10/07/2021 – “If we are to grasp the true meaning of the glory of Jesus: transcendence must be conjoined with immanence, divinity must be coupled with humanity, heaven must be balanced with earth and God’s distance must be complemented by his nearness.”//excerpt from “Ruthless Trust” by Brennan Manning
Brennan Manning went home to the Lord quite some time ago. It is not about the messenger, but he is on my all-time short list as spiritual mentors. We saw him in person as a headline speaker at our First Presbyterian Church renewal conference in Houston around two decades ago.
My verbatim excerpt is from Chapter Six: “Infinite and Intimate” , with multiple gaps noted. Again, why would I want to paraphrase Brennan’s work. But I do encourage you to pick up the book.
Let’s get started:
“All human attempts to express the inexpressible —- or, as philosopher Alan Watts put it, “to eff the ineffable” — remain woefully inadequate because of the huge quantitative and qualitative difference between our stumbling articulation and the divine Reality.
Kabod (*A – see below) is not a safe topic. It induces a feeling of terror before the Infinite and exposes as sham our empty religious talk and pointless activity, our idle curiosity and ludicrous pretensions of importance, our frantic busyness. The awareness that the eternal, transcendent God of Jesus Christ is our absolute future gives us the shakes. One day out of the blue comes the thought of inevitable death, and the thought is so troubling that we want to live the rest of our life in a shoe.
(*A- Homework assignment: Research “Kabod YHWH” – the “o” has a a long dash symbol above it. But I will note: The “Kabod YHWH” is a visible tangible and interpersonal manifestation of YHWH. The “Kabod YHWH” is YHWH.)
Small wonder that there is a deafening silence from our pulpits and publishers about the transcendent character of the Almighty God. And who can blame us? Throughout the history of salvation God has revealed his presence but never his essence. Since the Holy One is ultimately unknowable, we can only stutter and stammer about an omnipotent deity who, with effortless ease, created a star 264 trillion miles away.
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But we pay a price for steering clear of transcendence and unknowability. The loss of a sense of transcendence among today’s believers has caused incalculable harm to Christian spirituality and to the interior life of individual Christians. The first casualty has been silent reverence, radical amazement, and affectionate awe at the infinite goodess of God — those traits that are embodied in the scriptural term ‘fear of the Lord’. (Jimmy repeat note – When was the last time you heard a ‘fear of the Lord’ sermon at your home church?) Adoration which flows naturally from the attitude to appreciate the grandeur of divine reality, is conspicuously absent in our prayer life. Quiet time is often not quiet. Our designated prayer time is generally consumed by hurried meditation on a scripture passage, a run through the Rolodex of persons to intercede/petition for, and occasional expressions of gratitude for the gifts of our lives — faith, health, family and friends. The inner urgency to fall prostrate before the Infinite rarely intrudes on our consciousness.
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When the glory of the transcendent God is not addressed, our focus shifts to human behavior, the cultivation of virtues and the extirpation of vices, the qualities of discipleship, and so on. Personal responsibility replaces personal response to God, and we become engrossed in our efforts to grow in holiness. Our primary concern becomes our spiritual, intellectual, and emotional well-being. When other Christians ask us if we are happy, we automatically respond in the affirmative or brush them off with benevolent smile even if we are close to tears.
Obviously, there is something pokey and cramping about this inordinate attention devoted to ourselves, the state of our souls, and the presence or absence of happiness in our hearts. As Simon Tugwell notes, ‘ One of the surest ways to avoid being happy is to insist on being happy at all costs.’ The religion of cheerfulness, as Father Brown reminds us , is a cruel religion, and maybe the best way not to go mad is not to mind too much if you do go mad.
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Clearly, the God of our imagination is not worthy of trust, adoration, praise, reverence, or gratitude. And yet, if we are unwilling to address the issue of transcendence, that is the only deity we know. The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibliolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.
An exclusive emphasis on the divine kabod and the transcendent mystery of God banishes God from our world and our lives. He remains far away, aloof in his infinite majesty. He dwells in unapproachable light. The whole universe is too small to contain his immensity. We can no more catch a hurricane in a shrimp net or Niagara Falls in a coffee cup than we can grasp the infinity of God’s reality. A one-sided focus on his Otherness reduces the Holy One to a cosmic observer, a distant outsider disengaged from the yaw and pitch of the human struggle.
Immanence is not the opposite of transcendence but its correlative, immanence and transcendence are two sides of the same coin, two facets of the same divine reality. Transcendence means that God cannot be confined to the world, that he is never this rather than that, here rather then there. Immanence, on the other hand, means that God is wholly involved with us, ‘that he is living in all that is as its innermost mystery,’ that he is here in his mysterious nearness. (More on this in the next chapter) Disregard of God’s immanence deprives us of any sense of intimate belonging, while inattendance to his transcendence robs God of his godliness.”
Soli Deo Gloria!