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.

An Incarnational Vision for Religion

The point of the incarnation is that the Divine comes to us where we are, not that we have to search for it tirelessly. Sadly, for many, Jesus is a barrier to God. By this, I mean that they cannot understand how, if people all over the world and throughout history have never heard his name or about the events of his life, God can be seen as loving and as holding that dogma up as a requirement for having a relationship with the Spirit of God. It is, in fact, a Christian doctrine that we need God to come to us or our searches will be in vain. It is certainly true that humans are meant to search for the Divine and for deeper things, but if that search is in vain, God appears weak and not very universal at all.

I would imagine that if God is universal, which God is if God is God, then God must be larger than any religion. This means that if the God testified to by the Christian religion is real, then Christianity must testify to something bigger than itself, bigger than any dogma or doctrine. Having said that, doctrines are certainly great utility and, like the incarnation, act as vehicles to seeing the Divine more clearly. This is what theologians call “special revelation.”

These doctrines are incarnational because they embody deeper truths that connect us to the Spirit of God, just as the body of Jesus harbored the Spirit of God and translated it for us in comprehensible, human ways.

The Bible states that no one has ever seen God. This means that every image of God – every conception or articulation of God – is an icon, a sign. To solidify those images is to make the icon into an idol. Unfortunately, dogma and doctrine have been used to solidify images of God into idols.

John says that God is Love, God is Light, and God is Spirit. The prophets of old said God is Holy, meaning transcendent of human understandings and images. These are the most authoritative statements made about the nature of God in the Bible, and none of them represent anything less than transcendence and sublimity except perhaps love because it acts as a signifier for every action God performs among people. If God is Spirit, God cannot be solidified in dogma. If God is Love, God is understood through loving actions before the nature of God can be excavated (an impossibility).

What we observe of God are not framed representations but fluid movements. In regards to our experiences, God gives before God is. God becomes for us an experience of the Sublime. In Jesus we have observed the movement of the Divine among humans in the form of love, and we have called this good news. It is good news for the whole creation and for the future of creation.

The universal Spirit of the Divine saturates everything and gives life to all things. This God is universal and acts through love. This universal God comes to all people and does not need help. However, having been called to the discipleship of nonviolence, love, reconciliation, and the good news about the incarnated Christ and the kingdom of God, we have been given the ministry of reconciliation and the imperative to share those things that have helped us connect with the God of Love.

We speak of incarnation and incarnate the Divine in ourselves – which is why we call it the “body of Christ” – and we carry that light forward toward the reconciliation of all things.