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.