New Blog Announcement

a new chapter of divine presence realized in moral, embodied human life—an ethos of conation, virtue, and humility over instrumental rationality and technological seduction.

 

the iconoclast's descending 

(pulls down systems)

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

Douglas Blake Olds

26 May 2025

 

This Blog is a follow up to my prior 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.

While the Blog Crying the Wilderness of Mammon lamented demonic diversion of human purpose--which included the calls to conceits of false transcendence (Matt. 4:9) generated by the pursuit of appropriative power--that chief demon is now consigned to an unbridgeable abyss. This successor blog from the victory of immanence of the metaphysical conation of heart over a ego-strategizing mind set on winnowing futures--the victory of the deontology of virtue over instrumentalized ends (the snake's ratio in the garden)--now moves from pessimism ("Crying") to optimism, and the kinesthetic inculcation of Christ-all-in-all, from repentence 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.

It is in this victory that its assay is essayed and poetized herein, moving from denunciation to construction, from lament to hopeful embodiment, but recognizing that many are still shocked in a middle space between considering a return to transcendent pieties and authorities, and wondering if technocratic acceleration is aligned or should be refused to that retrieval.

My new blog announces another 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 accountabilty 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.

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.

Manifesto for Ecclesial Poiesis Beyond the Guild:

Toward a Biblical Theology of Prophetic Rupture, Metaphysical Repair, and Eschatological Urgency

We break—
decisively and with poietic intent—
from the ossified norms of academic acceptance that reward careerist obedience to dead form.

I. Rejection of the Dying Genre

We reject the guild’s gatekeeping conditions:

• Not too speculative, not too political, but safely both sidesism.

• Rife with patristic or rabbinic citation—but empty of moral demand.

• Loyal to inherited categories—presence, typology, temple, mediation—recycled through ontological nostalgia.

• Prioritized for “teachable form,” making them usable by seminaries clinging to antimetaphysical assumptions about sacrament, participation by theory, and typological coherence.

• Dilatory formats of "literature search" even of now mooted, dead philosophies disguised as systematics.

• Playing "gotcha" with "plagiarism" software.

• These works offer a ready-made set of metaphors (e.g., temple = body = cosmos = Eucharist) for pastors who would preserve tradition than challenge the systems of simulacra and abuse metastasizing within it.

Such guild genre is not theological depth—
It is usability as social and elite appeasement.
It trades prophetic confrontation for academic palatability.
It is ecclesially inert in the face of historical crisis.

It is recognizable form to an establishment that has not yet repented of its metaphysical scaffolding. Including:

Not to publish outlandishly priced books and journal articles out of reach of Christian missionaries and coming workers of repair; or to wait months or even years at a time for publication and editorial decisions. Anonymity and thus lack of accountability for referees.

---

II. Alignment with Prophetic Conation

Instead, we write for ethical urgency—
not typology, but metanoia.
Not presence as object, but covenantal attention.
Not academic reception, but ekklesial repentance: The Book of Revelation's Letter to 7 Churches.

Not by citing but by enacting, and nailing to what walls and excludes corrections that prophetically welcome historical throughput.

We unlicensed iconoclasts--bivocational theologians, poets, organizers, healers--are no longer bound to perform theology according to a dying genre’s expectations.
We write for the new heaven and new earth praxis and realized Golden Rule ethics of deontological virtue—
to expose antichristic political and dog-matic meme cultures,
to rupture guilded quietism,
to restore truth-function and metaphysical discernment,

to discover rupture homologous and different in other archival revolts

to make theology again an instrument of repair.

Not recrudescent, performative polemic, ours scales and scopes the call to ecclesial awakening and the human essence of ethical perfectability.

Therefore we commit:
to write theology as pointing to covenantal risk,
to publish as neighbors, not competitors,
to read as those accountable to judgment,
and to teach not to preserve form,
but to train the soul toward energizing justice and grace.

--

This blog upholds 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 reframes 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. 

To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our awareness mode from epistemologically-centered focus on forms to conation—heart-led—centering on energies and kraft that bring peace and reconciliation. To let the past of philosophy, ego-centrism, and formalism fall away, instead to expand our sense of now in the Golden Rule addressing street-level and wildlands corner necessities, and so dissolve the fear in our minds’ consequentialist seeking of power, of appropriative advantage. 

Reality, if organic and divinely intended, would involve Golden Rule operations of incorporative attribution—pushing actions of conative alignment with grace and providence. So that moderation is not a virtue of poetry, but shameless rodomontade and metaphoric overflows that rouse an ethnos from moderation, that challenges by combat syntax what moderation tolerates to its shame. Disquiet philosophy, then, by 

Psalm not proverb; 

By prophecies, not elegies; 

By implosions not stateliness of grief; 

By the pitch of prayer,” not Manhatted ironies of interior liberal stages. 

The forceful defiance of spiritual entropy, refusing to become a twee palliative. 

Iconoclasm against orderly blasphemies.

Humans ever seek liberation from accountability, from the obligations of virtue. Henry Corbin notes, “Sacralization and secularization are phenomena that take place and have their place not primarily in the world of external forms, but first and foremost in the internal world of the human soul.

Secularization reduces the soul’s relationships by mechanics of disinterested (made into a binary) causality. This hegemony of secularity leads to a bullying poverty in world and experience—a crisis of meaning-making. On the other hand, a Trinitarian world of the divine heart is one in which things enter into relations with each other ruled by causal connections inside the world, not of detached experience and epistemology, but by obligation—Shema, Law, and Golden Rule, obliged relations of proximity of awareness not appropriation or force, in which things exchange intimacies by mere existence. Causality in scientific terms is a mechanical and externaizing relation. Poetic relationships rest on shared creation, a thick sympathy that connects all created things.

The iconoclast’s descending is not a mere continuation of critical voice in the absence of accountability. It anticipates metaphysical counter-modernity that is radically embodied, conatively (intentionally) virtuous, and fully eschatologically realized without fear. It defies the cartographic gaze seeking of absolute sign posts, and takes to the meteorological sky of context and fragment: gusting with Logos’ realism, rupturing simulacra of transactional totalitarianism. Iconoclastic poetic artifacts—glossolalic invocations, parabolic miniatures, prophetic shards—launch new participations from the remnant of an age passing away.

	Old blog: Crying in the Wilderness of Mammon	New blog: the iconoclast's descending
Tone	Lamentation, exposure, warning	Rebuilding, incantation, theological assay
Mode	Prophetic denunciation	Iconoclastic construction
Target	Mammon, technocracy, AI, liberal collapse	Same—but now surpassed by poietic vocation
Anthropology	Postlapsarian analysis of desire + fracture	Conative anthropology of repair
Metaphysical Register	Ecclesial eschatology under duress	Golden-Rule realism amid immanent eschaton
Ethical Premise	Metanoia by critique	Facultative deontology by kinesthetic craft
Poetics	Mourning rhythm; textual analysis	Pentecostal grammar of embodied rhythm
Final Image	“Wilderness”	“Descending” – Moses/Samson/Christ/poet pulling down the temples of simulacra and system

 

In short, this blog aligns with 2025's cultural moment consigned by system overreach, technocratic mechanization, and exhausted liberal proceduralism toward the turning points of renewal: the radical reimaginings of ethics, theology, and socially humane energy that extend and repair.

We are what we heal and by this, repentance, reset on Becoming's course.

The time of guild negotiation is over. The philosophers have all failed.

The eschaton is now.

Biblical theology is validated only by its apocalyptic witness to energies not orders, not forms.

Poiesis writes to break the temple of simulation.

This is rupture and transitional iconoclasm in the Spirit, for the people, for the telos of Christ returned.

Note:

[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)