Religions, of whatever kind, are more than mere vehicles for ethics. They are celebrations and rituals, grand narratives and systems of meaning that, among other things, give reasons for behaviour considered moral by them. When religion becomes a mere vehicle for ethics, it has consequences. Religion becomes mere duty, and the notions of “entering the joy of the Master” or “the heartbeat of life as holy joy” either become incomprehensible or are seen merely as an imaginative construal, and therefore superfluous. When celebration and grand narrative are disallowed as fabrication, then all that remains is duty and social contract. Christianity is no exception. Writing of the Lutheran tradition of the mid-twentieth century, Jürgen Moltmann offered this critique:
7
Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 208
Theology does not have much use for aesthetic categories. Faith has lost its joy, since it has felt constrained to exorcise the old law with a law of the new. Where everything must be useful and used, faith tends to regard its own freedom as good for nothing. It tries to make itself useful and in so doing often gambles away its freedom. Ethics is supposed to be everything.8
Moltmann found this fault in Lutheran theological discourse one generation after the publication of the Church Dogmatics. Johnson also laments this paring down of religion to its ethical injunctions as “Dionysian malnourishment”. Entering the joy of the Master is somewhat problematic, if the master-servant or Father-child relationship is deemed non-existent or one that is based solely on obligation.
Our perception and understanding of the world we experience, directly and indirectly, depends on sensation, language and memory: information stored in the brain. In that sense, all our knowledge is construal, an electrochemical and biochemical representation of one's experience of the world. Some of our construals are immediate, others are mediated. When you see some forks and knives on a table you do not say, “I see these implements on the table as knives and forks.” Rather, there is immediacy in your seeing, and you report it as such. You see the forks and knives.9 On the other hand, when someone is deliberately rude to you, you will see it as a personal attack on you. Some construals are immediate and some are mediated. It is important to be able to tell the difference also with regard to theological construal.
Another matter affecting our perception and understanding is the making of distinctions. When distinctions are made and then falsely insisted on as dichotomies with no common ground between the extremes, such false dichotomies distort reality. The converse is also true. A synthesis of true dichotomies also leads to distortion of
8
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology and Joy (London: SCM Press, 1973), 39.
reality. Because false dichotomies and syntheses may confuse the understanding of Christian joy, this matter deserves some attention.10
The dichotomising of experiential and propositional truth results in a false bifurcation of reality.11 Illustrations from computer programming may demonstrate the point with regard to propositional and experiential truth. When the accounts of a business are computerised, the accounts are stored as an electronic construal in the computer memory, or perhaps as a magnetic construal on the hard disc drive. The fact that it is a construal, a representation “only”, is of no consequence to auditors, accountants and cash register operators. Such a representation, however, must be very propositional for it to work, so that the experience of the employees of the business corresponds with the accounts represented by the accountancy package. The package is propositionally designed to be a realistic construal to conform with experience.
A computer game, in order for the program to work according to plan must have a clearly defined logic, just as an accountancy package does. But the experience of the player of the game is not restricted to reality as experienced outside the game. She does not necessarily expect the representation of events in the game to match real events. A game is an imaginative construal, obviously needing some conformity with experience in order to be playable, but there is no need for a one-to-one correspondence with events in the game and experiences outside the game. We do not say the computer game is “wrong”, when a character in the game can teleport to another location or swallow a pill to double her strength. Such imaginative construals of an alternative world are the life-
10 Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy contains these lines with regard to joy,
Deine Zauber binden wieder, Once more your magic couples, Was die Mode streng geteilt; what high fashion split in twain.
11
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/truth/ Michael Glanzberg, "Truth", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). A sixfold approach to truth through correspondence, coherence, consensus, (social) construction, pragmatics and subjectivity has much to recommend itself.
blood of virtual reality. Without experience, propositional truth is a mere abstraction; and without some propositional framework, experience is meaningless.
How we live with our construals is another matter worth considering. To give another example of realistic construal, cartographers make maps that are meant to be useful representations of actual locations and regions of space. Yet the maps in the front of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings12 are an imaginative construal, and one can enter into Tolkien's world imaginatively. One can even construct a real location to match Tolkien's imagination, such as Hobbiton13 in New Zealand and physically enter it, and become an actor in the film. When actors remain trapped in their acting, we call them insane. On the other hand, an accountancy package, without a business to apply it to, remains a mere abstract concept and may not deserve the name construal, as it lacks concrete content.
It is therefore important to recognise the different pathways of construals – from reality to an alternative imaginative representation implemented in reality (Hobbiton), or from reality to reality (an accountancy package in use, or a flight simulator being used to train pilots). The more imaginative construals can be enjoyed as a form of entertainment. We temporarily escape the frustrations of existence by entering an imagined world of our own construction, whether it be music, a play, a novel, or a computer game.
We distinguish realistic construals from imaginative construals. There is a further possibility with regard to construals. A construal of reality that disallows a particular structure of reality will cause problems. For example, a construal of reality without reference to an adequate concept of time leads to conflict between experience
12
J.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (New York: Random House, 1975).
and logic: the framework of Zeno's paradox is inadequate with regard to time. As a consequence, Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, simply because the tortoise had a head start.14
Most human beings can distinguish between construals that represent error, fantasy and reality. This indicates that it is legitimate to make a difference between inadequate construals, imaginative construals and realistic construals. Erroneous, realistic and imaginative construals involve both experiential and propositional aspects. These two aspects should not be dichotomised.