Bataille : by Sacrifice we Sanctify

By sacrificing a thing to God, we "de-thing" it, and it returns to us as blessed, no longer mere matter, but a vehicle of the Divine. We go from a pure economic economy to a gift economy, God's economy of grace. Bataille, with qualifications, has much to teach us on this.

Bataille, of course, makes the blunder of most intellectuals when he takes the sacramental lived experience of sacrifice, or the intimacy of eating, and disembeds, and therefore disfigures, them from biblical narrative, creedal formulae, and the praxis of an embodied faith community.

Christ, of course, came not to give a doctrine, but His body, the Church, to share us in to a particular type of person whose form of life naturally shapes how how perceive and receive the world - as gift.

Bataille did rightly recoil from any theology that proclaimed eternal life could be possessed in a way that did not actually involve this world :

“One cannot posit divine intimacy unless it is in the particular, without delay, as the possibility of an immanence of the divine and of man.”

Indeed, in the prologue to his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, St. Bonaventure also says that “no one is in any way disposed for divine contemplation that leads to mystical ecstasy unless like Daniel he is a man of desires (Dan. 9:23).”

Bataille did consider medieval sacred festivals, monuments, and architecture to function as at least partial replacements for the reality of immanence, so that Protestantism with its anti-sacramental cosmos and reformed doctrine of justification, having definitively severed the order of intimacy from the order of things, was for him practically identical with the death of God and the rise of industry .

I don’t think his criticisms of authentic Catholic, and Orthodox, ways to the divine, quiet hit the mark as essential, he’s used to the bland fleshless rationalism we see all too much today, but it is a valid criticism of Protestantism, and elements clearly within lived Catholic life that we need to be conscious of of fight against.

Against the “fall” into the utilitarian “order of things” Bataille opposed the “order of intimacy” which he interchangeably called “life,” “the holy,” “the sacred,” “the mythic”, or even “salvation.” Bataille believed religion was at its most effective when it breaks through the utilitarian order and demands sacrifice—an act of consumption that negates any further use.


“The opposite of project is sacrifice. […] And where only the result counts in the project, in the sacrifice, the act consecrates value in itself. Nothing in sacrifice is put off until later;”

— Bataille

And, if Christianity is true, then Christ’s sacrifice has indeed sanctified the world, by removing all things, including people, form utilitarian “thing hood” and conferred infinite value, sanctity, and all things. Another way of saying the is we are all Priests, and must offer up, sacrifice, the things of the world, ti be returned as blessed by God, no longer objects of mere use for ourselves, but now as means and vehicles to and of the the Divine; sacrifice and gift, are ultimately One - but that is only if indeed there is a divine telos to the Cosmos, which Bataille denies, despite all desire phenomenologically intended toward the good necessarily.

The point of a sacramental sacrifice, in rational Christianity, IS to unite the flesh and spirit in an erotic way that does not degenerate in violent and chaotic multiplicity.

Bataille’s criticisms of reason as a pale discursive faculty have little to do with Christianity’s traditional stance, after all, regardless of what we see today. It is the liturgy which shapes how and what we desire, affirming that true discourse of the God who cannot be grasped by thought must be related to by an open heart in communal praise, charity, and thanksgiving.

This is the sin of Protestant thought, with its “faith commitments” to mere creeds, informational knowledge apart from transformational embodied knowing experience in embodied liturgical forms of life.

Catholic thought, utilizing Platonic philosophy, always knew better than to separate or oppose desire from intellect, after all, one can only know what one loves, one must wish to know a thing first to intend one’s attention to that thing, hence all knowledge begins in the heart.

Think of King David - “I will not give to the Lord what costs me nothing” or the woman who broke an alabaster jar of ointment over Jesus’s feet instead of giving money to the poor.

David’s sacrifice was a destruction of utility and the woman at Bethany recognized that worship does not justify itself by anything other than itself.

Unfortunatly, Bataille refused to accept that sacrifice was in any sense teleological, or that it resonated with the peace of God rooted in the goodness of Creation.

Ultimately, without a proper doctrine of the fall, he ends up in a kind of reverse Gnosticism, divinizing the agony of our present incarnated fleshly existence, and extolling what amounts to yet another death cult, for there is nothing real outside the game for desire to pursue, yet in reality, at the end of discursive thought, it is only true eros which risks the leap of faith past what the mind can grasp to land into the abyss of God’s love.

Naturally, his thought led to his work with the Acéphale (‘Headless’), a human sacrifice-themed secret society, but for Christians Christ is the head of Logos, not a logos severed from eros, but one rational BECAUSE it is first embedded in the story of Christ, the God who sacrificed out of love, and it is this narrative that creates the grammar and "rules", the spirit, of Christian erotic rationality.

Let loving the beautiful be your morality

                                                

Without the power of desire there is no longing, and so no love, which is the issue of longing; for the property of desire is to love something. And without the incensive power, intensifying the desire for union with what is loved, there can be no peace.

—St. Maximus the Confessor, The Philokalia

Orthodox Christian theologian Timothy Patitsas has written a beautiful book,The Ethics of Beauty. In the West, he says the intellectual sins like pride were taken as primary, while in the East, the sensual sins were taken as primary. 

In Orthodoxy, first the passions must be cleansed, then we can perceive and fall in love with true Beauty.

Moved by Beauty the will now desires to embrace Goodness.

Lastly, we are ready to bow down to Truth.

The modern world operates in the opposite way, stop being ignorant and just do the right thing.

It’s not about moral reform, to will yourself to do good. You’ll naturally wish to do good when you perceive it to be desirable. What causes you to desire something ? When you see it as beautiful . For that, you first need to cleanse the nous to perceive what’s truly beautiful and fall in love with it, thereby embracing the Good you now see as Beautiful.

The following are excerpts from an interview he did HERE :

“….in Orthodoxy first comes the battle with concupiscent passions, which we win by fasting—in other words, by falling in love with Beauty itself, and not with false beauty. But what is this real Beauty, but Christ himself in a moment of self-emptying love? And so through Beauty we learn the Goodness of the Cross—that is to say, Ethics—and we ourselves long to pour out our life for our brothers, sisters, enemies, and all of creation. To contemplate this good-ness, to be illumined, we must give alms. We are then illumined in both senses—we contemplate correctly, and our light “shines before men.”

The healing of the soul begins with noticing God’s many theophanies, and with falling in love with them. In other words, it begins with Beauty.

After this we can discuss Goodness. By embracing what we ind within authentic Beauty—the crucified Savior and the Cross—we attain Goodness and become good, and ind our communion to others restored.

Finally, through these two steps we are brought to the gates of Truth, by a purified feeling. I mean a theological sensing, the innate ability we have to recognize theophany even in its hidden manifestations. In relying on that intuition, or in recognizing that within the Beautiful story of Christ is goodness, and therefore almost certainly truth—we fall in love with beauty and step out in faith toward it.

Is faith any different than eros? Abraham stepped out of his land and onto  a journey of exile not because he worked it out intellectually, but because he had received a theophany! Perhaps faith is just the memory of theophany, the continuing to launch out towards that divine supernova when it seems to have gone dark?

And when we ind within Beauty the miracle of empathy, and contemplate this Goodness by imitating it, we see that the irst feeling is not left behind. Rather, it is amplified and becomes contemplation, a feeling that includes discursive thought—a faith that is expressed as reason. 

And Finally our sense of truth is but an amplification of our sense of Beauty and our sense of Goodness or morality. The three are just one clear channel, one pure stream—from feeling to contemplation to knowing Truth directly. 

This is why Orthodox theology looks the way it does, so pure and free, so elegant and aesthetically satisfying—rather than cold, logical, and hard.

Your sense of the beautiful is already an intellectual power, and your initial  knowing of truth will still be a falling in love with the beautiful through feeling. 

                                                       

This is why Orthodox ascetic struggle, and Orthodox theology and ethics, do not begin with intellect and truth, nor with the intellect investigating goodness. Or, they may temporarily begin there if challenged to do so, but they will always return to their real beginning, which is Beauty, followed by Goodness, then the appropriation of the self-revelation of God. We begin with theophany, then add correct praxis, and inally we investigate dogma.

Imagine an ethics that was nothing more than Truth investigating Goodness, with no thought for Beauty? Who would even care about what it discovered? But isn’t this exactly how we deine Ethics today?

Or, imagine a psychotherapy in which Truth investigates Truth, asking only whether what we feel is true, always seeming to denigrate concern for Beauty and Empathy in the form of its very practice? Can there even be a Truth without Goodness and Beauty? Well, this is just what we call “objectivity,” and it is just a kind of hell.

We begin with theophany, then add correct praxis, and finally we investigate dogma.

Purification, illumination, deification .

Deification comes not from moral struggle, but from ascetic struggle—the attempt to fall in love with Christ and him alone, to be chaste, to energize our eros. And Illumination is a contemplation not yet of theological truths, but of goodness, of the empathy and compassion at the heart of beauty. 

Thus to purify our reasoning, we emphasize not logic, but the giving of alms; only this will clarify our judgment about goodness and render us Illumined.

 Deification is not separate from the others. To attain Eros (Beauty; the first commandment of Christ's two greatest commandments) and Agape (Goodness; the second of these two commandments) is already to be Deified.

 Or, we must see that even the first rays of Beauty in our lives, represent the onset, incipient but real, of our deification. We know the theologian to be deified because when he speaks, it is God speaking with him, with one voice human and divine. He is theologos be-cause he has found his own logos in the Logos who is Theos. This could be anyone."

                       

Man as Microcosm Healing the Fractured Cosmos

                                                               

For most of the eastern religions the Cosmos is mind. So too for many quantum physicists and some idealist leaning Christians - all is consciousness.

If so, it offers an explanation of The Fall - that God’s energies were creating the Cosmos as pure gift. Everything filled with Logos - logic, ie every thing acting in accord to God’s will. Then something disrupted this flow of gifting. An intention arose in some being. 

To narrate this spiritual truth in images the Bible tells us that Man made a counter-intention to God’s will. Instead of accepting the fruit at the proper time when mature as a gift, Man took. This disrupted the flow of grace, and the Cosmos fell.

St Maximus tells us that Man is a Microcosm of the Cosmos, and within him is contained 5 fractures of being.

We now live with the dualities of created and uncreated, intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, paradise and universe, male and female.

Man, being microcosm and mediator of the spiritual and material, is called to heal these divisions within himself.

To unite heaven and earth by virtue, to unify the tangible and intelligible worlds by acquiring angelic gnosis, and to reunite by love the created and the uncreated.

As Andrew Louth puts it,

“…through accomplishing all the stages of the spiritual life, the human person achieves, not simply union with God, but also fulfils what is the essentially human role of being the natural bond of all being, drawing the whole created order into harmony with itself, and into union with God.”

The healing is also reflected in the Eucharistic liturgy, St Maximus tells us in his Mystagogia.

Basically these divisions are echoed by correspondences in the Church. Sanctuary/nave is reflected in invisible/visible, heaven/earth, soul/body, mind/reason, New Testament/Old Testament, meaning/text.

So the movement between sanctuary and nave in the liturgy interprets and is interpreted by movement between the other divisions.

So the liturgical movement celebrates the healing of the five divisions.

                         

Another way to think about it is that the cosmos is Mind, which is “funneled” (incarnated) into brains.

The disharmonious FALSE patterns of chaos in the cosmos (incarnated as passions and conflict) are attuned within us to the TRUE patterns in harmony with God’s loving will.




Think of it as being in accord with the Tao, the Way. What is “true movement?”

Well, right now we exist as biological beings, and get our energy from dead biological beings - animals and plants.

This is life as bios.

However there is another type of life energy : zoe, or spiritual life.

It’s often missed in translation, but Christ came to give us zoe, true life, which is eternal, and animates not our biological body but our soul.

Our biological body moves in three dimensions, up and down etc, and also in the fourth dimension, time.

Our soul does not move this way. Our soul moves by desire. Think of when you move toward someone in your intention, in love. This is an invisible movement of your soul.

This movement is exercised by virtue.

Order *IS* love.

The incarnation basically injected this harmonious pattern in perfect accord with God’s will (because Christ IS God) into the disharmonious patterns of our world and universe.

Kind of like a harmony injected into a cacophony that gradually harmonies all those discordant notes with God's perfect song.

As David Bentley Hart says HERE,

"...virtue is, he [Augustine] argues....is the establishment of the soul's proper rhythm; and the soul that is virtuous is one that turns its rhythms not to the domination of others, but to their benefit. "

Christ then draws all contradictions into Himself, purifies and harmonies them.

In Jordan Daniel Wood’s superb new book, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor, he puts it like this :

“Every creature’s motion, sinful or not, generates time.

False motion renders existence more crudely finite, slavishly borne along with the flow of phenomena.

True motion—the motion of virtue, knowledge, love of God in Christ—brings creaturely motion nearer its term and thus cessation, and hence takes leave of the provisional necessities of spatiotemporal existence…

But those logoi carry potentialities that are themselves actualized for the first time in one hypostasis, Jesus of Nazareth.”

.

Inability to Love & Avoiding God's Love

           
                             

Do You Know Yourself? Psychological Problems and the Spiritual Life by Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos is a wonderful book.

Fr. Symeon's main thesis is that many people are not making spiritual progress because they are stuck in psychological ruts.

Fr. Symeon uses the work of the psychologist Karen Horney. She posited that neurosis is comprised of three flawed "movements" that people make in relation to each other are: moving toward people, moving against people, and moving away from people.

The solution is to detach from a false image of yourself.

I’ll concentrate on those who move away from others. In today’s psych jargon this type in the extreme might be labeled as having Dismissive Avoidant Attachment or being Love Avoidant. 

The following are excepts from the book on this type :

“We don't know what degree some people who remain unmarried fail to move toward marriage because God calls them to another life. It may be that they remain unmarried because they are afraid of marriage. They think they'll lose this freedom - this unhealthy freedom, however. They think they'll lose this independence - this unhealthy independence, of course. To be precise, they're afraid that someone else will enter the depths of their existence, and they don't want this at all. Certainly other needs exist that finally cause them to get married. For example, when a woman is looking for protection, affection, in the end she'll get married, but this shortcoming will exist. How is a communion of souls and persons possible in this marriage, then?

He doesn't want people to approach him, he doesn't want them to influence him, he doesn't want them to obligate him to do anything.

This type also has the tendency, among other things, to deaden his feelings, to suspend them, not to allow them to act, to operate. And he does this, as a rule, because every one of our feelings, this or that feeling, causes us to open up, to express ourselves, causes us to manifest ourselves. Precisely because this type of person is closed, however closed off even before his very self...

                     

This type, then, is the sort of person who can't open himself to God, who can't trust in God. He ends up being that Christian who is doing fine, just fine, but deep down - he feels it, he sees it, when he's paying attention - he still doesn't have communion with God, he still doesn't have contact with God. The light of God hasn't come into this secret darkness that exists inside him, into this double-locked shell of his.

....he wonders why he doesn't love other Christians, why he doesn't love other people. 

It's possible that the whole relationship between this "good" Christian and other people appears to be good, be ongoing, but at depth, however, his existence has no communion with other people, and this Christian doesn't feel that the other existences pass into him and his own existence passes into the other existences. That is, doesn't perceive his soul to be open so that the love of his brothers, his fellow Christians, and first and foremost the love of God passes inside him.

…a hyper-sensitivity is created in a certain way, like a defense mechanism, which is immediately set in motion, at work, in operation, as soon as something comes along and influences this soul at its depth, as soon as it comes along in some way to obligate this soul to do something (against its will) or as soon as it gives the appearance that it wants to oppress this soul.

For him it's a catastrophe to open up. We could say that this type knows one word - closed. Openness frightens him - and still more openness before God.

….[When] a person surrenders fully to God, this means that he accepts a visitor within him. He stops being fenced in and closed off. The unhealthy type, however, can't do this, because he seeks isolation, he has recourse to isolation in a compulsive way.

How is it possible for this person to receive grace? How is it possible for the light to come to such a soul? It isn't possible.

….it’s possible that we want away and we try to make it go away, and yet it doesn't go away.

Let me give you an example so that you understand,

It is difficult for granite to melt from an ordinary fire as for this situation to be resolved by ordinary efforts. In order for granite to melt, it requires a very high temperature. And in order for this situation to go away, for this wall to melt and the soul to open, it requires, to be sure, a great temperature of faith.

However, when this human being who has such an unhealthy condition understands how he himself is, deep down, and how he moves, and he can be given truly to Christ and truly be reborn in Christ, then he'll really be flooded with love, he'll become a true personality and will have a true, real relationship with other human beings."

Finally, from The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology :

                ".....the embodied historical struggle of every creature to discover and to be its true self, to communicate the vivacious idea at its core, is never left behind but is integral to its consummate realization, to its fullness of life. And as the creature fully lives into its self-communication, this true life surges past all false selves constructed by sin and prejudice and violence of every kind, and onwards into the inexhaustible self-sharing of its truth; for the truth at the heart of every creature is God's eternal and imperishable knowing and loving of it and this is the life from which it flows and which, Christians believe, God intends it to enjoy forever."

Robert Imbelli HERE comments,

"The death from which Christ saves us is far more than physical death. It is the very corroding of God’s image in us through fantasies of self-aggrandizement and hatred. These distortions of the generative divine ideas wreak havoc not only on individuals, but also on the whole human community and the rest of material creation. Sin falsifies divine communication and erects obstacles to the communion God desires. At its deepest, sin is refusal of Incarnation. For, in a sentence from Maximus the Confessor that McIntosh relishes, “the Word always and in all things desires to realize the mystery of his embodiment.”

With the resurrection of Christ, God’s life-giving Word stands fully revealed. Christians are those whose converted consciousness perceives the fulfillment of God’s plan in the risen Christ and whose conduct seeks to further the restoration of all things in him. Immersed in Christ’s paschal mystery in baptism and nourished by the Eucharist, Christians are led “into a new communion with the divine ideas…a new perception of all reality from within the eternal divine knowing and loving of all things.”

Sisyphus or the Saints, ritual or rote, time accursed or graced ?

 

    

Contra Plato, I believe we must let the poets lie to us, but only with those lies that tell the truth. 

The poet Stephen Dunn wrote a series of poems on Sisyphus, that old Greek cursed by the gods to forever roll a boulder uphill, never to reach the top, never to rest, only endless struggle with no future change or end. Life feels like that. Our endless numbing days of rot and habit. The solution to time's curse ? It is ritual.

As an Orthodox Christian I try to follow the liturgical calendar, referencing days to events in the life of Christ, bodily entering the rhythms of His life. Mircea Eliade wrote about how myth and ritual redeemed "the implacable becoming that leads toward death" :

"The defense against Time which is revealed to us in every kind of mythological attitude, but which is, in fact, inseparable from the human condition, reappears variously disguised in the modern world, but above all in its distractions, its amusements.

It is here that one sees what a radical difference there is between modern cultures and other civilizations. In all traditional societies, every responsible action reproduced its mythical, transhuman model, and consequently took place in sacred time. 

Labour, handicrafts, war and love were all sacraments. The re-living of that which the Gods and Heroes had lived in illo tempore imparted a sacramental aspect to human existence, which was complemented by the sacramental nature ascribed to life and to the Cosmos.

By thus opening out into the Great Time, this sacramental existence, poor as it night often be, was nevertheless rich in significance; at all events it was not under the tyranny of Time. The true ‘fall into Time’ begins with the secularization of work. 

It is only in modern societies that man feels himself to be the prisoner of his daily work, in which he can never escape from Time. And since he can no longer ‘kill’ time during his working hours—that is, while he is expressing his real social identity—he strives to get away from Time in his hours of leisure: hence the bewildering number of distractions invented by modern civilization… 

The ‘fall into Time’ becomes confused with the secularization of work and the consequent mechanization of existence, and the only escape that remains possible upon the collective plane is distraction."

Dunn captures this well in his poem,

SISYPHUS’S ACCEPTANCE

These days only he could see the rock,
so when he stopped for a bagel
at the bagel store, then for a newspaper
at one of those coin-operated stalls,
he looked like anyone else
on his way to work. Food—

the gods reasoned—
would keep him alive
to suffer, and news of the world
could only make him feel worse.
Let him think he has choices;
he belongs to us.

Rote not ritual, a repetition
which never would mean more
at the end than at the start . . .
Sisyphus pushed his rock
past the aromas of bright flowers,
through the bustling streets
into the plenitude and vacuity,

every arrival the beginning
of a familiar descent. And sleep
was the cruelest respite;
at some murky bottom of himself
the usual muck rising up.

One morning, however, legs hurting,
the sun beating down,
again weighing the quick calm of suicide
against this punishment that passed for life,
Sisyphus smiled.

It was the way a gambler smiles
when he finally decides to fold
in order to stay alive
for another game, a smile
so inward it cannot be seen.

The gods sank back
in their airy chairs. Sisyphus sensed
he’d taken something from them,
more on his own than ever now.

Another thing about secular time, it is cursed. It is cursed because it is free. It has no form to contain spirit. We can do whatever we wish, even as it destroys us.

In his poem Sisyphus's Affair, he imagines the cursed Greek cheating on his wife, a portion reads :

For a moment he longed for the old days
when there were gods to take offense,

when a man who wanted too much
would be reduced to size
with a life-long redundancy or thunderbolt.
But, no, there’d be nothing so neat.
It came to a choice, and he chose everything.
He left almost everything behind.

                                          

Not faith vs works, but two different Torah communities

 

                

The great scholar and host of the OnScript Podcast Matthew Bates claims that here below we have the most important New Testament article of the last several years by Kevin Grasso.

The phrase “faith in” Jesus was one of Luther’s innovations.

The main contrast was between the interpretation of the Torah that vindicated Christ as God and the other interpretations of the Torah.

But both are "faiths" one can belong to and preach.

It is not a contrast between faith and works.

Paul simply has a different interpretation of the Torah.

The interpretation he thinks is wrong is the one where it is obedience to the commandments, or things like circumcision or food laws, ("works") that leads to righteousness and salvation.

A person will be righteous by virtue of being a part of the faith, the community and way of life of the Christ-followers, NOT merely his own "faith" that certain beliefs about Christ are the correct ones.

Link to a podcast of Bates intervening Grasso HERE

Link to Grasso giving a simple explanation HERE

And here is the Grasso's simplified version of his argument HERE

Dr Kevin Grasso sent me this response as a clarification:

".... It is both a message and a movement. Galatians 1:23 is instructive as to what this sense is. It says "He who use to persecute us is not preaching the faith (τὴν πίστιν) he one tried to destroy" (ESV). The verbs tell us a lot about the meaning of the 'faith' here.

It is something that can be both preached and destroyed. It is, therefore, a message (since it can be preached), and it is something that can be joined (the verb 'destroy' here always takes an object that refers to people). So it is a message that can be adopted and that would lead to a different way of life depending on the content of the message.

The content of the message is the Christ. The way of life was centered around Him rather than Torah. Being a part of the Christ-faith means to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, and as Messiah, he is king. As king, we would owe our complete allegiance to him.

My take would be that Paul is reading Torah in such a way that it points to the Christ-faith as the means to righteousness rather than the commandments of Torah.

In this sense, Paul understood Torah more broadly than mere commandments. Abraham is Paul's example of someone who was righteous by πίστις (the response to the Christ-faith) but did not adopt the system of Torah-commandments because he was simply before the time of Moses.

This shows that the Torah actually supports righteousness by the Christ-faith and not by the commandments (this is how I read Galatians 3 and Romans 4--though that is, of course, an oversimplification)...."

                                    

To me, the makes sense and dovetails with Margaret Barker's work HERE where she posits that Paul was looking at the Jewish Scriptures for a type of Judaism that no longer existed in a complete form at his time...

The Pharisees were just one sect, faithful only to Moses's Torah and the commandments there, which were often about rituals and rules that initiated one into a more nationalistic cult where Yahweh was specifically a god for them (the book of Jonah makes fun of this, presenting Yahweh as God of all peoples, and interacting with them all).

The Judaism Paul has in mind includes more than just the 5 books of Moses, and reflects a Judism before King Josiah's reforms in Deuteronomy that made the cult specifically all about Moses and following his commands....

This was a more original faith, that worshiped a universal greater God.

Islam even came about claiming to be this ancient lost faith....

As David Armstrong writes :


The YHWH of these sources is diverse....But both portraits are of a corporeal, multiply embodied deity, with a divine retinue (inclusive of a goddess wife, Asherah, and numerous sons, though these make the later editors uncomfy). He is also, decidedly, much more cosmic and even supracosmic than the earlier El or YHWH. As Judah’s political fortunes waned between the vying Assyrian, Egyptian, and Babylonian superpowers, a reform of the cult led to an exclusivist and aniconic form of Yahwism, where YHWH became Judah’s sole god, it became impermissible to depict the divine body, limits were placed on the monarchy’s power and self-conception, and a new legislative code were adopted, all under the reign of Josiah, Judah’s penultimate king."

So Paul thinks this ancient way was about faith (meaning loyalty) to a specific king and his way of life, for Paul Jesus Christ, instead of being loyal to Torah prescriptions that only applied to Israelite ethnic and national formation.

This was a major Isrealite trend before Josiahs reforms, when he made Judism all about worship in only one temple, and Yahweh as a God only for them....

When he did that, the Bible says a third ! of the Jews left....Many large Jewish sects at the time had probably never even heard of Moses....

Now that the Temple was gone, Paul naturally looked to other traditions in the OT.

This king will come and give eternal life and free us from the demonic gods that cause death and attack us with strife, and the ancient Isrealites that were loyal to this king, who Paul sees as Christ, were people like Abraham, and others Jewish cults...

The Forgotten, Who Do Not Dream

Art, Tales of Galilea - Eliran Kantor.

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

- Psalm 126:5-6 (the psalm of Joy)

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life.

- Proverbs 13:12

You, reading this, have never been utterly without hope. Such a condition may indeed be incompatible with living. You may have come close though.

I believe the world is divided into two existential landscapes - those of the gods and those of the dead.

The gods are those who dream. The dead those who cannot.

It is two different kinds of visions. The gods see past the present landscape, somewhere over the horizon where the future is lighted and their sight stretches toward it.

The dead have eyes that do not project outward.

Hope is having a relationship to some transcendent end, something above and beyond that one can see towards, regardless of how things turn out.

Can one live with only a transcendent hope ? With truly no earthly thing to intend one’s heart towards ? Whether love, health, or security ? At least one must have purpose…

Ah, but if your eyes are not connected to love, one see’s only death.

The gods and the dead. I do not know which is more blessed.

Two poems.


Czeslaw Milosz, Were I Not Frail and Half Broken Inside


Were I not frail and half broken inside,

I wouldn’t be thinking of them, who are, like me, half broken inside.

I would not climb the cemetery hill by the church

To get rid of my self pity.


Crazy Sophies,

Michaels who lost every battle,

Self-destructive Agathas

Lie under crosses with their dates of birth and death. And who

Is going to express them? Their mumblings, weepings, hopes, tears of humiliation?


In hospital muck and the smell of urine,

With their weak and contorted limbs,

And eternity close by. Improper. Indecent.

Like a dollhouse crushed by wheels, like

An elephant trampling a beetle, an ocean drowning an island.

Our stupidity and childishness do nothing to fit us

For this variety of last things.


They had no time to grasp anything of their individual lives,

Any principium individuationis.

Nor do I grasp it, yet what can I do?

Enclosed all my life in a nutshell,

Trying in vain to become something

Completely different from what I was.


Thus we go down into the earth, my fellow parishioners,

With the hope that the trumpet of judgment will call us by our names.

Instead of eternity, greenness and the movement of clouds.

They rise then, thousands of Sophies, Michaels, Matthews,

Marias, Agathas, Bartholomews.

So at last they know why

And for what reason?


                                                 

A devastating poem Tin Ujevic, Croatia's great bohemian drunkard poet :


DAILY LAMENT


How hard it is not to be strong,

how hard it is to be alone,

and to be old, yet still be young!


and to be weak, and powerless,

alone, with no one anywhere,

dissatisfied, and desperate.


And trudge bleak highways endlessly,

and to be trampled in the mud,

with no star shining in the sky.


Without your star of destiny

to play its twinklings on your crib

with rainbows and false prophecies.


– Oh God, oh God, remember

all the glittering fair promises

with which you have afflicted me.


Oh God, oh God, remember

all the great loves, the great victories,

the wreaths of laurel and the gifts.


And know you have a son

who walks the weary valleys of the world

among sharp thorns, and rocks and stones,

through unkindness and unconcern,

with his feet bloodied under him,

and with his heart an open wound.


His bones are full of weariness,

his soul is ill at ease and sad,

and he’s neglected and alone,

and sisterless, and brotherless,

and fatherless, and motherless,

with no one dear, and no close friend,

and he has no-one anywhere

except thorn twigs to pierce his heart

and fire blazing from his palms.


Lonely and utterly alone

under the hemmed in vault of blue,

on dark horizons of high seas.

Who can he tell his troubles to

when no-one’s there to hear his call,

not even brother wanderers?


Oh God, you sear your burning word

too hugely through this narrow throat

and throttle it inside my cry.


And utterance is a burning stake,

though I must yell it out, I must,

or, like a kindled log, burn out.


Just let me be a bonfire on a hill,

just one breath in the fire,

if not a scream hurled from the roofs.


Oh God, let it be over with,

this miserable wandering

under this dome as deaf as stone.


Because I crave a powerful word,

because I crave an answering voice,

someone to love, or holy death.


For bitter is the wormwood wreath

and deadly dark the poison cup,

so burn me, blazing summer noon.


For I am sick of being weak,

and sick of being all alone

(seeing I could be hale and strong)

(and seeing that I could be loved),

but I am sick, sickest of all

to be so old, yet still be young!

…

Of course, this is the earthly life of Christ, the entire time, invisibly, secretly, being his greatest glory and victory, having held fast to His vision, and defeated the abyss.

I just finished reading a memoir on a man struggling with depression, Where the Roots Reach for Water by Jeffery Smith. At the end he finds a kind, patient, caring, compassionate loving, understanding, empathetic partner to pull him out of the darkness. This is the fourth memoir on depression I've read that ends this way. With a savior (of sorts), usually in the form of a wife. Christ, of course, was alone.

I end with this touching, if not entirely orthodox, description of Jesus by David Armstrong HERE :


“History is largely the story of an elite few exploiting a great many and making the most basic and meaningful needs, desires, and experiences of human life all but impossible for the common person to enjoy.

For the majority of his life Jesus’ obscurity effectively meant that he was a non-entity in wider society: a peasant without the rights of a Roman citizen or the protective wealth of an indigenous aristocrat, he struggled most of his life without any meaningful power to change the circumstances of the world.

He was probably food insecure; His celibacy reported in the Gospels is certainly a consequence of unchosen circumstance of simple family, social, financial, or personal misfortune.

Could Jesus have wanted marriage and not had access to a viable option? Could Jesus have been widowed? When he did achieve public notoriety, it was for consistently condemning wealthy, powerful people and religious authorities for hypocrisy and injustice. He was a man of the people; he actively spent time on the social margins…”

Interview with me on Art, Literature, and the Orthodox Church

 

Here is an interview with me by the Orthodox Arts Festival, I discuss the arts, literature, Orthodox spirituality, and how the Church is failing the outcasts :


INTERVEIW


You can vote for my short story, The Ruined and What We Say to Them, here :


VOTE HERE 

Thank you.

How to Read Scripture

The ancients did not read scripture as Protestants might today. Of course, one can read these texts in any way - as a fairytale, as poetry, as documents of historical happenings. But scripture is something specific, it is a text that is inspired and with which we can commune with God. You can’t do that with a history book! That doesn’t deny the historical aspects at all, it just means these historical events carry a spiritual meaning, that God can communicate to us through that story, factual or not.

The great Jewish Biblical scholar James Kugel reminds us that ancients read scripture according to 4 principles. First, a text that is Holy Scripture must have its meaning revealed. The “plain meaning’ must be spiritually integrated. It must be “opened” as Christ opened the scriptures to the Apostles on the road to Emmaus.

Second, Scripture’s purpose is not to inform us about events in the past, but about the present: ‘these things happened to them as a type, but they were written down for our instruction upon whom the end of the ages has come’ (1 Cor. 10:11). That means the story about Jonah is about, among other things, what’s happening right now. It speaks to us here and now. Perhaps the Whale is a particular sin that is coming for you because you are running from it, for example.

Third, that Scripture is harmonious, nothing contradicts anything else in the Bible.

Fourth, if it meets all three of the previous criteria, then it is truly scripture, and that means it is inspired by the Holy Spirit, who in Christ speaks to us directly in the Scriptures.

This accords with spiritual understandings; for example, the OT verses about bashing your enemies children’s heads against the rocks was originally likely part of some martial ritual, yet, through a spiritual lens, Christens separated by centuries in vastly different cultures would come to interpret this as being about the need to stop sins in their “infancy,” a meaning nowhere in the text, but made possible by a new vision of God, and a community embodying ritualistically these ways of reasoning.

After all, when the early Fathers of the Church read something about God that contradicted their understanding of Him as revealed by Christ they would simply say the text is intentionally giving obviously false information to alert the reader never too read the text with “fleshly eyes” but according to the Christian Spirit.

The same biblical text can be used, we all know, to commune with some spirit of love or just as easily justify genocide, depending upon the mind and it’s environment where it is received and the unavoidable rituals universal to all human communities, secular or religious, that shape the way reality is received.

The reader’s location is always defined socially, culturally, historically, and linguistically, and, rather then the modern presumption of an individual interpretation, it is always following communal rules of some wider culture.

The hermeneutic question for Heidegger was the manner of being for one who is capable of understanding, only certain sorts of people, who lived a certain way in the world, could be positioned to have certain truths disclosed to them, ie, they had to somehow “be” in a way analogous to the truth being revealed.

Hermeneutics, then, is not something that a reader might do, might apply to a text as an object; rather, it is characteristic of who the reader is. It is an enactment of being of a reader. Probably why the God of the OT was experienced as uninterested in doctrine, and more instant on right worship, of shaping a community of persons that existed in the world in such a way to be able to receive both the world and His presence in a particular way - hopefully the world as a gift and God as love, as I’ve written about HERE.

As the Hegelian philosopher Bramdon has argued, inferential, not referential claims, regulate truth claims, as we are contingent social creatures whose knowledge depends on the gifts of communities of practice that make the world intelligible, hence there is no knowledge outside of community, knowledge is a social accomplishment, and justification a social effect. Liturgical living is not optional. Secular ritual shapes us as surely as any religious ritual.

Of course, there is always a Husserlian “life world” as a prereflective world of lived experience that opens only specific domains of meaning, man’s prereflective self-understanding being basic than simply interpreting a given phenomenon after preconceived patterns, which of course we do as well.

So, how did ancient Christians read what we now call the Old Testament? Well, through the cross. They starts at the end, with Christ crucified. From there they works out there theology, through the cross. All the Fathers did. That is the “eschatological” reading. Eschatology is the end, it is the revealing. On the cross, Jesus is revealed as God. This is what the Fathers call the “spiritual meaning” of scripture as opposed to the fleshly meaning.

For example, Christ on the cross to fleshly eyes would appear as just a man. But at His crucifixion, His true divine nature is revealed, and we finally see not just a man, but God Himself.

As Fr John Behr says, before his conversion Paul was very familiar with the Scriptures. He read them carefully. What did he surmise they were telling him to do? Well, to kill Christians!

Yes, without the revelation of Christ the old testament can tell us very little about anything. The Apostles knew the Scriptures, but could not recognize Christ as God until after His passion on the cross.

So, what does this mean? It means everything in the Old Testament must refer to Christ. It must point to Him. That is where every interpretation must end. The meaning must be Christ crucified.

It’s actually the same with all communication, and Christ is the Word. You don’t know what a sentence means until you’ve heard it to the end.

For example, if I begin a sentence, “The plant….”, and ask you what the word “plant” refers to, perhaps you’ll say leafy green vegetation.

I continue my sentence, “The plant was very busy today……”. Well, now you’ll probably say the word “plant” actually refers to a factory.

Now I finish my sentence, “The plant was very busy today secretly infiltrating the enemy's camp.” Ah ! The word “plant” referred to a spy.

Notice, you didn’t know until the end what the word “plant” meant. Only once you got to the end, could you then make sense of the word at the beginning, retroactively giving it meaning.

In the same way, you cannot know what the story of Moses in Egypt means until you get to the end of the story. Moses in Egypt is like the beginning of my sentence, equivalent to the word “plant”. What is the end of the “sentence” or story? Christ crucified! Yes, the story of Moses refers to Christ crucified.

We must begin knowing that whatever we read must refer to Christ on the Cross. Hence, the Israelites could not know the real meaning because only at the end do we retroactively confer meaning on the story. The meaning comes at the end.

So, the Fathers will say Moses is a type of Christ, and he goes into Egypt which represents death, and through the red sea which represents baptism, and is “resurrected” when he is led to the promised land which refers to heaven. The story really refers to Christ crucified and risen!

Now, even before I opened my mouth to tell you about the plant, I had the meaning already in my mind. The meaning was at the beginning for me, but you couldn’t know that. For you, the meaning only came at the end, in time.

Just so, the meaning, Christ crucified, is the end of the story in time but was the beginning in the sense that the story occurred for its sake. Hence Origen will say Christ’s passion is both the beginning and the end - of everything, of the Cosmos itself.

Hence, Origen will say without the cross the Old Testament is only myth, even if it happened. St Gregory of Nyssa will agree :

"Therefore the Apostle said, 'the letter kills, but the spirit gives life,' since often if we were to stand in the mere concrete reality of the history, scripture would offer us no patterns at all of the good life."

- Gregory of Nyssa, Hom. in Cant., prologue

So, St Irenaeus says:

“For every prophecy, before its fulfilment, is nothing but an enigma and ambiguity to human beings; but when the time has arrived, and the prediction has come to pass, then it has an exact exposition [exegesis]. And for this reason, when . . . it is read by Christians, it is a treasure, hid in a field, but brought to light by the cross of Christ.”

One can easily imagine how the meaning of your favorite book would change entirely if given a radically different ending. The Cross changed the meaning, or revealed it, for the entire “old testament.”

Finally, for most of history very few people could read or write, the primary experiences of scripture for most of history were visual, oral, aural, and dramatic in the context of public liturgy rather than private study.

Liturgical tradition is a continuation of the practices of the early Church, the Church is not based on the Bible. Rather, the Bible is a product of the Church.

Narrative coherence and what the Bible “means” for belief has always ultimately governed tradition and its development.

For example, that Arian controversies showed that each dissident party could quote sources of theology quite evenly, and thus as a singular issue either one could have been vindicated. But it was the narrative compatibility (faith that was already practiced, sung, and understood for centuries) with dogmatic theses that resolved the matter in favour of the Nicene party.

The evaluation of whether to affirm the Nicene homoousios or the semi-Arian homoiousios is not a matter that can be settled by "formal" logic." Which of these is a good move, a good inference, is inextricably bound to the matter of the community of practice who are heirs of the apostles' teaching, who receive and read and inhabit the world of Scripture, and who pray to Jesus. 

That "first order" of prayer and proclamation is on the plane of know-how; doctrines as formulated in the Nicene Creed are the fruit of the community of Christian practice "making explicit" the norms that were previously unsaid. Doctrines say what, up to that point, we previously did, in a sense. In doing so, the community of practice is able to discern what counts as faithful practice.

Doctrines are, in very real way, derivative from practice.

Doctrine is not synonymous with religion, nor is it either the center or foundation of religion. Religion is located primarily in our doings, in the practices that constitute a community of worship and devotion to God.

The meaning of the claim “Christ is Lord”—like the meaning of any assertion—is conditioned by use: what the assertion means is relative to the context of a particular community of practice.

To confess that Jesus is “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God”is to articulate what was already implicit in our prayers, a worshipful way of life nourished by the Scriptures.

So, one sung/read Scriptures communally and liturgically, not for information, but for transformation, for divination, and to commune with God.

You may read the texts anyway you like, but if read as *Scripture, they had little to do with past events, and instead were thought as God’s voice, attaining you to His point of view *in the present*.

Hence, the Bible is a sacrament, and only exists in the life of the Church, to remove the Bible from its proper environment is to deform and utterly change its meaning. Whenever the context is changed, so is the meaning. And each community has concrete practices that make such meaning *intelligible - in traditional Christianity that only through prayer, fasting, and liturgy that Scripture makes sense.

As John Behr says,

"The coherence of dogmatic reflection and scriptural exegesis, as practiced the context of a worshipping community and ascetic practices aimed at ‘putting on Christ’, is broken, however, when the ‘dogmas’ are extracted from this setting to be treated ‘systematically’, independently of scriptural exegesis, and set alongside other, primarily historically-oriented, ways of reading Scripture, resulting in a confusion about how it all holds together, with some emphasizing the absolutely historicity of everything that is written, others doing so for parts of Scripture, but neither reading Scripture as Scripture."

The Problem with Trads

     

“We can get caught up in being so Orthodox that we forget to be Christian”

-Fr. Seraphim Rose homilies

Both extreme left and extreme right function to keep the faith becoming too rigid or too formless. Many would say our present condition is one of relativism, false ecumenicalism, thin or absent borders, a destruction of distinctions, and so we need a strong Right traditionalism to protect the Church from postmodernism, subjectivism, and the endless deconstruction that eats away at our heritage like acid.

Frankly, I think those who blame "trads" are out of touch, surely it is liberal Christians who are in the vast majority, simply look at opinions on gay marriage. Trads are a small but vocal minority on the internet, the average Catholic Church, or Orthodox, will will be deluged by liberalism. 

I tend toward the traditional stance myself, however it does have its problems.

Oftentimes Trads will turn dogmas into an idol, worshiping not the living God but the correct theological answers. Ironically, this is very much a protestant, modern conception of religion. I've written on how religion is a modern invention HERE.

What we affirm is the experience of the Church, the theories about those experiences are what we call theology. The experience of the Church is that Christ has forgiven our sins, however even Bishop Barron will say he doesn’t exactly know what that means, though Catholicism has many ideas on this.

John Bossy in his book Christianity in the West 1400-1700 is surely correct that that “Creedal orthodoxy” replaced Communitas as a supreme virtue, and Christianity became a system of beliefs and moral behaviors….

This was also compounded by the change from transformative knowledge (being formed into a certain way of being by liturgical attunement) vs informative knowledge.

Marshall McLuhan and son note that the protestants hitched their fortune to dialectic over rhetoric and grammar, literacy becomes a substitute for the "communis sensus” birthing the Gutenburg Galaxy brain over audio communal doxological epistemology, HERE.

Instead of faith being a mode of perception, and religion being a “virtue” as it was for Aquinas, it become about concepts over resonance, information over initiation. See HERE.

Heck, even Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky writes,

“From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a doctrine, but exactly a community. There was not only a Message to be proclaimed and delivered, and Good News to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited."

Francis Young points out "religion" was not about doctrines or dogma's, but ritual. You shared a meal with your god, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life - bios, biological life, from flesh and blood, exchanged for the life of God, to ZOE, spiritual life….

And John Behr points out that “Dogma” is really about setting boundaries, less about making positive statements about God beyond the basics.

Furthermore, Behr reminds us that dogmas cannot be separated from liturgy :

“The coherence of dogmatic reflection and scriptural exegesis, as practiced the context of a worshipping community and ascetic practices aimed at ‘putting on Christ’, is broken, however, when the ‘dogmas’ are extracted from this setting to be treated ‘systematically’…”

Vladimir Lossky, the great Russian theologian of the mid-20th century, wrote:

Knowledge is given to us by faith, that is to say, by our participatory adherence to the presence of Him Who reveals Himself. Faith is therefore not a psychological attitude, a mere fidelity. It is an ontological relationship between man and God, .....This faculty is the personal existence of man, it is his nature made to assimilate itself to divine life – both mortified in their state of separation and death and vivified by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Faith as ontological participation included in a personal meeting is therefore the first condition for theological knowledge.

From Introduction to Orthodox Theology, pp. 16-17.

Thus the little old lady in the back of the Church who gives an incorrect definition of the Trinity, but has been grafted onto the Triune life of God by participating in His life giving mysteries, is perfectly “orthodox.”

Divine Disability in Pagan and Christian Tradition

      

I myself am an Orthodox Christian, but like CS Lewis I find great wisdom and even shadows of Christ in authentic Pagan spirituality.

For many Christians, the Pagan gods were indeed real, but flawed, and often over time were thought to have become degraded into forces for evil.

Others see Pagan myths as psychological forces.

First a Pagan perspective, then a brief Christian one.

Edward P. Butler is probably today’s most brilliant polytheistic theologian, in a recent exchange he writes 

“In Egyptian theology, we have many myths of divine injury and healing; healing never returns us to the previous state. Many prosthetics in Egyptian myth. One value of these is that humans are given a role to supplement a God's loss. 

To take a Hellenic example, one meaning for Hephaistos' being lamed is that He is the agent of human technology. So His disability is directly related to a potency of his in which we especially participate. 

Osiris' phallus is lost on the mortal plane because a crucial part of His resurrection lies in mortals going on. In this sense, His phallus is the mortal phalli, Hephaistos' walking is the mortal kinesis. 

I don't want to distract anyone from the mysteries of identification with these Gods through the experience of disability through this sort of reading, however. That embodiment, that presencing of the God, is sustaining for individuals and for communities.

@GalinaKrasskova: also something i think worth teasing out: healing not returning us to the previous state....begs the question of what is healing?

@DaphneLykeion: [RE: Hephaistos] It seems as some principle of transformation. As a god who is made lame, from previously being whole, that it gives him a certain access into changing a substance of one state into that of another. Breaking down and recombining that renders a specific service from the original form that the original could not.

Yes, and that's also suggested by His fall from Olympus to Earth, a "phase change".

@DaphneLykeion: I wasn't really thinking so much as a phase change but rather an undergoing of an "alchemical change". That the transformative process which renders change to create a greater product requires destruction and reform. 

In my mind this act of destruction inflicted makes the subject bearing higher potential to affect the world. Although not lamed I can see this situations were divinites are killed and brought back. 

Or even those gods who were "consumed" by Kronos and delivered again from him. But these are on a different scope from the more permanent evidential transformations that involve destruction. 

Yes, I think this is key, to distinguish the change whereby a God acquires a disability from other changes. My theory would be that this corresponds to an extraordinary capacity being acquired by mortals. One could test this hypothesis by looking at myths of divine disability to see whether there is a human capacity that corresponds in some sense to the disability suffered by the God.

@DaphneLykeion: The permanent disability however make these gods in line with processes of transformation and power. I think of it this way that Hephaistos who makes the greatest and powerful armor is himself physically unsound. His superior craftsmanship is inseparable from the fact that he is lame, whereas smiths are usually robust. 

As if an exchange of his vitality of form for the soundness and superiority of the forms that he creates. This exchange between his vitality and that which he creates is not separate from the destruction of his limbs. 

I think of it this way that Hephaistos who makes the greatest and powerful armor is himself physically unsound. His superior craftsmanship is inseparable from the fact that he is lame, whereas smiths are usually robust. 

As if an exchange of his vitality of form for the soundness and superiority of the forms that he creates.

@GalinaKrasskova: You see this with Weyland the smith too, a semi-divine Power.

@DaphneLykeion: Fascinating! It would seem that there is an exchange ongoing, from the process of disabling that lends its gift. The hand which is torn from a guard make him quite superior in his art. The torn eye giving the greatest sight.

@GalinaKrasskova: I could certainly see that with Odin and Heimdall.

@DaphneLykeion: The disabling on the gods acting as a process of strengthening some particular attribute to superior level.

@GalinaKrasskova: Precisely and it's interesting with Odin that He chose to pluck out His eye for that reason.

@DaphneLykeion: This would be related to sacrificed gods who by their all out death provide life/fertility. All different scopes. And this would provide new insight into Hera laming intentionally her son. Not as an act of cruelty as the myth seems to lend, for in Argos cult evidence shows very close relationship.

@GalinaKrasskova: She is the maker of heroes.

@DaphneLykeion: Exactly. If Hephaistos in Argos was called the war-like Zeus when he is lame, it would suggest a notable Heroic nature.

Also suggestive regarding the ontological status of warfare.

@DaphneLykeion: Quite so. And so we find a lame god who is superior in crafting physical forms and who is a great warrior.

Had some further thoughts on divine injury and disability. Note the value of certain founding moments of injury in diverse theologies, such as the castration of Ouranos in Hellenic theology or the dismemberment of Ymir in Norse theology. In these cases, the injury/dismemberment of a primordial God establishes what I would call "pantheon space". (In systematic Platonism, pantheon space is the intelligible-intellective or noetico-noeric plane, or so I have argued.)

Such acts localize the moment of self division or diremption of each henad, which releases the common space of being. Within the pantheon, it may be that all subsequent moments of divine injury participate this moment, as structurations of the field. A subtle moment of this in Egyptian theology is Re's self injury, which generates Hu and Sia, utterance and perception. Utterance and perception in this way become available for mortals to participate, and also subject to independent inquiry, epistemology. 

A question which occurred to me, is what would be the significance of a given theology having more injured/disabled Gods than another? If we follow out the theory propounded in last night's discussion, then it might be that the theology with more injured/disabled Gods would be experiencing more elements of experience as occurring immediately within the bodily presence (parousia) of the God.”
   

                                                      

Now onto Christianity.

“For the God we Christians must learn to worship is not a god of self-sufficient power, a god who in self-possession needs no one; rather ours is a God who needs a people, who needs a son. Absoluteness of being or power is not a work of the God we have come to know through the cross of Christ.”

- Stanley Hauerwas,

Kelby Carlson, himself, disabled, says a disabled person can be an actual image of God, of the reality of God, an vision of disability not as a sinful condition, but an image of Christ crushed upon the cross and therefore a disabled body can be a conduit of grace instead of a horror to be escaped from, for it is in suffering that we can “see” God, that is, when we recognize our own state of dependence and brokenness.

Rather than needing to be redeemed from a broken body, the disabled makes visible God, Christ who was crippled, betrayed, and broken :

“…disabled people can be seen as conduits for God’s grace and service rather than it only images of a broken creation in need of “fixing”….While brokenness itself is evidenced of a creation longing for release from bondage, an individual’s disability is, subversively, a venue for Christ to display his glory. 

Disability responds in graphic physical form to the idea of approaching God based on merit. Each disabled person with their twisted legs, nonfunctional eyes, or [whatever] visible or invisible disability they have, directly attacks the presumption of human glory.

Disability is a symbol or metonymy of the larger experience before God: one of weakness, alienation and dependence . . . .

Such a blunt assessment of disability’s pictorial significance might seem harsh, especially coming from a disabled person. 

If I left it there, it would be entirely inadequate. But disability is not merely a counter to theologies of merit constructed by man. It represents the opposite of that: a theology that finds its centerpiece in God’s death on the cross. 

The theology of the cross is a particular way of doing theology that disabled people can uniquely understand. It is the theology that acknowledges the “visible” things of God: 

namely the cross of Christ and visible suffering as the premier way of “seeing” God. God’s grace is manifested, paradoxically, in that which appears weak and nonsensical. 

In this view, one cannot blithely skip over the cross as a simple means to God’s vindication and resurrection. This results in an anemic view of suffering: something that is meant only to be patiently endured in the hope that perhaps someday things will get better . . . . 

Scripture reveals a redemptive way of looking at suffering, and consequently at disability (which, for a great majority of disabled people, involves suffering to one degree or another). Grace is seen as a means of living in and through suffering. 

Chronic weakness is seen as real strength. In fact, it is the only way to truly approach God in faith. Can we view this in an ecclesial way that might take account of the suffering of disabilities in the body of Christ?”