Ventricular Theology

On what happens when we don't go beyond what has come before

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

Last week we talked about the “traditions of our fathers” and how the context they set for our beliefs impacts both what revelation we receive and the direction those revelations can take. Since those traditions can be both beneficial and harmful to us in different ways, we also talked about the occasional necessity of changing them, or re-working or refining them so that they can better match up with the rest of what we know about the world. This refinement, in turn, makes us better able to receive more revelation, because our ideas are clearer and more correct.

Today and in the next few weeks I’d like to continue to explore this process of change. It’s a constructive process, meaning that each piece builds on and with every other piece, but it’s a process that happens within a larger context of knowledge and belief about many different things. When you change the context, the revelation might change as well. In fact, that’s basically the whole thrust of the principle of context: revelation is contextual, and so if the context were different, the revelation would be different. Push that idea as far as it will go in all directions and you’ve got roughly the last nine months of essays here at Rainbows.

What we’ll be looking at in the next while is a more specific point that’s closely related to the one we just said: when the context changes, it may also be necessary for our understanding or interpretation of a certain revelation to change; similarly, as we learn about the world and how it works, our understanding of the gospel not only might change but should change. We want a flexible view of the gospel that allows for this change and improvement of ideas over time.

I’ll start by arguing for why we should want that today. Some of the points we make will resemble points we’ve already made elsewhere, but I’m hoping that this little group of pieces will work together to help us understand why the gospel is an open system, and why we should want it that way, as much as it’s possible to have.

The argument will begin with a playful, budget-conscious trip into the history of neuroscience. Before that, though, let me give you an example of the kind of refinement I have in mind.

A first example