Uncontainable and Unconfortable

In fact we are always tempted, as human beings, to seek refuge is some unattainable future-ness and/or past-ness to give comfort or authority to our struggles in the present. Either that or we give the contingency of the present absolute authority, perhaps thinking that "what we make with our own hands, now" will somehow be sufficient to ensure that we are not deluded. If only.

Constructed nowness as the only viable path is the conviction of many good humanists, who have (rightly) rejected the god of human creation, yet wrongly deduce that this is "all there is to it" and hope that "we have the power in ourselves" to make it all right. If only. The evidence around and before us, when considered without romanticism, is not encouraging, however. Which is why it may be good news that God is not the 'God' we developed through our infancy and continue to project in our adolescence - and is therefore not, in fact, "ruled out" by the rejection of religion or the gods or metaphysics.

For as David Jenkins has also pointed out, the God who we meet in both the promise and perversion of the biblical world is not a prisoner to that world - but challenges it (and us) from within and beyond... subverting (especially) those who thought they had "pinned down" the divine in a text or a dogma. This is the truth the text demonstrates and yields to, at every turn. In fact, therefore, the "real" traditionalist is the person who recognises the dynamic movement and un-fixability of the God who refuses to be our possession or creation. And in the Christian experience, God is known decisively in a fleeting person not an immovable text -- flesh that is vulnerable, killable and abusable... but which we discover, by experience, to be joined to the uncapturable divine life in a way that defies description and reverses the domain of death. (That, not zombie ideology or mere narratology, is what is "meant" by resurrection).

[via FaithInSociety]