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new nets: set theory, why bother?
We’re taking our time plodding through set theory–bounded sets, centered sets, etc. Why? Why bother? What does any of this have to do with faithfulness to Jesus? Thanks for asking. Set theory is a way of understanding underlying cultural assumptions that affect the way we understand categories. Still pretty esoteric sounding? Except that categories are important in the Bible and in life. Who is a Christian for example, is a category question. Who is a member of the body of Christ? is a category question.
Different people in different cultures think differently about categories. What could account for these differences? Culture could. People in different cultures think differently about categories which affect their understanding of very important issues like “Who is a Christian?
What does culture have to do with the Bible, you may ask? A lot. Paul warns us about adopting the “patterns of this world.” We need to have our minds renewed so that we don’t do that. Culture is one expression of “the patterns of this world.”
We all know what it’s like to have Christians insist on a their particular interpretation of the Bible without examining their cultural assumptions. It’s obvious to us that some ardent Christians read the Bible with cultural lenses that distort their interpretation. Other Christians usually. Not us. Because we don’t talk with an accent, do we? We talk normal. It’s those other people who sound funny. 
For most of human history, most cultures assumed that slavery was normal. There were good ways to do slavery and bad ways to do slavery but very few cultures questioned the institution of slavery. Over time, we began to question that assumption. We allowed the Spirit to renew our minds so that we wouldn’t continue to blindly walk in the ways of the world regarding slavery.
It took Christians (and others) willing to examine their cultural assumptions in order for slavery to be abolished. It took people willing to challenge the cultural assumptions that led the vast majority of Christians to read the Bible through the lens of the assumption that slavery itself wasn’t wrong.
Why are most major American denominations divided along the lines of North and South? Why is is there a Southern Baptist Convention and an American Baptist Church? Why was there once a Southern Methodist Church from which the Free Methodist Church split off? Because Christians in the northern states were the first to question the nearly universal cultural assumption that slavery wasn’t intrinsically evil. Of course, it was easier for the Christians in the northern states to do this because their economy didn’t depend on slavery. They afford to question the assumption.
It takes work and the moving of the Spirit for the church to examine cultural assumptions. It don’t come naturally. It comes supernaturally. That’s why it don’t come easy. When it comes, it’s almost always controversial at first. Later, it’s like, “Why was that even an issue?”
Honestly, who wants to think about set theory? Who gives a rip whether we have a cultural preference for bounded set vs. centered set vs. fuzzy set categories? Who cares if our cultural preference for one approach to categories over another shapes our reading of Scripture, say, or the way we do church? If ever there were something that sounds like an academic exersise, an esoteric, waste your time in some kind of intellectual entertainment exercise, it is this. Who the heck cares to examine how our cultural assumptions regarding categories [say, what?] might affect our reading of Scripture?
I do. Because that’s what missionaries have to do. They have to examine the cultural assumptions that may affect their presentation and their incarnation of the gospel. They have to study the language of the people to whom they are sent and discover the cultural assumptions that are imbedded in the language. And other seemingly tedious and esoteric things. Like my daughter’s field hockey coach says, “love the grind!”
That’s why I’m grinding my way through this topic, taking my time.
A bounded set approach to categories, according to Hiebert, is the default setting of Western culture. If you don’t agree with that, none of the rest of this grind will make sense.
We’ve got some fruit flies in the house. They are harmless. They don’t bite. I don’t think they carry terrible diseases. We haven’t gotten sick as a result of the fruit flies, so far as I know. My daughter HATES the fruit flies being in the house. They also annoy me. Why? Because we live in a Western culture that has a bounded set approach to categories. Like inside-outside, indoors-outdoors. A bunded set apporach to this category means that there should be a very clear boundary between inside-outside and indoors-outdoors. Fruit flies belong outdoors not indoors. When they are indoors they are out of place and we are out of sorts.
That’s the way it is everywhere right? Wrong. In cultures with a different default setting on categories (fuzzy set, say, which doesn’t depend on sharp boundary distinctions) people are not nearly so concerned about having fruit flies in the house. I was just in Costa Rica, where they have, according to the locals, “a dirty floor culture.” They expect floors to be dirty. They don’t think you should be able to eat food off the floor. They survive, they even thrive. They can be faithful to God, even though they have a different cultural assumption regarding categories which affects their underestanding of what indoor and outdoor spaces should be like.
So the question is, is there something about the way we do church that is affected by some unexamined cultural assumptions? Of course there is. There must be, cultures being what they are. Is it possible that the way we think about categories, which seems like a pretty fundamental thing since we think categorically ALL THE TIME, could affect the way we read the Bible and the way we do church? Is there a benefit in examining what might be cultural assumptions, just in case we are assuming that our faithfulness to Scripture may actually be a blind faitfulness to something that is in reality, simply a pattern of this world?
Tags: bounded set, categories, centered set, Christian, church, cultural anthropology, culture, evangelism, fruit flies, fuzzy set, mission, paul hiebert, set theory
September 21st, 2009 at 11:44 am
Ken, your explanation here is why I resonated completely with the center set concept when you first brought it up. To me, this issue is all about access to God and the image bearing of God that the church community does. When a church puts on the mantle of a bounded set ideal, those boundaries are the primary characteristics that the outside world sees about that church. The outsider, I believe, sees the church and thinks it IS the boundary and even worse they view God through that lens as well. It is why we hear so many say “If that’s what God is like I don’t want to have anything to do with him.”. Even if the boundaries are objectively “correct”, the way we enforce these in many cases is a flawed depiction of how God actually works.
It seems to me that the bounded set person or church creates barriers to others seeing and coming to God. Shouldn’t that be the first check box on our spiritual journey? “Are you, in some way, a barrier to others finding God?” If I check that box then I need to, at the very least, get out of the way until I figure out how to not be the stumbling block. The center set approach gives us all the freedom to be on that journey, all at varying places, without any of us blocking another person’s path.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:20 am
Ken wrote – “It took Christians (and others) willing to examine their cultural assumptions in order for slavery to be abolished.”
With due respect, Ken, this is wrong. It took Civil War. Slave-owners would have loved to do nothing more forever than “examine their cultural assumptions.” And command everyone else to be Quaker pacifists. Examining cultural assumptions is necessary as you say (see more below), but those evil places of power inside your own city – right where you live and minister – are sophisticated snakes enough to pat you and I on the head for our brilliant insights into cultural analysis. So long as we remain bound in slavery to the bounded-set of paralysis by analysis. That death-kingdom of slavery was taken out by force. Not by polite analysis. So too, much of the Kingdom.
And many in that old kingdom still have not changed their cultural assumptions. And many of those who didn’t need to change their cultural assumptions in the first place, like the Quakers and many Congregationalists working the underground railway, had already built into the baseline of their faith exactly the necessary antagonism to set-theory of all kinds. Precisely because they knew the weaknesses – of all cognitive theology – in the first place.
What church did Lincoln belong to? – why was Lincoln’s very church membership (look it up) a precursor to his personal emancipation proclamation? – or was Lincoln a petty bounded-set political Machiavellian regarding his own church membership?
I do think that the Spirit is working in you, Ken, to explore this entire arena. The back-and-forth of conversation here on your blog illustrates the richness of the problems of merely getting the theoretical categories right. This stuff isn’t easy. At the merely theoretical level. And you’re doing a great service to allow others into your journey in this bias-checking labyrinth. When all is said and done, demonstration is more powerful than proclamation and analysis. In the sciences. And in theology. And in living. I agree that theory is important. We can’t even interpret data without theory. And we move constantly between theory and experience. So checking set-theoretical bias is important. The Corinthians attained a pettiness in their bounded-set worship of themselves because they were charismatic.
There’s irenic hope in the words of the Spirit (in that case through Paul in rebuke to the Corinthians) that the tender inward corrections of the Living Word can save us back – from Civil War.
Cheers,
Jim
September 22nd, 2009 at 6:48 am
I once asked a girl to marry me based on the center set theory.
She preferred the bounded one…
BD
September 22nd, 2009 at 12:37 pm
I once asked a girl to marry me based on the bounded set theory, she preferred the centered set one, because she wanted to be pursued through out the marriage towards an ever closer relationship, instead of having the pursuit end the day after the wedding.
September 22nd, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Quaker theology is very centered-set. But the idea that Quakers didn’t need to change their cultural assumptions is false. I recently found out to my surprise that American Quakers were not always anti-slavery, and it took radical obedience to the Spirit—in opposition to cultural assumptions—to change that.
A hundred years before the Civil War, Quaker colonists commonly held slaves, and there was no consensus among them about the matter. John Woolman was one of the radically obedient types who worked tirelessly until his death to convince his fellow Quakers that they were morally bound to reject not only slaveholding itself but every minute aspect of their culture that even peripherally supported it. He lived out his message in radical (yet humble and gentle!) ways that made perfectly good Christians extremely uncomfortable. He did not live to see the universal adoption of anti-slavery views among Quakers, but his ministry is absolutely acknowledged as the single most influential force that led to it. And there was nothing powerless about Quaker non-violence as a force to be reckoned with in the slavery debate that took place nationally later on.
So I think we can, in fact, credit Christians who examined their cultural assumptions with playing a critical role in the fall of U.S. slavery. Read The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman by Thomas Slaughter and see if you don’t agree.
I actually love Woolman as someone to emulate with regard to being a reformer in the Church. He’s one of the few who pulled it off without inadvertently fomenting a boundary in his “set” (and so many reformers end up kicked to the outside of it!). I want to re-study him and pray until I get how he did that… All I can say at this point is that the humility thing was crucial.
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
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Martha, excellent point.
Quakers were and still are prolifically promiscuous. My reference to Congregationalists too deserved the same good criticism you applied. I love the bric-a-brac here on Ken’s blog recently. People are getting – and playing with the method. I don’t want my response to ruin that. I’d just say this – my set back to your very valid set-criticism of Quakers (add Congretationalists too) – is that the set of Quakers and Congregationalists to which I referred would only be a sub-set of those larger bodies. There were – and still are – believers who have a pre-existing bias (and it is a bias) built into the baseline of their faith, against cognitive over-analysis in set theory. Or any other theory. And because of this predisposition, they have an amazing prodigy at out-bound mission. We understand this dynamic very imperfectly.
Where you make a much better point (better than mine – for my own learning, so thanks) ) is in implying that we don’t really know the full set of inner, private, silent debates, over the then-available sets of theology, that is, we don’t know all of what went on inside of these people, inwardly, before they acted outwardly – contra-slavery. And your Woolman is an outstanding study example. So, again, thanks.
We get to see a little more of these kinds of inward workings and inward debates made into outward testimony in the case of Martin Luther King, Jr. I love Caesar Chavez more than I can say – and I wish we had more of this internal biography from him (despite his latter-day failings, alas).
If you are into women’s issues (not that you should be), then the Quaker, Susan B. Anthony and her often-argumentative and rational counterpart, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, left us a breathtaking and priceless treasure. Because they put on pretty full display their own inner workings and their internal debates, in addition to their frequent fights with and against each other. I think the women’s suffrage movement – because of the explicit theological and practical debates between these unbelievably courageous women – is one the best possible sources for playing out the full implications of set-theory. If that’s of any interest.
My bias.
Thanks for making me learn and think anew.
Cheers,
Jim
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Ken – nota bene: I have a probably blinding-bias in favor of Vineyard churches (and a few others). My frequent critical comments on your blog against the Vineyards are partly my way of checking and testing my bias. Though I don’t make stuff up just to be contrary. If I’m too negative, it’s because I’m genuinely a jerk. If I do make stuff up for testing some hypothetical, then I’d say so. What I like about your blog – which holds for Vineyards in general – is a very nice combination of interaction between theory (in this case, theology, or set-theory) and experience. Vineyards are learning churches. Not mired in abstractions and impersonal dogma. Nor mired in experience-only. Learning in the interaction between theoretic stuff and experience. That is never easy. But it’s a rare and valuable example.
Cheers,
Jim
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
B.D., your analogy illustrates the problem with the bounded set precisely. Greg Boyd uses the analogy of a spouse who performs all the proper marital duties, but internally despises the other person. Hardly an ideal spouse, although not outside the “bounds” of marriage. I would actually much rather be married to someone who was quite imperfect in their behavior but was pursuing me and desiring a better marriage with me.
September 24th, 2009 at 8:26 am
Here’s Luke 18:9-14, which I believe points us toward a Holy Spirit led faith rather than a rule led faith: To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men—-robbers, evildoers, adulterers—-or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
For Jesus, sin is sin. There’s no doubt about it. He doesn’t try to claim that a sin is not a sin. But what he does do is show us that all of us are sinners, that none is righteous. That only God is righteous. And that our only appropriate response to our sinful state is humility and dependence on God. Further, he makes plain that we are not to draw a circle of righteousness with ourselves at the center and those with sins we don’t have on the outside, because this is arrogance and hypocrisy and perdition.
September 24th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Don,
I think you really hit on some truth here. The truly centered mindset says that we are continuing to purse and desire a better relationship with Jesus. But does that preclude true discipleship and iron sharpening iron and community like that written of by Dietrich Boehoffer in “Life Together”?
Where does “spurring one another on to good works” fit in the centered set theory?
September 24th, 2009 at 6:47 pm
I can’t wait anymore, what are the cultural assumptions, fruit flies in our house, which have tainted our Christian lives? Since we are missional in our own culture, isn’t it quite difficult to decide which cultural assumptions are the problem since we are living in the culture? Kind of like an uncertainty principle that says our cultural assumptions are tainted by that fact that we are viewing them through culturally biased eyes. And if this is true, our definition of the centered set will still be tainted with bias.
I’m sure Jesus is fine with all of the cultural bias, if we continue to love one another.
September 25th, 2009 at 9:15 am
happylad, we’ll get there….but yes, discipleship is the key in centered set and true discipleship which includes iron sharpening iron, but in the context of the kind of relationships anticipated in the New Testament. Life Together is one of my favorite books.
September 25th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Ken,
Life Together is one of my treasured possessions. The whole book is one long quotable quote. It’s an essential tool in all the healing work I do in pastoral ministry. There’s not much good in getting people’s hearts healed up if they can’t live in true community.
September 25th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Hi Happylad. Quite the contrary, I think discipleship within a centered set model encourages and requires more active “iron sharpening iron,” but within relationships of love, not judgment. For example, if someone in my men’s group is struggling with some kind of sin that’s getting in the way of following Jesus, in love I would want to do whatever I can to help him get back on the right path. Sometimes that would mean asking probing questions, truth telling, etc. But I wouldn’t exclude him from the group for this reason (unless of course his behavior was harmful to the others). That to me is a lot different than having a group where anyone can belong as long as they don’t commit certain visible “really bad” sins, and everyone else is excluded. In those groups it seems to me that everything is focused on not doing those particular “bad” sins, whereas every other hardness of heart or loveless-ness goes unchecked. For example, men’s groups that focus the vast majority of their “iron sharpening iron” on stopping pornography watching, sex and masturbation. (Not that those aren’t important subjects to discuss, but please.)
September 25th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Don and others,
I’ve been a follower of Jesus and, barring my first church experience, I have not found a church that focuses on and “bad” sins that would exclude anyone from attending the church. That’s probably why I get so frustrated at many of the conversations on this blog. People make blanket statements on evangelicals and “conservative” Christian churches and my 20 year history in Christ doesn’t reflect that at all.
In the 1990s I was part of an internet project on the issue of the debate on homosexuality in the church. People from both sides of the divide shared on issues of faith. We had hard and fast rules to keep the dialogue peaceful. One of those rules was to avoid generalizations. I think it really sharpened my skills and kept me from sticking my foot in my mouth on more than one occasion (not that I’m saying anyone has eaten foot in this post).
So I have an aversion to blanket statements.
September 27th, 2009 at 12:33 am
Hi back Don! I have found that the porn, sex and masturbation issues (any sin issues really) are symptoms of a greater and deeper need. Sin is usually meeting a legitimate need in an illegitimate way, so I don’t focus on symptoms a lot either.
I prefer to spend time in discipleship on the reasons we do what we do and on the real sins behind them (pride, envy, bitterness, self-centeredness, etc.). I find these to be the true source of my own personal struggle with sin.
September 29th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Well written Dave and Belfry.
I was wondering about this center-set vs bounded-set issue, if it is found in scripture? Center-Set sounds like the one I want since I have people in my life on the outside currently and who are not likely to buy into the prepackaged christian in america. But I want to see if clearly in scripture. I read Don’s post about the old testament being very bounded and then a few comments here and there to support center-set but does anyone have biblical verses?
October 2nd, 2009 at 8:52 am
“I read Don’s post about the old testament being very bounded”
Right, but then God got saved…
BD
October 2nd, 2009 at 11:24 am
BD, I agree, but the wording you used is not technically correct. It’s called the new covenant.
Jesus came to the world as God in flesh to free us from the law’s requirements that we could never meet on our own and bridge the gap between us and God.
All we need is to accept that, and we are no longer required to exercise the Old Testament law.
So, while your sarcasm is evident, the statement ‘God got Saved’ actually sheds some light in the how radical the new covenant is.
Thanks for the image.