How Things Fit: About the Title

“Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right, 

and the eternal fitness of things?”—Henry Fielding: Tom Jones, book iv. chap. iv.

Welcome to this blog! Let me tell you about its title.

“How things fit” seems fitting to me as a title. It fits for at least three reasons.

Things

First, it’s a riff on How Things Work, that book with all those wonderful cutout illustrations of technological devices like washing machines. That book seeks to open up the many technological “black boxes” of our world to the view of the average person – or at least the average curious person. One of my primary motives as a theologian is to open up the hood of this mysterious, wonderful, and sometimes dreadful world and to see what makes it tick. I want to know how everything, from physics to theology to the latest Broadway or off-Broadway play, all fit together (or how they don’t!).

I used to be a seismic engineer a long time ago, and the same kind of curiosity that made me love learning engineering eventually drew me into theology. I’m interested in how a deep and generous orthodox Christian faith fits with … well, everything I’m interested in: scripture, the Jewish roots of Christianity, philosophy, art, science, worship, and lived Christian experience in today’s culture. Those are some of the “things” I’ll be writing about and hoping to open up to view.

Fit

Second, the idea of “fit” seems just right to me as a way of describing what kind of knowledge I’m searching for. As I write in this blog and as I write elsewhere, I hope to maintain a certain proper humility blended with a proper courage in the kinds of claims I make. You see, I realize the image I used above, of “opening up the hood and looking inside,” has problems. The “machine” metaphor is so modern, so Enlightenment. God does not fit inside the machinery of this world. God’s relationship to the creation is much more complex. Nor is the world best described as a machine. Nor is theological knowledge like a car owner’s manual.

The world is not a machine-like “closed causal nexus” but rather a fascinating mass of energy systems held in existence by the love and patience of our elusive yet present and active God. It follows that our ideas about knowledge should fit the kind of world we live in and the kind of creatures we are – and so I feel much more comfortable with the idea of “fit” than more modern understandings of firm, certain, and necessary knowledge contained in univocal propositions. Can our words and propositions fully capture a bird in flight? … the smell of coffee? But some words are more fitting than others.

[As an aside, the notion of “fit” was part of certain strands of 18^th c. moral philosophy – and yet to many it seemed like an old-fashioned leftover of the past. In fact, it is being mocked in the comic novel, The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, in the quote above. It is a pipe-smoking old-fashioned philosopher aptly named “Square” who says those words! “Fittingness” is also an important aspect of Thomas Aquinas’ theology, who seeks to find how God, God’s activity, the created order, and our words, actions and knowledge all fit together. In contrast, modern understandings that God’s will and proper Christian beliefs can be fully captured in theological propositions still form the imaginations of many (most?) in the evangelical and Reformed worlds. But there is a more excellent way! The ancient phrase—adequatio intellectus ad rem—that pre-modern understanding of knowledge which says that we seek to make our intellects “adequate to” or “fit with” the things we talk about—that seems flexible enough and yet bold enough for our late-modern or post-modern situation.]

How

Finally, I like the combination of informality and seriousness the title suggests. One of my hopes is to put the things I’m learning, thinking about, and writing about in accessible language–while still trying to stretch people a bit! How I write is important. I experience my own thinking as a ceaseless movement to and fro between more technical discussions and the language(s) and experiences of our twenty-first century American culture. In my day-to-day life, I find myself moving between devotional readings of scripture, technical theological writings of people like Karl Barth and Henri De Lubac, and the bleachers of Black River Public School where my kids go to school and play soccer – and I want my own faith to be stretchy enough to make sense of it all. I want to test each part in light of the others and to make connections between them. I want my writing to reflect that. I want to make the insights and arguments that excite me in my theological work accessible to people who are not “in the guild.”

Welcome

So, welcome to this blog! I hope to write a new post every two weeks. I hope to start from either things I am working on theologically or things I encounter in the church or culture around me and then relate them to each other. I hope this will spur you on in your journey of faith and understanding. I hope it will start conversations. I hope you’ll like it.