Of Worldvision, Social Imaginary, Conglomerate Thinkers, Hollywood Film Sets and Reformation

Is the “social imaginary” of 21st century philosopher Charles Taylor the same thing as 20th century philosopher J. H. Bavinck’s “Worldvision?” Those who fall into these categories would have been what Glen Martin was talking about when he wrote about “Eclectic and Conglomerate thinkers.”

In all of these the idea is that people move in terms of a worldview that they do not self-consciously recognize as such. In other words in all these cases the individuals under consideration have not arrived at the way they are leaning into the world by being epistemologically self-conscious about the ideas that are forming the foundation for why they lean into life the way they lean into life. Instead, to use a metaphor, they are flowing with the cultural rivers current or whatever sitz-em-lieben they are in living in.

The way I have have often put it is with the analogy of a Hollywood film set. People, exceptions notwithstanding, are chameleons and they will blend into any film set that the culture gives them. So, if the culture is the equivalent of a Pirate film those who are not epistemologically self conscious about their belief system will dress in pirate hats, wear eye patches, and go around saying; “Arrrgh, Matey.” If, in their lifetime the cultural film set switches to a Western these same people will suddenly begin to wear ten gallon hats and speak with a Texas drawl.

Most people intuit “truth” and do not intuit it very well. In the words of Michael Polanyi they use “tacit knowledge” to ascertain what it will take to surf the zeitgeist and will accordingly adopt whatever it takes to fit into the “social imaginary,” (Charles Taylor) the prevailing “Worldvision,” (J. H. Bavinck) thus demonstrating themselves to be eclectic and conglomerate thinkers (Martin).

Still, like it or not the substratum underneath of all this is the handful of people who both play with and popularize and implement ideas which in turn eventually gets into the blood stream of a culture so that the social imaginary/worldvision can begin to gain traction so as to explain why the overwhelming majority of people lean into the times and so live the way they live.

To slightly change a quote from John Maynard Keynes;

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct ideologue/theologian. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

The long and short of this is that the largest percentage people don’t live the way they live or believe what they believe because they have thought through matters. They have not spent their lives examining the whys and wherefores of life. They were born, so to speak, on ice and having been born on ice they just put on their ice skates and took off without a thought that just maybe that wasn’t ice after all. Most people live the way they live and believe what they believe because they have caught all their “convictions and lifestyle” the same way they catch a flu virus.

This means it is those who are the idea people who are the most dangerous people as combined with those who promote the ideas which they more often than not don’t even understand. These are the creators, producers and manufacturers of culture (Hollywood, Publishing Houses, Media, Universities, etc.). More often than not in their role as “cultural gatekeepers” they are even more instrumental for creating the cultural film background set by which most people live by than those whose ideas they are (often unwittingly) pushing.

So, to make this practical, if we as Christians are to be have a plan of attack for returning to something that approximates Christendom what needs to be done is as follows;

1.) Negatively we must give a deadly virus to this current cultural context so that the social imaginary/worldvision can no longer be sustained by the average person in the culture. As Biblical Christians we have to find a way to make what was once considered “odd behavior” to be odd behavior again. That likely won’t be done by just chanting over and over again “that’s odd.” Instead it will be done perhaps by being able to mock the odd. Right now using the absurd to illustrate the absurd may be one of our best friends.

For example … We could run an ad campaign where someone tries to run their appliance by plugging in a male cord into another male cord and then run a tag line … “Gay lately?”

Look, Elijah mocked the hades out of his and God’s enemies. I think it is time for Christians to start clever mocking.

2.) Positively we have to have some people who are idea people who are casting Biblical Christianity in such a way that the current pagan theology of the self (as one example) is challenged and some other people who can promote those ideas into pop culture.

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“J. H. Bavinck argues that the Christian worldview is far more important than individualistic late-modern Westerners usually realize. Although very few individuals master and animate entire cultures and civilizations. In that light Bavinck portrays the late-modern secular West as unwittingly living off borrowed Christian capital in order to prop up new world and life views that, thus far at least, have only ever run a deficit. While every individual is unique, there is a distinct kind of modern Western personality that takes shape through Western culture’s love-hate relationship to Christianity. As Bavinck states,

‘Worldviews last for longer than one generation. One generation celebrates worldviews that provide no foundation for its life and without the generation’s exterior taking on noticeable damage. This is so because for all of us, our hearts are unconsciously so Christian.”

James Englinton

Translator

Personality & Worldview — p. 19

J. H. Bavinck

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“While cultures might be driven by grand worldviews, Bavinck argues that most individuals are not.”

James Englington

Translator

Personality & Worldview — p. 11

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Because the turbo-self is now ascendant so that the self is now King, anything the turbo-self can pull out of its social imaginary world vision can be expected to be given the imprimatur of social acceptability. The only exception to this would be the oddity of some turbo-self identifying with traditional Christian norms. That turbo-self would be squashed in a skinny minute. More likely, with the rise of the turbo-self we can expect more reality altering such as was codified by Obergefell vs. Hodges. What Obergefell vs. Hodges taught us is the there will no restraint on the turbo-self creating reality out of their social imaginary. In practice what this means is that just as the Uranian behavior of the turbo-self was codified by SCOTUS so we can expect eventually for every pervy behavior that the turbo-self can come up with to also be accepted and perhaps even codified eventually by SCOTUS.

We are already seeing this with the advance of acceptability of trannys — another fine example of the work of the turbo-self. We will see this with the rise of pedophilia. Keep in mind that whatever the turbo-self can imagine is to be accepted because the turbo-self as fallen is now sovereign.

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In previous understandings of the self in the West the self was understood to be shaped and formed by the communal/covenantal Institutions wherein it was suffused and so marinated. With the rise of the turbo-self these Institutions (family, church, University, guild) no longer serve as places where the self is molded, influenced, and even challenged. In the turbo-self age, these communal/covenantal Institutions are only valued as they serve as a platform for the turbo-self to put itself on display. Now instead of being shapers of the self, Institutions in the age of PoMo now are to be themselves shaped by the atomistic Turbo self.

All sense of communal man is gone and what is left is only the sovereign turbo-self. The irony here though is that what is in point of fact happening is that the self is still being identified as influenced by Institutions, however the Institutions have been for a generation Institutions that are Revolutionary and have been preaching the turbo-self at least since the sexual revolution of the 60s.

The Church Fathers & Their Racial Malice and Racial Vainglory… Paging Doug

Doug Wilson has invoked (perhaps even invented) new sins of “racial malice” and “racial vainglory.” Rev. Wilson insists that we Kinists are guilty of these sins. In all actuality what we are really guilty of is the “sin of noticing.”

So, in order to blunt this childish accusation by Wilson I will be posting quotes from Church Fathers that would have to be considered, in “Wilson World” as being guilty of “racial malice,” and/or “racial vainglory.”

Our first contestant is early Church Father Gregory of Nazianzus’

“Do you also say, ‘See, here is water, what does hinder me to be baptized?’ Seize the opportunity; rejoice greatly in the blessing; and having spoken be baptized; and having been baptized be saved; and though you be an Ethiopian body, be made white in soul.”

Gregory of Nazianzus
Oration 40, paragraph XXVI
(Gregory also says that baptism transforms the soul in a way different than our physicality and does not destroy or flatten our physical natures)

Notice above that Gregory clearly makes a statement of malice regarding the Ethiopians body.

So, Doug, if you’re out there… is this racial malice and was Gregory sinning here?

Contra Dreher on Isker and “The Boniface Option”

“I can’t emphasize this enough: The Boniface Option is a book for angry young men who enjoy being angry, young, and male.”

Rod Dreher
Dreher Column Reviewing Isker’s “Boniface Option”

On the other hand you can buy Dreher’s estrogen dripping books and find your male friends and give group hugs.

” if Prudence is the Queen of the Virtues, then Andrew Isker is a mouth-frothing Jacobin.”

Rod Dreher

Moaning about Rev. Andrew Isker‘s book “Boniface Option.”

Yeah… I’m sure that is the same exact thing they said about Jesus the evening after He kicked Banker tush in the Temple.

” To be bluntly personal, I once believed that divorce could not happen to people like my wife and me, both devout conservative Christians. Yet it did, and not because either of us were unfaithful to our vows. “

Rod Dreher
Dreher Column Reviewing Isker’s “Boniface Option”

I’m speechless.

Clue to Rod… the fact that you’re divorced means that at least one of you were unfaithful to your vows.

Maybe you need to go back and re-read your vows Dude?

Yet it is striking how over and over, Isker exhorts his readers to cultivate hate. Literally, he does this. “The need of the hour is to teach especially Christians to hate the fake and gay globohomo cinematic universe,” he writes. Of the “fake and gay world,” Isker says, “in order for Christendom to return, it is a world you must learn to hate.” And: “You must teach your children to love the things you love and hate the things you hate. You must overcome your aversion to hate.””

Rod Dreher

Complaining about Rev. Andrew Isker‘s “Boniface Option.”

It is amazing to me how dumb Evangelicals are. This is another example. When we call people to hate as clergy it is always with the understanding that that hate is born of love for the opposite of whatever it is we are hating. Love and hate are not isolated realities. I hate the opposite of what I love and I love the opposite of what I hate. Apparently, Dreher is too stupid to get this simple and obvious concept and so he faults Isker for calling the men of the Reformed world to “hate what is evil and to cling to that which is good.”

By all that is holy, our platformed leadership have cow patties for brains.

Interrogating Dr. Stephen Wolfe & His Book, “The Case For Christian Nationalism” III

I.) “This is why the magistrate cannot rubberstamp a ready-made divine civil code; he must apply discernment and prudence to determine public action.

Dr. Stephen Wolfe
The Case for Christian Nationalism — p. 257

First, we have to ask, “by what standard will our fictitious  magistrate arrive at his ‘discernment’ and ‘prudence'(?)”, and, “why should non-magistrates agree with a completely subjectively arrived at ‘discernment’ and ‘prudence’ of magistrates(?)

Secondly, I must say this strikes me as the apex of hubris. How can the creature say with a straight face that a divine civil code coming from God should not be rubberstamped? Does this not suggest that God Himself has no discernment and prudence in determining the divine civil code left to man for man’s public action?

How is this not a form of humanism — man the center?

II.)  “The end (goal) of civil law is the common good of the civil community. The common good is common in that it refers to the good conditions of the whole.”

Dr. Stephen Wolfe
The Case for Christian Nationalism — p. 257

Here we see Bentham and Mill Utilitarianism and pragmatism. The end that is pursued is the common good that provide the best conditions for the whole. But how could that ever be measured successfully? In a nation of several millions who could possibly ever determine the “common good as conditions of the whole” with any accuracy? I, for one, do not trust any group of men to be able to determine the common good. Frankly, invoking the “common good” is just a cover justifying whatever mischievous behavior that any given magistrate might pursue. I’m sure Abraham Lincoln believed that the War of Northern Aggression was the common good for the whole nation.

Is the standard for civil law really man’s common good subjectively arrived at? Should we not insist instead that the end goal of civil law is God’s glory, knowing that if God’s glory is the end goal the consequence will be the common good that provides the best conditions for the whole?

I see humanism creeping through Dr. Wolfe’s model.

III.) “It remains the case that cultural diversity harms civil unity, for it undermines the ability for a community to act with unity for its good. The community will have trouble ordering themselves through law and especially through culture. The consequence of multiculturalism is secularization (i.e. — ‘neutrality’), open conflict, or civil action that suppresses the activity and status of the newcomers. One key factor is the limitation of social power among a diverse population: an individual from one culture cannot easily correct one from another, nor can one people-group offer clear reasons for its behavior to the others. Most likely the injection of diversity, if on a mass scale, will result in a community of strife, distrust, discord, apprehension, and misunderstanding. A disordered body politic is not conducive to a well-ordered soul. As I’ve argued, the most suitable condition for a group of people to successfully pursue the complete good is one of cultural similarity. This is a natural principle of civil communities. Thus, receiving masses of people who are similar with regard to faith and dissimilar in other ways is generally bad policy. This is evident in the fact that the chief practical argument against Christian Nationalism in the Western countries, especially in the US, is that cultural diversity renders it practically impossible.”

Dr. Stephen Wolfe
The Case For Christian Nationalism — p. 200-201

This is a really fine statement. However;

1.) Wolfe talks about “secularization” and I’m not sure exactly what that is. I would prefer to say that the consequence of multiculturalism is not secularization (neutrality) but that multiculturalism is the consequence of a change in the national theological foundation that is being called “secularization” in order to make the change more palatable.

2.) Note especially this statement by Dr. Wolfe;

 I’ve argued, the most suitable condition for a group of people to successfully pursue the complete good is one of cultural similarity. This is a natural principle of civil communities.

This is spot on accurate and it also provide the reason why Kinists insist that inter-racial/inter-cultural/inter-class marriages are on the whole a very bad idea and are to be, generally speaking, adamantly opposed. Marriage is the most foundational of all “civil-communities,” and the expectation should be that not only does cultural similarity obtain but so must racial and even class similarity. Naturally enough, exceptions will exist but exceptions are exceptions and those who insist on being exceptions should expect adversity that is not healthy for a well functioning civil community.

Interrogating Dr. Stephen Wolfe & His Book, “The Case For Christian Nationalism” I

“The Christian nation is not the spiritual kingdom of Christ or the immanentized eschaton; it is not founded in principles of grace or the Gospel.”

Stephen Wolfe
The Case for Christian Nationalism — p. 186

1.) Why is it that a Muslim nation is Allah’s immanentized eschaton but a Christian nation isn’t? Why is it that a Jewish nation is the immanentized eschaton of the Jewish demon god but a Christian nation isn’t a immanentization of the eschaton of the one true God?

When we pray that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” aren’t we praying for a immanentizing of the eschaton on earth?

2.) Contrary to Wolfe, the Christian nation is the spiritual (and material) kingdom of Christ. What is it that makes the Church spiritual while leaving a family or nation not spiritual? This kind of hard division is the whole platonic move of dividing nature from grace and is a typical Natural Law move. If it is true that the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ then this hard subdividing of spiritual and material is unprofitable. It is true that the Church has a different jurisdiction (Word & Sacrament) from the other jurisdictions and that the Church certainly is not sovereign over the nation but all jurisdictions are “spiritual.” If they were not could we talk about Christ having all authority in Heaven and Earth? Could we talk about there not being not one square inch that is not part of Christ’s kingdom?

3.) Look, I get the danger in being over zealous about trying to immanentize the eschaton but can we just admit that all religions have something of the immanentizing of the eschaton in their belief system? Right now the eschaton that is currently being immanentized is the eschaton of the globo-homo crowd. Are we, as Christians supposed to be satisfied with that?

4.) I know for a fact that the signees of the Solemn League and Covenant would have never agreed with Wolfe’s take.

I am more comfortable with the wisdom of Herman Bavinck on this score than Dr. Stephen Wolfe’s offering;

“The kingdom of God requires of the state not to surrender its earthly calling or its unique national particularity, but rather to allow the kingdom of God to penetrate and saturate its people and its nation. In this way alone the kingdom of God is concretized.”