the person & the idea

When a thought captures my attention, I tend to find lots of related ideas throughout the daily activities & thoughts of my life. Here is my latest example. Recently Don Miller posted about relationship rather than right belief/theology being what “it” [Christianity] is all about. My previous post made reference to this post, and I will now add to it with additional connections.

“…because the one thing we can all relate to is character. And the harder thing to relate to are these sort of highfalutin concepts. And when we find ourselves getting away from the “who,” that’s when we start getting into trouble.” Daman Lindeloff, one of the co-creators of LOST. (HT Jesse Turri)

One of the things that the creators of Lost always said was, the show has always been about the characters. There are the abstract ideas and there are the concrete characters. People do things. People drive plots. People make stories. Without that you get CSPAN which is basically lot of really smart talking heads{which I love watching, though I’ll admit it gets dry & boring very fast}.

What Lost does isn’t new, Dostoevsky was a master at this. He took ideas and theories embodied them in people and pushed them to their logical conclusion/extreme.

In some recent readings which discussed Nietzsche’s understanding of responsibility & morality/ethics in general the author describes Nietzsche’s understanding of the abstract concept as fiction.

So for most of us, we understand things as such; we have the physical, unique object at the lower level with the abstract universal concept at a higher level. This is basic Platonism. Nietzsche deconstructs this and says that concepts are all simply metaphor. Language itself is metaphor, a fiction. Language can’t possibly attach itself to the object, it is only metaphor in describing it. For Nietzsche it is important that we understand our creative insertion when using language. To speak of justice or the good we are using metaphor to describe events which are impossible to truly describe. So it isn’t wrong to speak of these things, it is wrong to think they are absolute terms—as if there really was this thing called the good which attached itself to things…

While I don’t know enough about Nietzsche to fully explain his argument, my primary focus for this is to say that for Nietzsche the concept is of lesser value than the individual instances or events. So applying this to the Bible, instead of trying to gather universal principles or a systematic theology from scripture, the Nietzschean approach would be to take the individual stories as more real than the abstracted theologies.

What is most interesting about this for me, this is also what Jesus does. The Gospel of John describes this best, describing Jesus as the Word become flesh. The incarnation, it is the beauty and mystery of the Christian faith. Jesus gives us in life & death, a story, an embodiment of what theology through the ages has tried to teach us in the abstract.

Jesus follows this with his own life, calling others to follow him—not in a classroom, studying proofs of God’s existence but rather showing God’s love through his grace in their stumblings. He took them upon a journey with him; then he left, asking them to continue the journey inviting others along. Looking further at the New Testament, which gives us today our image of Jesus, we see a man/divinity who doesn’t teach systematically but rather confusingly through stories and daily actions as they come along.

Undoubtedly the disciples learned about hospitality, the great loving of the Other, through stories (the good Samaritan) and Jesus’ own actions (the Jewish leaders complain about his carousing with ‘sinners’).

Even looking a Paul, who no doubtedly influenced the early Church to a high degree is never writing in the abstract simply for publication to the general Church but rather always writing to specific people with specific needs.

In Conclusion, it easy for us all to fall into a Platonist perspective where we place the abstract-conceptual on an equal or higher plane than the everyday relational reality of life. Each of these people turn that on its head. They realign reality where the realm of people and the relations we hold with them in the foundation of our experience of life, thereby being more important.

I’m not sure where these thoughts are taking me, except in the recognition of a huge blind spot in the thinking & acting out of my faith.