Two years before his death, John Wesley wrote a sermon entitled, “Causes of the Inefficacy of. In the second chapter, I make a broader and more detailed case for the heuristic value of the three metaphysical models for theology.5 In the third chapter, I turn to Levinas and the origins of the third,.
Introduction
The Goodness of Finitude
In his rejection of ontological ‘Gnosticism,’ Smith is committed to an ontological completion, which will then shape his view of the ‘logic of incarnation.’ For this reason, Smith downplays Barth’s position, arguing that Barth’s Nein. When Smith argues for a formal capacity of revelation, we should take note of the implications.
Reverse Participatory Ontology
Before turning to semiology, we will turn to the ontology that makes Smith’s logic of incarnation functional. Ultimately, Smith’s concept of the incarnation appears to truncate grace in the name of affirming the finite.
The Semiology of Incarnation
- A Volitional Withholding
- The Semiological Turn
- Formal Indication
- Conclusion
The reason that the incarnation is central to Smith’s position is because of the divine presence in the finite human person Jesus. One must stand in the context of the game for the rules – the grammar – to apply.
Disclosure or What is Revealed?
The Ontology of Revelation
But before it is the logic of analogy, it seems to be the logic of semiology. How is it that God is present and absent in analogical language moves us to the third condition for the possibility of revelation, which is a reverse ontological participation.
Language of Faith
If we were dealing with the content of revelation, one would expect that the nearer one is to the source the more certain one could be of the reliability and truth of that content. Ontological analogy alone allows the transcendent to reach down to the conditions of the receiver without ceasing to be transcendent119.
The How and the What of Revelation
When Smith remains focused on the how, he couches it in the structure of the ‘concept’. This identification of the how with the tool – with the ‘concept’ – rather than the agent of meaning is one of my biggest concerns with Smith’s project.
Critique
Misuse of the Incarnation
In other words, it is not the impossibility of the sign that is at stake. It is the impossibility of the sign to escape systemic and structural violence that is at stake.
Language and the Nonviolent Concept
Adeodatus later says, “I admit that sound, smell, flavor, weight, heat, and other things that pertain to the rest of the senses, despite the fact that they can’t be sensed without bodies and consequently are corporeal, nevertheless can’t be exhibited through [pointing] a finger” (Ibid., 100). Against this backdrop, it is not surprising to find Augustine praying: “Have mercy so that I may find words.”137 So many of the ancient and early modern writers began their writings like this or came to this point in their writings.
Theological Colonialism
There is always content, but the how must be the interpretive and authorizing source of the what. This fact reiterates that what is at stake is the how rather than the what.
Conclusion
This indicative view of the ‘concept’ is more in line what Smith wants us to consider. This is structurally not unlike Levinas’s notion that the face of the Other is a mode of the infinite.
Introduction
It is out of these evolving metaphysical models of reality that rationality, values, and meaningfulness arise. While it is possible to have competing social imaginaries or, what I will refer to as models of reality, one is likely to emerge as dominant at a given time in a given society due to the fundamental commitments of each model.
On the Evolution of Models
Knowledge and Social Systems
Gettier problems are problems because of the two conditions stated above: (1) knowledge is individual and (2) it is cross-sectional. Information is provided through feedback loops, boundaries, and signal processing, and it is transmitted through the planetary network such that it can be acted on in ways that maintain the telos of the larger system itself.
Social Imaginaries
In the Trump example, truth becomes purely a mode of power, reminiscent of what we find in Foucault’s work. Religious images, as used in the Bible and Christian preaching, focus our experience in a new way.
A Hierarchical Model of Transcendence
- Hierarchical Epistemology
- Smith’s Concept of Revelation and Participatory Ontology
- Participatory Ontologies and Imperialism
- Realized Eschatology
For him, there are simply conditions that are proper to the functioning of the senses. This formal connection to the divine establishes, for Smith, the inherent goodness of finite being through the reversal of the Platonic ontological participation.
Medieval Transitions
Augustine and the Will
We find elements of a divided will in Plato and notions of a developmental view of the soul in Aristotle. Étienne Gilson takes the next step when he notes that the human will is “a fragment of the universal order” in Augustine.
Scotus on the Intellect and the Will
In contrast, Scotus, working within anthropological aspects of the Augustinian tradition, argued against Thomas that the will directs the intellect. The contingency of the will is a central premise to Scotus’s argument that the will has priority over the intellect.
Conclusion
Scotus later insisted that the human will was not a nature due to the creative contingency of the will. Instead of being an integral part of the cosmos, the person became its source of meaning.66.
A Model of Economic Liberty
Economic Epistemology
Plato’s recollections were not the result of labor, but the result of the participatory ontology to which he was committed. We have just not yet recognized that statistical regulation as the basis for society is not the result of the.
Community and the End of Communion
Interestingly, Levinas says that political theory optimizes my own spontaneity even while going about this project of reconciliation “by way of knowledge of the world.”110 In other words, knowledge functions in this context in the mode of social management. In such a rationalism, there is no longer any society, that is, no longer any relation whose terms absolve themselves from the relation,” Levinas states.112 Perhaps we find a clue here of the resilience of popularism in modern Western cultures despite the liberal values broadly celebrated within those same cultures.
The End of Eschatology
Taylor claims that the ‘affirmation’ of ordinary life is one of the dimensions of the economic form of modern life. This society and these relations would, perhaps, more perfectly express the radical liberty of the economic model.
Smith, Revelation, and Formal Indications
Smith and Hierarchy
Therefore, when Smith argues for the inherent capacity of the person to receive revelation, this claim is already at home in the hierarchical model without need of the incarnation. Structurally, God must accommodate humanity, a position that Smith justifies incarnationally.127 Still, while this innovation might strain the traditional orthodoxies of the hierarchical model, Smith’s claims certainly fit within that model.
Smith and Economy
To maximize the plurality of interpretations of the divine, the ‘concept’ can be used only in certain legitimate ways. Is God’s revelation “delivered over to the anonymous field of the economic life, in which I.
Conclusion
Towards a Participatory Eschatological Model
Sartre told the story of the infinite liberty of the human person, whose existence precedes their essence. In contrast, Levinas tells a story of the infinite responsibility of the human person, who is called to holiness by the Other.
Introduction
In this new metaphysics, whose foundation is ethics, the relation of the Same to the Other becomes the ultimate horizon of meaning. What keeps Levinas’s model from reverting to an economic model of dominating liberty is the asymmetrical height of the Other, which renders the relation to the Other unequal.
Eschatology as a Condition of Revelation
Eschatology is not Negation
Through labor, I achieve self-justification or self-righteousness, which comes at the expense of the Other. Consequently, negation is insufficient precisely because it remains trapped within imperialism as a mode of the economic.
Signification and Escape
It will have to come from outside in a way that provides egress from the totality of the Same. For this reason, I stated above that the human Other is but the mode of the infinite.
Language and Revelation
His project, for the very outset in The Fall, is the affirmation of the finite. Presence is ethical proximity, the proximity of the obligation, which is the call of holiness.
Ethics and Freedom
When truth is an ethical function, it is faithfulness to the Other who is present in its demand. The Same cannot choose goodness out of its liberty, for doing so would subordinate the Good and the Other to the Same.
Eschatology and Holiness
Rather, it is eternal and incommensurable in the sense that it is beyond the time of the Same. The Same experiences the time of the infinite as a surprising inbreaking into the totality that is history.
The Relation as a Condition of Revelation
- Atheism: Groundwork of the Home
- Desire
- Excess as Revelation in Relation, or Why Levinas Rejects Negative Theology
- The Magnificat of Freedom
- Knowledge
On the authority of politics, which amounts to colonialism, injustice – the possession of the Other – becomes justice – the establishment of the Same. The Same welcomes the Other in a way that does not lay claim or take possession of the Other.
Discourse as a Mechanism of Revelation
Ethics and the Content of Revelation
However, and here is where nuance enters into his response, this revelation of the other is a. Emerging out of a model of economic liberalism, the other free person is the step from the old to the new.
The Call of Justice as Revelation
Due to this exogeneous origin, it also calls into question my possession of the world. It is the obligation to give up one’s own life for the sake of the Other.
Summary and Conclusion
It is hard to imagine a scenario in which Smith’s concept of the ‘concept’ becomes the only legitimate one, carrying with it a set of norms that regulate spiritual, religious, and theological practices. Recall that Smith’s larger project was to examine the conditions of the possibility of philosophy and theology.
Introduction
In space-time, time is a function of the change of being, which occurs through an ordered succession. In this case of relation-time, when we talk about eschatology we are talking about that future fullness of time when all of creation is reconciled together into the fellowship of the Triune God.
Being and Time
The Ontological Difference
Revelation
Time as Communion
Truth and Reconciliation
Knowing God
Introduction
Nature of the Church
Escape from an Existential Ecclesiology
Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus
Eschatological Welcome
The Church and Socialization
The Problem of Socialization
The Hope of Hypocrisy
Eschatological Escape
Difference and Revelation
The Church and Intercessory Prayer
Formation in Vulnerability
The Church and Revelation