Today I Will Utter the M Word

That's right, readers, I am going to say it in print. Here it comes, "Meta-transcendental." I know, it has way too many syllables and probably should be shortened to something much more user-friendly. So if you prefer the short version, just say "Bible." However, there is a little something to the longer version, which, with a little explaining, can render the lengthier counterpart helpful (believe it or not).

Now, normally, as you have seen, I advocate the Ockham's razor principle for good re-writing. Keep it short, silly-head. But I also noted that there are times for rule-breaking, and this is one of them. But before we can make any fair sense of the M word, we need to take a brief look at the idea of a "transcendental." So what, pray tell, is a "transcendental?" A little etymology helps here. You will note the word, "transcend" built into the latter term.


To transcend usually carries the sense of "exceed" or "go beyond." The basic idea behind it, is that the things which transcends (at least in theological uses of the word) overflows, fills up the category we are considering, and then keeps going beyond something we only analogies (word-pictures) for. So when we say that God "transcends" the created order, we mean not that He is not here with us now (the word for this is "immanent.") But that He is that and so much more.



The God of the Bible is "immanent" (with and in) his creation. As Paul the apostle says (quoting one Epimenides of Crete), "In Him we live and move and have our being." Now we must carefully distinguish this from a view called "pantheism," which formally agrees with this, but whose proponents mean something quite different by it than we.

Now our shorter catechism says that "God is a Spirit" (from John 4:24), which means He does not take up space like we do. He is present at all places, and at all times, but not visibly or materially. But He is not identified with His creation, so that to eat a slice of pizza, one must in some way affect Him (pantheism denies this).

But God does not have the limits of the creation. So He in many ways, not only fills it, but goes far beyond anything we might compare Him to, although the Bible warrants many such comparisons. God is glorious like the Sun shining at midday in its strength. He acts like the wind, which blows where it wills, and you see its effects, but not the wind itself. You have never seen the wind. And yet we all know the wind exists, now don't we?

I will save this bit of trouble for the materialistic atheist for later. We all believe in things we cannot see: from the wind, to people who leave our presence (and yet we do not assume that because we cannot now see them that they have ceased to exist), ideas other people have, electrons, neutrinos (which the atheistic science world swears on a stack of Bibles do in fact exist), triangles (you only see images of triangles, not actual triangles), quantities (we represent these with numerals, but the numerals are not the quantities themselves -- you may have eaten two apples once, but you never ate the quantity "two" by itself, or all of us would now have to count from 1 and go straight to three).

You get the point. God is not material, tangible (you cannot touch Him -- like rainbows), but we know He exists just the same. How? We know Him by His Word and Spirit. He speaks. How do we know He speaks? We hear his voice in nature and in the Bible. "My sheep hear my voice," Jesus said.

This means that, although God is "transcendent," yet we still hear his voice, and see His goodness around us. His goodness, wisdom, power and eternity have been revealed clearly from what has been made so that men are without any excuse whatever for disbelieving His clear testimony.

A "transcendental" has to do with both God's transcendent and immanent attributes, as they affect the created order. So these can be stated as simple propositions. Here are a few of them:

1. Human language is objectively meaningful (it actually tells things about the real world -- when used well -- and communicates ideas in my head to form ideas in yours. This is happening right now. To be sure, there are philosophers who have argued the opposite of this. For now I will simply assume they are mistaken.

2. Laws of logic are real entities. These are not just conventions or agreed upon rules between me and someone else for the sake of being able to argue or debate about them. Specifically, these are "universal, invariant, abstract, and extralinguistic entities." If you do not know what that means, consider yourself lucky. Some people actually have to study this stuff in class. For now, the point is that these are as real as the Snickers bars I like to eat now and again.

Remember, just because you cannot see, taste, touch, smell or hear them, does not mean they aren't real. You haven't eaten "three" yet either, but we still need it in order to count. These are a bit like laws of science too, if that helps for a picture of what kind of thing we are talking about.

So a transcendental is something you must have as a feature of this world in order to make sense of the world around you. If language were not meaningful in what it communicated about the world around us, we would not have logic, science, morality or other rational enterprises. In other words, without transcendentals -- the most basic features needed to explain this world -- we would in effect be deaf, dumb and blind -- unable to make sense out of anything we experienced.

So as one person put it, transcendentals are the "necessary PRE-conditions for the intelligibility of human experience. " The short version of this is these are necessary -- without them you cannot make sense of things we take for granted in everyday life -- like having a pleasant conversation, or blogging. The are called PRE-conditions, since the world must have these features BEFORE we can understand what it is, and why it appears as it does. "Intelligibility" refers to the state of making sense out of something, rendering it "sensible" or clear to the mind (meaningful).

"Human experience" simply refers to what you and I wake up to in the morning, or the things we encounter mundanely - flies at barbecues, curry on Indian food (let us hope), presidential faces on coins, and lemonade (or a wine cooler, or beer) on hot days. You know, we call this "reality."

So transcendentals are those most basic features of reality that enable us to explain things. Without any one of them, we would not be able to explain anything at all. This is why they are "necessary."

Now a meta-transcendental, is the ultimate explanation for the existence of the transcendentals. Why are these propositions so basic to explaining, and not others? How are they related to each other? How do we explain the existence of the many transcendentals and "fit them together" into a larger package, an ideological unit we usually call a "worldview"?

So by slapping the prefix "meta," which is plainly stolen from the Greek tongue, on the word "transcendental," I mean to ask, what is the more basic (ultimate) explanation, for the very basic explaining units we all know and love?

The reason for asking this question -- of how to explain the many tiny explainers, in an all in one package deal -- is that someone somewhere must be able to tell us why transcendentals behave as they do, and how they fit together. Otherwise, we still have a really big mystery on our hands -- namely everything -- and that just won't do, since it is the job of worldviews to explain, and since it is never optional whether or not you will have a worldview.

We have them because in order to take dominion as God has commanded, we need to know why things appear as they do, and act as they do, under this or that set of circumstances. This is why scientists always poke and prod bugs in a laboratory, point very large looking glasses as the sky, and do all manner of other kinds of discovery-oriented projects.

Knowledge is not optional, and so neither are worldviews. And so the "meta-transcendental" question (which I will simply call the MTQ hereafter) is this, "what one worldview enables us to know all the things we know now, and might know later?"

Another way to ask it is, "which worldview alone provides the necessary preconditions for the intelligibility of human experience?" (enables us to grasp what we wake up to in the morning). This is why I say that transcendentals are like intellectual coffee -- before each exists to the pallate, the world is just one big haze.

Now later, and I am sure you saw this coming, I will argue (if the Lord wills) that only the Christian worldview -- all the things taught in your Bible taken as a single unit of thought, not each proposition in isolation added to others step-by-step -- can provide the foundations of knowledge (transcendentals), the bases for logic, science, morality, math, history, education, and even breakfast. And I will be using the various parts (elemental components) of Atheistic materialism to show this. Atheism is the whipping boy. This explains why the Bible says, "The FOOL hath said in his heart, 'There is no god.'"

The Bible sees itself (correctly) as the meta-transcendental, the foundation of all knowledge and fountain of all wisdom. Thus, its rejection entails folly (only fools reject it, and all who reject it are fools for so doing) and madness. Folly is the precursor to madness of a particular kind. You could in principle make one mad by interfering with his brain functions. But this is not what the Bible has in mind. It means a very specific kind of madness, the formal and necessary conclusions, which follow validly from folly (any non-biblical position).

This is not chemically-induced madness or brain damage. A person may be quite intelligent in this fashion, and yet be foolish in the extreme. The pre-eminent example of a fool in the Bible in a spirit named "Satan." Yet the Bible affirms his extreme intelligence as well. He is not unintelligent. He is a hate-filled psychotic of a particular kind. He hates fully and indiscriminantly. His hatred is not measured, qualified or restrained. And yet he remains extremely cunning, meaning that we need God's protection. Fortunately, God appoints beings very much like Satan regarding his strength and intelligence, which are holy, and filled with charity toward God's people. They hate Satan, the way he hates everyone. But theirs is restrained, measured, holy, and righteous.

This means that the fallen world is just a little off its rocker, as we say. Even God's people, in the resurrection, will look back on this life and wonder how it was that they could not see the obvious -- most of what they did not know. For now we see as through a glass darkly because of sin. This means, if even Christians are not as intellectually sound and consistent as they might be (though more so all the time as they learn to submit to God's Word), that we cannot and dare not look to the non-Christian world as any kind of norm or standard for what it good, acceptable or right behavior, because well, they're nuts -- which explains why Ph.D.'s can actually believe in and preach evolution on the one hand, and argue vehemently against unethical behavior on the other.

This is contradictory nonsense. It is bizarre, and it is typical on college campuses all over the world. Don't let this happen to you. I freely confess that when I started cataloguing the contradictions I regularly encountered on college campuses, it took me a long time to realize that this was not just folly. That much was obvious immediately. But the fact that when you SHOW people these contradictions -- plain as the day is blue in the sky -- they hem and haw and make really weird excuses for them, supposing these to be arguments, which no one in any court or classroom would ever entertain for their obvious absurdity.

It finally dawned on me after thinking on it for a long time. These people are willing, no matter what the logical consequences -- even if they end up teaching that your children are really no different than frogs (just more advanced frogs), they will never take this stuff as a sufficient reductio ad absurdum to their position. They will, we say, "Bite the bullet."

And then after 4 decades of teaching evolution in public school classrooms, they will complain that the schools are violent, and the students behave like .... like .... ANIMALS!!!

Hello? Is anyone still driving the bus? This is not brain damage. This is not from drugs. This is not because pagans are not intelligent. Many of them are very intelligent. But many of these intelligent people are ethically and logically -- crazier than cat pizza -- which by now has probably evolved into Country-fried Rats.

It is no wonder to me that the public university system cannot manage answers to any of the difficult - for some but not others - traditional, historical, scientific, and philosophical problems. They simply do not have the right equipment. They lack the meta-transcendental which God has given to His people, which alone is fully and finally sufficient not only to provide the preconditions for, and answers to, all that is raised in the various disciplies, but which is capable of developing wholly new disciplines not yet discovered (but which reside latently and implicitly in the Word of God), and which could literally transform history from its unlimited ethical and intellectual resources.

All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are Hid in Christ. And the Word of Christ provides to us all that we need and so much more, for personal, ecclesiastical, domestic, civil, national, and international righteousness and wisdom.

And the future belongs to the wise. You have His Word on it.