The Lamb Slain From the Foundation of the World: The Crucifixion as Revelation of the Kenotic Core of Reality

The NT writers named Jesus "the lamb slain from the foundation of the world." What does it mean that Jesus is a lamb? What does it mean that Jesus is slain at the beginning of time? Was this not an event that simply occured 2,000 years ago at Golgotha?

The icon of a slain lamb is pulled from the Paschal motif of the Exodus event that inaugurates Israel's narrative of liberation. The Paschal lamb is an icon of redemptive suffering: a creature who suffers and dies to protect a family from the messenger of death. The family is then able to flee an oppressive nation that is paralyzed by fear by crossing a parted sea by the hand of YHWH. The lamb here is a like a martyr, absorbing the force of death that passes over. Jesus as a lamb absorbs the death that threatens humanity, and his blood is smeared over the doorposts of the universe as a sign against the evil that always hangs over us as we exit the houses of our temporal existence to find immortality and resurrection. But what does this all mean? And how does this happen at the beginning of time?

I believe that the crucifixion here is a fundamental symbol of the God-world relation. That is, at the beginning of time God limited Godself in order to create a world of free agency and process--in order to allow the process of evolution to begin within set parameters toward an open-ended future. Thus God committed an act of kenosis or self-empyting in which God emptied Godself out into the freedom of open-ended creativity and process. Symbolized by crucifixion and resurrection, there is a recurring event of death and rebirth in the evolutionary process by which God suffers in, under, and with the creation. In this paradigm death is not the enemy of life but the very mode by which life renews itself and evolves. Thus the angel of death and the slain lamb are one. The lamb, in giving itself over to the angel of death, ensures the birth of new life (exodus). According to the writer of Hebrews, the life of the creature is in the blood. So when the lamb's blood is smeared over the door (gateway) to the house of temporal life, it's continuity is present in the transition from mortality to immortality. The lamb's body was consumed by the family, carried into a transformed existence as they crossed the sea. So as we leave the house of mortality and cross the chaotic sea of death, our existence is transformed into a different mode of being.

In this paradigm, the God-world relation is predicated on God's self-limitation as a work of love--a creative work that enables the alterity (or "otherness") that constitutes the intersubjective relation of love--in order that creatures may act freely and yet experience absolute dependency in the evolutionary process as they accept their death as necessary and unavoidable. The cross then is a victory over death because it is the acceptance of death as a doorway into a new kind of existence.

Similarly, the death of God at the beginning of creation is the entrance of God into a new kind of existence which enables others to exist freely. Even so death is for us a transition into a new kind of existence for the sake of an Other's freedom. When an animal dies, a tree is born. When a tree dies, an animal is born. The cycle of life requires the transition of death. Thus death is the enabler of new life, the source of resurrection. Our death is a resurrection. The event of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection is a historical affirmation of this primordial and timeless reality, inaugurated in the primeval kenosis of God at the creation of the world. In this way we can affirm with the author of Hebrews that in the cross, Christ has conquered humanity's fear of death. This author also writes that the cross occurs at "the culmination of the ages." In other words, the telos of creation's natural processes manifests itself most definitively and concretely in the symbol of Christ's historical crucifixion and resurrection, so that in this visible sacrament of crucifixion-resurrection we can catch a glimpse of the teleological pattern in creation's evolutionary fabric through which death and life become two sides of one event.

Alienation, Participation and Mediation: The Eucharistic Axiom of Human Destiny (A Phenomenological Christology)

The Jesus who we encounter as a distinctive phenomenon in the haze of ineffable religious experience is mediated by a retrojected interpretation of the radical prophet and mystic of Nazareth in light of the resurrection. This retrojection is a reversed historical projection: the identity of Jesus is established by his return from the realm of death into the sphere of the living and ascension into the life of God rather than by his birth. The assembly of his life-events construct a portrait that resurrection completes, producing what we call the Christ Event. Jesus only finds a singular identity within the totality of this event.

So what fundamentally occurs in the Christ Event? This question is primarily phenomenological, i.e. it concerns itself with the social impact and personal/experiential significance of the event. I will attempt to answer this through the categories of alienation, mediation, and participation. 

I. Alienation

In Paul's Adamic interpretation of the Christ Event, we find binaries of obedience vs disobedience, old man vs new man, etc. What we can retrieve from this is the fundamental distinction between two kinds human beings, primal and eschatological, as well as the role of the Christ Event in making the transition.

The primal human is the original human prototype of evolution, along with all of his/her imperfections and deficiencies. This type of human is caught in between the ground and the sky. Animals walk on all fours and belong to the earth. Angels have wings and inhabit the heavens. Humans walk upright and bridge the gap. They are caught in between two spheres of existence. They are also genetically caught in between base instincts and transcendence. Our base instincts, inherited from the sphere of basic organic and sentient lifeforms, demand that we protect ourselves, feed ourselves, survive, reproduce, perpetuate, and guard our own. This is predicated on natural selection and "survival of the fittest," paradigmatic of nature as "red in tooth and claw." On the other side, our drive toward transcendence is rooted in the emergence of self-consciousness, intersubjectivity, and awareness of the distinctions between things, others, and the finite & Infinite. We naturally tend toward the Infinite. Knowing we are finite, we experience a fundamental sense of alienation, caught between our animal finitude and our tendency toward transcendental integration with the Infinite (which is theologically personified as God). Unfortunately, the majority of efforts made by primal humanity to transcend their finitude have resulted in nothing more than the will to power--institutionalized by religion, legitimated in theology (through the ideological projection of grandiose images of the human ego onto God), and fully rooted in base instincts. Thus, our efforts toward escaping alienation have only doubled it over on itself. 

In contrast, the eschatological human is the human being who has successfully transcended the animal sphere and achieved the actualization of human desire in distinction to base instinct. The fundamental paradigm of incarnation in the New Testament establishes the identity of Jesus as the eschatological human through the unfolding events of his life that culminate in the resurrection, i.e. transcendence beyond finitude. The accomplishment of transcendence that culminates in the resurrection begins to unfold in the activity of Jesus' life and can be described within the category of mediation. 

II. Mediation

Jesus has always been understood in Christian thought as a mediator between God and humanity. Unfortunately, Western Christianity has couched this term in legal metaphors, almost always interpreting "mediator" as one who defends another in court.  However, Jesus is enabled to mediate through incarnation in the New Testament. Thus, it is important to begin with a brief overview of the meaning of incarnation before explaining what mediation means.

Recalling that Jesus' identity as the incarnate Son of God only comes together within the totality of his being and activity, affirmed and consummated in resurrection, incarnation cannot begin with a narrowed focus on the particulars of Jesus' birth or even the descension/condescension of the Divine presence onto him at his baptism by John. Both of these are useful as symbols, whether true or not, but they do not demonstrate how Jesus' identity ultimately came together in the memories of his followers. Without the resurrection they would have regarded him as just another failed Messiah. The resurrection retrojects an incarnational understanding onto Jesus in conjunction with his vocational activity: the resurrection, affirming the embodiment of the Divine presence in Jesus, reinterprets his words and actions as demonstrations and manifestations of that presence. Thus, Jesus incarnates (i.e. puts into flesh and blood) the Divine character.

The central metaphor for incarnation retrieved from the New Testament is the Logos of the opening poem to John's Gospel. The Logos is the divine principle that binds the cosmos together, the mediating logic within reality, the ground of order and form, and the "world-soul." The proclamation that the Logos has become present in Jesus borrows literary themes and terminology from Jewish wisdom literature, associating the Wisdom of God in Jewish literature (personified as a woman) with the Logos of Greek philosophy/cosmology. Paul also refers to Jesus as the Wisdom of God. The question then becomes, what is this wisdom?

Paul refers to this wisdom as weak and foolish in this world. He categorizes the world (better trans. as age), or the realm of darkness, as greedy, murderous, selfish, and hedonistic. He quantifies the Divine character through what he calls the fruit of the Spirit, which include generosity, self-control, and love. Jesus radically practices these virtues throughout his life, abandoning the ego/will-to-power in favor of loving everyone (including enemies) and generously giving to the needy. This is the wisdom of God mediated through Jesus by the Divine presence in him.

This incarnation/mediation is only made possible when Jesus distinguishes himself from God -- not my will but your will be done, not my will but my Father's will -- so that in obedience toward God, recognizing his creaturely finitude before the Infinite, he may participate in the Infinite life and consequently mediate it -- when you have seen me you have seen the Father, I and my Father are one.
Thus the human body of Jesus is a finite, creaturely temple for the Infinite life to dwell and empower, enabled when the creature recognizes its own finitude and self-distinction in perfect obedience and submission to the will of God--summed up in the character of Divine wisdom.

III. Participation



Jesus incarnates the Way -- the new existential mode of being for humanity, constituted by obedience to Divine wisdom and grounded in a basic re-cognition of finitude and creaturely distinction before the Holy ineffable Infinite. This is the new existential mode of being-in-the-world for the eschatological human being, enabled by two distinctions: the humble self-distinction of the creature from the Creator and, consequently, the new distinction of the eschatological human being from the primal human being.  The self-distinction of the creature from the Creator is a reversal of primal humanity's deficiency--symbolized by Eve and Adam's downfall through their will-to-power and desire to erase this distinction. This reversal accomplishes the creation of the eschatological human being. Christians hold that Jesus accomplishes/inaugurates this through perfect(ed) self-distinction. Jesus, in the full acceptance of his finitude and in submission to the Infinite ground of his being, imitated the love of God by extending it to others, thus eradicating horizontal alienation.

To participate in Jesus' way of being-in-the-world is to act in the absolute dependency that saturates the open-minded consciousness, to walk in that humility before other humans and God, and to imitate the love of God as disclosed in the historical activity of Jesus Christ. This mimetic participation (mimesis=imitation of human action) in Jesus' existential mode of being is the re-enfleshment of the Logos embodied by Jesus--that is, the Logos that is the world-principle of unifying love and creativity. This re-enfleshment of the Logos constitutes another body of Jesus, the body of Christ spoken of by Paul. Thus the human community as the body of Christ is the eschatological community -- a taste of the new creation that is always arriving from the future into the present. The human community's re-embodiment of Jesus' way of being is symbolized in the church's centering sacrament -- the Eucharist. The bread and wine are the body and blood of Jesus Christ transformed into a new ontological existence. As Paul says, because the whole community eats of this one bread and drinks of this one cup, they are all one body and one blood. Again, the Logos as a world-principle of unifying love is at work here, realized and actualized by the community as a preview of its creative transformation of the cosmos in the future. This unification saves us absolutely from our primal alienation by bringing us into a recognition of absolute dependency, finitude, and self-distinction that opens us up to God and the Other in such a way that we must relate and therefore love. This is a freedom from independence into interdependence predicated by mutual embrace. The Christ Event then can also be called the Eucharistic Event that repeats itself through our mimetic participation of the way of Jesus yielding the re-embodiment of the world-principle of unifying love. Thus the Eucharist is salvific, enabling our transcendence by inviting us into the mutual embrace of the Trinitarian community.

IV. The Eucharistic Axiom



Eucharist consists of a conjunction of the Greek Eu meaning "good,""well-being," or "happiness," and charis meaning grace or "gift." Thus the Eucharist in the joy of the Gift, the goodness of the Gift, our well-being in relation to the Gift. This Gift is the Gift of Presence. This Presence is the Divine Presence that we discover in the healing of our alienation and experience of unifying love and mutual embrace. Thus Divine Presence incarnates itself in human presence by unifying humans together. The joy of the Gift of Presence is the joy of the Gift of Love in human community, healed of its division, pride, and violence.

If we begin with the Eucharist and look at how it re-organizes and re-rationalizes our world, we will discover the foundation, axiom, and promise of a future and a hope beyond our always schizophrenic ways of being that opens up other possible worlds in which grace and love transform and nourish human life. We will discover the unfolding of a new destiny for human beings in relation to the unconditional love that holds this world together.

V. Conclusion



What we can conclude is that Jesus' identity follows and is constituted by his agency and not the other way around. In other words, Jesus' agency and activity culminating in the self-sacrificial love of the cross constitute his identity as the mediator/embodiment of the full Presence of the Logos that is the world-principle of unifying love that takes form in his way of being-in-the-world. This allows him to carry forth a salvation into the world that rescues us from our alienation and brings us into humble fellowship with other creatures through our mimetic participation in his way of being. This new way of being constitutes a new kind of humanity -- the eschatological human being.

Giving Up Christianity for Christianity: The True Meaning of Incarnation

What if Christianity actually looked like Jesus? I don't just mean the church or people. What if God looked like Jesus? What if the religion constructed in the name of Jesus looked like the humble peasant from Nazareth?

First of all, as a religion, Christianity would be diametrically opposed to the triumphalism of fundamentalist religion. Why? Jesus was not a triumphalist. Jesus didn't try to force his enemies to convert to his way. He embodied it and was willingly crucified for it.
Would Christianity be willing to undergo crucifixion for the way of Jesus?

What if Christianity was more concerned with embodying the emancipating way of Jesus than making its own name great? Jesus wasn't concerned with making his name great. He was concerned with inviting people into the way he embodied in his life, the way that leads us to the loving Father of creation and into the heart of reality.
Jesus invited people into a gracious understanding of reality, a view of the universe not as indifferent but as a relational cosmos grounded in the love that is the subsurface unity of reality.
Jesus was more concerned with the well-being of humanity and creation than his own life.

Christianity must take up its cross and incarnate the cruciformity of Christ.
The truth of Christianity is not propositional but relational and contextual, not abstract but operational.
Jesus was the truth not through his words but his actions.
The truth of Christianity must be contextualized through incarnation in the life of the one who would follow Jesus. In this way, Christianity may actually look like Jesus.

What if Christianity was more concerned with the well-being of the world than its own survival? If we seek first the kingdom of God then maybe, just maybe, Christianity will be added to us. But we first have to give up our triumphalistic notions of a God who loves and cares more for Christians than everyone else. And who knows, perhaps we will realize with the kingdom that we no longer need Christianity.

Perhaps upon seeing the kingdom we will realize that as a temporary vocation for the children of God in human history, Christianity is over, and that the goodness harbored within its event has been resurrected into our material reality as an all-encompassing presence and the revelation of the children of God in every human body loved and cherished by God. When Jesus died, Christ was risen in the body of those who remembered him and who carried forth his presence through the indwelling of the Spirit.
Perhaps Christianity will also pass away, and the Spirit within will be risen again in the whole of creation as the kingdom fully arrives with the peace of God covering the entire cosmos.

The Genetic Structure of Ethics in the Morality of Jesus

Moralisms, or ethical systems of rules and norms, fail to mediate the transcendental character of the Ethical. They are contingent, provisional, and given.
Goodness cannot be measured or calculated, demonstrated in the excess of grace in contradistinction to the moderation of Greek morality (reason=virtue=happiness).
Goodness is better understood as organic and pulsing than abstract and static.
Conventional ethics has a genetic character of economic transaction and reductionism. The economic character of ethics is predicated upon the transaction of a commodity.
A commodity is a traded good which benefits the receiving party. Participation in conventional ethics is constituted by the expectation of a commodity to the benefit of the participant.
The excess of love in the ethics of Jesus drives against the cold reduction and calculation of conventional ethics and radicalizes the commodity.
Thus, the genetic structure of ethics in the teachings of Jesus is the excess of grace over and against merit and economic exchange and the impossibility of the transcendental character of the Ethical (Ethos) to be mediated by a given norm or rule.
The irreducibility of what is good and right should keep us on our feet, not as blind judges but with eyes peeled to see the particularity of the Other, the singularity of each situation.
This irreducible ethos can only get its grip on the mind when mediated through the heart.
Jesus invites us to return to the organic structure of the transcendent good as mediated through the living experience, the being-in-the-world and angsty, emotionally laden quality of giving-a-damn that constitutes real human ethical action.
Of course, we could just as easily throw out the abstract jargon and call it love.
The irreducible call of love is the event that lies underneath the ethical dilemma and behind the eyes of those who are suffering.
What we need to be confronted with are not lines on paper but lines on withering faces.
We don't need the blackness of ink but the blackness of neediness in the eyes of the homeless staring back at us as we walk the street.
It's not ultimately the bodies of dissertations that will give us a "moral compass" but the bodies of orphans and widows, the bodies of Others who demand our love and care.

Being-Toward-the-Other: the Ontological Constitution of Salvation in Christian Soteriology

In the salvific transfiguration of being that results from an encounter with the Sacred vis-à-vis the symbolic medium of Jesus of Nazareth, a fundamental reorientation of self radically alters the path of the individual's vocation. The will is no longer fundamentally oriented toward Ego but toward the Other. Along with Heidegger's ontological constitutions of being-in-the-world and being-toward-death, along with Ricoeur's being-interpreted, another existential configuration comes into focus: being-toward-Other.

Through this traumatic encounter, the Gaze of being finds dissatisfaction in the objective horizon of its consciousness -- a field of idolized phenomena violently assimilated and reduced to objects of personal gratification. Under the vocationally tyrannical and objectifying Gaze of being the Other is mutilated and reduced to an enslaved other, no longer an Other but another shadow that is otherwise than Other, otherwise than being, a mere icon idolatrously mistaken for the Real. So this horizon of consciousness is realized as a killing field populated by shadow objects of Ego, fenced off from that which is beyond the perceptive horizon of consciousness -- the traumatizing Real, the Other, the irreducible and ineffable, along with its penetrating Gaze that commands our attention, sinking into the black voids at the centers of our eyes, invisibly crossing our Gazes in an ineffable and commanding commonality, soliciting our attention and reverence and caution.

So the traumatic encounter with the Sacred Other leads to a reverence for every other Other, a being-toward-Other which demands that we draw out of ourselves under the Gaze of the Other and respect and love the ineffability of the Other, symbolized in the black and bottomless commanding abyss at the centers of their Gaze, which is the locus of their irreducible singularity. 

But how does the Sacred Other function within the symbolic medium of Jesus Christ? How does it succeed in reconstituting our being? First, in the teachings of Jesus. Through the medium of evocative parable we are drawn into the experiences of the Other -- the desperation of the prodigal, the suffering of a man mugged and left in a ditch. But more importantly, the unconditionality of love behind these stories -- the celebratory love of a father for a son who took away his livelihood and destroyed his honor and fortunes, the dishonorable and scandalous love of a hated enemy who helps his enemy out of a ditch and pays for his healthcare anyway. Love draws us out of ourselves and beyond the boundaries Ego selfishly establishes. But what about the actions of Jesus? He heals the sick, raises the dead, and loves his enemies, embracing those who have been othered by the elites. He is unjustly murdered and crucified, and when we stand before the image of this figure in our minds, we stand before a naked and bleeding body, bearing the scars of our selfish world on his own flesh, a world we have contributed to ourselves. His blood cries out to us, his wails and cries screaming at our injustice, calling us to crucify our own Egos that crucify his body. And as the bleeding body of the Other, reduced to a mocked and derided other, he calls us toward himself to embody this cruciform love, to go out toward the body of the Other, lift it from the ditch, pay for its healthcare, and forgive it of what it has ostensibly taken from us.
 

The Easter Experience and the Empty Tomb: The Oracle of Early Christian Hope

Haight and Borg on Resurrection:
Recently I was reading Roger Haight on the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in his book Jesus: Symbol of God, who holds a view of resurrection similar to that of Marcus Borg and other liberal scholars. There is not much that I disagree with them about, but this has become a bit of an issue for me. They do not affirm a the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus as an historical event, but my biggest issue with them is not their denial of this event which they may find intellectually impossible to affirm, but the fallacy of their arguments against it.

Marcus Borg reduces the event to a mystical resurrection where Jesus is removed from time and space and taken up into the life of God, and speaks vaguely of the appearances, refusing to admit any empirical qualities to them. Haight, in similar fashion, sets up a false binary opposition. Contrary to his own stated postmodern epistemology and the irreducibility of this event, he argues that if the event is to be meta-historical and transcendent, Jesus must be lifted up into the life of God apart from an empty tomb or empirical appearances. The event is meta-historical; therefore it is not historical. The event is transcendent; therefore it has no immanent qualities. Jesus could not have merely been the resuscitation of a corpuscular body; therefore his crucified body had no continuity with his resurrection. Now before moving into a more thorough deconstructive critique of this position, I want to lay out the importance of the resurrection as an historical event for Christian theology.

Wright and Paul on Resurrection:
N.T. Wright lays out the significance of the historical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in his book Surprised by Hope. Therein he argues that the early Christian hope, which recapitulates and transforms the Jewish eschatological hope, was rooted in the future resurrection of God's children. The guarantee of this future resurrection was predicated upon the historical resurrection of Jesus. If Jesus was vindicated by God, so will his message and his followers be at the end of the age. But if Jesus is not risen, God has abandoned him, his message has failed, and we are wasting our time (according to Paul). Jesus is said to be the first-fruits of those who are asleep. This means that there will be a fuller harvest at the end of the age. It is a form of poetic justice: all those who have been oppressed and abused like Jesus and the outcasts he ate with -- they will be vindicated and risen up in the end.

Now Wright argues that the risen Christ was not the same Christ with the same body: his disciples didn't even recognize him at first. Paul argues upon the ground of Christ's resurrection that we will receive a new body in the resurrection, a celestial body that we do not yet understand or see. Wright refers to this as "transformed physicality": there is a continuity with physical existence, empirically and tangibly, but also a transcendent and fuller dimension to this existence. Perhaps it could be said this way: the new body is not less empirical but more fully so. It more fully exists, just as the promise held out is the promise of a "new creation," a "new heaven and new earth" that will be more fully material and real, not less so. We wont be ghosts in the clouds. We will be more fully human.

Jesus would have been more fully human and a foretaste of what lies beyond the eschatological horizon of his early followers' hope. What else could have drawn them out of their despair? They felt that Jesus had been a failure, and those who heard him crying out on the cross knew that he may have felt like a failure too. When Jesus was killed, so was his message. The disciples fled in despair. What could have led them to believe he had risen and been vindicated? I would argue nothing less than something very real and traumatic, something like an empirically present Christ. It's hard to imagine that they simply began to believe this as they reflected on their vivid memories of Jesus as Haight seems to think.

Haight's Fallacy:
So back to Haight. His belief that the event cannot be both historical and meta-historical is fallacious: he himself argues that Jesus mediates the presence of God as a concrete symbol. Why can the resurrection not be a concrete and mediatory symbol? In other words, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as an historical event can be understood as a dialectical symbol mediating a meta-historical and transcendent reality: Jesus has been taken "up" into the life of God, vindicated and exalted over his oppressors, concretely manifested in his empirical resurrection. Again, if Jesus is the first-fruits of the new creation and the second Adam (Gk. anthropos=human, Heb. adam=human), he must be more human, not less. The Jews believed that we are not whole beings unless we have both a body and an internal life-force joined as a psychosomatic unity. Jesus has to be a holistic psychosomatic unity from the new creation to accurately/truthfully preview the ultimate eschatological outcome of God's redemptive activity in history.

Theological Consequences:
Without an historical resurrection, the central oracle of early Christian hope is lost. Christianity as a spiritual path does not get lost, nor the luminosity and wisdom of Jesus' teachings. But the particularity of the Christian hope gets lost. The message of Jesus has a lot of transformative power in itself, but the resurrection gives it teeth. Some are content losing the metaphysical singularity of the Christian message   truncated from its spiritual path; others would like to have a form of poetic justice laid out in front of the world's suffering as a guarantee to the poor and oppressed, a messianic structure of hope-against-hope offered as an historical pre-figure to a future interruption to the insane samsara of systemic injustice as well as an ultimatum laid out before the oppressive cultural forces as a challenge and a threat.

The Paradox of Power and Triumph of Love

The Buddha was right that desire is what chains us.
Lao-Tsu was right that desire distracts us from the Tao, the hidden mystery/source of being.
Jesus was right that the desire for power, greed, and hedonistic pleasure diminishes the quality of being, so much so that it would be better to lose an eye or hand than experience the fiery disintegration of inflated desire.

Desire marries itself to power and control.
To want or desire is to believe that we do not possess something but that we ought to.
To take possession is to enslave and overpower something else.

The problem is that desire enslaves us. It does not give anything but only takes away.

You cannot lose what you do not desire.

To desire, possess, and control steals away contentment, gratitude, and fulfillment.
To let go of desire and possession, to experience the pure "givenness" of reality and the pure reception of human experience makes possible these things: contentment without longing, fulfillment without possessing.

We are already possessed by the world and its source.
We do not even possess ourselves.
But in a sense, we possess all insofar as it is given to us in experience.
But we do not control what we do with it.
We only control our responsiveness, our desire.

Power does not give control.
It takes it away and deepens the abyss in our spirit.
That is the paradox of power.
Giving up control does not take anything away.
It deepens our primordial integration with reality by removing the illusive barrier of power and possession.

To embrace reality without controlling or possessing opens the possibility of love.
Love is the selfless relation to the Other.

Movement toward the Other, not predicated upon a striving to possess it as an objectified other but upon wonder and amazement before the ineffability of the Other, results in the unfolding of love.

Love is the only purpose of relation to the Other.
Love is the only possibility of true relation to the Other.

But power is the enemy of Love.
Power is the abuse of pure givenness, a meritorious corruption from economic thinking.
Love is the acceptance of pure givenness, and participation within it.

Love is the source of fulfillment.
It is the unconditionality of givenness.
It is the heart of blind and wild reciprocity.
It is the source of being itself.

The Primordial Eikon and the Birth of the Second Adam in the Johannine Prologue

In the prologue to John's Gospel, the focal point of creation moves toward primordial time, not time as understood in Genesis which proceeds preexistent chaos and involves the ordering of things and sanctification of time, but time as before all forms exist.

Word, or "Logos," in the divine discourse that undergirds the universe, the rational principle of the cosmos. It finds functional equivalency with "Sophia," or wisdom, in Jewish commentaries which speak of wisdom personified as a woman who accompanies God in the beginning as a guide to bringing order into creation (in LXX, Sophia is the word used for wisdom). For the purpose of understanding "Logos" as symbolic personification here, Sophia will substitute:

In the beginning was Sophia, and Sophia was with God, and Sophia was God; she was in the beginning with God. All things were created through her; nothing was created which was not created through her.

Nothing is created apart from the divine wisdom which accompanies God and finds locality in God's essence. John 1 goes on to describe the life-giving qualities of Wisdom and the light which emanates from her to all who enter the world. It also describes how any who accept her receive a new birth not of blood. This beautiful creation poem then ends like this:

And she became flesh and pitched her tent among us . . . full of grace and truth.

Of course, the elipsis here leaves out the part about Sophia/Logos being the unique Son of God. We will get to that shortly.

Apart from the christological identification, John 1 deals with the impartation of divine wisdom to humanity in bodily form. This parallels the creation of humanity in Genesis 1 insofar that humans are created in the image of God. Thus the embodiment of divine wisdom in human beings in a unique sense in John 1 involves an untarnished new creation separate from the degraded icon of God present in humanity as a whole. John 1 basically recapitulates Genesis 1 as a new creation involving new birth and the re-embodiment of untarnished divine wisdom. For John this recapitulation finds its locus in the theophany of Christ.

This is where christology enters, and in particular Pauline christology. Paul describes Jesus as "wisdom (Gk. Sophia) from God" and the "image of God." The Colossian Hymn  describes Jesus as "the image of the invisible God." In John, Jesus continually mediates wisdom to those around him and speaks constantly of it. For Paul, Jesus in the Second Adam, the recapitulation of primordial humans as the untarnished "eikon" of God. Thus, it can be said that the Johannine prologue describes the birth of the Second Adam and the reentrance of divine wisdom into the world through the embodiment of a sacred mystery "hidden from the foundations of the world."

From an evolutionary perspective, these things happen in reverse. Humanity does not fall from a pristine state but historically gravitates toward something higher. Within this framework the elements can still be re-appropriated without great loss of meaning. The Christ-event does not function as a mediating source of renewal between pristine Eden, inaugural present, and golden future; it functions as a North Star which recapitulates any lost potentialities in history and illuminates the event horizon toward which humanity is being moved by the same spirit of wisdom embodied in Christ. Thus, the new creation is beyond history and renewal and constitutes an event horizon beyond which a glory lies, the glory of the divine embodied in Christ which Paul says remains hidden until the resolution of this age.

Hence, the glory which exists as a pure potentiality in primordial time is that towards which time moves as an actualizing factor in the unfolding of divine perfection as manifest in the concealed revelation of wisdom and love.

Religion without Religion, or the Deconstructive Gesture in Christian Thought

In a world torn apart by religious and ideological conflict, it's easy to see why people are quick to claim that they are spiritual but not religious, or more paradoxically, Christian but not religious. Christianity is a religion, and fully functions as a religious order when it demands either affirmation of certain propositions or conformity to a spiritual path. It seems quite obvious here that Christianity is a religion by definition. But perhaps there is a self-deconstructive nugget of religious criticism present in Christianity, one with the potential to eventually overturn religion altogether one day. This is what I want to explore at present.

In the doctrine of the incarnation, Jesus as icon of God symbolizes a self-restriction on God's part culminating in the crucifixion and confirmed in resurrection. This resurrection ultimately leaves behind not the permanent fleshly body of the rabbi from Nazareth but the mystical body of Christ, the divine body and temple of God's presence on earth birthed in Eucharistic immanence. The human community thus becomes the ultra-particular locale of God on earth, eradicating the holy of holies in the heart of the temple in Jewish tradition. We become the ark of the covenant, the presence of the Holy Mystery. Thus transcendent, universal Being empties itself out (whether in a primordially symbolic or historically ontic sense I cannot say) into the fluid structure of universal Becoming as an immanent Presence mediated through interpretive structures in human experience.

Thus the end of the supernatural-moral-metaphysical God finds historical inauguration in the crucifixion, and the immanent-evolutionary-panentheistic God emerges in resurrection in our very flesh.   This is the Christ-event.

For this reason God becomes most present not in triumphalistic power structures of authoritarian dogmatism or militant coercion but defenseless orphans, friendless widows, and ostracized minorities. God is not found among the religious elite but their victims, regardless of identity.

In fact, since God cannot be kept out of humanity locked in a transcendental structure of blind abstract universal interpretation, God cannot be kept exclusively on the side of one singular culturally-constructed identity. Thus, identities crumble and God becomes present behind all identities and interpretations, in the simple ontic facts of human existence and suffering.

Jesus claimed that he brought a sword which would tear families apart. The family was the central tribal identity in his culture -- not the nuclear family of the West but the patriarchal model of Middle-Eastern life (neither of which represent any sort of permanence in history). Jesus was inviting people into the simple reality of a universal human family of one blood -- that of the human race. "In Christ" they would realize their commonality in one blood - Christ's blood. This is not magical. Christ stands in as a representative of primordial humanity outside of any roles projected onto to him, not because this "identity" can be posited as a distinctive cultural role but the very opposite -- he is the negation of all identities that might have fallen on him during that time. Sure, he is like a prophet, but no regular prophet. Like a king, but no ordinary king. He is crucified outside the city walls over the valley of Gehenna -- a cultural symbol of identity-negation. Thus, "in Christ" identities are crucified and "new creatures" are born into one universal family beyond singular identity. This is why for Paul there are no biological, policial, or religious boundaries "in Christ," epitomized in his erasure of the "male and female" binary (biological), the "slave and free" binary (political), and the "Jew and Greek" binary (religious).

In this sense, Christianity invites us beyond religion, beyond itself, into the Holy Mystery and Presence which encompasses every particle of matter without selling itself out to conceptual interpretations but flowing through them as a life-giving force and empowerment of human beings in relation to each other.

An Evolutionary Tale of Cosmic Creativity

In the beginning, the Father fell in love with a reality-yet-to-be. Within her womb -- the spaciotemporal vacuum, he planted a divine seed of quantum concentration and potentiality. This seed then sprouted and burst open into an explosion of colors, nebulae, stars, galaxies, and other things that as yet remain behind a veil. And then on a little planet called Earth, the first seed of organic carbon-based life was planted in the soil of primordial mystery, watered by the Spirit as it hovered over, and from originary stardust it rose up to evolve through mystical multiplication and increasing intricacy.

And over an epic of millions of years, it became fully human, dangling like a leaf from a magnificent biogenetic tree. The tree did not need the leaf to survive of course, but the leaf -- although it may have had the potential to be the most magnificent fruit of the greatest intrinsic worth -- still needed the tree to survive, and is realizing over time that in order to survive, it has to seek the preservation of the tree as its own mother. Unfortunately, it has failed in this respect and has refused to bear the fruit latent in its DNA.

Now there are religious ideologies propagating a false consciousness which seek to eliminate the need for this preservation and conservation through the indoctrination of an ideology rooted in a "Platonism for the people," a doctrine which points them away from ecological concerns towards a sure and hopeful afterlife. The irony lies in the name of this ideology: "conservatism," which really turns out to be the conservation of "my wants, my greed, my self-entitled status and its benefits" over and above the conservation of the whole which gives us life. But by separating the Father from the whole, they argue that the whole can go to waste while the Father, who for some reason remains always ironically outside the "whole," raptures us out into another reality, one which is disconnected from this reality -- the one built on the blood and sweat of the oppressed -- and into another  one "out there" preserved for the privileged and elite -- just another silver platter on their plate of plenty. 

But I have a challenge based upon the very text of archaic authority which they yield as a hegemonic weapon to sever our cognitive dissonance and pacify us with false peace. The Genesis creation week takes a whole six days rather than one fraction of a second (perhaps this poem is trying to tell us that God did take some time?), and the second creation narrative points to the fact that YHWH planted seeds which then sprouted on their own and became a garden as opposed to an instantaneous creation (and as an aside, an instantaneous creation was Augustine's preference based out of his own neoplatonic presuppositions). 

But from another more beautiful perpective based upon the person as a microcosm of creation in nature (yes, I know, it sounds a bit anthropocentric but I don't intend it that way anymore than the implications of the mystification of repeated mathematical and geometric patterns all throughout nature do). This is best told as a story, myself not being the candidate for the character in a first person narration since it would sound awkward, and so on I will go with hypothetical anybody's personal creation story of evolutionary unfolding. There's a hypothetical girl. When her parents came together in love, her father committed through erotic expression an act of inception in her mother's womb, and through this inception formed a seed. The seed then multiplied, grew, and evolved in the womb of her mother, eventually becoming a human being.

A nine month epic of evolution from a single cell to a human girl. How is this different from an epic of millions of years of evolution from a single cell to a person? 

Microcosm and macrocosm. It seems like a decent enough parallel, although it may just be an arbitrarily drawn metaphor. Whatever the case may be, Christian theology is flooded with metaphors, microcosms and macrocosms (take for example the fact that Moses's basket in the Nile is the same word for "ark" in the flood narrative, and that in the Hebrew language is said to be made of the same two materials). So for whatever this tale is worth, maybe it will turn some conservative heads toward the epic of evolution as a grand unifying story with theological precedents calling for a "conservative" approach to the environment, ecological concerns, and the "conservative" preservation of our magnificent biogenetic tree.

On the Kenotic Evolution of the Divine

I. Deflection and Inscription

As stated in previous posts, the transcendence of God is a result of the impossibility to name, conceptualize, or reduce God. As the philosopher Lacan stated, we are dropped into an ocean of language and kept in its prison-house. Our language results from our historicity and cultural locality, born of interpretation, and we cannot think or interpret the world without it. We are forced to interpret the world in a particular context. Hence, there is nothing outside the text -- nothing outside of our interpretive experiences and historical moments. So when we speak of God, we ultimately speak of something we know not what. No man or woman has ever seen God.

God is the name we give to that thing which is always beyond the greatest thing we can conceive. God is the name of what we desire, why we desire, how we desire, and even of desire itself. Some say "God," others say Being or Tao or Spirit. Whatever the case may be, these words all point in the same direction, which is beyond all we see and toward something outside all locality and being, and beyond our origin itself.

For the philosopher Levinas, this meant that every attempt to name God was somewhat futile. Levinas was familiar with the Jewish tradition along with its ban on idols and indecipherable signifier for God, "YHWH." The Jewish forbiddance of idols had nothing to do with the noumenon, or the object-in-itself, and everything to do with the phenomenon, or the object-of-conciousness, the rendering of the noumenon via the interpretive Gaze. Hence, when any object is seen as an accurate representation or image of God, it becomes an idol - a reductive element. What this meant for Levinas is that any attempt to name God, describe God, etc., if it is to avoid the sin of idolatry, will result in deflection.

Deflection means that the images, words, concepts, etc. will inevitably bounce back at the subject, exposing the fact that they were projected from the subject herself out of the materials of her mind. Levinas claims that deflection will result in "neighbor love." This means that when our Gaze is drawn away from dead materials we mistake for God, it is refocused on something that we know to be alive and conscious and responsive and perceivable: the human being.

In Genesis, the Divine grants human beings the "image of God," or the name of God. The only thing in experience that we are permitted to give the name of God to is the human being. This does not mean that the human being is equal to God, which would result in reductive idolatry and contradict the Judeo-Christian tradition's other teaching that humans are not equal to God. However, it does mean that God has chosen the human being to be the primary site of mediation, at least in the New Testament. The act of recognizing the human being as being that primary/primitive site of mediation is an act of inscription. We are inscribing the name of God into the Other, identifying God within that particular site. We are not committing idolatry, but turning our Gaze toward creation's most privileged subject and finding an experience of God there rather than in wood, stone, words, or ideas.

II. Narrativity and Two Kenotic Events

Kenosis is a Greek word signifying the process of self-emptying. Divine kenosis is the self-emptying of God. Christianity contains two major kenotic events: genesis and re-genesis, or creation and new creation. But first a word on Christian narrativity.

Christianity can be understood as a type of metanarrative, but not according to the modern definition. As a narrative is does not posit a totalizing explanation of reality or function as a divine fiat making grand metaphysical claims such as so many dubious "truth-claims" in the Bible that have now been dismantled. Examples: the earth is flat, the earth is 6000 years old, the sun revolves around the earth, and a geocentric model and/or a three tiered world constitutes the universe we inhabit. Instead, the Christian narrative is a transhistorical collection of paradigmatic events and testaments that aid humanity by shedding light on our past and helping us think about the future. Christians ought to hold it as authoritative but not totalizing or inerrant. It helps them embrace mystery and suffering without resorting to nihilistic abandonment or mere naturalism, which encourage the embrace of animal instinct, focus on perpetuation of the species, and deter moral transcendence/responsibility. Christian religion, on the other hand, encourages ethical responsibility, transcendence of base instincts, agape, and self-sacrifice over against self-perpetuation.

In this vein, the two major kenotic events of the Christian narrative become very important. Here they are described in detail below.

1. Genesis

In the beginning, the wisdom of God ordered this vast cosmos into this intricate web of life. God, as the culmination of infinity and the Ground of all Being, enacted kenosis. God limited God's self by bracketing out infinity to create a space for finite creatures with self-determinative wills. This required limitations to be placed on God's infinite power. God did this because God is love, and God wanted to share this love with a finite creature that could respond in its own finitude to an infinite love. This was an act of self-sacrifice and self-limitation. It was a work of love. And God ultimately redirected our Gaze away from the infinite and toward the finite Other, whose own eyes speak of infinity.

2. Re-genesis

In the second beginning, the wisdom of God became flesh. Jesus was seen and heard as the Divine in flesh and blood. The Apostle Paul refers to this as Kenosis because Jesus was God emptying himself by becoming a finite vessel and ultimately, to become love and  to become weakness. God revealed God's self in the finite and called it "Emmanuel," or God-with-us. God brought "new life" into a humanity of death.

The kenosis of Christ is a change in the structure of the Divine in the earthly domain. God is no longer located in temples or clouds or above mountains, but within the body of humanity itself, or as Paul says, "the body of Christ." In the crucifixion, the Divine takes on full solidarity with humanity, even experiencing existential atheism in the cry "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" The God of power, intervention, sovereignty, and magic "dies" in the existential realm. The Resurrection does not lead to God overpowering the world and its determinative wills, even as Jesus "ascends to the right hand of God" to become King, but rather it leads to a new creation. Pentecost, a dramatic reorientation of God's interaction with the world, culminates in a more humanistic form of religion. God descends upon the body of humanity in the form of the "Holy Spirit," thus raising up (read: resurrecting) a new humanity, a new body, the "body of Christ" or the earthly body of God.

The implications of this event are endless and astounding. Understanding them better could do so much for dealing with the problem of flimsy theodicies, our lack of magic and miracles in a scientific age, and the growing sense of human responsibility toward "the other" in our world today. When the Divine is encountered at the site of the Other, the call to justice emanates outward and demands our response. And when we respond, we fully identify with Christ, thus becoming truly Christian.

III. "The House is God": Mark Z. Danielewski's Staircase, or a Literary/Aesthetic Perspective

In his postmodern novel of multilayered polyphonic narratives, House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski creates a grand sense of mystery within an infinite space spiralling down a staircase below a mere house. The House is a House of Mystery, a House of "Leaves," which not only brings to mind autumnal tranformations and elemental patterns of death and rebirth, but trails, paths, and especially counterpaths, or navigations away from the beaten path. The protagonist, Navy (read: Navi/gator), travels these "leaves" or counterpaths below/within the House, and he at one point claims that "the House is God." Which leads me to my point.

Invoking the subtitle of this blog, we (postmodern Christians) are following "counterpaths in the aftermath of God." We are leaving the beaten trail after having some mystical or luminous experience of the Divine, however deconstructive it may have been, and we are finding our footing on new territory, that territory mostly being here. Right here on planet earth.

So God is like Danielewski's spiral staircase. When Navy descended down this staircase, he became lost in a labyrinth of mystery. When the mystery ascended the staircase and entered the rest of the house, it resulted in violent disruptions. This is a bit of an inversion of traditional theistic understandings: we think of man as attempting to "ascend" to God to make contact (think: Babel), and we think of God's "descent" to man to identify more immanently. So Danielewski's inversion of ascent and descent relativizes the whole thing, especially with the notion that the whole thing is God.

And speaking of Babel, the writer Jorge Borges speaks of the universe as an infinite spiral or library in "The Library of Babel." This infinite library contains endless books from ancient to modern, all the way from contemporary and simple to old, mysterious, and incomprehensible. Men get lost in this library searching for God. On top of that, because it is infinite, any given place at any time is the center, or else there is no center. It reminds me of Gianni Vattimo's definition of nihilism (in the words of John Caputo): the emptying of Being into interpretive structure. So what if God displayed God's infinity in the structure of human language and thus endless interpretation? There would be no beginning or end, no center, or else everywhere is a center. Borges also briefly compares this library to a pyramid. Imagine that the pyramid begins at the pointed tip in the heaven and then widens in its descent. Now imagine God descending or "emptying" from the heavens and widening out into the endless interpretive structures of human language. Imagine how travelling the presence of God could be like travelling an infinite spiral staircase in an infinite library.

And so God is like this spiral staircase mentioned by Borges and Danielewski, and Danielewski's staircase changes shape and form infinitely.

First, a note on the descension into mystery. When Navy descends the spiral staircase, he becomes totally lost, until all forms disappear, including the staircase. What happens is he is forced to turn inward, to look into himself at his own psyche, illusions, problems, etc. This gives him more integrity. In his return to the natural world, his Gaze turns outward toward the Other, and he learns to ground himself in the ordinary. This is parallel with the descending (immanent) God of the NT (Christ), which results in integrity and neighbor love.

Second, a note on the ascension of the mystery. The violent disruption of the mystery into the House results in death and destruction. It also causes the House to reinvent and reorganize itself. This is parallel with the ascending (transcendent) God of the OT, which results in violent intervention and reorganization.

What we have here is a two way kenosis: God empyting God's self into the creation, and humans emptying themselves into the mystery/God. Kenosis here is dialectical -- the mystery empties itself out into the human realm or body of humanity, and humanity empties itself out into this divine body that it identifies with, thus sacrificing autonomy. The dialectical kenosis here is another meaning for "union with God."

IV. The Impossible Future

In an upcoming post, I will deal a little more with the issue of eschatology. But for how, here are a few notes on the future. The future can be seen under the following three qualifiers: the absolute future, the unforeseeable future, and the impossible future.

First, the absolute future. What I mean by the absolute future is the future that stands completely apart from all conceivable futures, from all desired futures, and from all planned futures. It stands outside of the horizon of our predictions. Whatever the future is, it has not yet been written because it has not yet happened. And many of the factors which shall determine it are out of our hands. This makes the future impossible because it stands partly outside of the realm of our own possibility and potentiality. And this makes it absolute because nothing we can do now will completely determine it.

Second, the unforeseeable future. The future is unforeseeable simply because it is not yet written and because it is absolute and uncertain. We are forced to thrust ourselves into the unforeseeable future and into impossibility.

Third, the impossible future. The future is impossible precisely because what is now possible has only partly to do with what is yet to be possible.

God is like these three qualifiers. God is absolute, unforeseeable, and impossible. God is absolute because God cannot be completely determined, and is only partly determined because of kenosis. God is unforeseeable because God is unpredictable. God is impossible because God transcends the realm of our possibilities. This has important implications for how we view the future of God.

Some thinkers look at our history up until this point and claim that because God has taken the direction of continual kenosis, there will be no overpowering final judgment and no reversal in this Divine self-emptying. But we cannot know for sure. The extent to which God became kenotic in Christ could never have been predicted by the OT prophecies or even by God's kenosis at the creation of the universe. How are we to know what the future holds exactly? God lies in the absolute, unforeseeable, impossible future, beyond our grasp. But what we do know up until this point is that the Divine autobiography in time has taken a strongly kenotic direction.

Postmodern Reflection III: The Imminence of God

I. Who is Jesus?

When Jesus asks, "Who do you say that I am?", my answer is that He is the Christ, the Tao, the Way, the Ground of All Being, the Ground of my Being, the Being beyond being, the great unfolding of the mystery of the Love of God in flesh and blood. In short, Jesus is Divine.

Now some will see Jesus as fully God and fully human, God in flesh and blood. I can and do agree with this, although I have to confess that I am not quite sure what it means for God to be fully human, or for a human to be fully God, which is why I would avoid using the "fully God, fully human" description. But I hardily affirm Jesus as God-in-flesh, the wonderful, fearful, paradoxical intersection of creation and Creator.

Others will see Jesus as a metaphor for God, a mystical Jewish rabbi who embodied the Love of God for the rest of us, showing us the Way to a deep, abiding relationship with God. And most of these people will not affirm the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I myself do affirm Jesus's resurrection and find myself in personal disagreement with the liberal view of it, although I believe it is possible that I am wrong and that this liberal view still affirms the point I made in the beginning: Jesus incarnates and unfolds the mystery of the Love of God in himself.

Jesus is wisdom from God and a flesh-and-blood source of the Divine. That is the point.

I think we have to be careful that as passionate religious people we continue to respect the Mystery that is called God, to preserve and safeguard its transcendence. This means that we are not dogmatic on our views about what it means for Jesus to be Divine, conservative or liberal. But for those of us who are "Christians," Jesus ought to be a place where we can somehow encounter the Divine through flesh and blood and discover God as personal and transformative while still transcendent.

II. Is Jesus the Only Way? -- A Deconstruction of the Question

I believe that when people ask whether or not Jesus is the only way, which is almost entirely based upon Jesus's (very contextual!) statement in John 14:6, they are working out of a paradigm that is foreign to Jesus. I don't believe this question is possible in a more Jewish paradigm. Here's what mean:

In the traditional paradigm, Jesus is called "the way to heaven." This is means that he is our ticket into paradise, a mechanism for our personal gratification.


In the new/ancient/Jewish paradigm, Jesus is called "the Way" into the kingdom, the Way that life is meant to be lived. The focus is not on going to heaven when you die, but in participating in God's bringing heaven to earth, remarrying them in a great wedding feast. Yes, Jesus is saying that certain other "ways" are false, meaning those of the other self-proclaimed messiahs of his day. Other messiahs and teachers were claiming that the kingdom of God (the marriage of heaven and earth) would come through violence and war and victory over the other, and therefore to participate in this kingdom was to fight for God and land (sound familiar?). But the Way of Jesus was and is to participate in the Kingdom of God through nonviolence, love of enemy, and crucifixion. It is a cruciform way of life, a life lived for the other.

To follow Jesus is to live this way of life. Think of the beatitudes: they are the ten commandments of the Kingdom of God, what the Apostles call the Law of Liberty or the Law of the Spirit. Let's read ALL of Romans 8:1 again (which is typically clipped short): "There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." Freedom from slavery and condemnation is found in the life of the kingdom, the life of the Spirit which is embodied in the beatitudes and the foremost commandment: love your neighbor as yourself. To live and walk this way is to find freedom in love.

So back to the question: Is Jesus the only way? It's not a way. It's the Way, and Christ incarnates it. It is universal, available to all, and perfectly unfolded in the life of Jesus. Jesus said he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. So if he's the "only" Way, he's also the "only" Life and "only" Truth, which makes no linguistic sense. Jesus embodies the universal, capital Way, Truth, and Life over and above all others - the universal Tao and Ground and Ultimate Reality that we harmonize ourselves with through the "way" we live.

So then why does Jesus say that no one comes to the father except through him? The answer to this is more contextual. There were many teachers who claimed that they had the keys to knowing God, but the ways of life they taught were contrary to the Way. Think of the Pharisees who taught that you had to clean up your life and live piously in order to be acceptable to God and in order to invite the coming of the kingdom and Messiah. Think of the Essenes who lived out in the desert and refused to engage the "unclean" society of the Other. Think of the zealots who wanted to defeat Rome through a violent uprising. Think of the Herodeans who collaborated with the Roman powers of oppression for money while Jewish peasants were suffering under the weight of Rome. The disciples of Jesus were surrounded by a polyphony of Jewish voices vying for attention. Jesus was claiming that they had all lost the plot, and that in him and in his lifestyle you would find the true Way: eating with sinners, loving enemies, engaging the culture (including Gentiles), standing up for the oppressed, siding with outcasts, helping the poor, etc.

So Jesus incarnates a universal Way, available to all people whether they know his name or not -- for as Paul announced, the Good News has already been proclaimed to every creature under heaven (Col 1:23).

Postmodern Reflection II: The Transcendence of G-d

The Jewish Scriptures are often seen as speaking of another god-form made in the image of man, anthropomorphic and schizophrenic, just like the other ancient gods of the age. However, while there are certainly places where the text speaks of God in this way, the Jews knew full well that they were using cultural metaphors, and the Jews today do not read their Scriptures as inerrant.

Despite your opinion on their god, there is something embedded in their text that once you see is inescapable, irresistable, seductive, frightening, and challenging all at once. A good introduction to this embedded point, a point which serves as the virtue by which a radical deconstruction opens up, would be the following quote from Daniel Chapelle in his book "The Soul in Everyday Life":

"In the biblical tradition of the Judeo-Christian West, the essential unknowableness of all things, the fundamentally unnamable ground of all Being, is represented by the tetragrammaton YHWH. This unpronounceable Hebrew four-letter word—the original unspeakable “four-letter word”—consists of four consonants without pronunciation symbols. The deliberate omission of pronunciation symbols keeps it unspeakable. This safeguards the mystery of Being from being inadequately named, from being expressed in ways that fail to do it justice. The etymological root of the tetragrammation YHWH is associated with the verb hawah or hajah, meaning “to be.” This has been related to the scriptural “I am,” and thus to the metaphysical idea of “He is” or “He who is”—Being itself, Being in its most absolute sense. Historical data about related words suggest that YHWH lends itself to being pronounced as “Jaweh” or “Yahwe.” Hence, the “Yahweh” of modern usage. The insistence that the ground of Being should be identified by an indecipherable cipher, a cipher that is deliberately kept unspeakable because it is too full of mystery, serves to reflect a reality that is unidentifiable because it is unnamable, meaning unknowable. Put in traditional philosophical language, historical beings are phenomenal or concrete and visible, but Being itself, the ground of all beings, cannot be named by any noumenon, any definitive name that identifies it in absolute, objectifiable terms."

From this radically deconstructive vantage point, God becomes simultaneously named and unnamed, both "God" and "god." The Divine is signified not through definition or empirical description, but through negation and direction. God is pointed to as behind the dark cloud, all definitions and descriptions becoming negated by that cloud--what the mystics of old called the Cloud of Unknowing.

This is where the forbiddence of idolatry finds its origin.

This ban on idolatry is unique to Jewish culture and tradition at the time of their inception and for a long time after. This is no mistake because the Jews desired to safeguard the mystery from being captured, co-opted, territorialized, and contained by a concrete object. These concrete forms, even though they were most likely understood symbolically, were understood as capturing and replicating the form of God through divine revelation. But the Jews knew that God was formless. To idolize God would be betrayal of God. It would bring the Creator down to the stratum of the creature, or the origin of all forms down to the forms themselves.

In the Hebrew language, in the etymology of words translated "idol," you can find English equivalents like "image" and "form." The Greek equivalent, as evidenced by the Septuagint, is "eidos" which translates to English as "idea." So not only are idols images and forms that we lock the Divine into, giving it the shape we desire it to have, but idols can also be ideas or concepts we use to tame and cage the Divine.

In the New Testament, the Apostle John claims that God is Spirit. Spirit in the Greek is the same word for wind. The wind is formless and image-less. It cannot be understood or tamed or predicted. The entire Judeo-Christian narrative testifies to this God -- the Ground of all Being, the Logos, the Tao, the Cosmic Christ, the Way. But the Old Testament is especially a testament to the transcendence of God, while the New Testament leads us more surprisingly into the immanence of God while continuing to safeguard the Mystery of Being.

Postmodern Reflection I: On Existential Emergentism and the Epistemic Threshold

Existentialism is compatible with nihilism in that an existentialist is born a nihilist and reborn an existentialist. The nihilist stares into the void, and as Nietzsche said, “the void stares back.” She perceives a groundless ground resting on nothing – everything from nothing – a relativising void. This is Absolute Terror. She stares it in the face, that great impenetrable darkness, and screams, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” But soon death’s prick, the experience of crucifixion, takes its toll, and the individual is left either dead or miraculously surviving. And at this point she is able to stare death in the face still and yet say,

“O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where are your inhabitants? Either they are forever asleep and have forgotten you totally, or they have vacated your empty stomach and you are left to starve. Your victory is empty and untenable.” At this point, having survived the void of death, the nihilist has gone through the cruciform cocoon and is emerging in an existential rebirth.

This rebirth is the resurrection event. The void that once rendered meaning arbitrary and illusive has been occupied by the subjective individual, rendered an object, and thus becomes a new ground for creativity. At this point the existential individual is ready to create meaning anew. Thus the creative act is born, and the individual is able to fly over the void on the wings of creative balance. This is Absolute Freedom.

Part of this existential maturity is the recognition that the impenetrable darkness perceived to be a void, an abyss of meaninglessness and soulless emptiness, cannot be confirmed as such. In fact, it may be that the darkness is the blindness that results as a consequence to an overexposure to infinite light. It may be that the dark cloud called “void,” this ineffable mystery that tears apart humanly-constructed meaning, is the sea of reality so deep and so wide that it cannot be contained and thus utterly fills every crevice while pouring over and absolutely transcending. Absolute Terror and Absolute Freedom are one. Thus the existentialist never really stepped into an abyss at all, but a sea so full that the creative act is not a god-act, but the rearranging of some materials in an infinite ocean, a form of human reductionism.

In a way, this non-god-act of dust from dust is still divine creativity. It is still a type of god-act. At the beginning of Genesis, our most popular creation story, a sea covers the earth and the spirit of the Divine sweeps over it. From this sea arises and manifests ground and land and earth and animal. Thus God creates from already existing materials, placing things in order through three acts of separation and three acts of filling:

Separation Filling

Day 1: light from dark = Day 4: light into sun and day, dark into night

Day 2: water above and water below = Day 5: fish into water and birds into sky

Day 3: land from sea = Day 6: vegetation and animals into land

And so we see that in this story, creation takes place through organization and emergence. Thus the true existentialist takes part in the creative act of emergence and organization and re-emergence and reorganization. When the flood comes up again from that deep sea called Mystery, she sails it until she finds dry land and starts again if need be. She sails the current of evolution as reality reorganizes and re-emerges, recognizing both potential and finitude, subject to that great current against which she cannot ultimately stand, but which she will one day join again.

Fundamentalism as Idolatry

The fundamental core of the “fundamentalist” brand of any faith tradition is a commitment to holding one’s articulation of all things spiritual as having the corner on the market to the exclusion and damnation of every other faith tradition. This position is damnable in itself. The problem is not a claim to authority, which works to a limited extent, but a claim to absolute authority over and above extra-traditional witness. This leaves the Divine no wiggle room.

Take for instance the extra-traditional movements of the Divine testified to in the Jewish scriptures. YHWH speaks directly to Nebachadznezzar, Gentile king of Bablyon, showing grace. God calls Abraham out of a world of utter mystery and ignorance, showing favor. In the record of Ezekiel, the Jewish temple priest Ezekiel finds himself in exile, banished from the territory of his God and his God’s temple (his God’s dwelling place), and in exile in Babylon. Babylon is the land of Ishtar, the Pagan goddess. His God surely cannot be found there. And yet, he has a surreal vision beyond words, witnessing strange creatures and wheels inside wheels and all kinds of odd stuff, and his God comes through in this vision. His God is there in the land of Ishtar, far from the temple where he “dwells” and “lives,” wrapped in mystery: the same God who called himself “I Am” to Abraham. And later this God, known as the mysterious, transcendent God who dwells behind dark clouds rather than in stone idols, becomes human! And no one would claim that the incredible accessibility of God in this human body means that God no longer transcends, although God has become very immanent. God is both transcendent and immanent.

In fundamentalism, the religious text confines God to human words and human witness. In Christian fundamentalism, the Bible itself becomes an idol. The Bible is understood quite “literally,” and the cultural worldview and language which composes the text is ignored or regarded as divinely inspired. The reader’s first or second impression of the text, apart from deep cultural study and very biased and personalized, immediately organizes itself into a theology and cages God up. The words of man in response to an encounter with the Divine become the very words of the Divine, thus solidifying the witness against any other.

Theology, like the Bible, is a witness and testament to the mystery of God. Human beings throughout history had many incredible encounters with the Divine, including the incarnation (Christ), and the product was this incredible response: the Bible. But the best words of humanity about God are not divine. They are still human words, translated through human and cultural metaphor. When a theology becomes the last word about God, it territorializes God from further revelation, denies God’s transcendence, and raises itself to the level of the Divine. Theology is our best Spirit-led understanding of a sacred text produced by a sacred witness of God, and it testifies to future witness and revelation. When we read the Bible as Christians, our stories intersect with God’s story and the stories of those before us, and out of that intersection comes a localized theology. That theology is local and limited, and yet profound and beautiful. And there will be those after us who will have other local theologies that are also beautiful, enabling them to join in the same dance with the Divine in which we are now also engaged. Let us honor this sacred witness and narrative, joining in and articulating and embracing, all the while allowing God to speak in whatever context he/she pleases.

Heaven and Hell in Narrative Perspective

If you call yourself a follower of Jesus, there may be a few things you want to consider. For one, if God’s love is not strong enough to draw followers apart from the threat of hell, how can that love be real and Divine and truly at the heart of your faith? The fear of hell cripples and weakens our faith, and hollows out its core, leaving only a shell. And the core of Christ is Agape – unconditional love – not wrath and fear. To be “in Christ” is to live and walk within the paradigm of this divine love. This is why, as John says, “God is Love” and “perfect love casts out all fear.”

Heaven and hell occupy the same space – earth: the terrain beneath our feet, the air we breathe, the cultures we live in. Every choice we make is an opportunity to bring heaven or hell to this world. And for the early Christians, the ultimate hope is the victory of heaven here, or the “Kingdom of God,” and “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” John says that to join the Reign of God is to pass from “death to life,” or from hell to heaven.

Heaven constitutes anything integral to the Reign of God and the story God is telling – the story of reconciliation, redemption, and transformation – and God is calling everyone everywhere to repent. To repent of hell – the stories we tell ourselves, the lies and illusions and fictions we live in. The illusion of inequality, the illusion of class, the illusion of merit and entitlement, the illusion of injustice as just – these fictions constitute the kingdom of this age and all things outside the realm of God. Those who live within a fictional paradigm of reality will find them selves miserable and disconnected at the realization of the Reign of God. Those who allow God to retell and rewrite their story, and to take heed to the story God is telling, will find them selves more fully integrated with reality at this manifestation at the end of the age.

Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord. Jesus – the God who took on flesh and suffered, who drank the cup of the victim, who befriended the outcast, the unclean, and the Other. The God who stood alongside the victim at a time of oppression, who condemned the Roman Empire and the kingdoms of this world, who overturned tables of economic oppression occupying the Gentile court, who called for justice and compassion and love, and was brutally murdered for it. This Jesus was vindicated at the resurrection, and will vindicate humanity. This God is Lord over the creation. All will see the glory of this reality of love at its coming, and all will be saved.

However, “each in his own season.” Some cannot bear to embrace this vision of God’s benevolent society among us – a society where the unwanted workman at the end of the day receives the same wages as the one who came in the morning. A society where people don’t get what they deserve, that doesn’t operate on the principle of merit. A society where the least are the greatest and the greatest are the least. A society where those with a name suddenly have no name, but those without a name become great. A society where those who humble them selves are exalted, and those who exalt them selves are humbled. A society that knows no war. A society whose citizens love each other unconditionally and “share all things in common.” A society where envy, malice, greed, and lust have no place. A society where the religious Other is welcomed into the “holy of holies” behind the veil, and yet the religious Elite find them selves suddenly cast out.

Because some will see this society come into being, and they will remain close-fisted for a time, suffering the consequences of their obstinacy. But then there are those who come to an end of them selves; who deny them selves; who take up the cross of shame, humility, and servanthood; who stand against the empire and against oppression; who care for the poor, the widow, and the orphan; who give up much to see this benevolent society become a reality for everyone; and they will see the glory of Christ when the Kingdom comes. They will shine like the stars in the Reign of God. This is the story God is telling – the coming of heaven to earth and the conquering of hell. Which story do you want to live in, which version of reality will you tell yourself, which do you find most compelling?

Why People Are Afraid of Universalism, or the Possibilities of "Love Wins"

Our reality is wired to a state of action and consequence, and this sequence is abstractly referred to as “Karma.” From our vantage point within a historical cycle within historical cycles (think of Ezekiel’s wheel within a wheel), we often feel as if we are trapped within what Hindus call “Samsara,” the great wheel of life. In Buddhism Samsara is a vicious cycle, only escapable by Nirvana – the total detachment from self, identity, and the world. Christianity often mirrors this reality rather than challenging it. Salvation comes through a detachment and disenchantment with this world, in hopes of transcending it and reaching another higher world.

Even the Eschaton presented in our theology does not see this world as becoming redeemed from Samsara, but being destroyed along with it – marking a break between “time” and “eternity.” Because of our Karmic understanding of reality, we have a difficult time imagining a reality where all would be redeemed and the ultimate consequence of destruction for evil would be defeated for all.

We yearn for the destruction of evil, and leave grace only a marginal area for ourselves and our tribe. We struggle to imagine a reality where Karma is totally and completely defeated and not just marginally curbed.

Many people claim they cannot understand why God would be gracious at all, and this illustrates why it is that they cannot envision a reality where grace reigns over all. They want at least some punishment and consequence, either for the worst of us (Catholics) or those of us who don’t repent (Protestants). And some of us cling to the penal substitution theory of atonement, which makes a way for grace to cease from interrupting and making even one small dent in the Karmic cycle. The solution is rather that grace is an alternative satisfaction of this blood-hungry Karma beast, opening a small tunnel out by redirected consequence while leaving the beast happy.

Universalism would mean the end of Karma and the Reign of Love in every crevice and corner of creation. It would require that the totality of Grace would rule, reign, and abolish Karma in its totality in every corner and crevice. Apparently, this scares some people.