The concept of Objectivity is a false product of Liberalism

If by “objectivity” you mean a final language that transcends the contingency of practice—some sort of pristine way to get a one-on-one correspondence to “the way things are” (“the final commensurating vocabulary for all possible rational discourse” —then yes, I deny “objectivity.”

James KA Smith makes the case against liberal ideas of "objectivity" in his book, Who's Afraid of Relativism, the following are some notes I took from that :

We make our way in the world by means of a know-how for which we are indebted to—and dependent upon—a community of meaning making. It is our social dependency as “knowers” (know-howers) that is ignored by representationalist theories of knowledge. We need an appreciation for the contingent, social conditions of our knowledge.

The very picture of an objective knower denies of our creaturehood—namely, our contingency, dependency, and sociality. The picture is fundamentally individualist and atomistic: the lone knower, however “limited,” confronted by—and mirroring , however opaquely—the “external” world, god like in so far as he doesn’t seem to depend on anyone.

And this is the account of "reason" as metanarrative - universal, transcendent , ahistorical, free from narrative or myth, that postmodernity calls into question.

On Lyotard’s account,  for example, Homer’s Odyssey —though telling a grand story and making universal claims about human nature—is not a metanarrative because it does not claim to legitimate itself by an appeal to a supposed universal, scientific reason; rather, it is a matter of proclamation, or kerygma, which demands the response of faith. On the other hand, the scientific stories told by modern rationalism (Kant), scientific naturalism, or sociobiology are metanarratives insofar as they claim to be demonstrable by reason alone.

At the heart of the postmodern critique of modernity is an unveiling of the way that science—which is so critical of the “fables” of narrative—is itself grounded in a narrative. What modernity did not recognize about itself was the way in which narrative infiltrated science.

The problem with metanarratives is that they do not own up to their own mythic ground. Postmodernism is not incredulity toward narrative or myth; on the contrary, it unveils that all knowledge is grounded in such.

Reason is just one myth among others, which is itself rooted in a narrative.

This universal penchant for ahistoricality resulted in the colonial imposition of one particular set of practices as rational and universal, when in fact they were the fruit of a very determinate history and geography. In this respect modernity represented a revival of traditional Platonism, which held that ideas—and it is ideas that modernity really cared about—trafficked in the eternal, unchanging, atemporal realm of the Forms.

In other words, to grasp an idea was to transcend time, and the ideas that really mattered were not conditioned by time or change.

If postmodernity is incredulity toward metanarratives, then does postmodernism signal a rejection of Christian faith insofar as it is based on the grand story of the Scriptures? The answer is clearly negative, since the biblical narrative and Christian faith claim to be legitimated not by an appeal to a universal, autonomous reason but rather by an appeal to a specific narrative.

We can properly confess that we know God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but such knowledge rests on the gift of (particular,  special) revelation, is not universally objective or demonstrable, and remains a matter of interpretation and perspective (with a significant appreciation for the role of the Spirit’s regeneration and illumination as a condition for knowledge).

We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity.

The church is most faithful, Stanley Hauerwas argues, when we “are content to live ‘out of control.’ For to be out of control means Christians can risk trusting in gifts, so they have no reason to deny the contingent character of our existence.”“ In other words, to know God isGod (and we are not) is to own up to the tenuous fragility of our existence. This is to recognize that everything depends not just our life and breath, but also truth and knowledge, even our epistemology and metaphysics. But all too often we construct accounts of knowledge and truth that effectively deny our dependence, that efface our vulnerability and try to “secure” us from the relativity of being a (rational, knowing) creature.

Hauerwas points out, because it means that the Christian understanding of contingency is itself dependent. "The liberal nihilists are, of course, right that our lives are contingent," he says, "but their account of contingency is unintelligible. Contingent to what? If everything is contingent, then to say we are contingent is simply not interesting.

In contrast, Christians know their contingency is a correlative to their status as creatures. To be contingent is to recognize that our lives are intelligible only to the extent that we discover we are characters in a narrative we did not create."' And that very discovery, I would add, depends upon our being "in Christ."

That's why the Triune God doesn't just send us an "objective" Word; he sends his Son who, upon his ascension, imparts the Spirit who gives birth to a community of practice to enable us to read his world.

He doesn't just send us a message;he enfolds us into his body. And that body is the community of practice in which we learn to mean the world—the context in which we learn what the world is for.

Our seeing the world as a gift to be used is relative to our immersion in the Story in which that makes sense. The church is the language-game in which we learn to read the world aright.

The church is that"conventional"community in which the Spirit trains us to know the real world.

Atomistic independent knowers don’t exist. We bear witness to HUMAN knowers, contingent social creatures whose knowledge depends on the gifts of communities of practice that make the world intelligible. For human knowers, there is no knowledge outside of community. Accordingly, there is no knowledge of God in Christ apart from the communal practices of his body, which is home to his word.

Embracing contingency does not entail embracing ‘liberalism’: in fact, to the contrary, it is when we deny our contingency that we are thereby licensed to deny our dependence and hence assume the position where we are arbitrators of truth. When we spur our dependence on tradition and assume a stance of ‘objective’ knowledge whereby we can dismiss aspects of Scripture and Christian orthodoxy as benighted and unenlightened. In short, it is the denial of dependence that undergirds a progressive agenda. The picture of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment is a forthright denial of our dependence, and it yields a God-like picture of human reason. It is ‘objectivity’ that is ‘liberal’.”

Conversely, the "atomistic" epistemology that is hound up with representationalist realism is actually liberal and subjectivist. It posits a picture of the lone, self-sufficient knower able to "mirror" the world without help, independently. Thus Charles Taylor notes that the Cartesian turn unleashes a subjectivism that has ripple effects across culture. "Now [after Descartes] certainty is some-thing the mind has to generate for itself. It requires a reflexive turn, where instead of simply trusting the opinions you have acquired through your upbringing, you examine their foundation, which is ultimately to he found in your own mind."' I, the subject, am put in the place of arbitrator and judge, throwing off the taint of external influences.This is why “absolute” truth is liberal: it denies of knowers to dependence and denies any indebtedness to tradition.

If knowledge is a social accomplishment, and justification is a social effect, then we need to appreciate that "intelligibility comes from skill, not theory, and credibility comes from good performance, not adherence to independently formulated criteria" . So "the reasonableness of a religion is largely a function of its assimilative powers, of its ability to provide an intelligible in-terpretation in its own terms of the varied situations and realities adherents [and nonadherents] encounter" approach "is not to be equated with irrationalism. The issue is not whether there are universal norms of reasonableness, but whether these can he formulated in some neutral, framework-independent language" .

Appreciation of the contingent, communal conditions of knowledge does not undercut the ability to make universal claims, nor does it preclude the possibility of asserting universal norms. It only means that it is impossible to see or grasp such norms from "nowhere" or from an "absolute" standpoint. The contingent conditions of a particular community of practice are the gifts that enable us to see and understand these "universal" features of the cosmos. But this means that the condition for their being "intelligible" is a degree of competence in the discursive practices of the community (or communities) that see them as such.

We receive revelation from God - noncontingent and absolute, who we confess is "God the Father Almighty" And yet one needs to "learn" to receive it as such, and the Spirit has elected to effect such "training" (in a Wittgensteinian sense) through the community of practice that is the body of Christ." Everything we know and confess as Christians is relative to this (contingent, historical) revelation, and our reception of this as revelation is dependent upon our inculcation in the community of social practice that is the church. There is now no revelation outside the church because there is no meaning that is not "use." Far from undercutting Christian orthodoxy, this simply brings us back to what we learned from Augustine…to see creation as creation, to receive the world as sacramentum mundi, depends upon (is relative to) a story about the world that is revealed to us by God and passed on to us in the community of the Spirit that is the church."

Bach against Atheistic Infinity - Creation's polyphonic intricacies.

David Bentley Hart, in his Beauty of the Infinite, contrasts different conceptions of infinity, and how creation's relationship to God reflects that, in the following excepts :

Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, Bach is there also), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite. It is in Bach's music, as nowhere else, that the potential boundlessness of thematic development becomes manifest: how a theme can unfold inexorably through difference, while remaining continuous in each moment of repetition, upon a potentially infinite surface of varied repetition. 

And it is a very particular kind of infinity that is at issue, for which there is really no other adequate aesthetic model: Wagner's "infinite" melody (so called) consists not in unrnasterable variations but in the governing logic of motivic recurrences; Wagner's greatest achievements might almost be said to make audible a quintessentially Hegelian logic, in a music pervaded by the most voluptuous and luxuriant kind of metaphysical nostalgia, the "infinity" of its unbroken melodic flow being of the most synthetic variety, rationalized (or sublated) by an abstractable system of leitmotivs. Is any music more fated than that magnificent arch spanning the course from Siegfried's funeral processional to Brilnnhilde's immolation and the conflagration of the gods in Gotterdiimmerung? 

In Bach's music, though, motion is absolute, and all thematic content is submitted to the irreducible disseminations that fill it out: each note is an unforced, unnecessary, and yet wholly fitting supplement, even when the fittingness is deferred across massive dissonances by way of the most intricate contrapuntal mediations. Nor are dissonances final, or ever tragic: they are birth pangs, awaiting the glory to be disclosed in their reconciliations - their stretti and recapitulations. Bach's is the ultimate Christian music; it reflects as no other human artifact ever has or could the Christian vision of creation. 

Take for example the Goldberg Variations, in which a simple aria from the Anna Magdalena Notenbiichlein is stated, only to be displaced by a majestic sequence of thirty variations composed not upon it, but upon its bass line (a simple descent from the tonic to the dominant, G to D, scarcely material sufficient for a lesser talent), and in which every third variation is a perfect canon (the canonic refrain being lengthened at each juncture, so that the final two are canons upon the octave and upon the ninth). When at the end of this glittering, shifting, and varied series the aria is restated, it can no longer be heard apart from the memory of all the variations in which it has been reimagined: it has acquired a richness, an untold profundity, of light and darkness, joy and melancholy, levity and gravity; it is all its ornamentation and change. Or consider the massive, shatteringly profound Ciaccona at the end of the second Unaccompanied Violin Partita, whose initial theme is no more than four bars long, a bass phrase of absolute simplicity that is succes- sively reborn in sixty-four variations, passing from the minor, through the major, and back to the minor again, arriving at a restatement (with a few chromatic adornments at the end) that, again, contains all the motion, variety, and grandeur of what has gone before. One could imagine no better illustration of the nature of creation's "theme."

Creation's form - a departing theme, submitted to innumerable variations and then restored, immeasurably enriched - is too lively and splendid to be reduced to the helotry in which, for instance, the Hegelian epic of Geist would confine it: no ideal and accomplished music, no final resolution beyond the "negations" of music, brings creation to a "fulfilled" silence; Christian eschatology promises only more and greater harmony, whose developments, embellishments, and movement never end and never "return" to a state more original than music.

 The analogy between God's and Bach's handiworks is audible chiefly in Bach's limitless capacity to develop separate lines into extraordinary intricacies of contrapuntal complication, without ever sacrificing the "peace;' the measures of accord, by which the music is governed. This is especially evident, of course, in the great fugues, particularly of the later years: a double, triple, or even quadruple fugue is never too dense for Bach's invention to comprise, to open up into ever more unexpected resolutions, nor does a plurality of subjects ever prove resistant to augmented, diminished, or inverted combinations. 

Perhaps the most exquisite examples of this inventiveness are to be found in the second book of the Well-Tempered Clavier and in the Art of the Fugue, but one might look anywhere in his oeuvre: the very lovely Fugue in F Major (BWV 540), for instance, in which the two contrasted subjects come together in a third part where they appear together in five different intervals, until they arrive at the magnificent conclusion in which the treble restates the fugue's original motif; or, to take an example particularly appropriate to theological concerns, the great Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major, Bach's "trinitarian" fugue, which is actually constructed from three fugues on three different subjects and in three different time signatures, the first (the "paternal") fugue's subject appearing in each of the other two in a rhythmically varied form, "generating" the second fugue and crossing, by way of a stretto, to the third. This is the pneumatological dynamism in Bach's music, so to speak, the grace that always finds measures of reconciliation that preserve variety; and so this is how it offers an aesthetic analogy to the work of the Spirit in creation, his power to unfold the theme God imparts in creation into ever more profuse and elaborate developments, and to overcome every discordant series.

....surely the Spirit, thus invoked, is a metaphysical mechanism, whose function is to delimit, rationalize, and unify all divergent series in some kind of Aufhebung. Such is a suspicion perhaps impossible finally to dispel, but for Christian thought, it is worth saying, the unity that the Spirit offers is of a radi- cally inventive kind: he is the creator Spiritus who brings about the terms he unifies, as the open exposition and wholly aesthetic expression of his love, the whole fullness of whose work is its only "meaning:' His presence is most definitely not the dialectical Ariadne's thread that is unwound through, and leads back out of, the labyrinth of history; he redeems creation's many lines not through negation or sublation, but by a musical accumulation, a restoration through further development and invention.

Because God is Trinity, and creation a song shared among the Persons, God is the context in which the polyphony of being is raised up, in which even silenced voices are preserved, and promised a restored share in creation's hymnody. As God is the "place" of what differs, all distance belongs to God's distance, all true creaturely intervals are "proportions" and "analogies" of his infinite interval, all created music partici- pates in his infinite music. The one voice with which God pronounces creation good is also the "irisating" voice of election, an address and a vocation that necessarily "analogizes" being, evoking from it its endless response, its polyphony; and so good is the theme imparted in creation that God desires it back, in the same generous measure with which it is given, sustained in its goodness as a beauty of which, still, only God is capable.

The Holy Spirit, as the perfection of God's love, the differing yet again of divine differentiation, and the delightful, outgoing, unbounded power of the divine life, always brings out of creation its "depth" of differentiation, calls forth the radiance of being's surface, causes difference to differ most profoundly within itself, and lends to all the inflections of the divine gift a vibrancy and particularity beyond any merely formal differentiation. As the third person, the superabundance of divine love, the for-itself, fullness, and joy of that love, he bestows a harmony that can never be anything but a free, "superfluous;' wholly fitting sequence of further developments. The Spirit is eternally turning the face of creation to the Father by conforming it to the Son, and thus creation is beautiful, and a gift restored.

Being is itself uneven for creatures, susceptible of a greater or lesser ap- prehension, recollection, and recovery of its theme; being itself is something lost in the privative measures of sin and progressively recovered in receiving anew the measure of charity.

It is the music of harmonious differentiation, which is infinitely fulfilled in the trinitarian perichoresis, and which, in creation, can be lost, forsaken, or belied. In sin, all intervals become disordered; desire is directed no longer toward the infinite horizon of this unfolding music, but seeks to introduce its own caesurae into being, to enclose itself, to possess itself as force rather than as a participation in creation's polyphonic intricacies.

Creation is a diaphoral economy, an unending action of communi- cation, and there are innumerable levels of beauty within its intervals: degrees of interiority and exteriority, folds, intense arrays of specular surfaces and, then again, interludes of shadow or limpidity; but what is enfolded, ultimately, is that thematic or analogical content that mediates one interval to another.

The Song of Creation

"As God is Trinity, in whom all difference is possessed as perfect peace and unity, the divine life might be described as infinite music, and creation too might be described as a music whose intervals, transitions, and phrases are embraced within God's eternal, triune polyphony."

David Bentley Hart explains his above musical ontology in The Beauty of The Infinite in the following passages :

Acording to Gregory of Nyssa, creation is a wonderfully wrought hymn to the power of the Almighty: the order of the universe is a kind of musical harmony, richly and multifariously toned, guided by an inward rhythm and accord, pervaded by an essential "symphony"; the melody and cadence of the cosmic elements in their intermingling sing of God's glory, as does the interrelation of motion and rest within created things; and in this sympathy of all things one with the other, music in its truest and most perfect form is bodied forth (IIP i.3: 30-33). 

The idea of a musica mundana or harmonia mundi is an ancient one, found in pagan philosophy, from Pythagoreanism to Neoplatonism, and in numerous patristic sources. It exercised a rare fascination for Renaissance and ba- roque theology, philosophy, and art (as evidenced in, for example, Luis de Le6n's great ode to God's harmony in creation). There are abundant biblical reasons, quite apart from the influences of pagan philosophy, for Christians to speak of the harmonia mundi: in Scripture creation rejoices in God, proclaims his glory, sings before him; the pleasing conceits of pagan cosmology aside, theology has all the warrant it needs for speaking of creation as a divine composition, a magnificent music, whose measures and refrains rise up to the pleasure and the glory of God.132 Augustine, reflecting on the transience of created things, suggests that the beauty of the world, like that of a poem (declaimed, of course, by a rhapsode), lies in its transitions(Devera religione 21.40-43); and at one point he argues that the beauty of the cosmos can no more be grasped by creatures than can the beauty of a poem by the discrete syllables that must pass away in order to bring it about (De musica 6.11.30).

The truly interesting feature of Augustine's thought on the matter, though, is his way of relating the soul - as a rhythmic sequence, a repetition that retains the memory of what has gone before - to the rhythms of creation: virtue is, he argues (very like Gregory), the establishment of the soul's proper rhythm (De quantitate animae 55); and the soul that is virtuous is one that turns its rhythms (or numbers, numeri) not to the domination of others, but to their benefit (De musica 6.14-45).

As Leo Spitzer, in his magisterial Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, remarks, "According to the Pythagoreans, it was cosmic order which was identifiable with music; according to the Christian philosophers, it was love. And in the ordo amoris of Augustine we have evidently a blend of the Pagan and the Christian themes: henceforth 'order' is love." Such a change in emphasis was natural: for Christian dogma all beauty and order belong eminently to the order of the trinitarian relations, and so have no basis profounder than love.

Creation is not, that is, a music that explicates some prior and undifferentiated content within the divine, nor the composite order that is, of necessity, imposed upon some intractable substrate so as to bring it into imperfect conformity with an ideal harmony; it is simply another expression or inflection of the music that eternally belongs to God, to the dance and difference, address and response, of the Trinity.

Dionysian rhythm, that is to say, embraced within the incessant drumbeat of being's unica vox as it repeats itself endlessly, from whose beat difference erupts as a perpetual divergence; and even if Dionysus allows the odd irenic caesura in his dance - the occasional beautiful sequence - it constitutes only a slacken- ing of a tempo, a momentary paralysis o fhis limbs, a reflective interval that still never arrests the underlying beat of difference. Theology, though, starting from the Christian narrative of creation out of nothingness, effected by the power and love of the God who is Trinity, might well inquire whether rhythm could not be the prior truth of things, and chaos only an illusion, the effect of a certain convulsive or discordant beat, the repetition of a sinful series.

It may well be that each and every "essence" subsists upon its own interior repetition, like the return - always varied, stated with a new beat and a different harmony - of the phrase from Monsieur Vinteuil's sonata that haunts the narrator of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu for many years, and equally true that difference and repetition are the only forces of essence; but does the distribution of difference occur always in the stress between a formless chaos and the invariable beat of the dance of Dionysus, or is the rhythm or music of being already sufficiently various in itself, already differentiated into analogical complexities, and already sufficiently flexible to liberate difference endlessly? Is the music of being that of Dionysus, or is it something more like infinite counterpoint, a music like Bach's?

If the trinitarian life is always already one of infinite musical richness, "heard" by God in its fullness, in the inexhaustible variety of its phrasings and harmonies, and if creation is a complementary music, an end- less sequence of variations upon the theme of God's eternal love, then there is no aboriginal sublime that surpasses the moment of the beautiful; rather, the sublime appears as a particularly intense serial display of beauty, a particularly weighty manifestation of God's glory (but all terror may be turned into praise).

Or there is the fabricated sublimity of evil, the immense discords of sin that disrupt charity's unfolding, derange every series, and resist every analogical path of recovery of the divine· theme. Being as God gives it, though, is originally nothing but degrees of splendor, hierarchies of beauty; creation is divine glory, told anew, and so its aesthetic variety is nothing but the differing modes and degrees with which participated being is imparted.

Creation's rhythm is analogical, not the interminable monotony of the "univocal" event, and so becomes ever more actual as its complexity and beauty increase in intensity- as, that is, it participates more fully in the richness of God's infinite “form”.

Can there be real difference that does not arise within a thematic motion? Can there be a theme that is not also al- ready a changing, disseminative diversity? And is the language of the sublime that postmodernism often adopts not then a new version of romantic Sturm und Drang, indeed the last gasp of romanticism?

Honestly, it is difficult to be convinced by a discourse of difference and distance that attempts at the same time to be a discourse of Heracleitean flux, because there is no distance in the flux: all dimensions are consumed before they arise. This is the "totality" in the aleatory: every moment of repetition is a singularity that entirely (or, if one prefers, virtually) contains the shape of the whole, a Leibnizian monad that is no longer in any meaningful sense a "perspective" on the whole, because the whole is a sublime, unmediated, absolute presence.

For Christian thought, on the other hand, true distance is given in an event, a motion, that is transcendent: a pure prolation in which all patterns are "anticipated," in an infinitely fulfilled way that allows for every possibility; it even makes space for the possibilities of discord, while also always providing, out of its analogical bounty, ways of return, of unwinding the coils of sin, of healing the wounds of violence (the Holy Spirit is a supremely inventive composer).

It is transcendence, the divine distance, with its analogical scope, that prevents presence from being totality, and this distance is the original "thematism" - the transcendent act of music - that makes real difference possible: repetition can occur only within a thematism that differentiates repe- tition from what it repeats, and yet allows it to be, quite precisely, repetition.

This "first difference" is the ontological difference, the primordial analogical disproportion between God's infinite transcendence and finite becoming that is the act of creation. This difference is itself the theme, present in every moment of the ontic, that inaugurates all the variations of finitude; and as this difference is a movement of grace within the triune act of divine being, all the variations that follow from it testify to the Trinity (in their being, form, and particular splendor).

If for Lyotard the sublime (conceived as the unpresentable) must be the starting point of modern aesthetics, beauty remains the still more original point of departure for a Christian aesthetics, because the sheer interminability of beauty's serial display can always overtake every invariable sublimity, and submit it to the analogy of beauty. The beautiful surpasses the sublime because beauty is capable of endless intricacy, and so is able to "present" anything; and the sublime, whether as an effect of immensity or disorder, still never ceases to belong to an infinite display that, from another vantage, may be grasped in its beauty (and, within this display, other perspectives are never wanting).

The quantity of beauty always appears in a distance that is the distance of God, and seen thus, it appears as glory, weight, splendor. And the ordering of desire toward the infinite God allows creatures to see all the differ- ences of creation not only as proximate mediations of divine glory, but also as mediated goods in and of themselves: for it is God who differentiates, places, and discloses, God who, as Dionysius says, keeps all elements in their separate- ness and their harmony (Divine Names 8.7). An infinite gravity- an infinite kabod, an infinitely determinate beauty - embraces and gives weight to the rhythms of creation. In God, then, lies the infinite horizon of the beautiful, its always greater spaciousness, the splendor of a boundless freedom that shows it...

One might best characterize the properly Christian understanding of being as polyphony or counterpoint: having received its theme of divine love from God, the true measure of being is expressed in the restoration of that theme, in the response that submits that theme to variation and offers it back in an indefinitely prolonged and varied response (guided by the Spirit's power of modulation).

There is no substance to creation apart from these variations on God's outpourings of infinite love; all the themes of creation depart from the first theme that is mysteriously unfolded in the Trinity, forever complete and forever calling forth new intonations, new styles of accompaniment and response.

The circular, "synthetic;' and pleromatic grandeur of the Hegelian infinite and the chaotic, univocal, and unharmonizable flux of the postmodern infinite are equally dreary; but the Christian infinite, free of the mechanical hypotaxis of the one and the boring boisterousness of the other, yields a profuse and irreducible parataxis, a boundless flood of beauties, beyond synthesis, but utterly open to analogy, complexity, variations, and refrains.

Within such an infinite, the Spirit's power to redeem discordant lines is one not of higher resolution but of reorientation, a restoration of each line's scope of harmonic openness to every other line.

It is the promise of Christian faith that, eschatologically, the music of all creation will be restored not as a totality in which all the discords of evil necessarily participated, but as an accomplished harmony from which all such discords, along with their false profundities, have been exorcised by way of innumerable "tonal" (or pneumatological) reconciliations. This is the sense in which theology should continue to speak of the world in terms of a harmonia mundi, a musica mundana, or the song of creation.

....let me stipulate that creation can never be understood, in Christian thought, simply as a text that conceals a more fundamental set of abstract meanings, to which all its particularities can be reduced; when I use the word "theme" here, I mean it in its strictly musical sense, to indicate a phrase or motif, a point of departure, which is neither more true nor less complex than the series of variations to which it gives rise. The "theme" of creation is the gift of the whole, committed to limitless possibilities, open to immeasurable ranges of divergence and convergence, consonance and dissonance (which always allows for the possibility of discord), and unpredictable modulations that at once restore and restate that theme. 

The theme is present in all its modifications, for once it is given it is recuperated throughout, not as a return of the Same but as gratitude, as a new giving of the gift, as what is remembered and as what, consequently, is invented. The truth of the theme is found in its unfolding, forever. God's glory is an infinite "thematism" whose beauty and variety can never be exhausted, and as the richness of creation traverses the distance of God's infmite music, the theme is always being given back. Because God imparts the theme, it is not simply unitary and epic but obeys a trinitarian logic: it yields to a contrapuntal multiplicity allowing for the unfolding of endlessly many differing phrases, new accords, "explicating" the "complication" of divine music. The theme is not an idea but a concrete figural substance, an insistence and recurrence, a contour of joy, a donation.

In short, it is a "thematism of the surface;' not a thematic "content" more essential than created difference: a style of articulation, a way of ordering desire and apprehending the "shape" of being, its proportions, dimensions, and rhythms. Being is a surface of supplementarity, an expressive fabric forever filling itself out into ever greater adornments of the divine love, a porrection of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to creation and, thereby, to the Father."

You are what you love because you live toward what you want.

Just finishes James KA Smith's wonderful book, You Are What you Love", it's a pop version of his more serious work. Below are some excerpts that sum it up :

"What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers?” Christian discipleship frequently starts off on the wrong foot here, as we preach and educate and train and do youth work and even parent according to the wrong model: we assume that people change through learning different things, whereas actually they grow through loving different things. And those loves are not formed mainly through new information, but through new habits.

If you are what you love and if love is a virtue, then love is a habit.

Christian worship, we should recognise, is essentially a counterformation to those rival liturgies we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibrating them, orienting us to rival versions of the good life.

You might not love what you think.

As lovers—as desiring creatures and liturgical animals—our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral.

Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow. Our wants reverberate from our heart, the epicenter of the human person.....discipleship is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than of knowing and believing.

Jesus is a teacher who doesn’t just inform our intellect but forms our very loves. He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings. His “teaching” doesn’t just touch the calm, cool, collected space of reflection and contemplation; he is a teacher who invades the heated, passionate regions of the heart.  And yet we often approach discipleship as primarily a didactic endeavor—as if becoming a disciple of Jesus is largely an intellectual project, a matter of acquiring knowledge.

Such an intellectualist model of the human person—one that reduces us to mere intellect—assumes that learning (and hence discipleship) is primarily a matter of depositing ideas and beliefs into mind-containers.”

The longing that Augustine describes is less like curiosity and more like hunger—less like an intellectual puzzle to be solved and more like a craving for sustenance ...It’s not just that I “know” some end or “believe” in some telos. More than that, I long for some end. I want something

It is less an ideal that we have ideas about and more a vision of “the good life” that we desire. It is a picture of flourishing that we imagine in a visceral, often-unarticulated way—a vague yet attractive sense of where we think true happiness is found.

We adopt ways of life that are indexed to such visions of the good life, not usually because we “think through” our options but rather because some picture captures our imagination.

You are what you love because you live toward what you want.

....if the heart is like a compass, an erotic homing device, then we need to (regularly) calibrate our hearts, tuning them to be directed to the Creator, our magnetic north. ”

We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love. These sorts of practices are “pedagogies” of desire, not because they are like lectures that inform us, but because they are rituals that form and direct our affections.

Our culture often sells us faulty, fantastical maps of “the good life” that paint alluring pictures that draw us toward them. All too often we stake the expedition of our lives on them, setting sail toward them with every sheet hoisted. And we do so without thinking about it because these maps work on our imagination, not our intellect.

Our desires are caught more than they are taught. All kinds of cultural rhythms and routines are, in fact, rituals that function as pedagogies of desire precisely because they tacitly and covertly train us to love a certain version of the kingdom, teach us to long for some rendition of the good life. These aren’t just things we do; they do something to us.

If you are what you love, and your ultimate loves are formed and aimed by your immersion in practices and cultural rituals, then such practices fundamentally shape who you are. At stake here is your very identity, your fundamental allegiances, your core convictions and passions that center both your self-understanding and your way of life. In other words, this contest of cultural practices is a competition for your heart.

Our idolatries, then, are more liturgical than theological. Our most alluring idols are less intellectual inventions and more affective projections—they are the fruit of disordered wants, not just misunderstanding or ignorance. Instead of being on guard for false teachings and analyzing culture in order to sift out the distorting messages, we need to recognize that there are rival liturgies everywhere. These pedagogies of desire are, in a sense, cultural liturgies, rival modes of worship.

To be human is to be a liturgical animal, a creature whose loves are shaped by our worship. And worship isn’t optional.

...we unconsciously learn to love rival kingdoms because we don’t realize we’re participating in rival liturgies.

We need to recognize that our imaginations and longings are not impervious to our environments and only informed by our (supposedly “critical”) thinking. To the contrary, our loves and imaginations are conscripted by all sorts of liturgies that are loaded with a vision of the good life. To be immersed in those “secular” liturgies is to be habituated to long for what they promise.

....we could be so fixated on intellectual temptations that we don’t realize our hearts are being liturgically co-opted by rival empires all the while.

How do we learn to be consumerists? Not because someone comes along and offers an argument for why stuff will make me happy. I don’t think my way into consumerism. Rather, I’m covertly conscripted into a way of life because I have been formed by cultural practices that are nothing less than secular liturgies. My loves have been automated by rituals I didn’t even realize were liturgies. These tangible, visceral, repeated practices carry a story about human flourishing that we learn in unconscious ways. These practices are loaded with their own teleological orientation toward a particular vision of the good life, a rival version of the kingdom, and by our immersion in them we are—albeit unwittingly—being taught what and how to love.

The way to the heart is through the body, you could say.

Our loves and longings are steered wrong, not because we’ve been hoodwinked by bad ideas, but because we’ve been immersed in de-formative liturgies and not realized it. As a result, we absorb a very different Story about the telos of being human and the norms for flourishing. We start to live toward a rival understanding of the good life.

The Spirit of God meets us in that space—in that gap—not with lightning bolts of magic but with the concrete practices of the body of Christ that conscript our bodily habits. If we think of sanctification as learning to “put on” or “clothe” ourselves with Christ (Rom. 13:14; Col. 3:14), this is intimately bound up with becoming incorporated into his body, the corpus Christi.

Discipleship is a kind of immigration, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Col. 1:13). In Christ we are given a heavenly passport; in his body we learn how to live like “locals” of his kingdom. Such an immigration to a new kingdom isn’t just a matter of being teleported to a different realm; we need to be acclimated to a new way of life, learn a new language, acquire new habits—and unlearn the habits of that rival dominion. Christian worship is our enculturation as citizens of heaven, subjects of kingdom come (Phil. 3:20).”

....we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes and molds us top-down. Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.

Oscar Wilde’s provocative dialogue “The Critic as Artist” articulates a relevant insight for us here: learning to love takes practice, and practice takes repetition. In some ways, we belong in order to believe. “Do you wish to love?” Gilbert asks in the dialogue. “Use Love’s Litany, and the words will create the yearning from which the world fancies they spring.”The liturgy of Christian worship is the litany of love we pray over and over again, given to us by the Spirit precisely in order to cultivate the love he sheds abroad in our hearts.

You won’t be liberated from deformation by new information. God doesn’t deliver us from the deformative habit-forming power of tactile rival liturgies by merely giving us a book. Instead, he invites us into a different embodied liturgy that not only is suffused by the biblical story but also, via those practices, inscribes the story into our hearts as our erotic calibration, bending the needle of our loves toward Christ, our magnetic north. The Scriptures seep into us in a unique way in the intentional, communal rituals of worship. If we want to be a people oriented by a biblical worldview and guided by biblical wisdom, one of the best spiritual investments we can make is to mine the riches of historic Christian worship, which is rooted in the conviction that the Word is caught more than it is taught. The drama of redemption told in the Scriptures is enacted in worship in a way that makes it “sticky.”

…there is a unique, imagination-forming power in the communal, repeated, and poetic cadences of historic Christian worship.

Christian worship doesn’t just dispense information; rather, it is a Christ-centered imagination station where we regularly undergo a ritual cleansing of the symbolic universes we absorb elsewhere. Christian worship doesn’t just teach us how to think; it teaches us how to love, and it does so by inviting us into the biblical story and implanting that story in our bones.

...in the rhythms and cadences of full-orbed Christian worship, we learn something about the gospel that we couldn’t learn in any other way—and might not even be able to put into words. Carried in the practices of Christian worship is an understanding of God that we “know” on a register deeper than the intellect, an understanding of the gospel on the level of the imagination that changes how we comport ourselves in the world, even if we can never quite articulate it in beliefs or doctrines or a Christian worldview.

Worship Character-izes Us

If we act toward what we long for, and if we long for what has captured our imagination, then re-formative Christian worship needs to capture our imagination. That means Christian worship needs to meet us as aesthetic creatures who are moved more than we are convinced. Our imaginations are aesthetic organs. Our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images. We tap our existential feet to the rhythm of imaginative drums.

The way worship does this is by inviting us, week after week, into a set of practices that don’t just communicate information to our minds but conscript our loves and longings through disciplines that speak to our imagination, the deep aesthetic register on which we tacitly understand the world without ever putting it into words—at the level of our social imaginary. To be human is to inhabit some narrative enchantment of the world. Christian worship fuels our imaginations with a biblical picture of a world that, in the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, is “charged with the grandeur of God.”

If God meets us as liturgical animals who are creatures of habit, he also meets us as imaginative animals who are moved and affected by the aesthetic. This key intuition about formation is as old as the Psalms. Desire-shaping worship isn’t simply didactic; it is poetic. It paints a picture, spins metaphors, tells a story.

In this way the gospel isn’t just information stored in the intellect; it is a way of seeing the world that is the very wallpaper of our imagination. Stories that sink into our bones are the stories that reach us at the level of the imagination. Our imaginations are captured poetically, not didactically. We’re hooked by stories, not bullet points. The lilt and cadence of poetry have the ability to seep down into the fine-grained regions of our imagination in a way that a dissertation never could. ”

You have a Christlike “feel” for the world, and you act accordingly “without thinking about it.”

“This kind of “sense” is deeper than knowledge; it’s a know-how you absorb poetically, on the register of the imagination.

Smith talks about growing up in Embro, knowing it by *heart, but not being able to give directions when asked,

"I’m not going to be able to help you. Why? Because the way I know Embro is not the kind of knowledge that you find on a map. I learned this town on the ground, from the bottom up. I learned Embro as someone who lived in it, not by looking at it or reflecting on it. Learning street names is an abstract sort of knowledge—a maplike knowledge that sees a town from a vantage point ten thousand feet in the air. Map knowledge is the knowledge of a spectator, not an inhabitant; it is how an outsider sees the village, not a native. I know this town differently because I learned it differently.

I have is what David Foster Wallace called “kinesthetic”: it’s know-how that I carry in my bones. It’s a knowledge that I caught, that I learned by doing. I didn’t even realize I was learning.

....our (culture-)making, our work, is generated as much by what we want as by what we believe. We are made to be makers, but as makers we remain lovers. So if you are what you love, then you make what you love. Your cultural labor—whether in finance or fine arts, as a fireman or a first-grade teacher—is animated less by “principles” that you carry in your head and more by habits of desire that operate under the hood of consciousness.”

Check it out.

Secular reason is only irrational nihilism

I've already made a posy on why Without Theology there is no reason HERE

Paul Tyson HERE explains why reason must have faith :

"If one does not start from this position of faith in reason, one cannot reason meaningfully at all. Without faith in reason, all perception and all language must seem to be meaningless self-generated chimeras.

From here, however, the belief that language, perception and reason are chimeras cannot be held to as being true.

For if one does not assume a knowable Meaning metaphysically prior to the flux and contingency of temporal natural existence in which human thought and language is situated, there is no true and there is no false.

Reason as sophistic manipulation cannot be true.....

There is now no viable belief possible in any equation of a true knowledge of the real with our secular epistemological modern heritage.

At the logical end point of that philosophical tradition, truth can no longer be believably grounded in anything more substantive than the inherent uncertainties of appearance, and meaning can no longer be grounded in anything more significant than the solipsistic, semantic constructions of speculative imagination.

Such a stance makes reason itself unbelievable; but who can reasonably believe that reason is unbelievable? Surely this is a perverse inversion of Anselm; dogmatically dis-believing in order to not understand?

Without the knowledge of transcendence, philosophy falls into meaninglessness and language, reason and science have only an arbitrary and pragmatic coherence that can reveal no true knowledge of the real.....

Attempts to construct non-metaphysical philosophy, independent of theological premises, are unable to make coherent negative statements about transcendent truth, and are unable to make coherent positive statements about non-transcendent "truth" either. As such they become Sophistic systems of constructed meanings that do not even aspire to truth, and they collapse into the nihilism and irrationality of their inherent metaphysical vacuity. Philosophy that is not grounded in theology is not even philosophy; it is little other than meaningless noise,

…non-religiously premised, non- metaphysical philosophy must abandon the notion of truth that our Western religious and metaphysical traditions have given to us. Where truth is openly abandoned, or where "truth" no longer means the state of belief where our minds are aligned with or inhere in the Mind who gives reality its intrinsic, qualitative and teleological meaning, then there is no intrinsic, qualitative or teleological reality beyond what we fictitiously construct. When this happens, nothing can ground our knowledge of the contingent, quantitative and purposeless "reality" we are left with in any fixed meaning. When all becomes constructivist and non-intrinsic, even the belief that all is constructed and non-intrinsic cannot be taken as anything other than an assertion of faith in meaninglessness. And faith in meaninglessness is a self contradiction of the first order if this faith is meant to be taken as a meaningful assertion.

Transcendent truth is knowable - though such knowledge is always a very personal gamble - yet, as it is the only grounds of what we can truly know, transcendent truth is not demonstrable via perception or any other 'natural' means.

If one does not start from this position of faith in reason, one cannot reason meaningfully at all. Without faith in reason, all perception and all language must seem to be meaningless self generated chimeras. From here, however, the belief that language, perception and reason are chimeras cannot be held to as being true. For if one does not assume a knowable Meaning above the flux and contingency of temporal natural existence in which human thought and language is situated, there is no true and no false, there is only sophistic manipulation. "Reason" is then intrinsically purposeless instrumentality, solipsistic illusion and a mere front for meaningless power contests, if there is no meaning in which reality itself is grounded.

Consider these three beliefs:

1. If reason and meaning are true, one must have faith in them to reason meaningfully at all. (Hence, no philosopher is serious who uses reason and meaning to argue against reason, meaning and truth.)

2. For reason and meaning to be true, they must transcend the flux and contingency that is characteristic of what is apparent to a merely natural perspective (ie, naturalism is a perspective that cannot sustain faith in reason).

3. For us to know reason and meaning the essence of our mind must be embedded in transcendent reason in a manner that transcends the merely natural.

These three beliefs underlie Plato's theological and ontological epistemology. This is an approach to knowing transcendent truth that, though not demonstrable, is the only way to have reason at all. As such it does not finally disintegrate into non-meaning.

Tyson continues,

"If a commitment to reason as a pathway to true knowing is an act of faith in the divine gifting of truth to the human knower then all knowledge that participates to some extent in truth is theologically premised.

Truth seeking that is not explicitly embedded in an outlook of religious faith suffers from trying to justify its basic epistemological assumptions as if unmediated perception and logic gave us some sort of sure and immediate access to Reality.

On the other hand, explicitly theologically premised approaches to knowledge escape the counter-Enlightenment critiques of modern epistemological foundationalism, for unlike naturalistic modernism, the warrants of truth are not produced by the perceptive, linguistic and rational powers of the human knower, rather the powers of the human knower participate in a limited manner in transcendence....

Whenever the divine becomes unknowable, truth itself loses any traction on the real, unless of course the real is understood in entirely transitory, meaningless and contingent terms. But then reason itself implodes, for if arbitrary contingency is indeed the real then the very idea of “the real” (as distinct from the arbitrarily apparent) becomes meaningless.

For any attempt to ground justified true belief in empiricism/rationalism alone (i.e., secular reason) is to set reason against itself.

Rational and empirical evidentialism is a type of reason premised on *faith* in human intellectual and epistemological powers naturalistically understood, whereas rationality and observation seen as natural revelation is a type of reason premised on faith in God’s self-revelation through every truth.”

As David Bentley Hart says,
"What, after all, warrants our belief in the power of rational consciousness to give us a true knowledge of ­reality?

It is tempting sometimes to read the whole history of modern continental philosophy as a cautionary fable regarding this divorce of reason from faith.

....[that] the world is not really known, it does not truly disclose itself as thought, because it has no ontological disposition to do so.

The philosopher does not start from a faith in being’s intelligible disclosure of itself—in fact, he starts by explicitly abjuring such faith—but rather vests his trust in the power of the self to posit reality from its own unshakeable position.

Every attempt of the rational mind to find the truth of things involves an implicit metaphysical presupposition: that there is some transcendent coincidence of world and soul, some original fullness of reality where they are always already one, which allows for their openness one to the other here below.

Only this permits us to believe that being is already manifestation, that it is by nature intelligible and comes to fruition as it discloses itself in soul: There is a reciprocal transparency of mind and world, an essential belonging of each to the other, because in their transcendent source they are one.

Without that original trust, that spiritual commitment, reason is not reason at all, but the purest irrationality, a game of the will. When faith and reason are truly separated from one another, neither can stand upon its own.

...in its very essence, all reasoning involves a venture of trust in an original orientation of truth to the mind and of the mind to truth, and in the ultimate unity of the two; and that, therefore, any attempt to argue from rational premises to rational conclusions that resolutely refuses to invoke what is and has always been revealed—in the mind’s most primordial encounter with reality—is not really a process of reasoning at all, but a journey toward absurdity.

To put the matter in a vaguely Platonic fashion, we must enjoy a vision of the truth before we can reason our way to it: That is, we are always striving to remember something we in some sense already know, but do not yet understand.

Nihilism is a way of seeing the world that acknowledges no truth other than what the human intellect can impose on things, according to an excruciatingly limited calculus of utility, or of the barest mechanical laws of cause and effect. It is a “rationality” of the narrowest kind, so obsessed with what things are and how they might be used that it is no longer seized by wonder when it stands in the light of the dazzling truth that things are. It is a rationality that no longer knows how to hesitate before this greater mystery, or even to see that it is there, and thus is a rationality that cannot truly think."

There is no such thing as "secular reason"

As Stanley Fish puts it HERE : There are no such thing as “secular reasons.”

He writes, "the professor of law Steven Smith does in his new book, “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse,” that there are no secular reasons, at least not reasons of the kind that could justify a decision to take one course of action rather than another.

It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain.

While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to; for it doesn’t point anywhere; it just sits there, inert and empty.

Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?”

If public reason has “deprived” the natural world of “its normative dimension” by conceiving of it as free-standing and tethered to nothing higher than or prior to itself, how, Smith asks, “could one squeeze moral values or judgments about justice . . . out of brute empirical facts?” No way that is not a sleight of hand. This is the cul de sac Enlightenment philosophy traps itself in when it renounces metaphysical foundations in favor of the “pure” investigation of “observable facts.” It must somehow bootstrap or engineer itself back up to meaning and the possibility of justified judgment, but it has deliberately jettisoned the resources that would enable it do so.

Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed? By “smuggling,” Smith answers.

. . . the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway — but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.

The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include “notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian ‘final causes’ or a providential design,” all banished from secular discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a direction — to even get started — “we have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversations — to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise.”

And how do we do that? Well, one way is to invoke secular concepts like freedom and equality — concepts sufficiently general to escape the taint of partisan or religious affiliation — and claim that your argument follows from them. But, Smith points out (following Peter Westen and others), freedom and equality — and we might add justice, fairness and impartiality — are empty abstractions. Nothing follows from them until we have answered questions like “fairness in relation to what standard?” or “equality with respect to what measures?” — for only then will they have content enough to guide deliberation.

Smith does not claim to be saying something wholly new. He cites David Hume’s declaration that by itself “reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question,” n his important book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre famously says, “I cannot answer the question, ‘What ought I to do?’ unless I first answer the question, ‘Of which story am I a part?”

Insofar as modern liberal discourse rests on a distinction between reasons that emerge in the course of disinterested observation — secular reasons — and reasons that flow from a prior metaphysical commitment, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on."

Liberalism only allows for secular reason to "count" in the public sphere, claiming it to be neutral and accessible to all.

But there is no such thing as an unbiased, neutral, objective standpoint. What people call 'reason' is based on a set of prior commitments. It is based on a belief system.

And what counts as knowledge is not neutrally determined, but constituted within networks of power— social, political, and economic.

SO, if the fundamentalist secularist get to bring in their fundamental beliefs and commitments and pretend that they are rational and objective, then why can’t religious ?

What is outside liberalism is then viewed not as reason, but irrationality, most especially the irrationality of faith. 

In claiming the realm of reason, liberalism also claims the realm of public space, which is precisely the space that is ruled by the rules of reason, which liberalism has laid down.

That's the trick, a liberal asks for a justification, but when given a religious reasoning, will simply dismiss it as not "real" reasons.

Only liberal-approved reasoning, with its own faith commitments, is allowed in the Public sphere.

"Religion" is a form of life not an intellectual system

Religion, for the ancients at least, was as a certain virtue, a certain habitus of the mind, a certain willingness to be open to the divine, to what it shows itself in nature.

"For the religious, knowledge depends not only upon rationality and clarity but also upon ethical living, participation in prayer and liturgy, practices of fidelity, and openness to the Spirit. This is chiefly because in knowing God, we seek to know a person and persons must reveal themselves through cultivated relationships."

- Francis Martin

James KA Smith uses George Lindbeck to defend that Christianity is more like a culture than an intellectual system, the following are some excerpts from his book Who's Afraid of Relativism : 

Christianity is a “form of life” found first and foremost in the community of practice that is the church. In other words, Christian faith (and religion more generally) is a kind of know-how; theology and doctrine, then, “make explicit” our know-how as know-that claims, articulating the norms implicit in the practices of the community that is the body of Christ.

Doctrines are, in a sense, derivative from practice.

Religion (e.g., Christianity) is not a set of propositions that one believes but rather a (communal) way of life. Religion will be a matter more of initiation than of information, a matter of know-how before it ever becomes a matter of know-that.

 In the cultural-linguistic model, “religions are seen as comprehensive interpretive schemes, usually embodied in myths or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human experience and understanding of self and world”  Contrary to the cognitive-propositional model, religion is“not primarily an array of beliefs” but more like a “set' of skills” (33). But contrary to the individualism and subjective-approach, the culturaI-linguistic model emphasizes the essentially communal character of religion: 

“Like a culture or language, it is a communal phenomenon that shapes the subjectivities of individuals rather than being primarily a manifestation of those subjectivities” .

Discipleship, then, is a kind of acculturation: "To become religious involves becoming skilled in the language, the symbol system of a given religion. To become a Christian involves learning the story of Israel and of Jesus well enough to interpret and experience oneself and one's world in its terms" . In short, a religion is essentially bound up with the communal form of its practices : the material practices precede and shape the subjectivity of adherents, making it possible to experience and construe the world in certain ways. It takes a village to have an "experience."

In a way, one needs to "try on" a whole new "picture"—be inculcated into a new (theoretical) practice—in order to he able to see the whole anew. And the only "proof" or demonstration that is possible, then, is the power of the new picture to help one make sense of the whole, and to feel its superiority to one's prior account.

Lindbeck's is a "cultural" model of religion because it emphasizes these dynamics of formation, socialization, and acculturation—all of which happen on the (implicit) level of know-how. The model is "linguistic" because this is how we learn a first language: it is caught, not taught. "To become religious—no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent—is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. 

One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly "articulated."A religion works like a language in this respect: "It comprises a vocabulary of discursive and nondiscursive symbols together with a distinctive logic or grammar in terms of which this vocabulary can he meaningfully deployed" . Note that final emphasis: this is a language to be used, put to work in a way of life. So, as Lindbeck notes, it's more like what Wittgenstein called a "language-game" that is correlated with a "form of life". Now, as a "form of life," a religion has "both cognitive and behavioral dimensions" . But in the postliberal approach, as with Brandom, our doings precede our thinkings. Practice is primary. 

A comprehensive scheme or story used to structure all dimensions of existence is not primarily a set of propositions to be believed, but is rather the medium in which one moves, a set of skills that one employs in living one’s life. Its vocabulary of symbols and its syntax may be used for many purposes, only one of which is the formulation of statements about reality. Thus while a religion’s truth claims are often of the utmost importance to it (as in the case of Christianity), it is, nevertheless, the conceptual vocabulary and the syntax or inner logic which determine the kinds of truth claims the religion can make. The cognitive aspect, while often important, is not primary.(ND,35)1 - Lindbeck

So the real question is - What does doctrine do ?

In the cognitive-propositional, doctrines are primarily used to make truth claims; in the experiential- expressive, doctrines are used to express interior feelings and experiences. “The function of church doctrines that becomes most prominent” in the cultural-linguistic model “is their use, not as expressive symbols or as truth claims, but as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action.”

If doctrines function as “rules” for the community of (religious) practice, this is only because those doctrines make explicit the norms that were already embedded in the community’s practiceIn other words, doctrines make explicit the know-how that was already implicit in our practice. To confess that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”is to articulate what was already implicit in our prayers, a worshipful way of life nourished by the Scriptures.

In fact, Brandom's account of inference is a helpful supplement to Lindbeck on this score. In particular, Brandom's emphasis on material inference is an illuminating framework for understanding how doctrine functions according to Lindheck. What counts as a good inference—a "good move" in the game—is bound up with the matter that is under discussion. The evaluation of whether to affirm the Nicene homoousios or the semi-Arian homoiousios is not a matter that can be settled by "formal" logic." 

Which of these is a good move, a good inference, is inextricably bound to the matter of the community of practice who are heirs of the apostles' teaching, who receive and read and inhabit the world of Scripture, and who pray to Jesus. That "first order" of prayer and proclamation is on the plane of know-how; doctrines as formulated in the Nicene Creed are the fruit of the community of Christian practice "making explicit" the norms that were previously unsaid. Doctrines say what, up to that point, we previously did, in a sense. In doing so, the community of practice is able to discern what counts as faithful practice. As Brandom puts it, in a different context,

"The expressive task of making material inferential commitments explicit plays an essential role in the reflectively rational Socratic practice of harmonizing our commitments. For a commitment to become explicit is for it to be thrown into the game of giving and asking for reasons as something whose justification, in terms of other commitments and entitlements, is liable to question."

But it’s always been like that - narrative coherence has always ultimately governed tradition and its development.

For example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.

The evaluation of whether to affirm the Nicene homoousios or the semi-Arian homoiousios is not a matter that can be settled by "formal" logic." Which of these is a good move, a good inference, is inextricably bound to the matter of the community of practice who are heirs of the apostles' teaching, who receive and read and inhabit the world of Scripture, and who pray to Jesus. That "first order" of prayer and proclamation is on the plane of know-how; doctrines as formulated in the Nicene Creed are the fruit of the community of Christian practice "making explicit" the norms that were previously unsaid. Doctrines say what, up to that point, we previously did, in a sense. In doing so, the community of practice is able to discern what counts as faithful practice.

Doctrines are, in very real way, derivative from practice.

Doctrines are not about the world or God, but how we can speak about those things on the first order level of prayer and proclamation...

Inferential, not referential claims…regulate truth claims…they make explicit the norms already in Christian practice…and then we can harmonize our commitments, renew or redirect our practices.

“Just as grammar by itself affirms nothing either true or false regarding the world in which language is used”—since grammar governs how one uses the language ; it doesn’t police what one does with it—“so theology and doctrine, to the extent that they are second-order activities, assert nothing either true or false about God and his relation to creatures, but only speak about such assertions” . A grammar makes explicit the rules of discourse that were previously implicit in our linguistic “doings.” 

So too theology and doctrine make explicit the commitments implicit in—and entailed by—our proclamation, praise, and prayer.

Doctrine is not synonymous with religion, nor is it either the center or foundation of religion. Religion is located primarily in our doings, in the practices that constitute a community of worship and devotion to God.

Thus for a Christian,“God is Three and One,”or “Christ is Lord” case, the Christian community; are true only as parts of a total pattern of speaking, thinking, feeling, and acting. They are false when their use in any given instance is inconsistent with what the pattern as a whole affirms of God’s being and will. The crusader’s battle cry “Christus est Dominus,” for example, is false when used to authorize cleaving the skull of the infidel (even though the same words in other contexts maybe a true utterance). When thus employed, it contradicts the Christian understanding of Lordship as embodying, for example, suffering servanthood.

The meaning of the claim “Christ is Lord”—like the meaning of any assertion—is conditioned by use: what the assertion means is relative to the context of a particular community of practice.

Within that community of practice, the crusader’s assertion is not “true”—it’s not justified or authorized as “rational,” given the canons of the ecclesial community of practice. Its falsity and irrationality is a matter of (bad) inferences that cannot be “licensed” by the relevant community of practice.

Their [i.e., the claims] correspondence to reality in the view we are expounding is not an attribute that they have when considered in and of themselves, but is only a function of their role in constituting a form of life, a way of being in the world, which itself corresponds to the Most Important, the "Ultimately Real.”

Part of the scandal of the cross is that the cross cannot be understood for what it is apart from one’s being enfolded into the community of practice that confesses “Jesus is Lord.”Our knowledge of this reality is relative to, and dependent upon, the Spirited community of practice that is the church.We are dependent upon such a communal context as the condition for understanding this as “the true story of the whole world. 

Atomistic independent knowers don’t exist. We bear witness to HUMAN knowers, contingent social creatures whose knowledge depends on the gifts of communities of practice that make the world intelligible. For human knowers, there is no knowledge outside of community. Accordingly, there is no knowledge of God in Christ apart from the communal practices of his body, which is home to his word.

Embracing contingency does not entail embracing ‘liberalism’: in fact, to the contrary, it is when we deny our contingency that we are thereby licensed to deny our dependence and hence assume the position where we are arbitrators of truth. When we spur our dependence on tradition and assume a stance of ‘objective’ knowledge whereby we can dismiss aspects of Scripture and Christian orthodoxy as benighted and unenlightened. In short, it is the denial of dependence that undergirds a progressive agenda. The picture of knowledge bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment is a forthright denial of our dependence, and it yields a God-like picture of human reason. It is ‘objectivity’ that is ‘liberal’.”

Conversely, the "atomistic" epistemology that is hound up with representationalist realism is actually liberal and subjectivist. It posits a picture of the lone, self-sufficient knower able to "mirror" the world without help, independently. Thus Charles Taylor notes that the Cartesian turn unleashes a subjectivism that has ripple effects across culture. "Now [after Descartes] certainty is some-thing the mind has to generate for itself. It requires a reflexive turn, where instead of simply trusting the opinions you have acquired through your upbringing, you examine their foundation, which is ultimately to he found in your own mind."' I, the subject, am put in the place of arbitrator and judge, throwing off the taint of external influences.This is why “absolute” truth is liberal: it denies of knowers to dependence and denies any indebtedness to tradition.

If knowledge is a social accomplishment, and justification is a social effect, then we need to appreciate that "intelligibility comes from skill, not theory, and credibility comes from good performance, not adherence to independently formulated criteria" . So "the reasonableness of a religion is largely a function of its assimilative powers, of its ability to provide an intelligible interpretation in its own terms of the varied situations and realities adherents [and nonadherents] encounter" approach "is not to be equated with irrationalism. The issue is not whether there are universal norms of reasonableness, but whether these can he formulated in some neutral, framework-independent language" . 

Appreciation of the contingent, communal conditions of knowledge does not undercut the ability to make universal claims, nor does it preclude the possibility of asserting universal norms. It only means that it is impossible to see or grasp such norms from "nowhere" or from an "absolute" standpoint. The contingent conditions of a particular community of practice are the gifts that enable us to see and understand these "universal" features of the cosmos. But this means that the condition for their being "intelligible" is a degree of competence in the discursive practices of the community (or communities) that see them as such.

After all, Pagan converts to the catholic mainstream did not, for the most part, first understand the faith and then decide to become Christians; rather, the process was reversed: they first decided and then they understood. More precisely, they were first attracted by the Christian community and form of life.