Category Archives: Eschatology

Secular Dogmatics / Secular Eschatology

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Part of the human condition is living in a world wherein teleology is an inescapable reality. What I mean is that in-built into our creatureliness is an innate notion that nature, or creation is heading somewhere; viz. that it has some sort of end. It isnā€™t just Christians who have an eschatology as part of their doctrine of creation [or as the mainstay of their doctrine of creation]; it isnā€™t just Christians who have a belief in last things, and how the cosmos, and the earth therein ends. The secular, because of the human condition, because ā€˜eternity has been set in our heartsā€™ (Eccl. 3.11), has a view towards the way the natural order will come to an end. True, the Christian versus the Secular view is dissimilar in some radical ways, but this is to be expected just as some can call Christ, LORD, and others cannot; because the others do not have the Spirit. This dissimilarity notwithstanding, creatures build intellectual and even spiritual constructs based upon the hollowed-out material left to them in the old-fallen-creation; insofar as the old creation has Godā€™s ratio, some might want to call it Logoi replete within it, here concepts of natureā€™s finitude and transitoriness help supply the secular with its own versions of the eschaton. These versions, the secularā€™s, are only able to be developed as a result of a sort of parasitic siphon on the actual eschatological reality as that has been Revealed in Godā€™s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Within the webbing of this Revelation the secular is given conceptual/intellectual access that helps illumine further what remains for them in the old-fallen-world order. In other words, itā€™s not as if the secular has no exposure to the Revealed reality of God in the taxis of the intellectual world order of ideas. Indeed, the secular has been shaped, ā€˜innately,ā€™ even as that is only given pressure for the secular in mostly unconscious ways, by the conceptual seeds broadcast this world over by the kerygmatic in-breaking of the Christian witness, as that has ruptured the horizon of this old-world-order with the Light of Godā€™s own beaming Eschatos in the face of the Christ; it is in this new horizon that that old-horizon can faintly sense orientations that remain dead to them, insofar as the Spirit has not hovered over them bringing the sprout of new lifeā€”the seed imperishable.

All of the aforementioned to say: The world order itself, as broken man experiences it, provides for a schema of the ā€˜endā€™ that ultimately bears witness to the fact that humanity has never nor will ever be alone. Fallen humanity, the secular, lives in a world that requires a response to its stimuli. The stimuli of this world is a reality that is extra nos (outside of us), a reality that is external to us grounded in the heavenly session of the Son of Man seated at the Right Hand of the Father. This pressure, even for the fallen humanity, makes such humanity squirm under the Light of Godā€™s forbearance; under the reality that this fallen humanity lives under the No of Godā€™s Yes in Jesus Christ. Such contradiction to the secularā€™s attempt to create a life out of the worldā€™s perceived nothings is precisely the point wherein humanity feels compelled to construct accounts of the ā€˜endā€™, as they couch that in their concepts of the ā€˜Beginningā€™ (protology), such that they hope to ā€˜innatelyā€™ mimic the reality pressed upon them without bowing the knee to this Ultimacy which they cannot escape. The secular has a concept of the beginning correlating to an end; not just in a linear sense, but in an apocalyptic sense. Colin Gunton helps illustrate what Iā€™ve been getting at thus far,

When we seek to speak of the eschatological dimension of creation theology, we should be careful to define what it is that we mean theologically. There are in currency a number of what can be called secular eschatologies, often scientific theories of the end of things in the observable universe, taking the form of the disappearance of everything in an immense black hole, a heat death of everything or the equivalent death by extreme cold. In response, some scientists have attempted to salvage from the wreckage some form of secular salvation, supposing that a kind of immortality might be attainable for the human race if something could be projected into eternity in computerised form. It must be said of all these that they are not truly eschatological, in the sense we shall explore, because they are simply or largely projections on the universe of forms of this-worldly experience. It is possible that some of them may signal an end of all things in a more radical sense, but it remains the case that the end of things as we know them is not necessarily identical with the End, just as speculation about the ā€˜big bangā€™, or whatever, is not the same as the doctrine of creation out of nothing.[1]

Gunton helps to reinforce some of my own inklings, and at the same time brings even greater precision as he notes the role that human projection plays in constructing naturalistic concepts of the beginning and end.

For my part, what I want to drive home, in the main, is that no man or woman can escape the conditions which they have been born into. And the harder they try the more precision they will offer in regard to the sort of mimicry they will achieve when they attempt to explain reality under the new world order within which they exist (but do not live); i.e. the New-Creation. I think this is important: The Secular animal only proves the reality of the cross of Jesus Christ as they attempt to continue to find some sort of harbinger in its Shadow side. What I am pressing is the idea that humanity is objectively oriented to God by the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ; whether they will acknowledge that or not. In their disacknowledgement of that they only ironically bear witness to Godā€™s No over them, and their fallen condition, while not participating in Godā€™s Yes for them in Jesus Christ. As a result, they live from the ā€˜kingdom of darknessā€™ and attempt to create a reality, even an eschaton for the human story, that is given fiery breath from their doomed father, the devil. The devil has been attempting to construct a kingdom out of the rot of his own choice to be against Christ rather than for him for millennia untold. Is it any surprise that his progeny in the dark underworld of this fallen world bears witness not only to the No of God, but to the tactics and tics of the devil himself?

[1] Colin E. Gunton,Ā The Triune Creator: A Historical And Systematic StudyĀ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), Loc 2961, 2966 kindle.

The Impossible Possibility: Heaven

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One day the impossible possibility will finally be possible in consummate form. Faith will become the concrete sight that it is even now, but in its fully living bodied-color. The dead grass will blow away once and for all, and all that will be left standing is the enduring and eternal Word of God (Verbum Dei manet in aeternam). And all those in participatory union with the Logos of God; indeed, all the saints, both militant and triumphant will finally come together in eschatological bliss, in the One who is blissful for us, the Eschatos of God, Jesus Christ. The brokenness, the woefulness, the despair, and angst, the doubts and anxieties, the unbelief and its heartache, will finally be put under the Savior’s feet; indeed, as He declares ‘the last enemy, death,’ is dead. The futility the unwilling world was put under will be doused by the springs of eternal life as they flow freely from the belly of the Son of Man for us, for the world. Even though we will, even though we do experience tragedy upon tragedy, thlipsis unimaginable in this fallen and broken world; take heart, Jesus says, for “I have overcome that world.” New creation has come, is coming afresh anew, and will finally come! Maranatha

The Christian Existence: Contra Systemic Dualisms

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The right and left binary represents a dualism that genuine Christian theology rejects. Dualism generally says that there are equal and opposing forces, light versus dark, in a cyclical battle of yin and yang. The Kingdom of God is grounded in the reality of God become [hu]man. There is no dualism, no competitive relationship between the fallen and unfallen; all of reality is subsumed within the singular person of Jesus Christ. Thus, Christianity, the Gospel comes with different expectations. The Christian is not in a loggerhead with the darkness, per se; the Christian moves and breathes from within the atmosphere of the heavenly Zion. This reality is not of this world, and thus not of the dualisms that often frame this world system. We are emissaries of the living God in the risen Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. In that sense we move differently than others, not being shaped by what the world optically presents to us as if it gets to determine reality by brute presence.

The aforementioned should have an impact on the Christian existence in this world. It should keep us moving towards and from the upward call in Christ Jesus. Politics, culture wars, and the like should never be defined by the whims and whams of the base person, the profane systems of thought progenerated by this world system; the evil age. Jesus is already reigning at the right hand of the Father (see 1 Cor 15), and will come once and for all riding on His white steed with the sword of God proceeding from His mouth. Maranatha

On Ethnic Israel and Jesus

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Given whatā€™s going on with Israel and Iran I jotted down some thoughts (elsewhere online) on Israel and how ethnic Israel continues to relate to the Man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ.

There is a right-wing movement among some so-called MAGA people who are highly antisemitic, or we could more accurately say: supersessionist. They have bought into the old rhetoric that Israel as a nation ceased to exist in 70AD, never to reunite again. But her ethnicity has always been vouchsafed in the Man from Nazareth (see Jeremiah 31). Her ethnicity transcends itself in its purpose as the Messiah bearer for the world. And yet, the promises made to the fathers remain irrevocable (see Romans 11:29). If the nation of Israel, as a people group ceases to be, this would entail that the Man from Nazareth, the Son of David, would cease to be. But since He cannot cease to be in his particularity as a regionalized man, then neither can the nation that bore him cease to be in its perdurance before God. And this is why, I would suggest, that whether leftist or rightist, antisemitism has continued to exist down throughout the ages. The Enemy of our souls seeks to kill, steal, and destroy anything that stands for the ultimate purposes of God; including the Jews. Rightists are just as malevolent as the Leftists, and of the spirit of this age; in the kingdom of darkness rather than in the kingdom of the Son of His love. The pattern has always been: ā€œto the Jew first, and then the Gentile.ā€ That motif has never changed.

Jesus is the true Israel; the Jew from Nazareth. The church is only the true Israel for supersessionists and some Catholics.

The whole Kingdom of Christ is contingent upon the fact that Jesus is the Son of David. Thatā€™s where his free election to be human was and is situated. Jewishness wasnā€™t abrogated by the ascension of Christ, Jewishness was amplified by the expansionism of becoming the one (Jesus) for the many in the organic fulfillment of both the Abrahamic and New Covenants, respectively (and all the covenants in between, Davidic in particular). The nation or eretz (Land) of Israel today isnā€™t the Kingdom, per se; but it is a foreshadowing and demonstration that God remains faithful to His promises; for the Jew first, then the Greek. Political Israel today isnā€™t the Kingdom of Christ, but it is a demonstration of Godā€™s faithfulness to His Word; which He willingly descended into in a Jewish body by design and grace. Only a Gnostic or Marcionite could think that God emptied His ā€œhuman shellā€ at the ascension. No Christian of canonical principle would ever affirm that ethnic Israel was superseded by the coming of the Son of Man. Lots of rubbish being pushed around in the ā€œChristianā€ church on this.

Problematizing a Development of Sacra Doctrina within the Church: With Reference to Peter of John Olivi

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Bernard McGinn writes the following with reference to the apocalyptic-theology-of-history present in the mediaeval theologian, Peter of John Oliviā€™s (c. 1248ā€”1298) thought:

The invective Olivi directs against the evidences of the carnal Church is concerned not only with the ecclesiastical abuses of the day, especially with avarice and simony, but also, like Bonaventure before him, with the use of Aristotle in theology. The ProvenƧal Franciscan also expressed belief in a double Antichristā€”the Mystical Antichrist, a coming false pope who would attack the Franciscan Rule, and the Great, or Open Antichrist, whose defeat would usher in the final period of history. Characteristic of Franciscan apocalyptic is his emphasis on the role of Francis as the initiator of the period of renewal and his hope for the conversion of all peoples in the course of the final events.[1]

Olivi was a student of the infamous mediaeval theologian, Bonaventure. But I thought this treatment by McGinn on Olivi was telling. Telling in regard to the patterns and thematics of theological development. Telling, in regard to how theologies and emphases often repeat themselves in various and all periods of theological development throughout history. As McGinn highlights, Olivi was concerned with a ā€œcarnal Churchā€; he was concerned with the imposition of Aristotleā€™s categories upon Christian theology (which of course Thomas Aquians was famous for doing). We also observe, that for Olivi, according to McGinn, he saw that the Catholic church itself had corruption riddling it throughout; he saw the Antichrist coming from within the Church, not without. This latter development is interesting to me because it reminds me of Martin Lutherā€™s view that the office of the Pope would finally produce the Antichrist (the Lutheran Church Wisconsin Synod still holds to this position in their confession). And then, we see in Olivi, a belief in something like a postmillennial understanding of the very end of history. He believes, according to McGinn, that the whole world will be Christianized prior to the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Many things stood out to me in this one paragraph on Oliviā€™s theology. The primary hook for me, and this wonā€™t be surprising to my readers, is that Olivi was critical of Aristotleā€™s presence in the development of the sacra doctrina within the Church. Olivi, like his teacher, Bonaventure, believed that Aristotle could only serve as an artificial grammar for articulating Christian doctrine. Such sucralose, in the minds of Bonaventure and Olivi, respectively, had no place in affecting a theology for the Church, insofar that Aristotle himself thought a construct of God as a pagan.

It is important for Christian folks in the 21st century to get beyond theology purely sourced from Twitter/X and other social media platforms. What the genuine student finds, if they study the books, is that things are much more complex and less concretized than they might want to think. There have been various strands of development, various traditions cultivated in the Churchā€™s history that transcend the parochial and sectarian and absolutized divides we see today on the interwebs. I think this one paragraph alone on Olivi helps to illustrate that point.

Within evangelical/reformed theology today there is a movement towards retrieval. And yet what this has come to mean, especially through the work of someone like Matthew Barrett and Craig Carter, is that what is really being retrieved is one strand of development that is Aristotelian/Thomist heavy; as if ā€˜Christian Aristotelianismā€™ was the only development present within the mediaeval and early and post Reformed churches. This simply is not the case; again, as our passage illustrates.

Conversely, I am anti-Aristotelian myself (no shocker there!) Some might think that this is because of my appreciation for the theologies of Barth and TF Torrance alone. Again, this is not the case. I was anti-Aristotelian way before I ever read Barth and TFT. I was exposed to the Bonaventure-Olivi thread of development twenty-three years ago in seminary. This thread was developed further with the sparker of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther; he looked back to such threads in the via antiqua through his direct mentor, Johann von Staupitz, and before him, Jean Gerson.

Anyway, this post is somewhat of a smorgasbord of hits on various issues; something like a Miscellanies. But I hope, at least, the reader might be able to better appreciate the ā€œproblematizedā€ nature of doctrinal development within the Church of Jesus Christ. In other words, I hope that folks might be alerted to the problem of reducing and then absolutizing oneā€™s pet positions. Surely, we ought to be convicted about the theological things we believe. But those convictions ought to first take shape (in a spiraling and continuous way) through the caldron of toiling with the sources (ad fontes) of the history of interpretation and development of the sacra doctrina.

[1] Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 205.

Contra a Christian Nationalist Christendom and the Crusades

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A few weeks back there was a debate on X with reference to the Crusades. Unsurprisingly there are certain Christian Nationalist groups who are promoting the legitimacy and value of the Crusades (and not Billy Grahamā€™s); attempting to justify them in the name of Christ. This all makes sense in the sense that these folks want a resurgence of a certain type of Christendom, primarily of a Protestant hue. I responded thusly,

The Crusades were a function of a Catholic ecclesiopolitical state. They were ostensibly carried out in the name of Jesus Christ; and for the preservation of the Gospel and all its entailments. The last thing Muslims saw, as the sword came crushing through their skulls, was the cross on the crusader’s shield. This was not done in the name of Christ, ultimately; but in the name of a sectarian Latin church who asserted that its authority was simply a prolongation of the incarnation of God on earth. This assertion is neither Christian, or Holy; and therefore, cannot be justified in the name of Jesus Christ.

On Amillennialism: Against the “Replacement Theology” Caricature

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The following is something I wrote in and around 2007; I was still a dyed-in-the-wool dispensationalist when I wrote this. But I was attempting to be as a critical as I possibly could be towards a hermeneutical system, and biblical eschatological position, that I had always been told was heretical and even antisemitic. I was told, by dispensationalism’s best teachers, that amillennialists engaged in a purely allegorical and idealistic interpretation of Holy Scripture; especially when it came to the theology and book of Revelation. And yet as I continued to study and press in further this simply was not the case whatsoever. Maybe some within the amil camp operated or operate that way, but that is not the majority report among amillennial exegetes; nor is it the historic position amongst amillennialists. I might qualify a little bit of what I wrote so many years ago (but not in substance). I turned amil publicly probably fourteen years ago now, and for many exegetical reasons (especially with the help of Richard Bauckham’s work on the book and theology of Revelation).

Some in my old church circles label anything that is not their hard classical dispensationalismā€”pretrib-premilā€”as ‘replacement theology,’ or more technically it has been calledĀ supersessionism.Ā This is the idea that all the promises made to ethnic Israel, once Christ came and the church was established, were taken over by the church spiritually; and of course this would be antisemitic, and thus antiChrist and heretical (since Jesus is the forever son of David, the forever Man from Nazareth). But this is not what historic amillennialism has entailed; at least not in the Protestant appropriation of it.

Let me add one qualification before I reshare what I wrote years ago: I take the Bible, in principle, to be intensively and radically about Jesus Christ (the One for the many); so did Jesus in His teachings found in John 5 and Luke 24, respectively. As such, the whole point of ethnic Israel’s existence (just as the whole point of creation’s reality in general) is in fact to mediate Christ to and for the world. To elevate human history to a level that makes Jesus an abstraction vis-a-vis ethnic Israel completely inverts the whole inner reality of everything; that makes the nation of Israel the point of salvation and creational history, and not the triune God in the scandal and particularity of Jesus Christ is to end up in another form of replacement theology, another type ofĀ supersessionismĀ wherein the nation of Israel replaces the person of Jesus Christ as the reason and being for all of history. It is a false dilemma dispensationalists offer when they assert that it is either all about the nation of Israel or the person of the Christ. It is a false dilemma because Jesus is continuously the Jew, and thus the fulfillment and reality of what it means to be Jewish before God in an ultimate way. The Christ is the second and greater Adam, which entails the notion that to be in the eternal and heavenly Adam, come to earth, is to be participants in an elevated and life of primacy which is Christ’s for the world. In other words, was Adam an ethnic Jew; was Abraham even an ethnic Jew (see Rom 4)? God’s purposes are ultimately creational/re-creational; they are cosmic, not sectarian; they are concrete, not abstract and dualistic; they are to see this time and God’s time (“eternity”) as coterminous through the analogy and reality of the hypostatic union of God and humanity in theĀ Logos ensarkosĀ (the Word [of God] enfleshed).

Here is how I described amillennialism so many years ago now:

Monergism.com, some years back, picked up a little summary description I wrote somewhere (on-line) on whatĀ AmillennialismĀ entails as an interpretive system. Hereā€™s what I wrote:

The Amillennialist affirms that the people of Israel have not been cast off or replaced, but rather, that the Gentiles have now been included among the Jews in Godā€™s Covenantal promises. In other words, not replacement but expansion. Godā€™s redemptive plan, as first promised to Abraham, was that ā€œall nationsā€ would be blessed through him. Israel is, and always has been, saved the same as any other nation: by the promises to the seed, Christ. Amillennialists, do not believe in a literal 1000 year reign of Christ on earth after His second coming. Rather, they affirm that when Christ returns, the resurrection of both the righteous and wicked will take place simultaneously (see John 5), followed by judgment and and the eternal state where heaven and earth merge and Christ reigns forever.

Strong points of Amillennialism

1) It is highly Christocentric: it makes Christ the center of all the biblical covenants (even the ā€œLandā€ covenant or Sinaitic)
2) It notes the universal scope of the Abrahamic Covenant (as key) to interpreting the rest of the biblical covenants
3) It sees salvation history oriented to a person (Christ), instead of a people (the nation of Israel)
4) It emphasizes continuity between the ā€œpeople of Godā€ (Israel and the Church are one in Christ Eph. 2:11ff)
5) It provides an ethic that is rooted in creation, and ā€œre-creationā€ (continuity between Godā€™s redemptive work now, carried over into the eternal state then)
6) It emphasizes a trinitarian view of God as it elevates the ā€œpersonā€, Christ Jesus, the second person of the trinity as the point and mediator of all history
7) It flows from a hermeneutic that takes seriously the literary character of the Scriptures (esp. the book of Revelation) [see the quote at Monergism.comĀ here]

One more point of clarification: I am not, of course, your normal Covenantal theology amillennialist. Mongerism [dot] com is. I am “Barthian covenantal,” which is a completely different creature; particularly as that is funded by Barth’s reformulated doctrine of predestination (election-reprobation).

Disruptive Grace as Protology and Eschatology

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Grace was disruptive in the protology (beginning Gen 1:1ff) just as Grace is disruptive in the eschatology (the ‘end’ II Cor 5:17 etc). As such there is no stable creation (nature), there is only its enduring Word of upholding wherein stability is found. The continuity of the creation, and its various “properties,” is not based in an inherent independence of its own (waiting for discovery abstract from God’s intensive witness in the Christ), but upon the Grace of God’s Word that continuously gives it life, even in the face and reality of its certain death (Rom 8:18ff). That is to say: creation is a creatio ex nihiloĀ (creation out of nothing), which entails that its value and meaning is always contingent upon God’s Word as He presences (parousia) Himself, afresh anew, through the hovering breath of the Holy Spirit. To look to creation/nature as if a means of grace, is to confuse the creation with the Creator who is the Christ.

The Eschatological Nature of Christian Theology

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There is no reason to absolutize any period of theological history, per se. In other words, every season of theological development, within the Churchā€™s history, is open for engagement. The Lord Himself said He would build His Church, and through Paul continued to say that He would, in particular, provide pastors and teachers, so on and so forth. This ought to teach us that Christ has been present, all along, in His Church. He hasnā€™t abandoned it or left it as orphans, but has provided His Holy Spirit to presence Himself and sacra doctrina among those who fellowship with Him in the triune life He shares with the Father and Holy Spirit. So, it is possible, and really necessary, to approach the development of theological dogma within the open frame that is provided by the esse of the Church itself. If we do this, as we ought, we will not elevate one period of ecclesial doctrinal development as sacrosanct over others, per se. This is not to say that there arenā€™t some fundamental inflection points in the Churchā€™s development of essential doctrine, particularly when we think in terms of the catholic developments surrounding Nicaea, Constantinople and Chalcedon, that have helped to regulate the grammar the Church uses in order to speak God in intelligible and articulate ways. But even so, these inflection points in the Churchā€™s history, should not be absolutized in a way that they remain closed off as if final words on the way the Church understands and relates to Christ. They shouldnā€™t be abandoned, but because of the eschatological nature of the development of Christian theological discourse, things always ought to remain open; finding their anchor point in the anchor of the Churchā€™s soul as the High Priest is seated at the Right Hand of the Father always living to make intercession for those who will inherit eternal life. We only are able, because we inhabit these bodies of death still, to see through a glass dimly, even as our proximate knowledge of God in Christ gives way to fuller and deeper understandings of Him, as we are transformed from glory to glory; from Christā€™s full glory for us. We keep pressing into the reality of our life in Christ, growing in His grace and knowledge for us.

Being Robed in the Eschatos of God’s Triune Light

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For Zionā€™s sake I will not keep silent,
And for Jerusalemā€™s sake I will not keep quiet,
Until herĀ righteousness goes forth like brightness,
And herĀ salvation like a torch that is burning. -Isaiah 62:1

ā€œArise, shine; for yourĀ light has come,
And theĀ glory of theĀ LordĀ has risen upon you.
Ā ā€œFor behold,Ā darkness will cover the earth
And deep darkness the peoples;
But theĀ LordĀ will rise upon you
And HisĀ glory will appear upon you.
ā€œNations will come to your light,
And kings to the brightness of your rising. -Isaiah 60:1-3

I willĀ rejoice greatly in theĀ Lord,
My soul will exult inĀ my God;
For He hasĀ clothed me with garments of salvation,
He has wrapped me with a robe of righteousness,
As a bridegroom decks himself with a garland,
AndĀ as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. -Isaiah 61:10

And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. -Genesis 2:25

 

A quick reflection on the Eschaton. The thought just occurred to me, once again, of just how self-incurved we are as fallen, yet redeemed, creatures still. We suffer from an unquenchable thirst for attention. We inherently desire, as creatures of the sin, that we would be accepted by others; not for the othersā€™ sake, but for our own self-incurved fantasies. When we walk by a pane of glass, lit-up by the sunshine, we often look at ourselves to make sure we still look good; with our brand-new kicks in tow. We often compare ourselves with others and think: I might not be a supermodel, but Iā€™m definitely better looking than that guy or gal. We are born with vain hearts that are disorderedly in love with themselves. In our very hearts, as fallen creatures, we seek our kingdom, and our righteousness; and all these other things are ultimately lost unto us (as King Solomon and so many others have learned by experience over the millennia.)

But what of the glorified bodies that we will put on at the second coming of Christ? The Prophet says we will be, and are in fact, robed in the garments of salvation, the robes of righteousness; indeed, Christā€™s righteousness. Moses by the Spirit says that Adam and Eve were both naked and yet were not ashamed. They were literally naked and werenā€™t stumbled by the physical form in the perverted ways that fallen creatures now are. We see the Prophet refer to Godā€™s Light for us, in a radically eschatological sense. I would suggest, that even beyond what Adam and Eve experienced, we will be, and even are now (by eyes of faith), so shrouded about with the Life of Godā€™s triune Light for us, that in the Kingdom-sense we simply are radiating the Light of Christā€™s life; that our bodies are ensconced in the Light of Christ, as we are participants in His life, that it is not possible but to evince and emote His Light; that we have become, in Christā€™s resurrected and ascended vicarious humanity, witness bearers, to the nth degree, of Godā€™s Life, as we have become encapsulated in His radiating Light. In other words, when we finally receive our new glorified bodies, like Christā€™s, we could be naked, and not be stumbled because we will so effuse the life of God, indeed as Godā€™s triune Life, is in fact our life, by the adoption of grace, that we will no longer have the capacity, nor the desire to focus on ourselves any longer. We will indeed be like our Father, in the Son, by the Holy Spirit. We will be so other focused from within Godā€™s being (ousia), just as He is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that self-consumption in an abstract fallen sense will no longer be a possibility. We get a taste of what this might look like on the Mount of Transfiguration:

Six days later Jesus *took with HimĀ Peter andĀ James and John his brother, and *led them up on a high mountain by themselves.Ā 2Ā And He was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light.Ā 3Ā And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him.Ā 4Ā Peter said to Jesus, ā€œLord, it is good for us to be here; if You wish,Ā I will make threeĀ tabernacles here, one for You, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah.ā€Ā 5Ā While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold,Ā a voice out of the cloud said, ā€œThis is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!ā€Ā 6Ā When the disciples heardĀ this, they fellĀ face down to the ground and were terrified.Ā 7Ā And Jesus came toĀ themĀ and touched them and said,Ā ā€œGet up, andĀ do not be afraid.ā€Ā 8Ā And lifting up their eyes, they saw no one except Jesus Himself alone. -Matthew 17

I long for the day when faith is swallowed up by sight. When we will no longer have this inherent penchant to constantly be self-consumed, and only be consumed by the life of the triune God, and all those participant in that life. I canā€™t wait till this body of death is finally put under Jesusā€™ feet, as the last enemy that it is, only to consummately be risen afresh anew with the glorified body of our Lordā€™s.

When you think about it, all of the worldā€™s ills are formed by the incurved heart, the ā€œEnlightenedā€ turn to the subject. We want and do not have, and so we either literally kill, or figuratively kill, to get what we donā€™t have, but want. May Christ have mercy sooner than later! Maranatha