i think you underestimate the degree to which a concept of the absolute and transcendent, properly approached, can allow for a skillful navigation of all the contingency and nebulosity of the (obviously real) world, its categories and conventions
to a certain kind of person (perhaps i am one) this degree of uncertainty is unacceptable. but the need for the certainty of the absolute leads to all kinds of problems, as you’ve noticed
the affirmation of an ultimately benevolent but basically unknowable telos of creation and/or an absolute on which the contingent rests, does not have to be another one of these, but rather can be a lightning rod or heat sink (pick your metaphor) for all of this. properly approached, it is a truly “separate magisterium” absorbs all of that reification and misplaced yearning for concreteness that otherwise tends to pop up.
this can be done badly, obviously. the two analogies that spring to mind are idolatry and immanentizing the eschaton: both misguided attempts to prematurely bridge the absolute into the contingent world. idolatry as in giving contingent things and categories (country, caste, name, sect, tribe) the same status of the absolute; immanentizing the eschaton by trying to guess His plan and be its worldly architect
the realm of the transcendent is a "reification sink"
i think you underestimate the degree to which a concept of the absolute and transcendent, properly approached, can allow for a skillful navigation of all the contingency and nebulosity of the (obviously real) world, its categories and conventions
to a certain kind of person (perhaps i am one) this degree of uncertainty is unacceptable. but the need for the certainty of the absolute leads to all kinds of problems, as you’ve noticed
the affirmation of an ultimately benevolent but basically unknowable telos of creation and/or an absolute on which the contingent rests, does not have to be another one of these, but rather can be a lightning rod or heat sink (pick your metaphor) for all of this. properly approached, it is a truly “separate magisterium” absorbs all of that reification and misplaced yearning for concreteness that otherwise tends to pop up.
this can be done badly, obviously. the two analogies that spring to mind are idolatry and immanentizing the eschaton: both misguided attempts to prematurely bridge the absolute into the contingent world. idolatry as in giving contingent things and categories (country, caste, name, sect, tribe) the same status of the absolute; immanentizing the eschaton by trying to guess His plan and be its worldly architect