Christology: Jungel and the Righteousness of God

Jungel was hilarious for me, because for all the times that people have explained justification to me, and for all the different ways I've understood and internalized it, I've just never cared, and so, for this non-Lutheran at least, and for all the times I've complained about it in other classes, there was this place where Jungel used justification like five times in two sentences and it's like someone saying 'wastebasket' over and over.

Well, I guess I had that one coming.

At any rate, God is righteous, says Jungle. And God is righteous in such a way that the merciful righteousness of the cross is not a negation of God's just righteousness but an expression of it - indeed, maybe, a definition of it. This is so because God's righteousness is not legal righteousness but relational righteousness: the bringing of two into some alignment. In the case of Christ, this is gospel and faith: the words that God speaks in favor of human beings are those that pronounce and actually make them righteous. This is not a break between God's righteousness and God's justice because the very nature of God's righteousness is that it is merciful. In other words, yes, righteousness is proper to God, but only insofar as that righteousness takes two and the very definition of God's righteousness is to justify the sinner. 'God forfeits nothing by forgiving us.'

In other words, if we can verb words like Calvin and Hobbs, God righteous-es. It's a verb. Whenever God justifies a sinner, God is righteous. For Jungel, this reaches its epitome in Jesus Christ, the 'subject of the doctrine of justification.' In the same way that the righteousness of God is simultaneously righteousness from God and righteousness due to God proper, Jesus Christ is doubly righteous: 'in him God is righteous and in him we becomerighteous.' Or, God's being righteous is our becoming righteous, and in Jesus we become the righteousness of God. This is the nature, the shape of the bond, of our fellowship with God.

It is also disruptive justification in this world, because it is the removal of the unrighteousness from life and the death of the unjustifiable, much as truth comes in the context of lies and reveals and destroys them.

But it is not a disruptive event in God, as God is always and already righteous Father to Son and Son to Spirit and Spirit and Father to the Son, each person of the Trinity as righteous other to every other of the persons. What the redemption of creation is, is the reiteration of this event for that creation: "If God is already righteous because he affirms otherness within himself, then he is also and even more righteous by affirming in addition the creature, which is, in contrast to him, completely other...He does so out of grace."

While I didn't come across anything new, per se, in Jungel's elegant formulation, what I did realize is that it works just as well, and for me is much more exciting, if you replace every use of righteousness with holiness, the center of my own tradition of faith. I wonder what that says about the relationship of God's attributes as a whole with creation - and of course, what it says about our own understandings of Jesus Christ.

Serial Fiction: Whisper from the Dust XIV

Exhausted, I blew out the last coals of his torch and we stood there together in the ancient darkness. “You’re manipulative,” I said.

“We have all encountered forces more powerful than ourselves.” He did not sound surprised.

I quieted the scroll to sleep. “Whatever you want from me, it does not matter. I do not have it. And I will not give it.”

“Again and again I’ve told you: this is not about you. It certainly is not about me.”

“The Blood of History is broken, and the ancient dead are lunatics. They don’t have any wisdom; all they have is memory! I wish this world would remember that those are not the same.”

“I’ve been waiting the last twenty years for you to find a better way.”

I snorted. “I never, ever will! I’m just an orphan. There is no way. Adlasola is correct: we are a laughingstock. We cavort in the woods and abuse certain decaying substances and make plans and never accomplish anything. It’s ridiculous.”

“The Historians would not persecute a joke.”

“They’re the joke, but we’re the punchline. Here we are, the chosen one led by visions to a secret place and all we get is dust because dust is what we are. How can you not get it? Are you actually so pompous?” I laughed, a little cruelly. I realized I had been thinking about this for a very long time.

“Don’t you see: the Historians didn’t always satisfy themselves with little electric tablets. Do you think the ones whose cruelty destroyed half the world delighted in literature? No! They were doing what we are doing: being driven mad by the Blood of History! By the time the first Faith came around, it didn’t matter what skill he had – the Historians were such witless despairing cravens that a whole world of them couldn’t beat him. And now we want to take their place! That’s the punchline!”

If Batyst had any temper beyond his perpetual rage against the Temple, he did not show it now. Instead he reached out – how he found my right arm in the darkness I do not know – and closed my hand more tightly around the scroll. I felt it hum awake.

“I forget how young you are,” he said sadly. “You do not know that nothing can be accomplished unless you yourself decide to do it. Everything else is just denying the power that life has given you. And that is the worst manipulation at all. But I am waiting for you, Del. All the Blooded are.”

I swore. “I don’t have any powers. I don’t! So I can play with histories – any apprentice can!”

“And you open Wells and remember the Blood of History. And I suspect that if someone placed a quicksword in your hand it would sing to life. But I’m talking about more fundamental forces than those. I’m talking about your humanity.”

I stepped back. “Wait – what? You think I’m—that’s absurd. All that’s just speculation.”

Batyst nodded in the darkness. “An omnifex – yes, one who can wield all Profusionist technologies. The first since the first Faith himself ended the wars between the cities. And it does matter what powers he had. It matters what each of us carries. You do not know yourself because you do not let anyone else know you. And you do not even care for yourself because you have no care for others. But I will be waiting for you even after you say what you came with me to say.”

I willed the little scroll silent, watching its little letters fade like the torch before it had. “I’m forsaking the Blood of History,” I said.

“You risk torment and death.”

“But I already am! And you said we all do, if we are doing it right.”

He laughed a little in the darkness, and I was glad of it. “Well. I admit I did not anticipate that you would choose this way.”

I shook my head. “It’s not a direction. Do you know the parable? ‘Where do you want to go, they asked the young man. Away from here, he replied.’”

Ryn breathed deeply, inhaling the same great lungful of air he had inhaled before. “We will see, Del Tanich, we will see. You have my blessing. And now I must ask you to forgive me.”

A cold shiver passed over me: perhaps in the darkness the coldness of the Unknown Well had begun to seep through my clothes and skin, or perhaps the same intuition which had finally revealed to me the truth of the history of our own Historians was still working ahead of my logical mind. At any rate, it was with dread that I asked,

“Forgive you for what?” I asked.

There were several still moments stretching through the utter blackness, and I thought that I had never before known Batyst to find anything difficult to say.

“There is another Blooding tonight,” he began, “at a Well just at the bottom of the southeastern corner of the plateau. I know because the Wells of the Dead tell me the time and location of each Blooding the day before it will occur. But I did not trust the girl Adlasola and sent her to this one. If the Well of the Dead will open to her she is to be let inside; if it is not she is to administered some of the collected Blood – even if it must be forced upon her.”

I did not reply. Though Ryn waited for some response. Instead I frantically asked the Unknown and the Healing Well for exit, s Batyst must have known I would. “I’m sorry, Del,” he said. “I said I did not trust her, but in truth I did not trust you. I was wrong. Do as you see fit.”

If I ever managed to summon a reply, it was hidden and suffocated by the Profusionist metal through which I passed in my departure. I scrambled up the walls like a madman as soon as the sentiences returned their acquiescence. As for Ryn Batyst, he must have left those Wells of his own time, some moment before the dawn when the patrols were not scheduled to be near. I have not seen him since.

I was not myself so cautious. I nearly stumbled into the hands of a guard who was crossing the square on his patrol. He was so surprised to see someone scrambling up from the Healing Well beneath his feet that he nearly fell over backward trying to grab me and push me away simultaneously. By the time he opened his mouth to shout ‘Halt!’ I was three paces gone. An urchin such as I had been soon enough learns to run. Learns or gets beaten or gets arrested and then beaten by the Guards.

Green or White, they say the colors do not matter. But everyone knows the Whites don’t run after you unless you’re somebody special, some ganglord or sadist who can inflict real damage. The Whites have inherited from their Faith certain lackadaisical policies concerning petty crime. Ariel, after all, is the city of the people, and people are seldom anyone particularly upright. Whites also get paid the same no matter how many people they arrest.

The Greens, however, have their pay supplemented by fines and confiscations. They’ll chase you if you so much as look at them, never mind if they catch you emerging in the middle of the night from a sacred site that has been closed for a generation. Consequently, they’re in much better physical condition.

The guard who I tripped up, of course, wore armor the very shade of the jade the Temple’s cast in. His alarm brought the sound of three more footsteps as I turned north, then cut east back a connecting alley. I jumped atop some crates and scampered through a doorway I knew was always left open, the balcony of a goldsmith I’d once sold petunias to when I used to do deliveries.

Like I said, nearly everyone in Ariel’s a gardener. A set of stairs on the other side of the balcony led up toward the roof. I vaulted up them just as the cries of the Greens below took on certain confused tones. Their hue and cry woke half the neighborhood.

Serial Fiction: Whisper from the Dust XIII

Chapter Five

September 14, 440 Y.A.

The Well was dank inside and dark. It was nearly as empty as the Healing Well had been; Ryn and I recognized this immediately, even as he lit another torch to replace the ones we’d left behind. We knew it was empty because the Wells of the Profusion all maintain traces of their previous users, mental impressions of those who’ve gone before. The Healing Well had long been venerated precisely because it retained that fierce loving clarity of purpose that had so driven the first Faith; all the other Faiths through time had come, sooner or later, to commune with his essence there – and left lesser traces of their own. For the rest, the Weapon Wells are said to impute some martial wisdom to all who enter them, the Wells of the Histories have long imparted knowledge to the Historians of their predecessors – and of the Wells of the Blood of History, well, of them you already know.

But the sentience of the Unknown Well – for I came immediately to think of it as that, and it did not correct me – bore no trace of having been used before at all. It was like walking into someone’s forgotten crypt beneath a derelict basement. It had not been used since before the wars between the cities. It might have not been used since the Profusion itself, and consequently never at all. My orphan’s education recalled nothing quite like it, and the Historians teach us more than most because they need articulate advocates among the poor of all the cities. If there is general knowledge of a subject, we are not unlikely to have gained it.

“I know of no Well like this one,” I told Batyst aloud.

“It hasn’t been used before,” he said, and I thought about his awareness but came to no conclusions. Because the Unknown Well, despite its alien and desolate impression, despite being even a little smaller than the Healing Well directly above it, was not entirely empty after all.

The growing light of what I presumed was Ryn’s last torch illuminated in the center of the room a long silver box approximately the length and width and height of a man lying down. The silver was of the same Profusionist metal as the floor and walls; it rested on a low slab so that the whole came only a fraction above my waist as we walked over to it.

“It’s a coffin,” I said inanely.

Batyst grunted and reached out to touch it. I did as well, and found that a seam ran all the way around it, only a finger’s breadth beneath the top – the coffin had a lid. I felt also that strange warmth that is one of Profusionist metal’s greatest mysteries: unlike all the modern metals of the world, it is always slightly warmer than room temperature. Batyst and I pushed against the lid together, though doubtless he could have removed it himself, by virtue of his decades as a blacksmith and of Profusionist metal’s own comparative lightness. Humans have never been able to make something so light and strong themselves.

But they have been able to manipulate it. The lid canted to the ground with a knocking thunk. Batyst raised the torch so that its light allowed us both to peer inside.

I don’t know what either of us expected. A quicksword eternally aflame, perhaps, or a suit made entirely of light. Perhaps I expected information in its purest energetic form, all the secrets of the Profusion pulsing through the interior as so much electricity. Perhaps Ryn expected filaments of all the dead, or an animated corpse that would restore to us the transfiguring grace of the Profusion itself. We would be pure exultants, then, hierarchs of the world as we threw down the Historians and led all others to enlightenment.

What was inside instead was dust. White dust-like powder lined the otherwise silver interior of the coffin. If ever it had held a corpse, that necessary remnant of our existence, that had surely disintegrated by now – but the dust bore no resemblance to anything organic. It was more like chalk, perhaps, or even snow, though even this Well was far warmer than that temperature and of course living Profusionist metal would have melted it regardless. No, if this coffin had ever been intended for a human form, such had never made it there. I reached out to touch the dust, but Ryn grabbed my hand.

“It’s no weapon,” he said, “and if it’s poison let the Historians find it and die.”
He sighed, looking from the box to me and shaking his great broad head. “There’s nothing worth risking here.”

I lacked the enthusiasm to so much as protest. For a moment, perhaps – Ryn has told me so many incredible things about myself for so long that I must have acquiesced to at least a few of them despite myself. Perhaps when I had opened this Unknown Well after first opening the Healing Well that had been unreachable for so many years, perhaps when I had awoken the scroll of history that supposedly spoke in only the dead languages of the Profusion – perhaps then considering all of those things I had for one electric moment actually believed. Believed that something beyond, something greater than my miserable experience of the world would be held out to me. The ghost of the faith of Ryn Batyst had held it out to me.

But it had gone with the opening of that lid.

The dead of the Blood of History, if they had truly sent us here to find some great weapon to scatter the Orchids from our world like so many seeds, were simply incorrect. They had been mistaken. There was no real reason, after all, to suppose that humans then were any less fallible then than they are now, and who is to say what a thousand years entombed has done to their collective human minds – if, indeed, they can still be said to be human at all?

“They’re insane,” I said, walking around the coffin. “The minds of the ancient dead have been corrupted.” Batyst started to say something, then refrained, merely staring at me in that grave intent way of his. His eyes shone in the dying torchlight.

“They sent me visions,” I said again, “when I was last in the Blood of History. The visions predicted the arrival of the Orchids but otherwise make no sense. I can’t understand them. I thought I did when I came here and the memory of that dream was the key to opening both of these Wells. But it was for nothing, Ryn. Because there is nothing here. The Blood of History has gone insane, their memories fragmented, their knowledge of this world illusory.”

Ryn Batyst closed his eyes; he looked very tired. But his voice had the soft impassioned quality that men usually attribute to a whisper. “They are wiser than you or I can possibly comprehend. Their experience has compounded their knowledge so that it no longer seems human anymore. But they have not decayed. The dead are not wrong about your abilities. The scroll in your hand – it is still awake.”

I held it up and looked; indeed it was, and increasingly it was the only light in the room. “But it tells us nothing, only that the Historians have been looking for this place. And now we know only that if the Historians do manage to open it, they will be just as disappointed as we have been.”

Ryn grinned wryly. “But we will have been disappointed first. And it is more likely that you and I can now go someplace the Historians cannot. We now have a refuge.”

“Do you always have a double purpose?” I asked, thinking of my testing before the Historians in the Temple.

Ryn sighed, breathing out a great lungful of air. “Part of the leadership that you must learn is to always accept contingencies. All plans fail, Del. All of them. Nothing you ever do will succeed as you intend it. What matters is how you let that defeat affect you.”

Matthew: On the Parable of the Lost Sheep

The Parable of the Lost Sheep tells the story of one shepherd who, having lost one of his one-hundred sheep, abandons the remainder of his flock to go searching for it. Finding it, he rejoices.

That is the essential plot to the three versions of the story – but there are some variations. First, the context within which the story is told in Matthew and Luke and Thomas are different: Matthew has it set as response to a question concerning care for God’s little ones; Luke places it as a rejoinder to the Pharisees concerning Christ’s association with sinners. Meanwhile Thomas has it as an elaboration of a description of Christ as being the way for those who are lost.

Second, only Matthew has the parable begin with a question ‘What do you think?’, the other gospels have it begin with some statement. Matthew has the sheep itself go astray; in Luke the shepherd loses it. In Matthew the sheep may be one of the little ones; in the other gospels it is only one of the flock. In Matthew the shepherd rejoices alone; in Luke he calls friends to join in the rejoicing – this means a different emphasis for finding and for celebration, respectively.

Finally, the implied object of the parable changes: in Matthew, it is one of the faithful who has gone astray; in Luke it seems meant to refer to a sinner.

Taken together, these imply a more didactic purpose for the parable in Matthew. It is a parable expressly for the governance of community in the midst of teachings about who will be greatest in the kingdom, where the little ones will be, how to deal with those members who sin and lead others astray. The opening question would be a pedagogical tool, and the sheep itself going astray clearly makes it more similar to a human being – in the sense of going astray as a willful action. Finally, as part of its unique emphasis on finding again, Matthew leaves the shepherd to rejoice alone at the end. The point is that those in the community should do for those who stray just what God would do: find them again.

To preach the Parable of the Lost Sheep in Matthew would be to reflect on God’s exorbitant fidelity to God’s followers and the implied innocence of those who are deceived; to go astray is more nearly to be lead astray and paired with the previous teaching concerning those who lead the little one astray the blame is quite clearly on the deceiver rather than the lost.

The sheep itself is not a fault and is to be found and restored to the community. The success of this endeavor is not guaranteed; sheep are sometimes permanently loss. But the possibility implies responsibility for and from everyone in the community, especially if we remember the pastoral tone of the beatitudes in the same gospel, and the nature of pastoral care in Matthew. The shepherd is alone in Matthew because the shepherd is the believing community itself. The sheep is worthy of rejoicing because it is one of God’s own faithful, and it is the will of God that no one perish.

Serial Fiction: Whisper from the Dust XII

Ryn gasped, and I knew that the gap, though of course not physical, was opening. Then my own feet sunk and I had only time to wonder if the Healing Well would have preferred we enter naked, or if that was solely the prerogative of the Blood of History. The hard white stone of Ariel softened, and it parted like sand to let us pass. The wail of the Healing Well inside my mind was no less heard than any call of the Wells of the Dead. We have often talked, Ryn and I, about whether or not the minds of the Wells are sentient, or simply reactive in the way of the minds of valkyries and quickswords and shrouds and all the other equipment and weaponry the veilmen have. It certainly feels as though a mind, strange and alien, were welcoming you to a house where you most emphatically do not belong.

Whatever it is or was, the mind of the Healing Well had parted the stone of the street to let us pass. It is not at all difficult to remember to hold one’s breath while one passes through stone and, even, the walls of the Well itself, which must be harder than any metal when firm, as no one has been able to open one without its own consent. Still, it took too long. The Healing Well was further beneath the surface of Ariel than one might have supposed, perhaps five meters – most of the Wells of the Dead lie just beneath the soil. And one is never ready for the drop from the ceiling of a Well unto its floor. I doubt that even the veilmen, who must enter one every time they change or recharge their weapons, can be prepared for every time they drop three meters unto a floor harder than cement, after passing through supposedly solid earth. It is no better for us Blooded to find our fluid sudden there, though it is our purpose.

Batyst and I were certainly startled to come out of the earth and to land, unprepared, on the floor of an utterly empty Well. I hit the floor and rolled in utter darkness. Ryn grunted and cursed at his own rough landing. The Healing Well was supposed to have been filled with great white light, though it had dimmed in years past, as a sign of its decay. But this Well held no light at all, not even after I had woken it. Sighing, we both struggled to our feet.

“Ryn, I – ” I stopped when I heard his great brown robes rustling and the striking of a flint against its steel. A few moments more, and Ryn Batyst stood in the glow of two primitive torches, rags soaked in oil and wrapped around heavy sticks he must have taken from the woods. He stepped over and I took the one he proffered.

“I could have carried my own, at least” I said.

“Do you see, Del, why I brought you here?” he asked.

Slowly, I walked around the Healing Well’s interior. As with many Wells, it was not very large: four strides and four again and again carried me all the way around its unbroken silver walls. Only the Wells of the veilmen in Nogilia and Nesechia are reported to be quite large, capacious enough to hold rank on rank of armor suits and vehicles. But though this Well had once held the wounded body of the first Faith, it could have held little else. In its center I spied markings that might once have been an elaborated circle.

“Not for anything the Healing Well has to offer, I guess.”

“You underestimate yourself. Do you realize what you’ve done! For four decades everyone has tried to wake this Well! The Historians, the Guardians, I myself have tried to wake it! And now you come and open it in the time of a few short breaths. You, who are not supposed to be able to manipulate machines at all. You who are too poor of birth to orchestrate the lowest Temple service. You, who deny what the mind of the ancient dead would say about you!”

I snorted, half- laughing. “But they were just trying to open it in all the wrong ways. It’s not a pet. It’s not something that obeys. I only treated it the way the Wells of the Dead are treated. I asked it if I could enter. It’s nothing you couldn’t have done, if you had but thought of it. And I don’t even know why I did.”

Batyst raised an eyebrow. “Did you?” He chewed a lip. “Yes, that might have worked. But I did not think of it. And you did. And the Well did respond to you. It would never have answered me.”

“What? Why not? You wake the Wells of the Dead more certainly than anyone. Those machines call you the most of all. Why would the Healing Well be any different?”

“Because the Wells of the Dead hold something of living flesh. But the Healing Well is entirely of artifice, a Well of the machines. It is not the same at all.”

I paced in the darkness, the firelight flickering. “But I am the same, I am the same as you. You failed the tests as certainly as I did, though perhaps less times. I was exposed to machines of each kind, history and weaponry and transport. None of them did anything at all. I’m common – a guildsman, nothing more.”

Ryn grinned like the sun again and held out his hand. In the dying torchlight I couldn’t see exactly what he held. He held it a little higher. ‘Take it, Del. It’s of no use to me.”

I reached out and took and almost could not believe. It was a history of the Profusion, a slate of metal no thicker than a piece of paper and almost as flexible, though only a third the size. And in my hand its letters hummed instantaneously to life, glowing in lines of green text whose characters were utterly unfamiliar to me.

“How?” I asked, shaking, “This is from the Temple. How did you get this? How could anyone?”

Ryn nodded. “When you were being tested. The Historians were quite preoccupied by their charade. Everyone knows they bring up histories from the vaults brought here from Kasora. Senre would never content himself in such dank places. So I looked around his desk. Security is always minimal that time of day, when they’re shriving the confessors.”

I sat on the floor, uneasy, and leaned back against the wall. “I wonder if I haven’t recovered from my fever yet. Why, though? Why bring me here just to read this?”

“Because it was a guess. Because I knew that you would have to experience in order to believe regardless. And I overheard Senre before he came to bless the Public of Guilds, talking with his apprentice about trying to open the Healing Well again. I had to see if they might find anything. And, of course, I had to help you hear.”

I gazed at the slim glyphs of text, wondering how the Historians had ever learned the language. My eyes were blurring, and I felt myself smiling foolishly. “But how, Ryn, how can I do this? I should not be able. No one like me should be able.”

Batyst sat beside me, his shoulder against my own as I tried to manipulate the history into speaking my own language, “Del, what if I told you that the Historians have been lying to the world about what makes that world possible. What if I told you that every time a child steps into the Temple to take the test, its outcome is already determined by some trick of the Historians. What if I told you that the Historians systematically exclude those adepts with more talent than themselves, and this is the reason for Thaeron’s long and slow decline. What if I told you that you could have been a Historian the very first day the Historians took you in their care?”

I sat in the darkness for a while, letting my mind go clear again. The goodness was too much to be conceived. The Historians had rejected me not because of my unknown parentage but because of my undeniable talent. I could have trained with them from the first day, and worked to lift up the people of Ariel from a position of real power, rather than always ineffectually scheming to undo it. Then from the darkness came an answering presence, and I exalted, and rolled up the history and tucked it inside my sleeve. I had read enough. I stood.

“Then I would say, Ryn, that the Historians wanted to open up the Healing Well again because they’re looking for something. I would say that they’ve read that there might be another Well in Ariel, a Well in which no one has ever been, and that they look for it because in that Well lies something that could save this world from its destruction, and the Orchids have made them more frightened than they’ve ever been.”

I paused, listening, strengthening the connection my mind had made. “And I would say, Ryn, that that Well is calling us right now, because it is right beneath us, but that the Historians will never open it because they do not know the right question.”

Then Ryn stood up beside me, and we let our torches fall, and we walked together into the center of the Well and what had once been a quite purposive circle. I wondered if the first Faith had seen it, and my mind asked another question of the darkness. With keen intellect the darkness answered, and we sank again through that substance that is harder than any metal, the floor of a Well of the Profusion, and into quite another Well entirely.

Christology: Cone's African-American Christology

Cone's Christology: life, death and resurrection as revealed in Scripture and as related to the experience of the liberation of the poor. This is the identification of God with the struggle, pain, and hope of liberation theology generally and with African American theology particularly. However, I think that for Cone if he got to keep any part of Jesus, he would keep his life, if you know what I mean - his life because for Cone Christ's death would follow precisely from that (states kill the vocal oppressed) and because the eschatological hope of Christ in the kingdom would be the hope that surpasses death. This is not unlike Cone preferring Christ's humanity over Christ's divinity, as he explicitly says. It is the 'with'-ness of Jesus that matters for Cone, and that starts and is almost contained in Jesus's life and ministry. He talks about Jesus as a friend and uses the language of rhythm more times than I could count. That's the reconciliation aspect, too. Atonement is attunement, to put it crudely.

So the concrete language of experience and compassion and living hope is all taken very well, for me. I disagree with you in some sense in that I don't think Jesus has one message for all people. Rather, what Jesus has is some message for each people, if that makes any sense. It's not that universal significance/salvation doesn't exist, but that you can never work that out apart from its prevailing concreteness: Jesus was a Jew. But the potential hazard of this, and this is something you also get at, is when Jesus only liberates only my people, because we're the onlyones who understand him. If African Americans become the new Jews not only in the sense of being preferred and chosen by God but also in the sense of having privileged (err, underprivileged in this case) access to the meaning of God in Jesus, then I think we have a problem, the same old problem that we had to start with. I can't see Jesus as being that totalizing, or that simplistic. If it's not going too far to say that we each get the God we need (which is an really old idea, I think), then it is going too far to say that I've got the God everyone needs. No, you've got the God each person needs. No one has the God that all people need.

Not even Cone, though he does make a decent run at it. I've often wondered, though, in all these liberation theologies that understand oppression in such devastating and right detail: what does human/Christian freedom look like? Is it Roman civic freedom? Modern Western freedom? What is this liberty - what does it actually look like in the world? Can we see the face of the kingdom of God? Is it the wealth of the poor? The hermeneutics of the poor? What are we all in this for, by Cone's account?

Serial Science Fiction: Whisper from the Dust XI

“Will there be another Blooding? I’d like to return to the city.”

“That is where I plan to go. As for whether or not there will be a Blooding, well, that is up to the Blood. The Wells call no one ahead of time, Del. If not you, they certainly don’t tell me.”

“Why do you always say things like that?” I asked. “Whatever you think I am, I’m not. What the Blood does tell me, I never understand. I crave the past right along with all the rest of this backwards world, but I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

Ryn chuckled. “It does not matter what I think you are. It matters who you think you are. It matters who the Blood of History knows you are. And you both agree on this: that you are not yet yourself. That is what you look for, Del Tanich. You are a word that does not yet know its sound. I would only help you hear it.”

“And that’s what you’re taking me for? I haven’t even eaten yet.”

“It is better that you do not. The smuggler’s gate is not for a heavy stomach. Still, I have bread that we can eat on the way. But we need to leave. It’s six hours walking from here.”

I nodded. During the day I had noted that Triske’s farm lay among the northmost parts of the Profuse River valley, in a crook of a hollow made by a splashing glacial stream. I stood up to go, in that hesitant but hopeful way one has when recovering from illness.

“Let’s go,” I said. “If I’m to open with the market at dawn.” Ryn looked at me, but did not say a word.

Our hike to the base of the plateau proceeded in some haste. We hurried toward an appointment. So far upstream, the River was narrower, and we crossed it on one of on one of those ubiquitous ferries for those few who do not wish to go all the way downriver, a simple slab of logs bound to a cable. Considering that we both wore our host’s apparel, if anyone saw us as the sun set and we poled across, they would have thought we were farmers off for an evening’s entertainment beside a still, or hunters or trappers scurrying from one copse to the next before the darkness fell.

Along with the moon rose the other four of those spheres called the Orchids, silent and ominous. Even Batyst was distracted for a moment. And I agreed immediately that they mean no good. They hang in the night like malice itself. They’ll not leave until they war upon this world, and the Historians teach that if loaded with personnel, such ships hold sufficient forces to occupy an entire world – but if loaded with weaponry, they can destroy that same world outright.

The smugglers awaited us on the other side. How Ryn had known where they would be, he did not say, and I did not ask him. Their manner invited little conversation and they engaged in none, save what would one flash another using the signals of their hands. I told myself to remember to ask Ryn if we might learn the same system; too many people know the urchin tongue, and I’m nervous now about the Temple’s spies. That last Blooding was entirely too close.

But the smugglers led us into the darkness of the trees without a sound, and I realized that those places where both river and trees came near the base of the plateau would be very few indeed. The smugglers were by necessity less crafty than I’d thought. And they walked a harder road, traipsing through the leafy woods in darkness complete without stars or moon or torches of any kind. Several times I stumbled, and only Batyst’s sure grip kept me on my feet. His voice jolted me out of my thoughts.

“You should know,” he said, “What I do for you is not conditional. It is not contingent on anything you say or do or think or feel. It has nothing to do with who you are right now. The Blood steered me toward a promise. I serve that promise, and so do you.” He smiled then, “Even when you do not know what it is. That is what I’m going to show you.”

The last of the smugglers turned back to us then, eyes flashing in the black. She motioned us forward, quickly. She didn’t care for us, of course – but the price of their guidance was that we carry sacks as heavy as anything I’d ever brought to market. I did not ask what was in them. Knives wrapped silently in wool, perhaps, for personal defense of the kind which the Historians prohibit, or the wet leaves of the plant that the Temple alone is allowed to use for the incense of its services. Tax-free flour, perhaps, underselling the variety the Baker’s Guild must officially use. To think of it, they might simply be seeds I carried slung across my shoulder, and I was undercutting myself by providing for one of those un-guilded vendors who furtively traipse the alleys of Ariel, going furtively from door to door hoping that no White or Green will catch them.

Whatever I carried, I collapsed outright in the clearing when we reached the cliff at the base of the plateau. We’d walked five of the six hours that Ryn Batyst had promised, and I supposed that meant that we had gone faster than expected. With a pair of oculars, the lead smuggler flashed signs at someone on the top, whose dim form I could make out in the light of the stars and moon and brooding, alien spheres. Those would be bad, I realized, for their trade. The guards would see quite further than normal in any night like this, clear of cloud and storm. So when it came my turn and Batyst awaited me at the top and the lead smuggler hissed at me to go, I grabbed the rope and only prayed there were no guards near.

To whom exactly I sped my thoughts, I of course cannot say. The gods of the Profusion, everyone knows, have quite gone, into the void beyond the void. It is their grace, and only their grace, that lingers – and will soon follow them entirely. But after I had pronounced one of the Temple’s oft-repeated forms, I gripped the rope more calmly nonetheless. I was fortunate that the smuggler going downward – for Ariel exports much, also, that is not sanctioned – was subtly heavier than me, so that a gentle hand pulled me upward. Though I’ve used it a dozen times, I doubt the smuggler’s gate is anything I shall ever become accustomed to. I’m always glad when it is over.

Batyst embraced me at the top and we bid our compatriots farewell. Doubtless, they wondered why we had not descended as Blooded normally would; it seemed unlikely that Batyst had told them. He certainly had not told me. And we did not turn west toward Batyst’s own street. Nor did he spare my street, by the shrine to the thirty-second Faith, more than a sidelong glance. We were traversing the city proper. While we waited in a shadowed corner for a patrol of Greens to pass – for we were long past curfew – I asked him why. He said only that it would make more sense as a surprise.

Still, when we stopped again to wait within the shadows of columns outside the abandoned Speaking Hall for a patrol of Whites to file past, the surprise became more apparent. And when we hurried over toward the center of the heart of Ariel and Batyst started reciting the words that Historians utter to wake their machines, our purpose seemed clear, though no longer sensible. The Healing Well had not been opened in forty years. Not even all eight Guardians or a full circle of Historians had been able to wake that Well again. There was no reason to expect that the chair of the Public of Guilds Public of Guilds and a newly-minted member of the Sower’s guild would do much better. Still, as we stood over it, our ears straining for any step of a returning patrol, I thought I knew the way.

From my mind I quieted those words that Historians use to fill the air. Instead I made myself as still and empty as I could, as still and empty on those nights when one stands before the call of the Wells of the Dead and nothing else can be said of any importance, as still and empty as a bank of fog. Indeed I recalled that strange white wind that had disturbed my vision within the Blood of History, though it now seemed like so many nights ago, as Adlasola Oso had not even known who I was. But I thought of that wind and of the woman, of the salvation of the world lying within the earth and soon felt the earth itself open up to me, a great crack in the pavement of Ariel’s crushed stone. I asked the mind of the Healing Well a question.