Jacob: The Knight of Faith

The absolutely different or wholly Other cannot be translated into any language. To the contrary, this altarity inflects an incurable wound upon language. Always open, this wound lies between the lines it (impossibly) both supports and undercuts. This loss of language can never be re-covered. . . . [This is] the difference that infinitely defers the eschatological movement of reappropriation. Offering no promise of arrival, this Other calls: “Come.”

Mark C. Taylor²

And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to eaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. . . . Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it. . . . This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven! . . . And this stone which I have set as a pillar shall be God’s house.”

Gen 28:11–12, 16–17, 22 (emphasis added)

Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. . . . And He said, “Let me go, for the day breaks.” But he said, “I will not let You go unless You bless me!” So He said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” And He said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.” . . . And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”

Gen 32:24, 26–28 (emphasis added)

”But who do you say I am?” And Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus said to him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.”

Matt 16:15–19 (emphasis added)

INVITED TO THE DANCE: DE-LIBERATION WITHIN THE ETERNAL MOMENT

Faith is like sleep. we don’t do it, will ourselves to sleep; we relax all effort, let go and give ourselves to it. Then, in its time, unannounced, it “comes,” . . . and we fall to rest.

The System began disintegrating the day the Writer reminded us that an “out-law,” Abraham, heard the ineffable in a command that lay beyond all known ethical and rational thinking, something within the voice ostensibly contrary to any re-membrance (re-petition) of the original promise. “Abraham keeps silent, . . . he cannot speak,”³ he “isolates himself as higher than the universal,”⁴ then, unthinkably, he acts. “The singularity of the believer constitutes a remainder that cannot be comprehended by reason and cannot be assimilated by morality.”⁵ Abraham, for Søren Kierkegaard, was the father of faith, in another voice, the ultimate “knight of faith.”

Kierkegaard’s less Christian friends, Johannes de Silentio and Frater Taciturnus, together with Mark C. Taylor, surmise through the deconstruction of the word that word cannot re-member or retrieve its original spokeness (meaning). And so, for Taylor, atheology supplants theology, and the totally other God emerges again, “offering no promise of arrival.” The Other can only call: “come.” So, Abraham, hearing an ineffable, remains silent and acts. He floats over 70,000 fathoms, an infinite qualitative distance (IQD) between God and humanity. The friends “paradoxically” redress the distance in a God-man—a philosophical (rational) rendering under modern metaphysics still dripping with Hellenistic derivatives. Their work portends the death of transcendence.

Karl Barth, spying this infinite distance, employs it (IQD) in denouncing the well-worked immanence of modern liberal theology. Allying Kierkegaard’s friend’s Abraham, he creates what many detractors call a theology of revelational positivism, forwarding again a transcendent impositional God that once again tames the freedom and self-determination of humanity. God speaks and acts from beyond, a gift, a Word in and for us. Settled. Even natural revelation receives a hearty “Nein” from the young Barth—nothing of God reflects within the natural.

But is this totally other God of the “God-man” the whole story of Kierkegaard? Kierkegaard indirectly ornaments everything he edits with signs, modes, and dynamics that suggest the necessary corollary of an incarnational imperative of mutuality (IIM) that is necessary for a filial relationship with God. If such relations are filial, something of God must experience as human, and something of humanity must experience as divine. Because of the risen Christ (not “God-man”) we face a hard reality—we are not God and fall into brokenness of spirit. This is the condition to become fully spirit (differentiated) in relation to the Absolute (Spirit)—thus the possibility of relating “absolutely with the Absolute”⁶—analogia spiritus. Kierkegaard everywhere leaves indirect traces that indeed humanity, all humanity, is somehow a synthesis of time and eternity, the finite and the infinite! In indirection, the Editor always tasks us with completing the meaning. Kierkegaard’s true IQD is not between former metaphysical (and anthropological) renderings of God and humanity, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, an actual historical person and Incarnation, not simply the idea of a God-man, forever transforms this divide. His IQD abhorrence remains with Hegel’s material synthesis of the temporal and Eternal, the finite and the infinite, not between God and humanity. The perichoretic nature of human relations infects everything that Kierkegaard edits and writes. It seems Kierkegaard installs an inseparable corollary to his friend’s IQD, his IIM, indirectly and in plain sight.

As Barth counters with Church Dogmatics, he soon surmises Kierkegaard’s anthropological and pneumatological implications of this Incarnation and Resurrection—Kierkegaard’s “Ingen (nein!)” to Barth. It turns out Kierkegaard’s insistence that an independent human spirit somehow interacts directly with God’s Spirit, absolute relating to Absolute, was a little too aggressive for Barth’s context. It reveals an interaction between divine and human spirit that Barth considered too difficult to parse in his time.⁷ Much more complex, Kierkegaard is a pneumatologist and anthropologist of Christology; Barth, sensing as much, put Kierkegaard back on the shelf. But the focus of Kierkegaard’s friends upon “infinite resignation” leaves the true night of faith buried within the text. The continuing rise of immanence (Hegel and on into poststructuralism, marching lockstep with materialism) and, to some degree, the overbearing priority of unilateral transcendence (Barth) ultimately renders faith (and the text) frozen, still, fragmented, unfinished, anomalous, desperate, and eventually robotic. Did such a critique ever leave the house of reason or escape the seduction of universals? I think not. Refusing to die, it only explores the waste land of this world and leaves us in infinite resignation with an irrevocable loss of attainment in this lifetime.

On the other hand, Barth offers a Word that does indeed come to us, albeit an imposition in unilateral relations (no hope of earthly filial relations). Either way, the former forecloses on transcendence and the other on natural revelation and the transforming of humanity from degree to degree. Either way, reason, empiricism, or the human spirit cannot express or reflect the divine. They are qualitatively different, separated by an infinitely deep canyon between subject and Subject. The light of this world cannot illuminate God or the transcendent.

In one respect, however, they are correct; we cannot find God in the light of this world. And so, the death of reason and transcendence leaves us under the totalitarian rule of immanence, which threatens to destroy whatever trust remains among us—leaving nothing between us but the “will to power.” “The horror of it all.” But Kierkegaard insists that to encounter the Absolute is entrance into darkness—the ultimate horror religiosus.⁸

Man has a natural dread of walking in the dark—what wonder then that he has a dread of the absolute, of which it is true that no night and “no deepest gloom is half so dark” as this gloom and this night, where all relative ends (the common milestones and sign-posts), where all relative considerations (the lanterns which are normally a help to us), where even the tenderest and sincerest feelings of devotion—are quenched . . . for otherwise it is not unconditionally the absolute.⁹

For some, transcendence is too dark; for others, divinely distant. With Abraham, they must remain silent. However, Abraham is not the final preeminent actor! Even Kierkegaard leaves buried the real treasure within the Text, right in front of our eyes, beneath a flashing neon arrow no less, albeit buried in darkness. He leaves buried for our indirect discovery a more profound treasure just beyond the first, a faith more scandalous than the first—the true seat of passion, of filial encounter. Venture a little further, and the transaction screams of much more than listening and doing what you are told. How can we argue that “the absolute different or wholly Other cannot be translated into any language” or even that “this altarity inflicts an incurable wound upon language”¹⁰ when hundreds in Jerusalem that thunderous day witnessed its coming, its translation into all languages—ad extra filling in and cementing the traces, no less within each person’s unique mother tongue, altogether separate! Indeed, Kierkegaard had his hands on the monster. His friends didn’t read far enough into the Text, into the absolute darkness, unwilling to face the true qualitative difference—the void—the birth of oneself becoming spirit. Who would have thought the ticket to transcendence was death, facing the Absolute, allowing oneself to become the sacrifice (Isaac). Isaac must remain preeminently important for one thing, the willingness to die, for letting himself go into the moment (naked without reason). He could have easily resisted his aged father. He could have held tight to a fabricated alterity, denied transcendence, and stumbled about in immanence.

With the death of transcendence came a “flatulent knowledge” that was as insubstantial as their clothing [not “held fast”] falling away upon every movement. They still look for movement, any movement, in all sorts of slits, cracks, and cubbyholes. No one can dance in a rational or poststructural world; I mean, really dance (choreia), everywhere, all around (peri), in Time. For them, the whole of reality—the making of reality—lay still, beyond them.¹¹

Abraham hears the ineffable call to risk what he had for more. In infinite resignation, he heard the Voice beyond, the penultimate modicum of faith. Silentio demands it was the greatest act of faith—Abraham—in the full light of day, doing the unthinkable. And here, Silentio and friends stop reading—the descending ladder of God was enough for them. But Kierkegaard claims that time and eternity, finitude and infinity, can come together within the world (faith), within existential consciousness (the “sudden” between, the spirit that is relationship itself). Leaving the Hellenistic world of subject-subject, he insists that this “beyond in the midst of our life”¹² is alive between us—subject-relationship-subject—a Power within our relationships filling our words with shared meaning, albeit beyond the visible light of day (reason).¹³ And now, for a moment, we must part company with his friends and read a little further.

Abraham hears the ineffable in God’s command; it transforms him, and he does it.God sees the ineffable in Jacob’s passion struggling against God;it transforms God,and God does it, delightfully.

Even Poststructuralism misses the indirection of Kierkegaard, as they remain behind perseverating upon the penultimate action of faith in Abraham. No one knows what to do with Jacob (save the esoteric twisting of the hidden)! Jacob decisively expresses all his desire, longing, choice, freedom, and self-determination through his impassioned struggle with God—in the darkness of analogia spiritus! Jacob’s ladder descends and, in becoming spirit, also ascends with every other passionate spirit throughout Time wrestling within the Eternal night just before the wounded Word rises anew into the daylight of each new cosmic interaction. A gift, to be sure. The penultimate aspect of faith in Abraham prepares us for the ultimate aspect of faith in Jacob; together, they enter into the fullness of time. Even more scandalous than Abraham, who does the unthinkable, Jacob’s passion expresses his own ineffable and impassioned desires against God, and prevails—God does it! Abraham heard and did the will of God. But Jacob, somehow perceiving more and wanting more, wrestles in defiance within the co-conditioning Eternal moment (“beyond” and prior to the light) as the impassioned desires of his heart, a prodigal coming home, transforms God within God’s Eternity. Together with Peter’s identification, from within this same darkness, they excite God (Christ) more than any other moments in history! Filial relations, friendship, and relational theosis obtain—a being emerges capable of knowing God as God.

Jacob becomes the first recognized true co-creator, the greatest co-creator in history! And no one seems to see the flashing neon sign of name and nation. Abraham ultimately acquiesces to God, but Jacob, in passion, does not: he insists upon receiving the blessing that his spirit senses is his to desire—for even in his fighting God, he is fully given to God. No one seems to acknowledge the true miracle of creation in the darkness before every gestalt of human consciousness—that lightning strike of the Eternal making all life possible. History knows no nation of Moses, Abraham, or David, only Israel. Besides Abraham and Sarah’s slight name change, God completely changes only two people’s names in all the Scriptures: Jacob (deceiver) to Israel (struggles with God), and Cephas (pebble) to Simon Peter (listening, rock). Could the cartographers have been any more explicit in establishing the preeminence of what is happening in Jacob and Peter? They signal the “mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations” (Col 1:26), this deep mystery hidden within the Jacobian darkness, beyond all flesh and blood, just before (each) new dawn.

Along with Peter, Jacob experiences firsthand the rock (the place) of divine-human contact, where heaven and earth come together, simultaneously.¹⁴ With every daybreak comes the Word (creation)—the relative relating to the relative—always a wound within the resurrecting; yet heaven and earth come together in each preceding night of the analogia spiritus—a mutual co-conditioning of spirit to Spirit . . . if one is willing to enter the cruciform (Isaac). Within the dark night of the Eternal, absolute interacts with Absolute before each resurrecting dawn. Each cosmic encounter heralds the potential site of divine-human holistic interaction where our words become respoken in the gifting of the Word, synchronizing billions of spirits into syncopating unity prior to the coming of the word—a potentially recurrent moment that incorporates human self-determination within a differentiated unity. This is the rock, the site upon which the people of God in two (developmental st)ages emerge, with Jacob and Peter. Here billions of infinities (spirits) dance unseen in analogical relation with God’s Eternity (Spirit)—each spirit appropriately and synchronously dancing in Time to the eschatological music of perichoresis (love).¹⁵

The one Absolute Spirit of the System (Hegel) is not found in Jacob or in the true nation of Israel; instead, we find the harmonizing dance of billions of spirits, back and forth, in and out of time, dancing altogether separate. It can only happen in darkness, not totally beyond, but hidden within the flesh, a rupture, and blood no less real than a rock. It is the only place one could hope to find it, on earth, through darkness, struggling and suffering with the One in his Time. It is here the Writer’s friends stumble forward in the darkness, failing to recognize that Jacob wrestled the One and knew not his name, a name refused and unable to be given in the asking. Though Jacob may have stood before flesh and blood, he knew from no flesh and blood and by no light of day that God had come into the world—a moment of theosis. It was then he knew that somehow, someway, the ladder also ascends unto the Eternal, and so he boldly climbs, wrestles, wins, and perceives the face of God.¹⁶ Prayer for Jacob was not just listening, learning, and accepting the will of God; it was human de-liberation of spirit-to-Spirit antecedent to and therefore inclusive within the Eternal—affecting the very providence of God in Time.¹⁷

In Jacob’s victory emerges a new ontology, a new relational metaphysics. Barth’s analogia relationis (a timorous attempt at Kierkegaardian metaphysics) only found half the ladder, and half a ladder does not end the Cartesian efforts of modernity in which all things similar mutually relate (analogia entis). Nor does it end the play of those who refuse being, for the no-being of poststructuralism still wanders upon the playground of being, deliriously and cryptically bearing universals in their vacant transgressions (only in the land of being does no-being find meaning). But, far from the approved criteria of either, the faithful transgressions of Jacob in the night expose a universal dynamic of relationality through which all things different mutually and meaningfully relate (analogia spiritus, the engine of perichoresis). As the quantum enigma of our new science sings the siren songs of the Writer once again, we no longer dance in a world out there (of being). We dance when two or more gather together with Christ (knowingly or not), worlds created in the dancing, with all the dancers, billions of dancers. These are the worlds in which persons dance collectively, worlds that pulse with movement, emerge, expand, disappear, and have no bounds but the syncopating lead of the risen One who orchestrates all movement in love. These are worlds of mutual co-conditioning in which Abraham moves with God, and Jacob, moving mountains into the Aegean Sea, prevails over (and with) God; worlds in which what Peter decides in perichoretic faith (actus directus/fides directa) becomes Christ’s reflexive will (actus reflectus).

From the trauma of God, the wound through which earth leaves its seed and heaven proffers the child—comes the sustaining gift. (Maybe Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Taylor are right, God is female, or something of God.) In the going and coming of ladders, the wrestling God of Jacob can only happen in the night—where absolute wrestles with Absolute before Time. Such gods that walk the Emmaus road must ultimately disappear in the light if they are to be truly known, filially, as God, in Time.¹⁸ Though the wounds of the Eternal are visible, the Eternal is not, a blind spot to be sure, defying material or ‘natural’ synthesis—the Divine must leave before daybreak or more than wound the wrestler destroy. For here is the site of the infinite qualitative difference. But Jacob becomes spirit and wrestles in the night where spirits move together. A risen Christ comes to Jacob in the analogia spiritus, a holistic knowing, a co-conditioning moment, antecedent and beyond all image, word, and the relative. If they wrestle into the day, the wrestler becomes god; that would mean pantheism and the annihilation of identity and personhood. If you want shared Absolute Spirit, talk to a pantheist or the Borgs of the twenty-fourth century; Jacob won’t know what you’re talking about. For he saw the face of God as God in the night and survived what modernity and poststructuralism deny.

In simultaneity shared meaning obtains—but always with respect to the relative meaning-frame of each participant, altogether separate. Without the analogous relations of absolute to Absolute (spirit to spirit) there is no shared meaning among true difference. We are relative creatures of difference moving and floating within relationships, not upon an Aegean Sea of being. For every assemblage of traces amid altarity must suffer crucifixion again and again to rise in mutuality—in cruciform movement with Christ. But there are no deaths among robots or Borgs.

Traces (words) alone lead us into solipsism. Poststructuralists make mountains of molehills with the evanescence of traces as they escape all divine contingency, themselves gods in the making. But Jacob was about Word and Spirit. The word must be wounded for analogia spiritus to enable mutuality. Though words are the house of being, they form upon an antecedent breath, a breath (spirit) without and before being.¹⁹ Spirit is asymmetrically complementary to word.

Therefore, this “stumbling stone and rock of offense”²⁰ is no more a geographical location than apostolic succession or even solely Jesus Christ himself! Neither are they the Keys of Peter. Within various developmental stages and through a darker glass they may have been provisional rocks, but the rock has always been that Power endemic within relationship itself, that Power of which the Writer speaks that moves within the interstices of our dialogical dance. This is the “mystery among the Gentiles,” a tripartite perichoretic heartbeat sustaining all creation simply because God Incarnationally loves the world. It is the unseen blind spot of the Eternal moment before each relational gestalt (word) that lies beneath the rational. If in purity of heart all that we are ventures in, our spirit and all such spirits come into dynamic analogical relation with the fullness of the Eternal Spirit from which the risen One constitutes all relationships, synchronizing billions of freedoms, desires, and disappointments into a swirling unity of synchronizing gestalts, a unity of difference (Pentecost), a unity of love. This is the Power that sustains the freedom and self-determination necessary for the emergence of a being that might itself know God as God. This Eternal recurrence comes to each open spirit until all hearts beat together decisively.²¹ It happens only under the covers of night, beyond sight, in a flash so dense no light can escape. If Abraham is scandalous, Jacob is mad—an even greater horror religiosus! Within such a scandal, the Writer’s categories expand; his Religiousness A and B transform, but the spirit of the Writer still remains.

Upon this rock the Text transforms again and again. The rightness of each new reading rides upon epistemic dispositions (the how—the crucifixion). Each new meaning (what) and its rightness (how) explode from the darkness appropriately infecting each new response, each new generation. From this rock leaps all creation, creativity, human freedom in co-conditioning transtemporal relations within divine providence, and the evolutionary emergence of relational theosis (the driver of human origins). The rock is perichoresis—the great eucharistic dance in which the nature of God (perichoresis), in due course, synchronizes all in all.

Mark C. Taylor is Erring when he employs the modern conception of the eschatological. “This loss of language can never be re-covered. . . . [This is] the difference that infinitely defers the eschatological movement of reappropriation. Offering no promise of arrival, this Other calls: ‘Come’.” Like most poststructuralists, he believes we cannot completely share meaning with another; we simply harvest the traces into our own eisegetical movements, passing like ships in the night. Calling across the water between us, we never obtain. Taylor’s theological rendering of the eschatological is teaming with metaphysical residuals that echo Pannenberg’s completions, the historical totality (all Hegelian derivatives). Any such manifestation of totality within any contextualization will always fall short—“infinitely defer[ring] such eschatological completions.’” Taylor never gets past the friend’s “God-man” or modern anthropology. Like most philosophers, Kierkegaard’s anthropology is beyond them.

The Editor demands, “do not confuse them [his friends] with me!” “The eternal essential truth is not behind him but in front of him through its being in existence or having existed so that if the individual does not existentially and in existence lay hold of the truth, he will never lay hold of it.”²² In other words, whether on earth or in the eschaton, Christ and the Spirit will always mediate and orchestrate the dance—perichoretically. With many nations, diversity will forever explode in unprecedented difference. In resurrecting, we know like him, not in some final eschatonic stage of completeness, but in living transformation, in Pentecost, in perichoresis! The eschatological moment is always a differentiated unity, never uniformity or completion. When we fully venture into our relations, analogia spiritus recontextualizes our relativities in analogical relation to the fullness of Christ’s Time. Truth and meaning are shared in every complete moment in history or the eschaton. Such moments transform our ‘sin’ in any age—a eucharistic moment of consubstantiation, if you will, causing other madmen to cry, “Sin boldly.”

Within the perichoretic dance, I see Luther and Calvin dancing together, paradox and transformation (differing dynamics within perichoresis), spirit antecedent with word, twirling together around and around, in and out of Time. Within being, they never arrive. But Kierkegaard and his friends are never just about being. They come in the analogia spiritus through the moments that create movement and dancing of being.

If it sounds as if all metaphysics is being thrown to the wind! It has. The breath upon which words form is evident, universally evident. We feel it; we see it move in the leaves of our collective movements. And so, we must explore the wind upon which no light can shine. Does the wind not fascinate us all, this quantum substratum within the ether that bears the seeds of reason and morals within each moment? This invisible dance of spirits that makes all life and movement possible within the waste land must become philosophical grist, scientific criterion, and once again, first philosophy in theology. If we passionately listen,²³ we can hear the “delicate whispering” (1 Kings 19:12) of the winds moving through the leaves, as absolutes wrestle beneath the dancing play of relativities. “Those who hear not the music, think the dancers mad.”²⁴

Faith indeed comes to us like sleep in the night, a gift. When we let go and allow our entire self into the venture of living transformation, we become spirit and enter the analogia spiritus—the antecedent co-conditioning moment of absolute (spirit) relating to Absolute (Spirit). Only then, in the twinkling of an eye, can we enter our rest as Christ turns to us, a gift in hand, and co-conditionally say, “Your faith has set you free.”²⁵

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