Always Fleeting and Always New

Change in plans.  I just have some notes I want to make, although I should probably console myself with the notion that notes, not treatises, are really what a blog is about.

“Roused, Readied, Reaped” has as its architecture a familiar notion of a cycle or arc of life, but insofar as the “roused, readied, reaped” phenomenon happens in the lives of creatures, unfamiliarity (or confrontation with the “alien”) is an intrinsic element.  Experientially, change is alien, growth is alien, learning is alien.  And of course, as I have written before, the divine is in the first instance to be viewed as alien to us, with every substantive instance of affinity between us and the divine to be seen as miraculous.

This can provide insight into what Jesus must mean by “seeing.”  In a set of unsettling (and theologically unsettled) statements Jesus tells us to pluck out our eyes if they cause us to sin.  The jarring quality of the statement (independent of the fact that it is meant to be jarring) is presented to us chiefly by our limitations of analysis of the teachings of Jesus.  We are drawn almost irresistibly to fancied commonalities with Jesus, and we have the corresponding aversion to the alien.

It is, however, to the alien we must look if we are to find truth.  It is also to the alien we must look if we are to avoid sin.  God’s purity is alien to us.  The sin that separates us from God is, however, most mundane and familiar.  We would do well to note that Jesus is not warning us from sinful members of our bodies.  When Jesus tells us what to do when our eye causes us to sin, his statement is predicated on the notion that we have had experience of what happens to us when we cast our eyes in a certain direction.  Similarly, we have experience of what happens to us when we put our hands to this or that, or when we direct our feet here or there.

The remedy of having one’s eye cause one to sin is to look elsewhere—anywhere, if necessary.  The remedy is to look to the alien, and any search for God’s truth will lead of necessity to the alien.  It is the age-old phenomenon of “the dog returning to its vomit” that characterizes sinfulness.  Indeed, anything that has become familiar to us is apt to be a danger.  When Jesus speaks of new wine in new wineskins, he is speaking of our need to not only learn new things, but also to be willing to let learning change our very selves.  It is for this reason that the notion of time-honored “Christian growth,” lurching up already in the epistles, has little or no basis is the Gospels.  Jesus does not direct his teaching to the building up of knowledge, but rather to the breaking down of internal barriers, each breach of which makes a person to some extent a different person.

Of course, we are apt to resist such change—such yielding to the alien—and we are aided in this resistance by the fact that we must rely on the old that we know (or think we know) in addition to the new.  Jesus recognizes this when he speaks of the scribe and a store of knowledge new and old.  He also recognizes, however, (in an extension of the “wine” analogy) how people are apt to prefer the old.  We want to be able to rely on what we think we know.

Reckoning, however, that we must be willing to give up all to follow Jesus, we must admit that it is incumbent upon us to be open to new things, and to be open to new views of old things.  This is what Jesus means when he says things like, “whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”  We, indeed, hear such things spoken from pulpit and podium, but rarely do we register such things in the immediacy that characterizes Jesus’ teachings.  Let us hear—and believe we understand and accept—a teaching of Jesus, and for the rest of our lives we will hear such a teaching repeated and accompanied by “whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.”  To us, however, that usually seems like an admonition for us to recall our experience of learning the thing in question.  This is a horror.  Nothing learned from God is ever really understood by us—that is the essential nature of an equation that includes the perfect and the imperfect.  If truth is directed to us by God, it must be renewed continually by us in our reception.  “In our reception” is the key—knowledge of the things of God is never to be recalled in terms of a previously-accepted teaching and reinforced by a conscious desire to strengthen a belief already held.  Truth from God is to heard anew in every instance—and hopefully in as many challenging, alien instances as possible—from the very first reverberation of sound and from the very first glimpse.

Connection with the Great Other is always fleeting and always new.

Dismal Proceedings and Dismal Results

One of the most depressing aspects of trying to engage in criticism of Christian theology is having to address actual contentions of Christians who are trying to explain the Jesus of the Gospels.  The Jesus of Christianity is another matter, of course—the Jesus of the rest of the New Testament, the Jesus of Christian tradition and of the practice of claiming that among dozens of faith traditions yours has the “simple truth”—this Jesus can be explained.  The Jesus of Christianity can be explained because the denominations have decided who and what Jesus is, and invariably they find their variant Savior in the Gospels.

But the Jesus of the actual Gospels cannot be so easily explained—a difficulty that exists, of course, only if one thinks he needs explaining.  And the very business of “explaining” is problematic in itself.  Explaining invariably involves drawing out an image of the entity in question from agreed-upon pre-existing notions.  “This” is explained in terms of “that.”  Unfortunately, our thought processes then consign that which is “explained” to the periphery of more mundane understandings—the more-or-less known exists at the edges of what is known.  The rub is in whether we can hold to a notion of God (or Jesus) as more-or-less known.  In the Age of Discovery the edges of the map could be left blank, or be thought perhaps the abode of monsters.  The theologians’ tendency to form a picture of Jesus from a store of received theology and then to explain him as he exists in the Gospels results usually in a “Jesus” who is a monster.

Such it is often in theologians’ attempts to explain our current topic: The Lord’s Prayer.  Jesus, in the Prayer, throws us up against a duty to grasp for a different world than that which we prefer to imagine.  In the Prayer we are deprived of that very “knowledge” base—our experience-worlds, individual and communal—from which we might try to launch a voyage of “explanation.”  Accordingly, it is from concept-denying apprehensions of an estimable “Other”—God above all names and all nouns—that we must try to grasp anew the mundane reality of our existence, a reality that in our more self-assured moments we claim we would discard in a moment to be closer to God.  Instead, of course, we attempt typically to try to explain God and the things of God, with predictably dismal results.

In my next post I will present an example of such dismal proceedings.

A Life is a World

In my last post I wrote:

“ . . . we must reject the notion that God is meant to be understandable to humans if only humans will allow his sovereignty to be appreciated in transcendence across concepts common to our experience.  Concepts are not the way we bridge the chasm between ourselves and God.  Concepts are the way we bridge the gap between our not thinking of God and our thinking of God.

“Concepts are the way we can remind ourselves that God cannot be conceptualized.  God is the Perfect Other, not the Perfect Thing, not the Perfect Things, not the Perfect Infinitude of Things.”

This truth can be found in the Lord’s Prayer, usually related as in Matthew:

“. . . Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread.  And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:  For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.  Amen” (Matthew 6:9-11, KJV).

In light of this blog’s insistence on God being beyond conception (The Great Other), the following can be revealed:

“Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name”: Our heavenly father resides in a plane or state or whatever that we cannot conceptualize, and Jesus is dismissive of our attempts to understand any particulars of the heavenly.  Of course there will be provision for us there, but Jesus assumes that we will take that for granted as well, and not dwell on it.  Of course we might hope to reside there, but we will exist “like the angels”—whatever that might mean.  There may even be graded honors associated with the “hereafter,” but Jesus is neither concerned about that nor even—apparently—privy to its particulars.

As far as the word “name”: There is no place here for the sophomoric notion than a literal name means something in itself.  Jesus says in Matthew 18 “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”  Many twos or threes or throngs have “gathered together” in the literal name of Jesus and wished or done the greatest of horrors—neither the name of Jesus nor of the Father are expressed in letters or sounds, but in renown associated with reverence.  “Hallowed” in the context of the Lord’s Prayer must refer to conceptualization, not naming, and it is as foolish to imagine that we can conceptualize God as it would be to imagine that we can ever process a “name” sufficient for the divine.  God’s name is hallowed ground—believed to exist, but drawn back from in prudence.

“Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven”:  Once analysis of the prayer is properly begun, the rest follows naturally.  The supplicant is looking to a re-establishment of existence as the realm of God’s incomprehensible sovereignty, such as had at first confronted Adam.  The world of Adam’s conceit—the place of familiarity and identification for which he and all his progeny have yearned—must be supplanted by the alien—the alien, that is, of God’s sovereignty.  Asking God to do godly things in the world of mankind’s conceit is both ridiculous and impious.  We must ask only for a new world such as existed when creation was new.

Indeed, it is inescapable—and intrinsic to the logic of Jesus’ teaching—that to have a “life” is necessarily to have a “world.”  To “lose one’s life” is to allow one’s world to go with it, and for it to be supplanted by the world of God’s design—a world of unfamiliarity being supplanted endlessly by unfamiliarity.  We have no place of residence to which we can properly claim title, and no legitimate notion of inviting others to our place of residence unless they be the unwashed, the unruly, the dangerous—people who cannot repay hospitality and are as like to repay it with hostility.  That’s what Jesus says.  That would be for us a world with which we might never be comfortable.  Small wonder that the denominations preach the tidy householder’s security and spout about such hideous things as a “Christian worldview.”

“Give us this day our daily bread”: Supplication for what we believe we need in the world we believe to exist is rendered in the Prayer with as short shrift as possible.  Indeed, given Jesus’ disdain for bread alone and his insistence that God knows what we need before we do, the business of our asking for what we think we need borders on satire.  Why would we not rather simply ask to never be hungry?  Jesus’ description of what we might do with faith as small as a mustard seed would dwarf the filling of our stomachs.

“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”: Once driven through the bottleneck of “daily bread,” the prayer broadens out again to exploration of the unimaginable world for which we must ask.  “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors?”  To paraphrase the young Hamlet, who then shall escape damnation?  The emphasis of this portion of the prayer—as indeed in any aspect of our attachment to the divine—must be the effectual dis-attachment we feel when faced with the impossibility of satisfying God’s requirements of us.  We might harbor fantasies—fantasies, that is, in terms of our understanding of our Adamic worlds—of being told, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” but Jesus rather places in our mouths, “we are worthless servants.”  If only our actual existences were such as would allow us to grasp for the former praise, when in actuality we deserve only the latter condemnation.

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”: Yet, as regards the above paragraph, need the situation be so dire?  Does not Jesus promise whatever we might ask?  Unfortunately, we cannot ask for some “thing”—that is, some aspect of our existence to be added, or removed, or altered—and expect any real improvement in our state.  As long as our world exists—as long, that is, as our life exists—we will always find advancement in any aspect to curl back upon itself with a vengeance.  Drive out one devil, and seven others will accompany it back.  “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” is asking for a new world—a new universe, a new existence—in which we are neither tempted nor faced with the prospect of testing.  The phrase is asking for the world that Adam rejected—the world that we all might be expect to reject, Adam or no Adam.

“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever”: This is the world—the kingdom—to which we must draw ourselves.  This is the world in which all that is estimable is estimable because it is of God, not because we find in ourselves affinity for it.  As I quoted myself above, “God is the Perfect Other, not the Perfect Thing, not the Perfect Things, not the Perfect Infinitude of Things.”  To say, of course, that we can “draw ourselves” toward the kingdom of God is next to meaningless.  Salvation will always be a mystery.  What is important about the Lord’s Prayer as regards salvation is the fact that is supplies a (usually missed) insight into the quandary of salvation.  A person who strives for salvation is really asking to be overtaken by mercy—striving being insufficient.  A person who understands properly the Lord’s Prayer is simply approaching the matter in the larger view.  We cannot ask for salvation as reward for what we do in our lives and in our worlds (which are really the same things).  We can, however, ask to be made offspring of the world of God—that is, to be overtaken by mercy working out across experiences alien and unasked-for, experiences that will drive us away from the familiar and from our tendency to find our gods in what is like us.  Whatever else might be said, the God of the Lord’s Prayer is not like us.

Confessing the Perfect Other

My exploration of the idea of God as the Perfect Other must start with a confession.  I have had a type of thought—and I will not say the thought itself is a bad thing—which I think is an understandable type of thought.  The thought, which I have entertained on and off for a number of years, is basically a conjecture to the effect that God is meant to be understandable to humans through a challenging of humans’ ability to conjecture beyond “normal” thought.  That is, God is meant to be understandable to humans if only humans will allow his sovereignty to be expressed in transcendence across concepts common to our experience.

The chief example of this type of thought as I have experienced it—and intermittently attempted to embrace it—is in Luke (and in slightly different form elsewhere in the Synoptics.)  In Luke 10, Jesus responds approvingly to the following answer from a “lawyer” about the most important aspects of the law:

“And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.”

My fascination with this passage arose from a notion that we were being challenged to test our limits of understanding of God by employing a certain logical device.  That is, if our love for God is supposed to be deserving of all of our capacities (heart, soul, strength, mind) and yet we are to love our neighbor, what then can we conclude but that—in some sort of pantheistic fashion—our neighbor, in order to be an object of the love which we must devote in its entirety to God, must be for us a part or aspect of God?

This conjecture, I must be careful to point out, is at least in part independent of the notion that Jesus is to be seen in our fellow humans.  To speak of us viewing other people as Jesus is more an evocative statement than a declarative one.  We can never forget that other people are not in fact Jesus—are not in fact possessed of the qualities of Jesus—and in any event in the lawyer’s response it is not “Jesus” or even “Messiah” that is phrased as the object of a person’s love, but God himself.

The lawyer says, in effect, that we are to give God all our love, and also that we are to love each other.  We do not solve the quandary thus presented by claiming that “in a certain vein” (such as persons potentially being believers being connected to Jesus being connected to God) we are all part of God.  God in such an instance of analysis is not God, but is—in part, at least—reduced to a physical, temporal phenomenon.  How this might be, we can attribute to “mystery,” but it would be just as “logical” to contemplate a “mystery” in which the love we must feel for God is as much different (and mutually exclusive, and independently overlapping) from the love we must feel for each other, as God himself is different from humanity.

God is different from us.  That is why he is worshipped.  God is not worshipped because he is like us, though we might frame our worship in terms of the familiar.  For example, we might declare that God’s love for us is as the love of mother for child.  Of course, to complete the thought, we must say that even if our mother’s love was to fail us, God’s love would not—which is not really a statement of praise to the Almighty.  What we might really mean is that our appreciation of God’s love for us is as our appreciation of the Perfect Mother’s love—which is really to compare God to himself.  And that how it ought to be.

To rephrase my contention from above, we must reject the notion that God is meant to be understandable to humans if only humans will allow his sovereignty to be appreciated in transcendence across concepts common to our experience.  Concepts are not the way we bridge the chasm between ourselves and God.  Concepts are the way we bridge the gap between our not thinking of God and our thinking of God.

Concepts are the way we can remind ourselves that God cannot be conceptualized.  God is the Perfect Other, not the Perfect Thing, not the Perfect Things, not the Perfect Infinitude of Things.