Christianity: A Bounded Centered Set

Maybe you have heard that there are a ways to categorize people and things. Two common ways to think about categorization is either as a bounded set or a centered set. Do not let the language trip you up, they are very intuitive once you know.

A bounded set is defined by its boundaries. If it metal and has wings, it is a plane. If you have blue eyes you don’t have brown eyes. We can group things into “sets” based upon the boundaries we draw. This is so common of a practice, that I bet you had no idea it had a name!

The other type of categorization is what is called a centered set, which is a group that is not defied by it’s boundaries but by the center. If a bounded set is concerned with who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, a centered set is concerned with the direction a person is moving. Are they moving toward or away from the center.

Image from: https://thehappypastor.wordpress.com/tag/bounded-set/

It might be easy to break this into a conservative/orthodoxy/bounded set verses a liberal/orthopraxy/centered set debate. However the reality is that Christianity is not a bounded OR a centered set.

Christianity is both.

Christianity is a way of living in that world that puts Christ at the center of our lives. Thus it is a centered set. It is a faith that understands that Christ and Paul and the early church worked did so much to break the idea of religion as a bounded set. When Jesus ate with prostitutes and Paul welcomed gentiles, when Jesus called a tax collector and Peter was told to not deem anything unclean which God declared clean, it is clear to me that one of the Christian projects is to dismantle bounded set categorization of people.

And yet, you may see, that to be a people who are centered on Christ who calls us to reject bounded set thinking, Christianity paradoxically becomes a bounded set.

To put it another way: Christianity is bounded set centered on the one who calls for the dismantling of bounded thinking.

This is a paradox, a mystery of the faith. Be mindful of those who might say that Christianity is only one or the other. To remove one set from our call is to cheapen and soften the challenging call of Christ.

Apophatic and Kataphatic

There is a saying in the Jewish tradition that scripture is “black fire written on white fire.” Weight is given to the words but just as weighty are the spaces between. It is also the case that musicians talk about music not only in terms of the notes, but also in terms of the rests.

And yet in much of the religious tradition I engage in, there is an emphasis on the black fire or the notes and much less on the white fire and rests.

It may surprise some of you to know there is a name for the black fire/notes of spiritual practice. That name is “Kataphaticism”. It is the way of knowing by what we can affirm. So for instance, if we say God is Love we are describing God by what God is or does. This is knowing by affirming or knowing by the positive. Much of our theology is kataphatic in nature.

Kataphatic tradition is wonderful, however it is only part of the spiritual life. Another part of the spiritual life is the "Apophatic” tradition. Is the way of knowing through negation. There was an old cartoon I saw as a child which something was lost. The main characters were searching for the item were growing frustrated that everywhere they looked the item was not located. It was pointed out that this was good news because if they could locate everywhere the item was not, then they would find where the item was.

Take the previous example that God is Love. The Apophatic tradition would ask what can we discover about God by saying “God is not Love”? Perhaps one of the things we discover about God is that God is not romantic love or even brotherly love. God is not love in the same way that I love gummy bears. God is not love because God is greater than love. Limiting God to the action of love means that we begin to believe that we can fully know God. Assuming that we fully know God is also called Idolatry.

Recently I read that Gregory Palamas said, “God is not only beyond knowledge, but also beyond unknowing.”

One of the beautiful things of the apophatic tradition is that by the unknowable God requires humans to be humble and repent of our confidence that we can fully understand God.

There is comfort in knowing by what we can describe. There is mystery in knowing by what we cannot. There is security in knowing by what we can see, there is faith in knowing by what we cannot see.

Black fire without white fire is just an ink spill. Music without silence is just noise. Knowing without negation is pride.

Even Satan Knows He Does Not Exist

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Pastor Brian Zahnd was explaining Satan to those of us who do not take the Satanvery seriously. Generally those are the people who are in the west, highly educated, wealthy, “rational” and suspicious of those things that are unscientific. A decent sized group of people.

In his efforts to explain the Devil, Zahnd described the way meteorologists would describe a hurricane. Hurricanes are powerful, destructive and are even given anthropomorphic names. But even as we name a hurricane, we know that the hurricane is the result of complex systems intermingling and colliding with each other. The hurricane cannot exist on its own.

Likewise Satan is powerful, destructive and given a name. We know that Satan is the result of complex systems intermingling and colliding with each other. As such, Satan cannot exist on its own. Satan is the result of the most complicated systems interconnected with the most complex animal on the planet.

Those of us who have read Stanley Hauerwas may recall how he wrote in his book Matthew, “That is why the devil is at once crafty but self-destructively mad, for the devil cannot help but be angry, recognizing as he must that he does not exist.”

It is Christianity, not Jesusism

Jesus is a big deal. Not only has part of the world measured time around his life with the less common "B.C." and "A.D." but as of 2010 there were an estimated 2.2 billion Christians. And that is the thing, the religion is centered on Jesus but is not called Jesusism. Christianity revolves around the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus, but the faith is built on the foundations of "the Christ". 

Not unlike the religion that revolves around the man named Siddhartha Gautama, but it called Buddhism. Buddha is a title, not a name, and it means "Awakened" or "Enlightened" one. Christ is a title, not a name, and it means "anointed" one. While Jesus is very important to the faith, Christianity is larger than the man named Jesus. Christianity is built on the foundations of the mystical Christ that was fully embodied in Jesus but the Christ spirit is not limited to the life of Jesus.

Jesus says that anyone who believes will have the Christ spirit and may even do even greater works than Jesus. The Holy Spirit is a more common name of the spirit of Christ that came down at Pentecost. Luther said that we are all to be "little Christs". 

Again I say, Jesus is a big deal, but Jesus knew that what God was doing was (and is) much bigger than even him. Following Jesus is a great idea, however if the Jesus you follow is not able to bridge time, space, divisions and people, then you might be practicing Jesusism and not Christianity.