Well, to start with Moltmann has the problem that, unless he or Christ were speaking analogically, Jesus directly contradicts Moltmann’s assertion that Sabbath is the crowning of creation. That the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath seems resoundingly straightforward, and would in fact undo Moltmann’s procession-as-priority schema, no matter how interesting an idea it seems. By the scriptural accounts, it is humanity and not the Sabbath that is the culmination of creation, and humanity and not the Sabbath that is the foundation of the kingdom of redemption.
This doesn’t, of course, erase the procession of the creation of history, but it does leave us with an intriguing tension between the genesis account of creation and the account, presumably, of the one who did it. That much isn’t Moltmann’s fault, but Moltmann does do an altogether too vague job of placing humanity within an evolution/creation schema. Perhaps Moltmann relies too heavily on a single creation tradition here to do this bit of reconciling?
At any rate, Moltmann fails here to construe that other claim of Christ, that the kingdom is at hand. Christ’s eschatology was rather more immediate, not in fact solely the consummation of all things at the end of all time but the consummation of all things with Christ himself. The specifics of re-creation in sacramental redemption seem lacking, a continuing thin spot in Moltmann.
Still, one agrees with creation being both open and closed, both free and determined – this models, of course, the temporal process by which we make choices; we can never make just any choice, but do choose from a menu of options, our selection of which must exceed the merits of any option itself (we don’t just choose by our reasons) – but one must disagree that creation and evolution are discussing the same goal.
For evolution as such the goal of humanity is, possibly, to survive until the heat death of the universe or alternatively, to have speciated into a form of life that will. Christianity as such posits the goal of humanity quite plainly as the death of the self for the glorification and fulfillment of the kingdom of God. These are not the same goals. However similar in structure the processes may be, their divergent ends implies that they are themselves different histories of the same temporal events. They make competing ultimate claims about the purpose of the universe and about the purpose of humanity.
That our two languages have similar sounds and structures does not and cannot escape the contradictions of the two cultures from whence they come. This is not to be anti-evolution or to be anti-scriptural. But it is to suggest that the metaphysical synthesis Moltmann seems to want to work toward presents itself as an essentially flawed endeavor. At least, it does if we assume what Moltmann does, and what Christian thought traditionally does: that God is necessary.
By the terms of evolution, we really can go slouching of toward a Kelvinist Bethlehem where what is born is not new life but simply the ceasing of all molecular motion as the energies of the universe irreducibly dissipate. By the terms of creation, this is one thing we simply cannot do. Moltmann opens up the possibilities but hedges his bet by assuming God’s ungoing creation of the universe, which makes God metaphysically necessary again, even as it makes evolution ultimately superfluous, one option among many.
What would be more interesting would be if one were to take evolution at its word and accept that God is, in fact, not necessary from a human perspective. What if we didn’t hedge our metaphysical bets and just let God be simply a gift, that most superfluous of metaphysical things? This, to me, is the benefit of the two-languages paradigm of evolution and creation: that it lets evolution be evolution as such.
Yes, the gift of God asserts: it really all could end with the heat death of the universe. There’s no guarantee that it won’t, and all the rational evidence does seem to lead this way. And yet, we have this hope. We have other sorts of evidence, not that this world requires God, but that God desires the world regardless of requirement. This, this is grace. Here, here, is our wager. Let the tensions be.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
On Moltmann's Evolution: Consonance
Sexual dimorphism indicates that, as human males are disparate from human females, the male retains behaviors of the sexual dimorph: aggression, polygamy, and social hierarchy. Sexual monomorphism, on the other hand, indicates that, as human males are similar to human females, the male retains behaviors of the sexual monomorph: passivity, monogamy, and flat- pair bonding. The tension between these two principles, of course, might well account for all of literature and a fair bit of human culture.
Biologically, we really don’t know which way we’re going. So to speak of the human as being simultaneously imageo dei and imageo mundi is not without precedent, and to introduce human beings as the embodiments of metaphysical tensions is at least as old as Shakespeare. But a right reading of creation might indicate that it is a good deal older still. Creation’s historical progression indicates a sequence of which humanity is not the final step: the Sabbath is. More, the historical progression indicates that even the highest step is dependent or contingent upon the others.
The human being is like the animals an animated body; the being of the human is similar to the being of the animals; the human eats as the animals eat; the human is blessed as they are blessed: with fertility. Yet animals cannot garden, and the human is to keep and tend and till the earth and it is not good that the human should be alone. The animals are not in the image of God. Even the angels are not in the image of God. But human beings are God’s vicar, proxy, and representative and as such precede the Sabbath reserved for the glory of God.
Our work is the glorification of God. Our work will always be the glorification of God; in the redemption of creation the glorification of God becomes the first thing that is the foundation of all new things. The human task then is not to supersede the creation but to precede it into the kingdom of God as servant-priests. The new creation will follow and depend upon and be the culmination of human work, and not the converse. Instead of the hubris of social Darwinism then, the biblical accounts of creation and redemption leave the human race not exultant but humbled as the serving base of the kingdom of God.
This is the divine history. By being open to the future, to the very progression of time, it is open to interpretation. It is not the exclusion of evolution but proposes an answer to the question of what evolution means. In evolutionary terms, in a self-directing, self-reproducing, self-ordering biosphere, both God and humankind seem to become superfluous; yet directing, reproducing and ordering meaning remain irretrievably human tasks – a religious worldview would merely ask that we direct, reproduce and order creation and its meaning toward God rather than ourselves.
One must demythologize both evolutionary and creationary accounts to understand them both and negotiate the tension between their claims. And the true real tension here is not between a science-world and a Bible-world but between a man-centered world and a God-centered world. Already, both science and bible agree that humanity is not the center. They also agree that the universe is not stable; history is not an orderly procession of natural laws and fixed states. More, bible and science agree that the future of the history is written in neither present nor past. Future is contingent upon the past but does not simply proceed from the past. The future is both determined and free, bound and open. The parts always give rise to a whole greater than their sum.
The world anticipates its future. It does so in a way contingent upon chance, though what evolution calls blind chance creation calls the freedom of the goodness of God. And what evolution does not call a goal at all, except, perhaps, the continuance of life, creation calls the goal of the revelation of the glory of God. That it ‘may not’ reach its purpose does not remove that purpose. That it ‘may not’ reach its purpose does not remove God’s continuous and creative Yes to the cosmos. If God is closed to anything, God is closed to closure.
God is closed upon liberation. God’s constitution is transformation; God’s expressive creation, then, is free, righteous and ultimately saved as this and only this is the eschatological exclamation of the glory of God.
Biologically, we really don’t know which way we’re going. So to speak of the human as being simultaneously imageo dei and imageo mundi is not without precedent, and to introduce human beings as the embodiments of metaphysical tensions is at least as old as Shakespeare. But a right reading of creation might indicate that it is a good deal older still. Creation’s historical progression indicates a sequence of which humanity is not the final step: the Sabbath is. More, the historical progression indicates that even the highest step is dependent or contingent upon the others.
The human being is like the animals an animated body; the being of the human is similar to the being of the animals; the human eats as the animals eat; the human is blessed as they are blessed: with fertility. Yet animals cannot garden, and the human is to keep and tend and till the earth and it is not good that the human should be alone. The animals are not in the image of God. Even the angels are not in the image of God. But human beings are God’s vicar, proxy, and representative and as such precede the Sabbath reserved for the glory of God.
Our work is the glorification of God. Our work will always be the glorification of God; in the redemption of creation the glorification of God becomes the first thing that is the foundation of all new things. The human task then is not to supersede the creation but to precede it into the kingdom of God as servant-priests. The new creation will follow and depend upon and be the culmination of human work, and not the converse. Instead of the hubris of social Darwinism then, the biblical accounts of creation and redemption leave the human race not exultant but humbled as the serving base of the kingdom of God.
This is the divine history. By being open to the future, to the very progression of time, it is open to interpretation. It is not the exclusion of evolution but proposes an answer to the question of what evolution means. In evolutionary terms, in a self-directing, self-reproducing, self-ordering biosphere, both God and humankind seem to become superfluous; yet directing, reproducing and ordering meaning remain irretrievably human tasks – a religious worldview would merely ask that we direct, reproduce and order creation and its meaning toward God rather than ourselves.
One must demythologize both evolutionary and creationary accounts to understand them both and negotiate the tension between their claims. And the true real tension here is not between a science-world and a Bible-world but between a man-centered world and a God-centered world. Already, both science and bible agree that humanity is not the center. They also agree that the universe is not stable; history is not an orderly procession of natural laws and fixed states. More, bible and science agree that the future of the history is written in neither present nor past. Future is contingent upon the past but does not simply proceed from the past. The future is both determined and free, bound and open. The parts always give rise to a whole greater than their sum.
The world anticipates its future. It does so in a way contingent upon chance, though what evolution calls blind chance creation calls the freedom of the goodness of God. And what evolution does not call a goal at all, except, perhaps, the continuance of life, creation calls the goal of the revelation of the glory of God. That it ‘may not’ reach its purpose does not remove that purpose. That it ‘may not’ reach its purpose does not remove God’s continuous and creative Yes to the cosmos. If God is closed to anything, God is closed to closure.
God is closed upon liberation. God’s constitution is transformation; God’s expressive creation, then, is free, righteous and ultimately saved as this and only this is the eschatological exclamation of the glory of God.
On the Founding of the Jesuits
I wrote earlier that accords, historically, are the documents produced by people deciding to agree in different ways. From this perspective, it was something like inevitable that the Roman Catholic church would eventually respond to the challenge of the Reformation by becoming, in effect, both more Catholic and more Roman. No doubt, Ignatius Loyola and his six companions would essentially carry what Luther would have called Popery not only throughout Europe but to the broader world. That they would have all agreed that the Catholic Church had problems would perhaps not have much mollified Luther; it certainly did not soothe later Protestants.
But, by the direct wishes of the current Pope, the Jesuits carried humility, mortification, and abnegation to the world nonetheless. Of course, that they also carried education through catechism and that they did so zealously is to their credit. Considering the current ostensible collapse of Christendom, one might wonder at the parallels between their service to the world and our own. They carried heartfelt faith to a Europe often only, from their perspective, nominally Christian. Both emergent and missional churches require missionary zeal.
But, to return to the time at hand, the Jesuits were not the sole reformers of the Catholic Church anymore than Luther was the sole proto-Protestant; they were rather one embodiment of a larger reforming impulse. The Capuchins, in a move not entirely dissimilar from the first monastic movements, took the ideals of Christian poverty into ‘small, hermitlike settlements.’ The shoeless Carmelites gave us the height, perhaps, of Iberian mysticism in the fervently pious Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, in their own parallel monastic orders.
In light of the scandalous excesses of the late Middle Ages, the ancient monastic values of poverty, chastity and obedience must not have seemed nearly so arcane. Prayer, meditation and service might even have come naturally.
But of course all of this could not have happened within the Catholic Church without a similar honest impulse among the cardinals and the office of the pope itself. The greater power of the pope only came as a form of greater spiritual power; to be gone, or at least reduced, were the days of intense involvement in the secular affairs of this world. Bishops were sent back to pastoral care of their dioceses, and the sale of church offices was finally addressed. And, whatever greater tensions there might have been, the theologians of the Commission for reforming the church did agree on God as the only source of salvation and the necessity of good deeds as the human response to that salvation, a note that later Protestants such as John Wesley would eventually take up.
But there would for the most part be no middle ground, as the zeal of the reforming zeal of Catholics and Protestants alike served mostly to deepen the convictions of both. The Council of Trent through its systematic rebuttals of Protestant claims came eventually to simply expand its own dogmatic base. And it is no coincidence that Catholicism would essentially remain unchanged after this until Vatican II; in deciding how to respond to Protestantism, Catholicism decided how it would respond to the emerging modern world.
The answer came in catechism, missal, and breviary. A matrix of factors such as the absence of external threat and its own increasing wealth had allowed the Catholic Church to sprawl somewhat in its relation to the powers and principalities of states and within its own orders and clergy and noble members. The founding of the Jesuits and the Council of Trent brought a sharp reversal of all and any of these wandering courses. All the sacraments were standardized; this and many other similar developments equipped the vast vehicle of Catholicism to go out into the world.
As the Catholic Church had once ‘sent’ Luther out of its comfortable environs, so now also it sent Augustinians, Dominicans and Jesuits out to make disciples throughout the increasingly known world. It was perhaps because they were so standardized that they were subsequently able to flexibly meet and engage the alien cultures of distant lands much more readily than Protestants, who would take some time catching up.
As the founder of the Jesuits had once been a soldier, so the evangelical movement that he began carried the routine, energy, adaptability and discipline of Christian soldiers (in armor and in robe) to encounter the world and subdue it – for the glory of Our Lord and Savoir Jesus Christ. And just as they had done among the barbarians of the German forests, so now the Jesuits and the like shifted the understanding of their gospel so that those whom they preached to and taught would have the ears to hear it.
But, by the direct wishes of the current Pope, the Jesuits carried humility, mortification, and abnegation to the world nonetheless. Of course, that they also carried education through catechism and that they did so zealously is to their credit. Considering the current ostensible collapse of Christendom, one might wonder at the parallels between their service to the world and our own. They carried heartfelt faith to a Europe often only, from their perspective, nominally Christian. Both emergent and missional churches require missionary zeal.
But, to return to the time at hand, the Jesuits were not the sole reformers of the Catholic Church anymore than Luther was the sole proto-Protestant; they were rather one embodiment of a larger reforming impulse. The Capuchins, in a move not entirely dissimilar from the first monastic movements, took the ideals of Christian poverty into ‘small, hermitlike settlements.’ The shoeless Carmelites gave us the height, perhaps, of Iberian mysticism in the fervently pious Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, in their own parallel monastic orders.
In light of the scandalous excesses of the late Middle Ages, the ancient monastic values of poverty, chastity and obedience must not have seemed nearly so arcane. Prayer, meditation and service might even have come naturally.
But of course all of this could not have happened within the Catholic Church without a similar honest impulse among the cardinals and the office of the pope itself. The greater power of the pope only came as a form of greater spiritual power; to be gone, or at least reduced, were the days of intense involvement in the secular affairs of this world. Bishops were sent back to pastoral care of their dioceses, and the sale of church offices was finally addressed. And, whatever greater tensions there might have been, the theologians of the Commission for reforming the church did agree on God as the only source of salvation and the necessity of good deeds as the human response to that salvation, a note that later Protestants such as John Wesley would eventually take up.
But there would for the most part be no middle ground, as the zeal of the reforming zeal of Catholics and Protestants alike served mostly to deepen the convictions of both. The Council of Trent through its systematic rebuttals of Protestant claims came eventually to simply expand its own dogmatic base. And it is no coincidence that Catholicism would essentially remain unchanged after this until Vatican II; in deciding how to respond to Protestantism, Catholicism decided how it would respond to the emerging modern world.
The answer came in catechism, missal, and breviary. A matrix of factors such as the absence of external threat and its own increasing wealth had allowed the Catholic Church to sprawl somewhat in its relation to the powers and principalities of states and within its own orders and clergy and noble members. The founding of the Jesuits and the Council of Trent brought a sharp reversal of all and any of these wandering courses. All the sacraments were standardized; this and many other similar developments equipped the vast vehicle of Catholicism to go out into the world.
As the Catholic Church had once ‘sent’ Luther out of its comfortable environs, so now also it sent Augustinians, Dominicans and Jesuits out to make disciples throughout the increasingly known world. It was perhaps because they were so standardized that they were subsequently able to flexibly meet and engage the alien cultures of distant lands much more readily than Protestants, who would take some time catching up.
As the founder of the Jesuits had once been a soldier, so the evangelical movement that he began carried the routine, energy, adaptability and discipline of Christian soldiers (in armor and in robe) to encounter the world and subdue it – for the glory of Our Lord and Savoir Jesus Christ. And just as they had done among the barbarians of the German forests, so now the Jesuits and the like shifted the understanding of their gospel so that those whom they preached to and taught would have the ears to hear it.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
On the English Act of Supremacy
With the English Act of Supremacy we see clearly that the Reformation produces not Protestantism but Protestantisms. This comes through what one might call the Venn-diagram approach to liturgical decisions: retain what is Sciptural and retain what traditional, retain what is Scriptural only and discard what is traditional, or retain what is Scriptural but leave traditional worship optional.
But of course the forces that gave Christendom a profusion of Protestant churches were not solely religious. The global unity of the church fractured since the Great Schism now breaks apart entirely as regional churches take up their own loyalties, just as nations are consolidating out of the fragments of feudalism. The English church henceforth belonged to the English king. It would also have its own English favor, once it came to disregard the Roman traditions that constituted that church before the Reformation. This meant that national churches would only enhance the distinctions between the churches, as political and regional concerns mixed with decisions and concerns about church polity.
This affected the Catholic church, too, as in the instance of the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella and the consolidation of powers in the Iberian peninsula. To be Spanish Catholic was now different from being French Catholic, and English Protestants were now religiously distinct from German Protestants. In other words, the Reformation as it developed birthed new categories, perhaps even new ways of being human. Allegiances would be strained. The Europe addled by the effects of the Black Plague was also the Europe of burgeoning market economies. Wealth and monarchs alike moved from affinities to feudal lords to affinities for the new urban centers; this meant a shift in ecclesiastic authority as well, as serfdom became a distant memory and merchants consequently gained more wealth, and often more social honor, than poor clergy. The Reformation, after all, was itself a part of much larger social change, though it remained a discrete part of it. What began with a crisis of authority concerning one pope in the second Great Schism became in time the distribution of spiritual authority to the priesthood of all believers, which in turn gave us the crisis of spiritual authority that claimed so much of Europe’s blood as Protestant and Catholic factions fought for social space. The Reformation meant that for the foreseeable future nothing significant would be settled by councils (Who would sit on them?). The Catholic popes and higher clergy had shown that they themselves were not what anyone imagined spiritual authority to be like, and the Bible then as now refused to interpret itself.
The nadir and synecdoche of this crisis of authority must be the treatment of the Anabaptists, who insisted on separating national and church authority and were thus despised by everyone and drowned for their convictions; one might here have wished for a simple declaration of heresy as in the days of old. Instead, Protestants could not (and cannot) agree on the proper interpretation, even the proper significance of, the Scriptures and the churches themselves. In the Protestantisms of the developing Renaissance, we see all the powers and perils of multiple and local authority: the ability of the spirit to energize specific people and the ability of powers and principalities to energize them against each other.
It is true, ultimately, that the Reformation made further reforms and revivals possible, but by confounding the authorities of church and state it also made those same future reforms necessary and inevitable. One wonders what would have happened if Luther had achieved his goals and contained the Reformation within the Roman Catholic Church. How would the story of church and state played out differently if states did not have churches to choose from?
But of course the forces that gave Christendom a profusion of Protestant churches were not solely religious. The global unity of the church fractured since the Great Schism now breaks apart entirely as regional churches take up their own loyalties, just as nations are consolidating out of the fragments of feudalism. The English church henceforth belonged to the English king. It would also have its own English favor, once it came to disregard the Roman traditions that constituted that church before the Reformation. This meant that national churches would only enhance the distinctions between the churches, as political and regional concerns mixed with decisions and concerns about church polity.
This affected the Catholic church, too, as in the instance of the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella and the consolidation of powers in the Iberian peninsula. To be Spanish Catholic was now different from being French Catholic, and English Protestants were now religiously distinct from German Protestants. In other words, the Reformation as it developed birthed new categories, perhaps even new ways of being human. Allegiances would be strained. The Europe addled by the effects of the Black Plague was also the Europe of burgeoning market economies. Wealth and monarchs alike moved from affinities to feudal lords to affinities for the new urban centers; this meant a shift in ecclesiastic authority as well, as serfdom became a distant memory and merchants consequently gained more wealth, and often more social honor, than poor clergy. The Reformation, after all, was itself a part of much larger social change, though it remained a discrete part of it. What began with a crisis of authority concerning one pope in the second Great Schism became in time the distribution of spiritual authority to the priesthood of all believers, which in turn gave us the crisis of spiritual authority that claimed so much of Europe’s blood as Protestant and Catholic factions fought for social space. The Reformation meant that for the foreseeable future nothing significant would be settled by councils (Who would sit on them?). The Catholic popes and higher clergy had shown that they themselves were not what anyone imagined spiritual authority to be like, and the Bible then as now refused to interpret itself.
The nadir and synecdoche of this crisis of authority must be the treatment of the Anabaptists, who insisted on separating national and church authority and were thus despised by everyone and drowned for their convictions; one might here have wished for a simple declaration of heresy as in the days of old. Instead, Protestants could not (and cannot) agree on the proper interpretation, even the proper significance of, the Scriptures and the churches themselves. In the Protestantisms of the developing Renaissance, we see all the powers and perils of multiple and local authority: the ability of the spirit to energize specific people and the ability of powers and principalities to energize them against each other.
It is true, ultimately, that the Reformation made further reforms and revivals possible, but by confounding the authorities of church and state it also made those same future reforms necessary and inevitable. One wonders what would have happened if Luther had achieved his goals and contained the Reformation within the Roman Catholic Church. How would the story of church and state played out differently if states did not have churches to choose from?
On the Call of Moses
The Promised God:
Identity, Becoming, and Vocation in Exodus 3-4
The call of Moses in the opening chapters of Exodus represents one of the most important points in the Judeo-Christian narrative. It may also represent a crucial point in the narrative of God. After Horeb, neither God nor God’s people will be the same. Moses certainly will not. But revealing a static identity is not the point of the text. Transforming identity is. The call of Moses places the identity of both God and God’s humans entirely in the promised future. Deliverance is promised. So is God. So also, despite his best efforts, is Moses. They all engage redemption as vocation. It is through their vocation that they will all ‘be who they will be,’ not immediately, but in God’s promised future.
The text begins with Moses in the overly appropriate vocation of shepherding. Jacob was a shepherd. So, for a time, was Joseph. The practice ties Moses in with the great figures of Genesis even as his genealogy in previous chapters ties him to the priesthood. Moses is already a symbolic man, poised to become the prophet of God that will shepherd the Hebrews out of Egypt. That he is not incurious means only that he is not entirely absorbed in his current occupation. He is perhaps, a man ready for something more: “I must turn aside and look at this great sight.” Moses is living perhaps in the wilderness of his own life, exiled far from his homeland and far from his people, the ones he once cared enough to kill for. Small wonder he left the sheep behind to “see why the bush is not burned up.”
Now the text is quite clear that the bush is not consumed because the bush itself is not on fire: “the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush” (italics mine); the angel and not the bush is burning. What the text only implies is a nearly perfect metaphor for consuming consciousness. Out of sympathy for his kinsfolk, Moses had killed an Egyptian – and then he ran away to live a comparatively comfortable if undistinguished life. His kinsfolk remained enslaved. One wonders if more than the bush was burning, and who on Horeb was miraculously unconsumed. One does not wish to make too much of this foray, but one might hazard that Moses’s vocation was perhaps glimpsed and then abandoned before he set foot on the mountain of God. Everyone remembers on Horeb.
When Moses does turn aside, the LORD calls him “Moses, Moses!” and Moses responds in the typical Hebrew fashion, “Here I am,” or “ready” – an identification which already presents itself as open and available, a possibility for future service. It is in response to this statement that God identifies God’s self as the God of the ancestral patriarchs, and thus, by implication, the God of the Abrahamic promise. It is only then that Moses realizes to whom he is speaking and knows to hide his face. And it is in response to Moses’s fear that God delivers the promise to deliver the Israelites. For all the attention given to God’s name, the dialogue between Moses and God actually covers quite a bit of ground before the issue even comes up. And the subjects first addressed between the two are God’s promised patriarchs and the promise of delivery from slavery. Promises come first.
Moses’ subsequent question is telling: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Identity is the question. It is questioned because of the size of the vocational calling. The answer is not a reminder of who Moses is but of what God promises: “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign…when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” Moses will know the scope of his identity when the vocation is accomplished and the promise of God has been fulfilled. And he will only know it then. This is neither the first nor last puzzling response of God to human concerns. But it is a response that ties Moses’ identity to God’s promised work.
Moses’ response in kind is now unsurprising: “If…they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” Moses understandably insists that God not remain a silent partner in the deliverance of Israel. But Moses here misses the implication of what has happened so far: God like Moses will be known when the vocation of deliverance is done; in fact God will be known in worship, the proper affirmation of the identity of God and the right recognition of God’s work. Whatever the theological wanderings through the course of history have shown, God’s notable response best aligns itself in context as the alternative translation “I will be what I will be.” From the first breath of fire the entire conversation has pointed toward the future. The covenantal relationship of God to Israel points toward the future. Why should not the name of God point toward the future, too? In other words, God might well not give God’s name here because God simply does not have one yet. God is not overwhelmingly present here, nor is God unnecessarily coy.
Instead, God is promised. God has always been promised. God reaffirms this when God says again “I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” because the litany follows the line of those who received the Abrahamic promise. The patriarchs never knew God by name but only knew God as promised; the callings of their lives reflected their relationships with the God who promised. Moses is to be no different. Nor will Israel be. This is precisely the point. God even says “This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.” Sinai has just become a sort of holy land, sanctified by God’s purposed call. Is this the moment in which Moses becomes a prophet?
It certainly sounds as if this is so: “Go and assemble the elders of Israel, and say to them…and they will listen to your voice…however,…the king of Egypt will not let you go...So I will stretch out my hand and strike…I will bring this people into such favor with the Egyptians that…you shall plunder the Egyptians.” That this speech is entirely about the future is by now a foregone conclusion. But that it includes such detail about the reactions of various peoples and the future actions of God indicates the precise and prophetic nature of God’s promise to Israel through Moses. God will speak and act through Moses despite the resistance of those who will not hear God’s promise; the promises of God are not always accepted by everyone. But the vocation of the prophet is to voice those promises nonetheless.
That Moses does not come to believe the promise based on the signs is also unsurprising; prophecy is never about the signs but only about the vocation of delivering the promises of God to the people. The transformation of the staff into the serpent and the healing of Moses’ leprous hand miss the point and fail to deliver confidence to the increasingly overwhelmed prophet. The belief of the people has never been the issue; the belief of Moses is. It is only when Moses gets to his own perceived incapacities that either God or Moses can begin to address the issue. The question is, again, one of identity: “I have never been eloquent…I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” God’s resounding reply “Who gives speech to mortals?” is a reiteration not of Moses’s identity but of God’s as purposeful creator; God gives humans speech and promises that God will teach Moses what to say.
Then Moses denies the promises of God. He asks God to send someone else. He implies that God was mistaken about his identity, his vocation as the deliverer of the promises and people of God. By denying his appropriateness, he denies his very name, as the Hebrew etymology ‘Drawn out of the water’ alludes to the promised deliverance of Israel across the Red Sea. We should not wonder at God’s anger here, but we should marvel at God’s permissiveness toward Moses to include Aaron—though, perhaps, we should not pause too much. God has never chosen the vehicles of God’s promises for their submissiveness and piety. Moses is hardly the first man to talk back to God, and God has always proved pliant enough to accommodate human weakness. In fact, it is precisely through the flexibility of God and God’s chosen people that God’s promises are fulfilled. As Moses does step into his role of sole prophetic shepherd of the Israelites, the only inflexible character of the story is Pharaoh. The course of Israel’s deliverance, the shape of God’s promise, will wind like the Nile itself – and be every bit as unstoppable.
Yet the promise is indeed now more complicated. In Aaron, Moses will now have his own prophet, who will relay the words of God that Moses tells him. It is, of course, not the first time that God welcomes a vocational partner. But one must note that even the promises of God here must be subject to some alteration, however superficial, or there would be no purpose for the translation. This is not, one presumes, to be a children’s game of telephone. God is no dictator here but is a teacher of the mouths of both men. God becomes a collaborator in delivering God’s own promise. God steps into God’s vocation.
Moses now decides to go. He asks his father-in-law if he may go. He takes his wife and sons and staff to go, but the mistrust indicated in his question to Jethro “let me see…if they are still living,” may be the reason that God reiterates Moses’ mission and insists that it will fail, including now the promise to Pharaoh that his firstborn sons will die. But the promise is also perhaps implicit to Moses that “whoever curses you I will curse.” The note of the son ‘Israel is my firstborn ’ is not then incidental, as progeny formed part of the same threefold Abrahamic promise. God’s promised future builds on what God has worked before.
Why God should subsequently try to kill Moses is of course something of a mystery. Why God fails to do so is somewhat more explicit. Moses’ wife Zipporah, whom God did not invite but nonetheless presumably accepts, takes a “flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it and said ‘Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me…a bridegroom of blood by circumcision.” Though the precise ritual is uncertain, the tradition it references is clear: circumcision is identity. Circumcision marks the people chosen by God for God’s promises. God seals covenants in blood. God consequently leaves Moses alone. Whether God tries to kill Moses because of their earlier conversation or because of some reason outside the explicit text or simply in order to foreshadow later events, the result is unequivocal: like Jacob, Moses is marked and identified now in a way that he was not before. Moses is God’s prophet. Moses is ready to deliver God’s promise.
God now collaborates still further in the acquiescence: he brings Aaron to Moses. The brothers, separated for so long, kiss in greeting, and one might see some wisdom in what God has allowed. Aaron for his part does not hesitate nor require proof from God, but trusts his brother directly. He steps directly into his role apparently without a second thought. He believes the promise. He speaks all the words that Moses speaks to him and performs all of Moses’ signs. And then, despite all of Moses’ misgivings, the people believe, not because they have been delivered, but because they have been heard. And, preempting God’s promise, they worship God there in Egypt, not because the promise has been fulfilled, but precisely because it has begun. This is sufficient. God remembers who they are, and they remember God, and they celebrate. In the best of the times to come, this will be their vocation, their identity, in response to the fulfilled promises of God.
Identity, Becoming, and Vocation in Exodus 3-4
The call of Moses in the opening chapters of Exodus represents one of the most important points in the Judeo-Christian narrative. It may also represent a crucial point in the narrative of God. After Horeb, neither God nor God’s people will be the same. Moses certainly will not. But revealing a static identity is not the point of the text. Transforming identity is. The call of Moses places the identity of both God and God’s humans entirely in the promised future. Deliverance is promised. So is God. So also, despite his best efforts, is Moses. They all engage redemption as vocation. It is through their vocation that they will all ‘be who they will be,’ not immediately, but in God’s promised future.
The text begins with Moses in the overly appropriate vocation of shepherding. Jacob was a shepherd. So, for a time, was Joseph. The practice ties Moses in with the great figures of Genesis even as his genealogy in previous chapters ties him to the priesthood. Moses is already a symbolic man, poised to become the prophet of God that will shepherd the Hebrews out of Egypt. That he is not incurious means only that he is not entirely absorbed in his current occupation. He is perhaps, a man ready for something more: “I must turn aside and look at this great sight.” Moses is living perhaps in the wilderness of his own life, exiled far from his homeland and far from his people, the ones he once cared enough to kill for. Small wonder he left the sheep behind to “see why the bush is not burned up.”
Now the text is quite clear that the bush is not consumed because the bush itself is not on fire: “the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush” (italics mine); the angel and not the bush is burning. What the text only implies is a nearly perfect metaphor for consuming consciousness. Out of sympathy for his kinsfolk, Moses had killed an Egyptian – and then he ran away to live a comparatively comfortable if undistinguished life. His kinsfolk remained enslaved. One wonders if more than the bush was burning, and who on Horeb was miraculously unconsumed. One does not wish to make too much of this foray, but one might hazard that Moses’s vocation was perhaps glimpsed and then abandoned before he set foot on the mountain of God. Everyone remembers on Horeb.
When Moses does turn aside, the LORD calls him “Moses, Moses!” and Moses responds in the typical Hebrew fashion, “Here I am,” or “ready” – an identification which already presents itself as open and available, a possibility for future service. It is in response to this statement that God identifies God’s self as the God of the ancestral patriarchs, and thus, by implication, the God of the Abrahamic promise. It is only then that Moses realizes to whom he is speaking and knows to hide his face. And it is in response to Moses’s fear that God delivers the promise to deliver the Israelites. For all the attention given to God’s name, the dialogue between Moses and God actually covers quite a bit of ground before the issue even comes up. And the subjects first addressed between the two are God’s promised patriarchs and the promise of delivery from slavery. Promises come first.
Moses’ subsequent question is telling: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” Identity is the question. It is questioned because of the size of the vocational calling. The answer is not a reminder of who Moses is but of what God promises: “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign…when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” Moses will know the scope of his identity when the vocation is accomplished and the promise of God has been fulfilled. And he will only know it then. This is neither the first nor last puzzling response of God to human concerns. But it is a response that ties Moses’ identity to God’s promised work.
Moses’ response in kind is now unsurprising: “If…they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” Moses understandably insists that God not remain a silent partner in the deliverance of Israel. But Moses here misses the implication of what has happened so far: God like Moses will be known when the vocation of deliverance is done; in fact God will be known in worship, the proper affirmation of the identity of God and the right recognition of God’s work. Whatever the theological wanderings through the course of history have shown, God’s notable response best aligns itself in context as the alternative translation “I will be what I will be.” From the first breath of fire the entire conversation has pointed toward the future. The covenantal relationship of God to Israel points toward the future. Why should not the name of God point toward the future, too? In other words, God might well not give God’s name here because God simply does not have one yet. God is not overwhelmingly present here, nor is God unnecessarily coy.
Instead, God is promised. God has always been promised. God reaffirms this when God says again “I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” because the litany follows the line of those who received the Abrahamic promise. The patriarchs never knew God by name but only knew God as promised; the callings of their lives reflected their relationships with the God who promised. Moses is to be no different. Nor will Israel be. This is precisely the point. God even says “This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.” Sinai has just become a sort of holy land, sanctified by God’s purposed call. Is this the moment in which Moses becomes a prophet?
It certainly sounds as if this is so: “Go and assemble the elders of Israel, and say to them…and they will listen to your voice…however,…the king of Egypt will not let you go...So I will stretch out my hand and strike…I will bring this people into such favor with the Egyptians that…you shall plunder the Egyptians.” That this speech is entirely about the future is by now a foregone conclusion. But that it includes such detail about the reactions of various peoples and the future actions of God indicates the precise and prophetic nature of God’s promise to Israel through Moses. God will speak and act through Moses despite the resistance of those who will not hear God’s promise; the promises of God are not always accepted by everyone. But the vocation of the prophet is to voice those promises nonetheless.
That Moses does not come to believe the promise based on the signs is also unsurprising; prophecy is never about the signs but only about the vocation of delivering the promises of God to the people. The transformation of the staff into the serpent and the healing of Moses’ leprous hand miss the point and fail to deliver confidence to the increasingly overwhelmed prophet. The belief of the people has never been the issue; the belief of Moses is. It is only when Moses gets to his own perceived incapacities that either God or Moses can begin to address the issue. The question is, again, one of identity: “I have never been eloquent…I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” God’s resounding reply “Who gives speech to mortals?” is a reiteration not of Moses’s identity but of God’s as purposeful creator; God gives humans speech and promises that God will teach Moses what to say.
Then Moses denies the promises of God. He asks God to send someone else. He implies that God was mistaken about his identity, his vocation as the deliverer of the promises and people of God. By denying his appropriateness, he denies his very name, as the Hebrew etymology ‘Drawn out of the water’ alludes to the promised deliverance of Israel across the Red Sea. We should not wonder at God’s anger here, but we should marvel at God’s permissiveness toward Moses to include Aaron—though, perhaps, we should not pause too much. God has never chosen the vehicles of God’s promises for their submissiveness and piety. Moses is hardly the first man to talk back to God, and God has always proved pliant enough to accommodate human weakness. In fact, it is precisely through the flexibility of God and God’s chosen people that God’s promises are fulfilled. As Moses does step into his role of sole prophetic shepherd of the Israelites, the only inflexible character of the story is Pharaoh. The course of Israel’s deliverance, the shape of God’s promise, will wind like the Nile itself – and be every bit as unstoppable.
Yet the promise is indeed now more complicated. In Aaron, Moses will now have his own prophet, who will relay the words of God that Moses tells him. It is, of course, not the first time that God welcomes a vocational partner. But one must note that even the promises of God here must be subject to some alteration, however superficial, or there would be no purpose for the translation. This is not, one presumes, to be a children’s game of telephone. God is no dictator here but is a teacher of the mouths of both men. God becomes a collaborator in delivering God’s own promise. God steps into God’s vocation.
Moses now decides to go. He asks his father-in-law if he may go. He takes his wife and sons and staff to go, but the mistrust indicated in his question to Jethro “let me see…if they are still living,” may be the reason that God reiterates Moses’ mission and insists that it will fail, including now the promise to Pharaoh that his firstborn sons will die. But the promise is also perhaps implicit to Moses that “whoever curses you I will curse.” The note of the son ‘Israel is my firstborn ’ is not then incidental, as progeny formed part of the same threefold Abrahamic promise. God’s promised future builds on what God has worked before.
Why God should subsequently try to kill Moses is of course something of a mystery. Why God fails to do so is somewhat more explicit. Moses’ wife Zipporah, whom God did not invite but nonetheless presumably accepts, takes a “flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched Moses’ feet with it and said ‘Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me…a bridegroom of blood by circumcision.” Though the precise ritual is uncertain, the tradition it references is clear: circumcision is identity. Circumcision marks the people chosen by God for God’s promises. God seals covenants in blood. God consequently leaves Moses alone. Whether God tries to kill Moses because of their earlier conversation or because of some reason outside the explicit text or simply in order to foreshadow later events, the result is unequivocal: like Jacob, Moses is marked and identified now in a way that he was not before. Moses is God’s prophet. Moses is ready to deliver God’s promise.
God now collaborates still further in the acquiescence: he brings Aaron to Moses. The brothers, separated for so long, kiss in greeting, and one might see some wisdom in what God has allowed. Aaron for his part does not hesitate nor require proof from God, but trusts his brother directly. He steps directly into his role apparently without a second thought. He believes the promise. He speaks all the words that Moses speaks to him and performs all of Moses’ signs. And then, despite all of Moses’ misgivings, the people believe, not because they have been delivered, but because they have been heard. And, preempting God’s promise, they worship God there in Egypt, not because the promise has been fulfilled, but precisely because it has begun. This is sufficient. God remembers who they are, and they remember God, and they celebrate. In the best of the times to come, this will be their vocation, their identity, in response to the fulfilled promises of God.
On Moltmann's Trinity: Dissonance
Dissonance
‘We are the sperm of God/ sent to fertilize the egg of the earth/ in the womb of space.’ It was my first poem, written in some bizarre amalgamation of Wednesday Bible study and my first sexual education class. It was and is a terrible poem. I never thought I’d read its analogy in the writings of Jurgen Moltmann, but there, I suppose, it is. The possibilities of the metaphor aside, the notion of God self-limiting in order to create, those possibilities aside, the analogy is still problematic for classical theologians.
Moltmann insists on the will, on God’s self-willing as Creator as constitutive of relation, but fails to recognize that the will of God might also be ‘without analogy,’ as Moltmann says of God’s creation. After all, who can know the mind of God? Which is not to say that creation was not and is not an act of God’s will (how could it not be?) but this is to say that the act of creation in human terms, the analogy that we do in fact have, is not of course solely an act of will itself.
Pregnancy is the great intentional accident. Even when we don’t plan it, we biologically ‘intend’ it with our actions, we anticipate the act of our creation. And even when we do plan it, we plan neither the moment nor the person, it is always a surprise for which everyone must express pleasure and astonishment. Creation is not solely about the will but also about the nature.
Moltmann acknowledges the possibility – “the activity which is immanent to God and essential to his nature is the eternal, unchangeable resolve of his essential purpose” – but refuses to carry through the implications lest he be labeled, I suppose, a process theologian. Throughout, Moltmann assumes too many dualities: resolve is not emanation; being is not nothingness. (And one is here reminded of the film The Never-Ending Story where the demon is the Nothing that devours the imagined world).
But the primordial nothing which God created by God withdrawing Godself is itself an act of God and so must express the character of God, lest God not act in accordance with God’s nature. Through Moltmann concludes by saying that this does not justify the existence of evil, this is not the same as actually not justifying it. Moltmann, I believe, has a problem here with evil.
Yes, we are to live with hope through the contradictions of the world apart from God’s love, but one would rather see a theology which more boldly incorporates the unresolved tension than one that implies that it should not exist and stops at the tension’s edge, refusing to say more. One does not imagine Moltmann’s God capable of surprise, as God must often be, if the self-limitation of creation is not a jest. One imagines Moltmann’s God resolving to be Creator with a strong chin and furrowed brow.
But what if creation were more like a birth from nothing than God’s architectural blueprint? One might imagine creation emerging from the space created as all the persons of God bow down to each other, perhaps in play or as was once suggested perhaps in dance. Creation is a playful act, sex is laughter, and each dance is different from the last. One might perhaps see creation as the patterns of the steps, or the sound of God’s laughter, or the imagined world of play? This is all very speculative, but spectacles help us see.
I’ve never doubted that God has been surprised and horrified by much of what we’ve done, and Moltmann shorts himself by not perhaps not leaving the future as open as it might and must be if God is to continually create in love. Because I’ve also never doubted the space God grants the universe – perhaps intentionally, perhaps accidentally, perhaps as something in between – to do whatever it is, precisely, that the universe will do. Is God the world’s future? Doubtlessly, yes – but yet not without doubt, or the play of creation would be a sham and love of God for God or love of God for creation would be something of a sham. Does the kingdom look more like a constructed house? Or does it perhaps look more like the totality and culmination and continuation of the dance itself?
‘We are the sperm of God/ sent to fertilize the egg of the earth/ in the womb of space.’ It was my first poem, written in some bizarre amalgamation of Wednesday Bible study and my first sexual education class. It was and is a terrible poem. I never thought I’d read its analogy in the writings of Jurgen Moltmann, but there, I suppose, it is. The possibilities of the metaphor aside, the notion of God self-limiting in order to create, those possibilities aside, the analogy is still problematic for classical theologians.
Moltmann insists on the will, on God’s self-willing as Creator as constitutive of relation, but fails to recognize that the will of God might also be ‘without analogy,’ as Moltmann says of God’s creation. After all, who can know the mind of God? Which is not to say that creation was not and is not an act of God’s will (how could it not be?) but this is to say that the act of creation in human terms, the analogy that we do in fact have, is not of course solely an act of will itself.
Pregnancy is the great intentional accident. Even when we don’t plan it, we biologically ‘intend’ it with our actions, we anticipate the act of our creation. And even when we do plan it, we plan neither the moment nor the person, it is always a surprise for which everyone must express pleasure and astonishment. Creation is not solely about the will but also about the nature.
Moltmann acknowledges the possibility – “the activity which is immanent to God and essential to his nature is the eternal, unchangeable resolve of his essential purpose” – but refuses to carry through the implications lest he be labeled, I suppose, a process theologian. Throughout, Moltmann assumes too many dualities: resolve is not emanation; being is not nothingness. (And one is here reminded of the film The Never-Ending Story where the demon is the Nothing that devours the imagined world).
But the primordial nothing which God created by God withdrawing Godself is itself an act of God and so must express the character of God, lest God not act in accordance with God’s nature. Through Moltmann concludes by saying that this does not justify the existence of evil, this is not the same as actually not justifying it. Moltmann, I believe, has a problem here with evil.
Yes, we are to live with hope through the contradictions of the world apart from God’s love, but one would rather see a theology which more boldly incorporates the unresolved tension than one that implies that it should not exist and stops at the tension’s edge, refusing to say more. One does not imagine Moltmann’s God capable of surprise, as God must often be, if the self-limitation of creation is not a jest. One imagines Moltmann’s God resolving to be Creator with a strong chin and furrowed brow.
But what if creation were more like a birth from nothing than God’s architectural blueprint? One might imagine creation emerging from the space created as all the persons of God bow down to each other, perhaps in play or as was once suggested perhaps in dance. Creation is a playful act, sex is laughter, and each dance is different from the last. One might perhaps see creation as the patterns of the steps, or the sound of God’s laughter, or the imagined world of play? This is all very speculative, but spectacles help us see.
I’ve never doubted that God has been surprised and horrified by much of what we’ve done, and Moltmann shorts himself by not perhaps not leaving the future as open as it might and must be if God is to continually create in love. Because I’ve also never doubted the space God grants the universe – perhaps intentionally, perhaps accidentally, perhaps as something in between – to do whatever it is, precisely, that the universe will do. Is God the world’s future? Doubtlessly, yes – but yet not without doubt, or the play of creation would be a sham and love of God for God or love of God for creation would be something of a sham. Does the kingdom look more like a constructed house? Or does it perhaps look more like the totality and culmination and continuation of the dance itself?
On Moltmann's Trinity: Consonance
Life began perhaps in a tidal pool. Perhaps it continues to be in a tidal pool, if one considers the ocean to be the staggering immensity of God’s love for us. ‘God loves and God loves and God loves.’ The Trinitarian refrain is not simple reiteration but rather reinscription, cutting deeper both the wounds in creation that bring creation to God and the wounds in God that bring God to creation.
God’s love laps at the universe. The tidal pool is deepened even as the division between the pool and the ocean grows and shrinks, grows and shrinks. ‘God loves’ is neither the word nor even the concept but is simply the sound of the ocean resounding against the barriers between God and creation. God’s love breaks upon the shore of time not temporally, not sequentially, but in the rhythmic grace of time itself.
There is something rather than nothing because God’s love carves the universe out of the space of God’s self/ves. Creation is what happens when the tide for a moment retreats so that it can resound. Is this tidal pool the ocean or is it not the ocean? It is separate from the ocean but filled somewhat with saltwater. It is not the ocean, but it reminds itself of the ocean. The waters have withdrawn, but only for a moment.
It is in the nature of the tidal pool that the waters will return. If they did return, there would be no tidal pool. If they stayed forever, the tidal pool would simply be a divot in the ocean floor of God. But behold! The wave breaks upon the shore. Everything is churning, moved by the tumultuous restlessness of God’s steadfast love. The tide retreats, the tide returns. Love floods the universe and reminds it from whence it came. It takes perhaps some of the barrier away with it.
What is this strange intake, this perplexing limitation of the ocean? It is more powerful than the tiny pond, it could sweep the whole shoreline away! But it does not. What does the ocean want? Does an ocean want? Does it, can it, want a little pool of life? There has never been a tide without an ocean, there has never been a withdrawal without something to withdrawal, without with-drawing. The tidal pool has not endured forever, though the ocean guards it as though desirously, rapturously, drawing-with the little pool of life.
We know that God withdraws because we are here and we are not God. This is the heart of our little living puddle, our piddling mud-hole in the great sands of time and the endless waves of holy love. Self-limiting? Behold the sea! It goes on around us horizon to horizon in all directions. We can go nowhere there is no love except perhaps the very place we stand, the place that constitutes us – though with any luck we might get our feet wet. The sound of the ocean is like the sound of a sleeping lover, the deep breaths of the assured.
God loves in and God loves out and God loves in again. Creation is God’s baited breath. Redemption is the breeze along the shore, the holy wind that promises God’s return. The returning tide is the very breath of God. We are mud and water and breath, the very sort of life one could expect from tidal pools. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. The lands are tidal because the tide goes in and the tide goes out.
When breathing, one collapses a little, the diaphragm folds us at the waist. In the very act of breathing we execute a bow, a humbling, a tiny self- limitation that is in fact a miniscule death. The breath of life leaves us. God’s act of redemption was primarily an act of suffocation. One is crucified when one can no longer hold one’s self upright. The bow carves out the self. God’s act of creation was a bow, a pouring out, a self-and-breath-and-tidal emptying.
God curves around creation at the belly, at God’s womb. Creation in turn bows to God, curled as a child in the womb. The fetal position is the primordial bow of life. We breath in tune with God, God’s breath is the tide of our very life. The sound of the heart is like the sound of the ocean is like the sound of our own breath. The blood in flowing retreats and beats, beats and retreats. The pulse of God’s love is the pulse of time. The blood of God is love. The space of God’s love is the tidal pool of the universe, and the God of the universe resounds in oceanic love.
God’s breath flows through and to and for the womb of all creation until it is formed and it is fulfilled. Selah.
God’s love laps at the universe. The tidal pool is deepened even as the division between the pool and the ocean grows and shrinks, grows and shrinks. ‘God loves’ is neither the word nor even the concept but is simply the sound of the ocean resounding against the barriers between God and creation. God’s love breaks upon the shore of time not temporally, not sequentially, but in the rhythmic grace of time itself.
There is something rather than nothing because God’s love carves the universe out of the space of God’s self/ves. Creation is what happens when the tide for a moment retreats so that it can resound. Is this tidal pool the ocean or is it not the ocean? It is separate from the ocean but filled somewhat with saltwater. It is not the ocean, but it reminds itself of the ocean. The waters have withdrawn, but only for a moment.
It is in the nature of the tidal pool that the waters will return. If they did return, there would be no tidal pool. If they stayed forever, the tidal pool would simply be a divot in the ocean floor of God. But behold! The wave breaks upon the shore. Everything is churning, moved by the tumultuous restlessness of God’s steadfast love. The tide retreats, the tide returns. Love floods the universe and reminds it from whence it came. It takes perhaps some of the barrier away with it.
What is this strange intake, this perplexing limitation of the ocean? It is more powerful than the tiny pond, it could sweep the whole shoreline away! But it does not. What does the ocean want? Does an ocean want? Does it, can it, want a little pool of life? There has never been a tide without an ocean, there has never been a withdrawal without something to withdrawal, without with-drawing. The tidal pool has not endured forever, though the ocean guards it as though desirously, rapturously, drawing-with the little pool of life.
We know that God withdraws because we are here and we are not God. This is the heart of our little living puddle, our piddling mud-hole in the great sands of time and the endless waves of holy love. Self-limiting? Behold the sea! It goes on around us horizon to horizon in all directions. We can go nowhere there is no love except perhaps the very place we stand, the place that constitutes us – though with any luck we might get our feet wet. The sound of the ocean is like the sound of a sleeping lover, the deep breaths of the assured.
God loves in and God loves out and God loves in again. Creation is God’s baited breath. Redemption is the breeze along the shore, the holy wind that promises God’s return. The returning tide is the very breath of God. We are mud and water and breath, the very sort of life one could expect from tidal pools. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. The lands are tidal because the tide goes in and the tide goes out.
When breathing, one collapses a little, the diaphragm folds us at the waist. In the very act of breathing we execute a bow, a humbling, a tiny self- limitation that is in fact a miniscule death. The breath of life leaves us. God’s act of redemption was primarily an act of suffocation. One is crucified when one can no longer hold one’s self upright. The bow carves out the self. God’s act of creation was a bow, a pouring out, a self-and-breath-and-tidal emptying.
God curves around creation at the belly, at God’s womb. Creation in turn bows to God, curled as a child in the womb. The fetal position is the primordial bow of life. We breath in tune with God, God’s breath is the tide of our very life. The sound of the heart is like the sound of the ocean is like the sound of our own breath. The blood in flowing retreats and beats, beats and retreats. The pulse of God’s love is the pulse of time. The blood of God is love. The space of God’s love is the tidal pool of the universe, and the God of the universe resounds in oceanic love.
God’s breath flows through and to and for the womb of all creation until it is formed and it is fulfilled. Selah.
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