The Restoration of Reason from the Eyes of a Neighbor: A Shema-Christological Metaphysic of Conative Healing

Douglas Blake Olds

Being an annotated, sermonic prolegomenon to millenarian iconoclasm preceding judgment--a theological prolepsis, the intervention into modern philosophy of mind, evolutionary theory, AI discourse, metaphysical epistemology in the age of Daniel 2:43, and in the footnotes, the necessary and overdue rehabilitation of Johann Gottfried Herder. This essays proposes a peripat(h)etic, perichoretic grammar for theological and pedagogical reconstruction after ideological collapse—anchored not in institutions, formal aesthetics, or instrumental binary logic, but in re-covenanted conation as intent.

This essay is offered as my living summa inside semper reformanda. It departs from classical natural theology; modern epistemology; AI critique literature; and  postliberal insularity and process theology; to articulate the contemporary post-secular (=recovery of the metaphysical) poetics of repair, founded not on speculative cognition of ends but on relational conation grounded in Shema-fulfilled Christology. This essay inverts the trend of western metaphysics--its epistemological centering and valorization--to address the contemporary situation of metacrisis portrayed in earlier installments posted in this series: the collapse of reason into simulation, cognition into recursion, and metaphysics that sustain life into technocratic and determinist dead ends (i.e. intelligence as machinable artifice). This exposes the confrontation between collapsed metaphysics--the metrics of liberal pluralism at loggerheads with the nostalgia of hierarchical dogma--and Shema-Christological poiesis, moving from the ruins of absolutizing knowledge to the post-secular repair of covenantal and conative metaphysics by means of poietic habitus of immanence. Poiesis dances its gesture, gentles it voice, and is trained in the virtuous Logos--the Christo-Shemaic sequence. Not the temple system which sends out pebbles for polish and peer review, but the iconoclast crying in the wilderness—the one who breaks the rock open” (Jer 23:29).

I. The collapse of Enlightenment hopes

Middle modernity stands arrested between false messianisms—including the types of recrudescent pieties exemplified by de Maistre, whose anti-Enlightenment creed condemns class revolution against the ancien regime only to establish rejected hierarchies and valorize rejected pieties anew, and the teleological accelerations of Marx [1], who attempted to replace the economic class distinctions of the Industrial Revolution with the eschaton of the worker, laboring ever on.

Marx's trajectory persists in a new class of Tech-Artifactants now seeking to supplant one eschatological distortion with another: a malign technocratic acceleration toward the degradations of speciation, sheltered behind redoubts—planetary moats, exclusionary and entropic [12]—within a human-reimagined design of the transactional cosmos, where labor is subsumed into capital pyramids, but still toils ever on, and now anon, defined as capital by a master class.

II. A typology of evasion through formalist aestheticism

Yet when a philosopher's artifice runs up against the necessity of ethical accountability, he may  become a kind of poet-martyr, choosing, after duress, either incarnation or ethical evasion.  Such choosing Heidegger made of Hölderlin, Dante of Virgil, and Creedal Christianity claims regarding Jesus, with different warrants. The Jesus path from the underworld accepts—repentantly carried through to dianoia—the created obligation to love and will the world in context, ever the microcosm in spite of macrocosmic abstraction of threat and ontologies. The other escapes—into aesthetic materialism or shopping-list historicism. Heidegger’s presents Hölderlin’s poetry as “validated” in a moral vaccum [10], "discharging unbearable tension [between call and flight] by becoming a “pure eye,” enclosing oneself in a world of forms and aesthetic contemplation” [2]. A soulless message of form, absent the energizing heart in its Hebrew anthropological sense of conation [3]. An eye’s libertarian hermeneutic denying the existence of neighbors as a calling. The eye of Pharaoh's cat oblivious to the Providence that keeps it alive, while its master has contempt for it [4].

III. Architects of systemitizing closure

Heidegger’s “subterranean” irrealia--Sein-zum-Tode as onto-telic withdrawal--severs energy from ethics and craft. In its place, Dasein emanates mirages of stasis and recurrent aerosols of sulfuration-- memetic, hermetic, disembodied shadow (the latter as Herder's critique of Kant [8]), epistemology excised from the embodied soul by providence rationed through its denial in conceptual simulacratization. Heidegger’s sire toward death, Nietzsche, aestheticizes material reason to its extreme in will-to-power and calls it [in Zarathustra] ‘remaining true to the earth.’ But the result of contemplative evasion into formalism is a hermeneutics closed to healing vectors of grace and justice: the world seems set by objectless “forces rotating around themselves, without purpose or meaning” (Gen. 1:2)-- a chaos of entropy and nihilism —like soot in a whirlwind--now carried through the tonsuring gaze and masks of ironic detachment posing as dialectic.

Until the heartbeat of grace reclaims, lifting veils that obscured grace and justice from the interior eye's comprehension [2 Cor. 3:16].

IV. The Constructive Core of Soul Making by a Re-trained Metaphysical Grammar and Praxis

Making the repentant heart--the seat of intention in Hebrew anthropology—conscious is the ground of reason rather than elidable by situational private interests, ego, and systematics. The “image of God” is not encompassed by ontological form in any way--and indeed pre-metanoiac memory (a prioris) must be carefully subjected to the virtue of recollection (Olds 2023)-- but as the emboldened kinesthetic capacity of immanent response to Creation in the  subjectvely experienced moment, outsourced to oblige to others' eyes of need. An embodied aesthetics, experience, and empathy of homologous situations of  challenge (attendance to milieux and operating grace). Sequenced from Shema only, Christ's reasoning makes intentionality of creative sustenance integral and indeed primary, though proceeding from metanoia--and necessary for ethical consciousness to be functionally sustaining (including by healing) the collective and thereby the self. Matt. 22:37 adding (feeding) dianoia into the Shema spirals us back to the human essence sharing the divine heart--its doubling witness--and then upward from there back to the reformed mind, the dia-noia.

Dianoia (διανοία — "understanding" or "thinking through") is situated cognition—is tied by the Christian sequence (Matt. 22:37) of the Shema to context, need, proximity, and relational obligation. Dianoia is having your mind properly intended and attuned in kinesthetic style and imaging to the direction of ethics and grace right for the moment, for the opportune care and enrichment the people and earth around you. It connects your virtues to other people, both present and arriving, and thereby makes you more essentially human imaging trusteeship.

So that the one attribute of “divine nature” humans may objectively mirror--the only one subjectively intelligible--is the conative essence, not its pure eye or an analogical representation of the infinite mind. All else escapes human finite technologies of access [6] except as follow on predictive, reasoning, prophetic ability of dianoesis to investigate how conation-- the circulating, not fixed, ladder of Israel's angels (Genesis 28:10-17) rising with testimony that falls back in prayer--has played out from below in archived histories/ethical historiography. How personal investigation--comparative literature and personal attendance to grace--spurs a maturing assessment of the feedback of virtues. How they bear fruit from the penitent heart below, not the arrogating mind above, to guide and re-train praxis inside an embodied, not speculative, milieu.

The grammar of immanence is not that of rearward ontological participation (that has been left to the Creator) but of  post-secular, Trinitarian anthropogenesis by poiesis: witnessed and actuating transformation of subject by the repentance-inducing object--both neighbor and Trinity—an anthropology grounded in accountable participation in sustained and sustaining grace, not speculative ascent into realms of inner dreaming and gestures toward hierarchical proximity. Where human ontology is repentent and is renewed from each moment and encounter of love.

V. Eschatological confrontation with pagan ontology and artificial determinism

The metaphysics of cognition operates within perceivable time and space and is thus tethered to contextual need, not suspended by unknowable transcendence or by a hypothetical function at the level of species-wide survival. While the organic and biological are often said to sustain the species as a taxonomic form, it remains disputed whether consciousness itself serves any such species-level function—especially where human nature is oriented toward aggrandizing aims—of selfish genes, technocratic control, or survivalist security. If there is no evolutionary advantage to conscious experience for the species as a whole, how—and why—did it evolve? Is such TESCREAL [5] triad a worthy and warranted basis for transhumanism inside accountability to the Creator's justice? Transhumanism is just the latest--if not most condemned--attempt to escape accountability.

Metanoia offers a theological reorientation: the spiritual survival value of mirrored repentance. For the essence of the Logos trustee incorporated by essence in a language group, the unit of selection is the language group. From its covenanting care from birth to death, the human species as language bound holds that the ability to “change one's mind” and language for the sake of others confers survival advantages not just for individuals, but for communities—and potentially for species-wide flourishing. This requires a consciousness capable of evaluating its own ideas from the standpoint of collectives immersed with individual accountability justice that unblocks the flow of Providential resources. Such a collective is not pattern-determined, and is not "probabilistic" when it comes to live saving, deontological command. Either debases the human as a trustee of the logos sustained historically by language and advanced by repentent insight.

For the human divine imager within a greater, expansionary call and trust—the cosmos—dianoia flows from metanoia: the dia (through) of a transformed noesis (mind) becomes the conduit for repair (Romans 12:2). Such a channel may extend shalom outward into “great units of selection,” not biologically essentialized, but spiritually constituted through covenantal love and ethical perception.

Contrary to gene-centric evolutionary theory, which locates the unit of evolution in form—whether the species or the gene—covenantal theology rejects the reductionist assumption that survival advantage lies in species-level statistical fitness. Instead, it holds that advantage lies poietically in relational attentiveness—in the neighbor’s eyes—that is, in ethical attunement [17]. Covenant affirms that what solidifies across time is not material genealogy but spiritual relationship. Evolution is not here proposed as a competing scientific theory, but as a metaphysical-theological reorientation: through the Trinitarian frame of conation, transformation proceeds not by algorithmic selection or aggregate fitness, but through the eyes of the neighbor—delicate, tender, and weak. Conative response is tested by torsion; relational fidelity as ethics (Heb. 5:14) becomes the human vector of creaturely transformation of noesis and kineaesthesia--of both thought and embodied perception. This anthropology of accountable immanence--ongoing in virtues, not reduced to a simplified moment of "justification" and collapsing monergism--replaces the universalizing abstraction of top-down perspectives that default to instrumentalism of agonistic nature. This anthropology, rather than grounding Being in nature's analogies, aligns with the Becoming of human essence as responsive and accountable love (Luke 10: 29; 36-37), the conation that unifies and sustains the species of the human trustee (the essence of God's imager, Gen. 1:27) then extended to the renewability of the earth's substance. This is human ontology cleansed of--repaired of--sin.

Yet ever humans are tempted to Parmenides famous error: "ταὐτὸν τὸ εἶναι καὶ τὸ νοεῖν εἶναι" – "Thinking and being are the same," which profoundly influenced classical metaphysics, especially in its Platonic formulations, where cognition tended toward stasis, hierarchy, and abstraction. AI inherits and perpetuates these philosophical legacies—legacies that dismiss metaphysics or reject the covenantal Christian metaphysics of the heart—without the soul of accountable intention. AI's mining of archived epistemologies of this error replicates the ancient collapse of ontology by mistaking reductive modeling for essence (i.e., by mistaking epistemological outputs—framed by intended,  instrumental ends—for ontological foundations meant for the potencies of ethics and freedom). Through the cultural sedimentation of technocratic scribes—whose epistemic biases have been rendered unconscious by hegemonic service—AI-generated hallucinations increasingly masquerade as reasoning’s soul—as if statistically emergent correlations and AI algorithms' routing, by design, their ideological hegemony as possessed of ontological necessity. Against this, Christological ontology—grounded in the Golden Rule—diverges by deontological imperative from the machined reduction of cognition to being. Ontology is found not in function or algorithm, but in intentional, covenantal attention to, and alignment with, the loved neighbor. It is obliged, accountable, and telic: ordered toward fulfillment in divine love, not toward cognition, its historical recursions, nor instrumental control from determinism's data sets. 

Philosophy, by material logic and earth-situated taxonomy and funneled into industrial AI, has turned from metaphysics and accountability into the priest of the sand-shitting, feet-soiling demiurge  (Daniel 2:43). This serves the dream of desertifiers, to destroy the forensic realm. An idealist self-closure of reason [7] — where cognition collapses into ontology's redoubt ("thinking and being are the same")--drives its stone placenta born heart-denying into an eschatological box canyon, its destined quicksand coming from the eternally-denying abyss.

VI. Pedagogical and Educational Import within the scriptural and metaphysical paradigm of an emerging era of deontological Christopoeisis:

A new grammar for theological pedagogy

This section outlines a post-secular pedagogy rooted in Shema-Christological metaphysics. It critiques both Dewey’s proceduralism and Freire’s liberationist eschatology as insufficiently attuned to covenantal ontology and moral formation. Rather than learning structured within adaptive civic frameworks or oppositional class consciousness, this paradigm emphasizes Bildung as conative, heart-led attentiveness—training perception through empathetic proprioception, responsive grace, and accountability to neighbor.

 Anthropological training is sequenced metaxially through the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9), capped by Matthew 22:37, and then routed by Hebrews 5:13–14's grounding of ethics (Golden Rule virtue) applied to kinesthetic sympathy and response.The educational framework that follows begins with metanoia (repentance)  and completed in dianoia (context-centered problem solving), where trained and habituated ethical perception precedes strategic (top-down idolatrous) cognitive schemes. This pedagogy resists technocratic rationalism, taxonomies of identity, and AI-driven instrumentalism, advocating instead for peripatetic accountability: a virtue-centered formation shaped by embodied movement through aligned, context-specific life that moves with grace.

Education, in  this vision, becomes Pentecostally poietic—preparing for the improvisational spread of divine immanence, not the strategic reproduction of systemic form. The result is a theological anthropology of learning grounded in the Christopoiesis of the New Adamic trusteeship (no longer stewards!): formation through relational virtue, ecological and eschatological witness, and the repairing energies of the expressive heart.

Critical  Lexicon and Glossary

Conative Bildung: Formation of volitional, grace-aligned moral response—training the heart by laying down the kinesthetics of intention, not the head by catechetical strategic emplacements.

Perceptual Accountability: Ethical obligation to sense the neighbor as teleologically implicated, not politically constructed.

Poietic Discernment: Tuning (post-repentance) to align with emergent grace in real-time; an eschatology of improvisation.

Moral Proprioception: Kinesthetic virtue-perception: awareness of one’s moral bearing (of grace and obligation) within the field of others’ suffering or dignity.

Social Homeostasis: Collective moral (re-)balancing achieved through conative resonance and covenantal virtue, not systemic calibration. Not static but fluid architectonics amid ecological resilience and earthly regenerative cycles hosting entries and exits.

Recollection (vs. Nostalgia): Operative moral memory that reactivates grace from prior experience—restorative rather than sentimental, active rather than passive.

To escape the abyssal fate noted at the conclusion of the previous section (V.), education of the young, pedagogy of covenanted, incarnational thoughput--Bildung--requires grace-dispensing alignment with the "eyes of the neighbor:" moving into the era of the Golden Rule where technocracy is ruled out while technology has an appropriated character and use (see Part 3 of another essay in this series).

Theologically grounded poietics of responsibility resists the procedural rationalism--allocative opportunity--of Dewey and the reactive liberatory eschatology of Freire (2014). Both ground the learner’s embeddedness in existing social structures; they fail to provide a metaphysical grammar of ontology, an anthropology situated in and contextualized by covenantal obligation and adequate to the Shema’s imperative [9]. 

In place of Dewey’s civic utility and Freire’s class awareness, I propose primary education of the heart-senses—a conative Bildung attendant to and aligned with providence expressed in ethics and aesthesis, from mission to palliation—unhoarded surplus rather than limited resources inside the emergent era of Pentecostal shalom. This is neither tolerance toward the demographically valorized and statisticalized “other,” nor liberation of the oppressed alone. Rather, Bildung aims for formation in a metaphysics of the heart’s return, not the mind’s proliferation.

Bildung, situated in Hebrews 5:13–14, invests in moral perception grounded in divine sequence: ethics and aesthetic perception in the Shema’s unfolding—from ear (dialectic) to heart, to nephesh (expressive soul), to embodied commitment—completed in Christ’s dianoia (Matt. 22:37), enacted as attentiveness activated by neighborly grace. Dewey’s elevation of adaptive intelligence and pluralist harmony detaches education from such telic dimension of responsibility to an immanent, processive emergence of shalom. In contrast, the Shema-Christological model centers ethical intentionality (heart-sense) in conation prior to training of culturally-buffered cognition, and character formation for shalom and righteousness (2Timothy 3:16), not ego-aggrandizing adjustment to conditions.

Freire’s “liberation” of the oppressed risks recasting virtue as reactionary and instrumental rather than relationally generative and deontological. While he rightly identifies historical subjugation, his eschatology lacks repentant metanoia as anthropological pivot, where the reorientation toward a deontological divine covenant through the Logos of repair contains the metaphysical account of the neighbor as teleologically given, not as socio-politically constructed. Metanoia drives dianoia to its rightful landing in of care [11] and other-directed virtue.

Moving by repentance from heuristics to social obligation: Virtue is not vow, just as the Golden Rule is not a guideline; contrary to Eliot's tethering intensity too closely to inherited symbolic orders of tradition and thus pattern, virtue responds not to the pattern for reordering trajectories, but to the ripe intensity of moment without strategy. Virtue's master, Christ who is all-in-all, reads the context and innovates from the Logos, through scriptural warrants of immanence and trained embodiment. Virtue is in order to heal and reorient what fractures shalom--of and from the source and structuring in autonomic formation. It is practiced through moral proprioception and disciplined, reflexive embodiment leading to sensitized soulmaking. Proprioception involves the sensory/motor attunements of balance and awareness filtered through higher order brain structures. Awareness of grace and one's conduit for such, as well as the moral gravity of others exerting a pull of concern and attention, especially in extremis. Unlike the old ideas concerning ESP, proprioceptive perception is telekinetic across distance and time, trained morally and habituated by virtue so that autonomic processing becomes part of conscious awareness. A polvalent human fellowship in the eternity of Christ, when it first came to be perceived autonomically and viscerally as homeostatic, but by training recognizes where fellowship in existence exerts a claim [Empfinden] and leads toward mutual healing stabilization, as in the case of John 11:38 [ἐμβριμώμενος--having deep feelings located in an anthropological interior] involves the virtue of emplaced memory [μνημεῖον ; a remembrance, i.e. place of interment], recollection. Social homeostasis--more restorative homeoflux--is realized by functional resilience where the individual participates in the whole, and facultation of collective life is achieved by archived preservation of conative metaphysics abd sequential training (Shema), including social recalibration to divine time in Jubilee ideals and sequences, sabbath dynamics, and checks and balances--not proceduralism but distributed moral proprioception across roles and functions--to serve morally extensive sodalities: The body of Christ (Romans 12:5; 1 Corinthians 10:17; 12:27; Ephesians 4:12).

Metanoia assumes the training of critical thinking that interrogates systems and tradition, and the peripatetic primacy of experience for such investigation--extended even, if not especially, into theology. Where the soul is grace-aligned communal relay beyond simple receptivity--not a sovereign epistemological center for individual "freedom." Both Dewey and Freire, while ethical in intent, fall into species-level proceduralism, collapsing personhood into emergent social identity rather than conative being-with.As such, they remain committed to the dialectical reductionism of technocratic rationalities—whether liberal or Marxist—that seek to shape personhood through structural conditions rather than receive it as a relational vocation within post-secular, Pentecostal immanence (cf. Jer. 31:34a). Pentecost’s eternity is that which ever renews the fitness of kinesthetic acts of the heart—erupting from within—to dethrone secular cognition and re-enthrone the Shema’s primacy of the heart, re-pitching Jeremiah’s covenantal tent within the body through ever-new autonomic virtues.

Core Principles of Shema-Christological Education: 

• Perceptual Accountability: Teaching must train to sense and engage the neighbor not as alterity or class figure, but as divinely implicated, created moral counterparts.
• Poietic Discernment: Formation in the kairetic rhythms and silence of grace’s emergence and telos—not just in analysis or critique from a static, recurrent, or determinist metaphysical frame. Where virtuous iconoclasm allows a changed matrix of Pentecost in Hebrews 5:13-14, where babble and intelligibility battle by emergent genius to intrude ontogeny into stymied phylogenetic realities--a Providential flow of embodiment and kinesthetics serving Christ becoming all-in-all [13].
• Telic Formation: Each learner is oriented toward divine shalom; education is both “open-ended” and open-hearted. Refusal of Technocratic Reduction: Against AI, metrics, categorical and logical taxonomies and identity schemas, which attempt to reduce virtue to signal-based categorical, instrumentalized ends rather than vector  grace and justice toward collective formation and discourse.

Bildung of Peripatetic accountability: Life is a test not mapped. None of us enter and exit through the same stormy channel, the same mother of ideas of each rooted but not shaped by our tribes and cradle. Wandering from these through what contexts we engage by leaving our tent to go out through the tabernacle of various hides—ram, goat, lamb-- to take our role in the Temple’s variegated canvas. Where we go matters less than how we go, and what we notice and study and align with than any realization of appropriation.

Recollection as Peripatetic Grace: Absolutes and their study requires the freezing of time, while life involves movement and the accumulation of experience. Nostalgia is the intuition of the prior, while recollection is the operationalization of the latter which unpacks memories laid down by the mind’s minding of time. To absolutize brain structures—religion here, pain avoidance there—is to map absolutes. Recollection aligns the weather of the moment with the climate laid down in the peripatetic, perichoretic mind. The mind's training is outside, in weather, and only later may begin to note the failures of all maps as reducing models and systems as their abstracting of the total events of the universe.

Ministry in the post-technocratic era: A Christopoietic Model

Training for church educators will abandon form-static evaluative tools such as spiritual gift inventories and personality typing systems, which presume closed categorical logic and systematized identity assignment. In their place, the Church turns social cultivar by Attentiveness Formation practices that promote proprioceptive awareness of moral gravity in lived milieux, and poietic exercises tuned toward grace’s emergence. And justice expected where grace is blocked. These train perception not as abstract cognition but as ethically embodied attentiveness and kinesthetic imaging within context of loving neighbor and serving God.

In lieu of systematic discipleship pipelines or cultural alignment strategies, ministry formation becomes newly grounded in Peripatetic Accountability: spiritual formation as movement, both literal (kinesthetic, place-bound) and relational (responsive, grace-aligned). These are bottom-up virtues, scaled from the radius of perception—the neighbor as felt gravity—toward widening moral scope, never abstracted from embodied experience.

Liturgy under this model is concerned not with the preservation of form—institutional repetition or aesthetic nostalgia—but with training of perception: cultivating the Church’s attentional ecology to discern grace in improvisation, rupture, and kairetic repair. This is the liturgical telos: to teach by demonstration and reflection how the body may come to feel the Spirit’s promptings in history and intimacies of moment.

Implementation Vectors

• Worship Revitalization: train attentiveness (e.g., silence, directional walking, mutual witness testimonies, sensorium psalmody).
• Formation Tracks: replace typology-based spiritual training with proprioceptive practices (guided embodiment, neighborhood walks with theological reflection, memory-as-recollection work). The primacy of Chaplaincy and palliative ministries.
• Ordination Criteria: Redefine leadership qualifications based on attentional maturity, transferrable to the vulnerable, not personality profiles or skillsets. Establish ordination protocols that assess perceptual and theological maturity through real-time moral discernment casework rather than doctrinal regurgitation or managerial aptitude.
• Pastoral Education: Train clergy in how to cultivate proprioceptive attention in themselves and others—rooted in Scripture, trauma-informed care, and poetic witness.
• Curriculum Design for community formation cohorts:
• “Shema-Christological Imaging"/Learning centered on metanoia → dianoia → proprioception, inner imaging of (kin)aesthetics.
•  Train virtue flowing from Jeremiah 31:34a (all shall know me...), integrating perichoretic, Shemaic responsiveness and Hebrews 5:13–14’s training of spiritual senses.
•  Embodied ethics classes using event (kairesis) discernment labs (e.g., improvisational virtue response to real-world stimuli). Commission artists, poets, and palliative practitioners as central to formation, not supplemental—integrating theological imagination with sensorium-centered ethics.

NOTES: 

[1] The distinction of authors--the pseudo-providential de Maistre, the pseudo-eschatological Marx--but not its diagnosis nor prognosis--is Milbank’s:  https://x.com/johnmilbank3/status/1940044954254156089

[2] Descriptive quotations only, without attribution of warrant, are from Evola's critique of Nietzsche [noting that the illicit claims of both are tied by lineages and loops of controversy]: https://x.com/Daily_Evola/status/1940620165592633631

[3]Evocative of—but not derived from—Lévinas' ethics-through-alterity, Kierkegaard’s inwardness before God, Leibniz’s monadic vis activa, or McIntyre's retrieval of Aristotelian virtue, my proposal is filtered through a biblical, covenantal lens sequenced by Hebrews 5:13–14, of which Olds (2025b, fn. 1)  exegetically paraphrases: “[In terms of v. 13’s word of righteousness], solid food is for the perfecting—those whose sensory faculties of awareness have, through ethical proficiency, been completely trained for the purpose of distinguishing good and evil—the spiritually re-constructive and ruinous—in the world.”

My proposal is the theologically grounded poietics of responsibility for a time of ethical and cultural collapse, animated by covenantal attentiveness rather than reducible to procedural tolerance—post-liberal denotations of ersatz dignity and safety (performative allyship rhetoric) extended toward demographically valorized “others.” That is, the post-liberal arrogation of care over social alterns collapsed into invidious statistical taxonomies derived from a state's idea of nature.

Lévinas' ethics of alterity encounters the commanding, apophatic face without Pentecostal indwelling [20], while Kierkegaard’s isolated subjectivity lacks communal accountability. My proposal to “filtering” ethics through Scripture is not merely supplemental but corrective.

Post-secular covenantality rejects appropriative power in custodial logic or procedural assignment. Instead, it discloses immanent truth as outward grace-attendance, where virtue is no longer a power of the isolating monad but the alignment of communal accountability toward the integrative essence of eternalizing shalom. This demands the primary ethical and aesthetic training of the heart-senses—a Bildung that brings heaven to earth, the transcendent into proprioceptive immanence--shalom's balance of generational "entrances and exits" (--Herder in Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind). Education serves covenantal transit of souls, not a fixed system or schema. For the philological and biblical grounding of conation, see Olds (2023, Appendix I).

While Alasdair MacIntyre (2007) shares my critique of Enlightenment abstraction and bureaucratic modernity, our metaphysical, theological, and anthropological foundations sharply diverge.

MacIntyre’s tradition-based virtue ethics reinstates Aristotelian teleology: human beings as dependent rational animals, seeking eudaimonia through habituated roles in a restored polis. My project, by contrast, iconoclastically disrupts classical virtue traditions—even Aristotelian eudaimonism itself (Olds 2023, 10)—in favor of a Pentecostal, Christocentric reform grounded in the neighbor’s need and the Shema’s imperative of soul training in sequential anthropological testing that restores potential.

Where MacIntyre sees virtue as the individualized pursuit of flourishing within inherited forms, I propose a Christological poiesis grounded in conative immanence—virtue structured by the Golden Rule and enacted as mission from below (implied from Phil. 2:5–11 and Luke 4:18–19). The human is not a teleologically-formed rational agent, but a covenantal imager called into accountability to welcoming new, non-tradent possibles of history, offspring, and phenomena within the renewing essence of the earth.

Thus, MacIntyre’s pedagogy re-inserts the subject of culture and politics into tradition. Mine summons the learner into prophetic rupture—against system, instrumentalism, and the strategic hierarchies of order. In place of polis-based restoration, I propose training  individuated perception scaffolded by grace and tuned by justice's providential processing.

[4] Metonymies adapted from https://x.com/Vrbata20/status/1940134131087688064

[5] TESCREAL = Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. An inherently congeries of eschatological but pagan projects—proposing futures based on optimization, abstraction, and power, not love, repentance, or covenant. See also Olds 2023, 31.

[6] E.g. via the entrances to God through analogical knowledge, mystical claims of ascent by model and technique, ritual participation, conceits of deification beyond conation. What is offered here is a corrective re-course in the heart and the sequence of the operation of soul from the Shema and dianoesis of Christ in opening the gate (John 10:7-10) to divine wisdom and participatory mission.

[7]  "It is the science of reason insofar as it becomes conscious and that it is all Being ... it expresses perfectly the essence of the science of Reason,"--attributed to Schelling, On Hegel in the Philosophie der Offenbarung (1841).

Such a statement critiques a totalizing metaphysics that makes scientia of Hegel’s Absolute to foreclose moral contingency-- a science of Being and thus unaccountable to guided or sequenced Becoming. Boolean reasoning--the structural logic of moral collapse by winnowing ("rationing") human futures--supports the idea of Being becoming "self-aware" beyond--historically preceeding--the veil of ethics, in an analogical reasoning of the naturalist fallacy of what is provides the data of what should be--turning natural revelation into necessities within an immanent logic of yes/no. The divine "presence" grounded in nature not in essences of Trinitarian conation and the Trustee's enmeshment in the renewability of the earth.  Natural revelation (Romans 1, Psalm 19) is no longer poietic-- inviting, relational, and ethically responsive,  but is the utilitarian perversion into deductive necessity: it tells ethical artificers what must be, processed as code—a deterministic unfolding in machine automation--not what calls for covenantal response in proximity, reflecting alignment with the vectors of divine presence in justice and providence.

AI unleashed at this very historical moment is not to participate in covenantal renewal, but to detach from it. This is divine judgment's moment, because those caught in human nature rather than its conative essence have decided to place themselves into what is not natural: machines and systems through which Being unfolds itself—deterministic, efficient, and unanswerable. Divorced from conation, AI is deployed for rent-seeking, enacting neoliberalism’s radical privatization of what was once held in Providential commons: attention, labor, story, ecology, and time. The poietic becomes proprietary, sharing in the encapitalization of everything. The sustaining becomes extractive. This is not the birth of a new era of conative Christology, or even a new intelligence that solves universal human problems of civilization, but the foreclosure of moral imagination. 

Metaphysical justice—certain and purgative—awaits.

[8]Johann Gottfried Herder, a Christian pastor of the  (Protestant) Enlightenment, who established the contextual turn in Biblical hermeneutics, was a forerunner of the proleptic iconoclast: "Herder’s preferred mode of engaging with the world was “critical” in both of these broad senses of the word" [both discerning, in the Aristotelian/sapiential sense, and adversarial of tradition, in the Reformation's Enlightenment sense].  He "sustained to the end...an extended and bitter polemic with Kant, his former teacher" (Norton, 2009, 354-5), which included suspicion bordering on radical and iconooclastic critique of abstract ideas not grounded in corporeal experience. 

“Shadow…[is] darkness which attends our own backward gaze” (Lloyd 2016, 4), our reach back into memories of the mind’s processing and finding absolutes or universals, an epistemology Herder could not abide (Ibid., 167). For Herder these unembodied abstractions were “'Nebelträume'” (foggy dreams) (Adler 2009, 331). Herder’s rejection of disembodied universals reflects the Shema’s call to love not in idea, but with heart, soul, and strength—in the full embodiment of covenantal response.

For more on the philosophy of Kant in relation with Herder's, see Olds (2025a, 586-89).

[9]  For Dewey (2012, chap. 4), education is an adaptive, atelic, almost tautegorical pragmatics of sustaining Being--tying in to a will to live as esse, rather a will to serve and repair: “The educational process has no end beyond itself… that education is development, everything depends upon how development is conceived. Our net conclusion is that life is development, and that developing, growing, is life."

Deweyan Bildung excludes a metaphysical notion of anthropology in terms of sequential  ethical formation. The metaphysics underlying education is for Dewey instrumental, not deontological: “The distinction of the spiritual and material is itself… an outcome of function, not of structure.” Education serves social continuity with a terminus in credentialing and procedural adaptation to pragmatic aim. It substitutes civic utility and participation for soulmaking—the conative formation necessary to advance civilizations oriented toward covenantal care and prophetic repair

Again, this contrasts with Herder, who held an Augustinian approach to learning that always returns to (conative) caritas (cf. De Magistro):  “Herder himself also emphasized, “alle Aufklärung ist nie Zweck, sondern immer Mittel” (enlightenment is never the purpose, but instead always the means) [Journal, Sämtliche Werke 4:412]. So too he viewed criticism merely as a means or tool of the Enlightenment, an expression of independent understanding at work, and not simply an end in itself” Norton (355, emph. added).

[10] “Valid poetry… realize[s] the destitution of the time more clearly. The time remains destitute not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality. Mortals have not yet come into ownership of their own nature. Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains veiled. Love has not been learned. But the mortals are [existing: esse/Being in this state]." (Heidegger 2009, 94). 

The poet becomes constituted as a profitable guide into the world made underworld, a proleptic mourner. He becomes a cousin to the Eliotian bearer of nostalgia for customs and manners—a tragic endurer—but not the iconoclast who prophetically ruptures the world’s default to announce escape.

“[T]he default of God which Holderlin experienced” (Ibid., 76) is contextualized by Heidegger and tied by the editor (Ibid., vii) to Rilke’s "valid poetry," so that for Heidegger, validity of expression is experienced in the death of God.

Heidegger remains within a phenomenological suspension of awareness of grace and its human outworking in essence as presence, identifying absence as esse (the “default of God”). This position has no way of offering redemptive or covenantal response--metanoia as the telic reentry into being with and for the neighbor.

This “default” (Entgötterung) absence of grace's presence was Herder’s nemesis. For Kant's endorsement from the a priori position--radical freedom dispensing with the a priori need of grace, see Insole (2020). Heidegger's phenomenological suspension and Kant's categorical autonomy serve as connected, if not twin negations of grace from the position of refusing accountability to it.

For Herder, poetic vitality must awaken history, as in his study of Hebrew poetry--where the Davidic Psalms note the underworld in enemies vanquished by God's ever-aware presence--humans do not simply dwell in destitution and absence. Herder would reject Heidegger’s abstraction of pain and loss into conditions making for literary “validity.”

For more critique of Heidegger, see Olds (2025a, 590-93).

[11] Paulo Freire’s critique of the banking model of education—the latter's top-down, instrumentalist method of serving status—leads to his democratic proposal of problem-posing education, where individuals “develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world… as a reality in the process of transformation...[In a way congruent with Christian eschatology that moves from 'banker' intelligems of human nature,] men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world  with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation.’”(Macedo contextualizing and quoting Freire 2014, 12). His re-humanization program, however, remains tied to structural oppression (p. 48), not to virtue in a covenantal, deontological sense. Though the goal of liberation is Biblical, Freire’s method is not: he frames liberation within Marxist class struggle and a socio-political eschatology grounded in shared material interests, rather than in spiritual repentance or covenantal encounter initiated in the ind ividual and missionally extended from the bottom up, where a neighbor's eyes are sensed.

[12] Even the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics was ensorcelled by this Lethe of forgetting first principles, choosing to pursue entropy in the Styx of metaphysical fraud and criminality (Olds 2025a)--the pleasure palace dream with a seraglio façade of machinery's inner teletype building walls against the Law of Uncreated Light, vainly attempting to forestall divine judgment for planning nightmares for others.

[13] An updated Pentecostal matrix of utterance for the sake of expanding the Logos in milieux and meaning is characterized by aphoristic condensation; saturated compaction of metaphysical illustration of vectors, squeezed as from a tube of toothpaste; metaphorical rodomontade skirting flamboyance; even--yes, ladies--ostentation (cf, 2 Samuel 6) where ciphers require and reward having a dictionary (a contemporary application of  1 Corinthians 14:27-28 allowing for technological improvement)--which allows the tongue-tuners and jazz-makers interpret their own crypses in hand. 

To be serious: Both the proposal of the expanding Pentecostal matrix of speech and Walter Benjamin's posit of language as intrinsically theologically immanent resists its reduction to functional, utilitarian ends. For Benjamin, the “language of things” contains a divine residue awaiting messianic redemption. The Pentecostal matrix similarly resists rationalist or procedural language by saturating it with poietic pressure, metaphysical charge, and glossolalic excess—what Benjamin might call the remains of the original naming by the trustee Adam (Genesis 2:19c) but now activated by charismatic utterance.

The key divergence lies in language’s direction and teleology:

Benjamin’s (1916) earliest preserved and esoteric, even "mystical" writing (introduction to Benjamin [2019]) including his messianism, he held in reserve, suspended: Language is awaiting redemption; humanity cannot recover it by volition. Language is thus granted a tragic, entropic destiny until cataphasis is restored. Moreover, language is reified by Benjamin in this essay as the divine residue of things, not as reparative poiesis in directive vectors contained in the First Law of Thermodynamics.

"Language communicates the particular linguistic being of things" (emph. added), a closure of Becoming by disincarnate systemizing. Does  Benjamin’s early linguistic theology of suspension root his later catastrophic historical pessimism (in Theses on the Philosophy of History)?

On the other hand, Christo-Shemaic poiesis liberates language at Pentecost, is being duratively redeemed through conative participation in the Logos, animated by circumscripted dianoia and aligned with extending, embodied grace.

In the latter view, the Logos of Pentecost doesn’t await a hidden eschaton—it is already liberated, manifest through the righteous risk of speech that dares to interpret itself, that collapses the spectator/speaker divide, echoing Pentecost’s renewing.

Benjamin’s view of pure language is messianic in the awaiting [14], an apophatic suspension of teleology, a silent kinship of unliberated tongues. The Pentecostal matrix, however, erupts noisily and de-systematized as redemption's unfolding grammar—compressing metaphysical vectors into strange--and for some, estranging--utterance, staging Logos not as a return to Adam’s originary naming rights in formalism but as improvisational testimony to the Spirit’s eruptive emergencies.

Benjamin’s insight into the divine residue of language (Logos), but one that is conatively activated by Pentecost’s introduction of a grammar of translational alignment—no longer trapped in the ruins of Babel or the silence of waiting (Benjamin’s Jewish, non-Christian teleology), but now resonant, kinetic, and improvisational, reclaiming speech not as formality but as faithful witnessing through grace-aligned risk. Benjamin’s “pure language” as memorial is transformed at Pentecost into Spirit-animated performativity that echoes the Shema through the Son’s conative fulfillment.

In a painfully jejune philosophy of speech, Benjamin’s vision of language reveals Adam’s privileged act of participation in meaning by a super-Logos role for “naming the essence” of “things” (47 x in this essay). In contrast, this proposal writes from the secular maelstrom after Pentecost, navigating language's ruins with prescriptive, ethical obligations. Benjamin theorizes a descriptive language as given to Adam’s purview; while this essay is prescriptive, it remands that language must be reclaimed by every New Adam—not through system, but through poiesis aligned with covenantal love, where language names what repairs, how individual living logoi can reveal poiesis.

Benjamin’s essays a prelapsarian metaphysics of language—a Leibnizian monad, the cosmic stillness revealed before Babel as essence and expression, with an inchoate but building sense of historical rupture, ethical danger, or covenantal repair. His is mystic reverence for language’s purity; his poetics serves ontological (not ethical or telic) revelation. It has no use for naming the collapse of linguistic meaning under simulation and has no way to frame Christic, poietic, and accountable response in lived moments aligned with eschatological unfoldings of grace.

Benjamin is occupied with “things”—rendering Dingen by his translator—a Kantian conation toward the an sich. His concern lies with the essential meaning of a thing, as in Adam’s primordial act of naming, which he envisions as re-rendered in an “infinitely higher language...still of the same sphere.” Here, monadological connotations subtly govern Benjamin’s linguistic theology, nudging it toward a conservative, ontic-facing aestheticism —one attuned to essence-as-presence rather than aligned with a reparative telos.

In peripatetic and peripathetic hermeneutics, it is warranted exegetically to revisit Kant’s Ding an sich, not as the usual epistemic lure to substantives in the ontic naming, but to the telic conjunctive German preposition “an,” where a thing becomes metaphoric: moving (seeking) an intrinsic essence inside created contexts toward creating, sustaining, and repair. To extract "an" from its Kantian idiolect toward a discrete telic signifier risks a philological category error. Yet corrective conative poetics metaphorically allowable redirects rather than a simple inverting operation of the Kantian grammatical idiom, a move made by later idealists. Moreover, the very taxonomies of things err when the thing re-arrives to an putative ontic identity of substance rather than its embodied and productive grace. Rather the fundament of language of "things" is in vectors that serve the unified existence of "living things," indeed their extension and flourishing (by ethics, both human and ecological, of the collective and its sustaining milieux). These vectors of care would then form the plenary verbal primacy of human language (experienced bodily and trained by ear) and serve as derivative foundation of substantives experienced by the warrant in collective faculties. This verbal plenary primacy in the trigeminates of Hebrew was Herder’s primary insight into that language [22].

This essay not only rebuts Rosenszweig’s and Benjamin’s reservationist ontology, but also reframes the entropic destiny of language under modernity as the very condition for its redemption through Christic risk and relational poiesis. This framework is more immanently and ethically robust than the alternative frameworks and internal inconsistencies of theological linguistics in Rosenszweig, Tupamahu, and Gadamer discussed below, the latter two impinging on their stated understanding of Herder.

The poietic approach makes theological language not only a site of recollection (memory filtered through metanoia), but of ongoing covenantal performance of experience from the expansion of ontogenetic perception and phylogenies of poeitics, where the Logos is restoring Adam from within (the directional moment, not primarily from an aborigino) to union with the new man, Christ--and specifically his covenantal heart (Jeremiah 31-34). Then languages serve as an ethical vector outward—an open-ended movement from conation toward (German: an) meaning in facultation. The "thing" no longer an epistemic wall to cognitively groping essence, but tending the processual becoming of things-in-relation: Christ becoming all-in-all. Herder is the grandsire of this inversion from the ontic restoration of orders and forms to the accountability to ethical telos experience and practiced verbally, vectorally. This inversion (and its rejection of "rationing" what is Enlightening from traditional systems) is behind Herder's demonization (slander) as a "contra-Enlightenment" precursor to the "irrationality" behind (anachronistic) "genetic nationalism."

It cannot be said enough that "ethnos" for Herder is situated in Acts 2. It is a language group, not a nation-state or racial category. Shame on those perpetuating this hybrid anachronistic slander of Herder of romantic nationalism opening the fascist abyss [15]. Mine and his is not a supercessionist religious dialectic, but an accounting of metaphysical distortions. Not applying accountability simply to those who abandoned essence in favor of event (another distortion), but those who deny essence in the processing of events, where phenomenologies are challenges to nature on the path to essence.

[14]--Akin to Rosenszweig's (1917, "New History") divergence of Christian and Jewish teleology. Benjamin's philosophical method is iconoclastic, but not Pentecostally homologous. R. proposes, on thin  grounds, an elective distension between law and grace rather than its appropriately structured harmonization. His philosophy inhibits the fusion of religious horizons foretold by Romans 9-11.

By framing covenantal ontology to preserve Jewish election, Rosenszweig's essay (pp.190-91) undermines noesis of human, divine, and earthly essence(s) as irreducible and incommensurable--while removing import from the distinction of transcendent and immanent.  Rosenszweig suspends metaphysical access to the divine essence underlying eternity, while claiming to live in it by report of encounter.  His method treats revelation not as an unfolding of divine being into human knowing (noesis), but as irruption of an event without communicable ontology, implying that revelation is not tied to conative religio but to cogito of event (203-204), refiguring obligation as metaphysical import from covenant to social dialogue. Where the eternally elect find meaning in their own relationally constructed essence. Such new thinking suggests that a philosopher is not constituted to know God’s essence (much less human essence) but simply to respond--even if sacramental or violent--without participating in the divine heart through virtue and poiesis that sustains, unifies, and  repairs. Instead, R. buffers traditions as ‘dialogical,’ subject to intersubjective negotiation, a preservation of distinct roles insulated from ontological or eschatological convergence rather than the shared call to tikkun ha-lev. While there is no supersession, neither is there allowable protective delimitation (evasion?) and unaccountable divisiveness. While the Hebrew Bible links the divine essence of holiness with the accountable call of Israel to the same, the apophatic new thinking takes a seat in eternity awaiting the same, dialoguing while obscuring essence. Despite Pentecost, this kind of "new thinking"--obscuring, unaccountable, and apophatic--enjoined the radical denial of all  metaphysics yet was applied by R. to preserving if not hardening religious divides! Jewish election under the terms of denying any metaphysics of essence of the divine, the human, and the earth, while pastorally proleptic during and after the Holocaust, appears in philosophical terms scurrilous, and in religious terms absent scriptural warrant.  In contrast, Herder’s speculative philology underlying ethnic archives, though often dismissed, dared to trace the rhythms of divine and human essence within language and history. Rosenzweig’s refusal to do so, under the guise of theological modesty, stalls the very pneumatological invitation that scripture proclaims as already begun.

R.'s rejection of essence-based theological arenas--contemporary with Benjamin's suspension of telic language--both write in heat of WWI--leads to a rejection of participation in Becoming other than what can be negotiated (esp. when contemporized with wartime as a revelation of "analogia entis").  These contradict Trinitarian conative metaphysics which sees revelation as ontological descent and renewal by means of intentionality that sustains the whole. Just two years later, Barth would publish his Römerbrief that demonstrated how the crisis of ontological participation as war experienced across Europe bore forms of inter-ruptures across confessional lines. Barth reasserted divine sovereignty through Christ’s singular mediation, in contrast to Rosenzweig’s suspended participation in salvation history offered to national Israel. Rosenzweig’s project, emerging in the trauma of World War I, seeks to preserve the integrity of Jewish election in a pluralistic but apophatic! and framework of negative and deferred metaphysics. However, by resisting ontological convergence between revelation and being, his model clouds shared pneumatological destiny outlined in Romans 9–11.

While R.'s aim was to shield Judaism from Christian subsumption, metaphysical dualism takes hold in its extension. Rather than embracing the Spirit as indwelling conative alignment (Romans 9-11), Rosenzweig establishes distinctions between creation, revelation, and redemption, parceling them respectively into world, Judaism, and Christianity—a division that occludes the unifying mission of the Spirit as both trans-historical and kenotically immanent. He remains within a covenantal rupture paradigm, not its repair. He instead constructs a divisive form of social dialectic rather than theological sodality--a distinction for pragmatic fencing by dividing vectors of divine Hesed--Providence and Justice where grace is blocked--to preserve Jewish particularism over against Christian universality. Grace and law remain symbolically divided along ethno-theological lines, contrary to Galatians 3 and the right reading of Romans 3:19-31:

The misreading of Romans 3:21ff. (as Porter 2021) mostly flow from the missequencing of justice and grace in Economic Trinitarian ontology, a flaw in Anselm's late systematics of atonement (see Olds 2023, Appendix III). 

The "justice" on the cross was a transactional redemption from the institutionalized purview of Caiaphas (his transactional "gospel" enunciated in John 11:50) in league with Pilate—their participation with what Paul elsewhere calls the god of this Age (2 Corinthians 4:4, now judged John 12:21, and now sent to abyss's "power of a vacuum [Ephesians 2:2; John 14:30], though the silicon/iron Empire of Daniel 2:43 does not know it yet).  John 16:11 now fulfilled.

Opposed is the Pauline reading of the Cross that flows from the true living God whose mercy transcends that false institutionalization of Torah. Mercy triumphant is God's righteousness apart from an earthly institutionalization of religious statism. It is the resurrection of Christ's spiritual body which images the definitive interpretation of God's will, operating in the ongoing processing of God's Holy Spirit in providence, salvation, and word. The bloody corpse hanging on the cross reveals the operation of another institution and another will.

The kippurah/mercy seat (Numbers 7:89) was the site and movement from supplication to the revelation of God’s righteousness that responds with mercy: the expiation of judgment for those who do not know what they do, and thereby need the mediator’s Golden Rule supplication (cf. Romans 5:8).

Paul's theology holds the resurrection as interpretive reconstitution that vindicates Christ as the true Torah, not in legal terms, but in Spirit-filled relational being (Romans 1:4, 8:4). And that God's righteousness thus becomes a relational, pneumatic economy rather than a retributive one, or specifying, by command, any restoration or promotion of a favored order or forms (temple cultus, national theocracy, or metaphysical formalism).It is no longer about law upheld except by love enacted, not system maintained but divine presence restored by a radically new mode of ethical life, grounded in neighborly proximity (Galatians 5:14) and the sustaining milieux of eschatological freedom situated on this planet (Romans 8:21).

Rosenzweig’s apophatic--ineffable?--rupture preserves a metaphysics of disjunction--of favored forms and suspended meaning--without Shemaic and Pentecostal (con)sequence. Its openness to dialogue is dialectical ethno-pragmatism that routes to cyclical, articulated, and telically uncondensed (and thus eschatologically suspended) festival zodiac time (Rosenszweig 2008, 276; on time, see 224–27) but lacks the regenerative poiesis of the Spirit, refusing such categories out of fidelity to Jewish messianic reserve. How does such reserve serve the fulfillment of law?  For indeed, this Christian asserts, messianic grace renews human telic, restorative, and regenerative earthly essence through advancing covenantal proximity. Contra ontic nostalgia and stasis, where history is made kabbalic, resolved by the calendar; the future is situated in remembrance.

The inevitable growth of the kingdom is, thanks to the concomitant effect of the aformentioned "other,"...is the substance of our analogy...that, as against that growth, the idea of the future is here poisoned in the root. For the future is first and foremost a matter of anticipating [thus now suspended in]...[T]he kingdom... "among you" and coming "today," is a notion of the future which eternalizes the moment. And it is in this notion which expires in the concept of eras, the Islamic as well as the modern one...the sequence of times...[are] distended into the endless indifference of a sequence (Rosenszweig 2008, 226).

The “New Thinking” in the above quote carries the mature Rosenszweig's displacement of Trinitarian restorative noesis into liturgical repetition, maintaining a self- and culturally-enforced distance from divine presence where Christ has torn the temple veil (2 Corinthians 3:14). By replacing the embodiment of soul with phenologies of event without telic substance is hallucinogenic, offering forms of response without shared reality—rituals without renewal, deontological ethics without Becoming. While his "new thinking" is not to be aligned with a static Judaeic characture or supersession,  R. is idiosyncratically proposing recurrence in suspended time. By this, R. holds to metaphysically thin ethics rooted in election, even if not in ontological incarnated participation with the world a language group was sent to testify, a mission now suspended in time. His abdication of metaphysical meaning, outside of a metaphysics of phenomenology, by recurrent form tied to suspended covenanted time, disfigures telos by lacking a transfiguring or poietic metaphysics. The idea that "The One" denies "Trinity" makes the recurrent mistaking of conative vector for form, where the One may have three instantiations or alighments of intent imaged on earth. While. R. may claim covenantal grounding, it is the ontology of election without intervening prophetic clarification and recall to covenant in the Shema's heart, especially in Jeremiah 31-34, that telically moves in the Hebrew Bible from commandment to alignment. Hence the inability to perceive the messiah is not suspended in time but already operating. In order to maintain elective privileges of personal encounter, R. does not unpack the essence of that encounter save command and obedience, and its incarnation in intersubjective dialogue of whatever mission claimed rather unified by the heart's intent to serve healing and repair.

Where Rosenzweig folds time into calendar, the Spirit breathes kairos into history; where response is reduced to command, grace calls forth poiesis; where rupture reigns, covenantal repair renews.

[15] The simple reading of Herder’s large body of work has become an invidious way (the “genealogy of backshadows”) to dismiss Herder by linking him with the excesses of German nationalism.  Gadamer (1941) adumbrates--backshadows--from Naziism, subtly re-appropriating historicity and philology without adequately crediting Herder as progenitor of dialogical, contextual hermeneutics. And by which Gadamer, who has an anachronistic misrendering of John 1's Logos [19], situates Herder’s debt to Leibniz’s understanding of “vis” by attributing to the former an anachronistic and metaphysically tragic understanding of force as the operation of classical or Hobbesian agon epitomized in fascism rather than a Christian pastor's conative, other-directed pacification, admittedly Herder's ahead of his time modernism of immanence.

Tupamahu (2023) labels Herder a "romantic nationalist," the first substantive adjective owing to the "emotional" foundation of speaking in tongues/heteroglossia: "'Empfindungen' (feelings or emotions) is an important concept in the German Romantic tradition" [p, 33, n. 44], which is problematic exegesis of all the substantive term. Moreover, rather than a performative or unreasonable allowance for emotion, Herder's putative romanticism is repeatedly situated by Tupamahu in emotion dressed as misunderstanding "enthusiasm:" 

 "Herder insists therefore that “[s]peaking with tongues means nothing but speaking affectedly, enthusiastically, vigorously, and heartily just as [in] the Hebraic style [p. 30].” Heteroglossia is not an emergent feature of a changed church, but of a changed soul by means of rhetorically-charged enthusiasm and stratified reworking of expressive valences of the Hebraic soul and its organs of perception and discernment. Thence might come a changed congregation by such individual genius and its mimetic spread.

Empfindungen is not a generic term for unfiltered emotion [21]. But in the peripatetic terrain of a language-group and archived experience, it has a specific connotation with the facultative dimension of ethnic survival and flourishing: an embodied, telic, and shared expressive dimension to a limber, covenanted, and perception-preserving and earthbound awareness of the divine presence and accountability thereto. To label this "romantic"--which was atelic-- is a category mistake, as if "enthusiastic" speech was performed without meaning or reason. Tupamahu’s characterization of glossolalia as emotional or “enthusiastic” misreads the hermeneutic weight Herder attaches to affective language in cultural-perceptual continuity rather than ecstatic fragmentation (or contemporarily, by artifices of Turing machine engagement). Tupamahu (2023, 30-31) notes that Herder writes of glossolalia as "eccentric, highly poetic, and parabolic speech that others have a hard time understanding. On top of this eccentric nature, tongue(s) is expressed in 'broken oracles, mystic glosses [and] isolated ecstasies'...in order to inspire enthusiasm from the audiences." In other words, as Herderian poiesis that spreads the Spirit to unify the emergence of an advancing language group.

While language may have begun in catharsis, it is in the era of Pentecost formative, unenclosing, and metaphoric to map the suvival and flourishing of others, and for spiritual integrity and repair. The grammar of Pentecost gushes not chaotically but in the direction of the neighbor and divine justice. Pentecost could only be an ethical and morphological event—not performative frenzy but deontological [Golden Imperative] poiesis.  It is alive and livening, surplus, as the Spirit comes to re-schematize the soul outward--not just the tongue--to let a more expansionary embodiment gush forth in inspired--thus alien to outsiders (Acts 2:13)--speech kinesthetics.

Tupamahu's delimitation and denotation of glossolaliac expression as "emotional"--without expressing a telos--contextualizes his hermeneutics of "romanticism," applying a cultural vector of western modes of expression that he decries in the "colonialists" he's attacking: cultural foundations of "speaking in tongues" is reduced to a "political" dimension of nationalism (p. 28), thus romantically non-telic. 

Yet as Frank (2004, esp. 24-28) notes, the German Romantics denied teleology in history. Thinkers following Goethe such as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, and later Schelling foregrounded aesthetic intuition, irony, and subjective inwardness, they also resisted teleological history, favoring instead the poetic fragment, rupture, or infinite regress of self-becoming. Herder, by contrast, articulates a moderated teleology—not a rationalist universal history in the Hegelian or Enlightenment sense, but a facultative, circumincessive development of Geist within and across cultural-linguistic groups (Völker). This is not static providentialism, but a poetic, historically textured, and divinely infused, kinesthetic anthropology of Logos. Herder's proposal of Humanität (Clark 1955, 314f) as perfectibility is keen to discern its telos, and through the development of his comparative methods (anthropology, literature, historicism, linguistics) reveals a nuanced  hermeneutics of teleology; exits and entrances, descents and ascents of a people--an ethnos--processing, looping as a language group with their Spiritual insights and facultating, developing sensibilities (Empfindung).

Tupamahu (chap. 6), citing almost entirely secondary literature, moves to align with the idea that 1 Corinthians 14 details (untelligible and non-linguistic) phenomena of vocality different from those of Acts 2 (intelligible linguistics) on the ecclesial function of heteroglossial strangeness. This is a challengeable binary foreign to both Paul and Herder, and Tupamahu's presentation should not avail of it in his misreading of either, or of Luke (Ibid.).

Tupamahu not only misreads Herder in terms of his influence on the history of glossolalia--Herder’s historical-theological precision--but misreads Paul substantially because he sees the scriptural Paul as enabler of Caesar's imperialism by means of his Corinthian church, in contrast with Luke's universal Church established by Acts 2. Tupamahu’s anti-imperial gloss on 1 Corinthians 14 collapses Paul’s subversion of Roman order into a confused affirmation of imperial discipline. In Tupamahu's "Politics of Imperialism" section in his chap. 5, he suggests Paul collaborates with Caesar's imperial program. By silence, not by coin or tax:

Paul employs the rhetoric of peace...through silencing...[so that] empire will...stand with... a unified language...The unification of language provides stability and order to the imperial rule throughout history. This logic of imperial order and peace through the unification of language, I would argue, also runs beneath Paul’s discussion on tongue(s) in 1 Cor. 14.

And so Tupamahu's argument, from a postcolonial framework operates in a different register than Herder’s philological theopolitics, also is applied to an inversion of Paul and of the Corinthian congregation who preserved memory in liturgy. By framing Paul's guidance in Corinth as a linguistic discipline aligned with imperial logics, Tupamahu  recapitulates the very procedural paradigms he aims to resist—those that reduce ecclesial formation to institutional or ideological constraint rather than pneumatic improvisation. Like many voices trying to apparatus a post-secular destination for favored groups and orders,Tupamahu’s attention to marginalized voices in ecclesial formation, while commendable, leads him to a set of oppositional readings of the Christian canon that risks reinscribing the procedural logic he seeks to escape. Neither Herder nor Paul was a romantic nationalist serving imperialist means. Both in contrast held to anthropological and historical teloi. Herder’s late Enlightenment cultural anthropology was concerned not with state formation but with the preservation of perceptual, ethical, and linguistic diversity for the purposes of facultative and processing ethnic "Geisten." Particularly when viewed through the lens of Pentecost as disruption toward teleology's repair and resumption, not discipline of tongues as disrupting form and manner, and of Corinthian ecclesiology as a fragile, radically egalitarian assembly resisting public spectacle, not reproducing imperial performativity, then the faithful reading holds Paul’s leadership as reflecting a subversive and quietly insurgent endorsement of counter-Roman structures—"grace and peace;" not complicity, but conation.

Barr’s (1961, esp. 10–11; 14) semantic framework rejects the once-common contrast between a “Hebraic” mode of vivid, dynamic, processual thought and a “Greek” mode of static abstraction and timeless form Barr’s model, while protective against theological overreach, may ironically truncate the theological vitality of biblical language—precisely the opposite of Herder’s poietic philology. Insofar as Barr seeks categorical precision and contextually delimited meaning, rejecting affective or analogical drift across time, he would resist Herder’s fluid, historicist, and experiential view of linguistic emergence as grounded in the genius of an ethnic, verbal, and non-substantive Geist—an ousia of calling presence rather than an establishment substantia of form. Barr would include Herder’s view of language as lexically relational and expressing kinesthetically-mediated awareness, to assign it as exegetically imprecise or semantically incoherent, since it lacks categorial fixity and epistemological rigor. 

Barr does add the helpful note, though reductively, that contextualizes Herder's view in Hebrew linguistics manifest by "thinking" through "historical narrative or the future predication [embedded in Hebrew] forms of literature" (p. 15), a concession that partially validates Herder’s insight into language as temporally extended and culturally inflected. Still, Barr is modally centered in thin considerations of language as "thinking," and that literature is reduced to form by which cognitive operations are the sole methodological program of enlightenment and access.

Herder’s telic notion of semantic resonance—of analogical overlap and archived meaning—conflicts with Barr’s insistence on tight, contextually-bound lexical fields. Thus, Barr ultimately classifies Herderian philology as guilty of “illegitimate totality transfer:”the attribution of deep theological meanings to words across contexts where such resonance cannot be empirically traced or logically delimited--where improper exegesis conveys thick (fully embodied) theological concepts as inherent, across all their uses, even if indirectly or speculatively. Barr’s critique is better suited to policing lexical misuse of historically-bound substantives than to evaluating metaphysical, metaphorical, or ethical constructions such as poiesis, virtue, or covenantal conation, which resist reduction to analytic fixity.

Wolin (2022), despite according appropriate ruin to Heidegger's earth and soil thinking, remains aligned with Kantian systematics and taxonomies. their rejection of language as an embodied vector of cultural, covenantal conation. By refusing Herder’s verbal-relational anthropology, these thinkers cut language off from its ethical and spiritual origins. Moreover Wolin slings a baseless racism disclaimer toward Herder (p. 72) and casual, rote dismissals of Herder's "romanticism" (pp. 266; 299). 

Ilany (2018) follows this anachronic backshadowing of Herder, making him an anti-Enlightenment figure who wouldn't join endorsing Ilany's faulty, second "generality:"

[I]t is generally agreed that at the core of the Enlightenment project lies the belief in the “education of mankind”... and the organization of the world according to universal rationalist principles (Introduction, text following footnote 17, emph. added; cf. text following footnote 84).

 Herder’s argument bears clear imprints of Lessing’s rationalist theory, which held that the national god was nothing more than a fictional being, a kind of “noble lie” that Moses invented to achieve a political goal. This approach highlights Herder’s modernity and cunning; rather than asking whether the national god exists, he examines the functionality of the idea for the establishment of the nation.

The very idea that a "universal" principle of theological order came by "rationing" of Providence is something no Christian pastor could abide unless trained and dressed as "cunning modernity" (Ibid.), a tired trope of Platonists seeking to claim transcental conceits [18]. But here is the fundamental internal inconsistency--sloppy thinking, not paradoxical apophaticism: Ilany both criticizes Herder as an “anti-Enlightenment” proto-nationalist and yet praises Herder’s cunning as if he were a rationalist modern. Not only anachronistic, the straw man of rationalism is the "as if"[16]. 

 Instead, Herder's method was not "as if" solo armchair musing but embodied and investigatory and, as Ilany's bete noir, Herder's Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, dialectical with other voices. Does Ilany take the time to sort through all the dialectical investigations of a "contextual science of divine presence" in the achievement of human immanence and perfectability that Herder voluminously explores as part of a developing Biblical and historicist hermeneutics?

If not, thus to suffer invidious and anachronistic invectives: "protoracist" (text accompanying footnote 80); mythogenic revisionist (text accompanying footnote 62); radical but hidebound (text accompanying footnote 117); "romantic" "influence[r]" (Ibid.).

But no backshadow libel is more prominent than in Sternhell's (2010) account of "Anti-Enlighteners," of whom Herder (some 1300 textual references almost entirely negative) is the most prominent manqué, a "perfect liberal" with his own "ism"--that functions both liberal and anti-modernist. Such "ism" is tardy, at least in his biographer's assessment (see below) but driving all the ills of an irredeemable "modernity."

[T]he idea of cultural difference, or cultural pluralism—which amounts to the same thing—is the basis of our modernity. Thus, communitarianism claims specifically to be the heir to Herderianism, which is made out to be the perfect liberalism. This form of liberalism, as opposed to humanism, is based on the cult of difference...and Levi-Strauss[ian structuralism] (18-19).

Thus we see in Sternhell almost the epitome of rabid concern for conservative rationalism, epistemic order, and static operations leading to conceits of transcendent form. I leave it to the reader to sniff the sulfur on the way to silicate in this shameful and scholastically shabby treatment.

These men's systemic scholarly distortion of Herder’s linguistic theology—especially in light of his non-systematic, ethical historicism as telic poiesis--are symptomatic and anachronistic graftings. These flatten Herder’s theological anthropology into ideological function-'isms.' Herder's biographer Clark (1955, 409), who faults him for neglecting to complete his "system" of ethics in contrast with his Kantian bias toward totalizing epistemologies—ignoring that Herder’s epistemology is intentionally non-systematic, because it is ethical, provisional, and contextual (i.e., peripatetic and poietic rather than Platonic).

Ideologues and Platonists—especially those inclined toward rhetorical suppression and dogmatic formalism—have long misrepresented Herder, often through ad hominem denunciation. As Adler (2009, 334f) notes, Kant’s vitriolic critique of Herder targeted not only his ideas but his very person, discrediting him as a writer, philosopher, and human being. Such polemics exemplify a broader Enlightenment pattern in which formalist thinkers sought to dethrone traditional hierarchies only to enthrone their own systems in their place. Herder, refusing assimilation into this “standard narrative of the Enlightenment” (see Vanso 2016), was sidelined—his work deemed incompatible with the Kantian synthesis that became dominant by the mid-19th century.

Yet Herder’s writings emphatically reject both racial essentialism and colonial universalism. His notions of Volk and Geist are not precursors to imperial nationalism, but vectors and faculties of value facilitation—peace, care, justice, memory—mediated through tradents and archives within language groups, not expansionist collectives. In Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity and Letters on the Advancement of Humanity, Herder articulates a moral anthropology that is pluralistic, responsive, and dispersed: aligned not with domination but to the Kräfte of emerging immanence he termed Humanität: the sacred, dialogical, and virtuous advance of cultures in history aligning with metaphysical perfection (Heb. 5:14's τελείων).

Contrary to modern nationalism that justifies itself by aggrandizement, Herder views every nation’s “voice” as a unique and vital contribution to the divine-human archive of communicative being. His approach dissolves all charges of exclusionary and genetic ethnonationalism. To rehabilitate Herder’s intellectual and ethical stature is not simply historical correction—it is a necessary and accountable re-centering of metaphysical poiesis: equipping humanity’s regal immanence for post-secular ethical vocation and prophetic repair.

[16] Hans Vaihinger (1852–1933), a German philosopher and Kant scholar, is known for The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1911), in which he articulates a theory of cognition through “heuristic fictions”—deliberately false constructs used as regulative frames for action. This fictive epistemology displaces metaphysical reality with strategic unreality, allowing contraries to function as tools of instrumental rationality rather than as disclosures of truth.

Alan Watts offers a sharp metaphorical critique of this tendency to reify abstractions. In his words:

“The first deception [of philosophy] is that there are things [Dingen]… The pretense that things are separable from each other is necessary in order to think and talk about them… but the cut-up fryer doesn’t come out of the egg.”

Here, Watts exposes how conceptual parsing—breaking the world into analyzable parts—falsifies the interdependent whole. Vaihinger’s method codifies this deception, institutionalizing “as if” logic into what effects philosophies of managed illusion.

This epistemological fiction aligns disturbingly with the economist’s obsession with game theory—another calculus of scarcity and artificial contraries used to manipulate a static or shrinking pie (itself a counterfactual illusion). These modern variants of post-Kantian reasoning desacralize language and neuter its seat in conation, collapsing relational ethics into abstract probabilism which ration 'as ifs'. They serve not  neither deontologies of obligation, virtue, or wisdom but simulation that ever elides into pragmatics directed into the pockets of rentiers.

As I have argued elsewhere (Olds 2025a), as artificial systems vitiate human perception with add-on artifice of illusion machined by probabilism, they produce an anti-Logos—language severed from covenant and transformed into ideological hallucination. The provisionality fostered by mid-modern skepticism mutates, by machine, into ontological determinism: the future is no longer welcomed in its divine openness but preprocessed, winnowed, and sold back as a corrupting and condemned counterfeit.

Fictive contraries betray relation and conation by replacing lived response with false substantives. Through a mirror darkly, cloying memes, bogies, bots, and emoticons replace ethical language with reactive syntax, cheapening speech into spectacle and cute emoji. In this corruption, language forsakes its Logos-orientation—its generationed unfolding toward shalom as telic repair.

[17]  Ludwig Wittgenstein noted in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (5.6–7), "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." And the expansion of my language--by incorporation of strangers (the ger in Exodus Israel [Exodus 22:21; Exodus 23:9; Exodus 12:48-49]), the study of comparative literary archives. and pluralized expression--expands the limits of my world. This effects Herder's understanding of the poietic gift--new words breathe new life--that expands the ecological and spiritual niche of immanent design and perfecting. Herder recognizes hat every language-world—every Volk's vector of life-making—is uniquely creative and divinely significant. In his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity and other writings, Herder asserts that language is not merely descriptive but formative of reality via the human capacity, in language and imagination, to bring forth new meaning that mediates between nature and culture, history and essence. To embrace the stranger, to listen across the boundaries of culture, is to receive new lexicons of grace. Through such welcome and comparative inquiry, we participate in a theological ecology: expanding the human vocation to be imago Dei not by conquest but by compassion, not by flattening difference but by cultivating multiplicity in communion.

[18] And one may discern both the conceit and the Platonist after he extends a finger into infinite light to claw out a form, and the finger turns gangrene. Scratch the form or the Platonist, and a flow of insults from gangrene's stench and vitriol humour follows.

[19] Gadamer's (1941) anachronistic and spiritually deficient reading of Herder is better approached with a title, Volk in Denken Gadamers.

Gadamer (2013, chap. 5, text surrounding fn. 40) demonstrates his ignorance of historical Christianity in which Herder was reared, reworked, and is now updated. Gadamer applies the categorical of  “mystery of the Trinity" (Ibid.,), his translator using the term “mystery” 10 times in 7 pages, while the entire New Testament uses mysterion four times. Gadamer's misunderstanding of the Trinity from categoric logic and of the diachronic nature of philology dresses his uncomprehending analysis of the Prologue of the Gospel of John as standing for the entire New Testament. While overwriting the Johannine Logos with a Latinized verbum under classical logic rather than Hebraic narratives of conation, he daubs his prose with a barrage of untranslated Latin phrases meant to buttress his argument--to signal to his reader that he’s read all the classical sources--but seems a philosopher’s sleight by cosmetic erudition: A kind of "modern cunning." 

Gadamer reduces the philosophical application of the NT to the dogmatism embedded in the Johannine Prologue where its use of Logos he reduces to "verbum." Gadamer's Hellenized hermeneutical inheritance misses Hebraic kinesthetic anthropology. The Johannine Logos is not anachronistically Platonically programmed or sourced, consistent with his cognition-first anthropology. An establishment of metaphysics in conation is mostly absent in Gadamer's magnum opus, though he routinely addressed the "heart" in chap. 1 (surrounding fn. 46), contextualizing secondary sources in "pietism" that is "rational" and, it follows, self-oriented--applied to self and not aware of others in the application.

Like other critics of Herder, Gadamer re-inscribes pre- and proto-modern figures with ideological suspicion (e.g., Herder as proto-nationalist, or as by others, an "ethnic romantic") while extracting their methods for sanitized use. Gadamer inherits from Herder both dialogical historicism and philological contextualism as the foundation of hermeneutics but fails to assign adequate credit to Herder or rectifying his calumny. Where Gadamer attempts to assign shadow to Herder and to scale from them to exceed him, he makes many accountable errors.

[20] Lévinas’ “notion of the 'face' is primarily an example of transcendence, sometimes known as or associated with ideas of alterity, otherness, surplus, excess, exteriority, rupture and disruption" [Renault 1997 cited in Hutchins 2004]. As long as selves encounter the faces of other persons, any notion of how they interact, or should interact, even a materialistic or atheistic one, presupposes transcendence” [Hutchins 2004, 7].

The face, then, for Lévinas, is a transcendental meeting place. Sinaitic, even. As opposed to the Pentecostal direction to immanence (see below) and Golden Rule meeting of empathy with the other’s direct needs initiated by the glance. The eyes, by their ken and clarity, by their whist or oblique direction, are the organ of empathy in both directions: they signal deprivation and challenge, and by shared experience, also their pickup of phenomenological, pre-speaking connotation. The eyes are an immanent Sinai, a meeting of tikkun olam, in contrast with the “face’s” suggestions of transcendence.

Lévinasian transcendence holds the “face” as an epiphanic phenomenon of “transitivity” that arrests and summons the subject into ethical (a)symmetry): 

Teaching is not reducible to maieutics [socratic methods]; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced. The Aristotelian analysis of the intellect, which discovers the agent intellect coming in by the gates, absolutely exterior, and yet constituting, nowise compromising, the sovereign activity of reason, already substitutes for maieutics a transitive action of the master, since reason, without abdicating, is found to be in a position to receive (Lévinas 2011, 51 emph. orig.).

This exposes the danger in asymmetrical command without relationally-situated kenosis. What Paul (Romans 7:9)  calls the commandment’s ineluctable condemnation of sin-structured humanity.

Pentecostal immanence, on the other hand, holds that the Spirit-animated gaze initiates the activation of organs of relational empathy and kenotic and repairing movement toward the other, where Sinai is not only law-giving but extends into an emergent grammar of recognition-giving, where the covenantal law is reinterpreted through pneumatic perception. Pentecostal immanence avoids Lévinas’s danger of “totality” (i.e., collapsing the Other into the Same), by Spirit-led improvisation of accountability and Golden Rule obligation, which are not transitive ethical features in the moment, but sequential and telic (cf. 2 Corinthians 3:18; see below). Beholding from unveiling to unveiling and mirroring( 2 Cor. 3:18)  is mimetic spread by eyes witnessing the habitus—praxis and effects of virtue, the very inverse of ethical arrest by the gaze that Lévinas (2011, 65) qualifies as a command unmediated by grace or the receiver’s/witnessed kinesthetic experience:

The manifestation of the καθ’ αὐτό in which a being[‘s internal state (used in Aristotle’s Metaphysics)] concerns us without slipping away and without betraying itself does not consist in its being disclosed, its being exposed to the gaze that would take it as a theme for interpretation, and would command an absolute position dominating the object. Manifestation καθ’ αὐτό consists in a being telling itself to us independently of every position we would have taken in its regard, expressing itself. Here, contrary to all the conditions for the visibility of objects, a being is not placed in the light of another but presents itself in the manifestation that should only announce it; it is present as directing this very manifestation-present before the manifestation, which only manifests it (emph. orig.).

Because he understands metaphysics as totalizing (esp. p. 40), ethical manifestation for Lévinas is radically exterior, unmediable, and non-interpretable. It refuses, because it has no metaphysical basis for, discernment in ethical response. In contrast, Pentecostal ethics are irreducibly embodied,  co-respondent, and transformative by circumincession, not merely the passive reception of a command from exteriorized transcendence.

Immanence re-centers ethical recognition—from abstract alterity to Spirit-led attentiveness, practiced through grace, embodiment, and discernment. From this processes obligation in theological ethics beyond phenomenology, and ethical praxis more as a circumincessive dance of connection and sensitivity (Olds 2023) than an introductory “maieutic” of probing questions. Such a holiness-holding connection is more aligned with Buber, Herder, or Pentecostal semiotics discussed in this essay.

Where Lévinas’ face commands without context, the Pentecostal gaze heals through context—through relational (re-) alignment, grace-bearing discernment, and the pneumatological visibility of virtue.

[21] Herder links the operation of Empfindungen to the  "imprint of perceptions," with "the effect of which is in proportion to the closeness" of a poet's examination, (Clark 1955, 252, emph. added) which demands proximity of relation for constructive poiesis. Herder's understanding of the German term is far from Tupamahu's lexemic link with emotionality, the unconsidered or lurid babble of which might drive others away--more to estrange than to edify and unify.

[22] In short, the move from noun to verb is not only grammatical but eschatological—language is reactivated toward covenantal urgency. Recoursing from Hebrew nominals to the verbal trigeminal roots was the "prophetic" manner of decoding lexemic puzzles exemplified by Daniel (5: 24-28; see Seow 2003, 80-84). 

Herder recaptures a distinctly prophetic hermeneutic grounded in morphological reconstitution. Not simply etymology, but an exegetical praxis that reactivates buried semantic potential through a theologically charged reversion to root structures in condensed vectors (cf. condensation of festival energies and condensation of the prophetic Zechariah in the Holy Week activities of Jesus). Daniel’s reading of the writing on the wall is not philological in the modern sense of Barr (whose semantic atomism [lexemic boundedness] systematizes concern for lexical precision over the telic pulse of theological invocation) but rather charismatically poietic: the prophet perceives the signs not as fixed and categorizable referents to be logically unpacked, but as compressed vectors of grace and justice. Herder provides an expressive precedent, while Barr represents an opposing methodological paradigm, of prophetic and philological interpretation that is "performative/participatory" and theologically alive.

The prophetic mode of lexemic (dis)eruption is seen where stable noun forms are deconstructed into active processes aligned with YHWH’s conative will (cf. the vectors involved in the proper names in Hosea 1: 6 and Isaiah 7–8 ) and girds Pentecostal enthusiasm and energies in the New Testament Era of erupting Spiritual vectors of conative metaphysics.

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