(I’m not trying to shame anyone here, but rather help.)
There are some one-liners that are often used by people after a little theological education. Among them are these phrases:
1. “Jesus got thirsty because he was human, but Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee because he was God.”
2. “It is a misunderstanding of the unity of God to say that God the Holy Spirit sanctifies or that God the Son atones for our disintegrity or that God the Father creates the world.”
3. “In order for God truly to hear and answer prayer, God must undergo change.”
4. “There cannot be a hell if God truly loves us.”
5. “Eternity is timeless.”
6. “Eternity is unending sequential (chronological) time.”
(That’s enough. It’s not that any of those statements are simply “wrong,” or something. In fact all of those see something important, just as the blind man in Mark 8 saw something extremely important when he saw people who looked like trees walking. But there’s also something else, the “far-shining” people that he saw the second time Jesus touched him. It is extremely important to see both.)
Yesterday I made a short list of one-liners (sort of) that people with a little (and sometimes a lot of) theological education often say. I think I'll comment on each of those items on that list, one each day, until I've gotten through them. (Again, I’m not trying to shame anyone here, just help.) Here's the first one:
“1. Jesus got thirsty because he was human, but Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee because he was God.”
1. Actually, the miracles Jesus performs in the gospel narratives are signs that he is a prophet, like Elijah and Elisha, who performed similar miracles, even the really newsworthy ones.
2. There weren't two Jesuses, just one.
3. He does have "two natures" (as orthodox theology, West and East, maintains), but they are "natures" that are not to be separated or scrambled or blended together.
4. He is (according to the creeds) all God and all human. He is also just one "person" (a word that in the creeds does not mean what you think it means).
5. All this is explained with other obscure, but important, language.
6. That language says that Jesus didn't have . . .
7. . . . or didn't house, a set of human relations . . .
8. . . . ("the housing of human relations" is most of what "person" signifies here) . . .
9. . . . but rather his human relations occurred "in," or was decentered in the direction of, or was housed in, the coming of the fullness of God.
10. The picture here is of Jesus abandoning his very human life to the coming of God's Reign ("the Kingdom of God").
11. Think the Kenosis Passage in Philippians 2.
12. Here's my little commentary on all of that:
13. Jesus gave himself to the coming of God.
14. That is, he was faithful to the coming of God, so much so that wherever he went, God went, and wherever God went, he went.
15. That took him to Golgotha, where you'd expect God never to be able to go (see the purity laws of Ancient Israel).
16. But it turned out that this abandonment of his life became available room with open doors to God.
17. His life and death was dis-closed to a God who would not forsake such a loving and faithful body . . .
18. . . . and in fact traveled with this one all Holy Week long, even on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
19. This is unveiled on Easter Sunday with the utterly unrestricted disclosure of the whole fullness of the Holiness of God, God's "Godness" (a word I do not at all like).
20. That the body of *Jesus* is glorified just as *God* is glorified in this resurrection is the event in which Jesus's unity with God the Father (and God the Holy Spirit, which is another conversation) is declared.
21. Now, if that seems like "adoptionism" (look that up, if you want to), it is important that what walks out of the tomb is not Jesus getting a series of new moments (perhaps shiny and new moments) added to his chronological timeline . . .
22. . . . but the glorification of every moment of the history (the temporal life) of Jesus, all the way back to the moment of his conception . . .
23. . . . but most significantly the glorification of Holy Week, especially his days of crucifixion and burial) . . .
24. . . . and the glorification (however unappreciated by some) with all those in, with, and under whom his history is entangled (which, by the way, is everyone—past and future).
25. This is how Jesus was crucified from the foundations of the world or preached to those in hell or "was" "before Abraham." This is not about some weird metaphysics.
26. So, given the retroactive power of the resurrection of Jesus, everything the fully human Jesus "did" was done by one who is fully God.
27. This latter point (at least its second half) is also found in orthodox discourse (East and West).
28. It is technically heretical to say that there was a division of labor in Jesus's deeds.
29. Everything (!) he did was done concurrently by "one" who is fully human and "one" who is fully God, who happen to be the "same one."
30. That is, in Christ God got hungry, too, and a human raised the dead—because these two ("God" and "human") happen at once in every event in which Jesus was at work.
The day before yesterday I made a short list of one-liners (sort of) that people with a little (and sometimes a lot of) theological education often say. I think I'll comment on each of those items on that list, one each day, until I've gotten through them. (Again, I’m not trying to shame anyone here, just help.) Here's the second one:
“2. It is a misunderstanding of the unity of God to say that God the Holy Spirit sanctifies or that God the Son atones for our disintegrity or that God the Father creates the world.”
1. Whenever "the unity of God" is thought, it is always to be thought as "what cannot be thought," that is, elusively.
2. "The unity of God" cannot be abstracted from the complex ways God shows up in lived time.
3. Those "complex ways," have been understood by orthodox churches (East and West) as "threefold."
4. That is, God as work in the world is "Father, Son, Holy Spirit." But the number three is not chosen randomly here. The abstraction (three) is a gesture toward a certain occurrence.
5. "Father" names the mystery that eludes us."
6. "Son" names this mystery "with us," confronting us.
7. "Holy Spirit" names the tugging allure of this mystery.
8. These are indeed three concurrent moments, that is, that happen as a "once." (Regardless of how often we think we perceive it as happening.)
9. And so, God works among us in this broken time—always!—as the mystery that confronts us with allure. (Incidentally, that's what it means to be created *in* the image of God.)
10. It is now very widely accepted among theologians that (as Karl Rahner said) "The immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity." (Look those words up, if you want, but I'll try now to tell you kinda what this one-liner means.) That is, whatever "God alone up in heaven, when nobody's looking" might mean, it is not to be detached from what happens among us creatures.
11. God *as God* is the receding *once* of God as *the mystery who confronts us with allure*. Again, God is not just a unity, but "is" a "once." (FWIW I just realized how important it is to replace the phrase "unity of God" with "the once of God.")
12. When the early church was trying to figure out what to do with "the Son" and "the Holy Spirit" in relation to "the Father," it drew from accounts in Scripture (and from the life of the early church) of what those three *do*—and they said things like, the Father creates, the Son redeems, the Holy Spirit sanctifies (all among other things). Of course, the Father created by confronting "nothing" with allure (etc.), but those works (that "economy") is not to be blended into some smooth batter.
13. One of the few most important texts in the history of the orthodox-izing of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is a book by Basil of Caesarea (around 300 AD). In it he lays out a large number of the works of the Holy Spirit. He argues that the Holy Spirit has to be God, if the Holy Spirit does these things. (It's stuff like sanctification/deification, the creation of faith, etc.)
14. And so, though it isn't helpful to split up the Trinity into three guys with different job descriptions and it certainly doesn't help to think that any one of them ever works without the other two working concurrently (e.g., there is no mystery here without the world's being confronted by it alluringly), to think "the Father" is to think certain deeds, to think "the Son" is to think certain deeds, and to think "the Holy Spirit" is to think certain deeds.
15. In other words, the coming Reign of God will be embraced by the God who is to all eternity the mystery who confronts us with allure. It is in this once that we are to live eternally . . .
16. . . . that is, in unbroken, unsegmented, nonlinear time.
Three days ago I made a short list of one-liners (sort of) that people with a little (and sometimes a lot of) theological education often say. I think I'll comment on each of those items on that list, one each day, until I've gotten through them. (Again, I’m not trying to shame anyone here, just help.) Here's the third one:
“2. In order for God truly to hear and answer prayer, God must undergo change.”
1. Yesterday I mentioned the guiding idea (first articulated explicitly by Karl Rahner) that (jargon alert!) "the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and vice versa."
2. This "rule" signifies that what God *as God* happens to be (from, to, and) in eternity is what God happens to be disclosed to us to be, temporally.
3. But it also signifies that the disclosed God is the eternal God.
4. Certainly, God is disclosed as one who responds to our lives, especially our hardships, in the complexity of prayer (metanoia, intercession, lament, petition, thanksgiving, and prayer).
5. That is, God is disclosed as responding to prayer (among other things)—to which the Scriptures and the long history of the church testify so abundantly that no example needs to be given.
6. And "response" suggests "change."
7. So, is that actual or only apparent change? Well, that depends on perspective.
8. In the midst of a world not yet in every respect glorified, God is to be imagined and thought as changing.
9. However, in the coming Reign of God all of creation, every moment of fractured and segmented time, is to be gathered into God's holy embrace, an embrace that hallows those moments. That's what "eternity" means.
10. In that "consummation" the moments of history are neither homogenized nor alienated from each other. They rather love, they love God and with God they love each other.
11. That coming Reign of God has a crucially important "priority" over the alienated moments of fractured time. "The last shall be first."
12. And so, the appearance of a change in God is actual, but it doesn't get the final word. The final word is a punchline that flips everything and thereby flips it all . . . with laughter.
13. And in that "consummation" what *was* (significantly) separated occurrences are made time-fully vibrant in a concurrence, a gathered moment of redemption without sequence.
14. Thus "change" is swallowed up in the glory of God’s unwavering "faithfulness."
Four days ago I made a short list of one-liners (sort of) that people with a little (and sometimes a lot of) theological education often say. I think I'll comment on each of those items on that list, one each day, until I've gotten through them. (Again, I’m not trying to shame anyone here, just help.) Here's the third one:
"4. There cannot be a hell if God truly loves us.”
1. This one has seemed obvious for a long time.
2. I suspect that it is obvious because we have fixated theology on pain.
3. We think that the pain of Jesus on the cross is what atoned for our sins.
4. Of course, being crucified is excruciatingly painful and the pain is demonstrated by the struggle of the body to breathe, nailed up there the way bodies were.
5. But it is much more helpful, it seems to me, to think of the suffering of Jesus on the cross as his "enduring" not just what a strong painkiller might alleviate, but Jesus's "baptism" on the cross, which plunged him into the sea of defilements that by definition kept God out.
6. He endured all that because his faithfulness to God took him there.
7. It was his trust that God as God was plunging into that sea of defilements, contrary to everything he had been taught by his significant others and that he knew was supported by a host of "legitimation structures."
8. And, Behold!, God had indeed gone there, just as Jesus went there.
9. Jesus glorified on Easter Sunday is the disclosure of where God was pleased to dwell on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
10. Redemption occurred in that holy week, because Jesus mutilated body simply could not keep anything outside; no barrier was left, and what he practiced all his adult life was demonstrably out of the bag (or wineskin) Holy Week.
11. Thus God's love (God *is* love on Easter Sunday, and therefore on all days and nights) is utterly dis-closed, poured out on all, no restriction.
12. There are now no "special people" and thus there never were and never will be.
13. The glory of God radiates in all spatial and temporal directions.
14. All the earth is bathed in God's glory, past, present, future, on Easter Sunday.
15. So, how can there be a hell?
16. Because all theology that will not leave or forsake the gospel emerges out of the gut punch that life on earth, as far back as anyone can remember or discover by research, *has been hell*!
17. When all of space and time are gathered into the apocalyptic Reign of God, that hell is gathered, too, but redeemed, the way the hell of Jesus on the cross is redeemed, in glory, in the dis-closed holiness of God.
18. This is not about "what a day of rejoicing that will be."
19. It is about a shalom that passeth understanding (sorry about the KJV; I just think it works better with this stuff).
20. Will there be no weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth?
21. That depends on whether the one you were in fractured time (on that decisive moment of your death, which names *who* you "were") is opened to such good news.
22. I mean, who wants to eat, sleep, bathe, and make love with God's creatures, among them diseased, dirty, ugly, deformed men, women, children (please don't even begin to think this is some kind of weird advocacy of pedophilia!), animals, forests, grasslands, rivers, oceans, and lands and the life that lived and died in, with, and under them ravaged by drought, fire, and the rapacious, ravaging, and wanton destruction inflicted by late capitalism and its lackey capitalists?
23. And so, on the one hand, hell is swallowed up in glory in the Reign of God. On the other hand, since that is not good news to those who are fixated on determining good and evil, there is to come a hell that is not to be celebrated in redemption, but endured as Dante's Satan endures capture in ice.
24. I left out the most important point. Here it comes:
25. Only a fool would say that there is no hell.
26. Hell is a daily event in this present evil age: in prisons, in drug gang infested neighborhoods, in regions afflicted by drought and disease, in abusive families, among the prey of White Supremacists, and so much more that I could go on making lists all day of hells.
27. If those who've lived in hell every age of human history (along with every age of life from the moment of its emergence from thick oceans) . . .
28. . . . if they are to be remembered, the hell that clings to them must be remembered (especially!) in the Reign of the God who redeems the damned from hell.
29. Thus, hell, too, is to be imagined "in heaven," but outbid by the glory of God.
30. Of course, this is not to deny the possibility of "eternal suffering" . . .
31. . . . as hard as that may be to imagine together with God's love . . .
32. . . . even if eternal *suffering* is not taken to mean pain and is rather understood as a kind of "endurance." But even that hell is to be imagined as swallowed up in God's glory.
33. In any and every case God is love and will not abandon anyone. Every hell is in the end "not so bad" since Jesus is there—and he was resurrected as a permanent resident of hell.
34. He will never leave or forsake that place.
https://youtu.be/4OKLhtAPxc4?si=lAJ4-v_bKqW4p8w5
Five days ago I made a short list of one-liners (sort of) that people with a little (and sometimes a lot of) theological education often say. I think I'll comment on each of those items on that list, one each day, until I've gotten through them. (Again, I’m not trying to shame anyone here, just help.) Here's the next one:
“5. Eternity is timeless.”
1. The way "eternity" has been understood at least among Platonists is as "timelessness."
2. Although Paul Tillich spoke of "the eternal now," among Platonists, prominently St. Augustine, eternity was understood as a state devoid of not only a past and a future, but also of a present.
3. This may be the worst of all the abstractions that have emerged with the domestication of the church (at least among classy Christians) that began (slowly) probably before the second century, but certainly *in* the second century (cf. Justin Martyr).
4. However, if all theological ideas are kept immersed in earth and sea, in life, especially the lives of the poor, eternity cannot be understood as timelessness.
5. That is, there is no life without work or the prospect of work—or an agonizing alienation from work.
6. Work is all about time.
7. Theology is prayer or it vainglory.
8. Prayer is metanoia, intercession, lament, petition, thanksgiving, and doxology—each bleeding into the others.
9. The gospel never wanders away from this complex of work-prayer and prayer-work.
10. When there is no hope left in the machinations of the principalities and powers of this present evil age, the only possible avenue for hope—among the heirs of Ancient Israel, unclean or not, Gentile or not, queer or not—is apocalyptic.
11. It is in the vision of a coming apocalyptic Reign of God that the lived notion of "eternity" emerges.
12. The Reign of God is the gathering of the dead (and the dying) . . .
13. . . . those creatures who endured fractured, broken, sequential time . . .
14. . . . gathered together in a resurrection that breathes unbroken life into them, these bodies of time, these bodies of memory and hope.
15. This gathering is eternity.
16. It is an abstraction if cut away from the resurrection of Jesus.
17. Jesus *is* "the resurrection and the life."
18. He *is* "eternal life."
19. His resurrection is what these phrases signify.
20. And the resurrected Jesus is the fullness of time, not timelessness.
21. The one who walks out of the tomb is not Jesus getting new moments added to his chronology, but all the moments of his life through Good Friday and Holy Saturday glorified, the dwelling place of the Holy God.
22. That is, eternity is not timelessness, but the fullness of time, the time of Jesus and the time of all those whom his mutilated body will not keep out.
Six days ago I made a short list of one-liners (sort of) that people with a little (and sometimes a lot of) theological education often say. I think I'll comment on each of those items on that list, one each day, until I've gotten through them. (Again, I’m not trying to shame anyone here, just help.) Here's the last one:
"6. 'Eternity is unending sequential (chronological) time.'”
1. This, I think, is the ordinary way eternity is understand in churches (and I fear also not terribly infrequently in Nazarene university religion departments).
2. It, too, is a pagan idea, though one closer to the ground than "eternity is timelessness."
3. This view is very common, for example, among what Eliade called "cosmic religions," that is, those who thought of and imagined God and the gods as encompassed by the cosmos, the world of time and space, just as we are.
4. For example, Valhalla is imagined among the Vikings as a place in this world where noble warriors go when they die in battle. There they feast and playfully compete with each other. Valhalla is a place of great joy and reunion with loved ones.
5. The God of the gospel, however, is not a God of this world. The world is God's "footstool."
6. Indeed, God is so other than this world that in Ancient Israel God's name ("Yahweh") is never to be spoken, even when it is silently read. Another word is substituted for it in the reading.
7. Salvation is a "mystery" (Paul tells us). The peace of salvation "passeth understanding." Salvation is so elusive to thought and imagination that "no eye" has seen it and "no ear" has heard it, no thought or mind can even articulately ask of it or think it. (I'm tempted quite a lot in these things to put chapters and verses next to my sentences.)
8. The only indication of that salvation that might stir our thinking hearts is the resurrected body of Jesus.
9. Jesus is, of course, our salvation, but he is that as the one plunged into our defilement, our "sin" (which is not to be understood as "a moral no-no") . . .
10. . . . and Jesus is literally "saved" from it . . .
11. . . . not by being made all shiny and new like Adam before the fall . . .
12. . . . but he is saved still defiled, still "sin," still mutilated, un-intact, without integrity. He is the "saved" one, the one who will in all eternity (which embraces our past, present, and future) be defiled.
13. And yet this salvation of the dead/defiled Jesus occurs as his defilement, his sin, is swallowed up in God's holiness . . .
14. . . . which, just because the defiled Jesus, the Jesus who is "sin for us," is embraced and thus glorified, is to be understood as holy love.
15. It is only because the body of Jesus is raised from the dead still mutilated that it can be said that "God is love."
16. Love here signifies, "Jesus—and all in whom Jesus is entangled—are embraced by the Holy God, inspite of the rules that would keep them alienated from the Holy God."
17. (Remember I'm talking about "eternity." That will be explicit soon.)
18. Well, we rhetorically ask, "The resurrected Jesus added to his chronological life story, didn't he?!"
19. Well, I don't think so. I think the resurrection appearance narratives indicate that they are appearances of the entire history of Jesus, entangled in the lives of all those he would not and could not keep out (his skin in tatters as it was) and that means *everyone*, whether we would say their lives are to be filed as past, present, or future.
20. I think it is impossible to place the resurrection appearances of Jesus in any ordinary chronological world, that is, as sequential.
21. Here are too hastily compressed thumbnails of the resurrection narratives in the New Testament (as they come to my mind right now):
22. (a) Mary thinks Jesus is a gardener (which he is, sort of) when he appears to her, until he says her name, which is followed by her recognizing him as Jesus.
23. (b) He wanders down the Emmaus Road with some of his former disciples, he interacts with them at least for several minutes, but maybe much longer, and they do not recognize him until they all step off that road, sit for a meal, and Jesus "breaks bread" with them, at which point he vanishes.
24. (c) He cooks and eats fish with some of his former disciples.
25. (d) He walks into the "upper room" even though the door is shut and locked.
26. (e) He invites Thomas to put his finger in the wounds in Jesus's hands and put his hand in Jesus's wounded side (Luke also draws attention to the still mutilated body of Jesus).
27. (f) Finally (I hope I didn't [but probably did] forget an appearance), Jesus appears before Saul/Paul (by the way, after Jesus's "ascent into heaven"), while this persecutor of Christians was walking on the Damascus Road expecting to make arrests. Jesus in this appearance is a loud voice and a bright light—and nothing else perceptible.
28. What appears? Well, Jesus's glorified lifetime does, from little baby to dying and dead criminal between criminals on Golgotha.
29. What does that mean about "eternity"?
30. It means that "eternity" signifies the gathering together of all of history, all of (no longer chronological) time, into a concurrence, into the "once" of the Trinity.
31. This, as opposed both to chronology and to timelessness, is a vibrant, vital, glorification, a hallowing of fragmented time, but with that fragmentation swallowed up in the once of the Trinity.
32. And so, clocks and calendars are in eternity only as pieces of fragmentary time gathered together with other pieces of fragmentary time into the Reign of God.
33. Eternity, therefore, is the concurrent *once* of redemption, of sanctification, of glorification, of theosis, vibrant by very close proximity to the holy *once* of the Trinity.