Monday Matters: Well, actually, it’s Jesus that matters…

I love this, Jim -- and am so jealous of all of you who were in these sessions with Moltmann!

This really speaks very loudly to our issues in the God Complex chatroom this morning, too; don't you think?

God revealed what mattered and revealed what was and is TRUE in Jesus -- as you did say this morning.

--maria

Yeah, I absolutely had that conversation in mind as well and was trying to figure out how to throw that in...but it kind of pulled away from the coherence of what I was trying to write here.

I get where the God is unkowable and the whole argument for uncertainty comes from. And I really love Pete Rollins book How (not) to Speak of God in which he takes on that issue of certainty. But I have to stop short of fully going there because I see the revelation of Jesus as the full revelation of God.

I do love however how Rollins, instead of using the word "true" uses the word "real." And says this "view of truth is concerned with having a relationship with the Real (God) that results in us transforming reality." That sense of "Reality" then is so much more full and dynamic than "Truth."

And, I'm just as jealous that you are going to Christianity 21!

jim

The witness of our sacred texts...and, frankly, of my own experience...is that it's a both/and proclamation. On the one hand, God is transcendent, infinite, mysterious, and kinda terrifying. Being in the unmediated presence of God's boundless love and grace is a knee-buckling, mind-blowing thing. On the other, God is immanent, present, compassionate, and visible in both Christ and the Beloved Community. The truth of our relationship with the Creator lies in the constructive dialectic between the two.

So...why can't we do both?

Could you elaborate a little on what Moltmann meant by not preaching generically about God?

Sounds like this was a very stimulating time! LOTS to think about, eh?

Evangeline - Moltmann didn't speak directly to this, but I suppose one application would be the God of civil religion. It is common for us here in the states to say "God Bless America." But what God are we really referring to? In that case God is not anchored to any specific self-revelation about who God is, God becomes whatever we imagine God to be.

Beloved Spear - Yeah, I hear you and I'm okay with the dialetic tension...I guess I would just say that the transcendent God has moved definitively toward us in Jesus Christ.