On the other hand, I worry (a la Rosalynde) that the protection from criticism which is a byproduct of this effort is also a failure to sufficiently engage the world in concrete and practical terms.

I think the “program” of Monday night family home evenings is a good example of trying to achieve a certain “economic” (in the sense of home economy rather than, and in resistance to, public economy) ideal. Of course I don’t think this program is the only way to work toward this ideal, but I don’t understand why Joe hates FHE. :-)

(Regarding Clark’s comments about formalization, I think the questions I keep trying to press Joe on are getting at a similar issue. My own work in the last few years has been based on the pragmatist thrust which underlies the work on virtue, action, and practices by the likes of Robert Brandom, Talbot Brewer, Michael Thompson, and Alasdair MacIntyre–I think these thinkers escape many of Joe’s worries, largely for the reasons Clark is suggesting. Now, insofar as institutional goals have a tendency to co-opt practices in ways that tend toward instrumentalism, I agree with Joe’s concerns. But I think these are concerns that can and should be kept in mind whilst considering and testing direct programs for action, always being careful not to idolize the programs themselves. A good concrete example of this kind of idolizing might be an elders’ quorum president using guilt to manipulate his quorum into doing their hometeaching. But can’t the virtues and vices of the program be kept in mind and actively critiqued while following it? Now, alas, it’s almost 5:30, so I have to quit philosophizing and start on my concrete practical duties as husband, father, and employee/slave of the economy….)

Regardless, however, I’ve only used that sort of thing here to give conceptual rigor to a notion of the immanent invisible, the invisible proper to a frame of the visible. I don’t think there’s too much of a philosophical crime in that.

I’m still reading Joe so I won’t chime in more than that. I confess I have a hard time seeing faith or hope as related to formal systems. To follow Peirce, it seems much more tied to abduction than deduction. Ol Kurt is just worried about formal deductive systems.

Regarding your parenthetical plea for clarification: Yes, this requires a bit of work conceptually. We could put the point in mathematical terms by pointing to the work of Kurt Goedel. What Goedel showed was that any system of sufficient complexity (but what’s sufficient here is pretty minimal!) must be either incomplete (there are truths formulable within the system the truth of which can’t be derived from the system-founding axioms) or inconsistent (there are at least two directly contradictory statements derivable from the system-founding axioms). The formulable statement within a given system of sufficient complexity that forces this either/or—an “undecidable” statement—marks a certain excess of the system over itself, a certain equivocal border where the system opens onto its outside, so to speak. That statement, however, properly belongs to the system (it’s immanent, we might say) while nonetheless being undecidable with respect to the system (it’s invisible, we might say). This notion of the undecidable Agamben ties to the Pauline notion of the remainder or the remnant, and I’ve extended that to the notion of the visible or the empirical. Consequently, rather than the cropped edges of a photography, the image I’d use is something more like the vanishing point in a perspectival painting: that by which everything in the painting is organized but which necessarily fails to appear. Does anything in all that help?

The refusal to name specific economic objectives is, in my reading, central to the technical workings of his core theological machine in the first half of the book. That is, to name specific objectives would be to move the object of hope into the realm of the seen, into the *present (fallen) order of things.* As he argues, such a move would reduce theological hope to mere wishing, lusting for idols of our own making: such a “hope” would be nothing but the technological act of remodeling the world after the image of our preferred utopia.

Thus he makes a virtue of eschewing direct programs for action — which handily protects him from criticism directed toward any such program he might advance. That characterization sounds harsh, which is not at all my intention. I understand (I think) and endorse every step in his argument. But still, the arrival point a bit clever. Adam, Joe — correct me?

(Incidentally, the need to keep the object of hope out of the realm of the seen, the present order of things, presents a problem, because he also can’t relegate the object of hope to the realm of the transcendent, where lustful men banish God’s wrath — the object of hope must remain immanent, or else the argument is vulnerable to Nietzsche’s charges of nihilism. Thus Joe’s needs a sort of interim concept, which he finds in Agamben’s (??) notion of “what remains to be seen”: that is, the object of hope is unseen, yet remains immanent in the present, like the edges of a cropped photo. I understand this move at the level of the argument, but I don’t completely get it conceptually. I’d love further elaboration from anybody who does.)

(I hope it’s clear that my own criticisms aren’t that Joe isn’t laying out “actionable proposals,” although I think this is a very important and helpful caveat. Rather, my complaint — or better, lament, or simply comment — is that Joe has started a project that, to my mind, opens onto a lot more work that really needs to be done. This work is not to come up with actionable proposals, but to critique more carefully and specifically the concrete institutional structures, practices, tensions, and values in modern society that are inimical to, or conducive to, the hope for Zion that Joe is articulating. And, to the point of your post, I think this critique should be undertaken precisely by reading scriptural texts more carefully, and thinking about the meaning of these texts vis-a-vis modern ideas, institutions, practices, etc.)