INTRO
In this series we will look into the distant past to see how a famous Religious movement unintentionally helped marginalize God and fragment our contemporary lives.
Over the course of 500 years, we will watch theology and money, power, science, and human creativity drift apart, then go to war with each other.
Not just because tracing this disintegration helps us understand contemporary conflicts.
Not just because of the strange beauty that can be found watching things fall apart.
And definitely not because we think some long-lost glory days held all things in perfect harmony.
We do this to give you permission
to pay attention to the deep intuition telling you the things we seek to understand and use when we do things like science and politics, economics and art, really do want to belong together, to help you see that we cannot know and use these things well if we continue to ignore their desire for belonging.
We do this to fuel an imagination for wholeness.
So for us, this peek into the distant past is not really about the past,
but a future integrated in Christ.
This episode, we look at how the fumbling of a healthy academic debate about God unintentionally helped fragment our world.
STORY
In this episode, we look back into the late medieval period to see how a shift in our understanding of what we mean when we say the word "God" opened the door for some massive, unforeseen, and definitely unintended, consequences that still shape the way we today understand and live in our world.
At the end of the medieval period, and the dawn of the Reformation, Christianity was an institutionalized worldview.
And at the core of this worldview was a certain understanding of the nature of God. Specifically, an understanding of what it means to say God is Transcendent. And this Christian conception of transcendence had two prongs.
First:
It was understood that God is radically distinct from all created reality. In that sentence, "radically" doesn't mean "wildly, but in a way that's kind of cool." It's built from the Latin word radix, r-a-d-i-x, which meant "root." So, when Christians said God is radically transcendent, they meant that at the deepest, most important and fundamental levels, God is not like any other thing.
You see this expressed over and over in the greatest Christian literature. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, wrote - quote - "What does anyone say when they speak of you?" - end quote. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that God is so "otherly other" that God shares no genus in common with creatures.
To understand that, lets unpack Aquina's use of that word "genus." This was all before the development of modern biological taxonomies. So it doesn't mean the same thing that the word "genus" does when we're categorizing all biological life. In contemporary taxonomies, the human genus would only group us with our previous human ancestors like Neanderthals.
Aquinas, however, was using the word "genus" in a more radical way. For him, and the philosophers of his day, a genus was any philosophical category of things that share enough common traits or characteristics that they could be divided into sub categories. So he wasn't just talking about different categories of animal life. What he was talking about a completely different kind of life.
If you think of genus as a kind of conceptual container, you see what aquinas was trying to do. He was guarding us against thinking there is some container grand and expansive enough to hold both God and anything else. That would make that other concept something that transcends even God in some way, would would also make God, in some way, dependent on that other thing.
But, according to early Christian thought, God is not partially transcendent, or part of some transcendent reality, but God is transcendent reality. God does not live and move in any other thing, but, by definition - all reality lives and moves and has it's being in God.
For a more detailed exploration of this, see the episode we just re-released a few weeks ago on what, by definition, classical theism means when it says the word, "God."
For our purposes in this episode note that for ancient theologians, God's transcendence didn't mean God goes beyond the limits of our power or our lifespan or knowledge, God even transcends being. However we can understand what it means for something to exist, God is beyond that, too.
This meant that when people like Aquinas said "God is everywhere," and "My hat is on the desk," they did not, in each sentence, mean the same thing with the word "is."
[MUSIC]
Let's talk about grammar for a little bit, because the key to understanding what I just said lies in the predicate of each sentence.
A predicate is a part of a sentence that has a verb and says something about the subject. In the sentence, "My hat is on the desk," "my hat" is the subject, "is" is the verb, and so "is on the desk" is the predicate because it tells us something about my hat. In the sentence "God is powerful," the predicate, "is powerful" tells us something about the subject, God.
To preserve God's transcendence, Thomas Aquinas said we cannot not predicate anything to God in the same way we would predicate it to us. If aquinas said the king is powerful and God is powerful, the difference in his mind would not simply be that God has more power than the king. Aquinas, would understand God's power to be a different kind of power than the power had by the king, not just a greater amount of the same thing.
And this rule applied, importantly, even for being. aquinas would not even use the straightforward term "being" to talk about God, he would call a woman or man a being, hats and pencils would be beings, but not God. Aquinas always called God the "sheer act of to-be" itself.
But our inability to predicate anything to God in the same way we would predicate it to ourselves, doesn't mean our talk or knowledge of God falls into total darkness or nonsense. Here, Aquinas borrowed from Aristotle's use of analogy.
Note that any analogy hinges on a creative play between likeness and difference. If I make an analogy between, say, my wife and a lion, you should be confident I do not mean I have married a literal beast with fur and an instinctual desire for raw meat. Whatever point of similarity holds between my wife and a lion -- say a courageous protectiveness -- the point of similarity tells you something about my wife precisely because there are also, so many more, other ways my wife is not like a lion.
So while we could never say, in a straightforward way that we exist in the same way God exists, we can say so analogically. And with this it's always important to remember two things. One, whatever analogy we make between us and God, the point of difference is precisely what allows the analogy to really communicate something to us. And two, wherever there is some point of likeness, God doesn't just have more of that thing, but also different kind of that thing.
This is the transcendent God ancient and medieval Christians believed they communed with and talked about.
[MUSIC]
But, in the Christian worldview, this transcendence came with a second prong, which was this: because God was not limited the way other things are -- and they made an especially big deal about God transcending the limits of space and time -- God was understood to be free to be intimitaly close to every part of Creation.
The most succinct and clear way I can articulate the difference that constitutes God's transcendence: instead of being like any thing, God is the source of every thing. If we can say a thing exists, God is not just near to it, or approaching it, but if it exists, God is the source of it.
So in the very same book we quoted above, St. Augustine could also say that God is, quote, "... More intimate to me than I am to myself."
And Christians put this belief in God's transcendent presence into practice at each worship gathering when they handled, tasted, and even ingested the divine presence in the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist.
[MUSIC BEGIN]
But then some of Aquinas' younger academic contemporaries started to argue that we should mean the same thing when we say we exist and that God exists. And this grew into a debate over whether we should understand God's transcendence to extend to and beyond being itself, of if God's transcendence should be centered in the immensity of God's power and the mystery will.
Which all sounds like a very abstract and high-minded academic debate, because it was. For centuries. And this is exactly what allows me to make my main point: I want us to ask the question, "What was it that allowed this to remain a high-minded academic debate?"
Think about how this year, families could not stand to get together for Thanksgiving because they had broken down into warring factions over issues that, if pressed, no one would have been able to give an account of the finer points of the science or philosophical arguments underwriting their respective opinions. Think about that, and it becomes a marvelous wonder that the debate over the nature of God was able to remain just an academic debate.
That is, until the Reformation
[MUSIC]
Before the Reformation, the medieval Catholic institutional structures and practices operated very much like I do as a dad when my two boys are fighting. Most of the time, one of my boys decides to just give up and run away. That is when I get to be the one that says, "No. You have a point and your brother needs to hear you out. We are going to maybe take a little break to cool off. But then we're getting back together in the same room and we're going to figure this out."
When a controversy developed around a new a idea, the institutional unity allowed previous Christians to evaluate, refine, and integrate what was good or true, together, without fragmenting and utterly turning on each other in violence.
But after Luther's requests for debate were ignored, then denied and attacked. It didn't take long for Luther's critiques to shift from ideas to key practices, and then toward the church itself.
And when Luther and his supporters responded to Luther's excommunication by simply forming another church, it was like providing a different structure that allowed the warring siblings to avoid each other and stew in resentment and instead of figuring out some way to work together, spend their time and energy coming up with new ways to defeat the other.
And once the door was opened to this way of doing things, the fragmentation spread at an exponential rate. One of Luther's earliest supporters was named Ulrich Zwingli. But less than a decade after Zwingli supported Luther following his excommunication, Luther and Zwingli had a formal and passionate debate about what is really going on with, guess what, the Bread and the Wine in the Eucharist. And when they failed to reach an agreement, guess what resulted.
Over the next century, religious controversy only multiplied. And so did the wars. So eventually people gave up on the idea of religion being the thing that could hold humanity together. A movement that came to be called the Enlightenment arose that experimented with the idea that human reason might be the thing that could hold us together. But after WWI decimated a continent and gutted a culture build on reason, only to have the rest of the 20th century quickly prove to be, by far, the bloodiest century of human history, enough people gave up on Reason, too, for a new postmodern movement to arise. But even with it's efforts, we still can't have a nice Thanksgiving dinner, let alone a good debate about God, without our differences breaking us apart.
We are the children of the Reformation's fragmentation. To do our little part in the middle of it, in conversation that follows, Julius and I zero in on the point where this began: the difficulty we face in talking about God, then we explore why that is necessary before we try to engage the practical consequences of our fragmentation.
DISCUSSION [Auto-Generated Transcript]
Julius: Welcome back to the podcast that is named “All Things” (in my attempt to try and be fresh with the intro…)
We're picking back up on—this isn't the first episode of the new series, but kind of diving into the bold claim that we made last week, about how—I mean the broader claim of trying to understand history not just as disconnected sets of events that have no bearing on our reality now, but also more specifically we started talking about the event in Christian history called The Reformation and how that ripples out and affects us today—even like Christians and non-Christians alike.
And so diving into the specifics of exactly what that affects today, we're talking about God. Which is perhaps the biggest—
Wilson: Always the topic, never the topic.
Julius: I know. Yeah, exactly. So just to dive straight into it, can you walk us through how the theological and philosophical shifts that happen, that we outlined in the story there, how those shifts ripple out into consequences that we, we feel and experience in our current day conversations about God—I mean, whether it's as Christians or as non-Christians in like the discourse on God…
Wilson: Bottom line is we can't talk about… We were, we… Like and potentially that we never can. It's, it's a hopeless endeavor. But given our current state, we find it near impossible to actually communicate about the topic of God to actually do, to make… to make God really a subject of debate.
Yeah, we see it all over the place. You can, you find it on YouTube, you'd find it on Reddit forums. You…you find it all over the place where— and it's not just, you know, some clear “us and them.” It's not always some like, you know Catholic Bishop or an atheist philosopher debating that happens, but you, you even have it like within different groups of Christians and different groups of theists, you know… Catholic, Catholic, and, and Jewish, or, or Jewish and Islamic, you know, and.
Julius: Yeah.
Wilson: Or a religious person and some quasi-agnostic philosophy professor and all these places you have… We have, we have lots of examples of people getting on very public forums and claiming to have debates about God. But what we're saying is 98-99% of those struggle to actually talk about God in the sense that like the deepest, the strongest, the, the best of—and not just Christian— of a theistic tradition and philosophy would would hand to us. So it, I mean, it… there’s nothing more confusing or frustrating than when you're sitting down with somebody and you, you pour a whole lot of energy and passion into something and at the end you realize you're not talking about the same thing.
But it's a totally different thing. Like that's frustrating enough. It's a totally different thing. When people spend hours and hours preparing, they bet their lives on their position. And, and then they pour out their energy and passion into debating this thing and then don't even realize that we didn't actually debate the thing. That like our felt experience. And I, what I hope this podcast would do is just name that for people. If you're, if you're somewhere not fully committed— well, I, I guess it's not, it's not, well… let's stick with that part.
If you're someone that's not fully committed, it can be incredibly confusing and frustrating just to hear these debates play out and you know, it matters and you want to, you know, do a good job, to be diligent and thoughtful in your response and not just judge other people. Right?
But then you try it. It's like. Part of what I would hope this would do is, is maybe name that frustration you feel when you've tried— and this is part of why it can feel so inaccessible is, as a culture, we really, really struggle to actually talk about this and this can be true too. So that's like, you know, the undecided, but that leads to the felt experience of the believer and convicted unbeliever to cause wherever you are looking for to both like test and potentially strengthen or revise your position, when you get in to listen to the other things, it feels like… eh, I mean maybe it just helps to know you're frustrated at the end because you tried to listen to something that didn't really get to something.
Julius: Yeah, I feel like I mean, just on a broader— our broader cultural curs is, I feel like we have a hard time communicating period… just in general about anything, just that we're so fragmented that with most things have so of substance that we can't assume that we're working from the same definitions and axioms.
And so, especially when it comes to… the transcendent source of all reality/being— which is not even… which those categories aren't even often what people associate with God.
Wilson: Yeah, that's I, I tell… So one of the, one of the most fruitful places that I've found to like have to engage this issue is in the classroom. And if you, if you're not aware of it my classroom is a classroom at a private Christian university. So not all of the students are Christian. Not all the students are theists in any way.
And, and more and more I'm having students from other religious backgrounds too. But in, in that kind of context, the most fruitful way I've had to put it is to, to say…
“All right— so I'm speaking directly to those of you in the room that still consider yourself Christian.” So to the Christians in this room I'll say one of the ways to test this, right. If, if you're, if you're moving towards a more Christian. And I, and I mean, that as in, as like… even that word has to be unpacked, you know. But what I mean by that is the, what I… what we take to be the strongest bits of the tradition that go back to the deepest roots, right… So, yes, biblical, but also like the, the first, you know, five-six centuries of Christian thought where, where people tried to define and clarify what we mean by biblical, you know, so the biblical witness and the witness of the church, and again, not just in the theological philosophical modes, but when the church lives in a certain way, right…
That that is distinct. That that would, would allow people to say, when we, when we trust this, when we commune with this God, like this is where it leads. So all of that, I would say… So like a focal point would be Acts 17, where Paul says to a group of non-Christians— a group of, and I don't mean pagan in a, in a disparaging way…
I mean, as this is what they were. It was there. So to a group of pagans, he says, look, I… So, what he's done is he's gone into the city and he's seen a lot of statues to their gods, right? And a lot of them are named, right, this… you've got a name for this God, and you have rituals for honoring this God, and you've got a name for this God, and you have certain civic festivals that honor this God and keep this God happy.
But I've noticed people that you're so religious that you've got a statue to an unknown God—right now here, here's the fun part. Paul says what you proclaim as unknown I want to proclaim to you as known. But let's, let's put a pin in that word “known” and understand that part of what we're trying to do is understand better what Paul really means when he says “I'm going to proclaim this God to you as known.”
So what you worship and proclaim as “unknown,” I made a claim to you as “known,” right? The Creator, the source of all things, right? And he says to him, This God has come to us in Jesus of Nazareth. Right.
But look, here's, here's what Paul says about him… and he quotes a pagan poet about this and says, “This God is not far from any of you, but closer to you than you could possibly imagine.”
This God is not far from any one of us for as some of your own poets have said, “In this God, we live and move and have our being.” So that God, right. That's witnessed to, that’s attested to in, in the Christian tradition that God, if you, if you really like, just set that down as like a pole in the ground, as a starting point to begin your journey into knowing, understanding God, one of the, one of the ways you can test if you're on track or not, I tell them, is look at, look at how you think about…
Look at how you pray to God. Look at the expectations that you form around the relationship you have with God. So if you're communing with God, what do you expect that to be like? If you pray to God and asked for something, what do you expect this to be like, if in, if in this, what you're thinking about or expecting looks more like Superman or Thor, you're on the…
You're on the wrong track because in him, all things live, move and have our being, everything. Right. So like what's not included in that. And so would Superman or Thor be included in that? Yeah.
I mean, if there is some super-human and, and in that sense, you could say divine, lowercase “d,” but truly divine, lowercase “d,” but still, truly divine being like Thor or Superman… even that being would live, move and have their being in God. And so if you're looking for a God that's off somewhere like Thor in as… and, and you've got to somehow get Thor's attention. Cause there's some big problem that you can't solve. It's it's too much for you. And so you asked Thor for help and you got to get Thor's attention. And Thor has got to get Heimdall to open up the rainbow bridge, to shoot Thor to all of that stuff. All of that.
It has its reality in God accord. The God that Paul is directing attention to is, is that so even it's not, you can't reduce it to Thor or Superman, some supra d-d or some supra, divine being that if we could get their attention, say the right things might shoot down and take care of a problem that we can't handle all of that.
And so that's like in the Christian imagination, I just say part of, part of how you come to a truer knowledge of God. According to what Paul is talking about in acts is to problematize some of our conceptions of God, even as Christians,
Julius: Okay.
Wilson: that cuts both ways because you could say that also to people that are more of a, of an atheistic or materialistic. they're looking for is, you know, the let's look at like the law or the principal that brings this thing about, and if you confuse God with the law or the principal, you've made the same mistake.
Now you're not thinking in a, in a mythological vein or mode of thinking like Thor, Superman, you're, you're not thinking that vein, you're thinking in a scientific Mode or vein, but if you're looking for the law, the power, that sort of thing, that would, that would explain some set of events or the existence of a certain thing, like here on your desk, you're, you're making the same category missed.
And this is where people don't understand, we think, oh no, we're thinking so, so, so different. You're thinking mythological, you're thinking some super human being I'm thinking scientific and empirical, but if you get what Paul is saying here, you're, you're making the same mistake. If you're looking for the law, the principle, because the same thing, just like you would say, okay, well, no, no, no, no, no.
Where did the war find door's strength? Where does Thor's breath and being come from? And what about that rainbow bridge that allowed him to magically pop down here? All of that, you know, all of that lives and moves and has its being in God. That's a different, more mysterious place. Same thing here. What about that law?
What about that principle that lives and moves and has it, where does it live and move and habits bringing all of it comes from God. And one of the people that I most respect, even though I do not share well, and he recently passed, So I do not share his final convictions or conclusions. Is Stephen Hawking.
So his is the dude. He brilliant. And he was a cosmologist like his, his whole thing was how does this stuff get here and why? And he stayed, he stayed within like a naturalistic, a more materialistic. Framework, as far as the things he would talk about and explore, but he was, he was a lot more intellectually, honest than a lot of the people that get, you know, honestly, they'd get more subscribers and likes on YouTube.
But because even Hockings has said. Okay. So here's the best we can come up with with hypotheses and explanations and equations, but even he was haunted and he said, quote, but what is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe why does the universe go through all the bother of exist?
Like even now at that point, at that point, the cosmologist and he wouldn't venture to make a confession of faith and to, you know, to, to make a whole lot of decisions or, or bet his life on that. But at that moment, what is it? The priests fire into the equations there. He's finally asking a truly theological question.
If we let this picture of God from acts 17 shape what we mean by theater.
Julius: So you've started to move the conversation from if we've begun from a place. Exploring the consequences of how the reformation made the or at least got the ball rolling with what it took culturally and philosophically to get fragmented enough to a place where we can't even talk about the same thing when we're talking about God.
So we've talked about like an intellectual. Philosophical like the implications of like how it has jumbled our discourse, but we've started to move into the implications on our lived experience of how, when our understanding of what God is, is like that superhuman demigod from outside of like the sky that we need to conjure up that.
It creates a different set of expectations, both for Christians and non-Christians on what God is supposed to be. And so for a non-Christian that becomes like, oh, that's a silly idea like that. And it. makes it like any real exploration of the divine kind of like they can write it off because if it's in that category, then it's, oh, it's like, it's silly.
So either on a lived experientials level, it it leads to, non-Christians like not taking the divine seriously maybe, or like at least this way of thinking about it. Christians who I like, I think that that view of God is just as common for people inside the church. And on, on like a lived reality level, it creates these expectations for God that often honestly lead to like disappointment because.
We still like it's, it's so common to then view God as like that Thor superhuman figure that we like, or, or like a genie or something, and that we need to somehow like pray hard enough to twist this divine power. To like come down and change things for us, that working from those categories leads to like, in our lived experience, like a constant either feeling like God is not listening to us or not active or not like doing what God is supposed to.
And that breeds. much disconnect and emptiness and hopelessness, I think. But if we're trying to move to a place where like, what if God is bigger than even all of that and like is on a far deeper level of what makes reality what it is that if we move closer to, like, what if w w of, as we move closer to like, God as like this mystery what does, what is the Christian hope for?
Like how we relate to. The divine mystery as something that is more than and deeper than just like a cause I feel like we can, maybe some of us want just like a God who's in this guy and comes down and that's like kind of easier.
Wilson: Yep.
Julius: But the, to explore something like what we're talking about, God is transcendent and mischievous and, and also like the source of all things that live and move and have their being like that feels like a lot more difficult and complex to,
Wilson: Yep.
Julius: to know what to do with it.
Wilson: So part of what you're really, really right to, to phrase it.
it's a, it's a, it's a very big, positive step forward. If, if what we're advocating is right. That what you've just done is a, is a positive step forward. When you said, when you phrased it as the hope for how did you say communing with this mystery? that
Julius: so. I think I was, I was hinting at like, something like convenient, but it was more of like a, if it's more like, Miss, like if it's mystery and transcendence, how do we relate to that?
Wilson: And that's. that?
is the way you asked the question. So we'll name it. So we're not just questioned, begging which in, in philosophy, by the way, this, this one's for free question begging doesn't mean, Ooh. Now this is the obvious question that is raised question begging means you tuck your conclusions in.
Your initial statements or your presuppositions, you rig the game. That's question begging. So as to avoid question begging we'll name that I, I F you've clarified there. What we would say is, is the goal or the hope that a deeper. W capital T more traditional and, but traditional doesn't mean the last 50 to 100 years in Western culture, traditional is like 2000 years and, and spans several like vastly, I mean, numerous very, very different cultures.
So the deeper. Traditional picture of God, the deeper. And again, this tradition too, just that this theistic tradition is spills beyond even just the Christian faith, but, but the iron man positions, the strongest things that would be offered by a broadly theistic position, if that's Right.
and good and true, which we're making the argument that it is, you've just helped us by clarifying what this would lead to it's communion with.
We are not, we're not advocating or talking about an explanation for everything. That's one of the places where both. People that will engage or theistic people that will engage these arguments and the opponents and contemporary debates make a mistake that if we're talking about God will find the explanation for everything. that's not what we're not talking about. An explanation for everything, whereas should, we're suggesting with this, that we draw from this deeper theistic tradition to help us commune with the. Not to find an explanation that will remove all mystery. This is, I mean, I get, I get really, really frustrated cause I hear it all the time in podcast.
I heard it recently on radio lab. I've heard it on stuff you should know, just, you know, not to call out, but to, to be concrete, but, and also just to, to not take a, just an oppositional fighter stance to say, I listened to the. A lot, because I love those podcasts. I've learned a lot from them, but I, I get frustrated there because often, and I've heard it in both of those recently, they'll say.
And now here at this point, you know, one of them was about the emergence of life in an evolutionary system. Right. And so the, the emergence of consciousness is a very mysterious. And still, if you take, if you take the goal of human knowledge to explain everything, consciousness is a, is a frustrating point.
It's a, it's a frustrating mystery for people. And so they would say on, on the podcast. And so here's the point where a theist will invoke God, but I don't like that because it removes the mystery. And I want to be like, no, no, no, no, no, no. If they're, if they're truly theist, they're deepening the mystery.
They are not removed. It's not a boom. Here's this thing. So swipe it away. It's a no, no, no, no. Now God becomes the point where we move deeper into the mystery. When we stop it here, we lock ourselves into our own rationalistic, tiny finite mind's ability to know, and we stay here. We, we it's the opposite.
We're we're. Putting up the boundaries and saying the mystery must firmly stay within these boundaries. If you're genuinely theistic, you're saying, okay, mystery, pull me out of my boundaries. That's a deeper kind of mystery. And what we're advocating is not that we would explain everything, but that, that we would, we would trust this as something that genuinely opens up an opportunity for us to. Go deeper into it. Didn't to commune with that mystery.
MEDITATION
We are convinced that our inability to talk about God shows us what's really been the issue though all the centuries of fragmentation and fighting that has proven to be the unintended fallout of the Reformation. We might think we are fighting over just what happens with the bread and wine or what determines what counts as valid knowledge or how to set up political systems and who has claim to what resources, but implicit in all of this is a deep disagreement about the nature of the relationship between ordinary things and ultimate reality.
That is why we are rooting this series in talking about how we think about God. It might seem, at first glance, like such an abstract issue. But the idea that God has the same kind of being that we do has massive practical implications.
It's not a perfect analogy, but a pretty good one that helps us see what's going on here is this: Think about two people talking over each other.
[CACOPHANY OF INDIVIDUAL NOTES]
Because we are talking about two things that are essentially the same kind of thing - these words and some other words - and because these similar things are happening in the same place and at the same time, they have to compete with each other.
If God shares the same kind of being with us, the same kind of power and presence that we have, then God must compete with us to be present and heard. God must either withdraw so we can be present, like one person being silent so the other may speak, or must overpower us to be effective, like one person shouting down another.
But if instead of thinking about two people talking at the same time, what if we just think about the difference between one speaker and the words they speak. That shift in the analogy makes it clear that we are not talking about the same kind of things.
You and your words can both be present and at work at the same time, in the same place, because you are not your words, but the source of your words.
[BEAT]
By the time of Luther, most of the Reformers had been deeply shaped by the idea that God definitely has more of everything it means to exist, but shares with us the same essential being.
So they might of thought they were debating how people commune with God in the Bread and the Wine - either through God's actual presence, or though our memories of past events that are evoked by the bread and wine. But the real issue always was, and still is, whether or not God has to compete with us and other ordinary things to be present to us.
But if God cannot be extraordinarily present in ordinary things like bread and wine, why would God be capable of being present in the other things we that tend to center our religious experience in. Why would God be able to meet and to speak to us in our memories and thoughts or emotions? Because, as neuroscience is learning and teaching us, thoughts and emotions involve ordinary things like chemicals and electrical currents. And how different are those things from calories, really?
But if God is the source of all these things, then God does not have to compete with any of these things to be present to us.
And if God is truly the source of All Things, then God is both the origin of all their massive difference and variety, and the one who can hold all this difference together in harmony.
[MUSIC FULLY COALESCES]
So here is why the way we speak and think about the transcendence of God is anything but a purely mental and abstract issue. One of the crucial tasks facing our age is finding something that can value genuine differences, and hold it all together in some kind of harmony.
In light of all our contemporary pain and conflict, people are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of our structures - because in more ways than we care to admit, we are still like ancient and medieval people, we too need structures that can help us engage difference and work through the tension without fragmenting into violence. But any idea or program or human vision will always have to compete with some other concept or social initiative to be heard and implemented.
Only communion with a genuinely transcendent God is capable of providing what we need. Only God's divine presence in ordinary things can enable us to imaging and build the kind of structures that can hold us together in non-competitive harmony. With out presence and work becoming something like the words that God speaks.