small step from the necessity of selflessness to the necessity of marriage as the lifelong commitment to selfless love. Thus, the Christian would perform a sort of surgery on the bleeding wound human culture has opened between our sexual cravings and the selflessness of true love – pointing out that the former will never be satisfied until the later is cultivated in something very like marriage.

Similarly, the Christian position affirms artistry and craftsmanship of all kinds, but evaluates the worthiness of art by means of the reflections of truth, beauty, and goodness manifest in the created order and accessible even to the uneducated layman. It may well be that certain abstract works are fully understood only be an intellectual elite, but their exclusivity is not, by itself, a mark of quality. Also, the artist who seeks to dissect art to its lowest level, severing art from intentionality, skill and technique (the artist who demonstrates a sadistic mastery of art by stripping it of form and substance) will not by the mere novelty of this reductionism gain the Christian’s approval. Of course, by this standard, much of what is labeled “Christian Art” must be discarded, but such a label is merely a symptom of a more wholesale reductionism of Christianity itself.

The marketplace also has the Christian’s approbation. It is nothing less than the biological image of man writ large, each portion of the market, like an organ, supplying what is lacking in the operations of the whole and receiving its sustenance as a byproduct of such kindness. However, by this same token, a Christian understanding of the marketplace refuses that a person should hide her gifts and wholesome aspiration behind the flimsy screen of self-interest, but be willing to pursue with abandon the particular calling for which she has been equipped – the calling which, if neglected, would leave some crucial facet of God’s image unfinished. Christianity’s view of the workplace is of a garden – where the giving of oneself comes prior to receiving one’s sustenance and neither the purity of the gift nor the sequence of the harvest is to be tampered with.

Whatever one sows, that will he also reap. Christianity (by examining God’s character) merely asserts that the one logically precedes the other and the bounty of the harvest is proportionate to the generosity of the labor. It is rare, for instance, that an entrepreneur interested only in his own gain manages to realize such gain. One must first do some good if one would receive good in return and it is almost impossible to benefit others while thinking only of oneself.

Again, it is bewildering that many churches, forgetting Jesus’ own participation as a carpenter, view the marketplace as a guilty pleasure, enticing believers away from more legitimate occupations.

I could give many other examples – spanning technology, family relations, entertainment, and economics – but these, I hope, are enough for now. I desire only to make the point that Christianity, far from being stubbornly entrenched as human culture’s opponent, should instead, by its very nature, be its greatest apologist. We have grown used the term “apologetics” as it refers to defending the idea of God or of Christianity itself, but it is, I believe, equally applicable in this context. The Christian ought to be the first to defend culture against every attacker (even if these attacks come from other Christians) for the simple reason that God’s image resides in what he has made and part of what he has made is human culture through the (often unwilling) agency of men and women. In defending culture, we defend the creative prerogative of its maker. This is not to say that God himself needs defending; defending culture is more like defending others from the inevitable consequences of getting crossways with the universe.

It just as certainly does not entail a mindless acceptance of every cultural whim or fancy. One may have to come near to blows with both the patient as well as his overly-aggressive physicians (both Christian and secular) if the infected member is to be salvaged. But what it most certainly means is a rugged commitment to seek beauty amid ugliness and and virtue amid brothels. This is not because we believe that either beauty or virtue will save us – there is not enough true virtue in the best of us to fill a thimble – but because all true and good things, however marred and misdirected, lead us to the one who is true and good himself, and part of his goodness, we are promised, is to hear those who ask him for help.

Summary of the Framework

Thus, we have constructed a framework for interpreting culture, and I hope it’s a good one. We have started with the image of God invested into human activity, acknowledged the twisting of this image in idolatrous self-worship, and celebrated our outrageous good luck (some would call it providence) that we have not been entirely successful in our selfishness for the simple reason that we, our materials, and our activities were all made to reflect another. While it is badly scuffed up and graffitied, the image can never be entirely effaced.

The resultant mindset, I have suggested, is one of advocacy, seeking the image of God in every aspect of culture and patiently, even obstinately, working out the kinks and connecting severed concepts until the original beauty is restored. Of course, we are not going to be entirely successful, and the biggest obstacle to our success is the rebellion of our own heart, insisting on making our own selfish divisions in what God has joined and inclining to the saw rather than the scalpel in repairing the divisions made by others.

The End of Knowing

Saying that we understand culture by means of God’s image is as much to say that we do not understand culture fully though we can encounter it as we can a person. For each person is a mystery – inscrutable, unique, unfathomable – and just as the depth of a soul cannot be fully plumbed, neither can the soul’s artistry. And what line could measure the creator of both the soul and its handiwork? Knowing culture, knowing another person, and knowing God, all involve a similar type of knowing. We may know many things about – facts, principles, frameworks – and these things may help us to know, but they do not by themselves constitute knowing. For there is believing-in and trusting-in which must occur to know the smallest particle or the smallest person. We reach out our hand to take hold of another’s, trusting its warmth and believing what is unspoken in her eyes. The hand and eyes of creation’s author offer a similar kind of knowing.

Thus, the end of this rational exertion is not rational but relational. We can know a person by proposition only up until the moment of introduction, past which point knowledge must expand beyond proposition or it serves as impediment rather than interpreter. Exposing the reflection of God’s character in culture is merely an introduction. For relationship to begin, God must extend his hand and we must trust its warmth.