Another Look at the Divinization of our World: Anticipating Life after Life after Death!!

[[Hi Sister, I wondered if you had noticed that Joyful Hermit is beginning to talk about "spiritualizing the temporal" (see: Spiritualizing the Temporal). . . . Is "spiritualizing the temporal" a good way of talking about the Christian mission to help bring the Kingdom of God? My own SD reminds me that no reality is ordinary in light of Christ's death and resurrection. What you wrote in your response to my two other emails reminds me of the same insight.]]

Hi, and thanks for connecting again! No, sorry, I haven't seen the video you noted here, though I am interested in hearing if its maker has made the fundamental theological change involved in the title you referenced. I sincerely hope she has! As I noted in my earlier post, an absolute dichotomy or antithesis between the temporal and the spiritual is a dualism typical of Gnosticism, a movement alive since before and certainly during Jesus' time. Scholars note that traces of it can be found in the Gospel of John (written around the end of the first century), though this may have more to do with John's countering Gnosticism through the Incarnation and all implied by that.

A shift to the idea of the spiritualizing of the temporal is absolutely foundational to Christianity and is a dynamic captured in sayings like, [[God became man so that man (human beings) could become gods!]] so, if she has made this shift, good on your videographer!! The Eastern Church's theology of "divinization" or "theosis," is a wellspring of Christianity's rejection of Gnostic Dualism. The same shift is critical to our own theology of the Incarnation including the way the Cross works to destroy sin and godless death as well. (If God is implicated by Christ in these realities, they cannot be godless any longer, can they? That is part of the radical shift in the whole of reality we know in light of the Christ Event.) It is also part of "the scandal of Christianity" because our God is found in places where religion often says God does not belong --- in the spatiotemporal, for instance. But in the Christ Event, our God reveals himself fully in the unexpected and even the unacceptable place (like a sinful world or on a criminal's Cross and in Jesus' "godless" death).

 In a piece I put up just last night on the dual context of eremitical life the last line from DICLSAL, noted, [[Thus, hermits are aware that the present and eternity no longer follow one upon the other but are intimately connected.]] This is the same theology once again; it reminds us that the reality of space-time and eternity interpenetrate one another leaving neither of them unchanged. The temporal is precisely where the eternal has taken up residence, and, as noted earlier this is why we call God in Christ, Emmanuel (God with us). As you say, it is very much part of speaking of the coming of God's Kingdom both in the way some commentators refer today as the Kin-dom or extended family of God, and in the more original Sovereignty or Reign of God right here on earth in space and time. Personally, I think hermits are especially called to affirm the world around us in this way -- another reason the piece I put up last night speaks of the world as a significant (and positive) context in eremitical life.

Your SD is definitely on the same page with his/her observation about ordinary vs extraordinary. In New Testament terms we say we are part of a new creation and of course, what we mean is that we are now part of an extraordinary reality where God has revealed his will to become all in all, and where that project is well underway!! When we speak of the world around us as sacramental, or celebrate the presence of the Holy Spirit within ourselves and in our midst, when we recognize that we are adopted Daughters and Sons of God and Imago Dei and Imago Christi, when we recognize that despite the limitations and even the distortions in our world, it is shot through with the power, presence, and glory of God, we are saying what your spiritual director says. There is nothing ordinary in our world, it is all extraordinary and becoming more extraordinary as time goes on -- not because of some sort of natural progress or evolution, for instance, (though we do believe in an evolutionary and unfinished universe) but because God is at work within us and in the whole of reality making it God's very own!

I am reminded that in our Bible class, we decided to use the Summer to read something a little different before we begin Galatians sometime in the Fall. We are now working our way through Tom Wright's Surprised by Hope, Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church. NT Wright reminds us that heaven is not our final or ultimate destination, but rather, what we truly anticipate is the new heaven and earth that will come in fullness with final judgment when God becomes All in All. (Tom Wright calls this, "not life after death, but life after life after death!") He teaches powerfully about the job of Christians to work towards this reality -- even beyond death as part of the Communion of Saints (in part, this is what he is referring to by the phrase "the mission of the church").  He captures this idea by calling us Christians, "Citizens of heaven, colonizing the earth."

In the piece I put up last night, the Church in Ponam in Deserto Viam recognizes hermits similarly as "sentinels of hope," precisely because hermits see this intimate relation between heaven and earth that exists everywhere we look! I love that characterization of the hermit's vocation!! We do not write off the spatial-temporal world, nor condemn it categorically, nor do we flee it as though our destiny is a disembodied heaven. Instead, we love it into wholeness in the power of the Holy Spirit. Or, we help make of it the new Temple of God in Christ by allowing and assisting God, in the language of your videographer, to "spiritualize the temporal!" 

On taking up our Cross: Accepting the Call to Kenosis and Authentic Humanity

The articles I put up recently on emptiness and the hiddenness of the eremitical vocation are profoundly linked, as I noted, to the theologies of the cross of Paul and Mark. Readers might remember that Mark's Gospel is often called a "passion narrative with a long introduction". But really, it is a passion narrative, a long story of self-emptying that climaxes on the cross. I was thinking about this recently because of one of our Friday gospel lections that had Jesus inviting and calling us to take up our crosses to follow him. Always before I have spoken of crosses as those difficult, challenging, and painful times we associate with suffering. We take up our crosses when we suffer well with the inspiration and empowerment of God in Christ. But I also understand more clearly that when we speak of Jesus taking up his cross it means his relinquishment of all of the ordinary ways to honor and success, power and prestige, relationships, family, even his own People, so that he may be completely transparent to the One he called Abba.

In Mark's Gospel the shadow of the cross marks the whole of Jesus' life. It stands as the summary and culmination, the most radical example of everything Jesus has been, done, said, and experienced until now. It is the symbol of the entire dynamic of self emptying which drove Jesus on as he ministered in compassion, prayed in the silence of solitude, felt the anguish of being rejected in so many ways or celebrated with his friends and disciples. Jesus is the one person in human history who did not only say yes to God, but who emptied himself (allowed himself to be emptied) so completely that in him God might be exhaustively revealed in the senses of both being made known and being made real with a human face in our world. Jesus allowed the will and purposes of God to so overshadow him, he opened himself so completely to God's love and power that he perfectly fulfilled the human vocation to image God. Our doctrine of two natures is one of the ways the Church has tried to speak adequately of this NT paradox that where Jesus was fully and exhaustively human there was God definitively revealed, and where God is definitively and exhaustively revealed there we see authentic humanity.

This is the dynamic Paul is speaking of when he talks of Jesus being obedient (open and responsive) to God even to the point of death, death on a cross. Jesus' entire life is one of taking up the call, task, and challenge to be fully human, and therefore to be imago dei --- not in the weak sense of mirroring God, but in the strong sense of allowing God's power and presence, his love and mercy, to flame up in Jesus without obstacle, obscurity, or distortion so that Jesus is incandescent with God, and so, when we see Jesus' humanity we see Divinity face to face. This is the heart of the Eastern notion of  "divinization and it is something we are each called to allow God to achieve in us in our own way. Humanity and divinity are not in conflict here. They are counterparts in genuine covenant existence.  This is why my most important (and beloved) theology professor (John C Dwyer) was fond of saying, "Human freedom is the counterpart of Divine sovereignty." What must lessen, what we must be emptied and stripped of is our false (or better, falsified) selves so that God may be entirely sovereign. And where God is sovereign we are most truly ourselves.

The emptying of self happens throughout Jesus' life and reaches its furthest points, its most radical form, in his crucifixion. Because Jesus embraces the godlessness of sin and death while trusting his Abba completely this kenosis is similar to that of the rest of his life. For this reason, although it is especially true that we can speak of taking up our crosses to refer to those times of significant suffering we might have in our lives, taking up our cross also means taking up the task, challenge, indeed the very vocation we have to be authentically human. We take up our cross every time we consent to being emptied and to allow God to be God, every time we allow the mercy of God to transform us or the love of God to empty and strip us of all falseness --- as well as to fill and make us whole and true with Divine meaning and purpose. To take up our cross daily is to take up the continuing call to become the persons God wills us to be whether this process is marked by the suffering of various forms of emptying and being made true, or the joy of completion and personal fulfillment we know in union with God. Taking up our cross is simply the task of embracing a life entirely committed to trusting and mediating the love of God as imago dei.