The end of ideology?

The loss of ontology and its replacement with function means that we do not know who we are. We are urged to invent ourselves but that seems an impossible creation out of nothing. When Jesus says "I am" he implies a "Thou art". This is the Christian solution to the ontological problem. We are to become, not something that is strange to our nature, not something that is defined by theory or ideology, not something of our own invention but our human selves. We are invited to become what we are. Thus Christianity is fundamentally humanistic. Ideology is the enemy of this process because it demands that we become something prescribed by a theory. The history of this is writ large and we wonder how "good" intentions could produce outcomes that were very bad indeed.

A culture that is built on the foundations of function and causation finds this deeply mysterious because it has lost the rationality of ontology. Such a rationality is puzzled that there are no clear instructions on how we should live, what should we do, what life is for. John refuses to satisfy the desire for arguments and certainty, instead he give us jokes and double meanings and refuses to be pinned down. He gives us the Being of the one true man who will infect us also with true Being.

To our surprise, this is not a template that produces cookie cutter Christians. Rather, it creates an open Being that is firmly rooted in human freedom. It is not the case that the omniscience of God subjugates humanity, as Nietzsche would have it. Rather, the Being of Jesus saves us from thinking that we know good and evil and thus saves us from ideology and theory and returns us to ourselves.

This is not an invitation to lawlessness, but rather, the recognition that the one who came among us and who is present with us still is the "law" that we may obey. We may call this the law of the gospel, a law that is not imposed with an iron fist but one that we are seduced by, fall in love with and which incorporates us into the ethos of the one true man.

By tempting Eve with the promise that she will know (of herself) good and evil, the serpent became the first ethicist. This is the recognition that ethics has a divine origin and any attempt to do ethics on our own will be demonic. I know that the word "divine" will be difficult for many readers. By "divine" I do not mean non-human or anti-human or otherworldly. When we identify Jesus as the Word of God we can talk about the humanity of God. It is the humanity of God, the humanity of the man Jesus who came amongst us "full of grace and truth" that enables us to be truly human. Our salvation is not from the pains of hell but from ideas that we think are "clear and distinct" as Descartes would have had it.