Friday, March 25, 2011

Matheology?

I was reading a book the other night. I know! Me, reading a book. No, seriously, it's called Simple Church, and it's about streamlining the way we "do" church to provide clarity about our mission, movement for people toward spiritual transformation, and alignment of our resources with those goals. Very thought-provoking stuff, and I'm really diggin' it.

Along the way, I started having some thoughts provoked. The line of thinking was something like this: People who have been in church all their lives will wonder why they need spiritual transformation when they've been in church all their lives. Well, that's a fair question. Do they? What does it mean for a disciple to undergo spiritual transformation? Well, since God always wants to move us from where we are to where we need to be, and since none of us is perfectly aligned with the will of God (good Reformed theology, there), everyone can stand to have their spiritual lives transformed into something deeper, broader, more meaningful, more fruitful, more faithful, whatever. Obviously, those who are not following the will of God because they make no effort at it will need a greater transformation to fulfill the will of God than someone who is making a stab at it. Or at least they have more room for improvement.

That's about the time I started to graph it.


The purple line is God's will, or God's righteousness. The blue line is how close a disciple gets over time. The green line is how close (or far) a non-disciple is over time. So a person's personal righteousness might be described mathematically as:

∆ = (X,Y)g - (X,Y)p
where ∆ is the difference between two corresponding points on the graph,
(X,Y)g is the X and Y coordinates on the God's will line, "g", and
(X,Y)p is the X and Y coordinates on the person's will line, "p".
Since this would be done on corresponding points, the X coordinates will be the same, so we might also write it as ∆ = Yg -Yp.

So for the disciple, ∆ is relatively small, and for the non-disciple, ∆ is relatively large.

Spiritual transformation, then, would be some function, ƒ(X), such that ∆–>0 rapidly.


Now, for the disciple, the change in the difference, that is ∂∆, is relatively small, but for the non-disciple, ∂∆ is quite large and obvious. Even though the disciple is actually closer to the will of God, the change in the life of the non-disciple would be much more dramatic. The goal would be for both people's lines to approach the God's will line asymptotically, that is getting closer and closer as the graph moves on further in time (the X-axis). Well, I'm assuming here that one can never fully match the will of God, otherwise the goal would be ∆ = 0.

It's been a long time since I've played with this kind of math, and that's all this is, of course, is playing. This has no real mathematical value, and I'm sure my terminology is full of errors. It may, however, illustrate a necessary process in spiritual development for the mathematically inclined.

I also then wondered if a straight line of slope = +1 is the best representation of God's will and righteousness. Perhaps God's righteousness is a straight line of slope = 0. Maybe God's will is parabolic. I don't know. Maybe I'm over-thinking this.

Lastly, I was just now, as I am writing this, trying to define ƒ(X). It looks like it is a parabolic function, or maybe hyperbolic. I really don't remember the formulae for either of those. Again, I suppose it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that ƒ(X) is an intentional function applied to the data starting at a particular point. The second graph shows that the data for both the green and blue lines is somewhat random and haphazard until ƒ(X) is applied. After that, each line follows a more predictable and intentional trajectory. It is this intentionality that should be characteristic of church planning and programming.

Of course, I made up the data here to make the graph do what I wanted to show, and in real life the data would still be bobbing up and down, regardless of how intentional one was. My point here is, as I said before, to express a lesson in spiritual formation with math. Hey, it helped me, and it was fun.