Violence, Hospitality and Complex Adaptive Systems

In an article on TheOoze, Emergence and the Divine Order: What Lies at the Heart of Emergence?, Fr. Matthew Mirabile muses about the transition between modernity and postmodernity and its effect on the church. His musings focus on Complex Adaptive Systems theory, and postulates that in embracing the key features of modernity, the church abandoned some of the complexity needed to survive. The recovery of mystery and symbol may well be the emergence of a adaptive entity with the complexity needed to progress towards God's eschatological goal.

It was an interesting thought, juxtaposed as it was in my mind with the writings of Hans Boersma in Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition. Boersma's thesis is that in reducing our understanding of the atonement to only the metaphor of juridical penal substitution, we have lost too much. In particular, we have lost the capacity to see in the atonement, God's invitation into divine hospitality.

This is particularly important in our current culture, where religion of all sorts, and Christianity in particular are seen by many as being the source of violence rather than the source of hospitality. A recovery of a more multi-faceted, and hence complex, understanding of the atonement is necessary if we are to credibly extend to our culture God's invitation into divine eschatalogical hospitality in the face of this world's inescapable participation in violence.