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.