79. Cf. John 4:34.
80. See Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 25, 37, 55, 87.
81. Cf. Rom 12:1.
82. Jenson, Triune God, 67 n. 16.
83. American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd ed., s.v. “kwel-1”: “Greek telos, ‘completion of the cycle,’ consummation, perfection, end, result.”
84. The host (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “host, n.4”) is both host and guest (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “host, n.2”).
85. A reader of Kierkegaard may be tempted to write “existentially.”
86. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 77: “The hypostasis is not the product of nature: it is that in which nature exists, the very principle of its existence. Such a conception of hypostasis . . . implies the existence of a fully human existence, without any limitation, ‘enhypostatized’ in the Word, who is a divine hypostasis. This conception assumes that God, as personal being, is not totally bound to his own nature; the hypostatic existence is flexible, ‘open’; it admits the possibility of divine acts outside of the nature (energies) and implies that God can personally and freely assume a fully human existence while remaining God, whose nature remains completely transcendent.” Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 182: “Think of an arrow flying, as is said, with the speed of an arrow. Imagine that it for an instant has an impulse to want to dwell on itself, perhaps in order to see how far it has come, or how high it is soaring above the earth, or how its speed compares with the speed of another arrow that is also flying with the speed of an arrow—in that same second the arrow falls to the ground.”
87. Barth, CD 1/2, 346, 348, 355, 356–57: “The name of Jesus Christ creates the Christian religion. . . . We have to think of [the Christian religion] in the same way as we think of our own existence and that of the world, as a reality which is to be and is created by Jesus Christ yesterday and today and tomorrow. Apart from the act of its creation by the name of Jesus Christ, which like creation generally is a creatio continua, and therefore apart from the Creator, it has no reality. . . . There never was a man Jesus as such apart from the eternal reality of the Son of God. . . . The human nature of Jesus Christ has no hypostasis of its own, we are told. It has it only in the Logos. The same is true, therefore, of the earthly-historical life of the Church and the children of God, and therefore of the Christian religion. . . . In a secondary sense we can, of course, explain the necessity of the rise of Christianity in the light of Judaistic development and the political, spiritual and moral circumstances of the Mediterranean world in the Imperial period. But in its reality we can never explain or deduce it from that source. . . . It is this name [of Jesus Christ] which stands in relation to the world of religions, as does the sun to the earth. . . . It means that the Christian religion is snatched from the world of religions and the judgment and sentence pronounced upon it, like a brand from the burning. It is not that some men are vindicated as opposed to others, or one part of humanity as opposed to other parts of the same humanity. It is that God Himself is vindicated as opposed to and on behalf of all men and all humanity.”
88. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “sacrifice, adj.1”: “Etymology: < Latin sacrificus, < sacri- , sacer sacred (sacra neuter plural, sacrifices) + -ficus : see –fic suffix”; s.v. “-fic, suffix”: “Repr. Latin -ficus ‘-making, -doing’ ( < weakened root of facere to make, do), forming adjs.” “Sacrifice” thus signifies “making sacred or holy.”
89. “Is this Brazilian woman an actual, living, flesh-and-blood human being, a woman with a name and address? I mean, do you know this woman, have you met her, have you talked with her? Because if she is and you have—how dare you tell her story?! What gives you the right to steal her narrative voice? What gives you the right to objectify her? Frankly, I find it offensive and demeaning that you would presume to represent her here, to commodify her, to force her into this work and force us to become voyeurs with you!” “There is no answer that I—or anyone—could articulate to resolve such questions. Everything would be so much simpler, if I could simply answer that I have made it all up. But something like this, someone like this, something so exceptional, so contrary to the demographics of ‘immigration trends,’ cannot be made up. If these are my words (and, of course, in a litigious world of property claims and rights, one could argue that case), it is my prayer that, by the time another day of hard work is done, they will have at least stopped being ‘mine.’ ‘Is all this, then, fictive? Is she a symbol of something?’ If she is a ‘symbol,’ she is a non-representational—an iconic—one, or at least this is my prayer. And, if she is ‘fictive,’ she exceeds fiction, the way every saint, Catherine of Siena, for example, exceeds not only her story, but all the stories of the saints.”
1
The Root from Which They Spring
Introductions
Take off your old coat and roll up your sleeves,
Life is a hard road to travel, I believe.90
I have been a university teacher for about a third of a century. My area of presumed expertise is theology. Theology is, if it is anything at all, a way of giving attention to God. Simply put, professors of theology profess God. That is why good people send their children off to college to study with theologians, with people like me. And I—professor that I am—do profess God, overtly, loudly, passionately. What is so embarrassing, though, is that I have such a hard time saying what it is that God means. You would think that someone laboring in this field for so long would have at least that much nailed down! Yet I must confess that I do not.
The problem is not that I am a closet infidel, hiding behind some plastic mask of public piety (like a candidate running for office). I try very hard to be honest and open, particularly where I am most professional. That is, my comprehension-failure is no secret. In fact I would think nothing would be more evident, as I go on and on in class, than that I strain just to get that black hole of a little three-letter word out. But, of course, my task as a professor of theology is not just to get that one word out; I am to throw out a whole galaxy of words and ideas and images and passions and practices that are agitated by and drawn into that black hole.
Of course, speaking of God in this way is hopeless. To say “God” in the field where I labor is surely not to say “a compressed and compressing density, that heaviest, darkest phenomenon of orthodox physics.” And though there are speculative physicists and writers of science fiction who think of a black hole as a portal to another, distant point in space-time—and it might not be out of the question to think of one as an exit portal to some altogether different configuration of space-time, some new cosmos even—I have for a long time now been unable to speak of God as a way out of this earthy world. Speaking of God seems rather to be a way into it, even if as an alien.
There, I have already said too much. My location is showing. Yet there is nothing surprising about that. Every college sophomore knows that God is tradition-specific.