4.14.25 - Palm Sunday and the Temporality of Christ
I recently had an interesting email exchange with another online writer who I like (and is in many respects smarter and better at this than me). I'll share his work sometime separately, when it makes sense. Context unimportant, I rambled a bit about how why I think the historic and culturally specific features of Christianity are essential for its underlying theory of God. There are some people I've talked to, including myself in the past, who seem to think it's silly that a religion––which is supposed to offer some universal and timeless truths––should be so wound up in the history of a particular period in the middle east. Overtime, I have come to disagree with this view. Here is an excerpt from my email:
Take as a premise a, perfect, platonic God, living in the world of the forms, living in eternity. Outside time, he is omnipotent, but also impotent. Because you can't "do" anything. Nothing happens. Agency, which I think we identify with God, with the "word," is definitionally tied with cause and effect. Maybe this is a limitation of our perception, but I don't think it is. There's no reason to believe that there is a meaningful, atemporal account of agency, will, or power. For God to be God, he necessarily has to leave his platonic plane, and become temporal, limited, to be like us. In fact, the most Godly thing God can do is to subject himself to the extreme limitations of our material world, and then exhibit his agency in spite of it. God has to become a part of history to be what we think of as God, to be tied to the limitations of a certain culture, time, and place. In Christianity's case, Jesus became just another jewish messiah during the Roman empire. Why not be more . . . general? More universal? This question is central to Christian theology--the paradox is central to it! That God made himself a baby and was born, and "died." God being temporal, being historical in nature is essential to him being God, not a defect. The temporal must meet the eternal for either to have meaning . . . Anyways, don't think a purely "philosophical" religion is really possible. Such an enterprise would be inherently "secular."
Really, if you accept this idea (and I do) that agency is wound up with a certain relation to space-time, then God had to become incarnate at SOME time and place. No matter where and when it was, there would be the question, why then and there? Now, I don't claim to know or really care why Christ happened to be born when he was. To me its sort of a meaningless question, right? Christ's birth is THE event that everything is relative to. It's like asking why the North Pole is where it is. Christ defines our relationship to God and to Time. Really, Christiantiy starts a new kind of time . . . I'll articulate this another time, but I think there's actually good work here already and I remember my Professor in undergrad talking about Saint Paul and time . . . https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Time-Life-Temporality-Christ-ebook/dp/B0BW13WS6D#:~:text=Standard%20interpretations%20are%20that%20Paul,but%20rather%20that%20they%20overlap.
The point is, I reject the idea that a unviversal God must be one dismbedded from time and place and culture. I don't think such a god would have much meaning to us. What would such a God be? An idea? A set of axioms? If God has such a nature, we might as well think of him as just math, or synonymous with reality or nature itself, and that basically becomes deism, which frankly I think is a whole lot of nothing. No, God, I think, is synonymous with the Will, the Word, Agency . . . God is not synonymous with Universe, God is the masculine, agentic force that sparked the birth of the Cosmos . . . if anything the purely material Universe is this inert, feminine substrate, like an unfertilized ovum . . . this would somewhat explain the mystery of God being described in masculine terms when he is in some sense supposed to be above such distinctions. I think that without God there is nothing, but it wouldn't be precisely correct to identify God with everything . . . God is the Word that makes the World incarnate, but not exactly World itself. And Jesus is God incarnate, and to be incarnate is to be in, not outside of, spacetime.
Sometimes, these things can be visualized, vaguely in the mind's eye, but not perfectly articulated.
But a God made incarnate in a time and place is one us fleshy humans can contend with in our material world. It's one where palm leaves have a special meaning, where we sit in Church, fiddle with them, tear them up, and burn them the next year. Where we put their ashes on our forehead. Where we sort of worship Jesus's mother. Funnily enough, the historicity, cultural specificity, and incarnate nature of Christ are all invitations to worship God in ways that feel, well, pagan.
Happy Palm Sunday.
knxnts