Epistemology

The State of the Epistemological Debate

I want to address my epistemology here directly in response to the ongoing comment debate on my last few blog posts. Those posts weren't meant to be polemical or argumentative. I was talking out my own spiritual situation and proposing a response -- a personal program for my own spiritual growth. My friend Robert, in an effort to help me be rigorous in my thought and to communicate with people sharing a different perspective, was pushing me to clarify on several issues.

But the real issue of the debate in the comments is epistemology. How do we know what we assert? I should say from the outset that I hope to keep this post as impersonal as possible. It will necessarily be personal insofar as I draw on my own experience, but I'm primarily talking about epistemological frameworks. They are held by people -- and people identify very deeply with their epistemologies. But hopefully there's a fundamental way in which people who hold very different views can respect one another, even if they believe the other person to be dead wrong.

Robert has been asking repeatedly that I give a description of the effects of my proposed spiritual program in practical, "real-life" terms. He has asked that I give empirical evidence for my assertion that a spiritual life based on orthodox theology is "life-giving". And he has pressed me to provide a a demonstrable hypothesis and some account of what the things I'm discussing would "look like."

I should apologize because I have, in a way, been evading all these questions. And that's because I can't answer them. And that's not because I'm not intelligent or just a neophyte or because I haven't thought all this through with sufficient rigor. It's because I believe that these are questions which should not be answered.

So I don't intend to answer those questions here, but I do intend to lay out why I think they shouldn't be answered and to give a fundamental overview of my epistemology, in the interest of full disclosure and intellectual honesty. And also because I think that if I come out and clearly state my epistemology, then it might be more possible that I be granted certain courtesies. That is, if I am clear about what I think are the fundamental criteria for truth, then I won't be pressed to give answers to questions founded on criteria for truth that I have rejected.

The Epistemology I Reject

Probably to the same extent that my friend (and anyone else who shares his epistemological framework) believes the exposition of my thought to be vague, thin and untenable, I believe his criterion for judgment and the questions he is asking to be misguided and spiritually questionable. I'm not saying he's stupid or a bad person; I'm saying we're working with entirely different criteria of truth.

As I understand it (and I'm completely willing to be corrected if I'm reading this wrong), my critic's epistemology involves or requires the following:

1) things which have an experiential or tangible nature or consequence (this may be emotional and interior, not necessarily physical, but it will always be mediated through the physical embodiment of the subject)
2) a foreseeable practical effect of any proposed cause, something which happens in the world of the tangible which we can experience and which therefore can be empirically observed to proceed from that cause

3) a full description in experiential/tangible/practical terms of anything proposed prior to acceptance of its reality and existence

4) a position of skepticism towards the reality of anything which does not meet the requirements outlined above and therefore an effective denial of its existence for all practical intents and purposes (e.g. an abstract thing might exist, but cannot be definitively proven or disproven, because it does not effect life in any unmistakably causative and experientially perceptible way, therefore it has no impact on life and can be treated as non-existent without having an impact on life)

My problem with this framework is that I believe it to be utterly inadequate for any consideration of God. Furthermore, it seems to eliminate all possibility of faith. It seems to stand in contradiction to most of the teachings of Christianity (granted, this is "Christianity as I understand it"). And it also seems to reveal a certain (in my opinion) lack of respect toward God and a usurpation or underestimation of God's position vis-à-vis the created order.

Reasons I Reject this Epistemology

Here are the specifics of my objections, in as much detail as I can provide. I have extensive recourse to "unproven assertions" in this section, which I am not attempting to prove. I will more fully lay out my epistemology in the last section of this post.

1) God is utterly sovereign and transcendent. And also God created the universe, which is not transcendent. Therefore, if we attempt to judge God by standards we develop from within the created world which are independent of a confession of God and not rather derived from a confession of God, then we are proposing to elevate the mundane over the transcendent and stand in judgment over God solely on the basis of our own limited existence, which is the sort of thing God doesn't like.

2) If we presume to judge God/dogma/spirituality by our own interests (some practical difference it makes for me, something which will help me make the decisions I need to make), then we are again usurping what I believe is the authority which belongs to God -- that is, the right to will and decide what our interests should be and what we, as created human beings, are supposed to do and care about. Because I believe that God made us for God's own purposes, I think that unless we allow God to shape and transform and direct our interests from the "practical" ones that we can understand and describe from within our own empirical and embodied experience, then we are going to get our purpose wrong.

3) Therefore, the "goal" of our living a Christian life is to let God shape us, shape our epistemology, our goals, our character, our understanding, and everything. And because those goals are those of a transcendent God and we are not transcendent, we cannot know them going in. We can't know exactly what it will look like because it is totally other. If we could describe an "end goal" in practical, tangible, and human terms, it would not be a divine end.

4) We have, in fact, seen perfect human life. Perfect human life will look like Jesus, but we cannot look at Jesus as a "how-to" guide and describe discrete, practically applicable Jesus principles. We cannot apply "principles" lived out by Jesus from within our own limited and creaturely understanding. Because what makes Jesus the example of perfect human life is his full and perfect divinity. Jesus is not living out discrete principles that can be abstracted from the ineffable and transcendent "personality" and being of God. The incarnation does not "reveal God" in the sense of showing God doing human-ness properly and then just say, "OK. Now just do that." The incarnation reveals within the context of a fully human life that God is Other and that humanity needs the right sort of relationship with the living and transcendent God to have life and to live human life well. And that relationship is not purely or even primarily about what we do "practically" (although it has "practical" results). The focus and purpose of that relationship is God -- our purpose is to satisfy our desire for God, to attain fellowship with God, to be renewed in God's image. Because in the end, that is what it means to "do human life well". It will result in better decision making and some nice practical results. But those are the natural by-product of being in harmony with God's will by being in thrall to the transcendent God.

5) I can't describe these practical things or how my decision-making will be helped, exactly, by this relationship with God. I don't know. I don't really care. The thing that makes faith count as "faith" is that it is not knowledge. It has no objective or empirical predictive power. You don't go through all the proofs and make a 5-year projection and develop a criteria for judging your progress and then decide to submit to God, if it seems like a good deal with some practical benefits that appear beneficial to your "before-submitting-to-God" perspective. You simply submit to God.

6) Faith is the core of Christianity, faith as a set of assertions about who God is and who Jesus was/is and how the universe stands in relationship to God and how God revealed God's self to the universe. (CT 32 preview: this is fides quae creditur -- the faith which is believed). But faith is also at the same time the activity of casting onself in full surrender by the grace of God upon the mercy of that mysterious and ultimately incomprehensible God, faith as an existential leap into those assertions, expecting there to be something real behind them to catch you (fides qua creditur -- the faith by which one believes).

7) Therefore, nothing about Christianity is provable, demonstrable or adequatedly described in terms that are tangible, practical, or accessible to human beings outside of faith in the God of Christianity -- which includes faith that the God who exists is really who Christianity says God is. [Note: God is much more than is or can be described, but Biblical and orthodox statements about God are still really who God is, even if they are incomplete and do not fully express the transcendent identity of God.]

8) And finally, if any claim about God made by Christianity were provable, demonstrable and fully knowable by any old person whatever, then Christianity would be logically self-contradictory (insofar as it claims belief in a transcendent and infinite God).

What I Believe and Why

I believe that God is transcendent and the creator of the world and that God is Triune and that the three persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) aren't just a way of saying "God likes being in relationship" but are three distinct hypostases of the same "substance (which isn't material) which are united in their operation. I believe that the Son was begotten by the Father eternally and not created and that the Spirit proceeds from the Father eternally (and maybe from the Son, but I'm not sure about that). I believe that this Triune God is the One who revealed Himself to Moses and the Prophets. I believe that the second person of the Trinity was incarnated as a man, Jesus of Nazareth -- the God-man, theanthropos, not losing His full Divinity nor taking on less than full humanity, not acting as a conjunction of two separate subjects but as a single subject to whom can be attributed all of Jesus' actions (and passions, although His Divinity remained ontologically immutable), neither mingling these natures into a new hybrid being nor possessing a single will, but with His human will freely acting in service and deference to His Divine will. I believe he was the Messiah whom the Jews had been promised. I believe he was killed and truly died and that he rose from death, bodily and fully, and appeared to his disciples. I believe that he ascended into heaven and dwells with the Godhead in its fullness and that he will come again to judge the living and the dead and that all those who trust in Him (that is, in Him Himself and in the transcendent God whom He revealed when He was incarnate, not in some ethic or idea that He represented by His life) will be resurrected bodily to an incorruptible and everlasting life.

I believe in a lot of other stuff the Church says. And in things the Bible says. I have gone through this in detail because I'm attempting to be as precise as possible, although certainly much of it will sound "abstract".

But the question really is "why?" -- So I have come up with what I imagine are the questions which would be posed by the experiential/empirical epistemology and how I would answer them. I include this here in the form of a Platonic dialogue. Once a classicist, always a classicist.

How do I know to trust the Church and its dogma? -- Because I trust the God who shows up in the Church and in orthodox dogma.
How do I know they aren't wrong? -- I don't. I believe that they aren't wrong.
But couldn't I be wrong about that? -- I can't prove I'm not wrong, but I am sure that I'm not.
So what makes me sure that I'm not? -- Because God has shown up in my life within those very doctrines of the faith.
How do I know it's God? What's the epistemological criterion? -- Because the beauty of the God that showed up in the creeds brought me to my knees and enslaved my heart and because I long for him with greater passion than I have ever known.
Beauty? That's the epistemological criterion? -- Not quite: Truth. That's the criterion. It just so happens that Truth is soul-compellingly beautiful.
So how does one know if one has found soul-compelling beauty? -- Easy: one's soul is compelled.
So any time anyone feels some soul-compelling beauty, are they right? Have they found Truth? -- Not necessarily. I don't know if anyone else has actually experienced the soul-compelling beauty of truth just because they claim to have experienced it. But if they claim to have experienced this and proclaim what the Church proclaims, then I believe they are right.
But then we're right back to the Church again! -- Seems so, doesn't it?
So let's say my soul feels compelled. What does the soul-compelling beauty of God look like as opposed to some counterfeit soul-compelling beauty? -- It looks like the Triune God that the Church proclaims.
But what does that look like? -- Like nothing else. What does chocolate taste like? It just tastes like chocolate, doesn't it? No one who has tasted chocolate ever asks a question like that.
But where's the perceptible difference that it makes in a person's life to know this abstract dogma-God? How does it affect, say, decision making? -- One now tries to make decisions out of an ardent and awestruck devotion to the utter beauty of the Goodness of God's being.
And what do these decisions look like? -- Why do you want to know? To judge whether the effects are to your liking? On what basis do you judge the effects to be good or bad? If it's on the basis of your passionate relationship with the God proclaimed by the Church, then why ask the question? And if there's another basis you're operating from, how do you know it is true? Or do you want a laundry list of things to do, principles to follow to avoid the whole business of submission and surrender to a God who wants to transform you in relationship? You want to make sure it's really God first? You can't. You want to make sure that the Church is right before you trust them? You can't.

I tried to do this for years. I was hip with post-modern epistemology. I went to college and got all my critical analysis skills trained up really well. I started looking at people like Gandhi and the "Buddha" and thought they were doing it right. And I wanted to believe God was universally accessible to anyone and everyone because that seemed to me to be the right thing for God to do. As a Quaker, my eschatology was basically a world without violence where everyone lived in harmony with one another and with the environment and just incarnated principles of love and honesty and simplicity and non-objectification of one another. That was something worth hoping for, dying for, praying for, living for and into.

Except that eventually, the utopia got really stale. It was like vitamin-water eschatology -- presumably good for you but practically flavorless. It was an anemic, insipid, lifeless and unlivable eschatology. I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Everything was great. Who's going to argue with universal love among human beings? What was I finding wrong? -- There was no God there. Sure, there was "that of God in everyone" and there was the Spirit moving in the special Spirit way (which in my experience felt a lot like a hybrid of Marianne Williamson, Jiminy Cricket, and a glass of brandy that gave people things to share with the meeting like "When you love other people, that's heaven; but when you're trapped in yourself and armed against other people, that's hell" or "I don't know what God is -- but God is like electricity: I flip the switch, and God is there" or "Love means never having to say you're sorry" which the Spirit evidently also inspired when Erich Segal penned Love Story)

What makes the difference between what I expect now and what I expected then? -- A transcendent God. Sure, I think the eschaton will include lots of harmony between people and creation. Sure, I think we'll all love each other. And yes, it's good to be nonviolent now and to work for those who are poor, outcast, hungry and oppressed. But the key is: while that is good, it's not of primary importance. God is what is matters; it's only through God that the rest of it matters to the extent that it does. And God's not a laundry-list of pragmatic concerns. God has a unified and ultimately ineffable nature which we can only hint at through abstract language. God's being is the source of God's will. And while we follow what we know to be God's will through the Church and the Scripture, we still need to do the "work" of showing up for grace -- of yearning to be transformed into the likeness of God, of contemplating and adoring that God. As that happens, we become more likely to make the sort of decisions that are in accord with God's will because we have internalized God's word and because God (not us) has transformed our hearts and minds.

And the other key difference between the robust and theologically driven eschatology I have now and the one I was promised by Quakers and the generically "spiritual" and by non-orthodox liberal Protestants and "social justice Christians" is that God's not boring. If the end-goal were simply us incarnating perfectly this whole Jesus principle of love and equality in God and "power through humility" or "victory through loss" or whatever and petting animals and eating lots of fruit and nut roasts, it would just be stale. It's barely a step up from playing harps on clouds with halos. (Or a step down -- I rather like the harp). Why I really care about a transcendent God who is beyond human comprehension is that the endeavor to know such a God is a source of infinite delight.

That's the reason that I have named my blog "epectasy". And my life has been like that: God is heart-rendingly, breath-takingly beautiful. The Trinity is beautiful -- not the mere "idea" of Trinity, but the God who comes and inhabits the idea when you contemplate it. It leaves me with my heart trying to burst from my chest and tears in my eyes and a desperate longing for more -- to know more fully, to look longer. And yet, it's not a cranky desperate longing, like an addict who needs a fix. It's a desire born of lack that stands in the midst of utter bliss.

I'm not pretending to be perfectly transformed and oh-so-spiritually mature now. I grew up very much in the church and have considered myself a Christian since I was 5 years old. There was a only short period of about 3 years where I wasn't actively involved in seeking God. I was never complacent and uncritical within my faith; I did a lot of theological thinking from the time I was 4. Still, I'm a total neophyte. My time wasn't totally wasted before, but I haven't been squarely on the right path until now (it was a graced path, but it had some potholes). And there is an eternity stretched out ahead of me in which I will never come to the end of knowing God, never come to the end of the process of being perfected. So, given all this, is there any reason that anyone can give me that would be compelling enough for me to hold off on seeking the face of God until I can come up with some "empirical evidence" that pertains to the "practical world" of decision making and -- I don't know -- dirt and machines and flow charts and whatever else is presumably inhabting this strange world that is so much more "practical" than mine?

Patristics Chick at VBS, Part 2 -- "Yes, Virginia: 10-yr olds care about the homoousios!"

People in the MDiv program like to laugh a bit at us MTS (Masters of Theological Studies) students. While MDiv's have the reputation for just wanting to hug and "be in the trenches with the people", MTS's have the reputation for being a bit too scholarly, socially inept, and maybe a bit less "Christian" than those who have a more pastoral vocation. There was a story in our satirial blog, The Depressio, entitled "Students Tried Too Hard In Field Ed" which depicted a student locking a kid in a closet to represent Jesus' time in the tomb and trying to let the Sunday School poppets wrestle with the rather unsatisfying ending of the Gospel of Mark. When I was getting advice from my mentor about applying to the more ministerial ThD program, he recommended doing some "ministry". And he seemed slightly worried that I might do something crazy, like, well... trying to teach 10 year olds about the consubstantiality of the eternal Logos with the Father or the hypostatic union and the ultimately heretical nature of Nestorius' two-subject Christology. ("Hey kids! Can you say 'apokatastasis'?") Well, to be honest, I was a little worried, too.

I love theology. I'm more in love with God when I think about divine impassibility and divinization soteriology and inter-Trinitarian relations than when singing praise songs and hearing Bible stories about how "God so loved the world" and all that. So, I'm exactly the sort of person who could make all kinds of grave ministerial mistakes, like trying to market theosis to a Western post-Augustinian, post-Reformation world. Or trying to tell kids about how the Son is homoousios with the Father at VBS.

However, the latter is exactly what I did.

Here was the situation. My academic mentor happened also to be the Bible story leader at VBS. When I was volunteering to help, he told me the lesson was the parable of the sower and joked that it would be like our Early Christianity intro "on steroids". I instantly had visions of him tying the parable of the sower into a lengthy discussion on grace and bringing in Origen's interpretation of how the rain falls on the just and unjust alike and so the hardening of pharaoh's heart as a result of grace is really because pharaoh had hardened his own heart and so the "rain of grace" just runs off. I am sensible enough to know he wasn't going to tell 5-10 year olds all that, but I acknowledged that fact with a slight pang of regret. Still, all during the lessons I kept waiting for him to bring up baptism.

On the last day of VBS, my mentor had another engagement to lecture and couldn't make it. So the pastor filled in for Bible time. He pretended that since it was his first day, he didn't know anything about the story. He kept messing up parts and making the kids correct him. Some of them got pretty into it, giggling and groaning and yelling "no!" when he said things like, "A sower went out to swim..." But a few of my older kids were just not amused.

My autistic kid summed it up at once: "He really does know it, but he's going to keep saying wrong things just to be silly." And one of the ten-year-olds who goes to the church said wisely, "He's a pastor. He can't fool me -- he knows this story." So, most of them were playing along, but some of them were sitting there kind of rolling their eyes indulgently.

And I get that. When I was young, I'd usually try to play along, but those sorts of things drove me up a wall. To be fair, they got to review the key points of the story. That is, they've got the "earthly narrative" down pat. They know the seeds don't fall among "hot dogs" but among "thorns". And these are good things to know.

The problem came up when he started reviewing the "heavenly meaning" of the parable's "earthly story". This part was exceedingly short, in my MTS opinion. But I must admit I didn't hear too much of it. His first question was: "So who does the sower represent?" Some kids called out "God" and others said "Jesus". And my little ten-year-old corner got feisty.

Kid #1: God IS Jesus. They're the same thing.
Kid #2: Nunh-unh! Jesus is a person! God is up in the sky, like... he's God.
Kid #1: [looks at me] God is so Jesus... isn't he?
Jen: Well, Jesus is God, but God isn't the same thing as Jesus. It's not like God is sometimes being Jesus and sometimes is being God. Jesus is God's Son and so he's the exact same kind of thing as God, just like you are the same kind of thing as your parents. You're people like your parents and Jesus is God just like God his Father is.
Kid #2: OK.
Kid #3: If Jesus is God's Son, then is God Jesus' real father -- like really?
Kid #1: Then who's his mom?
Kid #4: Mary's his mom.
Jen: Well, Mary's his mom when he was born as a person, as Jesus. You know how you have a birthday, the day you were born?
Kid #4: Jesus' birthday is Christmas.
Jen: That's when he got born as a person. But Jesus is a person AND he's God. So as God's son he was always around just like God is and he never had a time when he "got born". And because he's God just like God is, he didn't have a mom. We need moms and dads because we're people, but God isn't like human beings so he doesn't have his Son the same way people do. But when he became a person too he got born as Jesus and then he had a mom.
Kid # 3: But his dad is still God. Because it wasn't Joseph.
Jen: Right. And that's how Jesus is a person and also still God.
Kid #1: Ohh! I get it now.
Kid #2: [nodding wisely] That makes sense.

Their last comments almost made me laugh, because of course it doesn't make "sense" -- these are the major mysteries of Christian doctrine. It took the Church centuries to be able to articulate it, and we still don't know the "how" of it. But after that, at least they were no longer using their modalist and adoptionist ideas. I had managed to give them something that was orthodox that they could grab hold of, be satisfied with, and grow with. It was the happiest moment of my entire week and it felt like a little gift to me, the cheese at the end of the maze.

I felt a little bad about having this discussion while the wrap-up of the lesson was happening, but we had about six kids that were paying attention to this and wanted to know. And we were quiet. They were asking the questions and they were listening for answers. The thing I've learned with these kids is that you'd better take every opportunity you've got because the moment is gone in a second. The pastor finished recapping the heavenly meaning in the minute that we'd spent talking and then the youth helpers had them playing "Simon Says" (this was a recurring theme). I figure six out of nineteen kids asking about key items of the faith was worth bending propriety.

The incident has made me think a lot. There are several things.

1) Having a darned good handle on theology is important for ministry. Period.

OK. Let me hedge a little -- it's important for a lot of ministry. I'm not saying that people can't be ministerial unless they have theological training. One of the things that bothers me about the MDiv's is that they seem to equate "ministry" with "being pastoral". And one of the things that bothers me about some MTS people is that they seem to think that being stringently orthodox is an end in itself, for everyone. (I don't quite agree, but that's a whole 'nother blog post.) You can sing, play an instrument, sweep floors, give money, hand out food at a soup kitchen or a whole lot of other things that help the Church without having theological training.

However, if you're going to teach, preach, or counsel, I think solid theology is desirable. And I think it might be even more desirable for teaching kids. I'll admit that I'm congratulating myself a bit on the answers I gave. It wasn't perfect. But the point is: I wouldn't have been able to give those sorts of answers before this year. I read a good bit of theology, including some of the key stuff on "Arians" and the hypostatic union, in the year before I started in the Div School. Back then, I probably would have gotten a bit too geeked out, gone into the history, maybe even said the word "homoousios". Partly, I would have just gotten too excited and I would have been saying it more for myself than for the kids; I didn't have enough of this in my life to miss out by "dumbing it down". And I wouldn't have had the familiarity to be able to "dumb it down" into 8-10 yr old speak. I'd only scratched the surface. I knew homoousios. I didn't see the full and rich tapestry of issues behind it.

Before last year when I was reading theology, I might not have noticed that their comments were straying out of the corral. Or I might not have cared. I didn't get so hepped up about Jesus because I disliked the whole "me and my Jesus" trend -- the Christology that produces those macho T-shirts for men which show crosses and iron nails and thorn crowns dripping blood and those WWJD bracelets and which makes women get alternately weepy and happier than otters on Prozac at retreats and Bible studies. I was into the Father and the Spirit. I was working on a way to dispense with Jesus altogether. And that's because Jesus was human and because all these Evangelical sorts are way more interested in themselves than in God and so focus on Jesus almost to the exclusion of any idea of the Son before the incarnation (another rant for another time). I might have just said something like "God isn't Jesus, but Jesus is God." I'd be willing to bet that most regular people would hear "God is Jesus" and say either "God is Jesus' Father" or "Yes, Jesus is God."

2) I will never let anyone ever again tell me that people don't care about these things.

I think the reason that adults don't want to hear about it is that they've heard something enough that they're absolutely sure it's right. They don't mind hearing what they've always heard and nodding along, but they don't want to investigate or hear something new. Kids, on the other hand, are used to not knowing everything. If they get in a disagreement, they might actually ask and try to learn. At a certain level, kids are able to be more invested in finding out what's right than in being perceived to be right. These kids cared. They might not know all the reasons why it matters, but they care whether Jesus is God or just a guy or what.

3) The obverse of the first contemplation: ministry is important for theology.

Let me be clear here: the content of one's theology should never depend upon human situations. I'm sure this is very controversial and a whole lot of people will revile me (if they were to read my blog, which most people don't, so I'm safe). And I still think that, as a hopeless patristics geek, I will still have "private theology time" where I go as abstract and complex and "ethereal" as I possibly can -- partly this is what I need to do to fulfil the Shema and love God with my whole mind. And partly it's just crazy fun that makes life enjoyable while I'm waiting for the eschaton.

But if this sort of work is what I'm born to do, if it's a true vocation, then I'm meant to do it with reference to something beyond myself and beyond the 20 or 30 other patristics scholars in this country (OK, I'm understating. But only slightly.) Therefore, I need there to be a proportion in my life. So much of the Christian life is grounded upon our theology -- or it should be. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of our teaching ministries in the church are less effective than they could be because they aren't based on a very deep theology. The problem is that people who are good at practical things are often impatient with abstract thinking. And the people who are good at abstract thinking aren't good at (and often just hate) thinking about the practical. There's a presumed "trickle down" from scholars to Church, but I don't think it's working so well -- at least not in my field. And I'm becoming more and more convinced that there are actual "practical" things that need a healthy dose of historical theology. For this reason, I think many of us who are doing the "abstract" have a serious obligation to be thinking of the "practical" and to frame our research questions with some sort of relevance to what is actually going on in the Church, what's happening "in the trenches with the people". Ideally, we should write about it. But even if we can't write for general audiences with practical ideas and suggestions, we need to be looking for the implications for the concrete and practical.

Let's say we're working on the Christological controversies and the debate between Nestorius and Cyril of Alexandria. Historically, how did the reasoning of the time support or make difficult the orthodox formulation? Is there friction between the formulation and our current "grammars"? What about post-modernism? Is there an epistemological conflict between the two or is there a way of reconciling them? What does this mean for how we articulate this today? A lot of people are just dropping Chalcedon and I think that's wrong. What is motivating this trend? What needs are we trying to fulfil in people by dropping Chalcedon? What will we then lose? What is it in Christianity that makes this formulation integral? How does its loss affect how we teach? How does it affect our imitation of Christ? How does it call into question the hope of the resurrection? What does this then impact? How do we articulate the aspects of Chalcedon which are, in fact, spiritually gratifying? How do we present the values and orientation implicit in the Chalcedonian formulation in a way which makes clear their relevance to our lives in this day and age? What of the needs behind the rejection trend are legitimate? What are the logical errors or failures of piety which prompt the rejection of Chalcedon? And how can we correct for this? Is there some human need that we've been neglecting in presentation of doctrine or in ministerial praxis, a lack which then makes the rejection of Chalcedon attractive as a means of meeting the need? How then can we meet those human and spiritual needs by means of a ministry that grows out of the Chalcedonian definition? How can we teach Chalcedon in a way which invigorates and is spiritually nourishing?

[-- This is my problem. I feel like it's really important to do this. And I have a sense of what it is that I want to do to join the practical and the abstract. But I don't really have the words and can't manage to articulate it. But I just know that good, deep theology can help people!]