Sacred Symbology pt. 5. The Imago Dei: A Prophetic Think Tank

The Transponder

A transponder is found on aircraft. A transponder is designed to respond, or answer back to an airport control tower that electronically asks for identification. This identification is given by a code. This can occur over many hundreds of miles of space between them.

A pilot will typically be given a transponder code when he submits his flight plan. The control tower must associate the blip on this radar screen with that particular plane and code. The control tower will then typically ask the pilot “skwawk” that transponder code, something like “Cessna 123AB, squawk 0363.” When the pilot dials in that code on his “skwawk box,” he and the tower radar are now synchronized continuously as the skwawk box sends out the code. The tower can then know the altitude, speed, destination, and type of aircraft by a certain blip. This system keeps planes properly separated in the air to avoid collisions.

Transpondence in one minimal sense is one person bringing out from his spirit hidden things into the light of day that can be seen, heard, and taken into the spirit of another very different kind of person. This is bare communication by language tokens. It is symbols crossing over the walls that divide people subjectively. But the highest sense of the word ‘transpondence,” which I employ here, is symbols crossing over the boundaries between ontologically incompatible persons, but representing epistemically compatible source knowledge between them. But there are incompatibilities that must be reconciled in order for a trans-carnal union to take place. The two parties are trying to overcome these obstacles and come to a meeting of minds, but in ontological terms this is far from easy.

The registration of a flight plan by the pilot, when a transponder code is given to him, is a crucial formality needed to become capable of being seen by the tower. After the plane is in the air none of these change. The tower knows its transponder code from that point on, and that does not change.

God is like the control tower. Man is like the aircraft. God is this fixed, complex legal authority that registers aircraft, tracks its motions and waits for a response to a certain request for certain information keyed on a particular piece of information given by the authority and shared between them.

In this relationship of the creator to his symbolic representative, there is a dialog that goes on. God’s initial “question” to man, the aircraft, is for it to supply its identification by many biblical examples. “Who are you?” “Where are you?” “What have you done?” A complete response by the plane will include one like “here I am,” I am ashamed,” “you are God.” But the question and the response, no matter what they are, are keyed on the code that they previously bonded by, so “you are God” is not a naïve assignation, but a technical one.

So our questions hinge upon what must this code be that they share an interest in, that God initially gives and man accepts. The only thing we can be sure of now is that it is something that is not manufactured by man, is given by God, something in a species of knowledge and not in phyla, and the same code that man has is the same code that God has and is never changing.

Of course, using such analogies of the transponder with respect to communication between God and man has great limitations. Most importantly, it speaks of a piece of information being given and requested, but we can’t conclude through the analogy exactly what information God would require from Man from this example. With the transponder, it’s an alpha-numeric number. It, of course, contains the type of aircraft, and being a number is a narrow description as to what kind of information it is, ruling out millions of possible things such as the color of the plane or the pilot’s favorite color. The code is made up of numbers, but also that those numbers are assigned differently from plane to plane.

But this might tell us that, although the fact of it containing the planes type and a series of letters and numbers is a constant, it has a variable dimension from plane to plane. If the syntax of the code and the precise characters and content of the code are said to correspond loosely to the information itself that is shared between God and man to make a connection, we might be able to say that this informational token, this symbol that God gives, refers to the same compulsory fact but is experienced slightly different by each person. Maybe there is something to this idealism and realism, just not with Man being the start and endpoint.

We might get at what kind of code God expects Man to dial in by thinking about mans possible reasons for rejecting it. The pilot has the capacity to reject the code or outright and refuse to dial it in. Why he would refuse to do this when it is the law is mysterious. Maybe he refused because man does not like the syntax or his particular series of characters? Maybe he wants to smuggle drugs. So, why, informationally, does man affirm God by dialing in this code?

If the code were thought of as symbolizing a reason for contact and a future between them, man could reject the code on the basis of apathy or conscious rejection from a knowledge of who God must be. The rejection of the code could be because man believes God is a dismissible and arbitrary authority because he is not present. The rejection is because, although man accepts his presence, he believes that there are better reasons to approach Him, better ways of communication arbitrarily manufactured by man. The latter accepts message and person as real but not its given meaning, and the other refuses that the message is important even if it were known because God is not local.

Man, therefore, would believe that the reason for believing God as a real transcendent being, or his plan as given by him in his established system, is in one way or another subject to self-definition.

Then how is this code more than a mere sign between them, with arbitrary, self-defining content, by God without care for man and by man without care for God? What would make this content perhaps, in a great sense, as much an alien thing to God as it does to man, and at the same time makes it the most understandable thing and most lovely thing possible between them? Is there an informational token, a kind of knowledge, between “where are you?” and “here I am,” that is supposed to cause God to step into the personal spiritual space of another that is not God for the intention of claiming, and a token of knowledge that is supposed to cause man to rise above himself to a place which is not man, but which he desires to claim as himself?

I don’t want to impose a fancy term with “Transpondence” gratuitously. But I really do believe that this analogy brings out some very important differences between the kind of communication we should expect between man and God if God has shown himself to man empirically and man has shown himself to God as having received it and believed it.

Many correspondences can be found in this analogy with the expected relationship between God and man.

2. 2. • The communication carries through the air over long distances between the tower and the aircraft.
      • The pilot does not decide what the code will be and the control tower does not demand a code that the transponder cannot dial-in.
      • What is asked is very specific. The tower is not asking for the color of the aircraft, and the aircraft is not telling the tower through the transponder what is on the lunch menu. The tower and the aircraft are not “feeling” what the question will be or what the expected answer will be.
      • The language for one is the language of the other. It’s the same code that they are exchanging. No matter what other information they may exchange, it cannot be exchanged without that code first.
      • The language and the message is the same thing. The message that is used to establish communication is the same code used to gain information.
      • There is no possibility for the message to at any time become irrelevant or stagnating and the meaning of breaking down and becoming incoherent.
      • The code is predicating any further information that will be obtained by the tower or the aircraft, such as heading and altitude, its relation to other aircraft in flight and the clearance to land.

We might also say that the nature of the aircraft is tracked by the tower, as to its real-time flight data, but this is after the aircraft establishes its existence and “nature” on the radar screen by the acceptance and dialing in of the code. The pilot looks for the control tower to supply guidance after giving the code, establishing the FAA’s benevolent nature, but only after the authority accepts the aircraft’s existence by requesting the pilot to skwawk the code. Therefore, the code establishes the existence and the nature of each party.

You can’t take this analogy too literally, of course. But I think this “code,” this predicating piece of knowledge to transcendent communication that is so simple, but also something that seems to have so little information, which must be exchanged in order for any subsequent information to be passed, and which will determine if the plane will appear on the authorities radar and land safely, is informative of this transcendent symbolic type that I am always talking about, but not yet telling you exactly what it is.

2. 2. 4. Personhood requires freedom, and the ability to communicate, but it also requires that this communication be understandable and lawful.

This point establishes at least that there is a clear understanding between man and God that both can empirically test and affirm, not only the product of imagination or guesswork.

In addition to freedom and the ability to freely communicate, personhood requires that there is a hermeneutic involved: rules of grammar, syntax, and logic, in the communication.

We will find that the first two things in the list covered above that go into personhood can be freely admitted by all Christians, that man has free will and that man and God must form a relationship through some form of communication. It is obvious to both liberals and conservatives that this logic does no violence to any of the content of their faith, in their particular creeds, world views and religious sentiments. But here, when we come to define the exact rules by which a thing righteously carries meaning, such as between man and God, all the trouble starts to appear. However, this is the most important step, since symbolic communication denotes both revelation and concealment of meaning, depending upon the rules that we know that will control the presentation of that meaning. If we are symbols of God and meant to freely fulfill that symbol in our communication with Him, it is not enough to be recognized as a person by God unless we are also intelligible, lawful and understandable to each other in accordance with the basic symbolic logic of creation.

I am only saying that we may generously, lawfully and rightly regard or treat an insane person as any other person, but we are not here treating him as a person on the basis of his ability to act outside of the demons or organic handicaps that might harass him to no fault of his own, or his ability to respond to us intelligibly and meaningfully. We regard him as a person gratuitously with respect for his species, his form, perhaps his ontological nature, but not his expressed nature, which actually gets in the way of full personhood and a normal relationship with him. But the Personhood of which I speak between ontologies requires that when we speak to someone that this person can ingest that information and respond back appropriately and thoughtfully so that a relationship around shared loves and interests can be secured, not just around his existence as a certain form.

Personhood, if not to be established but to be regarded fully to the expectation of a relationship, requires that each person exchange legal symbols that accurately reflect the meaning carried in their beliefs, ideas, values, and aspirations. This does not mean that God rejects involuntary mental invalids as persons or does not afford them respect. But it does mean that, if we had full capacity and choice to act not as mental invalids and we choose to anyway, this bears upon our moral character, and, at least biblically, certainly suggests a good reason for God to misunderstand and reject us morally.

The  Imago Dei is an image of God that is a demonstration of God as a God of truth, and the only demonstration we have of a God of objective truth is the messianic revelation of historical promise and fulfillment by Christ. He and it, the person and this his informational entity, are given freely to the world by God. When man honestly confronts their reality, the cause, and the effect, man becomes an image of God’s mind through that gift, and nothing less.

The Meaning of Justification in the Unexpected Insight of James 2

Sacred Symbology: The Sump and the Cure of the Transcendent Type. Part 4

Sacred Symbology: Transcendent Strangeness, the Strangeness of Man to it: Part 2

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