Epilogue

How Does the Church Move Forward?

You may indeed believe that Jesus Christ is the unique word of God and that our explicit belief and confession of him and his works alone are essential for salvation. Jesus did not. According to him, the complementarity of the Spirit’s distinct presence and work must be active in our experience of faith and confession, for speaking against the Son of Man will be forgiven (Matt 12:31–32). In fact, this passage and others suggest that only our response to God’s Spirit is necessary for redemptive faith (Matt 12:32; Matt 25:31–46, 7:21–23). As we have seen in this reading, Christ is not removed from the act of redemption; rather, our need to explicitly know that Christ is the living author of that redemption is what is removed. Ultimately, this means that without our spirit experiencing God’s Spirit, we fail to know God as God—experiencing something of his nature. This is an implicit, holistic knowing.

Therefore, closing our hearts to fully knowing him or others will not be forgiven. He spoke of the Spirit throughout his ministry; the disciples and the early church went on to experience the Spirit of the Father (Matt 10:20). Redemption begins with the Spirit, who alone communicates the full Presence of Christ, of anyone, or of any truth. Closing our hearts, or portions of our hearts and minds, to the transforming fullness of others and of God will not be forgiven. Such openness, however, requires openness to the dark side of ourselves and life, which often leads to suffering and shame (our cross). Only with fully open hearts, forsaking everything, can we give ourselves to experiencing the transcendence of God, and we know “Truly, this is the Son of God.” Therefore, for Jesus, the Trinity takes preeminence over Christology.

For the church to continually transform, it must remain open to our ongoing sanctification in the world. “Greater works than these [you] will do, because I go to My Father” (John 14:12). “If I do not go away, the [Holy Spirit] will not come. . . . And when He comes, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness. . . . I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth” (John 16:7–13, emphasis added). Christ is “transforming our lowly body that we may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself” (Phil 3:21). “All the earth [shall be] filled with the glory of the Lord” (Num 14:21). An undeniable process of redemption is unfolding within our midst, and therefore the church’s preeminent work is to identify this glory and facilitate its emergence in every way possible.

For Paul, transformation is the engine of Christ’s redemptive process. It occurs through beholding (2 Cor 3:18) and exposing (Eph 5:13), allowing the light to shine on our darkness. Hollywood has learned to facilitate this far better than the church. Unknowingly, we walk out of theaters every day, slowly changing in significant ways. These narratives give us space to see our personal lives indirectly, without fear of immediate judgment. From these vantage points, we are free to behold the truth in our relationships as our imaginations slowly draw us deeper into a “feast” of increasing fullness of life. Along with the good, these forces in the world also intentionally and subversively twist this emerging fullness toward destructive ends. The church must expose this as well.

The first priority is to cultivate a culture of beholding the glory of God in whatever form it takes in the world, both inside and outside the church. Rather than pushing the community forward by abstracting external moral codes, the church must lead the way into ever-increasing fullness of life because of its ongoing transformation into Christlikeness. As the church matures, it should be able to address the world with a new and expanding kind of attention. Secondly, this process often begins by exposing unseen, often socially acceptable destructive behavior within our interactions, usually subtle aspects that lie unnoticed within our social choreographies. When our churches begin to indirectly 1) expose the glory of the Lord that is emerging within us and the world, and 2) expose the subtle darkness within our interactions and reveal the alternative abundance of life that such behaviors short-circuit, transformation will continue.

Self-discipline is not the Gospel's primary call. Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit, not a product of isolated will. Disciplined behavior is only a provisional measure to maintain social order so our transformation can continue. Only when the church acknowledges its own brokenness will it become a safe place for those who long for healing and greater fullness of life. Those who refuse to recognize their brokenness may take leave, continuing to focus on outward behavior rather than the emerging goal of genuine relationships.

Christ and the Spirit are calling the church to grace and truth, including the uncomfortable truth of what lies unseen within us and the unseen fullness of life that wants to emerge. Grace merely provides the time and space to eventually acknowledge our hidden and not-so-hidden dysfunctions. Without the willingness to acknowledge these truths, we cripple the Spirit’s redemptive work.

M. Scott Peck boldly suggests, “There is no way that we can live a rich life unless we are willing to suffer repeatedly, experiencing depression and despair, fear and anxiety, grief and sadness, anger and the agony of forgiving, confusion and doubt, criticism and rejection. A life lacking these emotional upheavals will not only be useless to ourselves, it will be useless to others. We cannot heal without being willing to be hurt.”¹

The church will continue to stagnate until it opens to these ever-expanding relational choreographies and speaks to the heart's primordial cries for love that lie beneath all our twisted desires. Christ warns us that it will not be tranquil.

As our understanding of how we relate continues to grow (e.g., in the redemptive aspects of psychology and sociology), we will gain a fuller understanding of love. How is it that the prophets of culture do this far more powerfully than the church? This is because the church is largely clueless about the underlying drives within the passion of the Prodigal. We are being drawn into the future by a God who is ahead of us, pulling us forward rather than pushing us from the past. In this respect, Jesus drew people to his side. The church must be attractive, the bearer of something others want, a community that draws others to it. If it is not, to that extent, Christ is not in it.

As human beings, we live far beyond the cognitive. We are individuals and extensions of our relationships. We are movements, emotions, infinite mysteries, and bundles of cognitive dissonance, most of which elude the nakedness of Modern reason and intellect alone. Until our communication incorporates, and even becomes, literary art and story, as Christ modeled, it will speak only to the shallowness of the intellect, while our hearts and spirits die a thousand deaths of loneliness. We are entering the adolescence of human history—a time when law and moralizing constraints must, when possible, give way to new levels of vulnerability, trust, and empathy.

Concluding Insights on a Developmental Theology

It is shocking how little the academy attends to Paul’s (and the writer of Hebrews’) insistence that the Spirit continually transforms us and the world. The question before the church remains: what in humanity is being transformed? Broadly speaking, the Spirit is transforming all of us and our relationships into the image of Jesus Christ and his love. Therefore, our theology must be developmental, increasingly articulating how this transformation is unfolding. If we follow Bonhoeffer, even our theology should become clearer. We would expect this growing clarity to shed new light on age-old problems, such as theodicy (the problem of evil), divine providence and human freedom, and to present an adequate Christian pluralistic hypothesis for a rapidly evolving pluralistic world. Below are a few ways Christian theology might expand based on this reading of the Scriptures.

Preeminence of Trinity over Christology

Excluding pivotal themes about the preeminent role of God’s Spirit in the salvific knowing event of Christ and others in the Scriptures, such as Matthew 12:31–32 and 16:13–20, hinders the full expression and development of Christian theology and faith practice. The church needs to better identify the nature and contribution of each to the knowing event, specifically the multifarious roles of the Spirit. If Christ subordinates the human response toward himself to that of the Holy Spirit, then the entire understanding of our faith hinges on our understanding of spirit, divine and human, and how they interact.

Spirit as Relationship and the Wholeness of Personhood

If we consider Colin Gunton’s conviction that human persons and relations are perichoretic in nature, in which humanity analogically and increasingly reflects the internal dynamics of the Trinity (love), we can begin to understand human persons in ways that reveal new insights into human social interactions and the divine-human relationship. If God is one, acting as three persons, we might consider the Holy Spirit as God's love mediating the relationship between Jesus Christ, the Incarnate God (temporal), and the Father (the Eternal person of God). In our faith, the Spirit becomes the relationship between the temporal Jesus and the Eternal Father, the distinctive third term of the relationship itself that, together with Christ, spans the qualitative abyss between God and humanity. Humans and their interactions, to some degree, reflect this same tripartite nature. As Kierkegaard argues, human personhood is a relationship unto itself, creating the self, and when the self fully relates to another or unto itself, the self holistically constitutes itself as spirit (a whole greater than the sum of the parts). Rather than thinking of the human soul and spirit as an embodied soul/spirit, we might consider that the spirit envelops the body, or better yet, contains the body, becoming the supervening organizing principle of the body and soul. When we venture the entirety of our soul and body (actions) into our relations, our relations become transformative (perichoretic). This understanding of spirit, though not new, offers a profound and far more coherent understanding of humanity, the divine, and how we relate. Kierkegaard argues that we are spirit when we experience passion.

Expanding Our Understanding
of the Redemptive Process

The redemptive process renews our understanding and holistically redeems our spirit, including the body, desires, relationships, emotions, unconscious motivations, and our enculturation (lived paradigms), creating new states of consciousness and relationality that increasingly foster openness to the Other while intensifying our individuality. Merely acknowledging or confessing belief in Christ as the primary locus of Christian redemption is deeply shortsighted and ultimately unscriptural. According to Christ, our openness to the Spirit is primary to knowing and genuinely believing in him. Acknowledging or professing faith in Christ must now be understood in a much more holistic and embedded way, which will help the church foster a more genuine faith in Christ.

Human Condition for Redemption:
Holistic Openness—the Cross

Vulnerability is our openness to the reciprocating openness of the Other and ourselves (our willingness to be whole, a non-fragmented person). This does not mean eliminating privacy but allowing the genuine relations of the Other to affect our entire selves. Only through complete openness to the Other's genuine openness do we allow transformation from one degree to another within the redemption process. The entire Bible tells us that the spirit is the whole of the person, not some invisible subset or aspect within us. When Jeremiah says we will find God when we seek him with our whole heart, when Jesus places preeminent importance on our complete openness to God’s Spirit over our ‘knowledge’ of himself, when Paul tells us that spirit “searches all things” and “he who is spiritual judges all things,” and when John tells us the Spirit “will guide us into all truth,” and because of this anointing “you know all things” (emphases added), they are all acknowledging the wholeness of personhood as spirit. It is the highest (most holistic) state of our organizing principal/principle enveloping the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious—thus relating to the Other as a whole. These passages and more insist that how we believe and act is more important than what we believe and do. In a sense, how we believe becomes an ontological contingency in what we believe, drawing us further into that which is most real (eschatological). Generally, biblical writers parse the how and what of our beliefs only when exposing disingenuous beliefs and relations. When Jesus and the apostles tell the general populous to “believe in Jesus,” they imply a belief (the what) with the whole heart (the how); only in special situations of responding to disingenuous belief do they occasionally point to these more complex contingencies within the anatomy of convictions and focus on the how of belief (e.g., Matt 12:22–32; 7:21–23; 25:31–46; Act 5:1–11).

Speech act theorists would argue that how and what we believe, including our bodies and our contextual specifics, indivisibly constitute the totality of the belief (speech) act. Ultimately, wholeness is a composite that produces our belief or truth, but to the degree we compromise our wholeness, we denigrate the veridical quality of our belief. We cannot separate the incarnated response (belief) from its living encounter. In this respect, each reoccurrence of a belief, as well as the activity of theology, must undergo deconstruction and genuinely re-incarnate within every new occurrence. Therefore, each new interlocutor uniquely co-conditions the conversation with their presence alone, which is far more interactive than we realize; this reflects the way of the Spirit and Christ within their Eternal relations (perichoresis). Before we speak a word, we enter the presence of the Other within an emerging, mediating action of swirling possibilities and a holistic exchange of massive amounts of unconscious information that create the ground of the relationship itself (Col 1:16–17). This is an eternal moment of pre-intelligibility, during which Christ creatively adjudicates all our desires, longings, and will—potentially reconstituting them in synchrony with the Other before and within the creative act of dialogical encounter (a Creation). If we enter with our whole hearts, the Spirit draws us into this co-conditioning interaction with God before the next moment is created. Neither the Spirit nor Christ coerces our openness, but once we enter that precognitive moment of the analogia spiritus, grace holistically presents a host of response possibilities from which we act. To the degree we are open to the Other, we are also open to constituting and acting in synchrony with God’s will in co-conditioning concert with our will and that of all others willing to pick up their cross. Our response, of which there may be many, is our own in concert with all relevant participants, including Christ. The inevitable response may parallel the law, extend beyond its reach into the infinite possibilities of love, and in some situations, obviate the law. If we venture all, says Kierkegaard, we become spirit and enter into the “Fullness of Time,” becoming an individual-in-relation—a whole spirit set in juxtaposition to the universe (the eternal).

And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the Eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name; let us call it the Fullness of Time.²

To the extent we hold fast to our vows of closure, we fall back into learned, patterned responses and systems alone—what Paul calls authorities, rules, and powers (1 Cor 15:24). Alternatively, we have all experienced moments of deep unity and intimacy when we and the entire interaction allow the operating “powers and principalities” within our midst to synchronously transform in unitary (perichoretic) movement with the Spirit of God (1 Cor 15:20–28).

We enter each moment with a relational disposition that both shapes and is shaped by the Other's disposition. Though our relational disposition can vary from interaction to interaction, throughout a lifetime we generally bear a patterned degree of openness that textures the quality of our relationships, faith, and beliefs. Willingness to seek an increasingly open disposition before the Other is our choice and condition for redemption. Only to the degree that we believe (consciously or subconsciously) that a benevolent being or force of grace exists at the heart of Creation will we open to that Power that creates and mediates all relationships. We will release ourselves into the necessary dark night, cross, or void for genuine relationship and transformation only if our spirit first senses and holistically responds to the grace within that transtemporal moment. The moment of faith is a precognitive interaction (affected by the eternal) just before, beneath, and surrounding our gestalt or action into time. This is not unlike the necessity of breath (wind/spirit) upon which words take shape.

When we are fully open to ourselves, others, and the world, our actions align with our faith, hope, and love, and we differentiate as spirit in juxtaposition to the world (Other). This is the faith, love, and hope through which biblical heroes of faith move autonomously with God as individuals, in contrast to the crowd, culture, or the world. It is also the posture and action before every novel invention and scientific discovery. If our openness to the Other is complete, we will act in synchrony with the Spirit, even if it means standing against the non-synchronized world. We must be willing to risk loneliness and suffering for the possibility of deeper intimacy and greater fullness of life. “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matt 8:20). It is the relational posture of Jacob and the prodigal son before the world and even God.

As with the champions of faith, there is always spiritual evidence of our faith's integrity. However, in the institutional church’s demand for cognitive certainty, it is evidence of which the church may have little interest. In this respect, our faith communities must learn to identify (discern) genuine faith as best they can, wherever they might encounter it, and facilitate its growth accordingly. Looking for and encouraging Kierkegaard’s notion of passion may seem risky to most, but this is the true call of the Gospel. It is a call to freedom from prescriptive responses and deterministic systems of enslavement that we adopt for the illusion of safety and power (Gen 3; Matt 4:1–11). Only in vulnerability are we free to truly experience another person’s infinite, unique depth rather than an overdetermined construct or emotive stereotype. Just as America is an obese nation dying of malnutrition, we are likewise an electronically over-socialized nation dying of loneliness.

How a person relates—the humility of knowledge, openness to fully encountering others, a willingness to embrace change, and a willingness to risk our existing relationships to deepen them—has everything to do with the emergence of genuine faith. These factors are vital to facilitating redemption and to increasing the fullness of life within the church.

The Preeminence of Faith
and Love Over Reason, Knowledge, and Morality

According to Kierkegaard (Johannes Climacus), humans are composed of time and the eternal in “juxtaposition.” What reflects the eternal within humanity produces faith, discovery, novelty, vitality, and love. Our temporal dimensions condition reason and the relative—the descriptive elements of cognition. However, time and the eternal are active and always in tension, with the human spirit taking slight priority over our cognitive knowledge (word). Therefore, our holistic response takes co-conditioning precedence over the relative aspects of reason and cognition in conditioning self. Reason is an aid in correcting misguided or incomplete understandings of faith or love, but such reasoning itself depends upon the conditioning of the eternal. Faith is the aspect of our thoughts and actions that genuinely connects with what is future and beyond consciousness (Heb 11:1). For Kierkegaard, faith can be consciously known and understood (rationally) only in hindsight. Faith, therefore, is a passionately held conviction (experiencing) based on more than, but including, what we can currently understand, articulate, or manifest, and it is potentially active in all interactions.

This study of the Scriptures exposes the modern perversion of faith. In genuine faith, God enables us to experience what is future and unseen (Heb 11:1), bending time and location. This is not merely an internal conviction but an eternal experience—widening the aperture of our temporal perception. A vast difference exists between knowledge known in faith and knowledge that is closed and isolated (e.g., knowledge bound within an ideology). As we have seen, the Bible is quite clear about this matter. Because Reformed theology was born amid the Enlightenment, its faith and most of its translations of the Scriptures regarding faith diminish the role of the human spirit and the play of the eternal as significant factors in human consciousness, relationships, and ultimately, the Christian concept of faith. A strong case can be made that some of these Enlightenment effects on the church were maliciously intentional from outside the church. Nevertheless, without the action of the Trinity within our midst, we cannot experience or know Christ or God in the complete Hebraic sense. This is not the typical understanding of faith within the church today, but a more comprehensive reading of the Scriptures suggests that only this notion of faith is genuine.

Facilitating Transformations
Over Growth of Knowledge

Besides divine conditioning, all genuine growth and expansion of our faith—transformation—must also be self-generative; in other words, it must emerge from the internal struggle of the individual or community within its own subjective experience and time. If change does not happen in this manner, the faith will not be integral to the person (an internal authority). Therefore, a one-size-fits-all approach to facilitating growth is not possible. Each person, community, and situation is different, and we must take care to determine how best to help them advance in their redemptive process, even if the path of advancement is not readily familiar to the facilitator. As shown earlier, Jesus and Paul were more concerned with facilitating transformation than with the stages of growth through which each is transforming, even though each stage is appropriate and true within its timely context.

Perichoretic Communication:
Expanding How We Communicate

1)Pausing Before Response

Though, as Kierkegaard contends, the moment is filled with the eternal, it is often helpful to pause before responding and allow the full unconscious aspects and weight of the eternal to shape each interaction. This brief pause, still short of reflection, helps us avoid falling into patterned responses that diminish the interaction's potential meaningfulness. Taking a moment to enter the fullness and mystery of the encounter holistically allows for the greatest possibility of a free, creative, unique, and holistically generative response within the interaction, the other, and ourselves. Such pauses are the birthplace of genuine love.

2)Prioritizing Holistic Forms of Communication
Over Distribution of Information

Teaching that yields coherent and reasonable conclusions about our faith is essential. However, indirect forms of teaching and communication are far more powerful and should take priority in matters of faith. Jesus rarely offers straightforward instruction or explanation; instead, he employs stories, parables, imagery, irony, and more (hyperbole, allusion, idiom, metaphor, metonymy, paradox, parallelism, personification, simile, symbolism, synecdoche, wordplay, embarrassment, shame, affirmation, examples, action, comparisons, etc.) to spark faith within people. Holistic communication better fosters faith, love, and hope when we use indirect methods. Our knowledge and understanding will follow, secondarily. Jesus and Paul confirm that meaning in our words and actions is hollow and worthless to the degree that we fail to actively experience faith or love within them.

Similarly, for Kierkegaard, truth is subjective; it must emerge synchronously from within the self and the relationship in each unique situation. Truth envelops us and uniquely reveals itself to us personally (Pentecost)—subjectively—even that which is rational and historical. He argues that only indirect communication can convey the things of God: “there is no lack of information in a Christian land; something else is lacking, and this is a something which the one man cannot directly communicate to the other.”³

Because God, en totem, lies outside any human analogy, God must ultimately become active in the knowing event within each of us. It is something no person (facilitator) can directly give or mediate to another; it must happen between God and the individual. The art of facilitating indirect or holistic communication is knowing how to get out of the way and let each participant work through their final meaning-making process.

It requires a discipline of the spirit to honor every human being, so as not to venture directly to meddle with his God-relationship. . . . Wherever the subjective is of importance in knowledge, and where appropriation thus constitutes the crux of the matter, the process of communication is a work of art, and doubly reflected. Its very first form is precisely the subtle principle that the personalities must be held devoutly apart from one another, and not permitted to fuse or coagulate into objectivity. It is at this point that objectivity and subjectivity part from one another.⁴

The facilitator (or church) must figuratively stand to the side, out of the way, disappearing like the bodily presence of Christ on the Road to Emmaus at the moment of faith, thus allowing faith to integrate into each person's unique meaning frame through the analogia spiritus between spirit-to-Spirit, enabling faith to become their own (within an intersubjective interaction).

We have already reviewed the growing number of communication media in this reading that speak holistically and indirectly, for example, story, film, song, poetry, and all art. Didactic sermons reciting two-thousand-year-old contextualized Scriptures and singing four-hundred-year-old songs will communicate the Gospel indirectly and holistically to very few people in contemporary culture.

A Perichoretic Shift in Hermeneutics

Poststructural theorists Mark C. Taylor, Thomas Altizer, John Caputo, and Carl Raschke have all effectively announced the death of ‘God’ and the end of ‘theology’ within the Modern hermeneutical context. Resurrection and complete paradigmatic transformation require a preceding death. In contrast, we have considered the groundwork for a new hermeneutical process that employs the model of Pentecost.⁵ In his seminal work, The Alchemy of the Word: Language and the End of Theology, Raschke calls for a new theology and hermeneutic that embody the following qualities.⁶

1)Raschke argues that a postmodern theology should abandon the Modern program of constructing a consummate, universal theology. We need more responsible, indigenous theologies unique to each culture and community. As with Pentecost, each theological rendering reflects the same Word and Christ’s personal emergence, whether explicitly known or not, within each community and at each stage of development. Theology, as with our transformation into his image, must continually expand as our capacities and heuristics evolve and transform from one degree to another (Bonhoeffer). Alternatively, we need to develop a more comprehensive (ultimately universal) theology that is broader and more inclusive, sensitive to time and change (stages of transformation), and that supports infinite indigenous theologies, as Paul models in Romans 14. In this respect, this study is intensely postmodern but seeks to correct the abusive anthropological and geopolitical agendas of Poststructuralism, which inappropriately change or eliminate words like spirit, truth, and eternity rather than appropriately transform them to maintain historical continuity.

2)I agree that a new theology must take into account the death of “‘God,’” the “sign,” and “theology,” for “all signs are idols . . . stripped of the power of presence, which can be achieved only in the face-to-face encounter, in the mysterium of the Between.”

This regeneration in its totality . . . simply provokes the need to reinterpret the entire nexus of inferences regarding the existing data and to repattern the conventional scheme. . . . It necessitates a ‘paradigm shift’ in Thomas Kuhn’s celebrated words.⁷

However, when Raschke says we must “remember that revelation is not the disclosure of something, but a process through which mean-ing emerges,” he and all poststructuralism, surprisingly alongside Barth (and Reform thought), stop reading at Abraham, fixating on the Akedah. They fail to read on to the preeminent exemplar of faith, Jacob, from whom God will bring forth his people. Raschke fails to acknowledge the possibility of a postmodern theology that juxtaposes time and eternity through the activity of a trinitarian metaphysics (and Orthodox anthropology) that analogically bridges difference and sign by mediating metaphor and shared meaning. They fail to fully escape the prescribed strictures of the Modern paradigm (agenda). Still captured within its structural strictures and mandates, they eliminate or diminish beyond historical recognition the meaning of spirit, truth, eternity, and faith, rather than transform and expand them with a new understanding that analogically parallels their use in the Scriptures and Christian tradition.

For example, Raschke begins with Martin Buber, “It is from one man to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed (81).” This is similar to, but different from, Kierkegaard’s dictum that theological knowledge “is something which the one man cannot directly communicate to the other.” Knowing that the hermeneutical issue resolves “in the mysterium of the Between,” Raschke fails to fully grasp Kierkegaard’s metaphysics of the Middle, the third term of the emerging relationship—the analogia spiritus that ontologically grounds words (“the logos of concrete relations”) within a meaning analogically commensurate for both the ancient author and the current reader within a co-conditioning immanent/transcendent dynamic. Here, the author intuitively (holistically) and ontologically experiences that which is “afar off” (Heb 11:13) beyond his contextual ability to fully articulate—holistically experiencing what might be more fully articulated in the re-paradigmed reading of a more developed future context. In this respect, there are no ultimately incommensurate language games, only differences in which aspects of knowing are variably implicit or explicit per each unique context. Nonetheless, the fullness of meaning is holistically available to all participants who are fully open to each other. The diachronic continuity of meaning and usage of concepts like spirit, truth, eternity, and faith is attained in the creative moment and co-conditioning involvement of all moments transtemporally relating through the perichoretic trinitarian act of creating. For them, the Trinity and Pentecost remain discarded or oppressed tropes of the past. Again, when a person experiences that shock of recognition and immediately expresses, “I knew that, I just didn’t have the words to express it,” where did that former knowing come from? They were experiencing it holistically from “afar off” as faith—an ontological experience—within “the fullness of time,” which Raschke argues is always potentially “now”? Yet he and all poststructural thinking discount the power of this pneumatological (ontological) commensurability within the diachronic knowing experience that retroactively co-conditions the original utterance, bringing it into commensurability with all in-spired future readings, infinitely so. Raschke just didn’t go “afar off” enough.

Therefore, in one sense, Raschke is right. The death of “God,” the “sign,” and “theology” must be acknowledged and then reexperienced moment by moment. But if, as quantum theorists contend, information is now understood to be retro-causal, we need to consider that the originally inspired (spirited) author can holistically experience meaning from “the Fullness of time,” potentially conditioned by the meaning-in-tension of all others, even future others. For those who pick up their cross and die with their God, the “alchemy of the word” works both ways in a diachronic co-conditioning interaction. This is a game-changer in hermeneutic theory. Because poststructuralists refuse to acknowledge the Spirit's true power and the temporal ubiquity of its holistic telling (eternal knowing), their ladder between earth and heaven goes only one way: down, the way of Abraham’s Akedah (often an agenda, to be sure). The way of Jacob, the way of Christ, remains unknown to them, for they refuse to acknowledge the conditioning power of the interactive eternal singularity (Heb 11:6–8).

Nevertheless, the development and expansion of language throughout history demand constant changes in how we read the text. Each age has its own expanding reading and will draw more (or less) from the text, creating new and relevant analogically commensurable meanings and intimacies. Though articulated a little differently in each context, the meaning for each participant and each stage of development may be perfect within its unique context, yet never exactly equal in its diachronic articulation, and yet hopefully acquiring ever greater articulation and fullness of life with each new generation (2 Cor 3:18).

3)This distinctly Christian perichoretic theology and hermeneutics, far from the monistic tendency of Hebraic, pantheistic, and Poststructural thought and the dualisms of Hellenistic and Modern ontologies, should expand our understanding of what is happening in the “between” of Buber’s “I-Thou relationship.” This trinitarian understanding and theological anthropology, in which the future is just as determinately real in its becoming as the present, begin to reveal how analogia spiritus facilitates the sacred Incarnational event of meaning-making within language and, therefore, like Pentecost, how the same meaning uniquely yet analogically emerges within each person, interaction, and context.

The poststructuralists’ mistake seems to be their failure to fully escape their Modern strictures (interestingly, a structural imposition)—their elimination of the full ontic play and reality of spirit within human nature and development. When Raschke quotes Gadamer saying, “‘every word, in its momentariness, carries with it the unsaid,’” and then speaks of every word’s “pregnancy” (potential) and that “the ‘meaning’ of a word cannot be circumscribed in time and space” (Raschke, Alchemy, 52–53), he completely misses or dismisses the potential play of human spirit in Climacus and Gadamer. Climacus (Kierkegaard) argues “that if the individual does not existentially and in existence lay hold of the truth, he will never lay hold of it,” but Gadamer’s complete statement, that Raschke cuts off, goes on to say that the text is much more than pregnant with potential, “it is . . . the living virtuality of speech, that brings a totality of meaning into play, without being able to express it totally . . . an infinity of meaning to be elaborated and interpreted” (Marion’s “saturation”). In other words, “a totality of meaning” is somehow “in play,” conditioning the words within each unique interaction despite those words’ inability “to express [fully articulate] it totally.” Therefore, the human spirit can potentially holistically sense the shared meaning, ad extra, beyond and within each unique cognitive iteration (Pentecost). Gadamer concludes: “In this thinking there is no question of a self-conscious spirit without world then having to find its way to worldly being; both belong originally to one another. The relationship is primary” (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 416, emphasis added). Note the perichoretic nature of his statement “both belong originally to one another.” Therefore, the presence and meaning of analogia spiritus, the reflectively mediating third term of the relationship itself, that Raschke and the poststructuralist relegate to reserve and pregnancy, Kierkegaard and Gadamer birth in spacetime—alive in the existential and co-conditioning moment of the analogia spiritus within our communicative acts, a meaning that is unique within and for that moment alone, yet analogically synchronous through the eternal dance with every other iteration of this truth within its corresponding context.

A More Pervasive Incarnation and Pentecost

With God becoming human (the Incarnation of Christ) and Pentecost (the advent of the Holy Spirit), the Eternal God (the Father) changes forever. From that moment, God can communicate with humanity in a genuine, filial manner throughout history, in any direction. With the Incarnation and death of Christ, God becomes a personal God for each person or community in their respective time. On the day the Spirit of God pours out upon all Creation with differentiated fullness (Pentecost), temporal humanity changes forever—full autonomous personhood emerges within humanity. From that point on, from the beginning of history to the end, humanity acquires the potential to genuinely communicate with an Eternal God in a filial manner. Like the resurrected Christ, linear time does not hold the Spirit of God captive. As we study the history of God’s communication with humanity, we find God incarnating Godself in ways that are appropriately meaningful to each specific person, interaction, and context—analogically comparable, not universally identical. In this respect, the risen Jesus Christ comes to everyone within their personal linguistic, socio-cultural context and stage of development (Acts 2; Rm 14). The postmodern call to a radical Christology further offers a more creative and all-encompassing understanding of Christ-with-us that releases the church from its original insistence on a universal soteriological criterion based on cognitive beliefs or sacrament. Such beliefs, sacraments, and presence are indeed potentially veridical, but their cognitive and traditional symbolic identification will have only an analogical relation to each context of redemption. This cautions our judgment of what outward manifestations constitute salvation and redirects our attention toward other, more universal aspects of human response that initiate the redemptive process (Matt 25:31–46). Therefore, we know God’s Incarnation in a radically personal and intracommunitive way. Because God respects and meets us as individuals within our unique meaning frame, each person and community will experience and understand the same truth and encounter the same Presence according to their respective context and stage of development.

A Perichoretic Christian Pluralistic Hypothesis

With greater communication, social migration, and globalization, the world is rapidly becoming one community. One of the most significant challenges for Christianity today is developing an acceptable and effective pluralistic hypothesis from within the Christian faith. In other words, if God is redeeming the world and not just the church, how does the redemptive process take place (at least provisionally) in different cultures and religious faiths from a Christian perspective, if we believe it does? If Christianity cannot offer an understanding of how the redemptive activity of Christ operates within the world and within various cultures and belief systems (relational or religious), then Christianity will continue to lose acceptance as a viable belief system. Such an understanding of Christ’s and the Spirit’s cosmic activity in no way diminishes the Christian belief in the uniqueness of Christ as God’s Incarnation through which God experiences and redeems the world. In other words, how is it that Christ will say to many who did not consciously know him that they did, in effect, know him in “the least of these” (Matt 25:38–40)? Christianity must become an inclusive exclusivist expression of faith—one that maintains the uniqueness of Christ while coming to an understanding of how a trinitarian God is working within secular society and other religious cultures, transcending each community’s specific cognitive beliefs.

Lesslie Newbigin, a longtime Christian missionary to India, concluded that the redemptive process differs from election. The former may be active within the heart of any human being; the elect are those who have come to consciously know Jesus Christ as the source of that redemptive process. Similar to Newbigin, Christ and Paul allude to a Christian pluralistic hypothesis. If Christ places the preeminent emphasis on the how of faith and a person’s spirit and openness to the Spirit of God (no flesh and blood) rather than on the cognitive knowledge and acceptance of Christ himself (flesh and blood), then we have the raw materials for an acceptable pluralistic hypothesis. As we have extensively considered, beyond the name of Christ, if we 1) are genuinely open to the transforming effect of the Other (love) and the redemptive work of God, knowingly or unknowingly, and 2) fully engage the Other, acting upon that emergence of faith within us, then we bear our cross, engage our suffering and the suffering of others, and thereby knowingly or unknowingly encounter Christ and “the least of these” (Matt 12:31–32). This understanding of the atonement is the fullness of the provisional legal atonement, which was only a shadow pointing to its entire redemptive relational expression.

With each transformation, greater meaning will inform our knowledge of Christ within a flourishing meaning frame. If countless contextual factors condition our beliefs and experiences, then the church, in all humility, should carefully consider how Christ is working within each unique person and culture (e.g., Endo’s novel Silence). In this respect, we must expand our understanding of the great commission. As the world becomes more complex and religious pluralism becomes an increasingly pressing issue within our local communities, our former narrow and privileged understanding of redemption needs to expand, as the Scriptures suggest. We must further clarify the distinction between Christ’s redemptive activity in and out of the church to better identify genuine unconscious encounters with Christ outside the church and less-than-genuine faith within the church.

A Perichoretic Understanding of
Divine Providence and Human Freedom

If God is making human beings in God’s image and God is, in some way, trinitarian, then humanity may relationally reflect God’s tripartite structure (Gunton). If so, an aspect of human beings (body and soul) may, in relation to the risen Christ, constitute in time (Col 1), and, as Kierkegaard suggests, another aspect (spirit) may holistically constitute precognitively in analogical relation to the eternal through God’s Spirit.⁸ When all our concerns, desires, wishes, longings, and disappointments enter through the precognitive, ‘passive’ moment of awareness—we enter the third term of the relationship and the potential co-conditioning dynamic that occurs just before our reflexive gestalt enters the light of consciousness (a mediation, albeit a wrestling with Christ). To the degree we are willing to allow the relationship to affect (transform) all that we are, unlike the Pharisees or the older brother, who would not allow Christ to affect their social position, cultural privileges, and knowledge (Matt 12:22–32), we are drawn into the Eternal de-liberation in which our will and God’s will emerge (are created) in co-conditioning unison. This happens to the degree that we are willing to pick up the cross and open all that we are to God (Reality). During this moment of analogia spiritus, Christ potentially mediates and synchronizes billions of freedoms before creating each moment in time. Those who refuse synchronization, and those aspects of us withheld from open interaction, refuse synchronization and become empty/demonic. Christ accomplishes this through his unique and undistorted relationship with the Spirit, who transtemporally brings every spirit in every moment of history to him through this Eternal and dynamic singularity that breaks into the interstices of his Time.

We get a sense of this Christomorphic dynamic in the strange trinitarian (perichoretic) language of Jesus in John 5:16–30, when Jesus says, “The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do,” and yet, “the Father judges no one, but has committed all judgment to the Son.” Though Jesus is here speaking of the resurrection of humanity, he implies much more than the disciples could then fully understand. “The hour is coming, and now is” (emphasis added) when you will hear my voice that transforms your deadness into an increasingly eschatological fullness of life. The resurrected Christ lovingly adjudicates all freedoms by what he perceives (“sees”) from the Father in Eternity through the Spirit. Our holistic spirit-to-Spirit interaction brings us into a co-conditioning relationship with Christ and the Spirit as he adjudicates and juxtaposes all potential free acts (human will) while he holistically “sees” them dynamically emerging from the Father. Jacob wrestles holistically within this darkness before the light of consciousness dawns (Gen 32:24–30); Peter perceives Christ's wholeness directly from the Father through his relationship with the Spirit—from no “flesh and blood” (Matt 16:14–19). It happens in our holistic spirit-to-Spirit interaction just before, within, around, beyond, and conditioning our conscious response, in a co-conditioning interaction before Jesus’ providential creating action. Therefore, divine predestination affirms God’s freedom and power alone to create. But because of humanity’s relationship to the Spirit, drawing our concerns into the singularity of this dynamic Eternal, human will can emerge in co-conditioning relation to Christ’s will as he adjudicates billions of concerns within what he and we sense (“sees”) through the analogia spiritus within the Eternal singularity; humanity’s concerns emerge within all human beings just as they do in Christ, as the Spirit draws us into the adjudicating interaction, each conditioning the other as we optimally come into synchronicity with Christ’s adjudicating de-liberation (e.g., Jacob’s wrestling and Peter’s recognition of Christ). In other words, human beings can freely affect Christ's creating hand before his synchronizing creation of each new moment. As earlier stated, this phenomenon of co-conditioning within the eternal allows Jesus to say, “Your faith has saved you.” It is also why Jesus says to Peter when he enters the fullness of faith, “Whatever you bind and loose on earth will be bound and loosed in heaven” (Matt 16:19, emphasis added).

This holistic capacity of the human spirit in relation to God’s Spirit transcends the antiquated Hellenistic polemic of human freedom versus divine providence—in which God (Reformed or predestination theology) or humanity (Radical Reformed or Pelagian theology) must dominate and/or initiate the relationship (transformative matrix of mutuality that maintains individuality). This limiting Greek understanding of relationality, a dualistic paradigm, still vitiates the structuring of Modernity and, yes, Poststructuralism. It presents an awkward and false dichotomy of one or the other, which is becoming intolerable in light of our growing anthropological knowledge, emerging relational dynamics, and the Postmodern critique. Even Kierkegaard, over 150 years ago, said the Reformed theological “concept of ‘predestination’ must be considered as a thoroughgoing abortion.”⁹ In Kierkegaard’s mind, the sixteenth-century reformers made these theological assumptions within a truncated dualistic paradigm of sequential causality (either/or) that lacks the heuristics of his day and even more so today. In a relational trinitarian theology and tripartite ontology, neither the human person nor God acts or decides before the other but emerges together in a co-conditioning eternal moment before each temporal moment, which the Spirit and Christ transparently mediate (Col 1:24).

Immanent in all our interactions is the perennial call of the cross to genuine relationship, a call to relax our existing knowledge and desires into the Trinitarian execution of synchronicity with all Others. This is not a classical ‘decision,’ although it can be during those rare times when we fully and synchronously move with Christ’s Time (e.g., Jacob’s wrestling). Decisions are generally understood as reflexive responses. However, our openness or closedness to this transformative matrix between us, or to God, within our interactions, is prereflexive, a precognitive disposition to enter (or not) the cruciform metamorality of Christ and the Spirit of God.

To have “faith,” Kierkegaard argues, “there must be the situation. And this situation must be brought about by an existential step on the part of the individual. . . . The requirement is that you must venture out, out into water 70,000 fathoms deep. This is the situation.”¹⁰ He describes this “existential step” as a “dying to the world,” a “precondition” necessary for receiving this condition. Climacus (Kierkegaard) states that “From the God himself everyone receives the condition who by virtue of the condition becomes the disciple,”¹¹ and the condition is analogia spiritus. We can only reject it as an “offense” to the mind or receive it as the “happy passion” of faith. He points to a relational disposition of closedness or openness toward the possibility of a benevolent God, and, for Kierkegaard, a God who Incarnates into the universe as one of us. To receive faith, he insists, “the only thing and the greatest—something the greatest and the lowliest of men are capable of doing for God—is to give oneself completely,”¹² for without such a giving, we fail to become a spirit in relation to the Holy Spirit, without which Christ cannot synchronize our freedoms, desires, and longings with those of others and himself. In every way, morality is beyond us and can only emerge each moment in a christomorphic movement into Christ’s metamorality. Nevertheless, it is a preconscious decision that resides in our relational disposition, one that neuropsychology increasingly discloses (e.g., McGilchrist, Damasio, et al.).

In a tripartite understanding of anthropology, all relationships are mediated by the third term within the relationship itself. This emerging spirit of the relationship preserves the participants’ distinctness and personal character (Colin Gunton) while creating a mutuality (empathy) that allows them to lovingly affect one another so that each maintains their own will distinct from the Other. As Jesus said throughout his ministry, “Your faith has saved you (Luke 7:50).” Because of the divine choreography of the Christian Trinity—perichoresis—and Christ’s reflection of that image within humanity, human freedom and divine providence can emerge together with the freedom of God. The Christian experience of faith and prophecy depends on it.

Toward a Coherent Theodicy (Problem of Evil)

Currently, there is no fully satisfying, viable theodicy. However, as our knowledge of the world, our relationships, and the redemptive process deepen, we need to revisit the problem of evil. If a loving God created the world, evil must have a purpose, which might become clearer as our knowledge grows. Just because no satisfying theodicy has yet emerged within orthodox theology does not rule out its possibility in the future. Addressing this issue within the church is paramount because it poses a significant intellectual challenge for both the agnostic and the Christian mind.

Nevertheless, new heuristics and categories are emerging that clarify this issue. Appendix 4 below suggests one possible resolution or theological direction toward a viable theory. The basic resolution in the Appendix is not entirely new, but new anthropological dynamics, arising from a better understanding of trinitarian dynamics and the imago Dei, point toward a more satisfying theodicy.

Briefly, if the imago Dei reflects the relationality of the Trinity (God), and if God is creating humanity in that same image (perichoretic), we might consider that God is creating humanity as distinct, autonomous persons with free will, capable of experiencing mutual relations and shared meaning with others, despite their individuality. If this is true, it is not too difficult to imagine that such a self-directed creature would necessarily have to emerge within a radically free world in which its own spirit freely opens to (choosing) each ensuing degree of transformation due to its perichoretic, transparent relationship to the divine Spirit. In other words, it must play a free and vital role in its own development and decisions if it is not to become a robot or a mere extension of God (pantheism). In this respect, God restricts all personal interventions within Creation, acting only in concert with all free human acts of faith within Creation, ‘intervening’ only to maintain the freedom of Creation. This would be necessary to create a being capable of knowing God as God. Different from, but similar to aspects of Process Theology, this is true of every level of existence within Creation, from the cosmological forces (desires) active within stardust itself, through the animal kingdom, and on into the developing co-dominion status of humanity—each freely acting according to its nature and character, with the emergence of greater and greater self-directedness and self-consciousness—order emerging out of, or we might consider with, chaos.

In this way, the radical freedom necessary to create a being capable of autonomous radical freedom and of knowing God as God (i.e., through analogia spiritus) requires the possibility of defaulting from, or choosing other than, God, and therefore evil. If God is creating human beings for co-creative dominion with God as individuals, every step of redemptive history (even evolution) requires radical freedom from beginning to end. We might even consider that the greater the freedom, the greater the allowance of evil, thus expediting the emergence of the imago dei within a being of like nature to the divine. Grace is nothing more than the space and time for humanity to work out its truncated desires and fully release itself for transformation by Christ and the Spirit of God who adjudicate and synchronize all freedoms, who transform us into his likeness, the imago dei, from one degree to another. [See Appendix 4]