“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. [1 Cor. 18-25, NIV]
We Preach Christ crucified.
Paul is pretty tough on Wisdom here, and this distresses me no little bit, as I have been essaying a distinction between knowledge and wisdom in this blog. Of course, Paul is contrasting the wisdom of God with the wisdom of man, and the latter is found wanting while the former goes unrecognized. So, God in his wisdom, does not hold divinity hostage, and becomes man:
he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! [Phil. 2:7-8, NIV]
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! [Phil. 2:7-8, NIV]
Christ crucified and death on a cross. Foolishness to some, wisdom to others. It's a matter of reading. There is something Johannine going on in these passages. Those who are 'in' share something wonderful; those who are 'out' were never in and share in something false (cf. 1 John). In the Pauline version, 'in' has the power and wisdom of God, and 'out' has a stumbling block and foolishness. But foolishness and and wisdom go hand in hand; for God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and his weakness is stronger than human strength.
The weakness of God. Repetition. Reading the Cross finds the weakness of God. We have noted earlier that confronting the reality of the Cross entails stripping divinity of analogical strength and power, the self-indulgent imposition of human characteristics upon God, the human intellectual, physical and emotional likeness upon God. The jeering crowd sums many of those characteristics up:
Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!” In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’” In the same way the rebels who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him. [Matt. 27:39-44, NIV]
The crowd betrays their embrace of a God that would swoop down from heaven and take Christ off the Cross, rescuing from his persecutors. This is the God that dies on the Cross of Christ. That death is sealed with the words of the 22nd Psalm, whose quotations began in the bitterly ironic 'wisdom' of the crowd. The Psalm, though beginning in abandonment,
moves from abandonment to union with the God who is, the God finally free of all anthropomorphism and anthropopathism and released into his nature of relationality. Christ's antiphon to the foolishness of the crowd is the wisdom of God. "God, God, why have you abandoned me?" Christ starts the psalm again to exonerate the crowd from their God, to displace that God with 'the Lord' God. The very weakness of God does not lower Christ from the Cross, but punctuates that weakness with death. The Lord 'God who is,' is the God of resurrection.
future generations will be told about the Lord.
They will proclaim his righteousness,
declaring to a people yet unborn:
He has done it! [Psalm 22:30-31, NIV]
They will proclaim his righteousness,
declaring to a people yet unborn:
He has done it! [Psalm 22:30-31, NIV]
As I have noted earlier, all themes of the Gospel find their trajectories through the Cross. The foolish mockery of 'sonship' from the passing crowds becomes the relationality within the Trinity itself. Here, too, the Cross cuts an apophatic space: the space made between Father, Son and Spirit, and the very relationality that comprises the triune Godhead. In this way, it is Christ who unfolds the mystery of the Trinity as relationality that cannot remain enfolded in the gender of Father and Son. The event released in the Cross, the truth of God revealed in the Crucifixion, is whats going on between the human and divine. And part of that truth is that God made humans in his image and likeness, male and female he created them, and he saw that it was good, as good as it was when the man saw the woman and saw himself as other in the Other.
The Cross is the threshold to new life. By sharing in the experience of the Crucifixion, we undergo a kenotic release, creating the negative space to receive the spirit of Christ, who has commended it to God and everything that is. It is the liturgical movement of the Mass that moves us to cross into the Cross, partake of the Body of Christ, and move into a new life in the future. It is true that we leave the 'God that is us'
behind, but we have opened ourselves to the space for the
'God who is.'
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ReplyDeleteI'm unsure about Christ not dying 'like the rest of us,' especially as you connect that death to the resurrection. If the event is to be released, or the text deconstructed (they both mean the same thing here) there can be no swooping at all. What happens to Christ in the resurrection must be thought of as being of an entirely different order from his being swooped off the Cross. Isn't Rahner helpful in sorting this out for us?
DeletePerhaps I will comment again later after some more reading.
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ReplyDeleteI do not have too many difficulties with these remarks. If the Cross truly open up an apophatic space, then that space *could* be filled with the God of onto-theology, but then the event of the Cross us suppressed. What if the 'God that is' does not have analogical power of instrumentality? Is there a difference between resuscitation and resurrection? It seems to me that contemplation of the resurrection is best done in a negative space, through the via negativa.
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ReplyDeleteIf we take the gospel narratives as normative of the experience of the Cross and death of Christ, we do not witness to the Cross at all. I think that is what's going on in the Passion narratives. People are present, but not to the experience of the Cross.
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ReplyDeleteI have tried to put a coherent reading of the crucifixion, however incomplete as that is. The concept of resurrection is not a simple one, and Rahner's view is the most coherent one we have so far. Have you found Rahner wanting in this regard. I have no intention of trying to come to a more developed idea of resurrection. But you are right to persist in underscoring the relationship between the Cross and the Resurrection.
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DeleteThanks for this analysis. I will be responding shortly.
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DeleteI just pressed a very wrong key and deleted some hard-earned work product. Feh. A shorter, perhaps more streamlined version:
DeleteThanks for the kind words. I have reviewed Rahner on the death and resurrection of Jesus. He is laser-like coherent. He moves from the unity of the death and resurrection to our own faith in resurrection as being 'intrinsic' to the resurrection of Jesus (p.267). He constructs a concept of 'resurrection in hope' from the act and content of faith as 'inseparably connected' (268). The expectation of one's own resurrection is the horizon of understanding where the resurrection of Jesus is experienced (274). Moving into scripture, he observes that our own faith remains tied to the apostolic witness, and he concludes an 'inseparable correspondence' between hope of resurrection and the 'real presence of such a resurrection (275). Hence there is an 'interlocking hope in resurrection and the resurrection of Jesus (278).
In this presentation Rahner comes as close as possible to how entanglement works in the newer theological gesture. I am reading in these pages from FCF a powerful, transhistorical connectedness and relationality from which our own faith in resurrection is involved in the resurrection of Jesus in a strange and provocative complicity. Rahner does not have the language of enfolding and unfolding (though interestingly he knows Cusa) at work in FCF, but I read entanglement when he speaks of the inseparable. The very unity of the death and resurrection of Jesus is a unity of entanglement, and our involvement in Jesus's resurrection, and his in ours is something of spooky action at a distance.
DeleteI appreciate the difficulty you identify in God's witness to the death on the Cross being rewritten into the Resurrection. You did however note that for Jesus to have been fully human he had to experience the finality of life (very Rahneresque) as death. You are suggesting that the weakness of God that punctuates Jesus's death reappears as something much stronger in raising him from death. How would all that play out in the unity of Christ's death and resurrection? Does that imply a continuity, a unity within God's weakness: something like this: since it is *only* a resurrection, and not a restoration to more life, is that God's weakness somehow punctuating the resurrection as well? The concept of the weakness of God is imperfect, and Paul's use of the concept underscores God's strength. Is there a unified field theory here? Is it indeed something analogous to Schroedinger's entanglement. Is it identical?
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DeleteIf you say it's our fault, our guilt, our responsibility, not God's, then why is Jesus resurrected? Surely we share as much blame for that as any other unjust death in history. Yet God didn't let it go at that.
DeleteIt's never been a question of what God does but why God does it so rarely. That just doesn't make sense to me. It is the incredible amount of suffering that God leaves as it is which still gives theodicy its traction.
Think of all the deaths that, in their injustice and horror, have caused despair and hopelessness and more death. God didn't let the disciples of Jesus disintegrate into obscurity and despair, though, They had an experience that changed them, or so it seems. If I believe that then I have to believe that God withholds whatever that is from almost everyone else. Most people in life, the vast majority, are lucky if they can avoid this despair of an unjust death and then we are left on our own to solve and merely cope as best we can.
There's no mercy in this kind of radical freedom God has given us. I can see no mercy in it whatsoever. I am forced to conclude it is simply not true, that we are simply mistaken, as we have been about so much else. It's an honest mistake, but a mistake. No one is risen.
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ReplyDeleteThis critique is helpful in that it suggests that if solidarity is to have any expression at all, it must be within the concept of entanglement.
Delete“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
ReplyDeleteMaybe this resonated with the early Christian communities, but the “message of the cross” does not exist, if it ever did. Because the risen Jesus has not returned from Heaven, at least not by the time I’m writing this, there is no agreement or consensus across extant Christian churches. Christianity as an ongoing historical phenomenon and global religion was not expected, it seems, by Jesus’s ministry and those immediately involved. There is an urgency in the protean Jewish sect that seemed to cause an explosion to the world outside Judaism. T