Here's where I get tripped up. You wrote, "the Christian fascists, as Christians, believe themselves to be standing on the Real. They're wrong, in my estimation, but they are making ontological claims." If my ontological claims disagree with yours (they probably don't much, but say they did, say I was a Christian fascist), who's to say which one of us is right? There's no real way to get to the bottom of it and see for sure who's right, not until Jesus returns and tells us, and then you've still got to accept that he's right. Another way of putting it is this: Buddhists are firmly grounded in an ontological layer, but the Real they visualize is very different than the Real Christians visualize. Christians can't prove to Buddhists they're right and vice versa. So the ontological layer itself seems like it's grounded on air too.
I’m grateful for these thoughts, and their urgency. The drift you describe isn’t just intellectual; it’s spiritual and political. When morality loses touch with deeper foundations, it hardens or collapses. We reach for justice but lose the capacity for mercy. We denounce cruelty but can’t speak of joy.
You show how this thinning comes not only from secularization but also from the misuse of religious forms. The challenge isn’t just to act morally—but to act as if something is real beneath it all.
What vision of the Real—shared, not sectarian—can still ground resistance and hope? Before debating answers, we need greater interest and investment in the question. You move us in that direction.
At the age of 45ish, after 15 years or so of becoming a Christian and immersing my self and my young family in a 90’s evangelical church community, it slowly, and then all of a sudden dawned on me that at least some of my bible believing friends, actually believed that the Jesus who claimed to be God, who was crucified on a cross, … was, and still is that same dead man (can we even call Him a man), who is alive and well in that same resurrected body, ruling the cosmos from Heaven.
I can tell you before then, when my “ontological level” of belief (the loyalty to the God who is Love kind of belief, as opposed to the assenting my mind to a set of facts kind of belief), my ‘moral and existential levels’ were more connected to a metaphorical resurrection of Jesus. Yet, even with this ‘handicapped faith’, my life got better.
Now I am in my early 60s. I have stopped “mocking God with metaphor”. My ontological level is in line with the resurrection that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15, “… For if the dead are not raised (physically raised, with a Real body, the kind that Thomas, and Paul, for that matter, had to see to believe), then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied”.
And then Paul ties the ‘moral level’ with the ‘ontological level’. And he is definitely saying that all believers ‘should’ have the same ontological level in the Risen Christ. He says to believers in Corinth, “Come to a sober and right mind, and sin no more; for some people have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.” (1 Cor 15:34)
This is very helpful stuff and much appreciated. But like the commenter below, I am interested in what you call, at the ontological level, the real and the true. This seems very similar to Francis Schaeffer’s “true truth”. Back then, I always felt this rather insistent tautology was trying to obscure something that was not possible to explain, and indeed as far as I know Schaeffer never felt the need even to try. It’s all very well having the ‘real and true’ when your whole society and culture accepts it (for example, as my Islamic friends do their Islamic ontology). But once the general acceptance for a metaphysical consensus in a culture is broken, as it has in the West since the Reformation/Renaissance/Age of Reason, however do we Christians talk with integrity about ontological, Christian, true truth?
We have an unsustainable moral order which is forgetting the narratives that gave rise to it, because so many people now think those stories were just tall tales to begin with.
I love so much of what you're saying, but this one section lost me: "The secular liberal humanist, by contrast, is a nihilist. That is to say, the secular liberal humanist--as a pluralistic post-modernist..." I'm not one to argue philosophy (so I may be doing this badly), but there seem to be some definition issues here. Surely many secular liberal humanists are not nihilists (may be more true of "*materialist* liberal humanists" - but secular can mean a strong valuing of avoiding religious hegemony rather than materialism or something opposed to spirituality). Similarly, many secular liberal humanists are not necessarily even post-modern. For example, one of my reasons for agreeing with your quotes from Magic Eels is that arguments on gender are supposed to have their origins in social constructionism but are applied with the blunt force as if their views have become essentialist. Their proponents don't end up sounding post-modern at all.
The most succinct and perceptive explanation I've read in awhile 👏🏻👏🏻
Great thoughts.
Here's where I get tripped up. You wrote, "the Christian fascists, as Christians, believe themselves to be standing on the Real. They're wrong, in my estimation, but they are making ontological claims." If my ontological claims disagree with yours (they probably don't much, but say they did, say I was a Christian fascist), who's to say which one of us is right? There's no real way to get to the bottom of it and see for sure who's right, not until Jesus returns and tells us, and then you've still got to accept that he's right. Another way of putting it is this: Buddhists are firmly grounded in an ontological layer, but the Real they visualize is very different than the Real Christians visualize. Christians can't prove to Buddhists they're right and vice versa. So the ontological layer itself seems like it's grounded on air too.
I’m grateful for these thoughts, and their urgency. The drift you describe isn’t just intellectual; it’s spiritual and political. When morality loses touch with deeper foundations, it hardens or collapses. We reach for justice but lose the capacity for mercy. We denounce cruelty but can’t speak of joy.
You show how this thinning comes not only from secularization but also from the misuse of religious forms. The challenge isn’t just to act morally—but to act as if something is real beneath it all.
What vision of the Real—shared, not sectarian—can still ground resistance and hope? Before debating answers, we need greater interest and investment in the question. You move us in that direction.
At the age of 45ish, after 15 years or so of becoming a Christian and immersing my self and my young family in a 90’s evangelical church community, it slowly, and then all of a sudden dawned on me that at least some of my bible believing friends, actually believed that the Jesus who claimed to be God, who was crucified on a cross, … was, and still is that same dead man (can we even call Him a man), who is alive and well in that same resurrected body, ruling the cosmos from Heaven.
I can tell you before then, when my “ontological level” of belief (the loyalty to the God who is Love kind of belief, as opposed to the assenting my mind to a set of facts kind of belief), my ‘moral and existential levels’ were more connected to a metaphorical resurrection of Jesus. Yet, even with this ‘handicapped faith’, my life got better.
Now I am in my early 60s. I have stopped “mocking God with metaphor”. My ontological level is in line with the resurrection that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15, “… For if the dead are not raised (physically raised, with a Real body, the kind that Thomas, and Paul, for that matter, had to see to believe), then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied”.
And then Paul ties the ‘moral level’ with the ‘ontological level’. And he is definitely saying that all believers ‘should’ have the same ontological level in the Risen Christ. He says to believers in Corinth, “Come to a sober and right mind, and sin no more; for some people have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame.” (1 Cor 15:34)
This is very helpful stuff and much appreciated. But like the commenter below, I am interested in what you call, at the ontological level, the real and the true. This seems very similar to Francis Schaeffer’s “true truth”. Back then, I always felt this rather insistent tautology was trying to obscure something that was not possible to explain, and indeed as far as I know Schaeffer never felt the need even to try. It’s all very well having the ‘real and true’ when your whole society and culture accepts it (for example, as my Islamic friends do their Islamic ontology). But once the general acceptance for a metaphysical consensus in a culture is broken, as it has in the West since the Reformation/Renaissance/Age of Reason, however do we Christians talk with integrity about ontological, Christian, true truth?
We have an unsustainable moral order which is forgetting the narratives that gave rise to it, because so many people now think those stories were just tall tales to begin with.
I love so much of what you're saying, but this one section lost me: "The secular liberal humanist, by contrast, is a nihilist. That is to say, the secular liberal humanist--as a pluralistic post-modernist..." I'm not one to argue philosophy (so I may be doing this badly), but there seem to be some definition issues here. Surely many secular liberal humanists are not nihilists (may be more true of "*materialist* liberal humanists" - but secular can mean a strong valuing of avoiding religious hegemony rather than materialism or something opposed to spirituality). Similarly, many secular liberal humanists are not necessarily even post-modern. For example, one of my reasons for agreeing with your quotes from Magic Eels is that arguments on gender are supposed to have their origins in social constructionism but are applied with the blunt force as if their views have become essentialist. Their proponents don't end up sounding post-modern at all.