To Which We Lower Ourselves

On 8/20/2026 I wrote,

"No degree of rebellion or impiety or whatever can be possibly rendered into a necessary conceptuality of smallness really imaginable by humans, on the one hand, and really representative of truth on the other hand.  What we see in the story of the Fall, and in the story of Adam's misalignment with his Creator beforehand, is God's placement of form upon a pre-function, ineffable state--the state of humanity's possible alienation from God that is a state receding backwards in time to the inconceivable . . . . This regression has no end-point we can understand, for alienation from God has no smallness that can be ever reached or postulated . . . . The crucial nature of our sinfulness, and the pervasiveness of our sin-nature, ought to impose upon us the realization that our affinity for evil is not to be understood as a phenomenon, but as a state--and that state is as simple and as undeniable as the fact that We Are Not God.  We are not God--and all else is sequelae.  The story of those sequelae is understood by us as the expression of phenomena, but every phenomenon that we believe we can understand about God is something we always understand too late."

"State," of course, is a poor substitute for some type of word that might describe a condition that exists--in this case, as our conceptualizations "work backwards"--as a condition understood as disappearing into the infinite while yet we must attach to "existence" that time-and-place conceit-mode that entraps us.  We were created as Not God--and all else is sequelae.  And all such sequelae spill forth from still prior states, impossible for us to pursue to the source.

We were created as God-not-God.  In our conceit-frameworks, we are impossibilities fashioned by The Impossible.  The Genesis use of the ancient term we translate as "image" cannot be subdued and dissected by us so that the latent-or-more-so implications of us either as "imaged" by God or as "images" of God can be established.  That we would be "like" God is ridiculous, and that we would be "unlike" anything referenced originally to God is ridiculous.

The anger, for example, of God is real--but we must reference it to the "workings-out" of actions of God that we can never work out.  The God who "discovers" sinfulness on the earth is not like some apoplectic householder who--having thought to have dispensed orders and responsibilities in accordance with some free-floating, third-party-authored prescription of labor-management relations--is outraged to discover afresh miscreance among his underlings.  No, the God who comes down to Earth to discover the carryings-on at Babel is a God related to us in a literary convention--the story is not "true," rather it is real in that it is addressed to us in accordance with our real limitations at understanding that which in regard to God is true.

We are God-not-God.  We were created like God with the propensity to be not so--what followed was a story without plot or timeline or setting, if only because the moment-state of us becoming "not so" was a moment of unimaginably infinitesimal dimension.  The only story was us created as God-not-God, the story of us created in the image of God.  The Bible describes us as created by and through Jesus--the only end of the story can be Creation vanquished in all its injustices by Jesus and incarnated in all its sufferings by Jesus.  It is the grinding duty of every follower of Jesus to tread toward the consummation of that unplottable story, even as every inclination of humanity is to grasp toward the times and places and reasonings-out of a human-pronounced "world" that we cherish even in its manifold faults--that we cherish even as Adam cherished his.  As the story of humanity goes, we and Adam have God at hand, and we and Adam will (have we but time and means) put our hands to anything else.

If in our first moments of existence, or if in any other moments, we would do what Jesus asks of us, we would indeed exhibit the perfection that Jesus requires of us--even as our Heavenly Father is perfect.  Before we were in a state of sinfulness, we were in a sinless state in accordance with our being created in the image of God.  That this blessed state passed in an immeasurably small moment, and occurred across immeasurably small spaces, is merely to restate the very initial conundrum--that we are impossibilities created by The Impossible.  All else, in connection with our trying to understand our predicament, is consummate silliness.

In Christianity, the great starting-point of this silliness is the singular fascination with The Fall.  No more sublime comedy exists in literature than the story of the talking snake, and no story casts abroad with more vigor the farcical nature of its ironic point.  The man and his arranged bride have been fretting and tromping about on the terrain of their burgeoning appetites for days or decades or millennia beyond counting, and sooner or later (like all of us, lest anyone should boast) they were going to eat of the Forbidden Fruit.  Humanity's access to the omnipresent divine has never been enough for humanity, and to join conventional Christianity in pronouncing humanity irredeemably sinful, we cannot but conclude that every attachment to existence serves to sunder a human being's relationship not merely with God, but also with that human being's birthright as being like God--like God, that is, until the first impulse or sensation of "existence" intrudes.

We were created to be like God.  When we exist we are not like God.  One would almost think that we would have to give up our very existences to be saved.  Actually, it is inescapable that we have to give up our very existences to be saved--but we are not going to do that, even though in his insistence that we must "give up our lives," Jesus requires that very thing.  No, instead we are going to make metaphorical and ceremonial and humility-gilded expressions of being subsumed into the crucified person of Christ.  The process of being "subsumed" is proper, but inevitably every element of humanly-lived "process" attaches us to the existence that surrounds us.

I offer no original prescription for this--I am scarcely able to process the diagnosis, and then only because Jesus provides it.  The problem is not that we sin in our existences, but rather that we attach sinfulness to failures of operation within perceived "good" or at least "neutral" existences.  No, the very fact that we exist is what separates us from God.  Neither the enticements nor the goods of existence are our essential banes--that role is reserved for existence itself.  That is why Jesus requires the perfection that we cannot claim individually to have always lacked--for we were created in the "image of God," and we debase both ourselves and God to try to figure out--or delimit--the implications of that phrase.  We will never live up to the image of God, but neither will we understand the nature and extent of our lack if we do not reckon that the totality of our lived existences stands between us and our Maker.

Neither our duties, nor even our understanding of our duties, stand between us and what Jesus requires of us--only us as distracted by the temptations of existence to which we lower ourselves.  Jesus, after all, does not say that our lack of faith prevents us from being able to ask God to move mountains--our lack of faith prevents us from being able to order mountains about ourselves.  We should be able to do such things--we were made in the image of God.

And yet for us we know only the image of God through our existence-riddled selves.  Sundered from our intended selves--ourselves basking in the "this day you will be with me in Paradise" availability of God in every circumstance--we can scarcely wend our way through an onrushing procession of false images, false images presented to us and created by us.  In our existence, we are the image of God, our temptations are the image of God, our Tempter is the image of God.

Our comfort is in the Jesus who wept, and who cried out to his God.  There is no comfort else.

In This Supplanting

There is a certain jibe against conventional Christianity that--one would hope--is in most applications quite unfair.  This is the objection to Christian morality to the effect that the name "morality" is scarcely deserved by a system of rules that serves merely as an exchange of behaviors against future rewards (or punishments--though it is the "reward" aspect that receives the most scorn.)

How is it truly "moral," one might say, to forego pleasures in this finite life in order to gain (presumably greater) pleasures in a future, infinite life?  Of course, two millennia of Christian moral thought has been anything but neglectful on this point.  It is the transformation of the person, the realignment of the person so as to do the will of God for its own sake, that is held to be the core of Christian moral striving.

Yet no one will doubt that the purported transactional nature of Christian morality is seen in frequent cases to float to the surface of many of the morasses of human thought and behavior that seep throughout our experience-realms, religion included.  Often we do what we are "supposed" to do, yet it cannot be denied that nearly as often it is obvious that we are not feeling particularly attached to the possible elevated inspirations of our actions.  And then again, do we not possibly place ourselves in "daily grinds" of ethical frameworks that obviously we find taxing, while yet it might be imagined that original selfless motivations have led us to undertaken such larger enterprises?

And so, of course, such questions can wend on and on.  There are, to us humans, no really clean scenarios of moral behavior.  Largely, it is left to us to try to clean up any of these messy situations to the extent we are able--and the attempted removal of the most unnecessary accretions to moral behavior would be at the top of the list.  In terms of Christianity's aspiration to foster the realignment of persons so as to desire the will of God, it would be best that followers of Jesus renounce two of conventional Christianity's oft-cherished conceits--that true religion involves conceptualization of an anticipated afterlife, and that true religion brings relief from shame.

The first score is easiest to address.  The notion of a conceptualizable afterlife is ridiculous.  The broken nature of humanity--a concept rehearsed ceaselessly by Christianity--must be understood first (as I have written almost ceaselessly) as a breaking of communion between Creator and created from the conceptualizable first.  There is no "going back to Eden" or the like--the bliss of Adam and Eve blissing on each other and sharing late afternoon chats with their Maker is not a true conceit of our existence's broken linkage being fixed.  The anticipated place of "going back" to "how it ought to be" is properly an anticipation of communion with the divine that we cannot imagine.

It is for this reason, apparently, that Jesus dismisses out of hand conjectures about who will be married to whom in the afterlife.  Jesus does not declare simply that God by his sovereign will can assign properly marriages in disputed cases (taking humanity back to the realm of "help-meets), nor does Jesus say that humans will be understandably human though no longer having any use for marriage.  No, Jesus throws in even the essentially unassimilable notion that people (or the saved among people, at least) will be "like the angels," whatever that means.  Of all the things that make us human, we cannot even know what--if anything--will persist in the afterlife of our social affinities.

We will die, and we will be confronted with many things that we did not understand, and we will be confronted presumably with many things that we did not understand for no other reason that it did not please us to consider them.  We do not know ourselves, and in our (fascinating, really) predisposition to imagine ourselves willing to be surprised about ourselves after death, we prance through our daily lives with nary a thought for the (undeniable, really) fact that this postulating about our undiscovered selves emanates from our "selves" as we package them for our personal possession each.  It is intrinsically perverse for us to imagine that we will learn merely many things about the consciousnesses that frame our moment-by-moment self-conceptions--while yet we have no warrant to deny that our essential selves might be constellations of memories and forgettings and impulses and whatnot though which our mutable momentary conceits of "I am" are mere wanderers.

We can imagine ourselves saying to Jesus on that dreadful day, "When did we give you drink (or not), comfort (or not)?", but we cannot imagine the divine perception that will scour possible levels and extents of our persons--and rarely (we should presume) to our credit.  To say that we might understand the process of Final Judgment would be as ridiculous as for us to maintain that we can parse out the Story of the Sheep and the Goats.  Would a collection of bereft souls wailing to be spared punishment really call out to the King, "When did 'we' not give you something to eat?"  And would it really be profitable to assign anything more than a diffuse, multi-faceted, generalized warning to a story that--if taken literally--will dissolve itself, since Jesus has made sure the surprised "sheep" and "goats" know the punchline already?

A "diffuse, multi-faceted, generalized warning" would be appropriate for us pitiful humans, especially as we are understood properly to be deserving of that to which I alluded above--shame.  A religion that purports to take away shame, or that--worse still--contends that a proper earthly orientation to the Savior can take away shame, is a religion that accords to itself an understanding of human beings that only God can know.  What we do not know about ourselves ought ever to make us invite the propensity--rare enough as a commodity--for shame.  It is shame that can pervade us, can pervade even the selves that we do not know or only fitfully know, while that manipulatable and socially-bargainable notion of "guilt" can be assuaged by infinite means, even as "guilt" presents itself to us as something bounded and finite--even as we maintain that guilt can be seen in its defined qualities to spread to those defined boundaries of our self-conceptions.

Shame, when lived with, can serve to supplant (even if flaccidly) those self-conceptions we would rather live with.  And in this supplanting of the self is to be found the only joy that Jesus says we can have.  We give up our lives for the joy of giving up our lives for Jesus.  This is the moral equation of salvation--not doing things or forgoing things merely to gain the desired opposite in a bargained afterlife, but rather enjoying faint and partial subsuming of self in the present, in exchange for enjoying inestimable and unimaginable subsuming of self in eternity.

Of the Fruit and the Tree

There is yet something else to be said about trying to come to grips with the third kingdom I described in the previous post.  The third kingdom is that which we arrogated to ourselves when first we tried to make sense of our existences.  Of course, the absence of our trying to make sense of our existences is not something that can happen on our present plane.  We cannot merely repose in the comfort of a Creation bestowed upon us by a God who made everything to be beneficial, and who presented to us the means to assure both ourselves and our fortunes if we would but ask him.  We are human.  We are fallible.  We are not going to ask him--at least, not without interposing our own shameful inclinations.

Adam did not avail himself of God's proximity, and we are not going to do it either.  We even tell ourselves that God is far away--far away, that is, from the lungings of our urgings, when rarely we lunge for God rather than something less noble.

And so we surround ourselves with our own conceits.  Our conceits are what make sense of the worlds we think are around us, and out of our very conceits we construct those self-same worlds, and on and on it goes.  We exist on the brink of madness, and we are afraid that we will go mad if we let loose of that skein of little madnesses of which we each construct our lives.  I am no fan of apologetics that presume to tell people what they are thinking, but of necessity any adherent of Jesus' teachings must subscribe to Jesus' assertions about what goes on--or must go on--within people.

Jesus told people that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood.  John told people that all of Creation was created by and through Jesus.  This driving toward madness is the self-same striving toward understanding that, where the things of God are concerned, would take as the greatest application of Jesus' admonition to have people understand that Creation is identified with Jesus.  We see and touch and eat and drink Jesus--if only our eyes are open to the fact.

The above is not all that madness-inducing--in fact, it might seem rather trite.  Trite, that is, compared to the consternation among Jesus' hearers when first he presented them with the apparent prospect of actually eating his flesh and drinking his blood.  What might seem to be madness-inducing, however, is the understanding that holding Jesus to be the great permeating element of Creation, is simultaneously to hold Jesus to permeate the most intensely-wrought episodes of Scripture.

In particular, the Jesus who upbraided his followers by asking them why they could not themselves decide what is right from wrong, is the Jesus who is the one person to know in perfect detail precisely why people cannot decide right from wrong.  To decide right from wrong is to go about an absolute duty that one is bound--as against the judgments of God--to be wrong about.  The duty remains.  The inevitability of failure remains.

And yet this was always so "from the beginning," if we are to harken back to Jesus' derivation of human moral states from the shadows of Eden.  Adam and Eve reached for the fruit.  They were incapable of exercising the knowledge-capacity, and fulfilling the knowledge-requirement, that followed.  God's forbearance was exhausted, and innumerable regimens of punishment were to follow.

And Jesus bore the pain of all this.  Jesus bore the pain of Creation.  Jesus bore the pain of every distance of every created thing from the Creator.  Jesus bore the pain that Adam brought upon himself when first he looked for companionship elsewhere than his Creator.

Jesus bore the pain of humanity when he hung upon the Cross, and Jesus bore the pain of humanity when he hung upon the Forbidden Tree--for in the madness of striving in fitful throes to understand the majesty of God, we must reckon that our self-same Savior was in the very fruit plucked by the hand of Eve.

The eyes of Adam and Eve were opened, as the description goes, and the God-man Jesus of the fruit and the tree and the garden and the world has known--and yet knows, and always will know--every pain and failure and frustration of humanity's endless duty to but open our eyes.

The True Inheritors

There are conceptual kingdoms described in the scriptures that have to do with Jesus.  First, of course, there is God's overarching and all-consuming kingdom of sovereignty.  Then there is the kingdom of heaven to which Jesus refers, an idealization of proper alignment of Creation to its Maker.  At least, that seems to be what Jesus is getting at, though it is in the very expected nature of any realm incorporating the participation of human beings, that the intrinsic limitations of human character, thought, and communication be present.  We don't really know of what the kingdom of heaven consists.

What we do know is that the kingdom of heaven is a good thing, and that striving for the kingdom of heaven is a good thing.  There doesn't seem to be any profit in rehearsing for the billionth time the two-millennia-old squabble about whether "striving" is associated necessarily with "works," or with whether "letting go and letting God" or even "predestination" is what makes the difference--or even whether some assessment or relative assignment of this or that person of this or that time or place as being "in the kingdom" is to be equated with salvation.  What is undeniable is that conformance to the person-image of Jesus is the point.  Jesus is of the kingdom of heaven, or the phase "kingdom of heaven" means nothing.

Of course, the kingdom of heaven would be properly everywhere at every time.  All that was created was created with Jesus and through Jesus--and so here we run up against the persistent notion of pantheism.  Of course, if God is everything or Jesus is everything, then the notion of salvation's necessity would seem to be hollowed out.  It is at this point that the ancient echoes of Jesus' suffering become pertinent to the analysis.  The crux of Jesus' role as savior is reduced to a narrative shadow when it is understood as something that Jesus took on as bearing the punishment of the results of Creation's misdeeds.  Creation--whether appraised as merely "very good" or as seen in an Adam never in moral repose--has been by virtual definition (as far as we can understand things) always alienated from the God who made it.  Jesus' role as savior has been wedded ever to his suffering so that anything that was not God might ever exist in the impossible impudence of existing as Something Not God.

And therefore all of Creation, when viewed properly, is the kingdom of God.  The essential question is the viewing of it, the "having of one's eyes opened to it"--so that the human being can perceive of nothing as existing but as permeated by the essence of Jesus.  That evil might be present in any such perceived thing is the business of God, not of the believer, and the human being's refusal to accede to God's lordship over such matters, is in perfect relation to the human being's refusal to have his or her eyes opened to that which is properly to be perceived--God.

This is the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of perception of God--which has been dispensed for us in the teachings of Jesus as the typification of Jesus as the God-man.  Even at the limits of our perceptions, of course--even at the limits of our ever having our "eyes opened"--we must have some sort of analog of our finite capacities upon which to focus our thoughts.  This, for us human beings, is the type-presentation of "Jesus" as a representation of the absolutely unimaginable nature of Jesus himself.  Even the gospels, with their descriptions of the fortune of eye-witnesses of Jesus as being blessed with seeing Jesus himself, do not stint to say that even a more select few are privy to the Transformation--with no contention present that even such an amazing display could ever be really "Jesus himself."

And so it should be scarcely surprising that the notion of Old and New Testament "types of Christ" is a contention that curls in upon itself.  Jesus as represented in the Gospels, Jesus in even the fulness of such revelation as we are given, is a "type of Christ"--if only because we can never assimilate anything but a representation of Jesus as Jesus or Jesus as Christ.  If our eyes were only to be opened, we would see that all that might be truly seen--all, that is, that might be scrutinized such that everything but the essential miracle of existing-while-not-God were blasted aside--is a "type of Christ."  Everything but the ineffable miracle of Creation presented perfectly to us, that is, everything that we perceive through our fallible and immoral lenses of perception--and assign through our perceptions the values that entwine our hearts--constitutes the substance of the faulty kingdom that commands our allegiance.

Only in the faintest of fleeting shadows do we perceive the kingdom of heaven--to say nothing of entering the kingdom of heaven.  Understanding, at least, the shrouds of sin-sodden faulty perception that surround us, we can understand as well why Jesus' descriptions of the path to the kingdom of heaven seem so anomalous.  And in a horrid and all-too-familiar, essentially organic way, our revulsion with the anomalous--that is, our great desire for apparent pattern and predictability--leads us to the third great kingdom understandable in the teachings of Jesus.  This is the kingdom of the Evil One.

This we might call the Kingdom of the Devil.  This we might call the fallen World that draws us in its seductive clutches, through the temptations of the Flesh, to the great abyss of damnation.  Or we might call this the realm of a slithering, dirty snake, or of a cringing accuser of a righteous Job, or of a sleazy tormentor of a starving Jesus.  The point is that Satan is scarcely the point, and Satan is dismissively described as an author of lies--all the while we are masters ourselves of authoring our own lies.  That which I referred to above--our desire for apparent pattern and predictability--is the fulcrum of our inclination to share the devil's predilection for casting judgments about.

This is the third kingdom--the kingdom in which we exist but for the excruciatingly rare, scarcely-to-be-expected glimmerings of mercy from Above.  It is bad enough that our base tendencies make it difficult for us to see the blessings of God all around us--on top of this we heap our judgments and our accusations and our endless, mindless pontifications about our own existences.  "Above" is the absolute realm of the Absolute God--the first kingdom.  All around us--had we but eyes to see--is the proper realm of our Savior as the Author and Bearer of Creation--the second kingdom.  This second kingdom is what was offered us from the beginning, and what we and Adam from the very first could not bear to abide.

And also all around us is the third kingdom.  This is the kingdom that we make a veritable hell--or make at best a dotting of islets of respite shared inequitably among creatures.  This is the kingdom of our human perceptions, of our human prescriptions, of our human plans and theories and justifications.  That we could not enjoy and share the second kingdom--that of simple Creation wrought by Jesus' suffering--is the mere state of our ungrateful and unreflective selves, Adam-like, from the first.  That we cannot make more than a ramshackle edifice of our morally-wrought Earth--this is the state of the third kingdom.  This, as will surprise no one, is what I will call the inevitable outworking of "the Fall"--the eating of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  That our eyes became "open," Adam-and-Eve-like, is scarcely the same as to say that our judgments became true, or that the convictions upon our hearts became reliable.

Adam and Eve could feel shame for the wrong things, and could fail to confess themselves to their Creator when they had done something shameful.  And they could entertain something shameful before they had done anything sinful--or was that sin itself?  Manifestly, the very same thing as postulating about such matters--rather than reposing in wholesome-because-deserved shame--is precisely what we ourselves do, and in so doing we are the true inheritors of The Fall. 

Form Follows Phenomenation

Christianity, for all its purported affinity for mysteries and paradoxes, does not really rest comfortably with uncertainty--despite the inescapable considerations inherent in an ancient faith and a fragmentary, assembled scriptural basis.  If it be maintained that Christian belief is founded--even if only in part--on exposure to the biblical text (and there do not seem to be viable ministries maintaining otherwise), then the latent fissures in Christianity's scriptural basis are not long hidden from any more-than-casual adherents.  The same study Bibles that are prefaced with claims that Christian belief is simple and straightforward are littered, throughout the books and from start to finish, with disclaimers about differing translation possibilities and references to this or that assemblage of the "best" ancient copies.

One of the last and most fiercely defended strongholds of "simple" Bible interpretation is the insistence on the merest of physical descriptions as being beyond question or ambiguity.  If Jesus is represented as saying that the mustard seed is the smallest of all, then one need not search with great difficulty to find some preacher who will assert that "science" agrees with Jesus, though "science" would be hard-pressed to second Jesus' assertion that plants spring from seeds that have of necessity "died."  If Genesis says that "light" existed from the moment of God's utterance, then physical light--understood by "science" in terms of photons--must have existed, though awkwardly Genesis does not until later describe the creation of the sun and other stars.  Well, why ought we not then to postulate light emanating from volcanic activity?  I mean, what's the harm in that?

However, there is an inevitable grinding-down of our capacity to appreciate biblical teaching when we exhaust ourselves in chasing rationales for this or that explanatory theory of aspects of God's creation activity.  Here we need to consider John's prefatory recapitulation of Creation as being a much-needed slap-in-the-face to the reader.  Jesus is here associated with the creation process through-and-through.  The Jesus who was at pains to make God's "very good" Creation is also the Jesus who feels the pains of every element of Creation.  If this be not so--or if commentators would assert that this be not so--then such commentators must bear the burden of proof.  Was it not lamentably Jesus' undertaken task to create animal help-meet candidates for an Adam who was beset by a need, a need Jesus would have felt through the Adam for whom he cared?  Was not it the case that the inestimable and innumerable agonies of Jesus on the Cross included pains for the eternal sufferings of all of his beloved though alienated fellow partakers of humanhood?

Can it be said so simply that the divine of which Jesus partakes created the Creation without any element of infused suffering (and here the Genesis reference to God "resting" provides the echo of a laugh)?  Can it be said that Jesus departed this Earth to an eternity of bliss in the company of the Father, when the comforting confines of an endless, blessed future are suited merely to stunted creatures like us who live "in time"?  Clearly, the first stirrings, and the final tailings-off, of any of our musings about the divine must reckon that the first and last inklings we can have are but suggestions of phenomena to which we can claim only imperfect experiential reference in describable things.  Clearly, if "light" existed at first in the mind of God, then it existed as a phenomenon that need not have awaited its material expression to "exist."  When God created "light," he called into being that which for us can be only suggested by our concept of "light."  The ancients' notion of the primary "element" of "fire," and our modern notion of photons and such, are mere sequelae to what God called across the impenetrable and unquantifiable threshold of "being."

God created a world that is introduced to us in Genesis as a world-not-world.  What else are we to make of a thing that is "void"?  God called into being light-not-light.  God raised Adam from dust before there was a process to create dust.  God called forth not plants, but rather the existence of ground latent with the generation of plants.  God called forth not animals, but rather a still-more-fantastic soil pregnant with the substance of beasts.  Our weak intellects can do no more (or at least I contend so in my weak intellect) than reckon that God created the phenomena of which Genesis speaks.  Inescapably, the operative definition of "phenomenon" (that which can be shown to exist) is our own little infantile play-toy on the scale of things cosmic or supra-cosmic.  We act out of necessity when we reckon things as existing when we can observe them (or imagine them as observable), but we wobble always along a precipice looming over our descents into silliness and hubris.

We say often that form follows function, but this aphorism is a perfect example of our awkward relationship to phenomena at large.  Clearly, the "form" of anything following its "function" presumes that the function element intrudes into the equation from an existence-state of some prior situation--a prior existence-state with its own forms, forms attributable to some even more prior state.  This is where our capacity to understand (or perhaps I should say, to assume a posture of sage "understanding" about) any foundational biblical premise breaks down.  Here we have no starting-points, and no ways to grasp the immediate processions from said starting-points.  The Creation stories (for there is more than one) present a perfect example.

Sadly, many commentators hold to the presumptuous notion that the particular story of God forming Adam from the dust of the earth is a "zooming-in" on the first making of humans, with Genesis' prior reference to the creation of humanity at large being merely a description on a larger scale.  Of course, the presentation of the making of animals--before humanity in one story, and after Adam's demonstrated need for companionship in the other--is but one example of the silliness of the "zooming-in" notion.  There is no reason to think that something that cannot be described within the ken of human beings would be presented to human beings as though it was something amenable to being parsed out.  God in his majesty created the world, and this (the First Story of Creation) is presented in sweeping and general terms.  God (as understood in the preface to John) created the world in a process-beyond-understanding through and with his Son Jesus, and this Second Story of Creation demonstrates the bonds of affection and strains of alienation intrinsic to an existence of humanity that Jesus both authors and shares.

What we see in the Bible is not form following function, but rather form being imposed on pre-existing things of God, things by God, things from God--all sorts of things imaginable and unimaginable, all sorts of things that (as shown in the breakdown of our intellectual capacity that manifests paradoxically as fantastically complacent hubris) we would expect as a matter of course from things having to do with the divine.  This, perhaps most importantly, ought to be the focal-point of our consideration of our evil and our sinfulness--and our hope of pardon.  We cannot see back into the first moment of humanity's alienation from God, though we disgrace both ourselves and our species if we pretend that we can see only essential innocence in that petulant adolescent Adam pre-Fall.  The stepwise descent of our first ancestors in the Garden cannot be related to some pristine starting-point, and so the denominations have decided that the so-called Fall will stand for that point, and the whole rest of the narrative will be twisted around it.

Sinfulness is not a "thing," such as to be reckoned distinct for us from an innocence understandable as perfect conformance to the will of God.  No degree of rebellion or impiety or whatever can be possibly rendered into a necessary conceptuality of smallness really imaginable by humans, on the one hand, and really representative of truth on the other hand.  What we see in the story of the Fall, and in the story of Adam's misalignment with his Creator beforehand, is God's placement of form upon a pre-function, ineffable state--the state of humanity's possible alienation from God that is a state receding backwards in time to the inconceivable.  The eating of the fruit imposes upon Adam a (fallible) understanding of formal evil, the presentation to Adam of his desired mate imposes upon him a duty of proper treatment of her, the presentation to Adam of possible animal help-meets imposes upon him a duty of proper appreciation of God's creative acts, the presentation to Adam of the Garden of Proximity to God imposes upon Adam the not-to-be-forsaken opportunity to commune in satisfaction with his Creator.  This regression has no end-point we can understand, for alienation from God has no smallness that can be ever reached or postulated.  

That Adam would fail in all of these regards ought not to be surprising to us, because we fail in these and similar regards with every breath.  The crucial nature of our sinfulness, and the pervasiveness of our sin-nature, ought to impose upon us the realization that our affinity for evil is not to be understood as a phenomenon, but as a state--and that state is as simple and as undeniable as the fact that We Are Not God.  We are not God--and all else is sequelae.  The story of those sequelae is understood by us as the expression of phenomena, but every phenomenon that we believe we can understand about God is something we always understand too late.

We will never catch up to the fact that we are not God--that is our tragedy.  To imagine that we can plot some course or regimen to that pursuit--that is madness.

New Description for Shame Appears

New Blog Description for Shame Appears:

Jesus became not broken, but bruised and bleeding--blurry like us.  We are not broken by guilt.  We are sodden with shame.

The Great Wound of All

Sometimes the pursuit of truth involves not merely the statement of uncompromising contentions, but more importantly the statement of implications to prior--apparently bold and uncompromising--thoughts, implications that are left latent, implications that languish as orphans, implications that capture no one's attention.

I will start with a certain bold and uncompromising contention.  Arguments for the existence of God are ridiculous.

I know it is not a novel thought, that arguing about God's existence is a fool's errand.  Here my particular take on the subject with be the assertion that believing in the existence of God for "reasons" means merely that one believes in the reasons, not in God.  Any number of godlings can be asserted to exist "because" of this or that reason, but inevitably the "reasoning" entailed thereby must involve observations, assertions, or conclusions on the part of the arguer that must, by definition, have the finality to produce the immediate and immediately adjacent postulated deity.  An indisputable evidence of the existence of a god is as firmly ascribed to by the arguer as the god itself, and the arguer is shown to be a believer in an effectual pantheon, even if this pantheon consists only of the deity paired with the increment of asserted evidence.

God, on the other hand, is the curator of reasons--there is no "reasoning" God out.  This fact is not unknown to Christianity, but like all other things that happen to humanity, the fact of the unknowable nature of God does not abide with us humans--rather it glances off.  "Glancing off" happens in the movement of--and therefore impermanence of--time and space.  The commentators will assert--as simultaneously-held propositions--that the Bible does not argue the existence of God (witness the stately presumptions of Genesis), while also the Bible as canonized includes Paul's convenient presumptions about what other people think when they look up (for example) at the purported majesty of the skies.  Paul does not loiter about, however, to explain how deity found without question in the evidences of Creation was an idea to have been seized upon by third- and fourth- cursed-generation Israelites, cursed when they went in and cursed when they went out, hunching and staggering under skies of storm and drought.

This is the fact of arguments about the existence of God.  They are played-about with by the denominations, because even if they are found abiding by particular persons--persons whose purported constancy beggars belief--even so do such arguments glance about among congregations and schools of thought--now holding sway, now being seen as cheap and threadbare.  God is beyond argument.  God is beyond compare to--or worse still, intellectual derivation from--observed phenomena.

And so belief exists within the person, or it does not.  Or it exists to some extent, greater or lesser.  And the existence himself of God is the least "believable" of all--if belief in God hinges on those impious assemblings of deity and phenomena I described above.  The "argument from Creation" is ridiculous on its own terms--and this argument is made only more pathetic when the notion is added either of godliness supposedly implied by the beneficial quality of Creation, or of godliness supposedly implied by the skillfulness (however fancied) of the creation act.

And, of course, that is not all.  Creation, in the Christian conceit, is cursed because of the sinfulness of humanity.  Not cursed simply because human beings do their lamentable and loathsome things upon it, but cursed intrinsically--so that the very Creation of beauty from which it is said often that we draw, willingly or not, our recognition of the Creator, is at one and the same time a Creation of ugliness.  And of horror.  And of misery.

This is where I must return to my beginning statement, to the effect that certain vast implications of strands of thought can lie neglected not because they are undiscernible, but because they capture no one's attention.  To the Christian, Creation is simultaneously cursed and yet also reflective of the goodness of Providence.  To the materialist, Creation so-called is a neutral mass of matter and energy.  That certain materialists will describe Creation as a hellscape of suffering is merely a retort, meant of ridicule the believers' rapture with divine handiwork that the believer is duty-bound to be enraptured with.  I will hope, however, that certain believers will come to accept that belief in a God worthy to be called "God" is a belief that prostrates itself before a God who can be believed in simply because he can be believed in.

And if God is not to be extrapolated from a--presumably good and well-executed--Creation, then we are no longer under compulsion to ensconce God in arguments for belief that are really arguments that make God contingent upon the supports for belief.  For we do not exist in a good and well-executed Creation.  We exist in that hellscape referred to above.  We exist with the chance to believe in a God of goodness, but it is not to call God "good," to ascribe to him our conceits about what we look about ourselves and call "good."  We do not even have anything but unreliable conceits about Jesus--we do him no honor in condescending to pronounce him "good."  We can only honor Jesus in reaching through our Jesus-conceits toward a lure of goodness that exudes from the ineffable, not from a God who we estimate as being worthy of our babblings about his goodness being "inestimable."

And then at least we can take the Creation-curse notion at face value, for the abiding implication of the Creation-curse is not that we can look around us and see good things with smudges and flaws.  If we see anything around us that we think "good," it is a thing of a moment of time and of a shuddering of space.  The more we look, the more we see Creation as sawing itself to bits, for even those things that we see as timeless (or at least "enduring") are but manifestations of what the scientists call "stratified stability"--momentary aggregations of fascinating interactions of particles that persist even as functions of their non-persistence, that is, of their ceaseless vibrations and permutations.  And eventually these motions will rend everything apart.

What Creation God created at first is represented to us only in our ability to hold conceits for moments, for we have no warrant to look at this or at that and say, This is How God Made It.  Behind this realization is the fact that we have no warrant to conjure up this or that proof that This is How God Is.  At first we can merely believe, and then we can look at what is around us and see not goods to be plucked (or plundered), nor evils to be squirmed away from (or cast into the teeth of those whom we deem more evil still), but rather we can see the great wound of all.  It is this great wound that Jesus dared to encompass, and to which he applied the balm of his ministry--and he demands the same of us.