I was a kid once and I enjoyed playing. Early on I played with most anything, I suppose, though I can't remember much of it. Such playing is what kids do, after all. After playing with the everyday objects of the house or barn, I remember playing with tinker toys, electrical wires and plugs, mechanical objects, train and erector sets, radios and other electronic items, and stereo equipment and speakers. I also remember playing with numbers, working out batting, slugging and earned run averages, and speculating about big league home runs per time at bat as a function of parks parks and average yearly ERA. (It was hard to get baseball information in those days. There has only been a functional internet for less than half my life, and I lived over 100 miles away from a real library.)
I don't suppose my play was too much different than that of others who lived on Midwest farms in the fifties and sixties. When not playing with toys or numbers, I played outside. Like many of my classmates, I thought about such things as the differences between the drawbar and PTO horsepower of various tractors, horsepower as a function of RPMs, and fuel consumption as a function of power. Anything useful on the farm could be thought about as having a set of measurable properties, and one could, in principle, do quantitative comparisons with machines that other kids' dads had. (In those days there were no farms operated by women alone, though many women farmed with husbands and spent their days in toil both inside and outside the house.) All of this thinking was just plainly fun.
Some who reflect now on the nature of play like to point out that one of its essential qualities of is purposelessness. By this they mean that a defining feature of play is that one does not play for some other end. The play is not an instrument one employs to accomplish something else. Play has no extrinsic value to achieve another thing. If by this they mean that 'purpose' cannot be predicated of something constituted as an end-in-itself -- play thus having intrinsic value -- I would concur, although I am chary flatly to say that on all occasions a thing must lack purpose if it fails to be a means to an end.
Indeed, what can have more purpose than a game? Of course, it does not matter ultimately if the team wins or loses. Whether the Vikings ever win the Super Bowl -- or even play in it again -- really does not effect anything in the grown-up world except possibly the micro economy around the park. But, of course, Vikings fans of all ages find all kinds of meaning in Vikings wins and loses, and even at times seemingly derive some purpose for their own lives in the winning or losing of the team. (One might reflect here more deeply about the nature of play in religion and sports, but this would take this post too far afield.)
In the late spring, summer and autumn in the upper Midwest, people head out to pasture-like places on hot days to hit a little white ball around, hoping ultimately to get it in a small hole 300 yards away from where they first hit it. The game has no extrinsic purpose for most, because very few ever can derive income and ultimately a living from it. Yet people play golf, in fact they spend money to do so. The game seems completely full of meaning and purpose, although the world is not changed in its playing.
Different people like different kind of games; they simply play differently. Moreover, people play differently at different times in their lives. Looking back on my life, I now understand that what I always simply wanted to do as my playing changed is somehow to keep playing. Erector sets were displaced by electronics, and then by something that still remains a passion for me: music. While I liked sports, I must admit that I was not athletically gifted. This was not true of music. With music I could actually play, and even play better as the years went by. Moreover, as the Pythagoreans knew, music is comprised of numbers!
At one time in my life, in fact, I thought it might be possible to derive income from such music playing. But it became apparent to me that the economics of this was not likely sustainable. I did not want to teach high school music, and it was clear that playing music professionally was a very serious matter indeed. In fact, while there does remain some play in musical endeavors when one does it seriously, much of the play simply has to be given up in perfecting one's craft. It seemed clear to me then that as the gravity of one's playing increases. one gradually ceases playing. This suggests that part of our the criterion for the application of the word 'play' is that one does not have to do the activity in question. I don't have to play Bud Powell jazz on the piano, and this not-having-to-play is an essential feature of that play.
Play thus has no external compulsion. When we begin to experience the pull of duty to the craft, our play soon becomes work. After all, training for boxing matches and practicing to play a recital are very serious matters. One has to work most of the time every day, if one is going to box professionally or play Bach's Goldberg Variations in concert.
I never really knew what I wanted to do when I grew up, but I knew somehow that I had to keep playing. In college, I didn't play in my math or science courses -- there were many reasons for that including the Viet Nam War -- but I did play some music, and towards the end of my undergraduate days played by both reading, and reflecting upon, books. Unfortunately, I did not seriously read until I was almost done with college. Following college there was, of course, serious work to do on the farm. However, I found that I was able to continue to play by learning Latin, studying mathematics and physics, reading Schopenhauer, and, more frequently, reading theology.
I must admit to coming to theology somewhat late. The German Lutheran pastor of my childhood church taught us in confirmation class how very serious this all was. Maybe it is because I had thought that theology was work that I did not read it seriously until I was 24 years old. My first two books were Elert's Structure of Lutheranism and Tillich's Systematic Theology. Both captivated me, and the latter seemed to me to be true play.
Tillich had put everything together brilliantly. It was like he had a giant erector set and he had fabricated an enormous building with pulleys, shafts and worm gears turning in beautiful ways. Moreover, the subject matter seemed quite disconnected from making a living. How better could one happily spend one's spare time? Why not read theology? How much fun could a human have? Clearly, reading Tillich was more fun and more engaging than watching the Vikings. And the subject matter was important because the building Tillich was constructing included the fabric of life itself. What better way to spend one's time than to do read and write theology? Here is something one could do that was important in itself without thereby having to scheme as to how to make a living through the doing of it.
But a funny thing happened to me on the way to finding meaning and purpose in the play of theology. I wanted more time to read theology, but in order to put oneself in a position to be able to spend one's time in such theological activity, I found that I had to study theology seriously, and hence move into an occupation more closely aligned to theology than was farming. And now came the fateful decision. Why not do a Ph.D. and thereby get to read, write and teach theology the rest of one's life?
This seemed to make sense. One could be a pretty good thinker, thought I, without becoming merely a professional thinker, without having to read and write 12 hours a day like the poor pianist memorizing the Goldberg Variations for recital. (Of course, Glen Gould seemingly simply played them.) One could, I thought, somehow still do theology playfully, one could do it in the cracks and fissures of the other professional activities of life, i.e., the teaching and research of the college or university campus. Moreover, being on faculty to think the big questions of man and women might just help a few students think those questions as well. (I was familiar with Wittgenstein's insight that good philosophical thinking allows us to get over the disease of philosophy, but I did not think it applied to theology.) And so was hatched the idea to get an income that is connected to the play of theology.
But life always interrupts play. Life is serious, after all. My life had veered into the play of business and capital formation, but the latter activities did not remain ultimately playful. And there was very serious work to do with respect to Lutheran church bodies, particularly the then nascent Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). It was my experience in the latter that ultimately propelled me to give up play almost entirely, and to work to establish The Institute of Lutheran Theology (www.ilt.edu).
While there has been some play in the last years in envisioning and implementing structures, there has been mostly work. One needed to be vigilant in budgeting, in developing constituencies, in marketing, in production, and in the building of a functional management structure. We have worked hard, and we hope we have successfully founded an institution that can serve future generations of those wanting seriously to study the great texts of the western tradition from a Lutheran perspective. We take the Bible and Lutheran Confessions extremely seriously, but we do not forget the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon, and we realize that meaning and truth in our time must be ultimately located in the playful fusion of horizons between our time and the time of these classic texts.
Now that the Institute has been formed, and my businesses have been built, I find that I am at a new time in my life, a time that might be a time to play again, a time for bringing together the bits and pieces of a lifetime of thinkings and doings. When I was young, all of the pieces of the erector set could conceivably be used to build most anything I wanted to construct. It strikes me that there is much to be playful about now as I try to put what I have learned into some kind of coherent order.
But there is great risk in being playful in theology. After all, theology is a profession and it has its guild that adjudicates the sense from the non-sense, the spurious from the relevant, the significant from the trivial. One gets a good reputation in theology, a non-playful reputation, for doing work that is important, for doing that which has a significant end in something other than in itself. Good theology, after all, is supposed to keep the Church moving rightly forward. So perhaps being playful in theology is something one should keep to oneself.
All this makes me think about the things that I have written. Have they been expressions of something important in themselves? I recall that the jazz pianist Cecil Taylor once said that art is a cry trying to get out. Has anything that I have written ever been the result of such a playful dynamic? Luther was passionate about what he wrote because salvation itself was at stake. Has anything been at stake for me?
Here one must be brutally honest. Perhaps over the years I might have said a couple of things in print that may have helped move an esoteric conversation in a particular way. Clearly, my academic work has been directed to a rather narrow audience, and my more popular writing has happened less frequently in recent years. What is the cause of this? Have I nothing any longer to say, or have I simply not prioritized writing to general audiences in the way I should have? Is it that I have worked so much, that I have no time for play?
When one reaches a certain stage in one's career, there are no more mountains that need to be climbed, no more work that has to be done. I finished out an academic career, founded a school, and built a number of businesses. I am happily married with wonderful children. So what is left? Does one simply wander off the stage and prepare for the Night?
I don't think so. If one thinks about things clearly, one will fathom that the same thing is left at the end of life as was present in life's childhood: There are again days to spend that one no longer has to organize in ways to make a living. One has time again, and time is the most precious of all things. After all, with time comes the possibility of play. The older time of one's life is properly the time to play again, but no longer with the limited toys of youth, but with all the experiences of an entire lifetime!
This blog is designed to be pure play. I don't write anything here for any greater grave purpose whatsoever. I write not to get a better position, to build fame, to reform the Church, or to establish another institution of higher learning. I write not to accomplish anything at all. I write now to play. And what is the contour of this play?
It is time to connect things together and try to build something new. While my fundamental passion has always been theology, I have always thought that the more preparation in philosophy one has, the better one will be able to do theology. Over the years, it has become obvious to me as well, that the best preparation for philosophy is likely not history, literature, or the study of a foreign language -- though all of these are helpful. The best preparation for the doing of philosophy, I believe, is sustained study and reflection upon the tools of thinking in general, and there is no better way to do this than in the study of modern logic, the logic now assumed by many to constitute the foundations of mathematics.
While many will no doubt disagree, this inference is unmistakable: To do theology well, one should know some logic, that is, one should know one's way around some of the basics in the foundations of mathematics. As it turns out, the study of logic helps us get clear on the nature of semantic modeling, something which happens all the time in theology, but upon which there is seldom any explicit recognition or reflection.
Getting clear on the nature of theological models should allow us to remain humble when we advance viewpoints about the nature of the design and the relationship of the divine to the created order. This involves us in mathematics as well, for when we deal with the divine, we must think the concept of infinity. But as everybody since Plato and Aristotle have known, the concept of infinite is deeply related to mathematics. It makes sense still, I think, to play by trying to relate the eternal realm of mathematics to the region of the divine. Playful theology should be more self-conscious, or maybe self-assured, about its mathematics.
But the relationship of theology to philosophy has another ramification as well. Philosophy was the discipline from which the special sciences were derived. This means that philosophy and the sciences are always related. Since theology has a relationship to philosophy, it must as well have a relationship to the special sciences. I have for a very long time believed that drawing the boundaries of theology in ways that they cannot in principle play on the same stage of truth is a really bad idea. If theology is to retrieve any of its old vigor, it must again know something deeply about the world. While theologians should understand some history, politics, literature, and critical theory, they should also know something about quantum theory, neuroscience, cosmology, and information theory.
When theological discourse is no longer available in the sciences, then the possibility of theological coordination and explanation is wholly occluded. Theories of the multiverse become plausible because there no longer is a bound to the questions science asks and speculatively tries to answer. What is, after all, more likely: A creating God at the center of the universe, or the bald existence of a multiverse, an existence without explanation, an existence which itself is only hypothesized because one thinks one can now ask and answer questions beyond the bounds of possible experience in the spirit of the regnant naturalism of our day.
It is time to play, and I intend to so. This means I will speculate and make connections that perhaps ultimately cannot be sustained. Theological play is like brainstorming. We throw ideas against the wall, many of which we shall probably ultimately have to reject. However, we shall try to ask some interesting questions.
Notice that the professionalism of the guild counts against such play. One ought, after all, put into print only what one knows. In the discipline of many hours of work devoted to one thing, one can learn a great deal about that thing and one might thereby become the expert voice when it comes to that thing. The world deeply needs experts in many areas, but being an expert is no longer playing, and I intend to play.
Anybody reading this is invited to join the conversation, My experience has been that the number of readers of my blog posts diminishes proportionally to that which I regard as theologically important. So let me be clear: I am no longer interested in what the guild might regard as important. Instead I want to play, and I would be deeply honored if some would want to read along and comment. Theological conversation helps a theologian stay humble and informed.
But if there are not many readers for some of these blogs, I do understand. Connecting theologically Bohmian mechanics to the Kantian supersensible substrate is perhaps too speculative for most. (I do realize that when one looks to be too speculative, one can easily come across as simply being childish.) Yet, I shall try to remain playful. After all, I believe that our entire lives can be understood from the inside as being a type of game. It is precisely in the intrinsicality of our existence, in its playful "purposiveness without a purpose" (Kant), that we find the leisure to ask what it has been about and what it means. Theology poses the most significant questions of human existence, and when these questions are no longer asked, then the game ends and we become other than homo ludens, we become other than who we are.
So I likely won't run after little white balls this summer. I will, however, try to think theologically and playfully about all manner of things. Perhaps this theological thinking is at its deepest meditative. Perhaps it thus can be linked to the "thinking which is a thanking" to which Heidegger alludes. I am thankful to have this opportunity to do some playful theology. Now its time to roll up the sleeves and have some fun!
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