The Resurrection Body

To think “body” without spirit is not. 

It’s nothing.

But nothing is thought—

How true is that… 

In last night’s dream I 

Showed off my hair, long Chestnut 

red like the tree and falling 

Leaves, dead—

Like the body nothing 

Unless 

Resurrection 

Some recent reading must have referenced John AT Robinson’s The Body and I’m now into it, interested especially (as indicated above) in the resurrection body. That looks to be the focus of part three, but already in the opening pages (as illustrated below) Robinson is building the frame for approaching the amazing possibilities.

Faith and Love, Inseparable

If you ever wonder about this thing called “love,” pretty certain that the thing must be at or near the top of value, of understanding, of making the most of relationship, religion, of life itself, The Act of Love by Rosemary Haughton might be of interest.

Faith and the “act of love” are inseparable. Faith opens onto a gap, thus making space for a commitment “beyond.” Faith thus serves to go on beyond a calcified, once living, now dead, grasp of the inarticulate, the human attempt to manage the Divine. Of course, the transcendent/manifest paradoxical reality, the pathway to God ever again draws into the wonder, extending the living experience of Love.

“The goal of Christian aspiration is God. The avowed aim of the historical Jesus, so far as we are able to discern him, was the revelation to men of the one he called his Father, and his own journey through life was a journey to the Father. The establishment of the Kingdom or ‘reign’ of God is the expected climax of human life and of the world itself, and this reign, fervently expected, is yet already present in the hearts of men by faith. But the very fact that it is by faith that men are called to enter the Kingdom shows that the notion of God implied is very different from that of the powerful, benevolent and wise director of the universe. The occurrence of faith is in the dislocation of ordinary experience, even religious experience. The entrance into faith is an entrance into darkness, an intellectual, emotional and moral blackout which results from the coincidence of two irreconcilable planes of experience. Therefore any God of whom one can form an idea, let alone an image, makes faith impossible. Such a God is an idol, and as such diverts attention from the demand of faith.

This is the point of the death-of-God type of theology, in spite of its obvious dangers as an excuse for the evasion of faith in another direction. The Nietzschean vision of man without God is not capable of providing a setting for faith, because faith requires for its fulfilment in love that element of always reaching further, beyond itself… in so far as the death of God is the death of an idol who protected people from the need for faith, it is necessary. Indeed it is not a new thing, but its necessity has been emphasized by every mystic from the author of the book of Revelation onwards.” (pp. 168-9)

As Haughton elaborates, this is the death and resurrection recurrent in daily walking, as human efforts to make concrete what cannot instead encounter renewal by grace: “The effort of the intellect to seize on the event of faith and make something of it leads directly back to the edge of the ‘gap’ and once again to the paradox of death and resurrection plunge the intellect into darkness and the presence [of the Guide] which is known too well to be grasped. So it goes on.” (p. 180)  

Illumination

Sunrise/Son Rise

"More than meets the eye”…is it art or photo? Is one real and not the other? 

Do we “see through a glass darkly” and what is seen when the veil is removed? 

Paradoxical reality. Understanding by the mind and knowing by heart. To trust in love. Taking a leap of faith…

In Act of Love, Rosemary Haughton says that in certain circumstances “the decision of faith can only be an entrance into a paradox . But, once entered, the paradox becomes an illumination, the darkness of the mentally impossible is luminous with a sense beyond the achievement of reason alone” (p. 15).

Mighty Fine!

Mighty Fine is this coffee morning. Greens and yellows making gold, leaning into the eternal question around coming or going and knowing it must be both, of course.

In The Passionate God, Rosemary Haughton explores this “exchange” of the flow of love, the natural response to Beauty, Truth, Goodness…but she also tells the trouble when refused, when the human capacity, freedom, instead of "yes," chooses "No," holding on too much out of fear or pride, lust, flat-out selfishness or on through all the deadly sins. How dare we feel other than gratitude looking out the window into such a kaleidoscope of wonder!

"The love which incarnate Wisdom so longs to give back to the source of his own life is received totally, as it is totally given and returned to its Source and Origin in one unbroken movement of ecstatic joy and thanksgiving, and that joy, that intensity of exchange of Being, is the one called Spirit. That which the Father breathes, speaks, expends is his own being, and it only is in being given. Therefore also it only is in being received, and the essence of that exchanged being (Exchange itself) is the one who from the generative embrace between Holiness and Wisdom has being as life, gives life and praises life. There is no holding, no containing, but an eternal torrent of exchanged glory which in human experience we have to separate out and call “love” to distinguish it from other human exchanges. But it is “love” because it is. This is reality, whose nature is indeed love, totally given, totally received, totally given back. All else that we call reality is “made of” that, and creation is the natural exaggeration of a love which must always love more" (pp. 172-173).

 

Love of the Autumnal

 

As noted last time, recent reading has featured the works of John A.T. Robinson (Honest to God and The Human Face of God). Near the close of the latter work, he writes:

“‘Who is Christ for us today?’ I have suggested elsewhere that the gospel passages with peculiarly compelling power for our generation are those, like the Sheep and the Goats just alluded to, the walk to Emmaus or the final appearance of Jesus by the lakeside, which ‘tell of one who comes unknown and uninvited into the human situation, disclosing himself as the gracious neighbour before he can be recognized as Master and Lord’. In this, as in other respects, our thinking today has, I am convinced, to begin ‘from below’ and move from immanence to transcendence, from relationships to revelation, from the Son of Man to the Son of God, rather than the other way round.” (p. 239)

     A few pages earlier, Robinson asserts that “the starting-point is the transformation of human relationships” and that this comes into play as we engage anew the great mythic themes, as we 

“relate atonement to experience—justification, sanctification, sacrifice, ransom, satisfaction and the rest… What do we mean in terms of actual human experience by saying that ‘in Christ’ there is perfect (?) freedom, complete (?) release from fear and self, no (?) condemnation, final (?) victory over sin and death, unconditional (?) community, a new act of  relation, etc., etc.? How do we make real what the dimension of transcendence adds in this realm, what openness to grace means, or to the prevenient love of God, or to the power and fellowship of the Spirit? It is from ‘the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings’ in the present that the Christian has to start—and then go on to speak of these in secular rather than in religious terms. In the process he may—or he may not—be able to refer back to the myth or theories of ‘the’ Atonement in such a way that men say, ‘Oh, that’s what that meant!’” (p. 232, 233). 

     In this passage, Robinson footnotes with a recommendation to consider also the work of Rosemary Haughton, and this prompted me to pick up a volume already at hand: The Passionate God. Indeed, Haughton extends this project of finding the transcendent themes in everyday life, particularly relating the incarnation to the experiences of “romanticism.”

“The other thing about Romantic love which could only have sprung from Christian roots (however little the gardeners of Romance realized this) is that the doctrine is essentially dynamic. It is about an energy that smashes through the surface of everyday awareness and makes possible an exchange of spiritual power and knowledge which not only penetrates the lovers through every aspect of body, mind and spirit, but reaches far beyond them to transform other relationships and the very aspect of the material world. It is clear, also, that it does not come from the lovers but ‘enters’ into them, and having done so it demands to be used, to be given and taken, to act and affect, to change and be changed. It discovers its meaning in the response to it; it can only be known in being given.” (p. 47)

The poignant beauty of turning and falling leaves in this autumn often tilt and whirl with these wounds and wonders of transcendence, incarnation, transformation, death and resurrection…

Deep Down Things

      This post is mostly a book/author recommendation along with an encouragement to continue asking the important questions, and even to live into religion deep down. Today, looking outside, we witness the change of seasons, possibly a reminder of shifting world views affecting even our reach toward God. Some leaves must fall, and their full lives, like ours, show forth the beauty and promise of transformation. 

      During the manifestations of late summer and early autumn, I’ve also been turning the pages of works by John A.T. Robinson [1919-1983] beginning with Honest to God (1963) and continuing into The Human Face of God (1973). His writings give me support in moving further with the themes that feel most significant. For example, the notion I call “resonance” connects with a primary focus he makes in Honest to God: “a number of things have unaccountably ’rung a bell’… if one is to retain one’s integrity one must come to terms with them.” To elaborate this resonance, he notes that “three [texts]…  have since proved seminal” (pp. 19, 21). These he names: Tillich’s Shaking of the Foundations called “The Depth of Existence”, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, and Bultmann’s New Testament and Mythology. Robinson explores the difficulties humans encounter in finding words to express the inarticulate; grasping at a shape-shifting reality proves so difficult:

Robinson asserts that to be honest to God is to persist through the fog, to refuse to surrender to a superficial view, and to plumb into the heart of matter because “God is by definition, ultimate reality” and “’the ground of our being’” (p. 29, referencing Tillich). Robinson further explores into the dominant but too-limiting view of God as a supernatural being in heaven. He shows that this perspective was considered “the great enemy of man’s coming of age.” This was the idea of God that they [Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and others] 

“must ‘kill’ if man was not to continue dispossessed and kept in strings. Few Christians have been able to understand the vehemence of their revolt because for them he has not been the tyrant they portrayed, who impoverishes, enslaves and annihilates man. Indeed, for most non-Christians also he has been more of a Grandfather in heaven, a kindly Old Man who could be pushed into one corner while they got on with the business of life. But the nature of his character is here secondary. What is important is whether such a Being represents even a distorted image of the Christian God. Can he be rehabilitated, or is the whole conception of that sort of a God, ‘up there’, ‘out there’, or however one likes to put it, a projection, an idol, that can and should be torn down?” (p. 41)

So, given the confrontation with the fallen leaves of the lost idea, what must we do? Robinson very helpfully names and elaborates the “task”

• “to validate the idea of transcendence for modern man” (p. 44)
• to affirm the existence of “a supreme Person, a self-existent subject of infinite goodness and power, who enters into a relationship with us comparable with that of one human personality with another… the existence of such a Being as the creator and most sufficient explanation of the world as we know it.”  (p. 48)
• to live forward “a view of the world that affirms this reality and significance in personal categories … that God, the final truth and reality ‘deep down things’, is love.”  (p. 49)

Looking Down the Road (AKA: Living Ethically...

September 10 daybreak

Last night’s dream involved attempting to transport a significant volume of fruit juice into a truck with a pick-up style flatbed but with sides too tall to get easily over. The workers carelessly risked sloshing out the precious essence because they had not secured the containers. Possibly the dream relates to the book I’m reading (Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself ) that extends previous material on theodicy.  How do we individually work out the translation of divine inheritance into daily life? How is our true essence expressed into ethical living?   

Looking down the road

The main text of Lenn Goodman’s Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself concludes:

“Allow me to sum up. As to the relations between God and morals, what I see in the Jewish sources is less an appeal to God’s authority than a dialogue between our moral knowledge and the idea of God. The dynamic of that idea urges our moral thinking toward unwavering rather than compromised values—toward absolute rights most notably, but also toward unstinting generosity and unselfish love…

No one capable of hearing what purports to be a divine command is without moral sense—a product, in part, of upbringing and experience, in part of our human endowment, as sensitive reasoning beings. So we adjust the imperatives to fit our circumstances, ably or ineptly, honestly or invidiously, thoughtfully or mechanically. We scrutinize and criticize what we hear, adjusting our ideas about God as we learn, the better to express our moral, aesthetic, and other values—just as we refine those values in the light of what we learn about God from scripture, tradition, and history…

For the hallmark of monotheism in ethics, and of ethics in monotheism, is the equation of being with value that is salient in our human affirmation of life and beauty, growth, thought, and creativity. What is right, as seen with the aid of this religious speculum, is not something arbitrary, changeable, or contingent but something bone-deep, as we have said—as deeply embedded in being as the fact of change and the reach of growth. . .

… we recognize some imperatives as divine, others as human, and still others as impostures, desecrations of all that deserves to be held holy. We test prophecy by its content, using our God-given reason, which is capable not just of noticing contradictions but also of recognizing truth and falsity, worth and beauty, striving and desert. Revelation, then, becomes an ongoing conversation; and our idea of God and of God’s will grows pari passu [with an equal step] with our recognition of value in all beings and of sacred worth and dignity in the human person. (p. 69)