Friday, May 11, 2007

direct from the source

God speaks everywhere, always. But that doesn't mean that every person and thing is equally reflective of the divine. You could read the W Hotel promotion book as scripture, and undoubtedly God is in there, somewhere. But other people and things are better sources of divine wisdom a) because that's the intent, and b) some people hear and reflect God's wisdom better than others.

It's a common piece of Unitarian Christology that Jesus was not actually God incarnate, but that Jesus did hear and reflect God's wisdom better than others. Some would say better than any others. Some would even say Jesus did it perfectly, in which case he would in a sense by an incarnation of God (God's wisdom in human form) but the Unitarian difference being that Jesus still did what he did as a human being, ontologically exactly the same as the rest of us, and doing only what all of us could do.

But the problem with Jesus as a source of learning God's wisdom, is that we don't actually have Jesus directly. If God did speak to Jesus, and Jesus heard and reflected accurately, even perfectly, we still only have Jesus through other people. And BIblical scholars tell us that no writer of the New Testament actually met Jesus. So that Divine Wisdom, as pure as it once was, is pretty muddied by the time it comes to us.

And that's the problem with every wisdom source, excpet one. Only in one wisdom source can the wisdom of God be intuited directly, or close to, without being transmitted and diluted through other people's experience. And that's the experience of God each of us has for ourselves, in our own minds and hearts. We're still mixed up in the transmission. We don't hear perfectly. And we interpret what we hear through our own biases. But that's still at least one step closer to God than we can be through any other channel.

No comments: