THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
23
The problem for all the different ways of representing the same
assumption, then, is "What's in the 'space' between?" If God is
genuinely distinct from Man, then how can there be any real contact
between them? Exactly the same problem arises when the world gets
divided into "Nature" and "Grace," into "pure nature" and the
"supernatural," or into any two places, one in which everything except
the Eucharist can make sense, and the other, the place where it's the
Eucharist that makes sense.
Here is God,
|
|
and here is Man,
and here is 'the natural world.'
This is a very, very serious problem. Here is another classic way of
representing it:
One
|
|
Many Many Many Many Many
Problem! If the One is really only One,
there can't be anything else in it,
including anything else that would
cause it to make some things that are
not itself, not-One. In other words, how
could you really get Many out of a
genuine One, a real First Thing? It
seems that there has to be some being,
or force, or place 'in-between' One and
Many for the Many to exist, but how
could that be?
Despite how it may look, none of this is of merely 'academic'
interest. This problem, in all its representations, really does affect how
the meaning of life gets conceived of, and therefore, how human life is
lived. This becomes obvious when we look at one method of 'solving'
the One - Many way of representing this problem. Suppose we say that
the Many are really just tiny parts of the One, so that it's really all One
-- if we just look at it in the correct way. This 'solution' has proved to
have perennial appeal. However, there are a few tiny problems with it:
many
many many many
many many many many many many
many many many many many many many
many many many many many
many many many many many many
many many many many many
All similar 'solutions' are (a partial list):
Pantheisms or Totalitarianisms, or (at
least) have no room either for real
human freedom or even real human
dignity, make genuine creativity
impossible, and make everything -- not
just men -- into totally replaceable
atoms of a larger Design, which Design
alone possesses real meaning. This
'solution' 'solves' the problem of the
One and the Many by subsuming the
Many into the One.
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.