Page 133 - EMCAPP-Journal No. 5

A Portrait of a Christian Psychologist: Paul C. Vitz

I often say, I am optimistic about the future on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; I am pessimistic
about the future on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Sundays I work at recovering my trust and
hope in God.
My optimistic scenario I call “Transmodern”. I will sketch out some of my understanding: This future
is not about returning to a period in the past. Such “futures” found in many forms today are usually
very fundamentalist and reactionary. But, I think the best of the modern period, such as an apprecia-
tion of freedom, most of science, etc will be part of this new coming era. But most of the modern will
be transcended, transformed and transfigured-hence the term “Transmodern”.

Paul’s family
five years ago

By transcended, I mean that the reductionist, materialist assumptions of modernism will be trans-
cended by an awareness of higher realities, such as religion, spirituality and higher ideals including
the virtues. I believe science will be transformed by an acceptance of purpose or teleology in the uni-
verse. (This means a degree of return to Aristotle’s final cause notion.) The social sciences and our
understanding of persons will be transformed by the acceptance of the central importance of love,
human relationships and also the virtues as basic for human flourishing. I propose also that how
we live will be transfigured in that the large modern state will break-up slowly or perhaps suddenly
and be replaced by much smaller social groupings with their own power sources, food supplies and
community characteristics. Today’s new technology is making large central organizations such as go-
vernments, huge corporations, enormous medical centers, big state universities, and large cities slow-
ly less needed. All of these systems are already showing serious signs of having peaked and are now
starting to decay. We have begun to decentralize. The internet, for example, has this effect. I suspect
this transmodern world will have major new Christian developments in it including much more fri-
endly relations between Protestants, Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox. There will also very likely
be other intellectual, religious, and spiritual expressions in the Transmodern , e.g. philosophical idea-
lism, Buddhism, expressions of traditional Judaism but also Messianic Judaism & Jews for Jesus, etc.
I am presently working on some theory & concepts which are relevant to understanding how such
changes might take place. These ideas are focused on the two types of codes used by humans to under-
stand anything: analog codes and digital codes. In part this proposed new period will require a new
respect for analog codes and the knowledge these codes express. However, this is a long story which I
am still working on. (Oh! O! Here comes my cognitive psychology background.)

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