Gates to Paths to Gates

Theologians seek to understand more and more about God.  Cosmologists seek to understand more and more about the universe.  Biologists seek to understand more and more about living things.  Cosmology and biology (along with virtually every other field of study) share a particular basis of legitimacy that theology cannot claim.  Fields other than theology can discover and incorporate new foundational theories without invalidating the substance of prior and less sweeping organizing principles; indeed it is often the case that the ability to explain and contextualize existing knowledge provides the most powerful testimony of a new theory’s value.

 

Biologists did not have to belatedly discover the undoubted phenomena of species and their categorical relationships in order to justify evolution as a legitimate subject of inquiry.  In regard to cosmology, the discoveries of gravity, relativity, and quantum mechanics did not obliterate the basic understandings of relationships between physical objects that have held since the first rocks got picked up and banged together.  Theology, on the other hand, rests on the presumption that the most fundamental ideas of God held by the observer can be expected to control—perhaps to entirely obliterate—every less sweeping idea about existence.

 

If God provides good things, then after this life he will provide for his own; such is the basis for Jesus’ assurance to his followers that he would prepare a place for them, and it is not surprising that his statement would seem to upbraid them for ever having wondered about the matter: “if it were not so, I would have told you.”  Similarly, the question about whose wife a woman would be in the hereafter is a question that Jesus said was obliterated by the power of God.

 

Nothing is left unencompassed by the sweep of Jesus’ teachings.  To lose all—family, possessions, stature, etc.—is not only to gain them in the life to come, but also to have cause to possess them conceptually in the here and now, as a co-heir of Jesus.  In time of drought, a last cup of water given away to a thirsty child remains not only effectually the possession of the giver, but is also the first-fruit of every good thing in heaven and earth, possessed by the giver in every way that really matters.

 

The matter of earthly possessions held as an actual, legitimate inheritance of a believer (think the Pentateuch) being subsequently denied the believer by a development in theology is but one example of what I describe here.  Foundational developments in theology are assumed to have the potential to sweep all before them.  (I trust the reader to know that a simplistic follow-God-to-get-good-things theology had been rejected long before Jesus, by Jews and by others.)

 

The important point, however, is that theology (or, more broadly, religious thought) cannot involve individual elements.  Broken down crudely into the concepts of the divine, the self, and the universe, it must still be said that a shift in the conceptualizing of any one of the elements must affect all the others.  Ostensibly concepts of God will be the drivers, but not even that much need be asserted; the important thing is that the elements cannot exist independently.

 

This is the most likely application of Jesus’ warning about new wine in old wineskins.  We cannot simply change in the universe; the universe—the kingdom—we inhabit must change as well, and change it does, though we might neither recognize nor allow the fact.  That is why Jesus speaks of gates and paths and the kingdom of heaven both nearby and already here.  The spiritual journey is rousings and readyings and reapings—a continual journey to the true kingdom.