Wow.  I haven't posted here since the middle of May.  

Well, I've been busy...and whatnot.

For the last several months, I've been extremely busy with my company, Singularity Concepts.  I've launched several websites and currently have some "bigguns" in progress.

But for some reason, I've gotten the theology bug recently.  So here goes.

The other day, I came across a post talking about problems with Arminian theology.  As was once my practice, I jumped into the fray, gunning down the arguments of my Calvinist detractors (not to difficult, but good sport nonetheless).  At one point, one of the Arminians actually defended the Reformed view of the atonement, and pointed me to a post somewhere which he believed was a "great" defense of PSA theory from a non-Reformed perspective.

Needless to say, the argument highlighted was terrifically weak and philosophically thin, but one point did pique my interest.  One of the fundamental arguments made by the author for his view of atonement is that sin damages God's glory, and that this glory must be restored.

Obviously, this is nothing new.  Beginning primarily with Anselm, theologians have thought this way about atonement.  Simply, they suggest that in the fall and continuing sinfulness, humanity degrades the glory of God.  As God must be glorified, the argument continues, something must be done to restore God's honor.  The answer, for whatever reason, follows that punishment of the perpetrators of sin will effect this restoration.  So then, the peculiar mystery of atonement is that Christ is able, as the Incarnate God, to not only encapsulate the whole of history's dishonor of God, but is moreover able to vicariously bear the penalty of this, thereby fully satisfying the honor of God and its due requirement for restitution.

Several problems crop up, of course, for this theory.  The most disturbing, however, is its view of God's honor and glory.

Consider this.  If God is eternally glorious, it stands to reason that the eternality of this glorification concomitantly requires that the amount or level of God's gloriousness is not diminished.  After all, if God's glory waned at any moment, God's would seek to be eternally glorified, and would thereby cease to be God.  Simple enough.

However, we must go deeper: what is the source of God's glorification?  Is it attributed to God by others, or is it self-referential?  The former conclusion poses signficant problems, for it requires that that which attributes glory to God exist eternally with God, whereby the glory which accrues to God might be equally eternal with God (for if God is not eternally glorious, God is not eternally divine).  If we say that glory is attributed to God by that which is not God, one must posit that that which is not God has existed eternally whereby it might be identified as the source of attribution of God's glory.  This, of course, blurs any meaningful distinction between God and that which God has created, creating a thoroughgoing pantheism.  So it must be concluded that God's glory is self-referential.

If this is case, however, we must return to the original notation about the eternality of God's glory, e.g., that there is no point at which God's glory is diminished.  If the logic of this is understood, then it must be further concluded that there is nothing, either internal or external to God, that can in any way add to or diminish from God's glory.  For such a scenario to be possible, one would have to suggest that God's self-referential glory has not be as infinite and eternal as the divine existence toward which it is directed and from which it procedes.

So for discussions of atonement, the notion that God's glory and honor is somehow detracted through human sin must be rejected, for if this is true, we must admit that human sinfulness is capable of diminishing the eternality and fulness of the divine life, even though that which detracts is ultimately dependant upon the former for its primal ontology.  

What, then, does this mean?  It requires that when we approach an understanding of atonement, it must be recognized that the cross is not "for God."  The cross is not a mechanism for filling a deficiency in the divine person, as if something needs to be restored unto God, lest God be understood as incomplete.  This is ludicrous, for a God which lacks that which is essential to deity (e.g., eternal glory) is no longer God. 

So over the last year, I've become quite good at playing nursery rhymes on my guitar--it's one of the easist ways to be able to actually play guitar while concomitantly appeasing the attentions of my two-year old daughter.  On my favorites (because it's easy) is the old-standby, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. 

Well, this last Saturday night, I did not sleep a wink.  Therefore, all Sunday was somewhat of a daze.  However, somewhere in the midst of it, I was playing this song and was struck by the question posed throughout:  "How I wonder what you are."  Indeed, I thought, how we do wonder what stars are. 

Of course, science tells us that they are giant balls of coalesced stellar gases.  Pa-shaw.  Here's my philosophical analysis.

Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are

Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky

Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are

Are you really just a ball of gas, as the hegenomy of science says?

Why should I believe that, when no one's ever seen it, and no one's ever touched it

I know I've never tasted it; I've never had a side of star with turkey on rye

Maybe it's an animal; maybe just a great machine

It's harder to tell what's real, and separate the make-believe

Maybe it's a giant sheet the ancients spread across the sky

And the moderns came in with their sticks, and only poked holes in it...

That kind of makes sense to me, because I have some holes of my own

And you say, you say, you say I'm a star; or at least I'm made of it

So when I pierced full through, with Western epistemology

Maybe I can be one of your stars; reducible to bare phenomenology

And you say, you say, you say I'm a star; you say, you say, you say I'm a star... 

Despite rumors to the contrary , my "theological blog" is not dead, at least not quite.  In fact, I've got a post regarding the doctrine of atonement in I Peter that will be coming quite soon (I hope!), so watch for that. 

The reason for my recent absence is that I've been ridiculously busy the last several weeks (likely excuse, right?), so this kind of thinking has had to take a back-seat to more pragmatic concerns...like watching Battlestar Galactica [reimagined]...

So Mofast Manna tagged me to participate in a meme wherein I am supposed to tell my life story in six words of undefined length.  

Okay...Here goes!

The singularity of being and nothingness

I am proud and excited to announce the relaunch and redesign of my web design portfolio - singularityconcepts.com .

This redesign has been long needed (I never really liked the original), and I am very pleased with the final outcome.

For this redesign, I not only took a radically different approach to the aesthetics, but I also retooled the purpose of the site.  Originally, I tried to pass off singularityconcepts as a multi-person design firm, utilizing "we" to refer to work that, honestly, only "I" do.  For this redesign, I ditched the disconnected feel of that kind of language and have switched to making this site a personal web technology portfolio of sorts for myself.  

This means radical changes for existdissolve.com as well.  From now on, all of my technology-related posts will happen at singularityconcepts. For those who read this blog (all 3 of you) and are bored by my ramblings about web design, those days of languish are over.  And for those who like that sort of stuff, you will have to change your bookmarks :).  To compensate for this, I am going to endeavor to be more regular in my theological postings.  Life around my house is starting to normalize, so I am hoping to get back into a healthy schedule of reading and writing in addition to the web projects I have in progress.

Anyway, take a second to check out singularityconcepts.com if you get a chance, and either here or there, let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Ok, so I know it's technically Saturday while I'm writing this, but I wanted to get down these Good Friday reflections before the weekend is over...

In pulpits across the country this weekend, congregations will hear various messages about the meaning of Easter: Christ's death and resurrection, the triumph of Christ over sin and damnation, etc.  Obvoiusly, these are fitting subjects to pursue.

However, when we think of Christ's death and resurrection, what does it mean beyond the sin-oriented connotations?  That is, is the cross merely about forgiveness of sins and the defeat of the powers of evil, or it is possible to find even more basic threads of meaning?

For example, is there a primal meaning in Christ's death and resurrection for existence itself?  Let me explain.

We live in a universe that, according to the best evidence, is at least 15 billion years old.  This history of temporal existence is marked by cycles of life and death, decay and new birth.  Stars grow, age and then spectacularly supernova, spewing in their deaths the seeds of "life" that will become the incubators for yet-to-form stars.  Animal life is similar: we grow, age and reproduce, the energies of our lives being passed on (whether through genetic information, assistance with survival, etc.) to prime the ground for the springing into life of new beings.  

As we look at the universe and, more granularly, at our own species, then, we see a dance of life and death, becoming and fading.  Rather than something that is alien and unnatural, we find that this interplay of life and death is, in a very real sense, how the universe "is."  Neither has a moral equivalency to the other, for both walk hand-in-hand in the unfolding of the divine plan for creation.

Now while the rest of the universe has no problem with this arrangement, and goes on in blissful ignorance, humans get tripped up on the reality of death-in-the-universe.  Whether it is something inherent to being self-conscious, or perhaps because humanity's sinfulness has caused us to take an unnaturally close examination of the meaning of our lives in relation to the dance of life and death in the universe, the fear of death is overwhelming to most.  We live our whole lives running from it, scarcely realizing that at every step of growth and movement we participate in the greate dance, ever giving ourselves over to it more completely.  Because we become so self-absorbed with the question of persistence beyond our inevitable un-becoming, death is the ultimate existential taboo, the great moral terror that rules over all.

So to overcome this great existential crisis, we attempt to shore up our personal existence against the overwhelming march of life and death by suggesting an existential transcendence over the same.  We are immortal souls placed in mortal containers, it is said, and when the shell passes we--our true, immortal selves--will persist.  But even with such a brilliantly devised escape from the "problem" of mortality, we are hounded by the nagging terror of losing the self-conscoiusness which we hold so dearly, and ostensibly curse our mortality to sanctify the immortal.

Into this conflagration comes the Incarnation of very God in Christ, and Christ's death and resurrection into the newness of life in God.  But what does this mean in light of the history of the universe?  In my mind, the juxtaposition of the history of the universe and the reality of Christ's death and resurrection is one of the most profound truths that could possibly be comprehended.  You see, immortal souls do not need a resurrection.  If we--our "true" selves--are defined not by our mortality and "creatureliness," but rather by some abstract metaphysical principle of ontology, then the resurrection is moot, for "we" would persist in being beyond the cessation of mortal experience.  In such a scenario, the resurrection is an odd appendage and might be understood as even a unneeded hindrance to an existence of immortal soul-life.

Yet as the history of the universe and our own experiences in life clearly reveal, we--our true selves--are not simply embodied immortality; rather, we are products of the universe in which we live, the sons and daughters of the interplay of mortality--life and death.  But interestingly, when this perspective is assumed, an entirely new vista of meaning is opened for contemplating the life, death and resurrection of Christ.  The meaning of the Incarnation, is exploded wide, for in the coming of God to creation, we begin to see more radically the immense love of God.  Rather than coming merely to "rescue" us from sinfulness, the Incarnation is a beautiful manifestation of God's care and valuation of creation.  It is the story of a God who loves the finite so much that God enters into the primal existence of creation that it might be assumed into the very life of God; the Creator has become, in Christ, the created so that the creation might share in the abundant and eternal life of God.

But even more profoundly, the resurrection of Christ sheds light on the seeming meaninglessness of the cycles of life and death in our universe.  Christ did not enter into the resurrection life of God simply through Incarnation.  Rather, like the seed which must first die before it can spring to the newness of life, it was in death that resurrection was granted unto Christ by the Father.  Yet lest we miss the point, notice how closely Christ's life, death and resurrection mirror the cycles of life which have already been outlined.  It is the epic drama of God embracing creation not simply as something to be possessed, but rather as a reality in which very God will participate fully, even to the death of Christ, the God-man.

So what is this all moving towards?  Let us grant that the life-death-resurrection of Christ is somehow corollary to the experience of mortal existence in the universe.  What does it mean?  

If it is truly God who is in Christ and who is bringing into the life of God the whole of creation through the Incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, then we must certainly reevaluate the nature of the universe.  That is, if Christ, in his life-death-resurrection, is somehow an archetype for the nature of that which Christ subsumes in his person, it is no longer possible to look on the history of the universe as a series of random, chaotic and meaningless occurences.  To the contrary, as God in Christ has taken unto Godself these very cycles of existence, it is clear that the structure of such a universe is a providential act of God, a setting of the stage for the ultimate fulfillment of the divine plan for the cosmos in the person and work of Christ.  These cycles of life and death, from the very first moments of space-time, have been moving, building and working towards God's design for creation, the making of all things new in Christ through resurrection.  As Christ's coming marks the ultimate unfolding and fulfillment of God's creative work, so in death and resurrection Christ sums up, or recapitulates the whole history of life and death, revealing them to be the handiwork of very God.

But further, such conclusions force us to resist the temptation to reduce the meaningfulness of resurrection to the salvation of the "immortal" soul.  Rather, it seems that the story of God's plan in the history of creation as revealed in Christ is that God has come not to simply to save immortal souls, but to more thoroughly to grant newness of life and perpetuation of existence to that creation which God created mortal and finite.  In the resurrection of Christ, it becomes plain that the universe's history of the dance of life-and-death is not something alien and undesired by God; rather, it is the mysterious unfolding of God's plan for the completion of God's creative work in the newness of life granted in resurrection.  Thus, in a master brush stroke, the lines of salvation as realized in Christ's death and resurrection are exploded beyond the narrow bounds of forensic justification or the procurement of a final destination for the immortal soul.  Much more profoundly, the life, death and resurrection of the Saviour reveals that the whole of our beings--life, death mortality and existense itself--is being transformed radically to participate in the everlasting life of the Father, a life which is never ending and whose light shall shine eternally.

So as we contemplate the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection, let us remember intently that its meaning is not constrained merely to conceptions of forgiveness and justification, but is expanded infintely to powerfully proclaim the fulfillment of God's creation as realized in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.