When playing a game such as poker, you have limited information (you cannot see all the cards), other players will deceive you, and they intend to win. Game theory is about what decisions and strategies you should take to achieve a favorable outcome.

Games consist of three main areas: players, strategies, and outcomes. A basic form of a game is a two-person game where a win for one player means a loss for the other. Known as a zero-sum game, the outcome of this type of game adds up to zero—a win (+1) is offset by the other player’s loss (-1). These games are one hundred percent competitive with no co-operation between players.

In a positive-sum game, your win does not mean a total loss for your opponent and involves some co-operation as well as competition. In such games, all players benefit, the outcome being positive. The cliché “win-win situation” refers to a positive sum game where all players benefit from the outcome. Trade between two nations is a classic example of a positive-sum game.

Game theory started in mathematics, but expanded to other disciplines including psychology, economics, politics, evolutionary biology, warfare, and theology. We can conceive of most, if not all, interactions in terms of a game: people bidding on an ebay auction, the Cuban missile crisis, a couple arguing with each other, a job applicant negotiating a salary, airlines overbooking flights on the assumption that some passengers will not turn up, a criminal taking a plea agreement instead of a jury trial, a person sacrificing their life for the sake of another.

The ways games are structured have implications for relationships and transformation. A married couple may frame an argument as a zero-sum game where each maneuvers, like game pieces on a board, to achieve a winning position—a position that means a defeat for their partner. Seminaries, religions, churches, and para-churches may frame their institutional identity as zero-sum games. Rules and beliefs establish and dictate how and why the game is played and who may play it. If you play, you play to win. If you play, you may only play as long as you stick to the parochial system; otherwise you are out. Blogs—from religious to atheist—will make little progress in relational transformation if a zero-sum mentality demands winners and losers.

In these zero-sum games, a community builds a petty game with rules and beliefs that exclude a multitude of other realities, creating a system of thought that is placed above people and transforming relationships.

The most famous example in game theory is the Prisoner’s Dilemma devised by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. The basic idea of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is this: The police have arrested you and your partner-in-crime on suspicion of robbing a bank. Lucky for you, the prosecutor lacks sufficient evidence to convict. You and your friend, however, are locked in separate, isolated cells and the prosecutor comes to you with a few options:

• Confess and we will let you go free and put your friend behind bars for 15 years.

• Don’t confess and if your partner confesses we will put you in jail for 15 years.

• If you both confess, we will drop the penalty to 3 years.

• If neither of you talk, well, we have enough to convict you on a lesser charge and put you both away for 6 months.

What do you do? The dilemma is this: the rational choice is to confess, no matter what your friend does. If they do not confess, you go free. If they confess, you only get three years instead of fifteen. But here is the catch: if you both keep silent the jail time is even less—only six months instead of three years. Do you confess or stay silent, or in the language of game theory, do you defect or cooperate? In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the rational choice is to defect, but the best possible outcome for both of you is to cooperate and keep silent.

Cooperation needs a relational connection. To achieve the best possible outcome we need trust, but trust is vulnerable to exploitation. Do you trust your friend enough, because if you co-operate and they deflect, then you are behind bars for fifteen years? In this case, game theory underscores that trust and cooperation achieves the best outcome for everyone. The rational choice is not always the best. The relational choice is the best.

Game theorists have studied many variations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma including iterative cases. Most interactions in life are not once off. Instead of a one-off game, what happens when we have the opportunity to repeat the game a hundred times? What strategy should we now adopt? The answer was discovered in two experiments organized by the political scientist Robert Axelrod, author of the highly influential The Evolution of Cooperation, a book that opened with the question: “Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without central authority?” Axelrod invited game theorists in economics, psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, political science, mathematics, physics, and computer science to submit computer programs that would compete against each other in an iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario. What program would receive the highest score? One that was more willing to cooperate? One that defected all the time?

Axelrod describes some of the programs:

Massive retaliatory strike: cooperate at first, but after a defection, retaliate for the rest of the game.

Tester: this program tries to find out what you are like, so it attacks in the first move. If met with retaliation, it will cooperate for a while. Then it will defect again, just to see how much it can get away with.

Jesus: always cooperate

Lucifer: always defect

If Tester plays Massive retaliatory strike, they both do poorly. Tester defects on the first move and Massive retaliatory strike defects from them on.

If Lucifer plays Jesus, Lucifer wins.

Axelrod thought that the winning program would contain thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code. The mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport submitted the highest scoring program, and it was also one of the simplest, five lines of code, a tit-for-tat program, where co-operation was met with co-operation, and defection met with defection. Overall, the top ranking programs were all nice, and on average, the defector programs scored significantly lower.

Axelrod described the tit-for-tat program as nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. It is nice so it starts with co-operation. It retaliates to discourage the other player from continued defection. It forgives and quickly restores cooperation. It is clear in that it is not duplicitous; its actions are straight forward and easily interpreted, thus providing a basis for long-term cooperation. The one distinguishing feature of programs that did well versus those that did poorly, was being nice. In other words, start with trust and co-operation, and avoid unnecessary conflict. A nice player is never the first to defect and co-operates whenever the other player co-operates. Surprising, nice people finish first.

Tit-for-tat is the most successful strategy when the Prisoner’s Dilemma is played numerous times. You start with co-operation and basic trust. If the other player cooperates, you continue to cooperate. If they defect, then you respond with defection. The strategy punishes those who take advantage of other players’ trust and generosity. The strategy, however, also allows for a change of mind. After deflecting, your opponent may once again decide to co-operate with you. In tit-for-tat, you respond with cooperation.

To express these ideas in theological language, for an iterative game that achieves the best outcomes for all players, we need trust, forgiveness, and repentance. Trust is necessary for cooperation and as we cooperate we repeatedly send the message that we are trustworthy. In a repeated game, however, there will be failures by all players. Forgiveness is necessary, for it allows us to continue to play the game when a defector decides to cooperate. Repentance is necessary, for it allows us to change from defecting to cooperating. It turns out that forgiveness and repentance are even more important than first realized by game theorists. In the complicated world of relationships, signals can be misinterpreted. Perhaps a player intended to cooperate but her actions are misconstrued as a defection. A player can make a mistake or perhaps they just need a second chance. Does the game now have to continue with repeated retaliation? Here is where a small tweak optimizes the tit-for-tat program; named “generous tit-for-tat,” it will randomly throw in a forgiveness about ten percent of the time. Call it grace—an undeserved mercy that breaks a cycle of repeated defection.

Playing games that benefit all players depends on healthy relationships. If we are in relationship with other players, we are more likely to cooperate than defect. Relationships encourage a willingness to forgive and repent. Relationships temper our fear that we will be tricked, and relationships temper our greed that seeks outcomes advantageous to us while at the expense of other players.

The tit-for-tat strategy illustrates that a relational approach is far from being a sugary pushover. Unconditional pacifism is a losing strategy because psychopaths and con-artists are always scouting to exploit some unwary soul, softie, or sucker. A relational approach that includes trust, forgiveness, and repentance, also includes a credible threat of repercussion for defection. “If another person sins, rebuke that person; if there is repentance, forgive” (Luke 17:3). A relational approach will retaliate, for example, against the zero-sum games of patriarchy, racism, and other forms of bigotry. It starts with trust and co-operation, is quick to forgive, but will also punish defectors.

There is, however, a problem with a game repeated a finite amount of times. If you know the game is finite and is going to end after a hundred moves, then even after repeated cooperation, the rational strategy is to defect in the final move. Take the money and run—there is no retaliation because the game has ended. This suggests the importance of infinite games, games that continue indefinitely, where there is no end and therefore no temptation to defect at the end.

The religious scholar James Carse has developed this idea in Finite and infinite games: a vision of life as play and possibility. Carse distinguishes between two types of games: finite and infinite. There are substantial differences between the characteristics and goals of finite and infinite games. Carse writes, “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” A finite game ends when somebody wins, thus finite games need fixed boundaries and unchanging rules to decide who wins. Because of the boundaries of finite games, it is impossible to play an infinite game within a finite game. In contrast, infinite games are ongoing and have no fixed boundaries or rules. Thus for Carse, “Every move of an infinite player makes is toward the horizon. Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary. Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a new vision, a new range of possibilities.”

For Carse, the goal of players of finite games are to become powerful, entitled, Master Players, supremely competent in every detail of the game that they essentially play as if the game is already completed. And because a finite game always ends, finite players have to repeatedly play to prove they are winners. In a finite game, the last thing you want is surprise, whereas in an infinite game, surprise is a reason for continuing to play. An infinite game is fluid and open ended, and the reasons for playing an infinite game are not to become powerful or to win. The concern of infinite players is “not with power but with vision.”

Finite games are defined by their boundaries, whereas infinite games are defined by their horizon. Boundaries are fixed and clear, and one cannot move beyond a boundary. But in an infinite game the horizon is open-ended—it is a direction toward we move, a place we never reach, a journey always open to newness and surprise.

Is Christianity a finite or an infinite game? What should it be? We would be naïve to assume that there is one message of Christianity. In the church’s two thousand year history, people have expressed a multitude of different ideas about Jesus and different versions of Christianity.

It is possible to conceive of Christianity as a finite or an infinite game.

Christianity formulated as a finite zero-sum game: we win; everyone else loses. We are master players, essential to this grand game, a game that has a definitive conclusion resulting in a win for us, and a loss for everyone else. The game is one of good versus evil, us versus them. Our particular beliefs and rules establish fixed boundaries of the game, and distinguish us from other Christians and their games. You may join our game and play, but only if you accept the rules that structure and direct our game. The benefits include power, titles, solid explanations, fixed boundaries, solidarity with us, and a winning hand.

As a finite game, Christianity has had little difficulty aligning itself with patriarchy, slavery, racism, hate crimes, torture and death of infidels, and colluding with empires—Roman, Spanish, English, American. In each case, there are clear winners and losers.

If Christianity is setup as a megalomaniacal finite game, it is impossible to play an infinite game. By its nature, it excludes the possibility of the gospel story as an infinite game.

A vision of Christianity as infinite play: Jesus creates a new playground that plays fast and loose with the rules, dissolves boundaries and fixed beliefs, and opens new horizons of possibility. In an infinite game, the central themes of the gospel story—incarnation, life, death, resurrection—are articulated in ways that place people and relationships above the system. In Christ, there are no winners or losers—there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female (Gal 3:28). Jesus is not a master player but an infinite player who invites all to an infinite game by including the excluded and rebuking the excluders. Anyone can play, no titles are awarded, no winners are announced, and boundaries are replaced by a gospel horizon.

This infinite game is characterized by vision and openness, where beliefs and rules are continually rewritten in order to keep the game going. To put boundaries on an infinite game, destroys it and stops the game. There is no end of play, and if need be, infinite players will choose death over life in order for the game to continue.

The gospel story as an infinite game contrasts with the beliefs and rules of finite games. Beliefs are certain and bounded. Stories have development, surprises, twists, paradoxes, uncertainties, even contradictions. Beliefs often end the conversation. An infinite story invites further discovery, directs us to the horizon, continues the game, and reformulates the conversation.

If the story is a great pyramid of inspiration and awe, beliefs are limestone rocks dug out from the structure. Beliefs are not necessarily bad, we just need to recognize them for what they are—abstractions from the story, attempts to collate our understanding, pieces of rock dismantled from the magnificent structure. Sometimes these rocks are useful for constructing smaller buildings, but often people just throw them at others. Beliefs are ready tools to create finite or zero-sum games that leverage power over others, but if all we have is rocks, we have reduced the grand story to rubble and can no longer resonate with its openness, poetry, surprises, and vision.

There is an infinite game, an infinite story, which starts: in the beginning was the game maker, and the one who plays, and the one who invites others to join the game and continue the play.

“You have to know the truth before you can lie to yourself.”  (comment heard during a recent meeting of technology executives)

Humanity is a highly adaptive, extremely pragmatic species not satisfied with just survival.  We aspire to meaning and significance:  life, beauty, love.  We defy death.  We relentless pursue wisdom using tools that support our aspiration.

In a recent Edge conversation, “How Culture Drove Human Evolution”, Joseph Heinrich explores the linkage between culture and cognition.  He describes this linkage as “the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.”    I appreciate Heinrich’s insight that our cognitive abilities evolve to explicitly support cultural evolution – to process wisdom.

I consider science, art, vocation, community, and faith as interdependent tools for cultural exploration and innovation.  Culture is of course both means and end, so each of these tools individually and together are both means and end.  One can say that science progresses through invention and improvement (means) of its instruments both hardware (telescope) and models (theories/explanations) and that the goals (end) of science are the development of better theories, explanations and instruments.  Family (a form of community) is both means and end of cultural innovation.  Likewise in faith, I believe so that I may believe.  But the interdependence of these tools and the fact that they are all leveraged and practiced through a common brain (or at least a common seven billion brains today), suggest that they serve (a la Heinrich) a common cultural evolutionary impulse.

A number of interesting implications may derive from this approach to wisdom.

•  The cultural framing of information/knowledge suggests a pragmatic approach towards “objective” reality.  On the one hand, our goals are to flourish within a context and these contexts have presumed realities and consequences.  Yet our appreciation of these contexts will always be cognitively, culturally, situationally, and socially constrained.  We discipline ourselves to relativize these constraints just enough to allow innovation to occur.  I have to leverage scientific tools of skepticism, and shared chains of evidence/proof in order to break out of theoretical stasis to allow new explanations, but despite these disciplines, paradigm shifts are still difficult.  The greater the social community invested in “states of wisdom” the greater the tensions restraining innovation, but, likewise, as implicit tensions increase between context and explanation, i.e. things not working, the greater the demand for and openness to invention.  These dynamics apply across all tool sets: science, art, vocation, community and faith.

• Do we need all of these tools?  Doesn’t science provide the only necessary tool for building improved cultural wisdom?  Isn’t art a primitive way to tell stories that science can tell much more effectively as a set of mathematical expressions?  Can’t machines become the “practitioners” of science, guaranteeing livelihood without human vocation?  Is family necessary in transhuman existence?  Can’t belief in science replace the need for religion?  The problem is that all of these tools are currently encoded into our cognition.  Science will not replace faith although one could imagine that scientism could become religion.  Such a religion would continue to rely on the cognitive tools of faith in order to acquire, store, process and transmit wisdom.

• We “know” through analogies, stories, metaphors and models.  This is true rationally and tacitly.  Metaphor is both reductive – we reflect a subset of our sensed reality in terms of our existing cultural knowledge, and heuristic — we hypothesize and explore discontinuities, newness.  Models and realities are not the same — models are pragmatic efforts to navigate (predict) realities toward our aspirations.  Today, every tool of culture uses the same seven billion brains to evolve wisdom.  Every tool uses analogies, stories, metaphors and models.  Science may use mathematical models, while faith may use saint archetypes.  These are cognitively analogous.

• Culture is experienced as complex intersecting ecosystems that cohere, collapse and re-cohere across multiple dimensions in continual innovation.  Culture is also experienced as engagement and belief – practice, imitation, celebration.  Many of these beliefs are basic, we assume them without inspection, but basic beliefs change all the time.

•  Some may argue that only certain tools are needed for exploring certain objects of knowledge.  I question this.  When we posit the “reality”, i.e. a context to be experienced and navigated, of gravity or of gospel we should expect to bring our full faculties – all of our cognitive/cultural tools to the game.  All of these tools are helping us build wisdom concerning these “realities” that are intended to help us navigate towards the future.  This is implicit in the interdependence of tools.  I am not arguing that a particular set of theories, relationships, vocational skills, artistic conventions or beliefs necessarily moves wisdom forward.   We need scientific, relational, vocational, artistic, and faith tools to develop culture and wisdom.  Scientific wisdom building/culture innovation leverage a particular set of strategies for collaborative model development and falsification.  Yet it also relies on vocational expertise (skills and coordination), community building, creative/intuitive theory/model innovation and communication, and basic beliefs, values and aspirations.

• Individual human minds and collective cultures can fail.  Cognitive coherence depends on being grounded in context with workable strategies for engaging that context.  I have a basic belief that gospel is embedded in the universe in a way that informs and enables human aspiration.  I believe that all human cognition/culture(s) perceives and responds to this gospel.  I believe that when human culture rejects gospel, humanity will unravel – consciousness, cognition and culture will lose coherence.  The issue here is not assent to a particular set of explanations of this gospel.   Explanations will continue to evolve, but the gospel context underlies human culture.  Lots to unpack here, so more to come.

My own crisis of belief plays out in several contexts. When religious and scientific communities frame their explanations in ways that demand skepticism towards the other I think we experience a lose-lose double-bind.  When faith communities define rules of inclusion and exclusion and allocate privileges based on those rules, compassion is compromised.  Finally, I am skeptical that “belief” makes me a better person than my neighbor.  I am fairly good at cognitive dissonance.  I engaged these concerns as interesting theoretical and theological discussion for most of my life while being careful not to compromise my self-identity as an insider.  But as many of those whom I care about no longer chose to “play the game,” my exploration became more pragmatic, urgent and personal.

In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong warns us that religion fails in two ways.  When faith becomes assent to a particular set of propositions, absolutely knowable, then religion becomes particularized, rooted in a given culture and context, reduced to an idol, and too brittle to morph with the progress of history, culture and generations.  Idols break.  On the other hand, when religious ideas are abstracted, made too theoretical and philosophical, become mythologies, they fail to engage us. We do not invest.

As I have been struggling with a way to think and speak about gospel in a way that engages us here in our 21^st century I am very aware of the problem that Dr. Armstrong describes.  If the gospel is for the select few, to whom true knowledge has been revealed, it becomes an incredible idolatry, a game board on which a few play out a shared fiction, irrelevant for most of the world. On this game board, like in a movie, we can suspend disbelief for a while, even for a lifetime.  On the other hand, if the gospel (incarnation, suffering, redemption, and spirit) becomes just a set of metaphors for attempting to invest meaning in a set of biochemical processes, then why bother.  We can share a few moments of wistfulness, how beautiful, how poignant, how self-soothing, but then back to the rat race on whose backs we are just fleas.  Paul says it well.  “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; … If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” 1 Corinthians 15:17-19.

So, what is the gospel I seek?  I am inspired by the idea that the human enterprise is the overcoming of suffering, evil and dealth to fully express love, life and beauty.  I hope/believe that this human enterprise is both response to and empowered in the gospel.  I hope/believe that the dimensions of the Jesus story: incarnation, suffering, resurrection, and spirit are powerful explanations of the embeddedness of gospel in this universe.  But, I suspect that I think way too small about all of this.  The New Testament writers often talk about gospel as “already, not yet” – a gospel that was real in the past, is becoming real in every moment today, and an anticipated realization of the eschaton – the horizon of the future.  A sense of the space/time scale of the universe tells us that we have barely begun our knowing of gospel.

Jesus said “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.  Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.” Matthew 13:44-46.

I want to hunt gospel (beauty, love, life) with all of you along roads, worlds, and futures unknown.  You in?

But aren’t there good examples of exclusive relationships? Yes, of course. Marriages, parent-child relationships, close friends—all by their nature are exclusive. The Dunbar number suggests that the number of social relationships we can sustain is around 150 (never mind what Facebook may tell us!). In choosing some friends, we exclude others.

What I am concerned about is something different—an exclusive mentality that leads to indignation, shunning, meanness, oppression, violence, and even murder.

Again, Christianity’s record is sullied. Common examples include the Crusades, Inquisition, and witch-hunts. But there are many others. For example, Philip Jenkins in “Jesus Wars” mentions an even greater bloodshed that occurred between Christians in the 5th and 6th centuries as they fought over doctrinal differences. Even today, many of us know pastors and professors who were fired because they came to accept modern science, or happened to disagree with some archaic point of doctrine formulated 400 years ago, or decided that women could become pastors.

The reasons for exclusion can be almost anything: a person or group’s class, race, sex, physical features, theology, religion, clothes, interests, morals, political views, sexual orientation, education, lifestyle, car, or way of talking. We can exclude someone in order to control their behavior—until they shape up, tidy up, or wake up. We can exclude others because we fear intimacy. We can exclude and shame people when we think they are making us look bad. We can continue to exclude a person who is already an outsider, so that we remain with the “in-crowd.” We can exclude other communities to further our “community,” which provides us access to money, power over others, status, identity, and other resources.

In fact, if we are looking for a reason to exclude, to separate us from the “herd,” there is always one available. Often they are the smallest and insignificant difference. Freud spoke about the “narcissism of the small difference.” The smallest of differences are often the basis for hostility and forming exclusive clubs.

The great irony, however, of exclusive clubs is that they are based on pretense. The only way people can do this is through pretense—a form of self-deception. Pretend that men are superior to women, Serbs to Croats, Whites to Blacks, rich to poor, CEOs to workers, Americans to Iranians, Calvinists to . . . everyone else.

There is probably some spiritual law that the more exclusive the group, the more pretense is needed to establish and maintain the group, and thus the more self-righteous and immoral it becomes.

Can the gospel speak to tribalism? Not only are there are substantial resources in the gospel story to challenge pretense, there is also an inbuilt critique of insider/outsider mentality seen in the life of Jesus. If there was one thing that riled up people, it was Jesus’s relationship with outsiders. It is difficult to read and interact with the accounts of Jesus without noticing his relational integrity with and love for outsiders—for people on the fringes of society, for people whom society shunned and excluded. We can find a similar example in Paul as he used the gospel story to break down the wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile. This is one of the topics I’ll be covering in this book project. We are looking for more supporters so please consider joining us in this ongoing conversation. The opportunity to support and join the project will be available until Friday evening, Aug 31.

Sin has a varied history. The way people have understood sin has changed over time. Views on sin have morphed according to the culture and what made sense at that time.

In this new book I’m writing, I want to consider sin as “relational failure” and how this approach can speak meaningfully to people in the 21st century. There are many advantages to understanding sin this way. Some examples: viewing sin as relational failure eliminates a common split between so-called “individual transformation” and “social transformation.” Sin, in this sense, can be relational failure in marriage, relational failure with the world and its resources, or relational failure with “outsiders.” Sin as relational failure, keeps us from the easy attribution of the other person as the “sinner.” Understanding sin as relational failure exposes a legal understanding of sin as inadequate. It is quite easy to follow a set of rules and be mean about it. It also indicts those that use religion or theology to sabotage or destroy relationships. Heretics are now the ones who have used their theology to promote themselves and exclude others.

If you are interested in supporting this project, please see more about it here.

The book I’m writing will look at how the life and message of Jesus can have transformative value in the 21st century. Part of the goal is to answer a question that people now ask: is there anything that Christianity can give us that we can’t get elsewhere? Here is the link if you are interested in supporting this project.

The incarnation meme seeks to provide a solution for the problem of God.  Any god worthy of  the name is transcendent.  In transcendence, god is unknowable, indescribable.  We are left only with agnosticism — an analogical feeling that there must have been a creator, but we can have no knowledge or even awareness of such.  Yet our experience of life is full of the mystery of transcendence.  As we live, create, and love, we are awed by something to which we give the name, god.  This god is immanent:  present in everything, known in everything. The pantheist simply says that god is everything, emergent from the processes of the universe.  Yet despite our growing knowledge of the scope of the universe, there is something fundamentally limited and  un-godlike in pantheist memes.  The incarnation meme invokes a way out of this.  It describes a singularity in which union is established, in which the transcendent God becomes immanent.   It suggests that the universe is only the universe by incarnation, by Christ.  It is the incarnate, resurrected one who creates, sustains, redeems and is known in every moment of space-time (Hebrews 1:2).

The suffering and resurrection memes are tightly paired.  The suffering of Jesus provides a context and initiates a conversation for addressing the problem of evil.  While it does not address the origins of evil, it fully acknowledges the evil incumbent in all life and in all living.  It posits death as the expression and consequence of evil.  The resurrection meme then proposes a solution to this problem.  In Christ there is a life, a new creation in which evil has no place and death has lost its sting.  In this view, life, beauty and love have a meaning, a validity, an expression, a continuity, a realization that explodes our current frame and perspective.  The problem of evil is fundamental to our contemplation of the meaning of life and existence.  Some suggest that there is no evil, simply a consequence of entropy.  For others, it is simply an implication of the struggle for survival.  The gospel memes of suffering and resurrection suggest that there is a solution for evil, and that death is not the end of life, love and beauty, while not making light in any sense of the existential reality of evil and suffering.

It is in the “In Christ” meme that the gospel impacts our own sense of place and meaning.  Incarnation suggests that the spirit makes Jesus immanent to every moment of my existential experience of life, beauty and love.  I walk through my own encounter with evil and suffering, internal and external, with Jesus.  I find new life in the resurrection.  Union with Christ and its closely linked memes of the spirit, are at the heart of existential Christian belief and life. The gospel is not a game at which a select few are invited to play, and effective optimization (following and not following of rules) results in even fewer winners.  Rather, the spirit/Jesus is intimately present and engaged with each one of us in each moment and story of our lives.  Our story takes place in, around, and through Jesus’ story.

In future posts we will revisit these memes repeatedly.  Here we simply try to provide an overview that will serve to ground other discussions.  In the previous post we discussed a pervasive sense of wisdom.  It becomes evident that the memes of incarnation, suffering and resurrection are foundational to our search for wisdom.  To rephrase a proverb, the seeking of gospel is the beginning of wisdom.  These memes will also become the context for our next post on the crisis of unbelief, where we will discuss how seeking occurs in the tension between belief and unbelief.

Technical descriptions of memes as units of culture are controversial.  But for my purposes, memes seem a useful way to talk about the way human experiences and explanations of gospel are culturally encoded, refined and transmitted.  I like the analogy to the idea of “treasures” invoked in the biblical parable from Matthew 13:52 (NIV) “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”  This parable itself represents a wisdom meme:  wisdom always evolves organically embracing both continuity and discontinuity with the past.

Many think of truth as something that is absolute, unchanging, describable, knowable, and therefore authoritative/unquestionable.  I think that the best we have available to us is wisdom: a practical, evolving body of memes that provide useful explanations and stories of our life and experience.  My relativity of thought is not a reflection of the reality of gospel, but of the nature of human knowing.  During the course of our discussions, I will be seeking old and new memes that continue to provide successful strategies for explaining, confessing, and living gospel.  I will be seeking wisdom.

In my “First Thoughts” post, I reflected on the reality of the gospel impacting the universe at every moment, place, and scale.  In a future post, I will touch on the implications of our modern understanding of space and time for theology.  For now, I will simply say that if gospel impact is pervasive, then we need to expect wisdom concerning this impact to derive universally and particularly.  We should seek wisdom everywhere.

1.  We anticipate and aspire to the new creation.  In Christ and like Christ we embody beauty, peace, justice, grace, hope, love, the fruits and excellences of the spirit.
2. We observe Christ in suffering – he lays aside his rights, even his life for us.  We suffer with Christ, laying aside our demands, our lives for the sake of those we are given to love.  This is love.
3. We seek wisdom in dialectic with traditions of faith responding to gospel:  in scripture, in history, in community (“old and new treasures”).
4. We expect that the spirit gives and nurtures life, love, beauty and wisdom in every age, in every place, all of humanity receiving/rejecting Gospel.  We become aesthetes of gospel in all humanity.
5. We seek wisdom observing all of creation (life the universe and everything) aspiring/groaning toward beauty, peace, justice, grace, and love.  We leverage every tool of relationship, knowledge, and stewardship in pursuit of this wisdom … logic, science, art, practice, presence.

There are lots of memes being invoked in this list.  The Christ meme unfolds in dimensions of incarnation, suffering/community, and resurrection/new creation.   The spirit meme expresses as Christ/Gospel instantiated universally and particularly (ps 104:30 “… when you send your spirit they are created”.  I hint at the “in Christ” meme; another take on the spirit meme.  Wisdom is a meme itself (which we may contrast with a law meme).  All of this will need to be unfolded in future discussions.

I think the acquisition, reconciliation and application of wisdom, the kind of wisdom that answers the question “how shall we then live?”, is a thoroughly human enterprise, perhaps “the” human enterprise.  It is task to be shared among all of us.

A final thought:  Humanity does wisdom/memes through storytelling.  We know through stories.

The outline of the book will follow the blog posts that I did last year on relational transformation. Our plan is to turn this and other material into a book. But more than that, we would love you to be a part of the process.

You can find all the details on kickstarter at:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1220030898/chasing-the-wind-the-quest-for-relational-transfor

I especially hope that you can be a part of giving feedback on the material pre-publication.

The campaign to raise support will run for 30 days and will end August 31st.

I am a seeker of Jesus. The mystery of Jesus, expressed in the powerful memes of incarnation, suffering and resurrection evokes gospel. I believe that this reality, this mystery is the crux of humanity and of humanness. Not can be, but is. The gospel is reality … like gravity.

For much of my life, I have done my seeking within the constraints of conservative Christian communities. But my children’s generation often does not see gospel in many of the mores, dogma, exceptionalisms, and exclusions of these communities. I can see why. They live in times where science, technology and society expose inadequate explanations, unquestioned fundamentalisms, and in particular, entrenched abuses of power and influence.

But, if the gospel is real, and its impacts are “gravity-like” pervasive across all human experience, then surely we can make common cause to seek new explanations, confession and service. Like all wisdom, these new explanations will be a considered mix of new and old. So we should seek this insight both in the past and in the future. And we should seek it in common with all of humanity.

I want to invite you to participate with me in a process of assessment, query and discovery with the goal to find ways to explain, confess, express and seek gospel that make sense and inspire hope in this 21st century. Practically I hope that this process will represent an update to a brief personal theology/confession that I have reworked every five years or so. The 2008 version can be found at gospelmemes.pkress.net.  In the past this document has only had to stand up to my own scrutiny. Given that my own life experience is continuing to change, I expect my own critique to be harsher than ever. But, I also hope that by conducting this query/discovery cycle in public I will be able to better understand how the concerns and explanations that I grapple with resonate with the rest of you, and how your perspectives can more deeply inform my own contemplation. Ultimately, I am hoping to find a language for gospel seeking that will resonate across generations, cultures and faiths.

I will be attempting to pursue this discussion as a series of short interactions. In upcoming posts I will reflect on …

1. Co-opting memes:  Wisdom
2. Crisis of belief
3. Cogency:  Science and faith
4. Incarnation and universe
5. Universalism and games
6. Resurrection and humanity
7. The problem of power
8. Dynamics of corruption