I—The God Ambiguity
God evolves. While this declaration stands the foundation of process theology, I intend it here to stand first and simply as an historical statement. The human understanding of God evolves as man comes to more fully understand the functioning of the cosmos and the human psyche. It is, thus, necessary and proper to make this observation at the initiation of talk about spirituality because we are inclined to forget, or disinclined to remember, that we as a species, and as civilizations within the species, change, grow, progress, occasionally regress, in brief, evolve, in sundry manners, and with and within those metamorphoses, so too our abilities to envisage, imagine, objectify and conceptualize, of which the notion, idea, and vision of God is the most abstract logically, and the ultimate both axiologically and aetiologically. It may, admittedly, be countered that the above declaration claims no more than it is not God who evolves but the human understanding of God or that alternately this evolution is simply an unfolding of the divine gifting of revelation, the “growing in grace” concomitant with the continuousness of “salvation history”. However, if God is not received as the God of Deism, not the Maker of a machine that operates without oversight and providential care, and if the term God denotes more than a mathematical principle to explain causality, God, as Judeo-Christian tradition has ever held, relates to his creation, remains open to relativity, to prayer and supplication and in them to the human capacities for knowing, willing, freedom and love, and so is responsive, relatable, relative, mutable. This is not heresy; Plato is. We tend to skim over that which the Apostle Paul means when he claims “if Christ rose not…”. Paul points us directly into the mutability of God: God in Christ[i] can and does experience desertion, despair and even death, and only in that mutability, that passivity to the fullness of human experiential compass, does God will to affect a turn, a conversion, in human consciousness toward the heart, the availability, the novelty and creativity of his Spirit. We tend, for sundry and often fallaciously pragmatic explanations, to over-look this. There may reside within each and all a haunting in want of sagacity and gravitas, but many among us have ceased to realize we live rooted in the depths unimaginable, and mindlessly skim the surface of life, confusedly accepting an influx of sustenance rather than pursuing the endurance of substantiality.
We no longer, most of us at least, believe the world is a disc covered by a dome affixed to distant mountains and set with stars and celestial lights cloaking the throne of the High One, and all this structure, by providential and creative hand, holding back the vastness of waters above and below—an embryological awareness presented as cosmography. The disc is now an orb. The waters are infinite and homogenous space. The “dome” of the heavens is gone. Where then is the realm of the divine in this new world-view? Certainly, despite ideas of a rosy paradise wherein angels mix with martyrs and virgins in endless luxuriance and bliss-filled worship, God and the divine realm are, must be, as theologs have long maintained, items not confined in time and space, items “spirit-ual”, non-material, items not merely earth-transcending, but time-space exceeding. Yet, most of us approach religions and the spiritualties they exist to support with images of the divine and spiritual as concrete as those of our ancient-most predecessors. Theirs we asquint as idols and naively literalized myth, ours we accept without critique. A prejudice is never prejudicial in the mind that contains it.
We may claim the statue, the crucifix, the painting is but an image, an imagined form, but we then proceed to think, act, meditate, pray, exist as if the image is the reality of the divine and holy—a tangible reality. Heaven and hell become places. Souls are things; they go places. And within this making of a space to contain the non-spatial, the non-material, time (the linear succession in which we put spaces) becomes time-less, all-time, eternity. As we take the spiritual as concrete, as quantitative, we negate its inherent qualitative-ness, force it—unconsciously–into its contrariety rather than understand it in its complementarity.[ii] The spiritual becomes forced into an “appearance” rather than being allowed its rightful stance as the essence, the creative power, the endurance, and thus the truth, that serves as groundwork of all quanta, all quantity, all quantitative-ness. There is in this caused a tension twixt quantity and quality, matter and spirit, and it is felt that matter must be denied if spirit is to be free. However, it is spirit that frees matter, that as the power of possibilities, as freedom, makes it all it can be.
Reformers and reformations come and go and we still fall into the same rut. We cling to Olympus as much as to Paradise. Few are willing, but for briefest moment, to surrender concrete reality and rise into, or sink into—for there is neither up nor down, neither in nor out in timelessness-spacelessness, in soul/psyche–because we fear its defiance of conceptualization, its sheer un-ordinariness to the world we daily strive pragmatically to navigate.
Let us look toward the whence we as a civilization, we as an historical-social composite of ideas and ideals, began.
II—The Olympians
With an unapologetically broad-stroked overstatement we may cursorily note the notion of the divine begins with a reservation about the sheer mass and potency of being, of the world, a sensing, a feeling, an intuition, a self-subterranean awareness, of power in the world, an energy, a “life-force” rather regularly anthropomorphised as the sky-father and the earth-mother-consort he fertilizes in wind and thunder, rain and light, a basic cosmology presented in the guise of theology. The sundry aspects of powers within the material world are their children. As time progresses, powers within the human mind and heart and soul manifest as divine powers: Gods of passions, learning, enlightenment, and love. Thus, leaping through centuries, we can observe Ares morph from the sacred power of the fields to protecting them, and in that, to guarding them from the usage of others. An agricultural divine potency becomes a God of war. In like manner, Athena, who seems in her Indo-European origins to be a solar divinity, becomes among the Greeks the Goddess of wisdom who eventually particularizes her power as the protector of that ultimate social guiding light and reservoir of wisdom–civilization. Apollo, also seemingly arriving from the Indian subcontinent as a champion of order and light, extends himself, ruling not only the sun, but the light and order of the mind. Artemis, his sister, who in her original form is the ruler of the wild world, becomes tamed into a Goddess of the hunt, and in the telling ascendancy of patriarchy’s estimation of things wild becomes named protector of female youth, as was punctilious Apollo of the male. Aphrodite, who rules love and its passions, has, not surprisingly, ancestral forms everywhere. Hermes begins as a lesser God guarding the roads, and thence becomes the message-bearer, guard of the travellers, and even of them that upon the traveller prey—thieves. The ubiquitous divinization of fire (the destroyer, the transformer, the sacrifice-bearer, and in its leaping about also the trickster and jester) personifies among the Greeks as Hephaestus.
The origins of these divinities vary. The God of one region may mirror the God of another. A people who dwell upon the open plains might easily enfold a mountain God within notions of prominence and pinnacle. Desert dwellers might need be more creative in the adaptation of naiads and dryads. Yet, in observing the texts of history, we plainly see that as people mingle in trade, in war, in varied ventures, as they are made to encounter one another, they influence one another, assimilate to one another, and with them their Gods, their notions of God. Divine identities and histories meld together, powers overlap, and each divine being undergoes the pressures of an evolution toward supremacy.
The Gods do more than evolve through understanding and cultural assimilation. The ancient Gods have a progeny simply because Gods die and new Gods arise, and with them the need to keep some sense of integrity and homogeny to the divine realm. Thus, new Gods re-place old Gods yet are to them related. Reality is always re-lating, always the spinning of a tradition, a holding on to things, passing them on, yet weaving them into a mediation twixt times and changes. Time and relativity have always been concomitant notions—implicitly if not as theory.
Thus, the school texts of our youth that gave us the Greek Olympians (and their Roman correlates) as a type of theological fait accompli were not inaccurate; they merely presented in clipped and concentrated form that which, to that point, had been the evolution of the depiction of creative power throughout a large swath of peoples from, approximately, the Indus to the Nile, and covering centuries, if not millennia. All powers originate in the consorting of the two primal powers of heaven and earth, Uranus (Father-sky) and Gaia (mother-earth). Their twelve children, the Titans, a race of giants[iii], preside over a golden age wherein harmony and peace rule the realms of reality. Mnemosyne (memory), tellingly, usually leads the list. She presides over that which makes the world human: words, language, the mechanisms of communication, and with her nephew, Zeus, gives birth to the Muses, who make the human civilized. Tethys (water, or better: slithering, flowing) consorts with her brother Oceanus to bring forth the sundry deities of the rivers, springs, and other moving waters. Theia (shining) consorts with her brother Hyperion (high one) producing the sun, moon and dawn. Phoebe (radiance of mind) consorts with her brother Coeus (inquiry) and they issue Leto, mother of those great lights of heaven and earth: Apollo and Artemis. Rhea (the mother ground, the Magnus Mater of ancient Rome) consorts with her brother Cronus (the harvester who will one day castrate his father, that is harvest his seeds). They issue forth the above and below of the world civilized man knows, a combination, or better put, a combustion of forces that can leap from one to another, can “warm” one another, animate one another: Hestia (the fire of altar and house), Hades (the ruler of the under-world), Demeter (earth Goddess), Poseidon (sea God), Hera (consort of her brother, the high lord of Olympus, Zeus)—a divine “economy”, a coordinated system of world-management.
It is commonly held that the Greek contribution to theology is its humanization of the Gods. The ancient vestiges of the divine as natural forces, or in animal or fantastic form, mutate. At times, the emblematic animal form resides along side of the humanized divinity as a faithful companion. Yet, in general, the bestial and imaginary recede into attributes and character traits. The terror of the unfamiliar and the magical rites transform as well into emblematic actions (sacraments) of obedience, of fidelity to an order. The fearsomeness of the Gods no longer ends in prostration, but in awe. This awe humbles, but numbing passivity and surrender to fate transcend into inspiration, animation, and moral action. The Gods remain unpredictable and utterly free compared to man, but, in the hands of the Greeks, fear gives way to beauty. With that, it needs be here doubly underscored that the Greek idea of beauty is founded on the idea of a perfect form, an ideal mathematic fundament, an equation containing the possibilities of proportionality, order, balance—an idea brought to perfection in the mind of Plato.[iv] Thus, Zeus. like many of his counterparts, is accompanied by Justice. In his reign the order of the cosmos remains. The division of the essential elements of earth, water and sky, and the fonts of religion (Memory/Tradition) and social stability (Justice) are maintained. Evolution is the mediation of time and its fluidity.
Coupling divine evolution, we may discern another. Several times each millennium there seems to occur an extraordinarily effusive jetting of florigen into the human heart stimulating a reformation of the traditions that depict and define the meaning of life, in brief, of religion. Thus, we find the turns and transformations initiated by Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, the priests of Egypt, Moses, and the Prophets of Israel, and in latter days by Jesus, Augustine, Mohammed, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley, et al. These sacral realignments and amendments are attempts to interpret the unfurling situations within both cult and culture, and adapt pragmatically. They represent more than the continuous move from the tribal toward the national; they present us, at their best, the expanse, the deepening, of the human consciousness, its world-awareness and existential comprehending. Thus, as the idea of God ascends toward wholeness, serenity, and self-possession, the time when things could be hidden from God recede. The cosmic will, first espied in the copulative embrace of sky and earth, increasingly moves toward presentation either as action (a providence, Love) or passivity (a predetermination, Law). In these continuing reformations of traditions, the creative, the progressive impetus, attempts to heal the human condition, to save it, to turn it from fear to awe, from magic to the practice of religion and its obedience (worship), from priestly machinations of temple to concern for the sociality of soul, from drifting into insular concern for self and materiality to regard for the station of man amongst men.
III–The God of the Hebrews
Like the Greeks and their Olympians, neither the Hebrew people nor their God premier on the world stage as a finished product. The people come into being, and in a manner more complex than the ritualized compendium provided as the sacred text.[v] We read that Abram, who after a divine encounter is re-named Abraham (translatable as Father of Many), was summoned to leave his native city of Ur, near the Persian Gulf, and move to Palestine. There he was promised that all the land he could survey would belong to his off-spring forever. His grandson, Jacob, who after a divine encounter is re-named Israel (translatable as Sovereignty to God) reportedly has twelve sons who beget the twelve tribes of the Hebrew nation. We ought well to note that the name changes auspicated in encounters with God tell us we are not dealing with human history, with simple “facts”, that we are on a trek with God in history, with sacred history, salvation history. This God-in-history, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is presented as ever the same God. God is God, but this God, even more so than Abraham and the tribes that claim affinity to him, has a history more complex than the condensed version that floats above the cursory reading of the scripture.
Isaac and Jacob are presented as the descendants of Abraham. While there may be an ethnic affinity, the presentation of them as his son and grandson are questionable and probably based on the need to press the founding ancestors of various incorporating tribes of nomadic peoples into a confederating-mythology. The narrative of the twelve tribes as the off-spring of Jacob/Israel’s twelve sons is likewise an eponymy, an attempt at cementing a coming together of variously related peoples in the processes of formulating a series of shifting political alliances. In this regard, it is noteworthy that two and a half of the tribes (Reuben, Gad, and half of Manasseh) decline entry into the land of promise and situate themselves on its border, and that the books of Joshua and Judges teem with tales that demonstrate merely the loosest of bonds amongst some geographically continuous groups who do not always act as if there is amongst them something more than a geographical connection (consider the basest example in the rape of the Judean woman by the Benjamites in Gibeah). The coming together of the Hebrew nation was necessitated by a series of migrations from peoples of unknown Mediterranean origins and the rise of the politically, economically, and technologically accomplished Philistines in the south. These two forces threatened the stability of the existing tribal areas. The first embracive unions under Saul and David were loose, precarious, and fraught with tribal distrust. David is crowned King of Judah (the two southern tribes) before securing the allegiance of the northern tribes and their assent to a type of united kingdom. He is not long gone before the frustrations seeded in the reign of Solomon erupt into the succession of the north which then styled itself the Kingdom of Israel. The rise of Assyria engulfed both the northern and the Transjordan tribes. Because Assyria had a policy of enforcing the racial mixing of conquered peoples, only the two tribes descended from Joseph and Benjamin, the children of Rachael, second wife of Jacob, self-styled into the Kingdom of Judah, hold the purity of race constitutive of the Hebrew people.
Scripture tells us in summary fashion that Joseph, son of Jacob/Israel and Rachael, went into Egypt, and there summoned his brothers and their families to weather the famine that raged over the middle-East in the earlier part of the second millennium BC. That there were in Egypt at this time foreign tribes is certainly credible. Around 1700 BC, the political levers of state were overtaken by a non-Egyptian people, the Hyksos, who were not inclined to discriminate on the basis of ethnic origin. Hebrew tribes would have been welcomed, just as after the fall of Hyksos power, they might well have been disenfranchised. Yet, that all the Hebrew peoples went into Egypt is simply part of socio-religious revisionism in the service of solidifying both cult and culture, “church” and state. Thus, also is the great exodus via a parted Red Sea. The Hebrew peoples in Egypt may well have taken the opportunity created by a cunning religious and political leader to leave for greener pastures, but the Red Sea adventure is undoubtedly a prolapsis, a transfer into the deeper past of a later event to make for a grander tale. We read in Exodus that after the crossing of the Red Sea the tribes gathered in the Sinai desert and there entered a covenant with God. Of the covenant circumcision was a sign. We read also in Joshua that forty years later, at crossing the Jordon, the people are told they need enter a covenant with God and the men be circumcised. In these forty years (a symbolic measure for a long time[vi]), where has gone the covenant of Sinai? How, if circumcision had for those many years been the mandated religious practice, can there be now a “mountain of foreskins”? We obviously are looking upon conflated and inflated narratives. There is some evidence that about a millennium and a quarter before Jesus, an earthquake rattled the region and temporarily caused a disruption in the flow the Jordan. Hence, by placing rocks (symbolically given as twelve—one per tribe) in the muddy river bed, a group of Hebrews could cross over to the “land promised”. This might well be too rich a memory to leave to one small group of invading nomads, and thus, the sacred narrative elevates it from the tribal and seismic to the national and miraculous, parting an entire sea for an entire nation to cross, and not on hastily laid stones, but dry shod. This does nothing to deny God works in mysterious ways, merely to include into that mysterium the power of religious vision, the unifying sight of all things in the sweep of Holy purpose and meaning, the mystical twinkling behind religions’ rites that can render history as art, as inspiration, as not simply nation-building, but as globalizing, as cosmic-consciousness engendering, a force the prophet Isaiah will later reap in unsurpassable poetry.
Because the editors of the sacred texts were inclined to enfold various renditions and traditions of the constituent peoples that come to make up the nation rather than delete contrary details, we are, to some extent, able to detect distinctive and opposing positons beneath the textual veneer. Morals and mores definitively evolve (consider the extreme example of human sacrifice by Jephthah that blinks no eye as it is recounted). There is room also to acknowledge that the divinely ordained rules and forms of worship mutate as the people move from being nomadic tribes to a settled nation, and a great deal of these transformations simply occur without divine warrant. The sacred tent of the desert gives way to several local shrines, some based on ancient traditions that could not be known were there not consistently in the land peoples constitutive of the “descendant of the sons of Jacob”. These sanctuaries, in turn, by the hand of David, God’s anointed (his “chrisom-ed” one, “christ”) are suppressed in favour of a central and thereby centralizing shrine in his capital city of Jerusalem. The prohibition against an altar of cut stone certainly does not deter his internationalist son and successor from raising to the glory of God a magnificence of craftsmanship as the centerpiece of his temple. Indeed, even the hereditary priesthood, established in perpetuity as part of the Sinai covenant, does not deter David from a political interference in his naming of Zadok as high-priest.[vii] Centuries later and after the Babylonian exile, Ezra, the scribe, will posit and give biblical confirmation to Zadok as the descendant of Aaron through Phinehas, but Zadok seems more likely to be a resident priest of Jerusalem who worked with David during his campaign of conquest and was thereafter rewarded with the high-priesthood. It would have made for a politically astute maneuver: a priest of the newly conquered city made a new capital, named as head of the new ruler’s religion. Thus, the priest descendants of Levi become acolytes to another line of sacerdotal succession.
Within this slow commixing of sundry tribes, some local, some the descendants of conquering migrants, we can estimate the evolution of the solitary God that emerges to view in the Deuteronomic reformation of Josiah (circa 600 BC). There seems, for the most part, to have always been a cult of a High God, but that does not appear to have been either a uniform cult or a purely monotheistic cult. A monotheistic thrust was certainly in play in the middle-East from the time of Akhenaton’s Egyptian reforms. In the Egyptian experiment, the enforced cult of a solitary God certainly was not well received, and thus, did not last. Revolutionary ideas often take time to root and flower. Moses, who follows Akhenaton by less than a century, may well have found in his theology a singularly potent tool for not only religious invigouration but political liberation. Couple this speculation with the tradition that Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, was a priest of a monotheistic religion in Median, and there is little room to doubt the singularity of God in Mosaic theology. But the singular and iconoclastic inclination of the Mosaic religion had a difficult road to trek from its very inception. The people led by Moses out of Egypt—a Hebrew people—were, scripture blatantly notes, accustomed to images. They, coming from the land of the Apis Bull, set up a sacred and golden bull as the centre of their religious focus. They continued to hold as sacred the Brazen Serpent fashioned as an emblem (it acts more as sacrament) of healing. It seemingly survived, and reappeared as the great totem of a temple set up in the northern kingdom, tellingly beside a freshly minted golden bull. There seemed also to linger along side the High God the Teraphim, rather tribal, familial, and household deities. Both Jacob’s wife and David’s wife possessed them. They cannot have vanished easily, for the reforms of Josiah outlawed them, and even in Jesus’ time Josephus commented upon their usage. They may have amounted to no more than the equivalency of statues of saints revered in many Roman Catholic households, but they exhibit the fluidity of ancient Hebraic monotheism and the idealistic nature of its prohibition against representation of the divine. Neither in the north nor in the south was the nominally monotheistic cult free from temptation by pagan notions, deities and rites, and patently rarely was either kingdom a paragon of virtuous resistance. Accommodation and synchronization cast a long shadow. From Abram become Abraham and Jacob become Israel we cannot but feel the evolution of the God of the Hebrews. Thus, when we read the various names given to God in the Hebrew scriptures, we can be certain that we are reading more than a series of titles indicative of the same ideated entity. Before Moses presents the sacred name as YHWH (or Yahweh, this being some form of the theologically dismissive I AM because I AM, or I AM who I AM) and indicating a continuity of worship amongst the tribes descended from Abraham (a continuity that comes, it seems, as a bit of a revelation to his summoned congregants), there are found the rather common middle-Eastern El (God), Elohim (its plural, which arguably may represent no more than a polite plural or a “royal we” as in Genesis’ “Let us make man…”), Adonai (Lord), and the opposing El-Elyon and El-Shaddai (possibly indicating a mountain God and a plains God respectively, although both are generally translated as God Almighty). Until the fall to Babylon, monotheism was the ideal more than the reality. Exile, coupled with the loss of access to temple and its rites, necessitated that if there were to be a cultic and cultural survival there must occur an intensity of focus. Monotheism emerges as the salvation of the people, as does a ritualistically rarified form of worship. The synagogal system, substituting for temple, begins a slow rise to prominence, and after the next great exile, that of 70AD under the Romans, by the direction of the learned-most of the scribal factions, the Pharisees, becomes the de facto cultic centre.
A generation before this final exile, however, there appears on the scene the prophet become a sacrament, he, who by faith and grace, becomes confessed as the great reformulator of peoples and the endless reformer of hearts and vision, Jesus.
IV–The God of Jesus
Jesus does not alter the theology of his heritage. He alters the response to it. He encapsulates the vision of God in his fatherhood and his paternal care. He shifts the focus of religion from Theology to Christology, from Law to action, and the action is creative love. He relativizes Judaism. The cult becomes secondary to the heart. This is not contrary to the thrust of prophets gone before, but heart here becomes not so much an interiorization of the divine Law as a committed submission to freely act in this world as the heart and mind of God. It is not a mediated submission, not a sacerdotally mediated relationship to God, with God. It is not a ritualistic or ritualized relationship to or with God. It is direct. God is “my Father and yours”. The child of God must act here and now as the face, the hand, the heart of God, our Father. God is here, within, in providential, grace-filled creativity and care; so let him be. Allow him act to help and heal self and world. Visit the imprisoned (no matter the type of their bondage); comfort the sick; feed, clothe, and shelter them in need of such; meet the others of your life in their needs. Be kind and supportive. Let our Father, with and in his boundless love, be in this world seen and felt. An early disciple will theologize that praxis in the simple words: “God is love”. This is not a romanticising of religiosity. It denotes a concrete, an incarnate, meeting, acceptance, and embrace of this world and the other of my life as valued, as, by the judgement of God, at-one with me in the here and now. Its concern is not for the enforcement of rules but for the interjection (incarnation) into the occasion of novelty, that is, propitiating creativity and fore-giving. It relativizes the beholding of the world as right or wrong, and sets us on a path of creative mutuality and support in the solid, unabashed, and unpretentious recognition that we all are children of one Father, all sinners, all called to be to one another and all his creation his providential and redemptive presence and agency. Holy things remain holy things because they are dedicated to the service of God, but things reserved to potent usage too easily become the instruments of abuse, superficiality, and thereby hypocrisy. Being religious, being holy, is something lived out in being there with and for others, being, allowing there to be, an incarnation of God. Such heart rises above all rules and rites as the cross of Jesus on Golgotha’s hill stood above temple mount and the crosses of his co-accursed, both the “good” and the “bad”.
Confessedly, both Jesus and his first followers expressed their spiritual insight, their revelatory experience, in the terms and ideas of their cultic symbols and their cultural lenses. While these, to be relevant to other cultic ideas and cultural lenses, must remain open to constant exegesis, reinterpretation, and representation, the notion of God given in Jesus Christ as set in sacred writ acquired quickly a distorted concretization by which many are today confounded. Too many enlisted to preach and teach forget the miracle of the Pentecost that gave birth to the “church” was that the good news of God’s creative, renewing, novelty-making power, his power to resurrect things past in new form, could be heard and understood by each “in his own tongue”, his own medium of communication and apprehension.[viii]
The anthropomorphic renderings of power that evolve into the vision of the singularly high divinity of YHWH in the Hebrew scriptures and carries forward into Christian sacred writ became muddled in the efforts of early Christian apologetics to explain them in au currant philosophical terms. The God of the Hebrews who could become angered or jealous, who could “repent” and change his mind either upon reflection or in piteous response to human supplication may have been well attuned to the divine mythologies of the ancient world, but it butted heads with the philosophical, the logical, notions that the Perfect One was beyond any type of change.
Early Christianity’s speaking of finding this God of the Hebrews “acting in” or being “present” in Jesus, a fully human being, only added to the complexity. The working out of the tension resident in trying to translate the artistic fluidity of a picture of the Holy into a philosophical formula of the Holy ended in the doctrine of the Trinity, a singularity of divine being in and as three separate and distinct forms, modes, functionalities, or actors [personae] of or within a singular substance [οὐσία, ὑπόστασις]. When the term persona was adopted, it predated our notions of person as subsistent and intelligent and individual. It was understood in two distinct technical senses: as the capacity of legal action, and as a theatrical mask representing a character, a mover within the plot,[ix] as, in brief, the scriptural notion of, to use Jesus’ term, “Power” as relatable. This divine unit of mind and will in its varied actions (“missions” in technical terminology) is worked out in Christian doctrine as a triad of Father (the all transcending source), Son (the divine Mind, Logos, or Word, the true and living “image of the Father”, in whom and by whom all things are created, and who is, therefore, the in-carnative power) and Spirit (the ever active, complete and completing, the—wholly/holy—conjunctive of will and mind both in the divine internal unity and in its sacrificial gifting of its own self in the created universe)—a God immutable in his essence but mutable in his worldliness, in the externalization of his essence, his all-embracive love. It needs be cautioned that never can there be suffered the conceit that God is not one. To speak of Father, Son and Spirit is to speak of personae, masks, functions within the singularity. Theology, thus, speaks of the three in a constant enwrapping (perichoresis), acting and being in union with one another: the Father works through the Son in the power of the Spirit, or a variant thereof. To speak of Jesus-Christ as Son of God presents an elevation of humanity to divine embrace, a completed, a type of apocatastatic, submission to God and his world for the sake of person-alizing both man toward his full sociality, and person-ifying God toward his full manifestation as creative love.
In such wise has the tri-unity of the Godhead been traditionally presented in Christian theology. With the Renaissance, there occurs a diminished interest in this aspect of dogma, and the focus shifts, and not without dogmatic danger, to the role of God as the Son of God, to the exalted Jesus-Christ. While some ignore the topic and others try valiantly retain the traditional presentation, others have acted to recast it. A. N. Whitehead[x] divided the divine into two aspects or natures: a demiurgic aspect named the “abstract eternal nature of God” which intimately and ceaselessly is involved in and with the unfolding of the cosmos, and a total of the infolded experience of God, a “concrete and everlasting nature”. For Whitehead and the disciples of his “process” theology, sheer creativity ever thrusting toward novelty is above God both in his eternal and everlasting natures. It is not as novel as first appears. If we consider the idea of God as set out in Eckhart[xi], a God who appears out of a God-platform ever receding from view and grasp, we may comfortably see in process theology the traditional Christian notions of Father, Son and Spirit here depicted in a contemporary voice as the ever transcending creative out of and within which appear the eternal and incarnating Mind (Logos, Word) acting in union with the power of the wholly/holy Spirit, drawing all things forward and preserving them within the divine singularity.
It is well to here add, most emphatically, a caveat. No talk about God, the tri-unity of God, Jesus, his Son-ship, his Christ-ship is to be taken literally. Such talk must always be understood as an artistry, the rendering of a spiritual vision, a picture meant to inspire to action, a “word game”, a cultically approbated group of poetic idioms, meant to engender openness and creativity. These sacred items, these sacred words cannot be received as the intellection of the literally incomprehensible, definitions of the undefinable. They are portraits, and like those of Titian, Reynolds, Modigliani, Picasso, et al., they can be found in many flavours and styles. Yet, even naming them pictures and portraits carries us into the symbolic, for God, soul and all items spiritual are not things but powers. To express God as Power leaves the designation ambiguous, as ought it to be. From a perspective of our own prejudicial valuation, the divine Power may be said to be manifest in creation in Nature’s most evolved aspect: man, specifically man’s higher powers: man’s intellect, man’s psyche or soul, man’s personhood, man’s capacity to love, to give, to commit himself to another. That allows man to use his highest powers as indicatives of the all transcending Power, but that Power is and as always shall be beyond any conceptualization, characterization or denotation. Even those terms that seem to be the most exactingly precise are ever merely indicatives. We may ask where is love, where is care, devotion, hatred, anger. We indeed experience and know their effects all about us and within us, but they per se are no-where because they are spiritual. They are powers of being that make being.
Even with such caveat held firmly in mind, we need vigilantly remember that Christianity emerges onto the world stage not with a theory or a philosophy of divine Being, but as a leap of insight. As a leap, it is an act of faith. As an act of faith, it is experienced as coming from a region “beyond” the quotidian self. Thus, in religious terminology it is named a grace, a gifting (flowing from either above or from the depths within), a revelation. Christianity begins with the revelation of the resurrection of Jesus-Christ.
V–The Revelation of Resurrection
For Christianity, the resurrection stands as the point wherefrom God in his transcendence, his immanence, and his dynamic shall be expressed. It is the root wherefrom all Theology, Christology, Ecclesiology, and Pneumatology are considered. Spirituality, Finding the Full Voice of Our Nature (June 2016) ended with a reverie on the resurrection. Such freshet of thought cannot be taken as the propositional brevity of the dogmatic, or as the cross-referencing expansiveness of hermeneutics. It was the fruit of prayerful reflection, and may broadly, by the maxim lex orandi lex credendi [the content of prayer manifests as the content of faith], be received as a theology with the caveat that no theology can be exhaustive.
The resurrection presents as a rarified moment, an extraordinary existence-coordinating experience percolating from the depths of the psyche, a singular and vivifying occasion of the constant transit of the Holy across the mind of man. It is encapsulated, or more accurately, constellated, as a new vision of the power of God, indeed, of God himself. Primarily, as an existential impact, it is neither a depiction, nor an expression of hope or of faith. It is, in its psychic origins, an act of love for both self and world, and so an act “of God”, an expression of a power transcending of quotidian self. In this it becomes for man a moral revelation, a summons to concrete response, to responsibility. It is a “liberation” not from physical death but from finitude, from the valuation and definition of self as bounded in one’s own finitude. It is a moral rising above law to love, above “forms” to vitality, and thus, the Risen One is always the Living One of an ambiguous form, the known, the experienced, but the not readily recognized. The resurrection is a liberation into one’s inheritance—the universe redeemed, made free in finding its God is its soul. It is, in brief, a psychic thrust of purist and purifying love; and love is never into to a void; it stirs the void into a creation.
During that dolorous Sabbath that knew so deeply the solitude dredged out of the soul when death dares pass-over and take away the beloved, a handful of women waited. Like the daughters of Jerusalem adjured in the Song of Solomon, they must for love abide the time. In the dawning of that handsel morn, it is women who go to the tomb. It is women who first receive the commission. It is women because this tale is not about a tomb but a womb. It is not about a visit to the grave of a beloved teacher and friend. It is about a handful of disciples coming to “see” in the pale light of a dawn, to—with a dawning awareness–understand the incarnation of God. It is a quaking of the world, an existential fractioning and a psychic realignment that releases the awareness of the divine presence, the worldliness of God, the in-the-world-ness of God. This is not another day’s rendering of a God-child in swaddling and stable, a divinity born into the world. Those narratives are retrospectives of this release, this still and silent moment that tinges with the recognition of God as not simply born into the world, but as world itself,[xii] as world shot through with divine power and becoming something new, something sacred, saved from man’s sinful insularity, redeemed, bought and brought back to its wholeness, its holiness.
To them that are inclined to consider the last words have edged theology too far, keep in mind that if the incarnation is understood simply as God taking on the cover of flesh/worldliness, we there go too far and are in the ancient heresy of Docetism. The incarnation of God is the placing of his essence, his soul, into the world. It is concrete, real, everlasting. It is, as the Apostle Paul expresses it, the ceaseless emptying of God into creation, a kenosis. The Creator has gifted himself into creation as its healing, its perfecting. God is incarnate and his incarnation fills the universe, reconciles the divisions exposed in the post-paradisiac curses, and is indefectible even in the experiential reality of death. It is Mary of Magdala who sets the question of the drama: “Where have they taken my Lord?”. She needs look only before her; the Lord, the soul of God is in the world he so loves. Neither she nor we can grasp this, thus, scripture rightly marks: “Do not grasp at me.” We can merely “go”, “do”, “tell”.
In the distinctively scriptural iconography, this insight occurs precisely as the moment the incarnation of God, the immanent, the world-penetrating presence of God is uncovered, lifted-up, made manifest, is risen before us. It exists ever as a dawn-moment. It is a pale enlightenment. Suddenness defines its coming and its going. Yet it is a power. It real-izes—makes a new reality. It manifests as a living, an animating, knowledge that God, the power of God, the soul of God is in the world—in a manner both decisively and indestructibly. It transforms, transvalues, the dead man, the sinful man, the self-centred man into the Christ-man, the Christian. In the eyes of faith, in the vision of the “new man”, the believer, the cosmos becomes the unity of all divine action (“the missions”), the uni-verse, the “inheritance” of the believer, an endowment made holy by the living Holy One dwelling within it, incorporating it and into it, guiding it, calling it forward to its truth and fullness.
The resurrection of Jesus is not about resuscitation or spiritualization. The idea of resuscitation gives us, at best, an earthly paradise reclaimed, a material place of pleasure and rest. Spiritualization “saves” the material only by fallaciously overcoming it and obliterating it. The resurrection is not about an empty tomb or a dead man re-animated. Those are apocalyptic images used to convey and concretize an illusive insight, an fluidity of recognition that suddenly appears and just as suddenly is vanished. The resurrection is about an insight into the message of Jesus that produces and effects the theology of Jesus. Jesus is he of history through whom, with whom, and in whom God’s incarnation is revealed. As spiritually revelatory, it is a divine act, an initiative of the divine, of the power ever beyond. That God acts in and through Jesus—actually, effectively, really neither makes nor reveals Jesus as God in some type of meta-physics. The revelation is about God not Jesus. It is a value-laden perception about a power that makes, remakes, the cosmos into uni-verse by speaking into the soul a singular descriptive: God, a singular name: Love. Jesus is its incarnate medium “raised-up” for-us and before-us. He is presented as the tabernacle, the temple of God, the gate, the door, the way, or more accurately and acutely as the (true and living) agent, the agency, of God, and thus, his “Christ”. To be the Christ is to be the Son of God because it is an act of love. Love is “spiritual”; it is not only unconfined to time and space, it redefines, revalues times and spaces. Love has the power to redefine all in a life that has come before it and all that shall follow. Thus, Jesus’ embrace and identification with the mission of God in the world reads back into the very heart of the Godhead, and Jesus is seen as the Son, the “image” of the Father. The subscription to Jesus, the medium of revelation, as the way, the truth and the life, the proclamation that salvation is only in Christ Jesus have a singular content: God can be known only in his incarnate presence, his worldliness, can be worshipped only in his worldliness, adored only in his worldliness.
It is well noted that when the scriptures speak of the Risen One of God being “seen”, the preferred term in the Greek is not βλέπω [blepo, I see], which references a blip on the screen, an impress of ocular sensation, but the more inclusive ὁράω [horaho], which also is commonly translated “I see”, but which references not merely the first result of eye-sight, but the subsequent and reflective abilities to envision, recognize, understand, witness. The revelation of resurrection confronts man with an integrating vision, one that calls for response, for as the High One has given his soul into its other-ness, the world, man is challenged and evoked to find, envision, recognize, understand, and witness his soul in his other.
VI—Jesus as the Christ, as the Son, as the Lord
The ideas of Christ, Son, and Lord, the ideas from which all the other “titles” of Christology emanate, cannot be removed from the dynamic of their Hebrew roots and turned into Greek metaphysics. The title of Christ (in Hebrew: Messiah) references an ambassadorship, the solemn designation of one to act as the fully empowered representative of God. Such designation was usually ritualized by an anointing with oil (in Greek: χρίσμα [chrisma] ointment or chrism, hence: Christ). At varied times, kings, priests, and prophets were so anointed and hailed. The title of Son is intimately connected with this representative power. When scripture speaks of a son, it is speaking in its patriarchal understanding of society wherein the son, by which it usually understands the eldest son, is, in the absence of the father, the voice and power of the father. The kings of Israel and Judea were said upon their accession to be “adopted” by God as his sons. In traditional Christology, Jesus is given three “son-ships”: the “son of man”, designating him as the apocalyptic, the revelatory, figure from the prophecies of Daniel who oversees the transition of the world from the rule of men to the rule of God, the “son of David” designating him the heir of Judaism’s great “adopted” sons of God, its kings, and “Son of God” designating him the very voice and power of God to his time and place in the world and its history. This last title and designation reiterates the idea of Messiah/Christ. Last, as the very voice and power of the Lord God of heaven and earth, Jesus is himself hailed as Lord, the Lord-incarnate. As Lord, Jesus is not de-fined by right and wrong; he, thus, seeks out the proper to the situation, to the person. He becomes the propitiator. While right and wrong do not define him, he knows them most intimately–he suffers them. He is the propitiation that reestablishes the balance twixt God and man, the sacrifice, the making whole, for man’s bifurcating insularity of “me” versus the other. From the perspective of the world he is the one who stands outside the law, the outlaw, the “rejected one”, and as such was he condemned and executed. From the perspective of religion, he is the scapegoat sent outside the camp to carry away man’s sinfulness, and as such was he taken outside the city and crucified. From the vision of his disciples he is the Passover lamb whose blood insures that death, finitude, ceases to de-fine man, that liberates man that he may rise up, not to Adam who dwelt once in Paradise and who dis-covered good and evil, but to Him whose gifting of Self as evolving creation embraces, enfolds, and bears all good, suffers all evil, to Him who is the Mighty One, the Holy, the Deathless One whose dwelling is Heaven.
Jesus is evaluated by his early disciples as self-less before God, transparent to God, and in his death is dissolved, lost, enwrapped, or as the Apostle Paul says, “hidden” in God. To look, therefore, to Jesus in his transparency, in his mission to the world, to Jesus crucified and “risen” by God to God’s side, is to “see”, to understand, God. The classical terms (hypostasis, ousia, substance, personal union, union of natures, etc.) are simply ways of attempting to speak that in an ancient philosophical parlance.[xiii] Christology become Theology because God is “acting” in the world. He is present in the world actually. He is its animating power, its soul, and as such is one in and with his action, his medium, his reign, his kingdom. He “empties” himself, says Paul, into his Christ, and the Christ in turn is assumed into, “ascended” to God. Thus, looking back to the beginnings of time, the disciples can claim that with the first “Let it be” the incarnation is set into motion to flower in the revelation of Jesus as the Christ whose mission includes the summoning of all into his mission and identity in the power and divine “mission” of the Spirit who in the resurrection is revealed as the animating bond of Father and Son, and of all them that embrace the mission of the son, the Christ-ship.
The difficulty that many encounter with Christian theology flows from taking the practical dynamic of these Hebraic designations and understandings and transmitting, transforming, and therein deforming them into Greek notions of the fundamental sub-structure of reality. While the philosophical thought of the ancient world may have aided the insemination of Christianity into the dying Greco-Roman world, and allowed it to become a grounding for the rise of Western civilization, it nevertheless, distorted the monotheistic and moral orientations which constitute the vivifying bedrock of early Christianity. This translation of idiom and icon into idea and principle may have well had historical practicality, but the problematic of such ever resides in taking pictograms that are primarily dynamic, practical, and moral, and reducing them to principles that are fundamentally mathematical, proto-scientific, and abstract. God, his agency in the world, in the life of the world, becomes therein not so much idealized as de-vitalized. In terms of church praxis and preaching then, the Hebraic roots of the titles given Jesus as Christ, specifically “God” and “Son of God”, need be redeemed. The church must surrender its blind adherence to Greek philosophical ideas and return to its foundations in Hebrew religious idiom. The dynamic and inspirational character of these idioms must be rescued from metaphysical abstractions that stagnate the visions referencing the holy, that renders them aspects of the frozen divine perfection of Neo-Platonism and the world-hating inclinations of Gnosticism. The religious icon is a defiance of conceptualization; it acts to inspire, to dynamically release out of self and into the world with incarnational force. The church needs, therefore, return to its scriptural origins. It needs speak of Jesus as the gate-way to God, the portal of the Holy, the temple and true icon of divine power. It needs speak of Jesus’ mission, his Christ-hood, as the action to present to the world the true religion, as the action to make felt the presence of all-embracing acceptance and care. It needs speak of the Spirit as the dynamic of God in the world for the world. It needs move away from the distorted optics that commonly present as a tri-god, and underscore the unity of God in its historical and holy communicity as the source, the presence, and the openness for the future, as the all transcending ceaselessly incarnating as gift and evoking in graciousness all forward to its fullness and satisfaction.
VII—Man and Cosmos Before the God Incarnating
Jesus finds his soul in God, and his mission, his Christ-hood, in God’s world, and so, as “Son of God”, as an active transparency before the power and will of God, is said to “save” it, “redeem” it, bring it to its true knowledge of itself. Yet, scripture rightly ever notes that Jesus does so merely as the instrument of God, the heart and hand of God, the grace of God. The Apostle Paul understood the title of Christ is everlastingly conjoined to the name and person of Jesus in respect of his being the primogenitor of a new world valuation, a new order of creation, “the first born from among the dead”, and thus, Lord of both the living and the dead. The disciple takes the name Christ-ian, but the role he assumes is that of the Christ and thus, with the Apostle, in all his workings humbly confesses: “It is not I, but Christ-Jesus within me”. The Christian finds his soul in God-in-his-incarnation, submits to being the living continuation of Jesus-Christ, to being the “body” of the Christ, the body of witness (church) in the world to the truth of God and man, and so is spoken of as being both ritually and really plunged (in Greek: βαπτισμός [baptised]) into being the body of Jesus Crucified and Risen in a new world in-formed of “resurrection faith”.
This resurrection faith neither Mary of Magdala nor we can “grasp”. The fullness of the divine incarnation is ever beyond us in every dimension conceivable and inconceivable, “seen and unseen”. God’s worldliness is not easily real-ized—philosophically, morally, spiritually, theologically. Since Paradise’s last moments humanity has been about individualization. Eve and Adam are made one. Each may to the other say “my flesh, my bone, my body, my interiority”, but the moment the first, the primal, crisis arises, they separate. They accuse each other. They find excuses—grounds for exclusion. With this a serpent-angel named Satan must stand not coiled about a tree like a great question mark quizzing man about God and the meaning of life, but as a symbol of a boundary line twixt that which becomes known as the primogenitor-dominator, the man, and his woe-ful derivative, the wo-man. Everything from that point forward, even things most sacred, revolve around not the “we” but “me”. There is no longer a unity of humanity and world, a communion, a uni-verse that can and does “walk with God in his holy ways”. There is the antagonism of domination, labour, pain. There is the disorientation of desires set out in the newly un-covered, the naked, individualities of humanity. There is a disjointing of the universe, a fear and guilt ridden humanity tearing apart the world in the blindness inherent in its alienation from its other and its wholly other, its God. Fire and sword now guard the gates behind which God alone walks. The “Holy One” becomes a solitude in himself and to his creation. Only a sacri-fice, a making-holy, can counter and restore the directionality of life from “for-me”. The propitiation or propriety is created by a dis-ruptive giving away of self—not by man–but by God himself, a definitive act of “for-us”, a for-God-and-man-and-cosmos, a fore-giving into a new world order, a new way, indeed, “a new creation”. Only God has the power to realize that the cost of the well-being (salvation) of all others is oneself. Only God comprehends the price of the cross, and not only embraces it, but rises above it, beyond it.[xiv] When a man takes up his cross, he surrenders into God, into the being of God; he takes his stand, and makes his standard: this is my-self broken open; this is my life given for the welfare of others. Here is the brocard the believer ever remembers, takes back into his-self, with thanks and devotion.
In the psycho-social reality mythologized as the “Fall”, humanity is divorced from itself in all its members, and from all the world. The uni-verse dissolves into the cosmos, an item of use. The clan, tribal, and other social groupings of persons are merely negotiated unity. The other as living reflection of oneself stands not a part lost to me so much as an item to be objectified or, at best, an encounter to be negotiated. Even a lover never penetrates the uni-queness of the beloved, and thus, the lover finds himself at times gazing upon the beloved, lost in a hypnogogic and silent yearning to penetrate the otherliness, to be one and at-one totally in body and soul. Such yearning for one-ness, be it within the Self or with another or the Ultimate Other reveals the constant thrust of the incomplete and hoped to be, the everlasting quest for the eternal singularity. All spirituality is symptomatic of this thirst for satisfaction, for fullness, for completeness, for the sociality that once was glimpsed in our human enwombing—a free and open commerce of heart and hand amongst gods and men, a paradise lost, a dissolution of individuality into the eternal One, a communion of saints, a Nirvana beyond all divisions and divisiveness.
The Hebrew scriptures had long held not only the intended holiness of humanity, but the goodness of all nature. It legislated the respect that was to be given both land and beast. It is marked out in Genesis that with the Fall not only is humanity at odds with itself but with nature. Neither humanity nor nature are immune from the contaminations of death and destruction spun out once self-interest is unleashed, once shame and guilt are discovered and impulsively hidden away from Light. The resurrection is that Light rediscovered, the propitiating act of God to be the healing of the world in submitting to place his self-interest, his soul, into the world. In them that first attempted the translation of this profound and animating revelation into a theory of action the old philosophical and ideational dichotomies were revisited: the Greek notions of love as eros [ἔρως], interpreted as self-interested or erotic love, as contrary and lesser to agape [ἀγάπη], interpreted as selfless love; the understanding of desire as conflicting with freedom; the idea of nature lesser to a super-nature; of “purity” (a frozen in time ideality of form, action, life) as a greater than the compromises of daily living; of matter as lesser than spirit. All these are but variants of one theme: the personally experienced loss of wholeness, the self as versus the other, the Adam-and-Eve of Paradise become the Adam in contrariety with Eve, a contrariness filled with angst, alienation, desires ever unrequited because they are rooted in a self whose interest is the self, whose attempted animation (soul) is in the self. We read this theme of frustration weaving throughout scripture. We read it in every confliction of history. We read it as art in Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, Kafka. The meaning of resurrection is precisely that these are resolved when one ceases to be the opposite of the other and surrenders into the other, finds his truth, his essence, his propriety, his soul is the other. Resurrection is the revelation of the incarnation wherein heaven and earth are reconciled because God accepts the world as his soul, his beloved, and he will not surrender it to corruption. The isolated self’s bifurcated vision is healed in the revelation of God’s incarnation. The man “entombed” behind the stone, buried in anxieties about self, in selfishness, in frailties and the pomposities of division (gentile/Jew, rich/poor, clean/unclean, good/bad) is called to the resurrection of the “dead”.
The inversion of me into we is not a surrender into sorrow and loss. It is the contrary because the cross is inseparable from the resurrection. The cross remains the point of self-sacrifice, but the self that is given over is given over to something greater. It is given into the true life-centre of our being, into community. It is given over to growing in the wisdom and grace that is concomitant with coming to know and truly care for the other. The cross becomes known as a portal that opens into love and all its joys. It is that which Plato espies when he speaks of a divine madness. It is that which the Apostle Paul understood when he claims the cross is to the self-centred man a stumbling block, a scandal, and a foolishness. Thus, the Christian holds the icons of cross and resurrection as symbols of loosing self and rising into and for the other, and therein reaching the fullness and satisfaction of life, mission, destiny, and grace.
VIII–“I shall make a new heaven, a new earth.”—The Conversion of Humanity and Cosmos
Pragmatically, the incarnational, the Christian, vision of God converts man. We are at a renewed station, an “as it was in the beginning”. Humanity is turned to an ancient insight in renewed understanding, profounder recognition, greater comprehension, deeper wisdom, and set before the most sacred invitation–concrete witness. The Power of the ever-transcending God fulfilling this world in love looks back through the ages–with a sacramental reservation–to that primal envisioning of our parentage: Father-sky in his fecundity “satisfying” Mother-earth. The sacredness of the uni-verse, the loving union of Creator and creation are reaffirmed. Man is encountered by his truth: his unity resides within the uni-verse, the world, and in its immediacy, in the other. It is concrete and it, therefore, summons to concrete response, to incarnative action, to real and realistic care, concern, and love. The other, both as he who stands before me and as the totality of the world, is always the true soul, the truth of self, and thus, there can be no self-lessness in the isolation of self.[xv] The Christ-ian knows he must find his soul and his mission in God, and that the soul of our Father is in his beloved world. In this he is ever confronted with the full and ultimate force of his every short-coming, failure, and sin, and thus, his every confession begins “Father, against Thee have I sinned”. He knows every “thou shall not” collapses into one positive summons: “Honour thy Father and thy Mother.”[xvi]
There is here no gnosis, no secret knowledge. It is a grace, a gracious possibility open to all them that will embrace it with transparency, with selflessness. It is an insight into the primal propriety of creation, its uni-versality, its inherent cohesion with God, a vision ever lost to the thought of self as a body opposed to the other rather than the self activated by and fulfilled in the other. The soul, that name we give to the principle of activation, is in, is, the other. This is the thrust of all spirituality—East and West–the union with the ultimate other, the cessation of division, of divisibility. In this secularized age, we find it rehearsed in varied forms in sociology, psychology, philosophy. Durkheim, Jung, Lindbeck, et al. recognize the other is not the opposed; the other is the milieu out of which and in which arises the self. Edmund Husserl, observing from a perspective well known to Aristotle, denotes that to re-present some-thing to self is to assimilate it, to include it into the self, yet when the force of an-other (which is a primary given-ness of consciousness) rises before the self, it appears not as a thing that can be assimilated but as a spectacle, a voice, a “thou shalt not”, a boundary, a summons to respond, to responsibility. Martin Heidegger moves the analysis beyond this boundedness, noting that this summons acts to draw the self out of the anonymity of the mass and into a mutuality of re-cognition (conscience), which is itself, at root, a pardoning, an allowance, and that, as William James had earlier perceived, resonates as in me and yet as beyond me. Franz Rosenzweig, ever turned to the mystical behind the philosophical, attests that the presentation of the other comes not as a boundary forbidden, not as a “thou shalt not”; it appears as a summons to our true vivification, a cry to the other to not only “come forth”, not simply to respond, but to “love me!”. It is a fiat before the forces of individualization to return to the primal unity transcended in will and commitment, in wisdom and understanding, in the freedom of self to give self away, to become absorbed with and in the wholly other, to be transparent to the Holy/whole One in one’s finitude and for one’s finite world. This summons returns us also to the primal reservation, the terror and awe of man before the once named “Father-sky and Mother-earth”, before the all transcending and the all pervaded, incarnated. The summons is not merely to awareness, but to action, and the action presents always as a cross to be borne with only a faith in “the resurrection” reality, in the inexhaustibility of creativity into novelty, into grace, serving to mollify and transfigure the wounds it brings. There is, as Bonhoeffer well knew, no “cheap grace”.
IX–Self-abuse
Throughout the many years I spent in academic and religious institutions under the direction of Roman clerics, there was no sin of apparent greater damnability than masturbation, more specifically male masturbation, for this was a time before feminism, women’s liberation, and any open and social acknowledgement that a woman could have such base want, despite the fact that it was commonly received as fact that it was of the woman’s morally accursed nature to be a hell-pit of distraction and disorientation for the male causing in him the arousal of all manner of wantonness and lust.[xvii]
I have raised the topic of masturbation not because I think it morally or socially an issue of note, but because it was those years ago, tellingly termed not only self-abuse but a mortal sin (a soul-killing sin), and the solitary vice. That execration of masturbation resides in two pieces of related and fallacious understanding and in an equally spurious ideology. The two related items are a verse in Genesis, and an embryology that dates back at least to Aristotle. In the scriptural tale, a man, Onan, was by law obliged to act as surrogate for his late and childless brother and perpetuate his brother’s line by impregnating his widowed sister-in-law. Onan refused to complete the copulative act and “spilt his seed upon the ground”. The offence for which he is punished is not fulfilling his duty to the family. However, this verse has been interpreted through the ancient understanding, perpetuated by Aristotle, that each sperm is an intact, a virtual, human-being awaiting planting in the fertile ground that is the woman. With this idea firmly planted, every sperm that is purposefully not allowed entry into the womb is a human life willfully discarded, and therefore, a monstrous evil. The false ideology that couples these misunderstandings is Gnosticism with its discontented dislike of all things physical and particularly of all things sexual, an ideology seemingly always in favour among fundamentalists and celibates.[xviii] As, however, masturbation was considered solitary–because it was without concrete and manifest social or institutional ramification–it was, in the eldritch mind of the day, somewhat discussable, and the discussing was always the ridiculously curt damnation of it based on the erroneously taken evidence of Genesis, Aristotle, and Gnosticism: do it, and should you die without truly repenting it, you shall go to hell. Yet, this simplistic, this enantiodromic judgement was attuned to something greater, to a truth: the sociality of man, the sociality of sexuality. It, on some level, comprehended that a retreat into the self was damaging, was indeed, self-abuse. What it failed to observe was that not every masturbatory act is such retreat. A habitual and purposeful shunning of the other constitutes the sin-ful. When masturbation becomes an action to the detriment and deterioration of one’s openness to the other, one’s seeking for unity with and in the other, then it is an act of insular selfishness, and is as such, antisocial, and person-ally disorienting and destructive. But–and here rests the essence of this note–masturbation is not the sole act potentially representative of such regressive behavior. An obsession with, an habitual turning toward anything that draws self, the capacities of self, away from the other is damnable—be it work, leisure, games, studies, sports, shopping, primping, or religion. Whatsoever allows one excuse to avoid the world and the other is sinful, a desertion of our truth-ful-ness.
In respect of this last annotation it needs be noted that meditation and contemplation are not exempt from being turned into moments of self-abuse. Spiritual “exercise” can occasion a “high”, a sense of consolation, insulation, elevation, elation, and it is understandable that such a state presents as both pleasurable and desirable. Because an experience is found in spiritual focusing, in meditation or contemplation, does not exempt it from abuse. The “intoxication” of the spiritual, to echo St. Peter on the Pentecost, has potentials akin to the hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, and the sense of release produced by opioids and other drugs—addictive titillations and escapist oblivion. Even Jesus at the end of his desert retreat faced the temptations of satiation, and the pomp and pump of power. Peter, never at want for being tempted, certainly wished to retain the “high” of the transfiguration experience. Grounded and rather pragmatic Paul seems to lug about a world-weariness after his ecstasy, his experience of “seventh heaven”. Yet, both dominical experience and adjuration mark it a grave error to receive such experiences as either a pinnacle of feeling or of being. The exercise of spiritual focus can be made into a regimen of self-abuse, can be manufactured into a psychic opioid, an escape from the reality of life and the Christian mission to act in and for the well-being of the world. The spiritual life, the qualitative mirror of our daily life is not an invariable ladder of assent to a heavenly dolce far niente. The purgative, illuminative and unitive aspects spoken of in theology may be ideationally stackable one upon the other, but in real life, moments of despair, guilt, terror, and doubt can flood even the most enraptured heart. Avila can effuse about the bedazzling riches that await her arrival in heaven, and a few days on recount the horrors of the chamber reserved for her in hell. The closer one comes to a light, the more of self is exposed. Thus, the so-called greatest of the saints speak of themselves as the greatest of sinners. Desolation follows upon consolation, sorrow and terror upon joy and bliss-filled adoration. Even that “dark night” brought forth to popular attention by the recent popularizing of John of the Cross is, contrary to Underhill, a part of such. It is an aspect of our thrust toward individualization reaching a crisis point, a summoning away from self toward something greater, something bidding, something unknown. The weary-some wee creature climbs to (or is carried to) a boundary, and knowing itself unable to go on toward the light, instinctively recoils into itself, into its death, its purgatory, its hell, its abandonment of God, into a carbonous chrysalis therein to await its salvation, or its evolution to wings, or its divine gifting of the powers requisite for the next moment of its being. The task is waiting, and that which is awaited is always an unknown and unknowable. When light does appear, it is, thus, received with a sense of giftedness that reads back into, floods back into, the darkness. As with Eckhart’s ever retreating platform, it expresses in body and soul the unsurpassability of God, the eternal transcendence of God, the boundary-less-ness of the holy. As the soul moves on, for every light-laden day there awaits a night with its darkness, its aloneness and its varied trepidations. The night must be embraced, allowed, weathered, for this is where history goes to be “liberated”, the past goes to be made healed, the darkness within to be made light. Such cycle, such holy circle, such mandala, has no end for it is God creating, God infolding, God saving. These internal, qualitative, character-bearing movements cannot be understood simplistically as a matter of “spiritual development”, they represent intimate aspects of human growth and maturation. This needs be stressed, for human nature is not an opposition of body and soul, matter and spirit—that is Gnosticism. The psych, the soul, exists as the conjunctive organ of human sociality and worldliness. The truthfulness of this Christianity has exalted into the theological: the Spirit is the communion of the ever transcending (Father) and ever incarnating (Son), and therein becomes the personae named the Holy.
There is, it need be noted, a flaw in any morality that paints the world in black and white, that outright condemns certain actions as forever incompatible with “right” living. As once dissection of the human body was considered sacrilegious and ever unacceptable, so too, to some, are abortion, contraception, experimentation with cellular and embryonic material, blood transfusions, euthanasia, etc. Certainly, such actions deserve circumspection. The rules and values that have defined civilization need be looked to respectfully, for they have in good part made us, but they must not be allowed to stagnate us. They need be received as guides, signposts, the considered reflections gone before us. They are not, nor have such ever been, inalterable fiats. To be open to that which is proper to the situation, to the sacred person before us, that is the Christian task, the Christian ethic. Openness to propriety rather than rule, openness to the uniqueness and complexities of the person before us and his/her situation, present us the cross where our blood must flow. It is only on the cross that the mutability, the vulnerability of God is exposed. It is only in submission to the Spirit of God who goes before-us that the truth of God who is for-us is seen, is known and rises-up to evolve with-us. That is the meaning of the Resurrection of the Crucified, the ceaseless incarnation of God.
It is a process: eros (loving desire-for the other), insemination, conception, gestation, birth, growth, maturation, agape (want-less love), eros (loving-for the desire of the other). Each brings its pains, each its joys that trans-form them and us and the eternal Power that is God into saying “Yes” again and again—an “eternal return” to fill, to fulfill, the world with joy, with life, with love. Agape endlessly becomes eros, and eros melts into agape; selfless love always ends in the desire of the other, always creates out of the void of that terminus of desire the self open to giving itself away. These aspects of love are not antithetical; they are cycled, an ever-cycling circle wherein self and other create, not simply one another, not simply community, not simply communion, but communicity, or as a theologian might opine: Spirit.
The revelation of the divine in the world necessitates one enter the world, honour it, embrace it, and honour the others of one’s life in the world. It calls forth worldliness, involvement, care, and concern for the other and the environment of the other—the personal environment and the global. It is a summons to be with, and whatsoever draws one away from that, insulates one in one’s own self, one’s own pleasure, one’s own distractions, one’s own little world with its preconceived notions of how things ought and must be, is psychologically, spiritually, morally, socially, really, a blemish open to becoming a blight. My soul is in the other, and without the other I am soul-less, a matter of merely matter.
X—Confiteor
I confess I am circumspect in speaking the above truth. I am aware how sternly it stands against me. It confronts my sinfulness and my connatural introversion. Regarding the latter, it warns me of the limitations of that which I can offer the other, in particular, offer the other through the medium of church. This specificity of my situation is not without equivalency. It is replicated within the church on countless fronts, for introverts are muchly, so say statistics, drawn to ministry. The introvert may do well as a sounding board, a source of sober second thought, a listener, a guide in prayer, but leadership and community building our not introvert strengths. The church must acknowledge where it has abilities and where it has not. Without prejudice to the grounding need for theological understanding and spiritual maturity, the church cannot allow itself to be a servant to the processes of bureaucracy that can churn the bearers of academic degrees in ministry and theology into ordinands. It cannot persist with fallacious and puffed-up ideas of “holy” orders. Church must allow itself to be receptive of all the graces within it, to the “charisms”, the charismatic abilities of its members. Ministry and priesthood are not sacred preserves; they belong to all who by baptism “into Christ” share in his duties as priest, prophet and governor. They that minister must know deeply and well that they do so only for the welfare of all, and that where they are lacking potentials or abilities, the community that is the church is, by God’s graciousness, not wanting. The proper task before them is to humbly acknowledge the truth, their truth, and seek out the person who can serve—by grace, rightly and well—where they cannot. To hold onto a power or prerogative in the face of inability is a misunderstanding of, and a misuse of that power
XI—Christian Spirituality and Religion
Both institution and ritual exist to support spirituality, to make viable and vivid being-church, being present in the world as the living body of Christ. Institution ought to be engagingly social, and ritual vivifying of the meditational and mystical. Hence, the exercise of Christian spirituality is not possible without some connection to, some root in, Christian ritual and institution, “organized religion”, “church”.[xix] Spirituality requires a point of focus, an idea of the holy, a distinctive and clear vision of God and man and cosmos, a tradition of idioms and images about which or before which the practice of prayerfulness begins. Spirituality can utilize ritual only if that ritual speaks to the soul of the mysterium of God and self and cosmos one seeks to enter. Thus, ritual must present a portal to the all transcending, the awesome, the sacred, the extraordinary, the mysterious, the majestic essence of existence. If “ritual” offers no more than the ordinary, if it rises not above the colloquial, common, and conversational, it fails itself. There is often today a confusion of mediums. In trying to foster moral living and relevance, the rituals in many churches have descended into being common, colloquial and conversational. These characteristics, however, properly belong to individual encounters, to times of private spiritual guidance and care. Ritual seeks something more, something beyond the personal, something communal, something rightly termed a holy communion, not the Lord’s Supper, but a gathering of all before the Definiens of all, the ever transcending of all. As institution ought to energize the idea of sacred immanence through dialogue and a realistic presence in the world, to the world, ritual ought to disclose the vision of the sacred transcendence that humbles, inspires, evokes, and imbues all with ultimate meaningfulness. Sacred ritual is sacred only in so far as it creates sacred time and sacred space, only as it opens to a vista wherein the daily routines and cares, words and costumes are put aside, and an environment is made for reconnecting with the extraordinary depths within which humanity and the entire universe are rooted.[xx]
I was recently in attendance at a communion service wherein after the homily, the presiding minister said to the congregants: “Now we’re gon’na say some prayers, and [name of intercessor inserted] is going to do the Prayers of the People”. Where has gone the once and simple “Let us pray”? Where has gone our sense of style, decorum, civility, manners? We need not wear white tie and gown to exhibit dignity. I was also recently at a non-denominational service where the accustomed Eucharistic prayer consists of a form of the words of institution sung alternately by cantor/precentor and congregation. It is simple, elegant and moving. It speaks also with succinct beauty of the universal priesthood of the church. Regarding this universality, there is to be noted the novel practice of dressing laity in the sanctuary in academic gowns. Provided one has title to an academic gown, such attire might befit a “choir office” such as morning or evening prayers, but the proper attire is usually and universally a baptismal robe, the full-length white garment commonly called an alb.[xxi] It is the sign of the priesthood of all believers and its denial to them that serve the Lord’s sacred assembly is nothing more than an unscrupulous sacerdotal self-doting, a conspicuous clinging to a badge of baptism as the singular right of “holy orders”. This conceit stands symptomatic of the disoriented desire to “preside over” the sacred assembly rather than lead it. Thus, there is to be found a near ubiquitous practice of having the minister of the assembly face the assembly during the prayers to God, our Father. One, however, if there be any sense of propriety, faces another when one speaks to another. When one leads others in anything, but most particularly in prayer, one turns one’s face in the same direction as they who are being led.[xxii] If this be not another enfeebling grasp at sacerdotal superiority, it is at best (and sadly so) colloquial conversationalism unbefitting to “sacred mysteries”. There is upon us a deluge of hapless revisionism eroding every symbol of otherness and sacredness in a witless search for relevance and modernity. We cannot turn wine into water in the hope that a generation or two weaned on incivility might be attracted. We cannot sing about the “mysteries of faith” when everything surrounding those words screams “banality”.
[i] Unless the term Christ is used in conjunction with the name Jesus, the reference is to the role of the Christ as God’s creative agent, God’s agency, in his creation. This belongs to whomever freely embraces the role of transparency to God, the loss of self to God’s creative mission of fore-giving into novelty, and so bears at once both the burden and joy of kenosis. Cf: on Kenosis and Eschaton, April 2013.
[ii] Every step taken by science or scientific speculation toward understanding the structure of the universe opens another realm of possibility to them want to locate, to situate in time/space, God, heaven, hell, and soul. When there was first proposed that there are, underlying the space-time extensions of our diurnal experience, multiple dimensions of reality that early in the cosmic expansion collapsed to miniscule extension, there, in that “unknown” place, pious souls joyously thought that, at last in this secularized world, a “place” had been secured for God and the spiritual realm. When the mathematical possibilities of a dark matter were first postulated, it became to some a space to infill with the spiritual. Some-where for many there must be fixed the spiritual despite the fact the “spiritual” itself denotes the negation of all dimension.
[iii] Primal giants predating human history or situated at its beginnings are not uncommon. In Hebrew scripture, they are said to have been destroyed in the flood, but they seemingly thereafter endure at the fringes of the world (Cf: Genesis 7, 10, 14, 19). Equally ambiguous is their fate in the Olympian tales wherein they are either destroyed or controlled by their divine successors. Among Norse myths the giants fare better. They present a constant threat to Asgard, and both the Gods and they know the divine realm will one day fall to them. In Hindu tales, the giants are controlled by Vishnu and Shiva and thus the world and all its content is kept safe. From the Celts to the Apaches there exist similar tales.
[iv] In fairness to Plato, his system of Ideas, long read through the lenses of Plotinus and Neo-Platonism, has been interpreted as referencing a spiritual world, when it ought be taken as a logical notion, a scientific speculation, a theoretical physics, a positing of a mathematical form-ulary underlying all things as the basis of all things.
[v] For a brief overview of the history of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah Cf: A Great Divorce, Part 2, Part 3, June 2013.
[vi] Forty is in Hebrew literature a symbolic number indicative of a prolonged period, usually of some type of testing. Thus, from the forty days of rain that begin the great flood to the forty days of Jesus’ retreat into the desert, there are found at least a dozen usages of this symbol to denote something definitive but of indeterminate duration, signaling spiritual history, not temporal measurement.
[vii] The usage of “without divine warrant” in this precis is, confessedly, an overstatement. Technically, the kings and high priests of Israel and Judah were the “anointed of God”. They were the divine voice (nuncio), legislative power (legate), the authorized messenger (ambassador). They were empowered to act as the “son of God”, the elder son of a patriarchy. They were anointed (messiah) with chrism (christ), making them sacred vessels of divine power and action; God–in them and through them–acted in the world. They had divine right. Thus, when David, Solomon, et al. change religious rules and forms, they are acting within their ex officio rights.
[viii] There is often a silliness in trying to transmit the meaning of a word or idea from one culture, its language, and its cultic/symbolic language into those of another. Transmissions must be true to the truth behind words and idioms, even if they be fondly held idioms. There was a recent translation of the Roman liturgy into a language into which it had not before ventured. Since the peoples for whom this evangelical work was undertaken had no word for sheep, much glee was expressed by the translators in being able to render “lamb of God” into “baby moose of God”! Such is not only silly, it is ridiculous and blasphemes against the intelligence of man. One can explain the pastoral nature of another civilization, the nature of a certain animal, and the historical and social relevance of the sacrifice of certain animals. There need not be some ludicrous tag-teaming of animals to say God gives himself, offers himself, offers his life, for the welfare of mankind. “Servant of God who offers himself to heal the sinfulness of the world” is more true to the early Christian notions than the pseudo-autochthonous claudication: “Baby moose who takes away the sin of the world”.
[ix] Cf: “Masks” and its Christian heritage, February 2012.
[x] Cf: Whitehead in Occidental Ideas, Part 24: World Progress, September 2015.
[xi] Cf: Eckhart in Occidental Ideas, Part 13: The End of the Gothic Age, April 2015. Eckhart’s idiom, while engaging, presents an idea not foreign to the ancient fathers or the mediaeval philosopher-theologians.
[xii] This is not a subscription to pantheism or any variant thereof. God remains always the Power beyond in dual transcendence as well as in immanence: the before, present, and to be; the font, the incarnate, and the summoning spirit. Christian theology speaks of God as being revealed in Jesus Christ. Thus, God as before us and God as calling us forth (God as Father and God as Spirit), are known only in the encounter with God-with-us, Emmanuel, the Christ, the incarnate one.
[xiii] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 23: Word Games, “A note on theology under the influence of linguistic analysis…” August 2015.
[xiv] Cf: on Sin, March 2013.
[xv] Lord Tennyson wrote that more things are wrought by prayer than this world knows of, and Thomas Merton opined that the world is probably preserved through the prayerful intercessions of a handful of devoted souls. Thus, as often noted in my essays, this is not to exclude those rather rare vocations to the contemplative life. They are, according to religion, a special grace, and according to a more secular and evolutionary view, an example of Nature insuring sundry aspects of human nature are well honed to thrive and replicate within the species.
[xvi] The commandments are recorded in both Exodus and Deuteronomy. It is noteworthy that in both versions the injunction to honour father and mother is the sole commandment that does not contain a negative, a “thou shall not”.
[xvii] As horrid an understanding of humanity this presents, it was not the worst, as all now know. But the unbridled desecration and destruction of the other—body, soul, heart, and mind—in so many forms was kept deeply suppressed and repressed socially, institutionally and individually. If ever such sin had been submitted to the dark of the confessional, it should have been met with the condition that absolution was withheld until there occurred a surrender to civil jurisdiction and justice. Such practice certainly was applied in matters of theft wherein absolution was consequent to return of or restitution for the taken property. The church sinned grievously in turning a blind eye to many forms of psycho-social domination and personal diminution, in spuriously attempting to secure the integrity of itself and its sacraments of holy orders and marriage, in injudiciously administering the sacrament of confession/reconciliation to the solitary benefit of sinner and criminal, in stupidly thinking the abuse of another by any one in any form was something that would sort itself out when the church’s mandate was, is, and ever shall be to bring both light and healing to the world.
[xviii] This understanding of sperm and womb is the groundwork of conservative sexual morality. It sacralizes egg and sperm rather than the persons in whose bodies they are produced. Granting preeminence to personhood rather than body parts and functions makes moral questions more ambiguous, less black or white, but properly recognizes the uniqueness of each individual situation and demands it be dealt with in its distinctiveness.
[xix] Cf: Can a Christian be an atheist?, October 2013.
[xx] Cf: on Divine Service and Sacred Choreography 2, January 2012; and on Liturgy as spiritual exercise and the ills of heterodoxy 2, January 2012.
[xxi] The cassock and surplice have long been used in substitution for the alb. The cassock is the traditional emblem of servanthood to the sacred assembly. The surplice—which is properly a full-length garment with full length sleeves—was designed to act as an easily donned variation on the alb. Both alb and surplice have, over the centuries, endured many variations, and the Roman cotta claims to be among them. Its truncated proportions seem to have been inspired by a loose fitting short jacket, and the adaptation of this form seems to have been for a surplice to wear outdoors (in processions through the fields, carrying the sacraments to the sick, etc.). However, the baptismal robe is meant to blanket the body, to symbolically wrap the person in newness and purity (white). Wherever such enwrapping is wanting, the vestment fails its singular purpose as symbol.
I speak from a particular tradition within Christianity. Certainly, the tradition that stands under the umbra of Calvin has for the past half millennium understood itself as shunning of the language of symbolism and concentrating its ministry in teaching and celebrating the divine Word as given in the scriptures. Academic gown (better known ecclesiastically as the Geneva gown after the city of Calvin’s first great experiment in Christian community building) became the badge of leadership. In recent times this teacher-symbol has itself often been abandoned for ordinary dress. Evolution continues. Passing on Christian ideas and ideals is the essential, and there are many forms and formats within which it may be done. As a civilization, many believe we have lost touch with and interest in the symbolic and mystical, yet advertising, marketing, and media companies, the film industry, numerous other religions, and sundry novel religious practices continue to capture (or capitalize upon) our openness to the subliminal aspects of being. For the ritualistically informed churches the challenge stands as how best to do that, bring that into the agora. To which there must be added a stern-most warning: because religious symbols are “sacred” items revelatory of the power and mystery of life, they must be handled and presented with the upmost reverence and awesome respect, or they shed completely their power and meaningfulness, and sink not merely into the ordinary but the trite.
[xxii] In the reformed churches that look to Calvin’s theology, the teaching and celebrating of the Word of God are primary. Thus, a teacher-student positioning is proper. It is a position well known to ancient cathedrals where the seat of the principal teacher (the bishop) is set in the centre of the apse behind the Lord’s table. Such position acknowledges the incarnate presence of the Holy, the Word “in the midst of” the people. However, when the transcending aspect of the Holy is addressed, when worship turns from hearing and learning to praying to the sacred parent God through the Word in the Spirit, then all are made equal and one, and all assume the same directionality. It is symbolic, but, symbols are more potent and meaning-ful than any verbalization because they capture not only the senses, the consciousness, but their subliminal base.