Mid-life Lesson #25: God is not God... except when God is

Christians have found it easier to imagine the kind of 'intervening God' the skeptics have denied and a lot harder to imagine the kind of utterly human 'God' Mark seems to be describing.

Which is why I've simply never been that interested in philosophical debates about the God of abstractions. I'll leave that to others. But as a Christian I'm immensely interested in "the story of Jesus as the story of Israel's God" (to quote a chapter title in N.T. Wright's new book).

For all that we talk about Jesus (and frankly we could talk a lot more about Jesus than we do), our daily patterns and thoughts seem continually to drift away from the encompassing, consummating, recapitulating, and captivating quality of the Human One.

Why do we constantly look away? Why are we so often tempted to peer into the hidden God and all the dangers attending there (Pandora's box), when the God we know in Christ is hiding in plain sight?

Ask me where God is in the your walk in the woods, and I may not have a good answer. From day to day I drift between panentheism, pantheism, and straight up agnosticism on that one.

Ask me rather whether Jesus is the recapitulation (thank you Irenaeus) of Israel and humanity, the Father's summary statement of it all--and more than that, ask me about divinization and the deification of the human in Christ (thank you Maximus the Confessor and John of Damascus).

Then we can talk!

And this Jesus who is recapitulation, source of deification, and so much more--this Jesus is also the human one who was circulating around the neighbor-hood.

Because God is not God... except when God is.