The Big Idea
This is a Tree of Thought for the ideas surrounding what it means to be human from a biblically founded perspective.
- Where we start is that we are creatures created in the image of God for a particular kind of life that conforms to God’s definition of good not ours.
The Core question
What is the universe and what are we as humans?
Both sides of this question are deeply connected. The creation account is very clear about how God unfolds the world with humans as the crowning piece of His creation.
This on a basic level means that we come from the earth and are connected with it but we also come directly from God as we receive his breath of life
Other Questions
What is the place and purpose of human work?
What is a healthy theology of change that comes for a biblical basis?
What if mechanistic science is not the highest or best good when it comes to exploring and building?
How can we approach the world, ourselves and our communities in a holistic manner?
Grounded Cosmology
Wholeness and centers as ways of understanding space
Rhythm, and liturgy as ways to understand time
God’s eternal power and divine nature can be seen clearly through creation. See Rom 1:20
Psalm 19 creation speaks of God, then move to how the law or God is good and valuable, then ends with personal application and prayer to be in sync with Gods good law and his good creation
The Starting Point of Theology and Cosmology
Creaturely Anthropology
A Theology of Change
Two Poor Mindsets about Change
- Anti-change. Tend to hold onto the past and the good old days. “We have never done it that way” syndrome
- Change as inherently good. Fast pace and relentless end up focusing on changing toward very overly specific and sometimes very short sighted objectives.
Smooth and Rough Change
The Big Idea
Many books about change have a distressingly ridge and simplistic understanding of what change is and how it works. What follows has been adjusted and organized from these common sources to present a more contextualized and comprehensive understanding of change.
Here is a basic outline of types of change:
- Smooth Change
- Entropy
- Unfolding - Pictured in Nature of Order
- Rough Change
- Destruction
- Survival Pioneering - Pictured in Canoeing the Mountains and Tempered Resilience
- Disruption Pioneering - Pictured in Disruption
Primary sources are:
Nature of Order Book 2 by Christopher Alexander
Disruption by Mark DeYamz
Canoeing the Mountains by Tod Bolsinger
Tempered Resilience by Tod Bolsinger
Everything in the world around us, including ourselves, are in some state of change. No one is the same person they were ten years ago. Therefore, the question for leadership and living is not if we want to change, but what kind of change are we hoping to encourage and pursue.
Smooth Change
Also known as Structure Preserving Transformation. 1
This type of change happens around us all the time. Children grow from babies to teenagers. Seasons change from winter to spring. Paint looks good, then fades, and then chips. While it may seem that many things are not changing significantly, every person, building, program, church, animal, etc. is in a state of smooth change. Smooth change starts from the current structure of the whole and makes small incremental changes. These small changes can be beneficial or damaging. This means that there are two sub-types of smooth change:
- Negative Smooth Change: Called Entropy.
- Positive Smooth Change: Called Unfolding.
Entropy is best summarized and experienced as aging. Everything gets older, everything wears out. Not all at once, but day by day over the years.
Unfolding works similarly but in the opposite direction. Rather than the natural slow decline, it is the natural slow growth. Each small step by step change is aimed to enhance and extend the heath and wholeness of the existing structure. For example, think of a tree that has slowly grown from a seed into a massive oak.
Unfolding is a subtle kind of change seeking to make the smallest change with the biggest positive impact. The basic process of unfolding is quite simple.
- It starts by asking the question: What is one thing that could make this better?
- Then doing it.
- Evaluating the change: (i.e. How did that go?)
- Then starting the process over again in an iterative cycle.
Unlike the next type of change we will define, the process of unfolding works withing the existing structure. The basic guiding maxim of unfolding is that a small positive smooth change (i.e. an unfolding) can sometimes have as much (or more) impact as a big rough change that makes two new problems.
Practically speaking, unfolding should push us to think less of preserving structure for structures sake (i.e. getting stuck in a fight against entropy) but actually look for what next step could unfold and enhance the overall wholeness, life, beauty, and harmony of a thing.
Note
A more philosophical explanation of unfolding can be found in the architect Christopher Alexander’s book the Nature of Order Book 2 Chapter 2: Structure Preserving Transformations Nature of Order Book 2 Chapter 2.pdf or an earlier unpublished manuscript of his: The Unfolding Whole.pdf. One thing to keep in mind is that he lumps entropy into unfolding as a natural part of nature. For our purposes it is helpful to separate them to identify exactly what kind of smooth change we are after.
Rough Change
Also known as Structure Destroying Transformation.2
This kind of change is also all around us. A tree is cut down, businesses close, people change careers, new projects begin, or a baby is born.
- Negative Rough Change: Called Destruction.
- Positive Rough Change: Called Pioneering.
- Reactive Pioneering: Called Survival Pioneering.
- Proactive Pioneering: Called Disruption Pioneering.
Destruction is easy to identify. We see it in vandalizing a store, stealing, smashing, winds, waves, storms, and all other forms of upheaval brought about by human actions or natural disasters.
Pioneering as positive rough change is often undertaken out of necessity. You are in a new land, market, or world and the old name of the game is changing. You need to learn how to survive or things will slip into destruction.
To avoid this there is Reactive Pioneering (Or Survival Pioneering) as described in Canoeing the Mountains by Tod Bolsinger. The basic and rather dire maxim of Survival Pioneering is “Change or die.” It is a type of change that does not have the luxury of deliberation but must react to the real pressure of a changing world.
Proactive Pioneering (or Disruption Pioneering) is similar in its nature as rough change but it is inherently on the offensive not the defense. Disruption Pioneering is described in Disruption by DeYmaz. It does not wait for the rules of the game to get changed before reacting. Rather, it seeks to change the rules first. He contends that disruptors can see: “what lies ahead, around the corner, long before others have even arrived at the intersection of present and future. Because they are out front and ahead of the curve, disruptors first define, then refine, and ultimately create new realities by changing the way we see things, think about things, and get things done. And once disruptors gain momentum, they don’t merely envision the future; they create and establish it. They frame the questions, shape the narrative, and influence the conversation. In so doing, they challenge what is and inspire what is yet to come.” - Disruption by Mark DeYmaz, pg. xxviii.
What Disruption Pioneering tries to accomplish practically is identifying faulty or negative aspects of a community and working to disrupt it with something better. The basic picture of the Gospel’s activity when employed through Disruption Pioneering is that, when the good news shows up, it should shake up and totally change the community around it. Interestingly, Luther and the work of the Reformers clearly fits into this kind of change.
Info
A related idea to rough change is The Edge of the Wedge
Conclusion
Change is something that every human and ever group of humans experience. It strikes me as odd that we often allow change to come to us in its negative forms of entropy and destruction rather than choosing appropriate positive alternatives. Unfolding, Survival Pioneering, and Disruption Pioneering all have useful applications. But just like you would not hang a picture with a jackhammer or break up concrete with a hand hammer, choosing the right type of change for a situation allows us to plan and apply change in a more precise and effective manner.
Link to original Footnotes
Mechanistic Cosmology and the Death of Theological Wholeness
Transclude of a-holistic-versus-mechanistic-perspective
Need
Start with the reason we need such an anthropology and basis for life and theology
We have lost the ability to see God in the world around us. Sure we see him in the spectacular or the stunning but hardly ever in the normal or the ordinary or even the holy that we encounter
Vocation gets us a lot of the way there but it also doesn’t give us a practical understanding of actually doing what we say we should do. We know we are all of the roles we are for the glory of god and the reflect his light but then practically we go about all of those vocations in the exact same way as anyone else
The reality of competing cosmologies
The idea the we sometimes don’t see how different cosmologies affect us
The idea of worldview doesn’t really capture this reality
Mechanistic nature of the universe as described by Christopher Alexander in nature of order book 1 preface
We often operate like the world around us is a mechanistic world that God kind of just breaks into now and again but the actual daily moment by moment participation and perceptible reality of God is not there. Or if it is then we end up acting like conjurers looking for got to bend reality for our benefit or something along those lines
Evolutionary Cosmology as a way to think of change, development and “progress”
Both of these can come into a Christian’s interaction of the world without ever rising to the level of “worldview” but can deeply affect how we approach and enact our vocations and life in the world
Foundation
Then move to the basic laying out of a creaturely anthropology. That is defined as the dependence and overlay of parts
Application frameworks
Next outline the basic idea of building on this basis with the idea of common characteristics
My work with rhythm and liturgy is off of the common characteristic of being time bound beings
The work of Christopher Alexander (Architect, Author) is interesting in this area since it is based on the commonality of human feelings and the basis of wholeness as essential for understanding the world.
Many other possible common starting places that would all work legitimately off of the foundation
- Models of Human Rhythms
- Patterns of Liturgy-The Rhythm of Life
- Embodiment of Community
- Sacred Space
- Thoughts on Liturgy and Rhythm