THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
33
even about the importance of coherence. Sometimes accepting
incoherence is our first line of defense against totalitarianism.
Sometimes it is just remarkably convenient. Other times it might be
just a simple admission that we don't have everything all figured out.
Further, there is often, or even usually, great disagreement about what
really is "coherent." All this is such a steady feature of truly modern
life that, ironically, we mostly ignore it, just to get through our day --
proving the point about our relative ease with massive incoherence.
We don't actually live as if our ideas absolutely had to be either
right or coherent. Trying to live that way might even be dangerous. On
the other hand, we do understand that throwing up our hands and
saying, "Anything goes," is at least as dangerous a strategy.
The fact that it is actually very difficult for truly modern grown-ups
to be grown-up about being truly modern grown-ups is not irrelevant to
the argument of this book. When we realize that 'grown-ups' do not
have even all the crucial things figured out, then what 'grown-ups'
might think of the Eucharist becomes a little less decisive. We may be
justified in taking another look at our grandmother's faith. The
proposal of Covenantal Theology, that the font, not only of all
coherence, but of all our reasons to seek coherence, is to be found
solely in the Eucharist, may look slightly less childish.
Before discussing Plato and Aristotle's representations of the
paradigm in the next chapter, one final way to represent the paradigm
needs to be noted here. At times, thinkers -- especially more recent
ones -- have claimed that the problems with the paradigm are solved
by imagining that the representation occurs in time rather than in
space, but that just isn't true. Nothing is improved, or even really
changed, for example:
Belief - - - - - - - - - - - - - > Reason
Freedom - - - - - - - - - - - - - > Coherence
Many - - - - - - - - - - - - - > One
(what's 'in-between' here may erroneously get called, "Progress")
One way to understand why the problem of the 'in-between' is not
suddenly solved by a temporal transposition is to realize that the visual
representation of time allows us to 'cheat' in how we 'read' these
drawings. When we make a drawing in which the same basic
assumption under study, formerly represented as a spatial metaphor,
now uses the visual to represent time:
Past - - - - - - - - - - - - > Future
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.