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.