Why, then, the unscientific scorn for practical knowledge? There are at least three reasons for it, as far as I can tell. The first is the “professional” reason mentioned earlier: the more the cultivator knows, the less the importance of the specialist and his institutions. The second is the simple reflex of high modernism: namely, a contempt for history and past knowledge. As the scientist is always associated with the modern and the indigenous cultivator with the past that modernism will banish, the scientist feels that he or she has little to learn from that quarter. The third reason is that practical knowledge is represented and codified in a form uncongenial to scientific agriculture. From a narrow scientific view, nothing is known until and unless it is proven in a tightly controlled experiment. Knowledge that arrives in any form other than through the techniques and instruments of formal scientific procedure does not deserve to be taken seriously. The imperial pretense of scientific modernism admits knowledge only if it arrives through the aperture that the experimental method has constructed for its admission. Traditional practices, codified as they are in practice and in folk sayings, are seen presumptively as not meriting attention, let alone verification. And yet, as we have seen, cultivators have devised and perfected a host of techniques that do work, producing desirable results in crop production, pest control, soil preservation, and so forth. By constantly observing the results of their field experiments and retaining those methods that succeed, the farmers have discovered and refined practices that work, without knowing the precise chemical or physical reasons why they work. In agriculture, as in many other fields, “practice has long preceded theory.” And indeed some of these practically successful techniques, which involve a large number of simultaneously interacting variables, may never be fully understood by the techniques of science.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: Why Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 305–06

There could be a worse hermeneutical lens (read: many, many worse lenses) for New Testament theology than the four poems that anchor the opening narrative in Luke’s Gospel: Mary’s song (1:46–55), Zechariah’s prophecy (1:68–79), the angels’ announcement (2:10–14), and Simeon’s blessing (2:29–32).

[Lenin] was famous for claiming that “Communism is Soviet Power plus the Electrification of the whole countryside.” Electricity had, for him and for most other high modernists, a nearly mythical appeal. That appeal had to do, I think, with the unique qualities of electricity as a form of power. Unlike the mechanisms of steam power, direct waterpower, and the internal combustion engine, electricity was silent, precise, and well-nigh invisible. For Lenin and many others, electricity was magical. Its great promise for the modernization of rural life was that, once transmission lines were laid down, power could be delivered over long distances and was instantly available wherever it was needed and in the quantity required… Man’s work and even the work of the steam-driven plow or threshing machine were imperfect; the operations of an electric machine, in contrast, seemed certain, precise, and continuous. Electricity was also, it should be added, centralizing. It produced a visible network of transmission lines emanating from a central power station from which the flow of power was generated, distributed, and controlled. The nature of electricity suited Lenin’s centralizing vision perfectly.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 166

Like planned cities, planned languages are indeed possible. Esperanto is one example; technical and scientific languages are another, and they are quite precise and powerful means of expression within the limited purposes for which they were designed. But language per se is not for only one or two purposes. It is a general tool that can be bent to countless ends by virtue of its adaptability and flexibility. The very history of an inherited language helps to provide the range of associations and meanings that sustain its plasticity. In much the same way, one could plan a city from zero. But since no individual or committee could ever completely encompass the purposes and lifeways, both present and future, that animate its residents, it would necessarily be a thin and pale version of a complex city with its own history. It will be a Brasília, Saint Petersburg, or Chandigarh rather than a Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, or Calcutta. Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities. The grave shortcoming of a planned city is that it not only fails to respect the autonomous purposes and subjectivity of those who live in it but also fails to allow sufficiently for the contingency of the interaction between its inhabitants and what that produces.

— James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 143–44

I personally believe that [the doctrine of the Trinity] has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding.

— Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful (and other essays), 5

The great philosopher’s comment — near the outset of his classic essay in aesthetics, “The Relevance of the Beautiful” — hints at the challenge of articulating in a theological/philosophical register something which can only truly be “understood” through being loved, through being worshipped. Here I want to draw attention to a few of the features of my previous articulation of — not the doctrine of Trinity exactly, but its raison d’être.

1. The articulation of this doctrine is an exercise in biblical interpretation. To be specific, this exercise requires, and presupposes, a kind of theological interpretation of a) the Scriptures of Israel, b) the New Testament, and c) the two Testaments together.
2. It thus presupposes — even as it inevitably influences — an account of interpretation, viz., an understanding of hermeneutics, which (in order to be adequate for the task) must be philosophically informed.
3. It also presupposes an account of how the Testaments relate to one another; which is to say it presupposes an account of history — and an adequate account of history must be, well, historically informed.
4. Furthermore, it presupposes an understanding of creation, as what the Creator is not. Yet that creation is capable of decisively receiving the Creator’s divine nature in the Incarnation of the Eternal Son; thus, the account of nature and creation must itself be Christologically informed.
5. Finally, it presupposes an account of the church: the community that identifies itself as called by the Father of Jesus Christ, its members sharing in his eternal inheritance through adoption and experiencing (subjectively and objectively) the presence of his life-giving Spirit, and worshipping the Three in — as — One accordingly. (Not to mention: the church has sought to say some authoritative things about the Three-as-One from time to time.)

At least these five factors, as one constructs them, will impinge upon the particular shape and articulation of one’s Trinitarian construction: a two-Testament approach to biblical interpretation; a philosophically informed hermeneutics; a sense of the biblical relation to history; a Christologically informed account of nature and creation; an understanding of the church and its worship. I am certain there are more. (I have not even mentioned where most Protestant theology has begun the task since the sixteenth century: the doctrine of revelation!) But the complexity of the task suggests that the particularities of the doctrine will thus inevitably be, in a sense and to a degree, contingent.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the theological/philosophical apparatus necessary to talk sensibly about and hold together an apparent paradox as truth:

1. “Hear, O Israel: YHWH is our God, YHWH is One” (Deut. 6:4). The foundational theological confession about the identity and nature of God in Israel’s Scriptures — the confession on which the theological unity of those Scriptures depend — is that there is one God, the sole subject of worship, the sole Creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them, incomparable with any other putative god, incommensurable with any creaturely reality.
2. “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt. 28:19f). The foundational theological confession about the identity and nature of God in the New Testament — the confession on which the theological unity of that Testament depends — is that the One God of Israel is to be rightly worshipped in the person of the Father of Jesus Christ; also worshipped in the person of Jesus Christ, the unique and eternal Son of the Father; and also worshipped in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, who is given freely by the Father to all those who belong to Jesus Christ.
3. And yet these three are not three gods, but one God.

In other words: the Church is right to worship Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as God alone, and in that worship they are (despite appearances!) in essential continuity with Israel’s worship of the One God YHWH. That is what the doctrine of the Trinity is seeking, in a theological register, to articulate.

We have together produced a type of university in which teaching and enquiry in the humanities (and often enough also in the social sciences) are marked by four characteristics. There is first a remarkably high level of skill in handling narrow questions of limited detail: setting out the range of possible interpretations of this or that short passage, evaluating the validity of or identifying the presuppositions of this or that particular argument, summarizing the historical evidence relevant to dating some event or establishing the provenance of some work of art. Secondly, in a way which sometimes provides a direction for and a background to these exercises of professionalized skill, there is the promulgation of a number of large and mutually incompatible doctrines often conveyed by indirection and implication, the doctrines which define the major contending standpoints in each discipline. Thirdly, insofar as the warfare between these doctrines becomes part of public debate and discussion, the shared standards of argument are such that all debate is inconclusive. And yet, fourthly and finally, we still behave for the most part as if the university did still constitute a single, tolerably unified intellectual community.

— Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 7–8

The testimony of history suggests that the phenomena of “nation” and “empire” are both equally ineradicable from human political life. There is a chicken-and-egg aspect to the relation, albeit with (over the course of millennia) both chickens and eggs getting larger and larger, and with the caveat that historically the egg of the nation really did come first. To (over)simplify: imperial projects emerge out of national projects that reach beyond their “national” boundaries, either in response to a regional power vacuum of some sort or as a desire to take over an existing imperial project, while national projects emerge (or re-emerge) from the desire to self-define over against a broader imperial project and/or the other national projects uneasily coexisting within that imperial frame. Once you have the first empire, all nations’ self-definition is somehow reacting to the context of empire. The modern exemplar of this dynamic is the rise of 19th century European nationalisms within and without the Habsburg empire: the nations and nationalisms in question positioned themselves and their national projects relative to (i.e., over against) the Vienna system, whether or not they had really been ruled by Vienna for some time. There are ancient exemplars, too: the empire incorporated by the Assyrians (who had a robust national project if ever there was one!) was taken over and expanded by the Babylonians, then by the Medes and the Persians, then by Alexander the Great.

The specialist in the history of either period might now protest that there are many salient and irreducible differences between Alexander’s empire and the Habsburgs’. Certainly, I am oversimplifying: a nation is not a nation is not a nation, and an empire is not an empire is not an empire. Such forms inhere only imperfectly in this crude matter. But if there is not such a thing as a “nation” or an “empire” (and the permanent squabbling over how to define these terms suggests this is in fact the case), there are such things as “nationalism” and “imperialism.” Not things, exactly. Rather, they are basic political impulses or desires: not, in themselves, goods or virtues, but tendencies of political aspiration that exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic.

And these desires have, as have all human aspirations and efforts here under the sun, virtuous and vicious aspects to them. The virtuous aspects of nationalism stem from the love of and gratitude for what is immediately given to me: it is good to be grateful for one’s own place and family and history and traditions, and to be in a sense protective of the goodness and justice of their continued existence (insofar, of course, as these traditions are good and just!), and to feel a sense of solidarity with all those who share those goods. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “Oh Lord, I thank thee that thou hast made me a $NATIONALITY — not one of those $OUTGROUP-NATIONALITIES over there, whom I hate and assuredly You hate too.” The good of nationalism is the love of the particular, and the evil of nationalism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to my particular. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of the universal.

For the virtuous aspects of (what one might call) imperialism stem from the love of and gratitude for those who are not immediately given to me: it is good to love and feel solidarity with those who do not share my place and family and history and traditions, because what we do share is humanity, is personhood. It is good to grieve when other persons, even those distant from me, do not enjoy the goods and fruits of justice and cultural flourishing. It is also good to want to share one’s own goods with those who lack those goods, and to want to share in the goods that others have. The vicious aspects come in as soon as one says, “And because we here must have the goods that they have there—” or “they must be given the goods that we have here” — “we are justified in dominating them, for the good of all parties.” The good of imperialism is the love of the universal, and the evil of imperialism is the hatred of other particulars as threats to the universal. It needs to be leavened by the genuine love of other particulars.

I said above that these basic political desires and aspirations exist in a permanent and uneasy dialectic; that nationalism and imperialism beget one another in a perpetual cycle. This is, I think, because we humans are easily dissatisfied — it is easiest to see the failings of whatever desire dominates one’s own political situation, nationalist or imperialist, and to thus overlook the failings of the alternative — and also because we are vicious. It is hard — maybe impossible? — to hold a pure nationalism or a pure imperialism without being consumed by the vicious aspects of either. The worst state for any person is probably to be a vicious nationalist and a vicious imperialist at the same time, as many (most?) empire-builders in history have probably been. But the best state would be to desire the virtuous form of both: a universal kingdom, with no geographical or temporal borders to compromise its perfection, ruled with perfect justice by a righteous king, so that every particular — every person — under the reign of this universal may flourish as itself, becoming the most glorious version of itself.

Nationalists and imperialists both, in their own ways, long for this kingdom. Their desires are incomplete, malformed versions of this longing: they are unable to hold together loving both the particular and the universal. Their last state will be worse than their first. But there is One who can.

Technology is the human’s achievement, not his failing even though the use he chooses to make of it may be fallen indeed. If the products of human technē become philosophically and experientially problematic, it is, I would submit, because we come to think of them as autonomous of the purpose which led to their production and gives them meaning. We become, in effect, victims of a self-forgetting, losing sight of the moral sense which is the justification of technology. Quite concretely, the purpose of electric light is to help humans see. When it comes to blind them to the world around them, it becomes counterproductive. The task thus is not to abolish technology but to see through it to the human meaning which justifies it and directs its use… not to abolish the works of technology but to bracket them, to escape their fascination in order to rediscover their forgotten meaning.

— Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, 24–25

Part I: Jesus the Human

1. Jesus of Nazareth raised bodily from the dead [resurrection accounts, post-resurrection appearances]
2. The bodily, human life of Jesus vindicated by his resurrection as enacting true humanity [all over the Gospels]

Part II: True Humanity, Creation, and Sin

3. Jesus: the true image of the invisible God [Colossians 1 and intertexts]
4. The image of God as royal status [Genesis 1 and the rest of the Bible]
5. Sin I — irresponsibility: rejecting the responsibilities that come with royal status [lots that can go here]
6. Jesus: the second Adam [1 Corinthians 15, Romans 8]
7. The Church: bride of the Lamb, second Eve [Revelation 21 and intertexts]
8. The first Adam and the first Eve [Genesis 2]
9. Sin II — idolatry: choosing knowledge of good and evil apart from life, leading to death and corruption [Genesis 3]
10. Jesus: the temple of the Holy Spirit [man, it’s just everywhere]
11. Christians: temples of the Holy Spirit [1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Romans 6]
12. Sin III — sacrilege: offending against the presence of God [Leviticus, Romans 6, 1 Corinthians 3 & 6, Ephesians 5]

Part III: The Shape of True Human Life

13. Human companionship: friendship and marriage
14. Human fruitfulness: discipleship and procreation
15. Unavoidably long excursus chapter on sexual behavior, human sexuality, and sexual bioethical issues which nevertheless has to be framed by (14) and (15)
16. Human vocation: rest and work
17. Human uniqueness: relation to other living creatures and to machines
18. Possibly (alas) another unavoidably long excursus chapter on technology and medicine
19. Human teleology: resurrection life and end-of-life bioethical issues

Obviously 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12 would be key individual units of argumentation. Having now made the sketch, it occurs to me that as a whole that section would map, albeit imperfectly, onto the traditional “threefold office” of Christ: 3–5 corresponds straightforwardly to the royal office, 6–9 (somewhat less straightforwardly) to the prophetic office, and 10–12 to the priestly office. Of course, the traditional order is prophet, priest, king, so maybe some reordering is called for. But the value of this order, I think, is that it anchors the whole testimony about humanity in the status with which it is created, the status that produces the subsequent vocations. That may be the wisest apologetic move, since most people (at least in the ex-Christian West), Christian or not, now come programmed with an intuitive sense of the dignity and worth of every person. That sense often lacks controls, but it may be the most natural starting point.

EDIT: Thinking more about this, it seems really important to have established multiple ways to talk about sin when we come to Part III and the different “ethical” topoi. Irresponsibility, idolatry, and sacrilege are far from perfect terms for Sin I, II, and III (for one thing, they aren’t all alliterative!), but they get at the need for multiple axes of evaluation. Some things that defy a Christian view of the human person in the realm of medicine, for instance, are not sacrilegious exactly… but still idolatrous and irresponsible. I want better terms for these categories. But one needs some such categories.