The Expression of Like Ideas

I must deal with the concept of “transcendence,” particularly as I believe it is misapplied to the teachings of Jesus (and, of course, to the understanding of divinity that undergirds Jesus’ teachings.)

I will refer to a Patheos blog post by Anthony Costello:

“The Next Major Shift In Christian Apologetics?: Paganism & The Power of God”

(https://www.patheos.com/blogs/theologicalapologetics/2022/10/the-next-major-shift-in-christian-apologetics-paganism-the-power-of-god/)

Costello writes, “Human beings are designed to worship that which is somehow above them, but which is also personal in nature. If they do not enter into relationship with God (who is ultimate in both aspects), they will find a lesser, but similar, replacement.”

Costello is repeating a perennial mis-statement of Christian theology—that human beings, such as we can understand them, reflect what we can presume to label “God’s design.”  Whether polluted by The Fall (with which I disagree) or shown to be lacking from the very recorded start (which I have described as Adam’s lack of satisfaction in being “alone”), humanity has never reflected a “design” that can be assigned to the will of God.  Indeed, the more it is contended that human beings (who Jesus called every one “evil”) reflect God’s design—and also the more it is held that we can presume to comprehend that original design—the more likely it is that we will fail at the last to understand our needs and to appreciate the salvation offered by Jesus.

Contrary to Costello, “human beings” are NOT “designed” to “worship that which is somehow above them, but which is also personal in nature.”  We are in a state different from that which we might contend was the original state of created humanity (if indeed we might even grasp what that state was).  Looking to our present state as some sort of shadow of our proper creation leads us to misunderstand Jesus’ role in re-establishing that proper condition.  Jesus did not go about connecting us with a God “somehow above” us, and he did not go about connecting us to something “personal.”  Jesus went about drawing us through those spatial and natural conceptions toward the ultimately inconceivable—the God I have described as the great Other.

Our God is a transcendent God, but standard Christian theology gives us a shrunken and impious version of that transcendence.  Christianity presents a “transcendent” God who “transcends” every boundary and every conceivable limit WITHIN THE COLLECTION OF PROPERTIES WHICH WE CAN CONCEPTUALIZE.  The “God” of Christianity can be everywhere at every time and know everything.  On the other hand, the true God transcends time and space and thought—or are we to presume otherwise?  The very idea that we can reenter communion with God is the greatest idea—the least conceivable idea—that we might encounter in our earthly existence.

Jesus’ ability to draw us again into communion with God is the ultimate miracle of salvation, and it is that very ability that is the center of the gospel narrative.  Jesus BEFORE HIS PASSION told his disciples that he had overcome the world, and Jesus’ ability to reunite us with God is the miracle of his narrative and of his salvation.  The Christian idea that Jesus saved through the Resurrection is nothing but a shrunken version of Jesus’ miraculous quality.  The Christian fetish with the Resurrection takes a stated version of “something that could happen only miraculously” (Jesus dying and then resurrecting himself—the “himself” part being crucial, what with the regularity with which people rose from the dead in those days), and then Christianity presumes to sell that story as a recognition of God’s (and Jesus’) “transcendence.”  This is a horror.  The dirt scuffed about on the floor of the tomb was a greater miracle than we can truly conceive, as is the very existence of anything.

Costello writes that if human beings “do not enter into relationship with God (who is ultimate in both aspects), they will find a lesser, but similar, replacement.”  The “both aspects” to which Costello refers are encapsulated in his description of God as “that which is somehow above them, but which is also personal in nature.”  Wow.  So the “transcendent” God who only Jesus could simply and without reservation call “Father” is “transcendent” enough to be ultimately “above” humanity and ultimately possessing of a personal nature.  What a pitifully underwhelming description of God, who truly transcends all direction—indeed, all dimension—and whose appraisal by humanity as a “personality” must border on degrading blasphemy.  Sadly, it is inescapable that “transcendence” in Christian theology does not refer to the inconceivableness of God, but rather to a self-congratulatory contest of trying to come up with the most sublime and expansive descriptions of conceptuality into which to huff up an idealized balloon of “God”.

Later, in a comment reply in which Costello contends that “atheism can’t last,” he tells us that “human beings are made to worship God, or, put another way, they are made for something that transcends themselves.”  This statement is particularly unfortunate, but is does highlight the essential flaw in Christianity’s assessment of the nature of God.  Actually, nothing in our existence is more to be avoided than acting as though “human beings are made to worship God, or, put another way, they are made for something that transcends themselves.”  “Transcends themselves”?  Girding its loins most earnestly, Christianity through the ages has attempted to expand its conceptions of the inconceivable God, with greater or lesser success, but it has never been able to free itself from that attachment of worship to appraisal of God.  After all, such a thing SEEMS pious, but appraisal is forever tethered to the self-conception of the one doing the appraising.

Unfortunately, there is a crucial difference between seeing God as frustrating all concepts, and seeing God as satisfying convincingly all expansive and majestic concepts we can come up with.  When our intellects collapse before the prospect of conceptualizing God, we at least in our exhaustion have taken a shuddering step—even a shuddering attempt at a step—toward true worship.  When, on the other hand, we praise God as a the ultimate of anything we can conceive, we are indeed trying to worship (as we must try), but we can never forget that we are shoving toward God a gift that is presented only with the provision that its value is commingled with the esteem we attach to our attempts to understand.

And any attempt to understand is destined to fail.  That failure is part of the worship, but a true moral failing latent in any of this is bound up with the idea that humans must worship something that “transcends themselves.”  God transcends all concepts, while—all disavowings of idolatry notwithstanding—praising God for “transcending” any limits within or between concepts merely rebounds to the undeniable fact that the worshipper is claiming participation in the scenario.  Actually, worshipping a God who is “transcendent” requires crucially the realization that the worshipper is neither “transcendent” nor capable of postulating any comprehensible participation in transcendence.

A worshipper of God is not an “understander” of God, and Costello notwithstanding, any attention directed to the notion that human beings “are made for something that transcends themselves” would be as meaningless as to contend that Jesus, demanding that his followers see their Savior in their fellow humans, was interchangeably demanding as Savior that his followers see themselves in their fellow humans.  We must extinguish both our selves and our self-driven approaches to understanding.  Our proper task in addressing ourselves to God’s transcendence is to attempt—however feebly—to extinguish all limitations of conception that we attach to God.  Any conceptualization that we retain is necessarily originating in, and tied to, our self-conceptions.  We have no other way of understanding our existence, yet God is not some burnished and magnified version of existence.

Costello, of course, is not solely to blame for the notion that human beings “are made for something that transcends themselves.”  Paul pandered to the philosophers by repeating back to them the notion that “in him we live, and move, and have our being”—as though the inescapable and rather pedestrian notion of the connectedness of existence was of signal import.  An ultimately unassailable contention can be made that termites live and move and have their being in the Creator—if one wishes to waste time on attenuated strands of thought.

Jesus, on the other hand, credited his audience with knowing how the world works, and how the universe in its existence “works” only with the postulation of an ineffable Source—at least as far as we can understand.  Between the mundane elements of the world with which we are familiar, and the ultimate fact that we cannot understand anything ultimately, we exist.  Jesus ought not to have to tell us this, but he does make it clear when he presents to Nicodemus the idea of the wind—a mundane aspect of our existence that nevertheless (then as now) we do not understand in its ultimate aspects.  The wind can be understood in its nearness in terms of the person’s self, and in its distant origins in terms of the great Other.

It is through the meta-conception of the great Other—God both near and far—that Jesus directs us.  The God of Jesus transcends everything, and any notion we might have that the God of Jesus “transcends ourselves” is ridiculous.  “Why do you call me good?” asks Jesus.  There is but one who is good.  God is not the culmination or apex or type or consummation of any “good” that we can conceptualize—the adjective “good” as we know it (along with any other expression of esteem) must break down when we try to approach its application to God.

So also must break down any contention that God “transcends” us, and the expression of like ideas on the part of Christians is an aspect of lamentable idolatry.