Dissident Aesthetics: The Way Forward for a Luciferian Age

“Things, moreover, like causes and motions, exhibit a final incoherence, suggesting an inner emptiness. Apophasis is here compounded by aporia. This emptiness of finite things either indicates an ultimate emptiness and non-truth at the core of reality, or else it points to the inner emanative and creative constitution of things by eternal mystery, whose own emptiness may indicate its boundlessness and incomprehensibility unconfined plenitude. One must have faith in the latter, and one’s participation within it, if one is to believe that the additions made by things, and by subjective things, arrive at an inkling of the truth.”

-Catherine Pickstock

“Beatrice is to be loved because she is beautiful; but she is beautiful because there is behind her a many-sided mystery of beauty, to be seen also in the grass and the sea, and even in the dead gods. There is a promise in and yet beyond all such pictures.”

-G.K. Chesterton

This blog is going to take a very different approach from what it had been previously. The last post I had made goes all the way back to 2019, which was about Norm Macdonald and the reality of death. I think the previous posts as well show a theological and philosophical journey, which this blog served me in many ways of allowing me to funnel all of the things I had been reading and helped me synthesize many different strands of thoughts I had been wrestling with in my life. It is now in the latter half of 2022, and like every other person over the past 3 years, have been through the gamut of suffering. In many ways my thoughts have continued to press forward in the trajectory they were headed in, but in other ways I have shifted pretty dramatically. It is true enough, to quote Tolkien:

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Now this passage has become a pretty big cliche for many people, but I think it does encapsulate the realities of encountering the world outside of our doors. The title of this post encapsulates my desire moving forward: Dissident aesthetics.

First “dissident politics”. Why on earth would I want to talk about politics here? Seemingly everyone that resides online either can’t stop or won’t stop giving their hot takes and opinions so why would I want to heap my own opinions on to this dumpster fire that is American/global politics? Well, the answer is roughly I’m not interested in engaging politics by way of obsessing over every new story that hits, or everything that is said from the right or the left, or for that matter, continue to feed the rage that is burning in the core of the political culture. There may be times where I will desire to comment on some current event, but this will not be the primary mode. “Dissident” is a term and a space that I have felt the most comfortable in the past few years embracing and inhabiting. The political climate in America, since 2016, has been saturated by rage, disgust, vitriol and worst of all an uptick in absolute partisan lines. I once inhabited a Libertarian/Anarcho Captialist ethos for a very long time, but through the years I found it to be lacking. More on this in the future.

I feel the dissident route has freed me, and certain online communities that would describe themselves as dissident have opened up avenues for me to feel at home in many ways. I will be writing and engaging from this perspective, and there will be some deeper dives into the realm of occult presence in the global and political elite, along with some commentary on various happenings when I feel like it.

Aesthetics is a shorthand here for theology/philosophy/liturgy, or better yet, a holistic experience of the life of faith. I will write continuously about various issues and topics of theology, philosophy, liturgy, book reviews etc.

My desire is to press on into the truth, not just in the abstract, but the way of living every day. Dissident aesthetics, as I am attempting to coin, is about incarnational living, exposing evil and pursuing to live a life that is oriented towards truth, goodness and beauty.

The Horror of Time and the Interruption of Death

“But I have leapt down into the flux of time where all is confusion to me.

-Augustine of Hippo

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

-2 Peter 3.9

If you know anything about Norm Macdonald is that his career has been one of risk and the pursuit of the perfect joke. He is my all time favorite comedian. I could listen to the same jokes and clips of him found on youtube over and over and still laugh every time. In a radio interview, amidst the shallow and vapid dialogue, Macdonald said something quite startling and revealing:

“I came to the conclusion that we’re all plunging headlong into death… I try to look at life square in the eye. As terrifying as it is, it is the most terrifying thing there is. Being alive means dying.“

This statement inspired three strands of reflection about time and death. Both have to do first with the human experience of the cursedness of time and of death; Second, how both are experienced disconnected from an eschatology; and third how God is redeeming time and how death needs to be seen in the light of Christ’s redeeming work. Somehow it will all relate to the comedy of Norm Macdonald, who loves to linger within a long drawn out joke. This to me signals something of the eternal peaking through in Macdonald’s comedy.

The Horror of Time

And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

-1 John 2.17

Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave a sermon on the verse cited just above. In it he reflects on the horror of time:

“The great philosopher of the ancient Greeks, Heraclitus of Ephesus summarized his most profound insight regarding the world within words: all things are in flux…Nothing abides, nothing is secure, nothing is assured in the world…meaning that just when you want to seize life, it already has passed by, slipping through your hands, melting away like nothing. Life does not live; it dies. To live means to die.”

This is the horror of time: time treads on the journey towards death mercilessly. Being alive means dying. We have no ability to change time, nor do we have the ability to change what has been done in time. Bonhoeffer notes, “whatever happens remains something that has happened; it can never be undone…Guilt remains guilt, omission remains omission…what has happened, has happened for all time.” To cite Ecclesiastes:

“What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done,

and there is nothing new under the sun.” (1.9)

As we experience this marching on of time, we experience it as merciless. It gives no care to our feelings, to-do lists, nor anything else that we deem important in our lives. Even in our accomplishments and successes, there is a lingering emptiness and we become aware that we are still not whole.

In the British television show Broadchurch, DI Alec Hardy (played by David Tennant) is seeking to solve an unsolved case from two years prior. It haunted him, as he was the lead detective on the case. At the end of the second season he finally solves the case, after nearly committing suicide because the horror of what had taken place, there is a moment after hearing the truth of what happened he finds himself alone in a room weeping over the tragedy. Following this Hardy has a sense of just how many lives have been destroyed, and how this destruction is still real and concrete even after some sense of true justice has been carried out. Hardy feels the horror of time and how, in the words of Bonhoeffer, “what happens remains something that has happened; it can never be undone…” Death it seems, has the final word over our lives. For us moderns death is only seen as a cursed interruption. We do not know what to do with it except for put it out of our minds as long as we can, all the while it is all around us and its sting will be felt by all.

Death as an Interruption

Without immortality, every human existence contemplated as such must end in despair; for death is, visibly speaking, the last word.

-Dietrich von Hildebrand

Going back to Macdonald’s statement about how “being alive means dying”, this is an insightful one into the modern perception of death; the dreadful end of a directionless existence. Sure we have existence, but this existence is accidental and the cosmos does not care whether we are here or not. Life is cold and distant,  To combat this dread many individuals work to prolong this as much as they can. Health, writes philosopher Byung-Chul Han, today is an absolute value. Han notes:

“His long, healthy, yet uneventful life finally becomes unbearable to him, and so he turns to drugs, and in the end is killed by drugs: ‘A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death.’ He seeks to extend his life to infinity through a rigorous politics of health, yet it is paradoxically cut short even ​before his time has come. Instead of dying, he comes to an end in non-time.“

Han in his book “The Scent of Time” makes the argument that time is no longer something that has duration. We seek to throw off the “chains” of tradition and structures in the name of freedom, and by doing so lose a grip on duration:

“Life is no longer embedded in any ordering structures or coordinates that would found duration. Even things with which we identify are fleeting and ephemeral. Thus, we become radically transient ourselves… When time loses all rhythm, when it dissipates into the open without any hold or direction, then all right or good time also disappears… The right time, or the right moment, only arises out of the temporal tension within a time that has a direction.”

We are transient because our notion of time is transient. We feel out of control and therefore we attempt to take control of our lives by having control over our time in the day. Theologian John Swinton helpfully writes that:

“Time is assumed to be something that can be broken down into small, practical components that can then be used as currency within various “marketplaces,” be they economic, political, relational, psychological, or spiritual. Time is perceived as fragmented, commodifiable, scheduled, and, above all, instrumental.”

Our very notion of what time is  does not allow for it to have duration, one over arching narrative that has meaningful connections. It is fundamentally fragmented, and in some way leaves us fragmented in ourselves. We want to keep parts of our lives separate, and by this we can keep some things in one box and some things in another. There is no space for duration, wholeness, and worst of all, lingering. If we linger too long, we have wasted time. If time is not used within the framework we have constructed, it is misused time and we are guilty of misusing it. In the event of death, which will come to us all, we will all be found guilty under the law of the western clock. Wasted time, mismanaged lives filled with regret and despair. What are we to do? Does death have the final word over who we are in the end?

Redeemed Time

“The last enemy to be destroyed is death.”

-1 Corinthians 15.26

The heart of redeemed time is fundamentally begun at the Incarnation of the Lord Jesus. Joseph Ratzinger reflects on the significance of the Incarnation:

“All time is God’s time. When the eternal Word assumed human existence at his Incarnation, he also assumed temporality. He drew time into the sphere of eternity. Christ is himself the bridge between time and eternity…now the Eternal One himself has taken time to himself…In the Word incarnate, who remains man forever, the presence of eternity with time becomes bodily and concrete.”

The very act of God entering into temporality means that time is not out of control, or transient, but time has a very specific end point. This is bound up in the person and work of Christ. Time is Christ shaped, as John Swinton puts it. He writes:

“Scripture is quite clear that God’s time contains the shape and form of Jesus: the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (Rev 22:13). The ethos and movement of time and history is Christ shaped. Jesus is time in the sense that in Christ human beings can see clearly what time looks like and what time is for. If this is so, then God’s time not only contains gentleness, it is gentleness. Gentleness is written into the heart of the universe. God’s time is gentle time.”

Here I want to mention the importance of the worship of the Church as practicing the very heart of what God’s time is. In terms of liturgy and the liturgical church calendar, the Church enters into the true time: the eternal time breaking forth into the temporal order. This practice of daily Sunday church attendance, while seemingly mundane and ordinary, actually begins to shape our lives in a way that draws us into the reality of the triune God which is fundamentally love. Love is the core of reality itself. As Swinton notes above, Christ helps us to see what time is for and what character it takes. It is one of gentleness and slowness. It is a rejection of the modern clock, and in the act of worship we come to know that our time is a gift and we must orient that gift and give it back to God. This orientation comes about by deceptively mundane practices; weekly worship, eucharist, prayer, forgiving others etc. Through these time begins to take a more gentle shape, and slower pace. Most fundamentally, however, our union with Christ also gives a new perspective and shape to death.

Time and death are also connected by Christ, in his incarnation, death and resurrection. Time is given a proper shape and orientation. Paul writes “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” (Gal 4.4-5) In this coming, by our baptism we are united to him in his death. “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life…Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him…So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Rom 6.4, 8 & 11) In our union with Him, death does not have the final word over our lives, nor over the whole created order. Athanasius puts it perfectly:

“By man death has gained its power over men; by the Word made Man death has been destroyed and life raised up anew. That is what Paul says, that true servant of Christ: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. Just as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:21-22).”

Christ, to cite St. Paul again, “…gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.” (1 Tim 2.6) Death and time are no longer cursed, and the truth for human beings is that in the coming of Christ is the end of all cursedness and despair. For God has stooped low and taken all of it on himself to rescue us from the domain of darkness.

Lingering (Redemption)

Back to Norm. What I love most about his comedy is that there is a slowness to it. Whether its a six minute joke about a boy named Dirty Johnny, or a four minute moth joke, the joy of lingering is to be found. This creates a duration, a connective tissue in the fabric of time. This is where the eternal peaks through the comedy of Norm Macdonald. The long drawn out sentences and seemingly pointless dialogue ultimately serves the purpose of the punch line; aka the eschaton. The small details are not meaningless, but are given meaning by the punch line. This is utterly opposed by historical time, because if the small details do not serve some purpose to progress, they are a waste of time. Byung-Chul Han observes:

“Historical time can rush ahead because it does not rest in itself, because its centre of gravity is not in the present. It does (not) permit any genuine lingering. Any lingering only delays the progressive process….Time is meaningful insofar as it moves towards a goal.”

Redeemed time, as opposed to historical time, permits lingering. It permits joy, laughter, pleasure, beauty, slowness and rest because these are the true ways of being. God longs to linger with his creatures. Time is not only meaningful if we are rushing towards a goal, but the goal has already been accomplished by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. To quote Han one final time:

“Time begins to emit a scent when it gains duration; when it is given a narrative or deep tension; when it gains depth and breadth, even space.”

Here the scent of redeemed time is that of Christ. St. Paul observes:

“For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life.”

The Christian should smell of slowness and gentleness. The aroma of Christ reshapes time, and thus our lives take on a the scent of redemption, and with it we may declare with Paul boldly:

“O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

 

References:

Han, Byung-Chul. The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering

Swinton, John. Becoming Friends of Time : Disability, Timefullness, and Gentle Discipleship.

Ratzinger, Jospeh. The Spirit of the Liturgy.

Marriage, Unity and The Trinity (A Sermon)

I recently gave this sermon at a wedding I officiated.

 

Marriage, Unity and the Trinity

So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

(Philippians 2.1-11, ESV)

 

Paul here writes to the church in Philippi from prison exhorting them to unity. For Paul, unity is not achieved through abstracted propositions and ideals that we can all agree on, but unity is found fully embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. This is why Paul builds up in this passage to direct his reader’s attention to Christ, to direct their gaze onto the man who is the concrete image of the invisible God (Col 1.15); in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col 2.19); He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature (Heb 1.3); the eternal Word from the beginning (John 1.1) made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1.14). In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul describes what we are called to:

“There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call— one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all”

Pay close attention to the end of that passage: Over all, through all and in all. To be called by God is to be drawn into the beauty and splendor of the life of the triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is three in one, in perfect union. The Father who is over all, the Son who is through all and the Spirit who is in all. This is on full display at Christ’s baptism:

Every act of God is inaugurated by the Father, effected by the Son and perfected by the Holy Spirit. It also reveals that God’s love is always entirely sufficient in itself; the Spirit receives and returns the love of Father and Son, and so witnesses, enjoys and perfects it, the Spirit is also the one in whom that love most manifestly opens out as sheer delight, generosity and desire for the other. (DBH, The Beauty of the Infinite)

We see in the life of Jesus the perfect union of the eternal triune communion of love, and through His life, death, resurrection and by the power of the Spirit, the church is to be caught up into this loving communion, and as we are knitted together into unity, through weekly participation in church worship, by the Spirit, our love and desire for the other, i.e. our neighbor, overflows from our very existence. Being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind is to have our affections and desires fundamentally orientated towards the reality that already is available to us in Jesus Christ. That is, as Christians we are becoming what we already are. The Greek word used for “being in full accord” is the word ‘sumpsuchos’ (soom’-psoo-khos), which is made up of two words “sun” (together with), and “psuchos” (soul, self, inner life, desires, affections) which can be translated to: harmonious in soul, souls that beat together; in tune with Christ and with each other. If we live by the Spirit, as Paul says to the Galatians, let us keep in step with the Spirit. To participate in the Spirit, to have fellowship in the Spirit is to have our fruit in the Spirit, of which the first is love. Love is the foretaste of our ultimate union with God, graciously given to us now and we share that with one another.
When Scripture says that God is love, it is not a vague sentiment about the presence of God in our emotions, but describes the very life and essence of God. To participate in the Spirit is to participate in the very life of God, which is an eternal triune communion of love. John tells us to love one another:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. (1 John 4:7-14)

This is good news! He abides and perfects his love in us. We love because he first loved us! We do not need good advice, but we need to hear the good news that God has taken action towards us not because of anything we had done, but because of His great love for us. This is the beauty of the gospel; that God took on our flesh. He plunged into the disorder and chaos of our sin, over the infinite ocean of darkness that separated us from Him, He bound himself to us ‘in such a once for all way, that he cannot go back upon it without undoing the Incarnation and the Cross and thereby denying himself.’ (T.F. Torrance) All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself (2 Cor 5.18), making peace by the blood of his cross. (Col 1.20)

In your marriage you will face trials, struggles, fights and countless other moments that seek to work against you. But in this remember that God is for you, and for your marriage. In Jesus Christ God has actualized his infinite love for you, and in the beauty of this love seek to orient yourselves and your marriage around this truth.

May your marriage be a continual proclamation of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered the sins of the whole world; to reconcile all things to himself by the blood of the cross, whether in heaven or on earth.

All Things Made New

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

-Matthew 5:4

“Still, I repeat, a man in sorrow is in general far nearer God than a man in joy.”

-George MacDonald, The Hope of the Gospel p. 37

Manchester by the Sea, the latest film by Kenneth Lonergan, for me was the best film of 2016. Quite possibly my favorite film I’ve ever seen. The main focus is on the character Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) who we first meet as a quiet, emotionally hardened janitor. As the movie begins to unfold what has happened in Lee’s life, you are hit with a ton of bricks and it becomes obvious that what Lee has suffered in his life is unbearable. He is a deeply broken man, one who has attempted to run away from his guilt and suffering. The death of his brother Joe causes a chain of events that draws him back to the place where he lost everything and putting Lee in charge of not only Joe’s financial stuff, but in charge of his son Patrick. Much can be said in light of what the film communicates about brokenness, loss and guilt among other things. There is a specific sequence of events that spoke deep volumes to my heart and is a cause for reflection.

Grief

Half way through the film Lee is at a police station answering questions about what had transpired the previous night. He confesses a mistake he made that lead to the event, and after he shares this information the detectives let him know they will contact him if anything else comes up. Lee is stunned, and seemingly upset they are letting him go without punishment. As he is leaving the interrogation room, he quickly reaches and grabs a gun from the holster of a police officer holds it to his head and as the other officers grab him and hold him down you hear him yell “Please!” in a panicked tone. He couldn’t bear living in the wake of what just transpired, and not being punished for it. His sorrow and guilt become his new identity, and this weight is unbearable.

Identity

We often root our identities in our past whether it is past sorrows or joys, accomplishments or failures. Whatever it may be, we are embedded in the past. Lee is ultimately defined eschatologically by this single event, which is understandable given the nature and gravity of it. It consumes his every waking moment. I thought to myself, “Where is God in this situation?” Even though it is a fictional situation, it still gives me pause about the nature of God’s work in our lives, especially in midst of our sufferings that are often due to mistakes we have made. As cliche as this question is but: where is God in the midst of tragedy?

I’ve heard it put that God allows bad things to happen because He knew something greater would arise out of them. The problem with this line of thinking makes God out to be some utilitarian deistic demi-god; not the God of Scripture. Paul himself tells us about God’s action in our afflictions:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)

God identifies Himself with our sufferings. Paul continues:

“For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.” (v. 5)

Our eschatological event which gives us our identity as Christians is the resurrection of Christ. This is the event in which we hope, and are marked as a people.

Evil

However we want to understand why evil is allowed, it is ultimately not something we can attain in our finiteness. All attempts at theodicies end up falling far short of any reasonable conclusion or response to the overwhelming suffering seen throughout history and our present day. Some might say “free will” is the reason why evil exists. Some even go as far to say God has ordained it for ultimately for our good. It concerns me how fundamental evil becomes to God’s act in creation in both positions, and I won’t stand for this conclusion. Both fall into the trap set forth by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange:

“God determining or determined: there is no other alternative.”

Categorically, God transcends finite categories of existence and non-existence, and thus determining or determined. To use David Bentley Hart’s language:

“God’s being is necessary, that is, not simply because it is inextinguishable  or eternally immune to nothingness, but because it transcends the dialectic of existence and nonexistence altogether; it is simple and infinite actuality, utterly pure of ontic determination, the “is” both of “it is” and of the “it is not”.” (Impassibility as Transcendence)

Fundamentally, evil has no part in God:

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5)

I’m inclined towards the historic position that views evil as a privation of the good. To say evil has an existence of its own is to assert a metaphysical structure of reality where evil competes with the good ontologically. Augustine writes:

“Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity. Therefore, there can be nothing evil except something good.” (Augustine, Enchiridion)

The point here is not a thorough going explication on the nature of evil, but to abandon any proposition or argument that necessitates God needing evil or suffering to accomplish His eternal plan within creation.

The response of Beauty

God responds to suffering and evil in the concrete form of His Son, Jesus Christ. “In Him the fulness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1.19) and therefore the fullness of beauty is displayed in the person of Jesus Christ who is God’s eternal Word and response to suffering. R. Jared Staudt, in his article here, ends with what contemplating the suffering of Christ means:

“In contemplating the suffering of Christ, in particular, we see a beauty which took on our infirmities and overcame their darkness. It is a challenging beauty, but a powerful one—with power to transform our own suffering and lack of beauty. It is a beauty that shakes us to the core, which illuminates us, and ultimately is the beauty that will save the world.”

Ultimately we may find the best response (or theodicy) might be a work of theological aesthetics, not rational arguments. This is because beauty penetrates us at our deepest levels, and beauty communicates who God is, however incomplete it is in our senses and knowledge. Pope Benedict XVI articulates this perfectly in his “Meeting with Artists”:

“Authentic beauty, however, unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond. If we acknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence.”

Beauty will save the world; it already began 2000 years ago. To end on powerful words from David Bentley Hart in his concluding remarks in “The Doors of the Sea”:

“Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes –– and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain… he that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold I make all things new.” (p. 104)

The Death of God & Transcendence

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“The true God is the hidden God”

-Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II.1, 193

In reflecting about the death of God we want to read a certain kind of atheism back into the haunting words of Nietzsche. We want to view him the same way we view guys like Dawkins and Hitchens, but this is ultimately a mistake. If we put him in the same category we do to the New Atheists, we would miss the weight of his words. The death of God for Nietzsche is a cultural event. This poses an opportunity and a catastrophe, wherein the belief in transcendence has come to an end and when the culture wakes up to this reality, nihilism (infinite meaninglessness) will come creeping in. Nihilism, for Nietzsche, must be overcome. This is where his Übermench rises and overcomes.

Tomáš Halík, in his wonderful book ‘I Want You to Be’, argues that Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead” can be seen maybe “not as only a sentence about God and against God but also one containing something of God’s message to us.” (p. 20) In this chapter Halík is writing about God speaking to us, and how often we only stop at God’s first word to us. Halík says this is a mistake. Like Abraham, who ‘at the moment God was hidden from him in incomprehensibility’ waited to hear God speak to him for a second time. Hope, no matter how small or incomprehensible, says Halík, is the chink in the armor through which the “still small voice” of God’s message can reach us. (p. 21)

We live in the shadow of Nietzsche’s Madman’s proclamation to the death of transcendence, Halík argues that this should be viewed as only the first sentence to us, which like Good Friday (the death of Christ), must be followed by a second sentence. Good Friday is an important message to us from God, but it certainly was not the final one. Here Halík offers his most lucid analysis:

“‘God is dead!’ That sentence uttered at the end of the nineteenth century continued to fascinate for the next hundred years. Maybe it was not only a sentence about God and against God but also one containing something of God’s message to us. A God who has not endured death is not truly Living. A faith that does not undergo Good Friday cannot attain the fullness of Easter. Crises of faith –– both personal and in histories of culture –– are an important part of the history of faith, of our communication with God, who is concealed and returns again to those who do not stop waiting for the unique and eternal Word to speak to them once more.” (p. 20)

The author of the book of Hebrews tells us much the same:

“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” (Hebrews 3:15)

David Bentley Hart thinks the time we live in the death of God, which is the death of a god that did not exist in the first place, is an opportunity to reclaim the true transcendence of God. For Hart the death of God was the death of the God of modernity and nihilism. In his essay “Impassibility as Transcendence”, Hart takes on both Thomists and modern fundamentalists alike. For him the language within the Thomist scheme of transcendence does not actually speak to God’s utter difference and transcendence, but falls short and looks as modern as any theology does today. The statement Hart seeks to give an answer to comes from Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange:

“God determining or determined: there is no other alternative.”

God, under both the Thomist  and the modern fundamentalists scheme, cannot avoid the problem that Lagrange puts forth, because He is simply another being among beings and is thus caught in the scheme of finite existence and causes. This is a grave mistake because God properly defined within the classical theistic metaphysical tradition is that God is the ground and source of all being. Hart expounds (at length) on the definition of God’s transcendence:

“God’s being is necessary, that is, not simply because it is inextinguishable  or eternally immune to nothingness, but because it transcends the dialectic of existence and nonexistence altogether; it is simple and infinite actuality, utterly pure of ontic determination, the “is” both of “it is” and of the “it is not”. It transcends, that is to say, even the distinction between finite act and finite potency, since both exist by virtue of their participation in God’s infinite actuality, in which might be always supereminently is. God is absolute, that is to say, in the most proper sense: he is eternally “absolved” of finite causality, so much so that he need not––in any simple univocal sense––determine in order to avoid being determined. His transcendence is not something achieved by the negation of its “opposite””.

He ends his scathing essay calling for Christians to see to it that this god remains dead:

“It is principally the god of modernity––the god of pure sovereignty––who has died for modern humanity, and perhaps theology has no nobler calling for now than to see that he remains dead, and that every attempt to revive him is thwarted: in the hope that, in becoming willing accomplices in his death, Christians may help to prepare their world for the return of the true God revealed in Christ, in all the mystery of his transcendent and impassible love.”

For Halík and Hart alike, the death of God is something to be seen as a hopeful event, because the death of this particular god is not the transcendent Triune God revealed in Christ, but a god who has never existed in the first place. Let us see it as an opportunity, not a catastrophe, that the true God revealed in Christ will once again speak His eternal Word to those of us who wait patiently in the midst of His seeming hiddenness and silence.

Beauty

“Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”

-Hans Urs von Balthasar, THE GLORY OF THE LORD: A THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS, VOL. 1 -SEEING THE FORM

Sacrifice & Obedience

And it is by God’s will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

-Hebrews 10:10, NRSV

“And take up their cross.” That cross is already there, ready, from the very beginning; we need only take it up. But to keep us from believing that we must simply choose any arbitrary cross, or simply pick out our suffering as we will, Jesus emphasizes that each of us has his or her own cross, ready, appointed, and appropriately measured by God.”

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

This year as part of my Lenten reading schedule, one of the books I am going through is Rowan William’s “The Sign and the Sacrifice: The Meaning of the Cross and Resurrection”. William’s has some wonderful reflections on the Cross and what it means for us today. In the second chapter “The Sacrifice” Williams seeks to reflect on the Cross as a “sacrifice”. He explores first what sacrifice means in the Old Testament, which for many may come as a surprise that sacrifice was a pretty diverse in its meaning. It wasn’t just sacrificing animals to keep God happy, it was much more nuanced and context specific than that. At length Williams writes about what is the common thread between the different meanings and purposes for sacrifices:

“But in the middle of it all is one great governing idea: a sacrifice is something given over into the hands of God, most dramatically when it is a life given over with the shedding of blood. That gift of life or blood somehow casts a veil over the sin or sickness or disorder of an individual or of a whole people. It removes the consequences of sin; it offers the possibility of a relationship unclouded by guilt with God; it is a gift that stands between God and the failures or disorders of the world. The gift is given – and it’s a costly gift because it’s about life and blood – so that peace and communication may be re-established between heaven and earth. And this was always symbolized by the fact that a sacrificed animal would be cooked and cut up and shared in the meal, which expressed not only fellowship with one another, but restored fellowship with God.” (Kindle Locations 290-296)

It is something given to God to restore fellowship. Sacrifice is done out of obedience, and Williams links Christ’s obedience at every moment of his life as a sacrifice to God for us. “Obedience”, Williams writes, “is not springing to attention and hastily doing what you’re ordered. Obedience is a harmony of response to God so that God sees in the world a reflection of his own life. Our actions in obedience reflect his.” (Kindle Locations 375-376) This a helpful frame for what it means to be obedient to God. He is not just an arbitrary rule giver shouting at us to stand at attention like mindless drones. No, obedience to God is us participating in the work of God. In our action we reflect God’s action towards us back to Him. This is what Christ did. The obedience of Christ “is a loving gift which directly and uninterruptedly and perfectly reflects God’s own loving gift. It’s the Son watching what the Father does and ‘playing it back’ to him. (John 5.19)”(Kindle Locations 382-383)

In Jesus, Williams continues, “we see all of that vast infinite eternal reality happening in a human life, happening in a weary, dusty-footed unkempt man completing a long journey, sitting down with his friends at the end of the day, breaking bread and pouring wine.”(Kindle Locations 391-393)

For He is the Word of God (John 1) and “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” (Hebrews 1.3) When we think of sacrifice let us reflect on the obedience of Christ that His whole life, at every moment, was a sacrifice to His Father. When we think of the cross “as sacrifice, however complex the ideas around it, what the language is trying to get us to see is that this new possibility is something objectively done for us, done on our behalf for us.”(Kindle Locations 410-412) Moreover, because of Christ it is possible for us to be human again, “to grow as we move along that living pathway to reconciliation with God and each other.” (Kindle Locations 421-422)

I have quoted Williams at quite some length, but let me cite him once more to drive home the fundamental truth which we should daily meditate on:

“Priests make atonement by performing sacrifices. But in the New Testament the subject is God. God makes peace with us, working through us, acting for us. It is God’s act, outside us, not up to us; something that God has accomplished.” (Kindle Locations 434-435)

God in Christ has done what we never could have. He reconciled us to Himself, not because of any foreseen faith or obedience on our part, but on the faith and obedience of Jesus Christ our Lord.

Lenten Reflections on Restlessness and the Gospel

“Properly speaking it is Gospel when it preaches Christ; but when it rebukes and reproves and gives commands, it does nothing else than destroy those who are presumptuous concerning their own righteousness to make room for grace, that they may know the Law is fulfilled not by their own powers but only through Christ, who pours out the Holy Spirit in our hearts.

They who interpret the term ‘Gospel’ as something else than ‘the good news’ do not understand the Gospel, as those people do who have turned the Gospel into a law rather than grace and have made Christ a Moses for us.”

-Martin Luther, Commentary on Romans

An Anthropology of Restlessness

The Lenten season calls us to reflection in our hearts and bodies about what we cling to and rely on for our day to day existence. These things often look different than we otherwise would like to believe. It is not so much “you are what you believe” rather it is you are what you love. The rhythm of our days seek to shape us into certain kinds of people for specific kingdoms. This is based in the fundamental truth as human beings, we are first and foremost desiring beings. As James K.A. Smith observes:

“We are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart to certain ends.” (Desiring the Kingdom, p. 40)

Liturgical practices, for Smith, is the various habits embedded in our daily existence. “Habits (precognitive dispositions) are formed by practices: routines and rituals that inscribe particular ongoing habits into our character, such that they become second nature to us.” (Ibid, p. 80) Moreover “the way we inhabit the world is not primarily as thinkers, or even believers, but as more affective, embodied creatures who make our way in the world more by feeling our way around it.” (Ibid, p. 47) If we understand ourselves first as primarily “lovers” before we are “thinkers” we will have to re-evaluate what it means for us to be influenced since we often believe that ideas are the way in which we are most heavily influenced. Take an example from Perelandra, the second novel in C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy:

“As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle to the good and find that it also is dreadful? …Here at last was a bit of that world from beyond the world, which I always supposed that I loved and desired, breaking through and appearing to my sense: and I didn’t like it, I wanted it to go away.” (Perelandra, p. 19)

We suppose we love God and ultimately claim to desire Him, but what if a small amount of God and His holiness appears before us (whatever that looks like I’m not sure) and we shrink in horror that it is not at all what we had supposed? I will contend that the Lenten season gives us the space to reflect on the habits and rhythms that shape our days, and ultimately our hearts. If we continually participate in the consumerist narrative of work, consume, sleep and repeat we will be in a continual state of restlessness. The Gospel is good news for us, the Gospel is the good news of rest in a restless age.

Rest for the Restless

For Martin Luther, everything depends on a merciful God and not on someone’s will. The debates about freedom of the will are endless, and at times verge on out living their usefulness as it pertains to reflections on faith, but we must be cautious when we speak about the conversion of someone from a non-Christian to a Christian. Much of the language used, especially when we talk about the nature of free will, often becomes contentious because we tend to give into the modern notion of certainty about the things we believe. We over conceptualize, place the emphasis on one thing (human choice) or the other (God’s choice) and when we reduce the issue to either tends to distract us from the truth of God’s unconditional action towards the human race.

Karl Barth, in his second volume of his Church Dogmatics, writes about God’s love as love that is ‘concerned with seeking and creating fellowship for its own sake.’ (II.2, p. 276) This love is an outpouring of God’s abundant goodness He is in Himself. Perfect Triune loving fellowship and in ‘loving us, God does not give us something, but Himself; and giving us Himself, giving us His only Son, He gives everything. The love of God has only to be His love to be everything for us.’ (Ibid) Barth further elaborates that ‘God’s love is not conditioned by any reciprocity of love. It is also not conditioned by any worthiness to be loved on the part of the loved, by any existing capacity for union or fellowship on his side…the object of the love of God as such is another which in itself is not, or is not yet, worthy of this His pleasure.’ (Ibid, p. 278) Here Barth is getting at the point I want to make: God’s love is unmerited and unconditional towards us, and we find it fully realized in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is the action of God that saves us, not anything we have done on our own part. Our salvation is truly secure not in our cognitive recognition of it, nor is our belief in our belief what secures us, but the objective work of Christ fulfilling the promises of God secure our salvation and reconciliation.

Peter Leithart in his book ‘Delivered from the Elements of the World’ has a chapter titled “Justified by the Faith of Jesus”. In it he explores Paul’s use of the term justification. He writes ‘in contrast to some standard Protestant soteriologies, though, Paul treats this judgement not as a mere verdict of “righteous” that is the basis for liberation, but as itself an act of deliverance… sinners have the righteous status of Jesus himself by faith, by trusting in Christ and entrusting themselves to the Father, by self-abandonment and loyalty to their Savior.’ (Delivered, p. 181) Leithart here wants us to grasp that justification is not merely a legal status change, it is not ‘merely a matter of ordo salutis or application of redemption; it is also, and most fundamentally, an event in the historia salutis. “Justification” occurred two thousand years ago.’ (Ibid, p. 183)

In this season of Lent as we seek to abandon the habits and rhythms that are forming us for another kingdom, and abstaining from eating or drinking certain kinds of meat or alcohol, let us reflect on the goodness of God coming in Christ out of the abundance of the Triune communion seeking us out to give us Himself, which is to give us everything.

Shallot Acrobats and The Joy of Creation

“The Christian apprehension of creation requires and involves the principle that creation is benefit. It shows us God’s good pleasure as the root, the foundation and the end of divine creation.”

-Karl Barth, CD III.1 p.331

“God’s gracious action in creation belongs from the first to that delight, pleasure, and regard that the Trinity enjoys from eternity, as an outward and unnecessary expression of that love; and thus creation must be received before all else as a gift and as beauty.”

-David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 249

Being a father of two young children you come across things you would not otherwise discover if you didn’t have kids. In particular we came across a wonderful cartoon called “Sarah and Duck”. It is a British cartoon in which a 7 year old girl lives life with her pet duck named “Duck”. They do very quirky and fun things in each episode, all filled with the joy of existence. What I enjoy most about the show is how everything in creation (bugs, the moon, clouds, rainbows etc) all are charged with a personal existence, and joy is an essential part in which Sarah and Duck participate in. It sees the ordinary as something deeply joyful and magical; from shallots desiring to be acrobats, to bugs playing in a bluegrass band for a bug party, or Venus rearranging the stars; all of creation is important and interesting.  Creation here is not something accidental, but purposeful, good and meant to be explored and enjoyed. Here is a little clip of the show. I highly recommend it.

In a way the show reflects something very true about creation and the way we should see it and experience it. To see creation the way God sees it we must become like children; to enter the kingdom Christ says we must become like little children. (Matthew 18:3) Moreover, David Bentley Hart in his book ‘The Beauty of the Infinite’ gives us some reflection on creation and delight:

“The delightfulness of created things expresses the delightfulness of God’s infinite distance. For Christian thought, delight is the premise of any sound epistemology: it is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creations beauty — only in seeing that creation truly is beauty — does one apprehend what creation is.” (p. 254)

Growing Old

“It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

G.K. Chesterton, in a post I shared earlier, says that God “has the eternal appetite of infancy” and we have sinned and grown old. I came across these words of Chesterton’s months ago, and I can’t seem to get them out of my head for even one day. Possibly because it reveals so much in myself about my condition and how I spend my days running from the truth of who I have become. I have sinned and grown old. The days are spent looking at screens, and going to bed looking at screens. Even though a lot of my time looking at screens tends to be for school and writing, even now as I write this post, it is still shaping my idea of what delight is. Or it is eroding whatever delight I have left in me for the ordinary things around me. More than this I feel the aching of longing for Christ to return and restore the beauty and peace creation began with. I no longer take much true delight in the gift and beauty which creation is.

Recently I finished reading the second novel in C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy “Perelandra”. Lewis has a way of penetrating through and cause you to live in wonder with his writing even if it is for just a moment. This theme of growing old comes up when Ransom (the protagonist) meets the Green Lady (Eve). The Green Lady represents what humanity was before the fall. Ransom is sent to Perelandra (Venus) by Maleldil to keep Green Lady and the King from falling the way of the people on Thulcandra (Earth). When Ransom encounters the Green Lady he struck by her radiant beauty and innocence. He struggles to find the words like “evil” in her language, because she does not know of sin and evil. In their conversations the Lady says that their conversations make her grow older. A phrase she uses is “come, let us grow older” in reference to conversation and knowledge. As the story moves on, sure enough evil finds its way to Perelandra in the form of Ransoms nemesis Weston. “It”, as Ransom refers to Weston’s body, attempts to get the Green Lady to lived on the fixed land because Maleldil has forbidden it. In the end, spoilers, the Lady and the King do not go the way of Adam and Eve, and are crowned at a year long ceremony. The King makes an observation about growing old properly and growing old like Adam and Eve. Maleldil caused them to grow older in a way that was not corrupting.

We however have grown old in the corrupted way. What we need is the Word to take up residence in our hearts and make us young again. Through growing in knowledge of Christ (2 Pet 1:3, 2:20, 3:18) we will escape corruption and be fashioned in His image. In this way we may begin to see creation as a gratuitous gift overflowing from the eternal Triune love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Rhythm

Bonhoeffer in his wonderful book ‘Creation and Fall Temptation: Two Biblical Studies‘ in which he comments his way through the first three chapters of Genesis dealing with creation. When Bonhoeffer comments on verses 4-5 in which God separated the light from the darkness, he writes that for us the ‘creatureliness and miraculousness of the day has completely disappeared. We have deprived the day of its power. We no longer allow ourselves to be determined by the day. We count and compute it, we do not allow the day to give to us… for technology is a campaign against the day.’ (Creation Fall, p. 28) For Bonhoeffer the six days of creation do not mean days in a computable sense, “it thinks of it in terms of the power of the day which first makes the physical day what it really is, the natural dialectic of creation”. (ibid, p. 29) What Bonhoeffer means by this what the day in its rhythm points to:

“In the morning the unformed becomes form and then by evening sinks back into formlessness. The bright polarity of light dissolves into unity with the darkness. Living sound grows silent in the stillness of the night. An expectant awakening in light follows sleep… The rhythm- repose and movement in one -which gives and takes and gives again and takes again, which thus eternally points towards God’s giving and taking, to God’s freedom on the other side of repose and movement- that rhythm is the day.” (p. 29)

Shallot Acrobats and Communion

What does this all have to do with a children’s cartoon? Well, everything. To delight in creation the way a child does is the way we begin to see it the way God intended for us. We live in the aftermath of the fall, in the brokenness and mire. The good news is that God became man, and in becoming man broke into our existence to reconcile all things to Himself, and to consume the world with His presence like the burning bush. Let us pursue delighting in what God has made, and what He is currently in process of reconciling and restoring. Let us be like the little children. Shallot acrobats point us to the eternal pleasure, delighting and communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Chesterton on Monotony

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” -G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy