Appendix

Appendix 1Transformation versus Change:
Scientific Paradigm Shifts

Our understanding of everything is always incomplete. Our knowledge is functional; therefore, truth becomes a quality of the specific interaction, as Gadamer reiterates, “the relationship is primary.”¹⁵ The meaning of anything takes shape in relation to everything else. When our contextual perception expands, the meaning and understanding of everything else expand with it, knowingly or not. In this respect, Jesus interacts with people differently than most Greek and Roman interactions. He almost exclusively explains little and uses stories, metaphors, examples, and evocative language to draw people into new ways of seeing and experiencing the world. As our cognitive understanding deepens, our knowledge grows and changes; when we experience a paradigm or narrative shift in the world, we undergo transformation. Change adds or removes elements from our knowledge; transformation, by contrast, alters our perception of the entire world—everything in it becomes new.

I still remember the day I encountered Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Something in me exploded. My mind raced through the implications as my entire world began to bend. The professor went on to show that Newton’s equations were incomplete; they worked in most contexts but failed in extreme cases. As we undergo scientific paradigm shifts throughout history, from Ptolemaic to Copernican, from Copernican to Newtonian, and from Newtonian to Einsteinian, our perspective and understanding of the world steadily shift from a more self-centered view to a broader, more circumspect, and more integrated one. With each new paradigm shift, we can see and understand more of our world. As Maltbie Babcock suggests, “Life is measured by the number of things you are alive to.”¹⁶

In Ptolemy’s cosmology, the stars and the Sun revolve around the Earth—a more egocentric perspective. This is an entire way of thinking about the world that shapes the meaning of all our knowledge. That is why it was so earth-shattering when Copernicus proposed the opposite, that the Earth revolves around the Sun. It was not just an astronomical adjustment; it affects how we understand everything, including our conception of ourselves, God, materiality, and our spirituality. Everything we know and experience shifts a little as we see it in the new light of each paradigm.

As anomalies accumulate, the existing paradigm becomes strained, eventually prompting a social transformation until someone discovers a new paradigm that resolves them. In this respect, meaning is, to some degree, relative and primarily functional. Meaning is specific to its paradigm, and understanding across paradigms is rationally incommensurable. However, the dynamic that creates mutuality between paradigms is the same dynamic at work when we experience analogy and metaphor. Nevertheless, the radical difference in paradigms creates a hermeneutical challenge to our ability to share meaning.

A paradigm is like a pattern, a way everything connects and relates, and it has a spiritual dimension. It is the tacit backdrop and web of connections that underlie anything that contributes meaning to our focal awareness. For example, the transformed meaning of a flower against the background of a forest, its meaning in a vase sitting in the middle of a factory of steel and concrete, or in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle returning home from war. The flower’s intrinsic meaning takes on new meanings in each context.

It is also why we remember little, if anything, before age three. The way we conceive and construct our world before we develop language is so radically different from how we do so afterward. Memories fail to make the same sense once we become linguistic beings. This phenomenon makes the discipline of historical studies quite challenging. We can never perceive the same world exactly as someone in the Ptolemaic world does. We can get close, but to be essentially the same, we would have to forsake all that we are and move into that lived world (die to our existing self and incarnate into it). We might consider that fully redeemed humanity will be able to communicate empathetically and completely across these paradigmatic borders because of its complete openness to that Power that facilitates all relations (Pentecost), even though each person’s understanding will take shape according to their own history and meaning frame (language, Acts 2).

These scientific paradigm shifts are like a child's development. As the child grows, it realizes it is not the center of the universe. It also goes through a process of breaking from the matrix (mother), developing its own ego and self-consciousness. After the pedantic posturing of young adulthood, each new movement toward decentralization brings new levels of humility, and with each new level of epistemic humility come new levels of empathy and intimacy. Humility is the fertile ground through which empathy and intimacy (love), the divine quality of the Trinity, analogically emerge between us.

In a significant decentralization move, Einstein revealed that Newton’s perspective, though functional for basic engineering use, holds only within each person’s relative context. Those same equations do not work for someone observing another person traveling at half the speed of light. Newton’s theories were inaccurate in calculating the timing of Mercury’s orbital appearance after its solar eclipse. Einstein’s ‘adjustment’ to Newton’s equations eliminated the growing anomalies mounting in Newtonian physics. We now know that all knowledge is somewhat relative and perspectival, yet ultimately commensurable.

Einstein’s adjustment to Newton’s equations provides the necessary modification to make those equations work across radically different contexts in spacetime. By suggesting that the speed of light was absolute, he used this constant to relate various contexts to each other effectively. In effect, he discovered that the quality of light itself facilitates the sharing of experience and meaning from one context to another. Similarly, transformation occurs when our entire way of orienting things to each other undergoes a holistic theoretical shift. Things that are invisible within one paradigm may become visible in the next.

A clearer, more descriptive understanding of the world emerges with each paradigm shift and conceptual revolution. Each new paradigm helps us recognize that our thinking is not grounded in universal absolutes we build upon (i.e., raw, foundational, and indisputable data; what philosophers call non-inferentials). Instead, all of our thinking, even the most fundamental data in our knowledge, emerges from socially established ways of perceiving the world (paradigms), and no knowledge or even data is theory-independent. A slightly different way of perceiving things is evident in every language, culture, family, and personal history. Each person’s perspective and thinking is unique and varies ever so slightly from everyone else’s. Understanding this is essential for the church, every Christian, and all who hold any religious or scientific convictions dear to their hearts. This nonfoundational understanding should affect how we communicate with others.

However, a living, universal communicative dynamic operates within our relationships, creating an analogical mutuality through which our differing perspectives can, to some degree, meaningfully interact (Pentecost)—to the degree of our openness to the Other. (However, because of sin, we fail to do so.) Just as things in the world actively encounter one another through the medium of light (energy), the New Testament suggests that Jesus Christ, the Word, and the Spirit are the mediators and ‘metaphysical’ dynamic—the ‘light’ of the world, if you will—through which all human communication and cosmic interactions occur. Even language is contingent upon this cosmic activity, even though our sin distorts it. In this regard, our growth and transformation into the image of Christ mean that we must periodically, often unconsciously, leave one world of relating and instantly enter another. The prodigal son enters a new home and relational world, different from the one he left. Likewise, the father was willing to step into it as well; in fact, he ran to the returning son, just as Peter ran into a new world to meet the resurrected Jesus on the beach.

History has shown us that each new scientific paradigm shift within our culture affects every discipline of thought, even our theology—how we understand and relate to God. In this respect, Atonement Theory has expanded in meaning, beginning with a litigious understanding and moving toward a more relational one that communicates much more of the Incarnation’s ultimate purpose. Within Jesus’ context, conveying this greater significance was quite difficult, even though he and the New Testament writers relentlessly sought to clarify that the greater purpose of redemption was to create a being capable of knowing God as God. Remember, during Jesus’ time, neither the language he spoke nor the biblical Greek or Hebrew had a word for relationship. Therefore, in our new, more informed readings of the Scriptures, we are beginning to better understand how the Incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Christ facilitate relationships with each other, the world, and God. As we transform from one degree to another throughout history, new heuristics emerge that reveal new understandings of trinitarian dynamics, expanding our knowledge across all our disciplines of thought, notwithstanding Christ's active role in redeeming the world.

. . .

What science has done for us spiritually is that it has been the only thing that I know of that has compelled us to wean ourselves of our infantile need for centrality.

Ann Druyan

Appendix 2Love - 1 Corinthians 13:
How We Relate, Not What We Relate

Kierkegaard suggests that our potential openness to transformation, ultimately to the transcendent, is universal and necessary for entering the redemptive process. However, our histories and contexts are unique and personal, far from embodying complete universal mutuality with others. A universal transcendent Power immanently mediates our relations, enabling the Other (others, ourselves, the world, and God) to condition the ongoing transformation of our lives and relationships. Love includes our openness to that transforming Power.

Though the integrity of our knowledge and ethical action results from such openness, it emerges appropriately from within each interaction. Nevertheless, our judgment and understanding of human openness to the transcendent, even in ourselves, can be difficult to assess with any certainty; this is why the Scriptures caution us against judging such states in ourselves or others. For example, we have all met compulsive people who are in love with their own agenda of ‘loving’ or ‘saving’ others. This book argues that true and complete love is rare and appears only periodically in significant amounts within our relationships. Within the New Testament, the deeper expressions of love facilitate transformations in others and the world; in other words, true love is the bed upon which faith and miracles occur, actions that transform the world. Though first-century Christians experienced it powerfully, faith and love in the modern West are more sporadic, we might consider, amid the West's affluence and self-sufficiency.

So, if we are just beginning to scratch the surface of love’s depths and if complete love performs miracles, this indirectly helps legitimize Christianity by acknowledging our generally low level of genuinely lived faith and spiritual fruit in our age. In other words, the Christian faith may indeed be as real and powerful as the New Testament describes, but in our age it is diluted and left untried. Today, we normally experience only a modicum of true faith and love in our interactions. Most of what we think is love usually contains mountains of self-serving aspects; every honest marriage reveals this over time. But the good news is that love, at some level, is still there and an essential factor in creating and maintaining a Christian community or any community.

Simply put, our openness to the Other is fundamental to what Jesus and Paul were trying to express through the concept of love. Note Paul’s description of love, especially his distinction between what we physically do for others versus how and why we do it.

1 Corinthians 131–7, 13

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become as sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. ² And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. ³ And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

⁴ Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not arrogant; ⁵ does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, keeps no account of evil; ⁶ does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; ⁷ bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things. . . .

¹³ And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Like Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Paul drives us deeper into our relational actions than the law and formal behavior. Their interest is in discerning the nature of how we relate more than what we cognitively express or physically do. They point to an ultimately indescribable relational disposition of radical openness to and connection with the Other. What is the Other? The Other refers first to the emerging relationship, a forming matrix between participants that mediates our relations to others, the world, God, and even ourselves. Our primary openness, however, must first transparently open to that Power between us that creates, sustains, and transforms our relationships. “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, . . . his own life, . . . [and] does not bear his cross . . . cannot be My disciple” (Luke 14:26–27). Complete love, which is rare at our stage of redemption, first engages (opens to) that Universal Power before all others. Jesus refers to this as our cross, in which everything, absolutely everything, enters the matrix of the relationship by which all of us become open to being affected and transformed by the Other. However, our openness to this Power lies deep beneath and prior to our reflexive response (action). It is a precognitive relational disposition or rare givenness of ourselves that conditions our actions—a quality of our relationship.

Therefore, giving food to the poor or sacrificing our lives for others is not love. Love is a quality of relating within these social actions—how we give or sacrifice. Both Jesus and Paul introduced a new level of connection with others, relatively unknown because of the new intensity with which Jesus and his disciples were experiencing it. Describing this newer, growing expression of love was difficult. The world had never seen anything like this so powerfully manifest, and it was descriptively irreducible and beyond definition. The fact that no Greek word existed for the concept of ‘relationship’ at this time suggests their limited heuristics and difficulty in defining it. Therefore, Paul’s context reduces him to simply listing a series of descriptive qualities that, in the end, are quite paradoxical within his context. For example, compare Jesus’ over-simplified descriptions of love as ‘clothing and feeding the poor’ (Matt 25:31–46) and ‘laying down one’s life for another’ (John 15:13) when addressing common people, to Paul’s deeper consideration of separating these formal behaviors from love while addressing more discerning Christian leadership. Paul states, “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing” (1 Cor 13:3); in other words, you can perform those actions without love. Understanding love is not that simple, and that quality aspect within our relationships is still emerging.

Paul’s description of love has more to do with how we relate than with what we explicitly do; in other words, it focuses on how we feed the poor or sacrifice ourselves for others. The nature of our presence with the Other has everything to do with the interaction's meaningfulness. We have all experienced that sickening pretense of kindness that masks self-serving motivation, even the motivation to ‘love’ others because of Jesus rather than simply delighting in our presence and uniqueness. One can explicitly perform every descriptive quality Paul mentions in pretense rather than genuineness. Love, like faith, is something generated within ourselves. The deeply educated nobility of any culture has made an art of pretense, so much so that you don’t even know you are cut until you move. They can do it with an exterior demeanor of kindness, gentleness, and a smile, yet you immediately sense you have been slimmed. So, how do we describe this how of genuine relationality? What is genuineness? In other words, we are looking at the qualitative nature of our relationships, something that is emerging only in our ongoing transformations rather than something we choose to do or not do.

Echoing Jeremiah’s warning that only those who seek God and truth with all their heart are genuine, Kierkegaard argues that Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. This means: 1) No hidden elements of the soul (conscious or unconscious) are kept from the influence of truth and goodness, and 2) the willingness to become “that solitary individual” whole and genuine before the Other—for only an individual can truly love. Again, “To be spirit is to be I. God desires to have I’s, for God desires to be loved. . . . ‘Christendom’ is a society of millions—all in the third person, no I.”¹⁷

Only a solitary, autonomous, and single-minded individual is free to love. If I am merely a composite of my social relationships and environment, or an extension of God or God’s Spirit (Hegel’s Absolute Spirit or pantheism), then I am incapable of loving the Other. If my world or socialization conditions my will toward the good, I am divided—no longer an I or a spirit (spirit being a differentiated wholeness). Yes, the world conditions my response, but if I am unwilling to stand as a fully differentiated person, it does not condition my will one way or another regarding truth and goodness. If the crowd infringes on my will, or if busyness and distractions dissipate it; if pleasures overwhelm it, fear of punishment motivates it, or if I abandon my will to false narcotic openness, then my heart neither wills “one thing” in genuineness nor is free to love in truth. In this book, Kierkegaard argues that 1) a person “must in truth will the good, . . . be willing to do all for it [and] . . . willing to suffer all for it.”¹⁸

At the same time, the person must 2) “live as an ‘individual.’ . . . For he who is not himself a unity is never really anything wholly and decisively.” This is authentic relation, auth-entic (self-being). We are authentic and genuine when we allow the relationship, truth, and its divine mediation to affect or transform our entire being—only upon this relational disposition of genuine openness to that transcendent Power does true love emerge. As Jean Sulivan says, “Love wants and demands eternity.”¹⁹

The birthplace of love is the willingness to offer our conscious and unconscious motivations and our vows of closure to be wholly affected by the Other (passion). When we are fully open to the immanent-transcendence in our transparent relationship to the Spirit of God, to that extent we reflect the way of the Trinity within and between us. Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Love begins with giving oneself in spirit (wholeness) and truth to that Power that constitutes all relationships.

When we venture everything into the relationship, that Power that constitutes all relationships not only transforms our actions but also synchronizes them with the actions of others. To be a person (an individual) requires having our own interests, but we should not inappropriately destroy others' interests. However, “love rejoices in the truth.” In other words, we do not technically sacrifice ourselves to others but first to the “truth” that manifests (Incarnates) within the interaction. In this way, Christ and the Spirit mediate meaningful interactions between whole spirits with differing meaning frames. Love moves us to respect the often-radical difference of another’s personal context and to allow the space and time for understanding. Paul expressed this by saying, “love keeps no account of evil.” Within Paul’s linguistic capacities, this was the best he could do to describe the complexities of love.

The Genealogy of Interactions

1. LoveWhen we encounter another person, we do so with a relational disposition. This disposition develops within us through our history of relationships. It reflects our relational style and a certain degree of vulnerability and openness toward the outside world. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we enter all interactions with a learned ability to perceive and relate to others (language, forms of life, various ways of relating—what we might call relational choreographies—and a spectrum of beliefs ranging from those loosely held to those most sacred and potentially untouchable). Each of us enters interactions in our own way, which shapes our perception and response.

2. FaithThen there is the process of coming to understanding and experiencing meaning between the parties involved. An emerging, holistic degree of connection precedes and envelops all understanding (sunesis) between us, which is always more than the sum of the parts. This might range from sharing minor significance to shared enchantment. It can happen in a stranger’s glance, in two people discovering a common insight, or in five men on a basketball court coming back from 12 points down with two minutes to play.

3. HopeInseparable from every interaction of shared experience, understanding, knowledge, or co-action is the anticipation of the future it embodies. Everything we experience is narrative in form. In other words, it unfolds as a sequence of interactions that give each moment its diachronic meaning over time. Nothing has meaning or takes shape without embodying its anticipation of the future. In this respect, the future conditions everything we experience—our expectations and hopes shape the meaning of every moment.

As noted, these aspects of our interactions resemble Paul’s considerations of love, faith, and hope. Paul’s use of love concerns how we intend others and our willingness to engage fully in the interaction and its new possibilities. This vulnerability is more than self-sacrifice; it is our willingness to enter a genuine, ethical relationship mediated by God. The biblical concept of faith emerges from the relationship itself. However, within every relational moment or belief held in faith, there are incomplete and unknown aspects that we do not fully realize or articulate in the moment, yet they affect that moment. Still, we are experiencing something of the future beginning to emerge in a real way within our experiences and understanding. Hope is our conviction about what we anticipate.

Therefore, love is preeminent to and necessary for faith and hope. The degree to which we love honestly and openly affects the meaningfulness (sense of reality) of our interactions. This is why Paul insists that love is more important than faith or hope. You cannot attain any significant degree of faith or hope without the appropriate relational disposition of love and openness before the Other. Taking a bullet for someone, just as with suicide itself, can be an intensely narcissistic act. The willingness to venture all of oneself into the transformative matrix of the relationship is love.

Shame and suffering are among the most threatening emotions we face, and our openness to them is another sign of our willingness to love. At the end of darkness, there is always light.²⁰

Even in suicide, what creates disgust and meaninglessness within oneself is the tacit frame of light surrounding it in our subconscious. Without the light, darkness has no meaning. The human condition of picking up one’s cross and taking the risk stems from our openness to believing that a Benevolent Force is at the heart of the universe. It is not so much the belief in the Benevolent Force as our openness to believing it, should it be true. But this is known only in a precognitive flash of Spirit-to-spirit, which we allow or not, and which then conditions our cognitive response and actions. That is why it is a relational disposition; it precedes our cognition and conscious decisions. If we, beyond all descriptive understanding, leap into that Power, we enter the redemptive process. Simply put, this kind of anticipation and openness describes the character of the prodigal son from beginning to end, a character that will always escape the purview of older brothers.

A Definition of Love and How It Grows

James Loder defines love as “taking non-possessive delight in the particularity of the other.”²¹ I have found no description of love more powerful than this. It also echoes my wife’s best advice to young psych nursing students working with chemically dependent and suicidal patients: “If you can’t find something to enjoy in these patients, you will be hard-pressed to facilitate any meaningful recovery in them.” In other words, the caregiver empowers and transforms through genuine relationships, and all the psychological knowledge in the world is pointless unless we first establish this bond of love with the patient.

This definition of love deepens our understanding of love beyond what Jesus or Paul previously stated. How do we delight in another person? Can we choose to delight in someone, or is it something that simply is or is not? Feeling delight is less a decision and more of an aesthetic response (holistic), like taste or enjoying beauty. It is a holistic response and, therefore, generally dispositional rather than volitional.

A relational disposition emerges, changes, or increases only through transformation rather than disciplined action. This happens only in the realm of our spirit, our holistic interaction with the Other, beyond thinking. Loving humanity in its twistedness requires re-paradigming our vision of the Other. We can often initiate this by inquiring into their deepest longings and disappointments. As we begin to interact, something within us subtly changes, and the energy emerges to leap into a new way of interacting. At this point, we are getting closer to the goodness in the Other, which frees love to arise within and between us. Our perspective evolves, and we begin to see and enjoy things in others we previously could not. It all hinges on our openness to the Other and on transcending our own personal vows of closure. Again, the New Testament suggests that transformation comes through two things: behold and expose. Either one facilitates transformation: beholding (waking up to) the glory of the Lord that is, to some degree, emerging in everyone and all Creation (Matt 25:31–46), or what our beholding unconsciously enables within us—the willingness to encounter the darkness within us and our relationships (entering the void), which allows the light to shine upon and transform that darkness (Eph 5:13).

The Academy’s (AMPAS) 1987 Best Foreign Film, “Babette’s Feast,” powerfully depicts the transforming effect of beholding. An embittered congregation of moralistic fundamentalists is drawn into enjoying an incredible gourmet feast while watching a retired military general who knows gourmet food. As the general eats each delicacy and drinks the most expensive wine money can buy, his enjoyment slowly erodes their original resolve to eat without indulging in the meals’ sinfully extravagant (prodigal) tastes. Just watching him respond in such surprise and delight to every bite unknowingly begins to transform them, and soon they begin to enjoy the glory of the meal as well. After dinner, the longstanding bitterness that had developed over a lifetime among the Danish fundamentalists has shockingly disappeared. They have beheld an element of God’s glory in Creation, and it is good. Their enjoyment of the food unknowingly opens them to better see the glory of the Lord in everything, even in each other, as their bitterness is transformed into grace, filling them with love.

Appendix 3The Hot, the Cold, and the Lukewarm

Jesus tells the church of Laodicea that they are neither hot nor cold but lukewarm.²²

Because of their lukewarmness, he tells them, “I could wish that you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, … I will vomit you out of my mouth.” What a shocking statement. He would rather they be cold toward him than lukewarm. Why would he prize a cold, distant, even antagonistic relationship over a seemingly warm familiarity that lacks enthusiasm?

Jesus says they are self-sufficient, wealthy, and have “need of nothing” outside themselves. We could say the same of the older brother of the Prodigal and the Pharisees; they were self-sufficient and in complete control. These people were undoubtedly not hot in their respective relationships, but neither were they cold. Jesus, nevertheless, castigates them simply for their unwillingness to see themselves as they truly are: “wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked” as others. Their lukewarmness of self-reliance and self-righteousness is so damaging to genuine relations that he concludes they are further from God than the cold who willingly acknowledge how far they are from God. At least the cold, the prodigals, are indirectly looking for gods to requite their short-circuited desires.

Those with a vital relationship with someone or with God are anything but self-reliant. Vital relationships entail interdependence that requires openness and vulnerability toward the Other. With that comes the willingness to experience everything, the sweet and the bitter. Those who turn entirely from a relationship—the cold—unknowingly put themselves in a better position to perceive and understand life with and without that relationship. One of the more successful marriage counselors I know is down on divorce but big on separation. He finds that experiencing life without the other for a time brings greater clarity when assessing the true value of the spouse and the relationship. Again, this reflects the primary themes of the two parables that precede the Prodigal Son parable: the parable of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Our deepest longing and appreciation often emerge when we live without each other for a while. Far more damaging are marriages that fall into parallel lives, disintegrating into a peaceful, utilitarian relationship with no vital interaction. The false sense of relationship generally masks lives of quiet desperation and loneliness. Some of the most ‘satisfied’ people I know fit this category. Like the Pharisees and the older son, it is difficult to convince these types of people that their relationships and lives are indeed “wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked.”

The cold often fail or simply give up on existing relationships and are well aware of their inability to sustain vital relationships with any degree of success. On the other hand, they sometimes sense the substantial lack of fullness in their relationships and wantonly search for more outside them. Consciously setting themselves against what is generally considered good often puts them in a much better position to eventually find the greater good, while others live satisfied with false and incomplete states of social interaction.

Psychopathic personalities embody the full extent of lukewarmness in their appearance of ‘goodness’, yet they live lives of almost total indifference, largely without conscience or empathy. Having seared their conscience through countless acts of indifference, they slowly close themselves off to the living Presence between them and the Other. Far better than indifference is someone who swells with anger and screams obscenities at the Other. Anger acknowledges the loss of something desired within the relationship. If they had not held that relationship, or the possibility of a relationship, so dear to their heart, there would be nothing to get angry about. Many marriage counselors will tell you that as long as there is anger in the room, there is hope. When one of the parties falls into complete indifference, there is little left to work with.

We can find these same categories at play in the story of the Prodigal Son and throughout the Scriptures. We might consider the father hot, the prodigal son cold, and, surprisingly, the ‘faithful’ older brother lukewarm. By the parable’s end, we learn of the older brother’s repressed longings, which blind him to higher states of interaction by making him overconfident in his own goodness and morality.

Appendix 4The Necessity of Evil:
The Problem with the Problem of Evil

One of the most significant intellectual stumbling blocks to belief in God today is the question of why a benevolent God allows so much evil. However, when we consider what it might take to create a being capable of knowing God as God—for example, the radical freedom necessary for the emergence of autonomous individual agency—evil may well be required. God is not creating servants (humanity’s infancy); God is creating friends of a filial nature capable of knowing (experiencing) the divinity of God.

If a benevolent God creates anything outside Godself, many issues arise, and the purpose of this brief thought exercise is to consider some of them. I am not concerned with confirming a theory but simply discussing a few thoughts about what may be necessary for human beings to be created in the image of God, whatever that might be. If we can agree on the theory’s potential coherence and feasibility rather than establishing its truth, we might better understand how evil could be a “necessary evil” within the Creation process. A person does not have to believe in this theory but merely understand its potential logic, possibility, viability, and coherence in order to remove the prohibition against the possibility of a loving God. In other words, if I believe in God and you do not, and I can show you coherent reasons why a good God must allow evil in order to create a being capable of knowing God according to God’s divine character (love), then that eliminates evil in the world as a deterrent to believing in a benevolent God.

If God creates a being in the “image” of God to know God as God, it would seem that an aspect of that being would have to reflect the divine image and share God’s nature in some way, and that an aspect of God would have to share or become the nature of that being, even if only in how they relate. Otherwise, how would there be genuine, familial interaction? The text is quite clear that God is creating humanity in God’s image, in some way “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). Alternatively, a part of God becomes Incarnate, lives a human life on earth, dies, and then bodily resurrects to the new (or end of) heaven and earth. Whatever this common ground is, something of like nature must be inherent in the other to make the relationship filial. Thus, a trinitarian God is necessary.

One important issue is that humanity needs to become a self-directed, autonomous being with its own radical free will. Robert Penn Warren suggests:

The creation of man whom God in his foreknowledge knew doomed to sin was the awful index of God’s omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection. To do so would, to speak truth, be not creation but extension. Separateness is identity and the only way for God to create, truly create, man was to make him separate from God himself, and to be separate from God is to be sinful. The creation of evil is therefore the index of God’s glory and his power.²³

More to the point, Kierkegaard insists that “To be spirit is to be I. God desires to have I’s, for God desires to be loved.”²⁴ But how does God create anything other than Godself? How can God create anything that is not an extension of Godself? If the world and human beings are to be outside God and possess genuine agency, something of God must die, severing itself from God and God’s nature.

This may be evident in the “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me” (Mark 15:34), as the Father withdraws the Spirit from the Son just before death, creating the space for sin—both by making sin possible and by God taking the sin upon himself in Jesus Christ—thereby allowing humanity to eventually obtain autonomy in contradistinction to God.²⁵ This becomes a true space torn from the divine fabric and glory of God within Creation. Only then could a being emerge capable of creating its own world in autonomous relation to God—a true “I”. From outside this Garden (world) of God’s glory, human beings now possess an autonomous nature, albeit with distortions, and the possibility of steadily moving into synchrony with that transforming Power. As independent agents begin to open to the idea of an actual relationship with God, they begin to reflect God’s relational qualities because of the intrinsic nature of that relationality within God—Love (perichoresis). This also draws humanity, through the Spirit, into the process of Christ's creating (i.e., synchronizing their world with Christ’s creating action).

The primary point is that no true love (genuine relationship) exists without the freedom to choose the relationship or action autonomously. Complete differentiation implies and requires the capacity to relate freely and willfully in synchrony with all others, divine or terrestrial. It is not about our given capacity to relate, which depends on our momentary state of development, but about our willingness to relate as Jesus and the Father relate (love, perichoresis). Therefore, given this necessity of radical freedom, we might imagine that the redemptive process would be quite messy as humanity increasingly chooses to synchronize itself with God (1 Cor 15:20–58) as God invites humanity, with Christ, to take dominion in co-creating the world. But this must remain forever an invitation, not a mandate; one in which every action must emerge from the willingness within each human being. The redemption of humanity contains all sorts of twists and convulsions as it works through its growth, free from Personal divine agency. It is left only with the potential of God’s nature (perichoresis) reflecting within all of nature that is open to it, if it is to emerge self-generative in true autonomy. These dynamics are active within the immanent-transcendent divine-human aspect of our interactions as Jesus’ personal call to relationship with all living and created things.

This same logic of freedom might also be necessary for anything God invites humanity to have dominion over, such as nature itself (natural calamities, earthquakes, disease, etc.). For Jesus stipulates that fully redeemed humanity can, in faith, say to a mountain, “into the sea,” and their faith will move it (Mark 11:23–24; Matt 8:23–27). If there were ever a biblical parallel to the entanglement theory of human consciousness and matter, this would be it. Therefore, if humanity is to eventually take dominion over the earth and become co-creators with God, such growth processes might necessitate that God grant creation the freedom it needs, leaving space and time for humanity to choose and develop into its synchronizing dominion in its own time, so those qualities fully integrate into the emerging nature of humanity (much like the prodigal daughter).

Does the world and our entire development have to unfold with such radical freedom, degree by degree? In other words, rather than allowing humanity’s inhumanity to humanity, could God not intervene through a series of cosmic blockades, each blocking a human act of evil until humanity chooses the right way? This, too, is just another way of limiting humanity’s power and forcing God’s own will through manipulative extension. This reflects what the wife in the Stepford Wives film (2005) and novel says to the husband, “If you could change anything in me by pushing a button, would you?” This kind of intervention, which overrides humanity, ultimately reduces humanity to non-autonomous action, severing humanity from its own co-creative agency, rather than allowing God’s nature (love) to fully emerge from one degree to another within the human heart through openness to it.

Therefore, each aspect of humanity must emerge through a struggle across millions of years of possibilities in evolutionary-redemptive history, through countless states of emerging forces, then emerging desires, all within radical freedom. Like the prodigal son, only the metaphysical aspect of love (perichoresis), reflecting within the glory of Creation, influences his willingness to open to transformation and his further development as he wanders free from the father’s direct personal influence. That force deep within all Creation—love—constantly pulses toward greater differentiated unity, into higher and higher order, and eventually into sentience. Once God breathes divine life into that sentience (creating humanity and the possibility of co-creating autonomy), evil and sin enter the world. All that we are, from the single cells in our bodies to how we relate (ethics), must emerge from within us and our relationships in freedom if it is to be truly us, each person an “I.”

This process would entail the repeating cycles of emergence, failure, tragedy, and re-emergence that we witness throughout history until human beings and the world choose to move in complete synchrony with Christ. We might even consider that divine action would intervene only to preserve creation's developmental freedom within its acts of faith, specifically for humanity. After that, all other divine acts of creation unfold as co-conditional acts of creation, with humanity acting as spirit (the whole of our being) in tandem with Christ. As humanity grows in faith, it synchronizes with God’s creative action from one degree to another. As humanity grows in its ability to co-create (faith), Christ removes all unilateral direct support of Creation, allowing humanity to move into symphonic synchrony with Christ through the Spirit; in other words, to affect Christ’s creative activity from within the eternal before he creates (similarly suggested in the film “Adjustment Bureau” 2011).

The role of the eternal is another significant factor in the creation process, specifically the effect of redeemed humanity’s co-conditioning within God’s creating action. Redeemed humanity has a co-conditioning impact on God within the Eternal through its holistic Spirit-to-spirit precognitive interactions, which may appear like divine unilateral interventions from God into Creation within a Hellenistic/Modern ontology of I-thou, but they are not. Humanity’s effect on the eternal interaction is invisible (inarticulable) within most dualistic paradigms of relationality. However, in a perichoretic ontology of I-relationship-thou, the synchronizing co-action of the analogia spiritus between God and humanity obviates the concept of divine unilateral intervention, as the human and divine emerge in seemingly instant de-liberation together before the act of Creation in time. In this respect, the typical understanding of intervention is essentially a misnomer. Humanity’s longings, dreams, and choices at any moment in history condition the creation of all Creation from beginning to end (transtemporally) if and to the degree we fully open to God within the holistic interaction of analogia spiritus. This posture of love and faith emerges from an active passivity in our relationship with the Trinity (the Spirit and Christ). All sin begins in our refusal to fully open to the Other.

Paul suggests as much when he says that God will give all dominion to humanity (both humanity and Christ). Humanity’s co-conditioning power (dominion) intensifies as God increasingly becomes “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). This is only possible if God creates humanity in God’s image—a differentiated being capable of analogically sharing a level of divine relationality.

The freedom of both the Creator and created human beings need not be mutually exclusive. If they emerge outside the mutualizing dynamic of analogia spiritus within perichoresis, it is sin (evil); within it, it is co-creation. Although the human and divine wills are separate and autonomous, this does not preclude their synchronous emergence from a precognitive interaction in the eternal before entering Time. Because of the holistic dynamic of analogia spiritus—the co-conditioning interaction within the eternal singularity—both God (Christ) and human beings can holistically de-liberate their respective freedom, will, and desires by transforming each other without canceling the other's autonomy. We experience this all the time in the dialogical deliberation of human relationships (in the temporal); within the divine-human interaction of analogia spiritus (in the eternal), this active de-liberation occurs instantaneously and then emerges within our thoughts seemingly out of nowhere (the muse and mystery that philosophers call hypothetico-deductive reasoning).²⁶

Any order emerging from chaos that does not arise from its own freedom ultimately becomes meaningless. An interventional act of God imposing itself on Creation without allowing humanity to co-condition that action short-circuits humanity’s development, just as an overcompensating parent negatively affects an adolescent’s maturation by removing the struggles that would otherwise allow them to experience the pain of failure. Even though God’s Spirit holistically affects the human spirit by simply relating to humanity as the Spiritus Creator (a manifestation of God’s Spirit that transparently draws, not pushes or coerces, the human spirit forward), every act of creation struggling to emerge from chaos must do so in total freedom and self-determination. The closing summation in the film “War of the Worlds” similarly echoes the ecological integration and internal integrity necessary for human emergence in both cosmic and divine relations:

From the moment the invaders arrived, breathed our air, ate and drank, they were doomed. They were undone, destroyed, after all of man’s weapons and devices had failed, by the tiniest creatures that God in his wisdom put [allowed] upon this earth. By the toll of a billion deaths, man had earned his immunity, his right to survive among this planet’s infinite organisms. And that right is ours against all challenges. For neither do men live nor die in vain.²⁷

If evil exists only to provide the freedom necessary to create a being capable of freely choosing between good and evil, then that evil is not in vain. Evil becomes a necessary possibility for an intrinsically genuine, not imputed, righteousness to emerge in humanity.

How Making War with the Lamb
Fulfills God’s Purpose: Revelation 17

Revelation 17:17 presents one of those intensely enigmatic biblical passages. Speaking of the world rulers who ride upon the evil Beast, it says, “God has put it into their hearts to fulfill His purpose, to be of one mind, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God are fulfilled” (Rev 17:17). How is it that God allows these rulers of nations and empires to work together in unison, rotating leadership or empire status, to work for the beast (evil or Satan), and “make war with the Lamb” (Rev 17:14), yet they are fulfilling the purpose of God?! When we consider their evil as a collateral necessity that maintains some semblance of order and temporal space for humanity to eventually choose the good/God (versus anarchy or total destruction), this supplies an answer to the enigma of how the evil kings riding upon the beast somehow “fulfill [God’s] purpose.”

Humanity must have the time (grace) to make its own decisions, allowing God to analogically transform our nature into God’s nature—love. Grace is not a free pass into God’s personal presence; it is the time we need to transform into (and choose) Christ’s likeness without losing our identity, from one degree to another, both in this life and in any potential purgative activity beyond. In a sense, the evil in us needs space and time to work out its shortened desires and eventually open to righteousness. The grace of God uses these rulers to maintain our social space for this process, despite their evil intentions.

Christ is the human Incarnation of God, who brings all Creation, throughout history, into synchronicity with the Father. Christ accomplishes this through the Eternal aspect of God (the Father) through the Spirit outside of but in the midst of time (1 Cor 15). Again, this is a process, not of coercion, compulsion, or divine imputation into a totally passive humanity, but of unending attraction, appeal, and invitation that arises from the sheer presence of the divine relating to us (via Christ and the Spirit) and from God’s love reflecting in our hearts. This is why redemption spans all of history rather than a single, instantaneous, non-temporal act of creation. This explains why evil is necessary for creating humanity and why Christ must work with, shape, influence, and, at times, restrain evil in these faithless rulers. Nevertheless, Christ must grant radical freedom to as much of Creation and humanity as possible in order to create as many as possible in the image of God so they can know God as God. Such freedom is also necessary to create individuation within humanity.

Therefore, history will be ugly. Christ says, ‘I do not come to bring peace upon the earth, but fire, a sword, and division’ (Matt 10:34; Luke 12:49–51). In other words, he restrains evil (in those not open to God) just enough to provide the necessary space for those with faith to open toward God and goodness over time—attempting to bring as many as possible into the new heaven and earth. However, 1) this restraint is not a divine imposition of freedom, for freedom is only a quality in those who open to transcendence (God),²⁸ which these rulers refuse to do. So this ‘imposition’ of God is of their own doing, in their ‘freedom’. 2) Secondly, God’s restraint is not solely God’s will but, indirectly, the desires and choices of the elect, those of faith, throughout history, co-creating this restraining activity. The restraint, however, is just enough to keep the world from destroying itself. So, when the elite (the kings or horns) are ‘fulfilling the purpose of Christ,’ they provide a provisional and functional level of society for the redemptive process to unfold. Christ’s restraining hand is not upon the faithful who are open to ongoing transformations but upon those who refuse freedom and transformation, like the older brother or Pharaoh, who remain imprisoned by their refusal to become whole (spirit) and therefore resist their own transformation by the Spirit of God. Because they withhold a portion of themselves from change, they resist the Spirit’s transforming action in their lives and ultimately become unable to enter true freedom—for “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17).²⁹ The “kings” are largely unaware that they are under divine restraint. Many of them secretly believe they are acting within an alternative understanding of faith—similar to the ancient mystery religions (such as Zoroastrianism, Rosicrucians, the High Masonic Orders, etc.).³⁰

This helps explain why Paul can claim that ‘all governing authorities are from God, and they exist for God’ despite the evil within them (Rm 13:1). Yet, “Then comes the end, . . . when [Christ] puts an end to all rule and all authority and power. For [Christ] must reign till he has put all enemies under His feet” (1 Cor 15:24–25). This suggests that redemptive history, coming into synchronicity with God, might eventually unfold through many transforming cycles, from one degree to another. We can identify one of these geopolitical cycles ending—being restrained—when internal resistance against Hitler (e.g., Bonhoeffer) seems to challenge Paul’s affirmation that “every soul be subject to the governing authorities.” When corruption and oppression become overwhelming and a desire for greater fullness of life emerges within humanity, humanity (Jacob) wrestles against it, and a new stage of redemption emerges under the guiding hand of Christ and the purifying fires of the Spirit. These fires occasionally lead to war, but more importantly, they burn away impurities, distilling greater goodness within humanity. This process of redemption stands in stark contrast to the academy's pejorative view that the world wars of the 20th century reveal there is nothing within humanity or its relations that God is transforming from one degree to another. Ask any informed Western woman if she would like to have lived in most past cultures in history, and you will usually get a very different response about human social progress than the myopic views of the dark propagandists of The Wasteland. Knowingly or unknowingly, transformations continue to occur in people over a lifetime, in communities and societies over the years, and eventually in all of humanity throughout history. Nevertheless, this transforming force of goodness, which reflects in humanity through that Power at work with and between us, is actively at enmity with the chaos and darkness from which it emerges.

In Revelation 17:14 (paralleling 1 Cor 15), the powers and authorities will make war with the Lamb, but the Lamb will overcome them. As stated in 1 Corinthians 15, 2 Corinthians 3, and Hebrews 8:10–13, this “overcoming” unfolds over time. Yes, the book of Revelation may forecast the end of the world and its final cataclysmic entrance into the eschaton (and maybe not), but more importantly, it reveals the cycles of redemption by which Christ and the Spirit draw Creation and all who are willing to synchronize with God and his nature—love. After all, theologian Jürgen Moltmann argues that Revelation is simply a book of liberation.

Conclusion

There will always be detractors who claim that humanity is and always will be so different from God that nothing of God’s true nature reflects in humanity, and that redemption comes only within the eschaton. What a gift to the ruling class, dare I say, a theology promoted by the ruling class. They argue that humanity, its culture, or Creation undergo no true progressive transformation from one degree to another. For them, 2 Corinthians 3:18 must be a gloss, a scriptural “Opps!” But I struggle to find this in the text or in history. We have a long redemptive road behind us and ahead of us; humanity and its social systems will continue to remain in relative darkness. Who knows, most of Creation may indeed fall under the complete control of an economic technocracy bent on controlling the entire world, bringing history to a cataclysmic Armageddon birth into the eschaton, the new earth. Until then, the Scriptures are quite clear that a risen Christ is actively doing all he can to systemically draw, not force, Creation into synchrony with himself and God (Heb 8:10–13; 10:11–18). We can only hope that most of humanity will venture into that future when God finally becomes “all in all.”

Whether or not we agree with this understanding of the world and God is a moot point. Regardless of whether the theory is true, its logic is coherent, reasonable, and scriptural, and it resolves many anomalies in the Scriptures that antiquated, less robust theologies cannot. Therefore, the problem of evil is not a hook on which the atheist can hang his or her hat.

Appendix 5An Allegorical Understanding of the Patriarchs
and the Promise

[The following brief appendix adds nothing beyond what the book already presents, yet offers a concise allegorical understanding of the Hebrew Patriarchs and God’s preeminence given to Jacob in the Old Covenant and to Peter in the New Covenant. Its meaning—stated here in its infancy—will no doubt expand in the future. I promise.]

Abraham:
Promise Given

The promise is understood to refer to his physical progeny. From his loins he will father God’s chosen people, meaning his specific physical descendants.

Isaac:
Death of Promise

We must be willing to let our understanding of the promise die, allowing the original promise to transform—expand in meaning. In other words, the original promise undergoes a paradigm shift, requiring a completely new but analogical meaning, but this can only occur if we are willing to die to our former understanding.

Jacob:
Promise Transforms

The original promise remains, and always will, as best it can be understood within each social context and stage of development. Willingness to die to our original understanding of the promise allows it to undergo paradigm shifts as we develop over time, enabling a completely new understanding of the promise. Each degree of growth offers a new understanding that is analogically equivalent to the original. As we grow in knowledge and new heuristics emerge, the original promise will continue to transform and expand with new and greater meaning—from one degree of glory to another.

In the patriarchal narrative, Abraham understands the promise as referring to his physical descendants, a primitive rendering. Yet his willingness to sacrifice his understanding of the promise, against all reason, for an understanding he does not yet fully grasp reveals his underlying trust in God. He and Isaac are willing to let the original understanding die, symbolizing Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Isaac also shows no resistance to the threat of death and thus becomes a symbol of such trust and of the willingness to let our existing understanding die to make room for an expansion of meaning. Jacob then obviates the original understanding that prioritizes the promise's physical aspects. In total faith, he seeks the promise (blessing) for himself, thereby inaugurating a new understanding of the promise as a lineage of all those with faith rather than a physical lineage subject to physical factors (birth order). In this respect, Jacob fathers a new family based on individuated personal faith rather than on inclusion in a collective of physical descendants. This is probably why he remains on the outskirts of the land and never completely integrates back into the family or physically cohabitates with his father or his brother’s family.

In this respect, Christianity begins with the Old Testament’s preeminence of Jacob and then historically hyper-jumps to Jesus, who, in his time, formally institutes this new fullness of the promise. After all, it is probably Jesus with whom he wrestled. Through the Spirit, this fullness then extends transtemporally into the past and future, retrospectively transfiguring all original undeveloped understandings and experiences of the promise in those who have faith. In other words, faith was there all along, embedded subconsciously in their experience. Therefore, even though the primitive understanding of early cultures could not articulate or understand the fullness of the promise because of their limited capacities for understanding, those with faith implicitly experienced (spiritually) the fullness of the promise from “afar off” and “embraced them” (Heb 11:13) within the primitive understanding (i.e., through a glass darkly).

[However, “. . . it is finished,” and yet, with every felicitous iteration or reading, its meaning will continue to expand—from one degree to another. I did promise.]