Thy Kingdom Connected

When it came in the mail, I was looking forward to reading Thy Kingdom Connected by Dwight J. Friesen. But I ended up being more annoyed by the book than enlightened. The problem with the book, for me, was that Friesen just didn't make the case for why the network metaphor was helpful. He spoke of links and nodes instead of relationships and things/places/people. Fair enough. But why? What does it do for us? Where does "links" take us that "relationships" doesn't?

The reason I found this book annoying is that Friesen consistently used highly technical terms from network theory, chaos theory, and other sciences and applied them to theology. This, in itself, isn't really problematic but the way Friesen does this reminded me of the way some people have taken Einstein's theory of general relativity and tried to somehow link it to epistemological relativism. Another example would be how some people have tried to take quantum theory and apply it to New Age theories (it is not surprising, I guess, that Friesen quotes Fritjof Capra a number of times).

For example, on page 98 Friesen - while talking about chaos theory - talks about "human beings, our interpersonal relations, and creation" as a dynamical system. As he correctly points out in an end note (his endnote on the definition of "dynamic systems" appears to be a direct quote of Wikipedia without reference, by the way), a dynamic system is a mathematical formalization. But, unless you are a reductionist of the greatest sort, human beings (let alone our relationship with other human beings or the entire creation) aren't dynamic systems. Dynamic systems are models. They are deterministic models. That's why they are useful to scientists and engineers. But even as a Calvinist, I don't believe humans or creation are deterministic in the way that dynamic systems are. And I doubt Friesen does either. Which means he either doesn't truly understand what the term means or he is not using it in the way that people who study chaos theory use it. And this is why I found the book annoying - he draws on certain terms from various subjects (chaos theory, network theory, etc.) and then uses those terms in a way that is quite different than how they are used in those subjects. And that makes me wonder "Why?"

I should end by saying there was a lot in the book that I agreed with (e.g., his discussion of the "other"). I just really didn't like the way the manner in which he arrived there.