Posted by johnboy on July 15, 1999 at 08:24:26:
In Reply to: God in all... posted by april on July 11, 1999 at 18:28:53:
>>>re: jboy, I miss you! Where you been?<<<
vacation
>>>Bede Griffiths says, "The Church also belongs to this world of 'signs.' The doctrines and sacraments of the Church are human expressions or signs of the divine reality, which are likewise destined to pass away."<<<
recall the Stendl-Rast treatment of the "mystical core of organized religion" and my take-off on same in "progressive catholics are gift"? how would you interpret this in the light of those writings?
>>>He goes on to say, "Christ also is the 'sacrament' of God. He is the sign of God's grace and salvation, of God's presence among men. This sign will also pass when the reality of the thing signified,is revealed. For as St. Paul describes it, 'Then shall the Son himself be subject to God, that God may be all and in all' (1 Corinthians 15:28). (Bede Griffiths, p. 75.): How do you interpret this?<<<
caveat, probably the easiest way to tell an inadvertent lie is to speak about the Trinity; ergo, for starters, i am effabling about the Ineffable and recognize that, even as we are invited to ever penetrate the Mystery, we are certainly not attempting to explain it away
at the end of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius we are invited to a "Contemplation to Attain Love" and we also consider the meaning of the mystery of the Resurrection---in this consideration, we might ask the question: "What did the Resurrection mean for Jesus?" and we'll come up with many replies, such as: 1) the Father's exclamation of "Job well done!"; 2)the Father's affirmation of Jesus' humanity; 3) the victory over absolute evil and the triumph over sin and death; etc ad infinitum (i challenge anyone to exhaust the meaning of this God-Event!)
we then ask ourselves, what does the Resurrection mean for me? for US? and in our recognition that sin is social, we also recognize that grace is social and we might come up with the answer that the Resurrection means for us PRECISELY what it meant for Jesus! and that is "job well done!" and victory over sin and death and an affirmation of our humanity
so i am suggesting that Bede is certainly NOT saying that the bodily resurrected, human-divine Jesus will pass away but rather, because we will ALL be transformed, our experience of Reality with a capital "R" will "give way" to a new order
our whole life and existence are made up of ongoing liminal experiences, of construction and deconstruction, as we pass from image to image and glory to glory, as we experience the rhythm of the apophatic and the kataphatic, as we go thru death and rebirth and all manner of Paschal mysteria
these deconstructions, for the Christian, don't mean annihilation but rather mean death giving way to new birth
the deaths of a human being and of the cosmos as we know it are profoundly cataclysmic, are major deconstuctions but they are not annihilations but rather are transformations and on a eschatological scale that we can hardly fathom
in this sense, i think Bede is talking about theological constructs, signs, symbols and metaphors "passing away" but certainly not the divine-human second person of the Trinity as a personhood-reality
this is like the first week of the Spiritual Exercises where we consider proper notions of God and then proper notions of self; it quite simply is a Spiritual Exercise that we engage endlessly throughout life until the Eschaton which is steeped in Mystery
i think of Fr Roger Moag who told 3 of his students (the Unholy Trinity is how he referred to them) that, for the intellectually-inclined, the Resurrection would be a very intellectually stimulating experience! an understatement indeed!
johnboy