94. See Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 19.
95. Rogers, After the Spirit, 98–99:
Mary’s eyes beholding Eve
and looking down on Adam, were impelled to tears;
but she stays them and hastens
to conquer nature she who para phusin gave birth to Christ
her son.
Yet her entrails were stirred in suffering with her parents
—a compassionate mother accorded with the Merciful one
So she tells them —Cease your lamentations,
and I will be your ambassador to him born from me.
So Romanos the Melodist, the greatest liturgical poet of the Greek Church, speaks of something para phusin. . . . The Greek preposition para is well suited to contain the ambiguities of excess. Its root meaning is spatial: beside, alongside, as in the word “parallel.” If the lexicon lists the meaning “against,” that is best understood as “compared against,” as in “paragon,” “paradigm,” “parable,” which indicate no opposition. It would be misleading to indicate contrariety rather than comparison. No one supposes contrast in such words as “paraenesis” or “Paraclete.” Even “parasite” is one that “feeds beside,” while “paradox” and “paranormal” connote what is beside or in addition to the normal, rather than against it. A “paraphrase” is supposed to say the same thing, not something opposed. Modern coinages such a “paramedic” and “paralegal” continue the correct understanding of those who work with or alongside, not against others.
96. See Moltmann, Future of Creation, 41–48, for the difference between extrapolation and anticipation. Also see Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, 63, 139–41; and Basic Questions in Theology, 2:241–49.
97. I am thinking, of course, of Otto, Idea of the Holy.
98. Kierkegaard [Climacus], Philosophical Fragments, 37.
99. Luther, De Servo Arbitrio, 200–239; the direct quotation is found on 234.
100. Neither Wesley nor Kierkegaard is an escapist mystic, however. They are both children of the earth, practical people who (unlike Luther) love the book of James, who love the way a command of God takes shape in the concrete evenings and mornings of ordinary women and men. Kierkegaard has a better eye for the ambiguity of all human works; Wesley for their definiteness as they become good news particularly for the poor. But the earthy concreteness of the work to which they both give themselves is inspired by a vision of the New Earth that we cannot see without the miracle of new eyes (cf. Heb 11:1). Kierkegaard may stress the “cannot” of this miracle and Wesley its “new eyes,” but in doing so they both bear witness to the impossible event in which we come to yield to an other who simply will not become our property. Indeed, as we perform the works that bear witness to this other, Kierkegaard and Wesley would have us let go of those works as well, as formerly Rich Young Rulers who, without grieving, follow Jesus through the eye of a needle (Mark 10:18–27). To keep the works of love, the works we have done, to hold on to them as our property, is to be poisoned by them, sickened unto death. See Wesley, Plain Account, 112[25.38.8]; “Repentance of Believers,” 352 [III.4]; “Original Sin,” 182–85 [III.1–5]; “New Birth,” 188–94 [I.1–II.5]; “Good Steward,” 296–98 [IV.1–4]; Kierkegaard [Anti-Climacus], Sickness Unto Death, 18; Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 40–43, 246–63.
101. And found out too many times that I had gotten it all wrong and had to begin again from the beginning. Perhaps that simply shows that even when one has gotten it all wrong, one might still pray. See Barth, CD 3/3, 265.
102. Von Rad, “ouranos, Old Testament,” 507; Traub, “ouranos, New Testament,” 520–21, 525.
103. See Gundry, Matthew, 106. “Hallowed by thy name” makes a similar point, it seems to me, that we do not name God; God does. This strikes me as an answer to Derrida’s account, in Gift of Death, 95–115, of the apparent investment logic of obeying the command of God.
104. See Husserl, “Phenomenology,” 700; and Ideas, 105–7.
105. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 215.
106. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mystery, n.1”: “In later Christian use mysterion became equivalent to sacrament (in several passages, e.g., Dan 2:18, the Vulgate renders it by sacramentum, even when it means only ‘secret’; in other passagesmysterium is used).”
107. The Greek phrase of verse one that the NRSV translates as “spiritual worship” is “logiken latreian.” The KJV translates it “reasonable service.” Neither translation seems to me to deliver the provocation of the juxtaposition of “logos” and “latreia” here. I do not read this passage the way Sarah Coakley does, however. See her Sacrifice Regained, 25–28.
108. Cf. Wesley, “Great Privilege of Those That Are Born of God,” especially 434–36 [I.8, II.1] and 442 [III.2–3].
109. Cf. Wesley, “On Zeal,” 308–21.
110. Barth, Evangelical Theology, 200.
111. See LaCugna, God For Us, 222–23.
112. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 31–46.
113. My friend Donna Techau has told me (in a Facebook conversation, February 2, 2011) that I might also say that the Holy Spirit “is a gentle fresh breeze. She is non-coercive repentance. She brings peaceable joy. She gathers us in her arms and holds us close. She dances lightly across our skin.” Rogers notes that “the Spirit blows not only like a hurricane but like a prevailing wind” (After the Spirit, 198).
114. Wesley, “On Zeal,” 313 [II.5].
115. See Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, 159–60.