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.

Would Fly Asunder

There is a bit of lore that is virtually universal in Christianity.  This is the conceit that the world as we experience it--the world that we look upon as the "wonders" of Creation--represents a design that shows us simultaneously, one, the awesome beneficence God presents to us, and, two, the "fallen" nature post-Eden to which we ascribe everything we find disturbing, frightening, or painful.  The "fallen" nature is, of course, placed rightfully on us, but we have an essentially unsurmountable disposition to reckon that we can tease out the evidences of God's design for us by seizing on those things we attribute to the design that is really his alone to comprehend.

Take sex.  There would have been nothing lacking necessarily in a Creation that consisted of a sinless Adam in communion with, and satisfied with, his Creator.  Humanity can exist in one person or many persons--or at least so much must be reckoned possible by us.  In God's observation that "it is not good for the man to be alone," is entailed the entirety of the potential for alienation of one person, or countless persons, from their Creator, who ought to be enough.  Why Adam was not--from the humanly-perceivable beginning--what he "ought" to be (for that is the import of my contention here) is a question that dissolves in our appreciation into the very question of why evil exists to begin with.

To say that it "just turned out" that Adam was not satisfied with God is ridiculous, since God knows everything from the beginning.  Are we to suppose it was similarly an open question (for God, that is) whether or not any animal was going to suffice as an "help meet" for Adam?  To say that God designed Adam to be unsatisfied with his Creator is, of course, a ghastly presumption.  Are we humans, for whom the origin of evil is a question unapproachable, to accord to ourselves the right to determine the framing of that question?  Adam was unsatisfied with God.  Adam was appreciative of his provided help-meet in his self-provided context of her fitting his own needs.  Eve spoke scandalously with the snake.  Eve ate of the tree.  Adam joined her and then blamed God for it.  Are we empowered rightfully to designate any of these points as the instant when the question of evil--unsolvable at any rate--became pertinent?

Much, of course, is made of the trauma of the "Fall," but that trauma did not include the instantaneous demise that would be the logical out-working of God's threat of punishment.  Can we know that God was not forbearing applicable punishment for the couple, or for the one man, from much earlier on?  Any notion of our understanding the "how's" of evil, or of our participation in it, is ridiculous.  It is ridiculous inanity for us to dress up theological contexts for a question the content of which is beyond us,

And then, as I promised above, there is the matter of sex.  There never "needed" to be more than one human being.  There never "needed" to be more than two human beings.  That the family structure came into existence is traceable through a narrative that shows such structure as filling unfolding needs, not as being God's design from the beginning.  (Of course, God knows everything from the beginning, but we do not have time to indulge in the silliness of going through that again.)  The denominations will understand marriage and the family as being under assault by a fallen Creation.  The denominations will even--remembering the Eden curses--understand marriage and the family as being cursed as well.  However, the denominations will embrace to the extreme the ghastly presumption that the designs for marriage, family, and society are aspects of God's "very good" Creation--Jesus' dismissals of marriage, family, and society be damned.

In our very day the conceits of family-, marriage-, and even sex-worship are as lively as ever.  Any human longing for mutually and competently understood fellowship--any such type of echo of fellowship with our Creator--is understandable, but the social-order and social-cohesion missions of religion requires the maintenance of institutions to be defended and coalesced around.  Anything can be reckoned by the denominations as "fallen" or "broken"--anything, that is, except the denominations' cherished social conceits.  The most horrific of congenital disorders, genetic or otherwise, can be processed as evidences of the brokenness of God's Creation, yet understood simultaneously as faint reflections (as are we all) of God's original plan.  But let the notions of genetic intersexuality, or of genetic factors frustrating the conservatives' cherished X-Y duality, or of psycho-developmental variations, be brought into view, and those denominations who hew most closely to God's beneficence over a sin-warped Creation will contort into a frenzy of denial that the paradigm of the male-female binary might deviate at any point from "God's plan."

And hanging over all of this is the potential employment of Genesis in its larger Creation narrative, with its presumptions of humans "commanded" to multiply and dominate.  Of course, as the denominations would prefer to ignore, the beasts of the field and the very elements themselves are the recipients there of commands.  That the story of Creation describes proclivities and roles for its components is no more to be understood in its "Genesis" than are the proclivities and roles for evil.  The question in the appreciation of Genesis is no different from the question looming over all of That Which is Not God--do we reckon the existence of a God beyond understanding, or do we conceptualize a God and flatter that image as reflecting an entity we call "beyond understanding?"

If we hold truly to a God beyond understanding, then we will reckon the pertinent rift in existence to be that which stands between created and Creator.  To bemoan--loud those those moans may be--only the chasm we credit as existing between our fallen world and the way Creation ought to be, is to place both God and our conceits about his designs on the blessed side of the chasm, and ourselves and the rest of everything "fallen" on the damned side.  Needless to say, we have thrust thereby next to God a pantheon of "godly" things that we cannot imagine God's proper Creation existing without--and we have made God himself an idol thereby.

It is the unfortunate function of religion to speak of God in the most expansive of terms, and to squeeze God down into the smallest of conceptions.  Christianity speaks of God as the greatest and biggest thing that can be imagined (which utterances ought, in their presumption, give pause), while yet the God of Christianity is the shrunken fiddler-about with effectually toy houses and toy families and toy marriages--while yet the rest of the universe shivers in concomitant want and exclusion.  Jesus speaks of God as found in the smallest of gestures expressed without reserve or boundary--while yet this is the most fitting and effective ministry before a God who defies even our definitions of dimension.

The world is not fallen.  The world ought not to exist--for that world that ought properly to exist finds its dimensions in God's ineffable will, beyond any of our musings about "beyond."  The world is not a pattern of what God would design--the world is a constantly stitching and unraveling tapestry that carries by the instant pictures that we only in our feeble conceits will try to hold.  Now we have an insight--now it is gone.

These flashings-about are what we need to understand about ourselves, and about those with whom we interact.  We do not really understand ourselves, and we do not really understand others, and anyone who wants to understand the things of God (a necessity of folly) must appreciate this lack of understanding most acutely.  It is pathetic how religion squeezes down our little-to-begin-with set of capabilities, and religion glories in doing just that.  So often do preachers delight is ascribing to this or that person a "scientific" mind, or an "artistic" one, or--whether a female wants it or not--a "nurturing" mind.  We can reckon just as well that one person's mind would be filled with a desire to "make sense" of existence--either conceptually or in terms of fulfilling some outwardly-provided template, while yet another person would be filled with a desire to flatten every conceptual horizon and burst every conceptual bound in pursuit of a notion that God must exceed all.

We might be the greatest of strangers to ourselves or to each other, and no one can be told that there is any bound to the perceivable that ought to be reckoned between ourselves and the God who is beyond all reckoning.  We, of course, will never reach the end of our world or the end of our possible reckonings about our world.  To maintain, however, that there is a divinely-designed world that confronts us is for us to place parts of God's Creation as bounds between us and God--and all a thing needs to be an idol is to have a frame or a pedestal, concrete or conceptual.

Better for us to take Jesus' advice, to hold (or to try to reckon, at least) that the elements of the universe would fly asunder if we but prayed to be one step closer to God.

Language of Our Separation

In my last post, I wrote, in regard to the general conceptions of God's sovereignty, as reflected in conventional Christianity:

"There is also the latent notion, of course, that God can do whatever he pleases (or at least that whatever God does can seem to us nothing more than the caprices of his good-pleasure), but the commentators do not really want to entertain a sovereignty of God that is beyond understanding, even as they tell us that the falterings and fallings-off-at-the-edges of their postulations about God's sovereignty must be taken as mysteries beyond understanding."

It is essentially by definition, that any idea about God has to be revealed as insufficient--the God who is greater than anything is greater than ideas.  What is most incumbent upon us human beings, is for us understand that the us-to-God axis is the most suspect of any trend of ideation that we apply characteristically to theology.  The human being tries to find out about God, and the human being who attempts thereby without warrant to expound upon God is that self-same creature who aspires without warrant to understand the human being.

It is of no avail for theologians to accept merely that all of their ideas about God must, as I wrote, "fall off at the edges"--because, as I contend in my present blog description, "God has no edge."  There is no breadth of ideation to be held confidently about God, even if the margins of the theologians' confidence be conceded by them to be both existent and extremely limiting.  We have no knowledge about God--that is, no effective knowledge about God such as to be knowledge about God that can be lifted out of a single context and applied generally.  There are moments of insight, as fleeting as they are ephemeral, and then they disappear.

All of our thoughts are presumptuous, and it is sad to witness how accusations of presumption lobbed about constitute so much of religious argument.  Our last mid-century's most literate of defenders of Christianity against materialism typify the point.  First, it must be noted that the materialist unaccepting of the notion of God was decried extensively by the religion crowd as fostering depression, angst, meaninglessness, truncation of human potential, and the like, but all of that must be brushed aside if the notion of the pursuit of truth be the matter at hand.

More importantly, the prevailing strain of theological pronouncements among the careful, learned, "let us reason together" religionists was such as to accuse the raw materialist of neglecting numerous realms of human experience that cannot be reduced to the empirical or to the extrapolation-from-empirical.  What escapes the attention of the "let us reason together" theologians, however, is that there is at best incremental improvement in moving from a pure materialist conceit (that merely that which is testable is to be considered), only to light in preference upon a realm of religious thought that claims to spread the predicament of humanity before an ineffable God, while reckoning that certain "time-tested" shared human notions are to be reckoned conceptually inviolate.

If God is beyond our understanding, and if our relationship to God is almost as beyond understanding--our argument having hewn, so far, to literate, mid-century "reasonableness--then we ourselves are beyond understanding.  I am not speaking here about us finding ourselves to be complicated or frustratingly capricious.  I am speaking here about the human's very conceit of being a creature who can say "I am," as being a false conceit.  To run through the progression more vigorously--if we do not understand God, then we do not understand God at all, and if we understand our relationship to God only partly, then we do not understand that relationship at all.  And if we do not understand our relationship to God, then we do not understand ourselves at all.

Of course, the fulcrum of my argument here is that very notion of "to understand."  The post-World War Two theologies and anti-theologies of "reasonableness" (and their precursors and sequelae) were, like so much of our notions of "argument," cousins rather than opponents.  "We" do not deserve to "sit in judgment of God" (as went the religionists' jibe) because God did not etch his name in DNA or in geologic strata, and "we" do not deserve to credit God as the consummate, mid-century gentleman for having laid out before us a terrain of solid, observable phenomena behind which we think arises unquestionably the conclusion that they are his handiwork.  Both the materialist and the literate-religionist lay claim to "reasonableness," when the notions neither of "God" nor of "us" is "reasonable."

We think we exist.  We think we understand what it is to exist.  None of that matters--what matters is that we squirm and reverberate within loci of consciousness that arise we-know-not-where, and that our thoughts moment-by-moment claim only tenuously to be either the center or the totality of "ourselves."  We cannot even claim that our internal fractures and the nebulous quality of our parts (parts that, for all we know, we attain or shed unpredictably into an equally nebulous miasma of surroundings) are to be blamed on "The Fall."

Adam was not told to refrain from eating of the tree because it would be fatally poisonous.  Adam was not told to refrain from eating of the tree because the knowledge of Good and Evil therein would be unwholesome for him.  No, Adam was, rather, told not to eat of the tree because he would be punished for it, because the results would be punitive, because a mechanism of unpleasant results lay in store for him.  Adam was threatened with punishment because his presumable desire to please his God was in potential conflict with his presumable desire to please himself.  When arose this bifurcation in the action-potentialities of Adam, other than in his very creation before "The Fall?"

We hear multiple voices within our self-understood selves.  We reckon and contend, moment-by-moment and year-by-year, with different versions of "ourselves."  Nothing about ourselves could be more true, and yet nothing is reckoned with less by the "reasonable" postulators of a godless universe assimilable by our brains, or even by the "reasonable" promulgators of religion who invite humanity to finger concrete evidences, or grasp communal delusions about "unquestionable" aspects of reality, and to ascribe such evidences and aspects to the hand of God.

What we were created to be, by the hand of God, is a population of wavering experience-loci hearing voices and receiving innumerable other communications from we-know-not-where.  This has always been so.  Adam was assailed by many voices, and Eve was assailed by many voices, and we hear the wind speak, and the birds speak, and our memories speak, and if we were as new and as cast into an unfamiliar realm as the first woman, we would be (as she most famously was) as unsurprised as Eve to hear a snake speak.

We can see where this is going.  If we are, as I have clumsily presented, "experience-loci," then we are deprived even of the simplistic notions that we are discrete beings whose many aspects are only incompletely explored, or that our various parts might be described in unfrightening terms like "fuzzy," or that at the worst that we are individuals whose fractures might be explained--and, it is to be hoped, remedied--as "multiple personalities."  No, we are beings who usually describe ourselves as individual human beings--and we hold only a tenuous warrant to that self-assessment.  Of course, if we really reside--floppy and malleable things though we be--in a universe that can hold even a fraction of the wildness and vitality such as to be commensurate with our bracing moments of appreciations about God, then what else might we expect?

And if we were created as such conflicted and in whole not-like-God-in-every-respect beings, wherein lies any proper notion of proportionality in responsible theology?  We fall in precipitous decline from any exalted (even if "thanks be to God") position to which we might aspire, if ever we dare to view ourselves unsparingly.  We are the "Crown of Creation"?  We know what feeble and conflicted things monarchs are reckoned by God.  We are made "in the image of God" as a sort of pristine potentiality?  We know how much we can disappoint in that regard.  We are made "in the image of God" as a design of God?  Then God knows why we are such a mixture of capacity and incapacity.

Even a reckoning of ourselves as creatures of innumerable down-sides fails to grasp any proportion of our degraded state.  Any notion of apology, or remorse, or recompense, or atonement will fail, even as Jesus casts the demand of perfection before us.  We do things that are wrong, and disgrace ourselves thereby before God, and we fail to correct the wrongs we do, and disgrace ourselves thereby yet again before God.  And yet the denominations litter our paths with assurances that God desires to convict us in our guilt, so that we might claim some offer of atonement.  And yet the denominations encourage us to admit and assess our guilt, as though some speaking, some describing, some measuring of debt frameable as guilt is what separates us from God--for it is our cultural fancy to describe guilt as great, as ponderous, as heavier than can be relieved but by some offer of salvific relief.

But our separation from God is not great--it is infinite.  The effective language of our separation from God is not guilt and its "heavy" connotations--the effective language of our separation from God is shame, and shame permeates our being--it does not merely burden or besmirch it.