In my Holy Week posting, on Sin, I spoke from the Scriptures and in the language of the Scriptures. I have no objection to humanism or the secular tongue visiting or speaking from these sacred texts; indeed, I daily pray they will do so, and re-proclaim the sacred message in words and ideas that will capture the attention and hearts of modern secularized humanity. However, they must do so authentically. They may not, they must not, edit out the core revelation of the texts, the essential spirit of this spirituality. God cannot be reduced to a pure immanent principle, or a pure dynamic. As I have insisted consistently in articles past, too many theologies and philosophies have failed to function healthily precisely because they have fractioned the divine up into a purely transcendent, a completely immanent, or an exclusively dynamic principle. The great insight, the monumental revelation of Christianity is the idea of a divine trinity, the divine existent indivisibly and always and equally as transcendent and immanent and dynamic (in religious terminology, Father and Son and Spirit). Wherever the singular divine is fragmented into merely one or even two of these aspects, everything that hangs upon that theorizing is etiolated, shrived of an essential ingredient. Many forms of liberation theology, death of god theology, etc. carry the fatal flaw of forgetting the essential transcending aspect of the divine. Many forms of modern philosophy (especially the process, existential, and idealist based efforts) likewise find themselves claudicate because some aspect, often the transcendent, is missing or underplayed in their explication of the divine or first principle. Modern Western man is so involved in this world and its possibilities, he seems to forget that it exists not in a vacuum but as a contingency held in place by the inexplicable beginning and equally inexplicable end of all that is.
This is not pure theorizing; little ever is. This has consequences as to how man views and values himself. A humanity strung between the unravelable mystery of the beginning and end of time and cosmos, between the transcending limits of knowledge and investigation, man projected out of that same unexaminable foundation, man hurling toward its likewise incomprehensible unfolding, can never be man claiming himself his own master or lord. How then does man claim himself, define himself? In terms of his free actions he is never wholly self-possessed, and can never morally claim self-righteousness, self-justification. Man is always an individuated epiphany of the complex cosmos and social milieu. Man can only value himself according to a certain ideal, but the individual man can never serve as the cosmic or social standard. The ideal is always a transcendent of such things, always as well the inherent vitality of such things, and as well their forward-moving dynamic. What is, therefore, the most secure, the most wholesome (in religious terminology, the holy) basis on which man may value, define himself? Without burdening this missive with arguments for the absurdity of existence or the randomness of existence, I shall merely posit my thesis that the only basis for healthful and wholesome existence is the understanding of oneself, the valuation of oneself in the mystery and givenness of this existence, in the uncertainty of its every moment and minute, as one of deepest trust, or trust’s personal aspect, as accepted and loved. This may well be taken as essentially and existentially a self-affirmation, or it may be taken in the religious sense of a divine affirmation and holding in fore-giving love, but whether understood as affirmed by self or by God, such positive affirmation alone will produce in man the groundwork for an authentic encounter with oneself, with others, with the world, with meaningfulness both cosmic and personal.
As I have posited before, the basis of all healthful human valuation resides in this self-affirmation, this self-acceptance as accepted, as, ultimately said, loved. Any moral merit a man may accredit to his actions is consequent to this, not prior, not preparatory, not supplementary to this. To them of any Christian discipline of faith that claim the contrary, I ask a meditation upon the ancient act of thanksgiving that opens the communion prayers in so many traditions: It is right and meet, proper to our salvation, that at all times and in all places we give Thee thanks. The ancient text has been variable translated, but all attempts at conveying the meaning of the Latin reference receiving the love and forgiveness of God in Christ with thankfulness as the essential constituent of man’s true dignity, proper office, and very life. For the Christian, Christ is the revelation of divine embrace, and our most authentic way of living out the response is to joyfully embrace it with thanks and praise. Luther would have summarized it thus: salvation (healthful existence) is by grace alone (from the divine side), and received humbly and happily by faith alone (viewed from the human side). In humanistic, in secularist terms: we can embrace the foundations of being as something ultimately meaningful, and in that affirmation of self and cosmos united, gratefully, graciously live out our existence with that same faith, that same hope, that courage to be (as Professor Tillich was wont to say) creatively loving the mystery which is at once self, other, and world.
I believe in God and in his Christ manifest in Jesus. But the prime terms of that statement (I believe, God, Christ) reference items beyond an empiric simplicity of knowing. They point to ultimate boundaries of our experience, to the limit-horizons of all valuations and aesthetics, and their symbolic vocabularies. Faith in God is a leap beyond the realm of experience and reason, thus, it is in theological terminology called a gift from God. Faith in God is the supreme act of trust, and traditionally (although not always!) for the Christian, that trust, being the ultimate trust, is personal. Things may be analysed and considered, persons act. Therefore, this supreme trust is foremost “act-ual”, not primarily conceptualizing, not “meta-physical”. It does not first theorize, it acts. It acts in hope and with love, and therefore, the orientation of the act is other-ward. As a love-act it is constant in its embrace, it is constant also in its relate-ability, it its openness to respond and adapt itself to the horizons and needs of the be-loved. Here is the basis not only of the mysteries of creation and incarnation, but of our Christian existence as the resonation of those two great gifts.
In this vitality, this active faith, I find so many, too many, unwilling to join the journey because too many who would lead and guide want some subscription to a definition beyond the valuation, our valuation, that the font of all that is is best understood as creative love, and that the path to truest human dignity and being is to act thankfully, creatively, and lovingly toward each and all. The first disciples beheld in Jesus the human face of God. That Jesus has died and is risen back to God. Where shall the world today behold the human face of God?–in Christians? Dare we make so bold to try? Jesus last words were a command: Go to all nations, be so bold. His promise is the spirit of God upon us and with us such that there is no thing, no problem, no situation, no doubt indiscernible or insurmountable, and consequent to that neither is there any word, any definition, any action, any tradition not open to adaptation. The creative love of God, the spirit of God is not merely our guide, it is our very life. That is the promise of Christianity. It is about reaching out to be there with and for the other in whatsoever manner is comprehensible in the situation. To them that find that scandalous, I tell you it is far less scandalous for us to adapt ourselves to our fellow men than for the high Lord of heaven to stoop to the confines of flesh and earth to make himself comprehensible to us. And to make this scandal all the more egregious, we are told that whatsoever we do will be done in heaven for such is the power of the creativity with which we are charged and entrusted.
The subscriptions and definitions may come, but that are intimacies of the heart, not the mind, songs of the soul, not theorems of the understanding; they are sighs of the church at prayer, intimacies improper to the addressing of the world, and they come in the secret most chamber in adoring moments away from the public forum. This is why the early church kept these things to itself. Catechumens were only slowly exposed to these enunciations, these codes of faith, these poetics of spiritual vision. When we commit ourselves to be, to act for God and his Christ, our lives will define them, to self as much as to world, our love will define them in ways words cannot. In Acts of the Apostles we read the first disciples attracted the attention and admiration of the masses not because of their body of dogmas, not because of the splendours of their rituals, but because they so loved and cared for one another. Let us so dare.