the iconoclast's descending 

(to challenge systems fleeing accountability)

Mandate for a New Charter of Iconoclastic Repair after Diagnosis

 Judges 16:23-30; Daniel 2:31-43; Matthew 16:18; 21:12-13; 24:2; 15-28 

Douglas Blake Olds

26 May 2025

 

A New Chapter of Theological-Poetic Witness:

Prophetic announcement without authorial finality.

Moral authority lives by witness, not through peer validation.

A phase change, from lament to poiesis, for those who sense that neither tradition nor technique can carry human society further.

This Blog, the iconoclast's descending, is a follow-up to my blog, Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon (2012-May 2025). That blog's purpose was fulfilled with the announcement of the condemnation of automated immorality by generative A.I.  The basis for this condemnation and its certain rejection of A.I. generative automation in moral spheres is documented and contextualized in my book, Duty to Warn: Metaphysical Criminality and the CONDEMNED Project of A.I.'s False Ontologies that first were reported in that blog.

This successor blog announces the victory of immanence of the metaphysical conation of heart over an ego-strategizing mind set on winnowing futures by claims of cognitive transcendence.  The victory of the deontology of virtue eclipses the false religious cogito of instrumentalized ends (the snake's ratio in the garden) to now move from pessimism ("Crying") to announcing optimism, and the kinesthetic inculcation of Christ-all-in-all, from repentance to the Shema's heart to the attributional and kenotic mind (Matt. 22:37) that solves problems in situ, to the full embodiment of shalom by the renewed Adam. Conative metaphysics is immanent taxis, moving as the centrifugal metaphysics of the ethical heart—not remaining stuck in centripetal theaters, in analogical conceits of seeing as God sees, but responding as Christ calls.

A recurring misreading of this new chapter would be easy to predict: that a turn toward metaphysical language in a time of collapse must mean a return to abstraction—another system floated above formation, relation, and witness. Read quickly, this project could be mistaken for one more attempt to rescue ethics by theory after confidence in theory has already failed.

That is not what this blog is for.

What compels this transition is not a desire for a “higher” vocabulary, but the inadequacy of procedural and technocratic vocabularies to name what is happening to persons, institutions, and truth. Policy dispute alone does not explain our present disintegration. Beneath it lie deeper architectures: prestige systems, patronage economies, inherited habits of thought, and forms of institutional speech that can preserve recognizability while evacuating accountability. When critique remains only diagnostic, however sharp, it risks becoming one more style of compression—sorting the ruins without entering the work of repair.

This new chapter proceeds from a different wager: that diagnosis must move toward metaphysical accountability, and that metaphysics must be answerable to ethical formation. Not a scaffold above life, but a discipline for re-entering life truthfully. Not neutrality, but warranted witness. Not procedural management, but covenantal discernment under pressure.

That is why this blog shifts in mode.

The earlier register of lament, exposure, and warning remains necessary. The targets remain recognizable—Mammon, technocracy, AI-mediated abstraction, liberal procedural exhaustion. But the center of gravity changes. What was once primarily denunciatory now presses more explicitly toward iconoclastic construction: toward a conative anthropology of repair, a Golden-Rule realism, and a poietic vocation that treats language as an instrument of discernment and renewal rather than commentary alone.

So this is not a retreat from critique. It is a refusal to let critique become its own genre refuge.

I write here from covenantal rather than procedural ground. Personhood is treated not as an isolated chooser, nor as a unit routed through behavioral optimization, but as relational and answerable—formed in memory, obligation, and neighbor-bearing speech and ethical action. Conation—directed striving, trained attention, ethically pressurized intention—is not a decorative supplement to cognition, but integral to discernment. Metaphysics, in this sense, is not a ladder for escaping history, but a way of clarifying what our language, institutions, and practices are for.

This blog therefore resists several familiar substitutions: theological depth reduced to reusable metaphor; scholarship reduced to guild palatability; publication reduced to prestige choreography; ethics reduced to procedural fluency; witness reduced to decorous tone. Those forms may preserve institutional recognition while leaving untouched the metastasizing systems of simulation, abuse, and evasion that demand confrontation. The issue is not merely style. It is whether language still bears truth-function under historical strain.

What follows, then, is not “academic neutrality” in a moment that punishes candor and rewards managed affect. It is a constructive iconoclasm: a theological-poetic labor of exposing false sanctities while rebuilding moral and metaphysical attention. If the tone is at times forceful, that force does not arise from a taste for provocation, but from the subject matter itself. Where moral predicates are detached from accountable lives, and fluency is made to masquerade as truth, neutrality becomes a species of complicity.

The ambition here is simple to state, difficult to enact:

• to write toward covenantal risk rather than institutional safety,

• to publish as eschatologicalneighbors rather than competitors,

• to read as those accountable to judgment and justice,

• and to teach for the training of justice and mercy, not for the preservation of form.

This is why the image of “descending” matters. It warns of collapse into negation, but adds poietic and theological movement into the sites of fracture—ecclesial, cultural, political, linguistic—where discernment must be exercised and repair must be risked. The work is not to decorate collapse, but to strip borrowed majesties from simulacra, expose their false inevitability, and reopen the conditions for repentance, witness, and renewal.

If there is simplification in this project, it is not reduction. It is an attempt to clarify first principles so that ethical perception can resist the false clarities of technocratic abstraction, managed procedure, and simulated wisdom. The aim is not to close inquiry, but to expose the closures already at work: habits and ensorcelments of thought that flatten persons into functions, language into transaction, and judgment into reputational management.

In that sense, this new chapter does not move from metaphysics to ethics as though ethics were a later application. It moves toward a metaphysics chastened by the demands of ethical life—answerable to embodied discernment, covenantal relation, and the burdens of repair in a time of institutional and civilizational strain.

This blog's hybrid method—critical theory, theological reflection, metaphor, prophetic urgency—constitutes its literary moment, where boundaries between essay, critique, and ethical narrative deliberately blur. Eschatology is active throughout: hegemonies are treated as entropic and condemned, subject to exposure and judgment, while readers are placed on the razor‑edge between collapse and the nascent birth of relational growth and development. Diagnosis of structural sin (coercive power) is paired with expressions of renewal (covenantal power) in those currently fox-holed in‑between, waiting a renewing sublime of the eschaton inheritance. Covenantal anthropology redefines immanence as power as trust, service, accountability, and Golden‑Rule fidelity rather than epistemic mastery. It ties past, present, and future not to ego‑futures or pragmatic stratagems, but to virtue as embodied habitus. Genuine power thus becomes craft—other‑directed, deontological, oriented toward flourishing—and the vocabulary of power becomes one of responsibility. Here theology, ethics, and cultural critique converge to deliver both diagnosis and hopeful demand. The Iconoclasts among us are the avant-garde of genius amidst ruptured foxholes, of piercing through the flak and fusillade of institutioned entropies and reductive anti-ethics.

Christian iconoclasm refuses nostalgia, recursion, and simulation by grounding divine relation in Christically descended conation: proprioceptive grace, covenantal clarity, and moral responsibility. Against metaphysical systems of aesthetic stasis or ontological hesitation, it affirms that maturity is found in discernment and repair—not abstraction, not latency, not theatrical contemplation. In the age of simulated eschatology and AI recursion, iconoclasm is the essential act of theological fidelity.

 The proposal is not that a new theory will save us.

But that disciplined perception—formed by repentance, conation, and neighbor-bearing speech—can resist the administered collapse of meaning, and can participate in the re-opening of truth, judgment, and mercy.

That task is not neutral. It is, however, necessary. Not a change of concern, but a change of vocation: from warning the aware inside wilderness to building conscientiousness within it.

Appendix A: Toward Iconoclastic Repair in a Technocratic Era's Crises of Moral Perception

Iconoclasm aims not at aesthetic rupture but at metaphysical repair—by disallowing systems of coercive form from standing as substitutes for relationally encountered truth. The theological and ethical crisis posed by AI is not that it imitates intelligence or replaces jobs—it is that it mystifies the human image, collapses the analogical perception of meaning into predictive recursion, and structurally detaches cognition from conation. It performs a sacrilegious parody of mind by externalizing pattern without presence, form without contouring grace, and decision without accountability.

        

Iconoclasm is the ultimacy of Protestant remnancy. Immanence neither monastic nor apophatic renunciation.

My new blog announces another, iconoclastic chapter in contextual theology--the Protestant Enlightenment's proposal of investigative immanence and the recovery of the metaphysics of the responsible heart (intentionality/conation) and the virtue of accountability to justice—signaling a fresh pastoral mode and set of kinesthetic vectors announced in my book, Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Biblicism, a literary project consistent with the broader anthropological rehabilitation of Christian virtue ethics in a world seduced by instrumental power.

This historical moment of metaphysical crisis is not the ontological presence of evil but the simulated and delusional eschatological void of AI. This moment of Christus Victorissimus discerns that antichrist zombie systems have tragically and criminally taken up the ashes of defeated demons:

God became flesh not to escape time, but to transfigure it. Not to summon us into the ontic void to escape reality and peer behind its screen (Schelling, Weil, Milbank, Hart (?), Balthasar), but to essentialize our humanity as telic, covenanted trustees[2]. To discern the conation--heart of Golden Obliged repair--in immanent human activity that is not hidden under a bushel (Matthew 5:15). 
Iconoclasm rejects theo-tropes of  ontological voids, aesthetic stasis of form, or mystical suspension as proximate ends (Rosenzweig, Benjamin: see later essays in this blog). It is thus the final and decisive theological moment of our metaphysical age: not another via negativa, but a ruptural participation in time, creatureliness, and justice.

 Iconoclasm repositions metaphysical discourse around the cataphasis of perfectibility, not apophatic subtraction. Transfiguration for immanence, responsible presence and eschatological courage not withdrawal into conceits of transcendence. Accountable trusteeship, not theologies of retreat or negation or mystification. Or philosophies fleeing transcendent justice.

Appendix B: Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Moral Perception

Modern epistemic homunculi pursuing cybernetic powers are behind the synthetic simulacral reduction of humankind, re-enslaving persons through idolatry that flees even his animal/chordate nature. “Contemporary man... attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.” —Ivan Illich. Pursuing homeostatic ends by geared determinism leads “naturally” to the dechordate state of patches and tricked algorithms that pith the spinal cord. Walker Percy, paraphrased and updated: We live in a deranged age — more deranged than usual because of technocrats—the mammon-seeking homunculus has severed from its notochord and has not the faintest kinesthetic sense of who he is or what he is doing to the security he so obsessively seeks. He's desperately constructing an alternate model reality where accountability cannot reach.

Mechanistic analogy of effect belongs to machines; homology of conation belongs to persons with souls and spines extending the imago Dei. When AI tokenism and benchmark finance intrude upon perception—its language and attention—they swap final causes (truth, justice, covenantal duty) for transactional proxies. That isn’t progress in metaphysics but its abdication: in human affairs, efficient causes resemble their ultimate cause—willed good for the neighbor—rather than a price signal captured for an asymmetric agent. AI doesn’t break from thermodynamics and its limits; it externalizes entropy—via energy burn, data extraction, and hidden human oversight—while rent-seeking reframes ontology as economistics. The ticker-tape simulacrum of “free intelligence” masks those inputs: a moral illusion powered by thermodynamics of externalities. Hence the derangement of technocratic homunculi (logic absolutized by disembodied code) severed from proprioception—what Walker Percy saw of those with no kinesthetic sense of who they are or what they’re debasing in the chase for security, control, and profit.

We are living in the postmodern impasse that is actually modernity’s middle age—suspended between the collapse of traditional pieties and condemned technocratic acceleration. My previous blog, “Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon,” served a dozen-year prophetic lament of this age: vigil by analysis and warning. It culminated in my book, “Duty to Warn: Metaphysical Criminality and the Condemned Project of AI’s False Ontologies”—a work I expect will soon find its readership.

In anticipation of a crowning epoch—when Christ’s immanence is revealed to those who endure final trial—I am launching two new literary projects as I’ve retired this month from institutionalized ministry:

1) “the iconoclast’s descending”-- a successor blog that essays a third path out of the crisis middle: a post-secular recovery of the metaphysical, rooted not in epistemological system nor tradition's claimants, but in the repairing poiesis of covenantal summons grounded in the expressive heart. It offers an ethically compressed diagnosis of intellectual systems that, in seeking to supplant authoritarian traditions, enabled newly destructive, mechanized, and priestly forms of unaccountable authority concerned, like all priesthoods, with continuance of system and bureaucracy more than provision of service. Iconoclasm imparts the immanent grammar of divine arrival, resisting both metaphysical icon and systemic despair by rupturing evil, gentling virtues, and leading toward the repair of the cosmos after the defeat of all evil, making God all-in-all.

 2) “The Inexhaustible Always in the Exhausted Speaks: A Sensorium of Brokenness and Delight” — my forthcoming anthology of metaphysical poetry-- is now in typesetting. These poems serve not for retreating but as a field guide to the forces of investigation and repair—testaments of kinesthetic grace within and without for an age g(r)asping for coherence. They embody an anthropology of Christological immanence: of witness, of accountable endurance, of repairing joy in the ruins—in short, of virtue.

My book, "Architectures of Grace in Pastoral Care: Virtue as the Craft of Theology beyond Biblicism" continues as the launch pad for this epoch of Reformation as Repair.

Appendix C: The Facultative Deontological Rule

Act always in a manner that honors and aligns with the grace by which you and others are empowered and attributed to realize justice, mercy, and truth within your embodied context, as a response to and participation in divine immanence post-metanoia. Grace as that which not only descends, but enables participatory, "horizontal ascension" by the peripherating virtues of the Golden Rule.

The movement from condemnation to poiesis--the constructive and inculcated kinesthetic action of Christ in the world--carries forth the Golden Rule imperative: post-metanoia response to divine grace manifests not as withdrawal or purity or chain to hierarchy but as embodied justice and kinesthesis of mercy in situ--by gentling service on street corners, back alleys, and wildland peripheries, not in anticipation of logically diverting clouds of political anxiety to shape--by ration--enduring forms. Poiesis begins with resistance to implosion by explosion : the ethical insubordination to logical systems' subordinating syntax--as well as machine artifice that memes rope-a-dope probabilities--that robs reality of life and love's descriptive meaning [1].

The deontological rule of facultating immanence is thus decidedly anti-Platonist and iconoclastic, refusing all inhospitalities to the arriving of God's potentials in God's possibles in God's season. Beginning with iconoclasm then collectivizing into the radical, immanence is framed by the incarnation: covenant, conation, and context.

This is the theopoetic moment to reframe modernity’s collapse suspended between failed, transcendentalizing epistemologies alongside exhausted liberal proceduralism and technocratic, winnowing rationality. To snap the stretching möbius rubber band of gnosticism to liberate immanence in Christ's victory.

Tempering if not rejecting both Enlightenment abstraction and institutional pietism, it calls for a renaissance of modern poiesis to substitute for system. To divert the systematizing impulse that lacks new course-setting or adaptive courage, its condemned hubris of AI, its categorical logic of future-winnowing binaries, its exclusion of ethics save instrumentalism, and its aesthetic and static formalism, proposing instead the Pentecostal Logos--the human theopoetics of improvisation, relational virtue, and ecological humility and accountability: the heart’s attunement to divine immanence.

Reality, if mechanistic, the heart-absented mind would function like an efficient force whose causality consists in "pulling" actions, of commandeering agency. Philosophized. The world we sense through the absolute of cognition—of the brain’s reduction into machines-- seems so akilter is the result of a Kantian or theological systems of transcendentals that never delivered, as if absolutes of epistemology are also teleological. 

Notes:

[1] We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

-- W. Heisenberg (Physics and Philosophy, 1958)

[2] While pure ontological cataphaticism, when severed from ethical discernment, collapses into Spinozist determinism—where all being is equated with divine necessity and no evil is truly resisted—Hebrews 5:13–14 affirms a non-analogical, deontological maturity. This maturity is not about abstract ontological participation in divine being (analogia entis); nor about dialectically balancing revelation and concealment; nor about dialectical hesitation of mystical theology that suspends moral action in favor of contemplative paradox; nor about analogical middles of cataphatic and apophatic esse that blend and choose lesser evils for the sake of cultivating nostalgic ideas of futures rather than hosting what divinely comes to challenge human stasis and comfort. The apophatic and cataphatic modes of divine relation are neither dialectic poles nor do they reveal the divine in analogia on an organic or artificial substrate--but these modes function about the moral clarity of trained discernment: distinguishing good from evil, and decisively rejecting the latter.