Dooyeweerd at the Movies:
‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’
by Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh (15 June 2023)
“At great turning-points of world-history, man’s historical consciousness is strongly aroused. The relativity of our traditional measures and opinions manifests itself in a clear way. At these historical turning points those who do not live by the Word of God and who had considered these traditional measures and opinions to be the firm ground of their personal and societal life, easily fall prey to a state of spiritual uprooting, in which they surrender themselves to a radical relativism, which has lost all faith in an absolute truth.”Humanism is in crisis. It is currently shifting from its classical objectivistic, mechanistic, rationalistic polarity (which presupposes the abiding normative laws of mathematics and physics — a clockwork UNI-verse model, if you like), to its post-postmodernist subjectivistic, irrationalistic, personalistic polarity (ie radically rejecting all normativity as it sinks into a black-hole of infinite flux — a haywire MULTI-verse model of alternative cosmic realities, if you like — see (with visual health warning) the recent Oscar-winning Michelle Yeoh movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’), but also the portending dissolution of human normativity into potentially non-regulated acid-baths of experimental bio-engineering, transhumanism, and AI consciousness.
(‘In the Twilight of Western Thought: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Philosophical Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press 2012, Series B, Volume 4, p 45)
The ultra-relativism of the latter subjectivistic polarity infamously rejects for instance the normative laws of biology in regards to the trans debate, but it rejects also the normative laws of speech and civilised discourse which undergird the negotiated social peace upon which democracy is premised — hence its modus operandi presents (counter-intuitively perhaps) as strident intransigence, governmental absolutism, raw mob power, infantilised hysteria, all symbolised by the iconic weapon of baby-pink-and-blue-painted baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire.
The objectivist rationalist polarity of humanism was in its own right a hugely pernicious and resolute opponent of Christ and His Word, giving rise to so-called Higher Criticism and to the moral blankness of mechanistic selfish-gene High Darwinism. All of which as we know have presented relentless challenges to Biblical accounts of the miraculous, but above all to the substitutionary death and resurrection of Christ.
The new beast from the sea, however, manifests in its subjectivism as a shape-shifting, obsessively personalistic, ultra-relativistic tyrant. Our response and retaliation would seem to require renewed focus on the incarnation of Christ (of course along with his sacrificial death, resurrection and ascension) — his continued embodiment in birth, in resurrection and in ascension providing the definitive endorsement of physical “bodyhood” regarding human and creational normativity.
Christ is the True Human. He is the Last Adam. We are made in his likeness, in the image of God. There does not exist an infinity of conflicting variations of my or your selfhood populating endless random universes. THIS cosmos is all there is, and we are the stewards of it. This cosmos is from him through him and to him. He upholds all things by his word of power. He reconciles all things in heaven and earth by the blood of his cross. This whole creation groans in travail as it waits for that day, the redemption of our bodies, being a new creation which in some deep sense will yet be a healed continuation of this present one, as our resurrected bodies will have unfathomable continuity with our present bodies.
This cosmos fell with the First Adam and is rescued by the Last Adam. We must emphasise all the more the structural norms of this creation (eg binary maleness-femaleness, eg the family unit optimally being comprised of mother, father, and progeny, eg the integrity of animals “according to their kinds”) — but also the exhaustive structural frameworks which comprise temporal reality in its totality. These are the concrete ordinances of the Lord, as the psalmist tells us. God’s creational ordinances have not as such fallen with man. They have not as such been corrupted by sin. God’s creational laws remain transcendently intact. Only the human heart has fallen, in its daily rebellion rejecting the pristine given-ness of God’s deep creational order, and in arrogant delusion attempting to level it all to dust and to rebuild it from scratch in the image of apostate humanity:
“The ground-motive of the divine Word-revelation is an indivisible unity. Creation, fall, and redemption cannot be separated . . . Did God reveal himself as the creator so that we could brush this revelation aside? I venture to say that whoever ignores the revelation of creation understands neither the depth of the fall nor the scope of redemption. Relegating creation to the background is not scriptural. Just read the Psalms, where the devout poet rejoices in the ordinances that God decreed for creation. Read the book of Job, where God himself speaks to his intensely suffering servant of the richness and depth of the laws which he established for his creatures. Read the gospels, where Christ appeals to the creational ordinance for marriage in order to counter those who aimed at trapping him. Finally, read Romans 1:19-20, where the creational ordinances are explicitly included in the general revelation to the human race. Whoever holds that the original creational ordinances are unrecognizable for fallen humankind because they were supposedly fundamentally altered by the advent of sin, essentially ends up denying the true significance of God’s common grace which maintains these ordinances. Sin did not change the creational decrees but the direction of the human heart, which turned away from its Creator.
Undoubtedly, this radical fall impacts the way in which humankind discloses the powers that God enclosed in creation. The fall affects natural phenomena, which humankind can no longer control. It impacts itself in theoretical thought led by an idolatrous ground-motive. It appears in the subjective way in which humankind gives form to the principles established by God in his creation as norms for human action. The fall made special institutions necessary, such as the state and the church in its institutional form. But even these special institutions of general and special grace are based upon the ordinances that God established in his creation order. Neither the structures of the various aspects of reality, nor the structures that determine the nature of concrete creatures, nor the principles which serve as norms for human action, were altered by the fall. A denial of this leads to the unscriptural conclusion that the fall is as broad as creation, i.e., that the fall destroyed the very nature of creation. This would mean that sin plays a self-determining, autonomous role over against God, the creator of all. Whoever maintains such a position denies the absolute sovereignty of God and grants Satan a power equal to that of the Origin of all things.”
(Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular and Christian Options, Paideia Press, 2012.) (MORE INFO)
by Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh
Those into philosophy might be interested in the following sequence of posts of Herman Dooyeweerd’s analysis of societal structures:
