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.