Short Note on the Theoretical Physics of Grace

(with an application to political systems)

Rev. Douglas Olds

December 12, 2024 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics informs us that entropy degrades every closed system--that the entropy (or disorder) of an isolated [closed] system increases over time, meaning the universe, as a closed whole, is moving towards a state of maximum disorder.

In such a state, only the constancy of renewal—the earth’s essence—from the open system of sun, spirit, rain, new generations of vitality and genius of language and art can keep the church from closing its doors to renewal and providence. For if it does, it becomes at first chaotic, then tepid, then saltless and insipid. What the Shema calls us earth imagers (Trustees) of the divine to: the endless expansion of purpose, empathy, intelligence/logos, and kinesthetic schema (soul). And teleology emerges from the renewing earth and is recognized as its essence that becomes part of the human essence of repair. In this, teleology is attended as a Trinitarian feature, a union of the human trustee and the earth divine imager of grace's heart. Teleology manifests the operation of summed spiritual inputs as the First Law of Thermodynamics. In such a case of the operation of these two laws of thermodynamics, the possibility of either historical recurrence or general--rather than generational cohort--decadence is metaphysically negated.

Teleology can either be denied—and resisted as a force instead to wallow in walled-off, separate, static definitions of “nature" attributed and tied to physicality and position[1]--or

cast in secular terms in neoliberalism’s updating of mammon: the moral horror of consequentialist “thinking,” (non-empathetic and inconsiderate of moral claims and duties—the disparagement of “moralism”),  aligned with the warrant of ignorance by bourgeois anonymity, crowd mirroring, celebrity-careerist vapidity, “bro-sports speak” and  “I think you’re pretty, do you think I am?” that never goes anywhere but to serve misleading appetites for security and affirmation-- 

or it can become part of an reformed awareness, an alignment, a caring attendance. This is the crux and touchstone of humanities portraying character development by the Golden Rule. In theological terms, grace is the eternal and infinite reaching into and leavening closed systems (institutions and self-styled idols) to reform them and so to sustain the creation by turning outward to heal neighbor. It axiomatically follows, as God is becoming all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28 etc.) , that physics must reflect the metaphysical primacy (not supersession) of grace. But currently obscured by the operation of justice that unstops the flow of Providential grace. The integration of physics into metaphysics becomes evident to our consciousness in Christ manifesting God's conative will. And his Church thereby Reforms by grace, beginning with the Church and is Always Reforming (Gratia reformata semper reformanda).  The Protestant call for the church and broader society is to pursue spiritual expansion, extension of perfecting ideals, and  rejuvenating deinstitutionalization as generations process.  By this the earth is on the path to repair, new generations of humanity redeemed, and through which eternity is temporally launched, peopled, mirrored, and won.

So that as material life reveals entropy-dissipating processes, then it follows that grace is its recognizable Spiritual manifestation. Trinitarian metaphysics of sacrificial other-directedness and physical accommodation and feeding reveals how life is sustained and extended by the conation of grace: the will to sustain and carry and launch and flourish and ramify through substance by expressions of grace and its aligning, taxic nature. Activated by human alignment, grace breaks (into) and reforms (re-souls) closed off, isolating, and toxic entities into their created potentials. So that entropy, that vexing feature of trying to live without work or obligation to others, is rather the nature of eternity that essentializes the human role to bridge what is passing away (by entropy) to what will, by our applied conation of heart and service, endure and expand with the cosmos. Entropy, then, Christologically understood, is a substance that transcends metaphor to provide the enduring grounds to living hope by its disspation.[2]

APPLICATION:

Power structures, particularly those in closed 'inner circle' cultures, function as entropy-spreading systems. They strive to maintain their position in a social order by exploiting subordinates, a practice doomed to failure as prophesied in scriptural teachings about ethical downfall. To enclose and sustain power, inner circle culture is an entropy-spreading system that climbs mountains on the backs of subordinates and is thus the palette of the prophetically goat-doomed. As David French notes (NYT 12/7/23), its religious forms are marked by certainty, ad hominem “ferocity, and solidarity (loyalty + confidentiality)” to maintain an elite’s control of narratives, especially those that privilege their “power” at the expense of enemy outsiders, esp. traitors to this culture. Censorship is ever the scandal of new categories of ethnicity, as inner rings try to control debate and separate wheat from chaff, friends from enemies. In this, they close off avenues for grace (Hebrews 13:2): they are doomed by closure. John 3:20.

In the same way, contemporary geopolitical revanchism is certain to fail as its actors propose that ancient civilizations should assert distinct, ethnic sovereignty under authoritarian leadership against the universalism ("monotone") of the liberal and representative democratic West. Assertive ethnocentricism disguised as a multipolar world, where global powers, re-rooted in exclusive traditions and histories, become overtly imperialist are doomed on global stage by reason of their retreat from individual openness. Instead, their attempt cannot succeed to retrieve a collective idea of ethnic closure to ground their territorial expansionist intentions. The Thousand-Year Reich lasted perhaps 1/2 generation, and such experiments may have a similar temporal limit.

The ideology of expansion rooted in closure—whether territorial, historical, or ethnic—is a profound metaphysical contradiction. It attempts to fuse degrading forces of entropy with principles of creative vitality—such as liberation and the light of genius—which it cannot sustain, generate, contain, or deny. A stagnating and stultifying militarist, academic or priestly hierarchy, clinging to ancestral retrieval and the values of the dead,[3] inevitably strives to suppress openness to innovation and the energies of creative renewal. Yet, such vitality, driven by generational change and spiritual insight, will inevitably break through at the Spirit's appointed time, dissolving the constraints of closure attempting to avoid the future and its heralding a future where human potentialities of every citizen is welcomed and actuated.

--

We come to recognize, by the Spirit of Pentecost, that an ethnos/nation is a language group (Acts 2:1-12) not a tribal structure, so to discern political lies & propaganda function as ethnic “treason.” Beware the ad hominem sleight, redirecting questions of intent (logos) into disputes about “numbers.”  And the “spirit of perpetual, unrepentant, anger-filled derision towards dissent:” revilement of the Kingdom of God, to be avoided. (1 Cor 5:11, 6:10). Concocting enemies is the Machiavellian proclivity, mode, and ploy of [Schmittian] religious politics to justify strong man saviors and warrant their violence.

Note:

[1] Used to explore ontological and foundational questions, the idea of organicism is the central feature of self-focusing or group-sustaining systems attempting to avoid mechanistic determinism and outside influence defined as decadence. When applied to the divine 'nature,' as Bavinck (Eglinton, 2014 978-0567417480) did—according with Schelling's speculations—it conceptualizes divinity as a series of interdependent wholes. These wholes resemble living organisms or are represented by evolving institutions, sustained through internal and external interactions (homeostasis). However, in theological contexts, such application is errant and leads to tragic outcomes and inhumane applications. It contradicts the doctrines of divine sufficiency and impassability, ignores the ontological precedence of divine existence over material causation, and misinterprets the Trinitarian will through a Hegelian lens. As it is concerned with self and friends, and so self-aware and -defined rather than other-directed to outreach and care, assisting Providence in Creation initiated in, if not reducible to, metaphysical conation (see Olds 2023, esp. Appendix 1). All else speculation into the divine being are formalizing conceits of the finite human mind.

Organicism's application to practical theology involves hegemonic flattening of diverse communities into the monolithic claims of self-sustaining institutionalism,, that idolatry which ever obscures individual and minority voices and perspectives of potentiality and genius within these communities, rendering history to a backward search for continuity and grounding the hegemonizing pursuit of "retrieval of orthodoxy." Organicism is thus a signal feature of determinist programs for social ordering and chained being. In other words, a closed historical system of collectivization.  Collectivation based on form rather than energizing cycles and launch by the Holy Spirit. Absent that, any  dogma or coercive order of form and formalism is entropic.

[2] How contrary this is to Carl Schmitt's false and deadening political theology in the Concept of the Political, part 3:

"The fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man leads, just as does the distinction of friend and enemy, to a categorization of men and makes impossible the undifferentiated optimism of a universal conception of man."

Enemy categorization is a closed and therefore degrading and decadent process, and its politics are doomed.

[3] See the discussion of historical recurrence and typology of form  in my review of a History of Religion(s) approach to biblical texts, particularly my extended discussion of Mircea Eliade. Both in terms of metacriticism and of phenomenology, Nietzschean and  determining "historicism" of recurrence are ideological systems of closure. They thus opposed to the dynamism and flow of telic grace valorized in this essay. So too organicism noted in footnote 1, a paradigm of Bavinck's systematics that encloses the divine inside material collectives and predicaments which suggests a hardening of Rahner's Rule, closing off the transcendent Trinity from an analysis of economic operations to focus on the destiny of orders. 

It may also be argued that categorical logic imposes closure on its predicates, thereby favoring form derived from historical modeling rather than telic energy encountered in contemporary experience. For a more dynamic appreciation of otherness and teleology, those who resist closure but from different angles include Gadamer’s hermeneutics [which author misreads Herder and the Gospel of John from a Kantian-Platonist lens on Logos], Levinas’s ethics of otherness, and Charles Taylor’s retrieval of transcendence [itself enclosing when concerned with form. However, his more recent work reframing poetry in ethical extension and immanence suggests an emerging awareness of ambient forces and conative vectors]. Taylor and Herder are waystations in encountering claims that form--e.g. Balthasar/Hart's idea of beauty--stabilizes or even institutionalizes  grace (or James K.A. Smith's idea that love liturgically orders nature, perhaps risking making the present moment contingent on preferred eschatological forms--a transcendentalizing of imagination and ritual venue or artifact--rather than its grace aligning, enabling energies of present-moment immanence. Neglecting to shift from form to lived immediacy).

See a forthcoming essay on this blog of the influence of Kant and Kantianism on enclosing logic and closed categorical, systematizing epistemology that prioritizes ego freedom tethered (as a prioris) to self-derived choice of ends and means, thereby accelerating philosophy's turn from virtues of accountability that reached its peak in Heideggerian existentialism. Philosophies in this trajectory emphasize autonomy and existential self-creation. For Kant, this represents a move away from traditional forms of accountability tied to divine or communal norms, reflecting the Enlightenment's broader rejection of traditionalism. While Kant’s categorical imperative attempted to reconcile autonomy with universal ethical norms, it ultimately prioritizes ego freedom inside the primacy of cognition rather than the heart's will, making the former the center of human essence rather than the latter as from the Shema (Deut 6:4-9). 

The Shema’s kerygma is God's love literarily double-helixed to the heart. The mind waits its strategic function in and after the New Testament's realization (Matt. 22:37) of the Jeremiah (31) covenant of heart in the life of Jesus. The heart's intent--conation-- is the essence of humanity realizing its metaphysical potential. It places accountability to God's heart at the center of human essence, prioritizing relational and ethical dimensions over abstractions of epistemology as absolute or transcendentalizing. By rooting human essence in a responsive and accountable will oriented toward divine justice, the Shema challenges frameworks like Kant’s, which risk reducing ethical action to intellectual exercises shaped by strategic and ego-determined programs-- his focus on a "kingdom of ends." Unlike Kant’s categorical imperative, which seeks universality in abstraction and thus favors calculation more than immediacy of responsibility to the moment, the Shema’s ethical orientation demands a lived accountability that is relational, embodied, and responsive to the demands of divine justice in the present moment--where the will has taken on the training of almost a reflexive virtue of loving duty.

 For Heidegger, existentialism's cognitive framing absent the heart's accountability to justice arises from a focus on the certainty of death, which relativizes the necessity of ethics by framing it within individual authenticity.  Heidegger's relativizing of ethics wavers between poles of negation of universality to that of situational ethics, or the outright rejection of ethical accountability to the demand of existence. In either case, Heidegger’s concept of Dasein roots authenticity in the a priori of one’s unique existence--its place and position-- defined by the march toward death, and any self-identified commonalities [mitsein] thereof that might facultatively and situationally bring considerations of Sorge (caring), though Sorge remains bound to individual existence and lacks a universal ethical foundation.