Easter is a profound narrative that leaves us grappling with the full depth of its meaning. Heaven meets earth in a dramatic way in this historic, cataclysmic series of events from Palm Sunday through the trial, cross, and resurrection of Jesus. Bishop Robert Barron gives a beautiful message for Palm Sunday, to show how Jesus, in his flesh, is indeed the glory of God returning to the temple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpVbF1k0h-o
One lens through which we can view the narrative of Easter is the love of the Father for the Son. We see an expression of the exponential love of God that is unparalleled in human history. Jeremy Begbie helps us unpack this high calibre love.
In Christ’s life, we discover what it is for divine love to be uncircumscribable by the world’s finitude. In the faithfulness that takes Jesus to the cross and raises him from the dead, we find the ultimate measure of what cannot be thought or spoken. In his cruciform victory over evil, confirmed on Easter Day, we encounter power-for-the-good-of-the-other. And here, in one utterly “possessed” by his Father’s love, we see God being who God will be. (J. Begbie, Abundantly More, 137).
At the end of the day, Easter is not about death but rather infinitely more about unconquerable new life and new creation. God’s life is a ceaseless dynamic of giving—a constant generation of new life and superabundant love. The unfathomable love of God gives life to all, inaugurating an economy of grace and goodness in the world. Love is writ large in the cross of Christ, the love between the Father and Son, but also love between God and humankind. Who could imagine a greater demonstration? The Son-Father relation of eternal love forms a central theological nerve within John’s Gospel.
This high form of love reaches its apogee, its most intense ‘living out’, in the crucifixion—where the Son and the Father give themselves wholly to each other in extremis, to the point of the Son’s death—and in the raising of Jesus to new life, even the nothingness of death must yield to God’s love-driven giving of life. God loves out of the abundance of his generosity. (J. Begbie, Abundantly More, 165)
William Cavanaugh adds pertinent words about the Word made flesh: “On the cross, it is hard to recognize the invisible and all-powerful God in the tortured body of Jesus. At the same time, God is manifested in the self-sacrificial love that the cross reveals. Jesus offers himself as a sacrifice of reconciliation and a new covenant to gather the nations” (W. T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry, 363). Amidst the betrayal and defection of close friends, the false testimony of hostile witnesses, injustice, poor government leadership, hatred and revenge, mocking and scourging, divine love prevails. Jesus, our Lord and exemplar, took the lowest place, rejected and marginalized as a common criminal. The cross breaks the power of violence, evil, and scapegoating in human culture.
There is a divine confidence in Jesus’s John 17 prayer at the Last Supper even amidst the coming chaos, anguish, and doom. Jesus prayed for an eschatological, dynamic oneness, offering his disciples joy. He knew that they would experience hatred and persecution (forces of dissolution and deconstruction) someday. It is by facing such hostility that they were to enter his joy, to experience his glory. True disciples of Christ must descend before they ascend. The Easter narrative continues today as we make space for the Father’s love for the Son in our hearts, within our communities. The Christian life consists in our sharing, by the Spirit, in the intense and immense love relation of Father and Son. Life of this eternal quality and love co-dwell. This is God’s strategic genius: The eleven disciples and those to follow in centuries to come, are situated in the real world with one missional tactic, to live out the love of Jesus Christ together—a further incarnation. This is our existential opportunity to access the full meaning of that rich and costly love in 2025. Like Abraham, we get to offer the thing we most love for service to the King of the Jews, who loves us to the end.
Charles Taylor wraps up his massive 1989 tome Sources of the Self with a provocative retrospective reflection on his work of recovering moral sources in Western culture. This reflection aids us in a critical understanding of Foucault and his followers. Taylor (1989, 520) writes concerning the horns of a contemporary dilemma, “Do we have to choose between various kinds of spiritual lobotomy and self-inflicted wounds?” Furthermore, he asks whether one has to choose between a form of soul-destruction or self-condemnation, the disavowal of moral goods or world-hatred? “Does one have to either judge oneself negatively, or mutilate oneself spiritually?” he asks wisely and profoundly (C. Taylor, 1989, 520). The crux of the dilemma is whether one can affirm the world and self, and at the same time affirm high moral standards/ideals and appeal to high moral sources. This is an existential concern.
Many thinkers today feel that this is impossible. At the centre of the dilemma is the human desire for affirmation—of self and the world—going back to Nietzsche. Taylor notes that often the more morally sensitive we are, the more likely that we are to reject the world. So many things about the world just seem wrong: suffering, injustice, unfair advantages of the elites. Indeed, Michel Foucault in his third oeuvre (Care of Self) felt that a person had to deny or deconstruct high moral standards, including the Christian quest for purity or holiness, in order to affirm self and shape the beautiful life. In essence, he believed that beauty can save us. This comes out in the way that Foucault reports on Christian technologies of self (spiritual exercises of the monastics). The logic of the dilemma for Foucault is as follows: One must overcome a traditional moral consciousness of normativity, a conscience which results in self-negation, a negation of the essential will to power that is the ground of my being, and thus how do I overcome guilt and self-loathing. He was in denial of the importance of repentance and forgiveness as a way to reckon with one’s inner self/soul.
But Taylor contends that this approach to the dilemma involves committing moral surgery (mutilation) to some of our most precious and powerful human spiritual aspirations such as benevolence (C. Taylor, 1989, 520). This seems like a heavy price to pay for this so-called liberation. Starkly put, one has to hate morality and the divine, and remove its influence over oneself (silence its voice) if one is to affirm oneself (maintain a positive self-worth) and affirm the world. Alternately, one has to hate self and the world if one is to love morality and live by the good and the summum bonum. Foucault and his ethics as aesthetics (which is rooted in Nietzsche) are bound by this dilemma, and he has chosen the first alternative in his technology of self-making—both the self-overcoming and the self-invention dimensions. He believes that one has to invent and reinvent oneself continuously as an act of defiance to moral law/the good. This is completely relevant to Millennials and Gen Z. The are caught on the horns of this dilemma and it is torture, multiplying their levels of anxiety.
Taylor understands the weightiness of this dilemma in late modernity, but he does not buy into the view that it is our tragic fate. He (C. Taylor, 1989, 520) articulates in clear terms the consequences of Foucault’s (late modernity’s) choice of gender, etcetera: “We have read so many goods out of our official story, we have buried their power so deep beneath layers of philosophical rationale, that they are in danger of stifling.” We’ve lost our positive cultural heritage of the good. We are caught in an intellectual fog. He feels that such moral lobotomy is dangerous, harmful, and unnecessary in the final analysis. Instead, his whole project attempts to uncover/revive these buried goods, that once were our champions, through their rearticulation, and thereby to make them sources that empower people once again (set them free on higher moral ground), to recover their true and vital spirit and value. This is the vision of his whole lengthy discourse in Sources of the Self (C. Taylor, 1989). By reconnecting the self to pre-modern (prior to the 18th century) spiritual sources of the good, he envisions a new fruitfulness in moral discourse, behaviour, and the qualities of human freedom of the will. A renewed or thick culture is definitely possible. This is surely the case with transcendent Christian agape, which he believes is a creative way to be released from the horns of our dilemma and to renegotiate relationships and the meaning of our role in the cosmos.
Taylor indeed owns the modern conundrum, and yet holds out hope for a constructive resolution, even a kind of miracle. He questions the cogency of Foucault’s radical/surgical analysis. It is too ephemeral and gives up too much that makes us human and helps us flourish as communal beings with giftedness and grace. On this point, he writes:
The dilemma of mutilation is … our greatest spiritual challenge, not our iron fate…. There is a large element of hope. It is a hope that I see implicit in Judeo-Christian theism (however terrible the record of its adherents in history), and in a central promise of a divine affirmation of the human, more total than humans can ever attain unaided. (C. Taylor, 1989, 521).
Oxford professor Larry Siedentop agrees in his fine book The Invention of the Individual. Taylor suggests that there is a sphere of sublime love, truth, beauty, and goodness that doesn’t capitulate to either extreme of the dilemma: self-harm/self-hatred or moral-spiritual lobotomy. It both transcends and rethinks the forces of suffering, injustice, and will-to-power, which are well-known to cause world-hatred, anxiety, depression, and even self-mutilation or suicide. He refuses to believe that we, like Nietzsche, have to embrace both good and evil, benevolence and violence, in the register of the aesthetic/beautiful (also known as ‘yea-saying’). Indeed, the need for higher wisdom to discern good from evil is at a critical level in our day (Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen).
Professor Taylor points to a redemptive possibility within the Christian and Jewish traditions (Old Testament and New Testament/Proverbs and Gospels). This includes evidence of those who remain morally sensitive, while still resonating with full heroic affirmation of personhood: “an ability to love the world and ourselves, to see it as good in spite of the wrong” (C. Taylor, 1989, 452). This is Dostoevsky’s notion of the miracle of grace, something that empowers one to love both self, God, and fellow humans. This is a particularly significant/impressive stance in our day of cynicism and selfishness.
Mutilation seems to be the only option for those who have bought into a disenchanted world, trapped within an immanent frame of existence, Taylor’s well-known ‘Secular Age’. These people have sacrificed strong transcendence of the good for the myopic ideology of a Closed World System or social imaginary. But those who have not done so, enjoy the benefits of grace: they experience a fresh recovery of their moral-spiritual agency, a sense of validation and affirmation from the divine other (God), and a renewed sense of their freedom as persons in community. They bravely allow themselves to be loved by God. This stance of hope expresses a profound poetic openness which releases them from the horns of Foucault’s dilemma through a dramatic transcendent turn. William Greenway captures its impact:
Taylor hopes for a participation with the divine that returns us to this world in such a way that we are able fully to embrace our deepest spiritual aspirations and fully to affirm the world, others, and ourselves without spiritual mutilation and without simply denying the reality of suffering and evil—a miraculous transformation indeed…. As a thinker situated within the mainstream of Western culture, Taylor’s proposed path to resolution of the crisis of affirmation involves appeals to God, grace, and agape, and there is no a priori reason to judge these appeals false or misleading“ (W. Greenway, 2000, 38-39)
These claims must be examined seriously and at depth because they do provide a plausible alternative with real integrity including weighty scholarly backing. There is a long and strong tradition that supports it. Taylor does not believe that one has to kill the moral soul in order to save freedom, creativity, and the self. His alternative releases people from the trap of such nihilism. Nihilism offers no foundation for human rights, which has massive social implications. Could it be that there is a possible dynamic and fruitful relationship between mature freedom, responsibility, and transcendent goodness? We meet many people in various careers and walks of life who are in earnest search of such a hope. Many have discovered such substantial hope in the divine Word who became flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, called King of the Jews.
Those who make gods become less than earthly raw materials by trying to fashion themselves into gods, while those who allow earthly materials to be signs of God who made them become assimilated to the divine life…. Human-made images mire humans in creation; God-made images elevate humans to participation in the Creator. For Saint Augustine, sacramental signs are not mere products of human creation but participate in the Incarnation, in which God takes on material creation. The most important God-made images of God, however, are human beings themselves. When they live as they are called to live in charity, they reflect God rather than see their own reflection in the images they create. (W. T. Cavanaugh, 2024, 189)
~Gordon E. Carkner, PhD. Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinars and Lecture Producer
Cavanaugh, W. T. (2024). The Uses of idolatry. Oxford University Press.
Franaszek, A.(2017). Milosz: A Biography. Harvard University Press.
Greenway, W. (2000). Charles Taylor on Affirmation, Mutilation, and Theism: A Retrospective Reading of Sources of the Self. Journal of Religion, 80, No. 1 23-40.
Hart, D. B. (2024). All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life. Yale University Press.
Siedentop, L. (2014). Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (2024). Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. Harvard University Press.
Gorgeous magnolias burst forth in B.C. Lower Mainland
Historically speaking, God has composed a major contribution to Western moral identity. Theology has a long-standing history with ethics. It is also interesting to note that Christianity mad a significant contribution to the concept of personhood, according to Hans Urs von Balthasar. The separation of morality from theism is a more recent phenomenon (18th century). What have we lost in culture as a result?
Charles Taylor claims that many of the goods that are commonly aspired to in the West have their roots in the constitutive good of Christian theism (R. Abbey, 2000, pp. 50-51, 98-99; and Taylor, 1999, Part IV; Morgan, 1994, p. 49). They are rooted in the life and witness of Jesus of Nazareth (Hebrews). This is also hinted at in Taylor’s book Sources of the Self (C. Taylor, 1989), but it became even more overt in A Catholic Modernity? (C. Taylor, 1999), and A Secular Age (2007). Thus, he believes that there would be real fruitfulness in reconnecting many contemporary goods to their historical roots—in Christian theism. It would make sense of them and empower them once again in significant ways.
Taylor recovers something profound that was lost in Western moral consciousness with his language of moral sources. From his perspective, moral sources are not about highest principles. Rather they are all about the qualities of the will, a concept which has been largely absent in moral philosophy for over a century. These are qualities that set us free to human creativity within community–promoting dignity and personhood. For example, the primary question for Taylor’s moral ontology is: What or whom do I love? (motivation), not What am I obliged to do? (right action). He wants to broaden and enrich the domain of morality, to fill it with joy. The latter, to him, is the last question to ask, even though it is often the main concern of contemporary ethical debates. The second question is “What do I want to be?” (character), a question that is in recovery to some degree in the late twentieth century through Virtue Ethics, heralded by intellectuals such as A. MacIntyre (1984) and journalists such as New York Times’ bestselling author David Brooks (The Road to Character; The Second Mountain).
The first question addresses the issue of sources of moral inspiration and motivation, that is the moral power behind decision and action. Just as the first flowers of Spring (magnolias) inspire us, stories of high moral character and courage add light to our lives and stimulate our imagination for the good. Taylor muses sadly about the current problem of weakened moral sources. How can we maintain a commitment to high ideals of benevolence, rights, and justice under the condition of weak moral motivation (constitutive good), due to a weakening of our moral vision? Moral Vision is a pressing problem in culture. He rightly points out that this first question was part of the normal philosophical discourse for ancients such as Plato, Augustine, and Aristotle. They would understand the concept of the greater good, the summum bonum, or the higher loves or loyalties. Indeed there is an urgent need to sort out our loves today in the West. For Augustine, Scripture is fundamentally about the love of God poured out in Christ.
Taylor points out something significant. The secular humanist perspective (immanent frame on ethics) is radically endemic to this time-space-energy-matter matrix. Its vision sees the good largely in terms of mere human flourishing, without any demand to give allegiance, love or worship to anything higher, anything transcendent of the self or the human sphere. It encourages us to be pragmatic and cut our losses in ethical decisions. Taylor rejects this implosion into the immanent frame, and suggests a route back to transcendence and to transcendent, trinitarian goodness. He sees this articulated in the biblical concept agape love. (C. Taylor, 1999, 28) This is a very weighty concept connected to transcendence and the summum bonum. It is not limited by the immanent frame of thinking or perception of reality. It expands the imagination rather than imploding it into selfishness.
Theologian Kevin Vanhoozer says the concept of person can be defined as: “A bio-social, spiritual sounding board, answerable and accountable to God, a grammatical subject whose mission is to glorify the ‘Thou’ who called it into existence” (a TEDS conference talk on Personhood).
Following on from a discussion that began in the previous section, transcendent agape love transforms the self, according to Taylor, a love from above, transcendent of the human community. It brings a whole new dimension of reality to bear on ethics, a higher source of the good, a larger, thicker discourse. In contrast to the secular age, the memory that human beings were created in the image of God and are automatically an object of divine compassion is well worth reviving. This love can be broached even in our ‘secular age’ as Taylor does in his famous book of that title (A Secular Age), where he covers the history of the knowledge of God in the West.
The original Christian notion of agape love is of a love that God has for humans which is connected with their goodness as creatures (though we don’t have to decide whether they are loved because good or good because loved). Human beings participate through grace in this love. There is a divine affirmation of the creature, which is captured in the repeated phrase in Genesis 1 about each stage of the creation, “and God saw that it was good.” Agape is inseparable from such “seeing-good” (C. Taylor, 1989, 516).
The individual self is elevated by this love, affirmed in its destiny, taken as a person with potential. Agape informs significantly the quality of the will and the character of freedom, the dimensions of personhood. Trinitarian goodness empowers, clarifies, and animates the human self. It acknowledges the value that each person gains from the recognition, mercy, and affirmation of God. Within this paradigm, the self does not struggle to define itself by itself alone (one dominant narrative today within the ideology of the aesthetic), but engages this transforming love from the divine compassionate other. It makes a big difference who loves us; it shapes our whole identity and the potential of our lives. Divine resources are phenomenal!
Divine trinitarian love creates the larger environment and potential for robust human loving, a love that issues from the power to love in spite of rejection, a sacrificial love. The source of such love/such good and goodness is infinite. This higher goodness is a relational attribute in God. It exists and exhibits itself in the form of a communion of love within the Trinity. It works at a high level. The relational, interpersonal, mutually supportive, loving relationship among the persons of the Trinity articulate such a love and honour. C. Schwöbel (1992, 73) explains how human goodness is rooted in this divine transcendent love: “In a conception where goodness is understood as a divine attribute, rooted in God’s trinitarian agency, goodness has to be understood as an essentially relational attribute.” From this perspective, humans do not invent the good, but discover it derivatively from God and within community, in relation to the neighbour. As a gift from God, it is full of surprises. It overcomes the distance between divine and human goodness and empowers human ethics, truth, rights, and justice once again. The agape incarnational community filled with endemic agape love provides a safe space of refuge amidst the conflicts, tragedies, and transitions of life.
Moreover, Jesus’s wisdom, life, and teaching directly addresses the large debates of our time—inequity, xenophobia, autocracy, poverty, and multitudes of displaced refugees. His love invokes justice for the oppressed, healing for the broken. His life work is the highest representation of agape love. See my larger elaboration of the power of such love in my recent book, Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture (G. Carkner, 2024, 91-95). One final quote from Christopher Watkin captures the trajectory of agape.
Love is the epicenter of the distinctively Christian way of being in the world—not power, respect, or tolerance, not equality, justice, freedom, enlightenment, or submission. Love is the overall shape of Christian ethics, the form of human participation in the created order. . . . Love sets the rules for how that world is structured and functions in its entirety. . . . Love is a way of being in and experiencing the world, approaching friends and enemies alike as people to be loved. . . . It is the warp and woof of Christian relationships. . . . Love is the signature disposition of Christ’s disciples. (C Watkin, 2022, 390)
~Gordon E. Carkner, PhD, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinars, Meta-Educator with UBC Postgrad Students.
Abbey, R. (2000). Charles Taylor. Teddington, UK: Acumen.
Brooks, D. (2015). The Road to Character. Random House.
Carkner, G. E. (2024). Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture: Grounding Our Identity in Christ. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishing.
Morgan, M.L. (1994). Religion, History and Moral Discourse. In J. Tully, (Ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The philosophy of Charles Taylor in question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schwöbel, C. (1992). God’s Goodness and Human Morality. In C. Schwöbel, God: Action and revelation (pp. 63-82). Kampen, Holland: Pharos.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taylor, C. (1999). In J.L. Heft (S.M.). (Ed.). A Catholic Modernity? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Harvard University Press.
Watkin, C. (2022). Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic.
Read more about Agape: David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 146-65; Larry Siedentop, The Invention of the Individual; Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity
Suggested Biblical Reflection: Psalms of Ascent 120-134.
One morning while waiting for the traffic lights to change, I was spellbound by a few monarch butterflies dancing above me in the open space of the quiet intersection. I paused for a few moments to enjoy the rare sight. These butterflies were, in their own ways, glorifying God and proclaiming the magnificent power of their Creator. The short life of the monarch butterfly,[1] which some writers view as the king of butterflies (the longest time it can live is less than a year), in all its splendour is but a shadow of the majesty, power, and holiness of the triune God.
Many of the biblical psalms are poems of praise to God as the great and glorious LORD or King of all creation (for example, to name a few, Psalms 8, 24, 47, 92, 93, 96, 147, and 148). For some people, however, the words “lord” and “king” evoke thoughts of authoritarianism, colonialism, and oppression—together with feelings of anger and fear. Yet God is addressed and revealed figurally as “Lord” throughout the Bible. How is this articulated? In fact, YHWH the personal name of God in the Old Testament, is represented by LORD (in small capitals) in the English Standard Version. When God is addressed as adonai (in Hebrew), it is written as Lord (in lowercase).[2] The New Testament uses the Greek word kurios and is also translated as Lord (for example, Luke 4:19, 5:17, 6:5, 19:38).
There is a popular but inaccurate belief that the Old Testament depicts God as judgemental and oppressive in contrast to the New Testament which describes God as merciful. Biblical evidence shows otherwise. According to the prophet Isaiah, the LORD, who loves justice and “causes righteousness and praise to sprout before all the nations,” (Isaiah 61:8, 11) sends his anointed One “to bring good news to the poor [or afflicted], . . . to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound”[3] (Isaiah 61:1).
In Luke 4:16₋₋21, we read that Jesus Christ goes to the synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath day and stands up to read the above words about the anointed One from the scroll of the prophet Isaian given to him. He then sits down and proclaims to the congregation that these words of Scripture have been fulfilled in their hearing, ₋₋₋implying that he is the anointed One, the Christ or Messiah. Henceforth, throughout his ministry, he shatters his hearers’ narrow view of God’s kingdom: He reveals to them that God’s mercy is meant to reach beyond oppressive, self-serving barriers to non-Israelites, even during the time of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. This is the concept of shalom.
According to Luke 6:1₋₋11 Jesus, as Lord of the Sabbath, teaches that doing good and saving lives on a Sabbath day do not violate God’s law, but actually fulfils it. This is notable because the additions to the law made by the Pharisees caused the observance of the Sabbath to be a burdensome affair rather than life-giving. Furthermore, in his epistle to the Corinthian church, the apostle Paul writes that words on stone tablets are powerless without the Spirit of God who has given life to those believers who embody “a letter of Christ” (2 Corinthians 3:2₋₋6).
As Jesus describes in Luke’s Gospel, the kingdom of God (unlike an earthly empire) is like a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds. Yet when sown in a garden, it grows into a tree and the birds of the air are able to freely build their nests among its branches (Luke 13:18₋₋19).[4] The context (Luke 13:10₋₋17) of this simile is Jesus’s admonishment of a ruler of the synagogue (a person of power and influence). This man criticizes him for healing a bent-over woman on the Sabbath day. While the religious leaders insist on a strict adherence to their Sabbath rules, Jesus holds the well-being of the woman at heart. Instead of regarding her as a disrupter of his teaching, the Lord Jesus welcomes the woman as “a daughter of Abraham” into his presence. He embraces her and pours out grace upon her. He knows that she needs to be set free from her disability, one which she has been bound to for eighteen years. Everyone, including the poor and marginalized (signified by the birds of the air) can find refuge, healing, and wholeness wherever God in Christ reigns as loving Lord.[5]
In Jesus’s relationship with his disciples, true liberty is experienced when he is accepted as Lord–a radical reorientation indeed. Those whom he sets free within the context of this relationship become truly free at the very core of their being (John 8:36; Galatians 5:1). His life-giving, healing power is far-reaching. He is the Lord of all creation (Colossians 1:16-20), and yet at the same time loving servant to all. Unlike our earthly lord/boss/supervisor/thesis examiner/president, Jesus the divine King was willing to suffer and die on the cross so that we could have fullness of life, experience abundance of grace, and joy (Colossians 2:9-10). Crucially, this is where we see the superabundant love of God displayed in vivid colour. The risen, living Lord promises to be with us, as we participate in the life of God and use our giftedness to the benefit of others. These constructive actions bear witness to him and his mission. Jesus clears a path through the jungle of modern life that draws us out of isolation and brokenness towards our full humanization. We find a stable, dynamic communal identity as we become more grounded in him, the icon of God (Col 1:15-20), the wisdom of God, the love of God.
2. See a brief explanation under the section “The Translation of Specialized Terms” in the Preface of the English Standard Version of the English Bible.
3. The last phrase may be translated as “the opening [of the eyes] to those who are blind.”
4. In his teaching, Jesus uses the created world to reveal truths about God’s kingdom.
5. See also Ezekiel 17:23; Joel 2:32; cf. Acts 2:21.
Eva Sham, Ph.D. in theology, University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, is an independent scholar/researcher in historical theology.
Next, I want to talk about how this transcendent goodness is trinitarian and relational, a personal goodness of a tri-personal God. Freedom has to have strong morality at its core (Timothy Snyder) to produce trust. This transcendent goodness I want to explore begins in God and then flows to creation as gift. It automatically has a relationship to the immanent human world. It is communicable, but at the same time, the understanding and experience of goodness involves a journey towards the triune God.
A full defence of trinitarian theology of goodness is beyond the scope of this discussion, so instead, I will limit this discussion to the exploration of what trinitarian goodness looks like as a plausibility structure, and how it assists in answering some of the problems, weaknesses, and gaps in ethics today. It also provides a discourse and a subject position from which to further protest late modern aspirations toward the hegemony of the ideology of the aesthetic. The task of ethics, from within this plausibility structure, is to assist the individual in the journey forward from human nature as it is—with its inclination toward the good, but with a lack of substantive context, and a lack of robust moral sources. Freedom gets interpreted as negative freedom from: Thus, there is a temptation toward evil, harm, and irresponsibility. On the other hand, I want to show the concrete embodiment of what the self can become in heuristic relationship to God’s goodness. This is to spark the expansion of the moral imagination for the common good.
Let us proceed. Rooted in the Trinity, this transcendent horizon of goodness involves the dynamic action of all three persons of the Christian Trinity in the world, not separate from the world or society. Here are some of the implications that human goodness can be defined in the light of divine goodness, rather than in exclusion of it. According to this theological/philosophical stance, “the trinitarian action in creation, revelation, and inspiration in the world is all part of the moral horizon in which human moral reflection occurs” (C. Schwöbel, 1992, 71). The transcendent is effective in the various culture-spheres of the immanent and entails significant implications for the moral self.
This goodness is communicated through creation represented by the Father, through the Son the God-Man in the incarnation, and by the Holy Spirit as the source of empowerment and inspiration of human morality and moral growth and transformation. The three persons create the conditions (the horizon) for knowing and doing the good (C. Schwöbel, 1992, 73). Here’s how it plays out: The Father as Creator has established the order, and the possibility of goodness in creation, a relational structure of goodness. The Son in Jesus Christ is the revelation of divine goodness, a dramatic means to see, encounter, and experience God’s goodness within the human historical sphere, the dynamic articulation of divine goodness within human culture. The Spirit is the inspiration of goodness in human creatures, a key source of the motivation towards good (constitutive good) for the moral self.
This articulation shows key ways that the finite human is made aware of and drawn up into the transcendent relationship, making divine goodness accessible and efficacious within the realm of human experience, yet without being assimilated into, or reduced to, this realm. According to Schwöbel,
It is one of the implications of this trinitarian conception of divine agency that the intentionality of divine action is not to be inferred from the structure of the world God has created, but has to be understood as grounded in the revelation in the Son. It is this paradigmatic action that is authenticated by the inspiration of the Spirit which then provides the framework for the interpretation of God’s work in creation. In a similar way the character of the work of the Spirit as inspiration indicates how God involves human beings in the realization of his intentions. It is the context of the interrelatedness of creation, revelation, and inspiration that we can talk about God’s action in terms of free, intentional action. (C. Schwöbel, 1992, 70)
Transcendent goodness is both secure and relevant because it resides in the integrity of the trinitarian relationality, the sociality of God, and yet it becomes accessible and possible to execute within the human condition because of the creation, revelation, and inspiration of the Trinity. This means that Charles Taylor’s transcendent turn to a greater horizon of the good such as agape is not a fantasy. It provides a robust plausibility structure, and a dynamic context for human identity, as well as an open horizon for moral and spiritual growth towards a self with a transcendent dimension of depth (a thick self). This plausibility structure will be further elaborated in future posts. In mapping the self this way, it will add detail to Taylor’s proposal of a renewed moral geography that includes God in a fruitful manner.
Now by definition, transcendent goodness is much more than an absolute or a highest principle. We cannot reduce it to Kant’s moral imperative, or a utilitarian good (result oriented). Goodness is of the very essence of God. The claim that God is good entails a distinctive character trait predicate. D. Stephen Long attempts such an articulation when he writes: “God is good in the most excellent way” (D. S. Long, 2001, 21). This means that there can be no greater good, nor a position of goodness from which to judge God—another very significant point. There is no gnostic higher moral vantage point above God. This is a qualitative transcendence that is completely worthy of our love and admiration (the best, most beautiful, most excellent goodness). This theological viewpoint is particularly endemic to the poetry of the book of Psalms. Biblically, God is the gold standard by which all human currencies of the good are measured. Put another way, there is an irreducible density to God’s goodness; it has tremendous moral weight.
“Christian faith is a way of seeing the world which beholds an unseen level of depth of love, goodness, significance which we do not make, but in which we can participate…. Our world is poetic at its core.” ~Dr. Judith Wolfe, St. Andrew’s University
Christoph Schwöbel proceeds logically and profoundly from this perspective to say that in creation:
God has set the conditions for being and doing the good and for knowledge of the good in the human condition. On this account, transcendent divine goodness is the ontological ground of the human good; the human moral horizon is rooted in God, contextualized by God, not vice versa. Furthermore, the knowledge of the good is intimately linked with the knowledge of God, and one’s relation to the good is ultimately connected to one’s relationship to God. (C.Schwoebel, 1992, 72)
One cannot conjure such goodness; it exists prior to human existence. D. Stephen Long adds further important texture to the distinction between human and divine goodness:
Participation in God is necessary for the good and for freedom. Evil arises when freedom is lost through turning towards one’s own autonomous resources for ethics. The fall does not result from people seeking to be more than they are capable of through pride but from their becoming less than they could be because they separate the knowledge of the good from its true end, God, and find themselves self-sufficient. . . . Seeking the good through nonparticipation in God, through the “virtue of what was in themselves” makes disobedience possible. (D. S. Long, 2001, 128)
So we are not alone in figuring out our morality and ethics, inventing them from the ground up, a priori. What are the implications of the transcendent turn to agape love in further substantiating the case for transcendent goodness as a source of the self? Dr. Quentin Genuis applies this concept of a thick moral self to medical ethics in a UBC GFCF lecture on March 4, 2025. Lecture Recording Found Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=386P0LbiYx8
Gordon E. Carkner, PhD, Meta-Educator, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinars and Scholarly Lectures.
Dr. Carkner offered a workshop at Apologetics Canada 2025 Conference on Saturday, March 8 in Abbotsford, B.C., Canada to rethink the modern identity quest via the discourse of incarnation. He will post a version of this on YouTube in the near future. Find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u74STiS7Yfc&t=1478s
Carkner, G. E. (2024). Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture: Grounding Our Identity in Christ. Eugene, Or: Wipf & Stock. See especially chapter 5.
Long, D. S. (2001). The Goodness of God: Theology, the Church and Social Order. Grand Rapids, MI: BrazosSchwöbel,
C. (1992). God’s Goodness and Human Morality. In C. Schwöbel, God: Action and revelation (pp. 63-82). Kampen, Holland: Pharos.
Vanhoozer, K. J. (2024). Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What it Means to Read the Bible Theologically. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic.
So, I have been writing about epiphanies of transcendence in the previous post. Here I want to build on that concept. It takes us into the economy of grace which is captured in the Christian term in Greek: agape love. Agape exceeds the bounds of reciprocity; it cannot be defined in terms of prescriptions for self-realization or self-interest alone. In this love, we find the self involved in a transcendence of the strong variety. But when this grace disappears, coercion, contempt and terror sometimes flow in to take its place. Dostoyevsky makes a very interesting connection between self-hatred and terror in the previous discussion (Post 14). The Foucauldian autonomous self takes a stance over against society and the other, a stance of resistance and self-protection, attempting to discover dignity in precisely this manner which Dostoyevsky discourages, of separation from the world. This explains the willingness of the aesthetic self to take responsibility for itself, but its unwillingness to take responsibility for other people and the common good. Some top authors who write clearly about agape are Glenn Tinder (The Political Meaning of Christianity), Larry Siedentop (The Invention of the Individual), and David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions).
Charles Taylor’s recovery of transcendent moral sources ultimately implies an opening of the self to something outside that empowers the self. This larger horizon could give enhanced perspective and positive energy to Foucault’s artistic self-creation. In fact, it does rethink his modern doctrine of self-creation/self-definition. Foucault is open to the epiphany of self within a self-reflexive horizon, but does not access, was not open to, the epiphany of agape love accessed within a transcendent horizon. Frame of reference is very important here. In fact, he never refers to this central theme in the Christian New Testament in his analysis of technologies of self. His focus is on the restrictive, self-negating versions of Christian self-construction, which calculate as good reason to deconstruct, reject and move beyond its ethics. This is a tragic miscalculation in the sources of the self and identity.
At this juncture in my discussion of a transcendent turn, it is valuable to move beyond the philosophical insights of Charles Taylor. I want to enlist the aid of two key theologians, D. Stephen Long and Christof Schwöbel, for a richer articulation of the point of a transcendent turn to the divine good/goodness. Their work on the interface between divine and human goodness shows strong resonance with Taylor’s trajectory of such a turn to agape love. Taylor also follows this argument through into his book A Secular Age. The following discussion will help to define more fully the rich and creative character of such transcendence and the concept of an epiphanic encounter. In Taylor’s thought, agape, at one level, is a quality of human relationships, a hypergood that informs and even organizes the other goods within one’s horizon. But at another level, agape can also be seen as animating and empowering the ethical subject, and thus reveals a constitutive good which is rooted in transcendent divine goodness. Now let us proceed to a further understanding of this concept and its implications for the moral self.
There is a certain strangeness to the idea of transcendent divine goodness. It exceeds one’s human cognitive grasp, or ability to define it. One can use terms like infinite, excellent, most intense, purest, unfathomable, or superlative as adjectives to describe this goodness. But one cannot fully grasp the qualitative dimensions of transcendent divine goodness with propositions alone. It is radically other, a radical alterity, trans-historical even though it is revealed in time, space, and history. At one level, it is incompatible, incommensurable with human concepts of the good. It is certainly no mere human projection into the cosmos. Goodness that we find in the world points to and participates in, but is not identical with, the goodness that is God.
By definition, it is much more than an absolute or highest principle. Goodness is of the very essence of God and the claim that God is good entails a distinctive character trait. D.S. Long (2001, 21) attempts such an articulation when he writes, “God is good in the most excellent way.” This means that there is no greater good, nor a position of goodness from which to judge God. This is a qualitative transcendence that is worthy of love and admiration, a goodness that is much more than moral virtue or useful goodness. God is the gold standard by which all human currencies of the good are measured. Another way of saying this is that there is an “irreducible density to God’s goodness” (Hardy, 2001, 75). Schwöbel (1992, 72) proceeds logically from this to say that in creation, “God has set the conditions for being and doing the good and for knowledge of the good in the human condition.” On this account, transcendent divine goodness is the ontological/metaphysical ground of the human good. The entire human moral horizon derives from, is rooted in God or contextualized by God. It is not autonomous.
Furthermore, the knowledge of the good is intimately linked with the knowledge of God, and one’s relation to the good is ultimately connected to one’s relationship to God. Long adds the following.
Participation in God is necessary for the good and for freedom. Evil arises when freedom is lost through turning towards one’s own autonomous resources for ethics. The fall does not result from people seeking to be more than they are capable of through pride but from their becoming less than they could be because they separate the knowledge of the good from its true end, God, and find themselves self-sufficient.… Seeking the good through non-participation in God, through the ‘virtue of what was in themselves’ makes disobedience possible. (D. S. Long, 2001, 128)
This important concept is what Long refers to as the blasphemy of the a priori, that is, the philosophical preoccupation that assumes one can determine the conditions for knowledge of the good a priori, without engaging the good at its best in God. This is a working assumption in Foucault’s moral self-making and in so many who follow in his steps. If the individual is the origin of the moral life, ethics would tend to be reduced to anthropology (what a tribe does) or autobiography (what I decide for myself). That is quite a reductionistic stance.
Another conclusion that can be drawn from the premise of transcendent goodness is that this goodness is beyond human control and manipulation, manufacture or manipulation. In the human world it is no mere social, legal or governmental construction of the good. Human attempts to articulate the good, construct the good, or to be good, are only vague, finite and inadequate facsimiles of God’s goodness. These articulations are also vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation, conflict of interpretations, and power interest, as Foucault saw so clearly. Thus people become dismayed and cynical about the very idea of the good or claims to commitment to the good. Some human standards are historically contingent, or a product of self-interest by those in power, employed in coercive or abusive ways, or employed arbitrarily by the leadership. Human claims and social constructions of the good are necessary, but not final. They are accountable to a higher (transcendent) standard. Humans needs a transcendent divine goodness to arbitrate and critique their various human claims to the good, arbitrate between human social constructions of the good.
In the next post, I will show that there is a trinitarian aspect of divine goodness. I also discuss this at more length in chapter five of my book, Towards an Incarnational Spiritual Culture. This transcendent goodness is relational, a personal goodness of a tri-personal God. This transcendent goodness begins in God and then flows to creation as gift. This transcendence automatically has a relationship to the immanent human world as we see in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. It is communicable, but the understanding and experience of goodness involves a humble journey towards the triune God. At the same time, it involves a revealing of this goodness in the world by God: Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist.
Application: How Does this Help with Current Moral-Spiritual-Identity Crisis Indicators?
I am feeling morally ambivalent; it is hard adjusting from campus hedonism to a responsible lifestyle in society. This can be a form of reckoning.
I am restless with the present employer: It is tough to adapt to an impersonal corporate culture with its never ending demands. Will I be replaced by Deepseek RI or some other form of AI?
I am afraid of marital commitment: There is so much that could go wrong–adulting is hard work with many uncertainties.
I am a bit ashamed about returning to live with my parents: The cost of housing combined with my accumulated student debt is formidable. The economic cards seem stacked against my generation.
I am suffering from the numbing syndrome of narcissism, cancel culture, and emotional turmoil on social media. It really is an addiction as powerful as crack cocaine as Jerone Lanier says.
I cannot help myself; I am constantly in search of the new, the more exciting, of the best ways to be outstanding, original, unique. It is exhausting. When do I arrive somewhere satisfying?
I feel valued only for my productive capacity and efficiency, not as a human being with worth. Matthew Crawford is right about our loss of ethics or broader human values in the workplace—I see all around me workaholism, performance-enhancement drug abuse.
Psychological wellbeing is the only way my generation understands human flourishing: Therefore, any challenge to our mental health is taken as a personal attack–> “You are trying to erase me.”
My generation is cut off from traditional sources of meaning-making (Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self). Expressive individualism that dominates today tends to fragment key relationships—it leads us to become more sociopathic.
Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, PhD, Meta-Educator with UBC postgraduate students and faculty, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinars and Scholarly Lectures on Christianity and Culture.
Hardy, D.W. (2001). Finding the Church: The dynamic of Anglicanism. London: SCM Press.
Long, D.S. (2001). The Goodness of God. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press.
Schwöbel, C. (1992). God’s Goodness and Human Morality. In C. Schwöbel, God: Action and revelation (pp. 63-82). Kampen, Holland: Pharos.
Schwöbel, C. (1995). Imago Libertatis: Human and Divine Freedom. In C. Gunton (Ed.) God & Freedom: Essays in historical and systematic theology (pp. 57-81). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age, Harvard University Press.
What features define human life and the value of the individual? How do individuals and communities understand and withstand suffering and pain? What is good dying? In our time, the essential human questions are often viewed primarily as bioethics issues. In reality, these are not exclusively medical or bioethical inquiries. Rather they are complicated and challenging ethical questions with which all human beings and societies must grapple. How does Christian philosophy and theology inform these life and death questions at deeper, more foundational levels?
Biography
Dr. Quentin Genuis MD is an Emergency Physician at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, and the Physician Ethicist for Providence Health Care. He holds a Master of Letters in Ethics from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He teaches in academic, clinical, professional, and lay settings on a variety of issues related to bioethics. His research and writing interests include the autonomy debates, end-of-life care, compassion, human dignity, addictions, and theological anthropology.
Epiphanies are suggestive of transcendence. Michael Morgan (1994, 56f)) points out that Charles Taylor sees a parallel between the epiphanies of art and poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the I-Thou epiphany of religious encounter with the divine. Taylor elaborates the idea of epiphanies (1989, 419f, especially 490-93). He sees Post-Romantic and modernist art as oriented to epiphanies, episodes of realization, revelation, or disclosure. Epiphanies and epiphanic art are about a kind of transcendence, about the self coming in touch with that which lies beyond it, a ground or qualitative pre-eminence. Taylor reviews various ways of articulating epiphany in Sources of the Self (C. Taylor, 1989, 419-93). He articulates how God, inserted into this idea of epiphany, fits as a moral source (C. Taylor, 1989, 449-52). Epiphanies can be a way of connecting with spiritual and moral sources through the exercise of the creative imagination: sources may be divine (Taylor), or in the world or nature (Romantics), or in the powers of the imaginative, expressive self (Foucault). These epiphanies are a paradigm case of what Taylor calls recovering contact with moral sources. A special case of this renewed relationship between the self and the moral source is religion and the relation to God, which he sees in the work of Fyodor Dostoyevski. The relationship to art parallels the relationship to religion. The self is oriented in the presence of the inaccessible or sublime, that which captures one’s amazement or awe, for example, when one’s eyes are riveted to a certain painting, and one’s inner emotions are deeply moved by a poem. One is taken beyond oneself, in an experience of transcendence; the experience involves both encounter and revelation.
After Kant and the Romantics, transcendence meant more than a selfless exposure or reorientation alone, but also a receiving that deeply involves the self, its imagination, its inner resources, its visions and revisions. In this calculus, for religion and art, the self remains autonomous and becomes fulfilled as it opens to the impact of the other. Morgan elaborates through the example of Jewish writer, Martin Buber, on this concept of religious epiphany or I-Thou encounter (M. Morgan, 1994, 60-61). Taylor appreciates (C. Taylor, 1994, 226-29) his use of Buber in relation to his (Taylor’s) concept of epiphany. For Buber, the religious event, revelation, involves a meeting between the self and the divine other, an encounter that depends upon both parties. It is an act of self-affirmation, even as it is a giving over of the self to the other.
The self is receiver, but it is a receiver, not of a content, a proposition, a truth, but rather of a “Presence, a Presence as Power.” Furthermore, that Presence provides “the inexpressible confirmation of meaning,” a meaning that calls out to be done, to be confirmed by the self in this life and in this world.… This confirmation and this affirmation of God and self in the world are what Taylor calls a “changed stance towards self and world, which doesn’t simply recognize a hitherto occluded good, but rather helps to bring this about.” (Morgan, 1994, 60)
There entails the emergence of a good in one’s experience. Thus, the concept of transcendence through epiphany, that has currency for artists and poets of the twentieth century, provides a category for us to extend to the transcendence of God. The idea of God as a possible constitutive good should be at least intriguing to some late moderns. Taylor’s historical account of moral ontology incorporates an advocacy of religion and the potential of a transcendent turn to the divine, and in particular, that of the Christian Trinity. Given the language of moral sources, it provides a contemporary moral and cultural discourse for moral sourcing within the divine. As Taylor (C. Taylor, 1989, 479) notes, an encounter with God can be the epiphany that reveals an “unambiguously good moral source.” Morgan (1994, 63) clarifies: “In Taylor’s terms, practical reasoning about goods can apply to such goods in the religious context. Revelation—the religious epiphany—gives access to the divine.” This is what is involved in the transcendent turn and the recovery of a transcendent divine goodness in relation to moral self-constitution, one which lies beyond human experience (wholly other) and yet engages fully the human moral-cultural sphere. It is a transcendence that provides an encounter beyond one’s relationship to oneself and a space for transformation or transfiguration of the self.
Definitions of transcendence can become confusing, so there is need for clarification of what I am expressing here, the specific kind of transcendence employed in the argument. There is a type of transcendence that many are attentive to, a horizontal version within the economy of self-articulation and self-interpretation, transcendence in the weak sense—a transcendence-within-immanence. Transcendence of this variety remains a form of intra-mundane and intra-temporal self-transcendence. For example, this is what is attempted in the quest for the beautiful life, living life as a work of art. It is one of the reasons we travel to other countries and cultures. It defines the project of the existing self, the pour-soi, as a dynamic process of transcending what is, by perpetually becoming what is not yet—through a continual re-invention of self and the finessing of one’s style. The emphasis is on becoming something new horizontally within one’s own history, something new and different. This process can involve some aspect of escape from the past and moral law as an impediment to free movement going forward (negative freedom). In order to distinguish the transcendence to which Taylor points, one can see it as transcendence in the strong sense, a radical alterity. This type finds its occasion within an encounter with radical exteriority, the radically transcendent divine other. But it is also punctuated by the incursion of the eternal into the temporal, informed by the descent of transcendence into the historical life of the self (the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God).
Calvin Schrag (1997, 124-29) points out that strong transcendence stands beyond the economy of the immanent culture-spheres of human life: science, art, morality, and even institutional religion. Yet it is still efficacious within them. It enters the economies of the culture-spheres without being assimilated by any one of them. This strong type of transcendent good provides a stance whereby no one culture-sphere or ideology can gain hegemonic control over such a transcendent good/goodness, or claim a God’s-eye viewpoint. It functions as a principle of restraint; for example, it works against the hegemony of the aesthetic culture sphere. Foucault mistakenly allows the radically transcendent to be assimilated or imploded into the aesthetic culture-sphere. More particularly, the ethical and the religious are absorbed into the aesthetic–producing an ideology of the aesthetic (Terry Eagleton). Human culture-spheres, however, are contingent and in flux, and this strong transcendence has the efficacy of a transcendent horizon of possibilities within those very culture-spheres. Such strong transcendence has the effect of opening up culture spheres to imaginative new possibilities. Charles Taylor believes that this understanding of strong transcendence is critical to one’s best and most robust account of the moral world.
Moral economics is critical in this discussion: the refusal or resistance of this strong transcendence is a choice to restrict the moral horizon and the moral imagination (to disenchant self, so to speak). It entails refusal of such an epiphany. It is not a neutral decision, but one with serious implications and consequences. This is the choice that Foucault makes. It affects the ability to see the world and the self as good, and produces a crisis of affirmation (C. Taylor, 1989, 448). Taylor illustrates some of the consequences through Dostoyevsky’s (1974) work The Brothers Karamozov.
One of Dostoyevsky’s central insights turns on the way in which we close or open ourselves to grace. The ultimate sin is to close oneself, but the reasons for doing so can be of the highest. In a sense the person who is closed is in a vicious circle from which it is hard to escape. We are closed to grace, because we close ourselves to the world in which it circulates; and we do that out of loathing for ourselves and for the world.… Rejecting the world seals one’s sense of its loathsomeness and of one’s own, insofar as one is a part of it. And from this can come only acts of hate and destruction. Dostoyevsky … gives an acute understanding of how loathing and self-loathing, inspired by the very real evils of the world, fuel a projection of evil outward, a polarization between self and the world, where all evil is now seen to reside. This justifies terror, violence, and destruction against the world; indeed this seems to call for it. No one … has given us deeper insight into the spiritual sources of modern terrorism or has shown more clearly how terrorism can be a response to the threat of self-hatred.… The noblest wreak it [destruction] on themselves. The most base destroy others. Although powered by the noblest sense of the injustice of things, this schism is ultimately also the fruit of pride, Dostoyevsky holds. We separate because we don’t want to see ourselves as part of evil; we want to raise ourselves above it. (C. Taylor, 1989, 451-52)
This makes some sense of the moral dynamics in Foucault’s self-making: closing of oneself to grace, or transcendent goodness, is precisely what is commended in Foucault’s construction of the moral self. There appears to be a provocative link from self-sufficiency to pride to the aesthetics of violence. Foucault is resistant to, and suspicious of any transcendent good, which would inform the constitution of the self, for fear of a hidden will to power. In effect, however, he boxes himself in by restricting the moral horizon in this way, restricting the dynamics, the ways in which transformation of self can occur. It fatally restricts the sources of the self in significant ways. What is needed here is a transfiguration of vision, a transformation of stance towards the world and self: “The world’s being good may now be seen as not … independent of our seeing it as good” (C. Taylor, 1989, 448), as part of a recovery from the crisis of affirmation. This shows the critical importance of the horizon of the self.
With this concern in mind, Taylor holds out hope for a transcendent turn, hope for a different type of transformation from beyond pure immanent, choice-focused self-invention which brackets the social world and God. Taylor’s critique of Foucault has revealed his lack of openness to discovery of self. It is likely that it is because of the self-restriction of weak transcendence. There is discovery of self within the economy of grace, a discovery and a transformation that offers a different stance towards self and the world. Continuing with his discussion of Dostoyevsky, Charles Taylor (1989) writes:
What will transform us is an ability to love the world and ourselves, to see it as good in spite of the wrong. But this will only come to us if we can accept being part of it, and that means accepting responsibility.… Loving the world and ourselves is in a sense a miracle, in face of all the evil and degradation that it and we contain. But the miracle comes on us if we accept being part of it. Involved in this is our acceptance of love from others. We become capable of love through being loved; and over against the perverse apostolic succession [of terror and violence] is a grace-dispensing one. Dostoyevsky brings together here a central idea of the Christian tradition, especially evident in the Gospel of John, that people are transformed through being loved by God, a love that they mediate to one another, on the one hand, with the modern notion of a subject who can help to bring on transfiguration through the stance he takes to himself and the world, on the other.… What he [Dostoyevsky] was opposing was that humans affirm their dignity in separation from the world. (C. Taylor, 1989, 452)
The economy of grace spoken of here is connected to transcendence, to the goodness of a triune God. The love, which is at issue, which works itself out in the economy of loving one’s neighbour, is a love which finds its ultimate motivation and efficiency in love that is freely given. It is a love that loves for the sake of loving; a non-possessive love, a love that loves in spite of being unrequited, a love that expects nothing in return. I recall a lecture by Judith Wolfe of St. Andrew’s University in which she said, “Christian faith is a way of seeing the world which beholds an unseen level of depth of love, goodness, significance which we do not make, but in which we can participate…. Our world is poetic at its core.” This is what I mean by a transcendent turn in outlook.
~Dr. Gordon E. Carkner, Meta-Educator with UBC Postgrad students and faculty, author, blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer.
Morgan, M.L. (1994). Religion, History and Moral Discourse. In J. Tully, (Ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The philosophy of Charles Taylor in question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schrag, C. (1997). The Self After Postmodernity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Throughout his work Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor (1989) makes the irenic suggestion that there is no good reason to exclude agape love of the Judeo-Christian heritage as a viable hypergood for the moral self. He sees it as the highest form of human relationship. Taylor (1989) writes, “Nothing prevents a priori our coming to see God or the Good as essential to our best account of the human world” (C. Taylor, 1989, 73). As a significant percentage of the world population holds to be true, “God is also one of those contemporary sources of the good in the West, the love of which has empowered people to do and be good” (C. Taylor, 1989, 34). Michael Morgan claims that Taylor’s account in Sources of the Self re-establishes the plausibility of the divine-human relationship for moral experience: “God is one of those entities that has figured in our moral ontology, has provided a standard or ground of value, and has given our beliefs and actions meaning and significance” (M. Morgan, 1994, 53). This relationship is generally occluded in contemporary Western culture and philosophical ethics, and so it remains significant that Taylor clarifies it through his language of articulation. He illuminates new possibilities for a robust ethical discourse.
The potential impact of the hypergood of agape love and the constitutive good of a trinitarian God on moral discourse is worth discussing. I proceed with a view to both appreciation of, and a balance/corrective to, some of the exclusions and extremes in Foucault’s aesthetic self-construction. This opens up new possibilities for the moral self within a larger moral horizon, and it further wrestles with the concept of accountability to the other (extra-self), both natural and human, through the concept of goodness-freedom, a word which I have coined in contrast to Foucault’s aesthetic-freedom. There is a fresh hermeneutic at play in this thought experiment which will add insight to the critical analysis of Foucault’s ethics and the proper contextualization of freedom. I have discussed in this series freedom as depicted by Foucault and others as ontology (a Nietszchean stance, an ideology of the aesthetic), or freedom as the escape of obligations or restrictions. Here I want to talk about freedom within the context of divine goodness-freedom. The creative engagement/interface of freedom of the will and divine goodness is proposed as a creative way forward in Western late modern culture, a way out of despair, violence, and nihilism.
I further explore the idea of a possible transcendent turn in ethics. I draw on some of the insights of philosophical theology to flesh out a plausibility structure for re-interpreting the moral self. There is an increasingly robust and fruitful scholarly dialogue between theology and ethics today. That is certainly true of theologians and post-structuralist philosophers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (G. Ward, 1997; J.K.A. Smith, 2004; J. Bernauer & J. Carrette (Eds.), 2004). And it should be stated for the record that trinitarian theology is a substantial, rich, and relevant academic discourse in its own right, especially in Britain and the United States. This particular discussion draws on one British (Alistair I. McFadyen), one American (D. Stephen Long), and one German (Christoph Schwöbel) trinitarian theologian for insights into a fresh understanding of trinitarian goodness and its implications for human goodness-freedom. I will not, however, offer an argument/apologetic for the existence of a good and trinitarian Christian God at this juncture, nor will I attempt to show why one should choose the hypergood of agape love over all other contenders. That is beyond my purview here. Other have entered this space with good results. It is curious that Foucault has shown a strong interest in Christian self-formation at this juncture of his research (born into a French Catholic family), and studied many documents in Christian monasteries. Both in the unpublished book Confessions of the Flesh and his later works and interviews, he shows an interest in Christian (especially Catholic monastic) technologies of the self, as he contrasts them with the pagan Greek and Roman technologies. For these reasons as well, it seems legitimate to proceed with this line of investigation. Spiritual formation has always been interested in the transformation of the person with ethical implications.
Taylor (1989, 71) provocatively notes that, “at least some of the hypergoods … must be illusory, the projection of less admirable interests or desires.” He questions ones that lead to reductionism, ones that abstract self from real life, ones that distort reality or exclude experience in some way. After all, ethics is about how we should live well together. We have shown in this series that one never starts from a position of ethical neutrality. All are embedded in a moral-spiritual world, even those who deny it. Taylor argues that our moral ontology springs from the best account of the human domain we can arrive at, and this account must be anthropologically relevant and liveable, relating to the meanings things have for us. In this light, he writes,
The belief in God … offers a reason … as an articulation of what is crucial to the shape of the moral world in one’s best account. It offers a reason rather as I do when I lay out the most basic concerns in order to make sense of my life to you. (C. Taylor, 1989, 76)
Indeed, it offers a plausibility structure, not an absolute argument or scientific proof. Taylor (1994, 228) reflects on this work: “My thesis claims to be about what actually makes one’s spiritual outlook plausible to them.” In this series, I have attempted to show a legitimate process of recovery of things lost—the language of the good and the context/situatedness/embodiement of freedom and the moral self. The recovery of the language of divine goodness for the discussion of moral self-constitution/self-discovery is not foreign to the trajectory of the argument, but aptly follows Taylor’s suggested transcendent turn. A contribution to moral thinking is offered, and a resistance to exclusion of the Christian religion in moral discourse is levelled. The argument begins with the concept of the epiphany of transcendence in the next post.
Gordon E. Carkner, PhD, Meta-Educator with UBC Faculty & Postgraduate Students, Author, Blogger, YouTube Webinar Producer.
See also https://ubcgfcf.com for our next lecture with Dr. Quentin GenuisRethinking Medical Ethics in Light of the Good.
Gordon is offering a public workshop on his new book at the Apologetics Canada Annual Conference March 8, 2025 in Abbotsford, B.C. Identity Through the Lens of the Incarnation
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bernauer, J. & Carrette, J. (Eds.) (2004). Michel Foucault and Theology: The politics of religious experience. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate.
Long, D.S. (2001). The Goodness of God. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press.
McFadyen, A.I. (1990). The Call to Personhood: A Christian theory of the individual in social relationships. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McFadyen, A.I. (1995). Sins of Praise: the Assault on God’s Freedom. In C. Gunton (Ed.). God & Freedom: Essays in historical and systematic theology (pp. 36-56). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Morgan, M.L. (1994). Religion, History and Moral Discourse. In J. Tully, (Ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The philosophy of Charles Taylor in question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schwöbel, C. (1992). God’s Goodness and Human Morality. In C. Schwöbel, God: Action and revelation (pp. 63-82). Kampen, Holland: Pharos.
Schwöbel, C. (1995). Imago Libertatis: Human and Divine Freedom. In C. Gunton (Ed.) God & Freedom: Essays in historical and systematic theology (pp. 57-81). Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Smith, J.K.A. (2004). Introduction to Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a post-secular culture. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.
Ward, G. (Ed.) (1997) The Postmodern God: a theological reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
C. S. Lewis famously spoke of fleeting experiences of joy he had early in life, a longing for something this world cannot satisfy. Dr. Begbie will creatively explore this through music, comparing this pre-Christian unfulfilled desire with Christian hope.
Biography
Jeremy Begbie is the Thomas A. Langford Distinguished Research Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity School, and McDonald Agape Director of Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts. He teaches systematic theology, and specializes in the interface between theology and the arts. He is Senior Member at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge. His books include Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge University Press); Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Baker/SPCK); and Music, Modernity, and God (Oxford University Press); and Abundantly More (Baker). Jeremy is a very engaging speaker and performer who has taught widely in the UK and North America, and delivered multimedia performance-lectures in many parts of the world.
Concerning Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World,
Late-modern culture has been marred by reductionism, which shrinks and flattens our vision of ourselves and the world. Jeremy Begbie believes that the arts by their nature push against reductionism, helping us understand and experience more deeply the infinite richness of God’s love and the world God has made. Begbie in this work analyses and critiques reductionism and its effects. He shows how the arts can resist reductive impulses by opening us up to an unlimited abundance of meaning. And he demonstrates how engaging the arts in light of a trinitarian imagination (which itself cuts against reductionism) generates a unique way of witnessing to and sharing in the life and purposes of God. This trajectory keeps our culture open to the possibility of God.
“In this book, Jeremy Begbie achieves a remarkable double feat: a quietly devastating critique of engrained reductionist tendencies in Western modernity and, in dialogue with his profoundly humane theological insight, an inspiring manifesto for fundamental value of the arts as part of what makes us human.” ~Bettina Varwig, University of Cambridge
Below are some mind-expanding thoughts from Begbie’s book, Abundantly More. May you discover more of the unfathomable depths of Christ and the richness of your faith: Christ in you, between you, your family, and your friends. This is the kind of theology that makes a big difference. Chapter 9 is very helpful on the Arts and your local church.
God is Uncontainable or Unlimited by time and space. “There is always more to God than we could ever think or say, always more than could be thought or said.” (J. Begbie, 2023, 129). “God is other than the world, and in this sense transcendent, but transcendent in a manner that transcends all creaturely types of transcendence. As transcendent, God is present to, upholds, and carries forward the entire contingent order with all its levels.” (J. Begbie, 2023, 127) “God cannot be circumscribed by the finitude of this world…. God cannot be encompassed or confined by any object or event in the world of space and time, nor by the space-time continuum as a whole…. God exceeds all human systems of representation, and that of course includes human thought and language—exceeding our cognitive grasp or the limitations of human speech.”
God is Infinity—in relation to time, God’s eternity; in relation to space, God’s immensity. God cannot be confined by the time-space continuum. God is incomparable as articulated in the encounter and calling of Moses: “I Am that I Am.” God is not a member of a quantitative series, like a first cause within creation. He is the very ground of being. God is incomparable re: power as both quality and quantity. “The created order does not contain its own explanation, its deepest secret lies beyond itself. Because of its dependence on and openness to the agency of the infinite God, it is possessed of an inexhaustible depth. There is always more that can be discovered, thought, and spoken.” (J. Begbie, 2023, 155) “All zero-sum views of divine and human freedom—views that assume the two are inherently competitive—will also be put in question; divine freedom will be reimagined as freedom for the love and freedom of the other.” (2023,156)
God is Uncontainable re: glory, goodness, excellence, truth, beauty, personal warmth and sacrificial love (agape). He is the greatest good imaginable, the most splendid beauty, the Logos of all truth.
He is, in balance, a Covenant-Keeping God: He is with you, for you, among you (past, present and future). This love is an active pressure within the godhead, dedicated to our human good. It is a resilient, steadfast love and faithfulness—articulates often as the God of Abraham, Isaac, & Jacob … (a multi-generational, promise-keeping God). This involves a grand narrative scope and trajectory of God’s involvement with our world. Begbie speaks of the “Unbounded pressure of covenantal goodness, other-directed faithfulness.” It is infinite, eternal, immense. John Webster speaks of: “God’s boundless capacity for nearness.” The results for us are an incomprehensible, ineffable expression of the Lord’s steadfast love: “He is resolved not to let God’s gracious purposes for creation come to nothing.” He is God-for-God’s-people & God-for-God’s world. (J. Begbie, 2023, 136)
God is the Eternal and the supreme architect and possessor of life and the source of all life: i.e., God’s energizing and life-giving power, sustaining created existence in relation to its Creator. (Deut 5:26; Jer 10:2-16; Matt 16:16; Heb 3:12). Patristic Theology states that: The world is possessed of a pattern of divine rationality by virtue of which all finite forms of this world are related to their ultimate origin. All creatures find their primordial coherence and ground in the logos. (J. Begbie, 2023,168)
Mary Ponders her Situation at the Epicentre of Immensities
Mary’s encounter with the angel Gabriel has to be one of the most profound experiences of any human being. She was chosen for a special task that was outside the imagination of her calling in life as a recently engaged young Palestinian woman. She becomes a ‘most highly favoured lady’. Can we learn from this striking event in ancient history?
Epiphanies are suggestive of transcendence. Michael Morgan (1994, 56f)) points out that Charles Taylor sees a parallel between the epiphanies of art and poetry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the I-Thou epiphany of religious encounter with the divine. Taylor elaborates the idea of epiphanies (1989, 419f, and especially 490-93). He sees Post-Romantic and modernist art as oriented to epiphanies, episodes of realization, revelation, or disclosure. Epiphanies and epiphanic art are about a kind of transcendence, about the self coming in touch with that which lies beyond it, a ground or qualitative pre-eminence. One might call it a gift of the imagination or a re-enchantment.
Taylor reviews various ways of articulating epiphany in Sources of the Self (C. Taylor, 1989, 419-93). He articulates how God, inserted into this idea of epiphany, fits as a moral source (Sources of the Self, 449-52). Epiphanies can be a way of connecting with spiritual and moral sources through the exercise of the creative imagination: sources may be divine (Taylor), or in the world or nature (Romantics like Thoreau), or in the powers of the imaginative, expressive self (Michel Foucault).
These epiphanies are a paradigm case of what Taylor calls recovering contact with moral sources. A special case of this renewal of relationship between the self and the moral source is religion and the relation to God, which he sees in the work of Dostoyevski. The relationship to art parallels the relationship to religion. The self is oriented in the presence of the inaccessible or sublime, that which captures one’s amazement or awe, for example, when one’s eyes are riveted to a certain painting like Monet’s Lillies, and one’s inner emotions are deeply engaged by a brilliant poem. The individual person is taken beyond self, in an experience of transcendence. The experience involves both elements of encounter and revelation. Light breaks into one’s darkness. It can come in a discovery such as finding out the chemicals in our bodies were once part of the death of a star. We are literally stardust, embedded in creation itself and we owe the stars our very biological life.
When innocent, young teenage Mary hears from an angel that she is to become the vessel of a most profound turn of events in history, she is in awe, overwhelmed. It is truly an epiphany, an encounter with radical alterity. Heaven and earth collide with each other, something dramatic occurs, like lightning. Time stands still in this kairos moment. She allows transcendence and immanence to come together in her body and in her life. It is utterly profound. She knows intuitively that she has been chosen to make history in the great salvation narrative. Her story is punctuated by the incursion of the eternal into the temporal, informed by the descent of transcendence into a young girl’s life. This encounter changed her, everything. We know it as the incarnation.
Dare we be open to such encounters, such moments of inbreaking epiphany? He comes to us as well to call us to the higher vocation of image bearing in our career and family and society.
Mary Considers Her Situationby Luci Shaw
What next, she wonders, with the angel disappearing, and her room suddenly gone dark.
The loneliness of her news possesses her. She ponders how to tell her mother.
Still, the secret at her heart burns like a sun rising. How to hold it in— that which cannot be contained.
She nestles into herself, half-convinced it was some kind of good dream, she its visionary.
But then, part dazzled, part prescient— she hugs her body, a pod with a seed that will split her.
It is a strong transcendence to use philosopher Calvin Schrag’s language. Transcendence means more than a selfless exposure or reorientation alone, but also a receiving that deeply involves the self, its imagination, its inner resources, its visions and revisions. In this calculus, for religion and art, the self remains autonomous and becomes fulfilled as it opens to the impact of the high otherness, goodness, truthfulness, and beauty beyond our imagination.It powers the sensus divinitatis. The human soul is enlarged. Morgan elaborates through the example of Jewish writer, Martin Buber, on this concept of religious epiphany or I-Thou encounter (Morgan, 1994, 60-61). Taylor appreciates (1994, 226-29) his use of Buber in relation to his (Taylor’s) concept of epiphany. For Buber, the religious event, revelation, involves a meeting between the self and the divine Other, an encounter that depends upon both receptiveness in both parties, but initiated by the divine Trinity. It is an act of self-affirmation, even as it is a giving over of the self to the Other. Life is enhanced, empowered, filled full. What occurs is revelation, high thought, deep realization, kairos time.
The self is receiver, but it is a receiver, not of a content, a proposition, a truth, but rather of a ‘Presence, a Presence as Power’. Furthermore, that Presence provides ‘the inexpressible confirmation of meaning’, a meaning that calls out to be done, to be confirmed by the self in this life and in this world … This confirmation and this affirmation of God and self in the world are what Taylor calls a “changed stance towards self and world, which doesn’t simply recognize a hitherto occluded good, but rather helps to bring this about” (M. Morgan, 1994, 60).
This brings the emergence of a supreme good in one’s experience. Thus, the concept of transcendence through epiphany, that has currency for artists and poets of the twentieth century, provides a category for us to extend to the transcendence of God. May this epiphanic realization continue this Advent Season and open up our world to horizons beyond our imagination, a re-enchantment, a re-visioning. Mary is a model to us. She allowed epiphany and grace to transform her into a vessel of the Christ-event, the most wonderful story of history. The incarnation is central to everything that life means.
Dostoyevsky’s (1974) work The Brothers Karamozov reveals the power of transcendence and the danger of refusing it, i.e. by remaining trapped by an immanent frame. Charles Taylor notes that:
One of Dostoyevsky’s central insights turns on the way in which we close or open ourselves to grace. The ultimate sin is to close oneself, but the reasons for doing so can be of the highest. In a sense the person who is closed is in a vicious circle from which it is hard to escape. We are closed to grace, because we close ourselves to the world in which it circulates; and we do that out of loathing for ourselves and for the world.… Rejecting the world seals one’s sense of its loathsomeness and of one’s own, insofar as one is a part of it. And from this can come only acts of hate and destruction. Dostoyevsky … gives an acute understanding of how loathing and self-loathing, inspired by the very real evils of the world, fuel a projection of evil outward, a polarization between self and the world, where all evil is now seen to reside. This justifies terror, violence, and destruction against the world; indeed this seems to call for it. No one … has given us deeper insight into the spiritual sources of modern terrorism or has shown more clearly how terrorism can be a response to the threat of self-hatred.… The noblest wreak it [destruction] on themselves. The most base destroy others. Although powered by the noblest sense of the injustice of things, this schism is ultimately also the fruit of pride, Dostoyevsky holds. We separate because we don’t want to see ourselves as part of evil; we want to raise ourselves above it. (C. Taylor, 1989, 451-52)
The current events of division, violence and brutality to others (diabolos) are just such a projection of hatred for the other. It is a simple, cold, deadly logic. It is completely grace-less, full of pride and narcissism–warlike. There appears to be a provocative link from self-sufficiency to pride and to the aesthetics of violence (religious or secular). See this pictorial example of the home of a corrupt chief of police in Mexico, now called The Parthenon.
Taylor holds out hope for a transcendent turn to agape love, hope for a different type of transformation from beyond pure immanent choice-focused self-invention and greedy self-interest which brackets the social world, the common good, and a God of love. There is discovery of self within the economy of grace, a discovery and a transformation that offers a different stance towards self and the world. It is an epiphanic discovery, but only if we dare allow it. Continuing with his discussion of Dostoyevsky, Taylor (1989) writes of this epiphanic encounter with transcendence.
What will transform us is an ability to love the world and ourselves, to see it as good in spite of the wrong. But this will only come to us if we can accept being part of it, and that means accepting responsibility.… Loving the world and ourselves is in a sense a miracle, in face of all the evil and degradation that it and we contain. But the miracle comes on us if we accept being part of it. Involved in this is our acceptance of love from others. We become capable of love through being loved; and over against the perverse apostolic succession [of terror and violence] is a grace-dispensing one. Dostoyevsky brings together here a central idea of the Christian tradition, especially evident in the Gospel of John, that people are transformed through being loved by God, a love that they mediate to one another, on the one hand, with the modern notion of a subject who can help to bring on transfiguration through the stance he takes to himself and the world, on the other.… What he [Dostoyevsky] was opposing was that humans affirm their dignity in separation from the world. (C. Taylor, 1989, 452)
We mourn the terrible losses on the Gaza Strip, in Ukraine, and elsewhere, and yet we do not give up on love itself. We must be open to the transformation of the world and our lower attitudes. God is coming! We must move away from self-righteousness to suffer and struggle for peace, hope, righteousness, light, and truth. The God of epiphany has extended the open hand of fellowship, an invitation to dialogue. If we come to realize that the core of reality is love, truth, goodness, beauty, humanism, our cynicism will melt away, our nihilism will give way to rich meaning and purpose. What do we make of Mary’s epiphany and her responses? Can it rethink and remake us?
Carlo Carretto captures it: “To have found God, to have experienced him in the intimacy of our being, to have lived even for one hour in the fire of his Trinity and the bliss of his Unity clearly makes us say: Now I understand. You alone are enough for me.“
Philosophical theologian Anthony Thistelton (Intepreting God and the Postmodern Self, 1993) writes that the mystery of the incarnation is too profound for human discovery by reason alone; it requires epiphany or divine revelation. It is beyond our limited imagination to conjure. On the other hand, open-minded reasoning engages, and is engaged by, such profound epiphanies. The right posture, the right intellectual virtues of humility and openness can result in discovering many profound insights.
O Emmanuel, Won’t You Come.
Gordon E. Carkner PhD, author, blogger, YouTube webinars, meta-educator with UBC graduate students and faculty.
Carretto, C. (1974). The God Who Comes.
Morgan, M.L. (1994). Religion, History and Moral Discourse. In J. Tully, (Ed.), Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The philosophy of Charles Taylor in question. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rutledge, F. (2018). Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ. Eerdmans.
Schrag, C. (1997). The Self After Postmodernity. Yale University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
See also Real Presences by George Steiner; Not in God’s Name by Jonathan Sacks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS7s9kDPKNwThe God of All Comfort with N. T. Wright. This sweeping articulation of a biblical theme is a great way to enter the Advent and Christmas Celebration.
Part 2. The Shepherds Experience a Sound & Light Show of Glory
The fire and light of God is revealed to these simple farmers as part of the grand announcement of incarnation, Emmanuel, God with us. It is complete with a transcendent angelic chorus singing Gloria in Excelsis Deo et Pacem ad Hominem (Glory to God in the Highest and Peace to all Humankind). Joy split the sky. It was like a supernova. In this splendid glory can be found beauty, truth, and goodness plus high time which is a connection with eternity. The shepherds experience a connection with the very ground of their being. Their minds are blown; they are frightened at first by such a dramatic display, but then a deep calm and curiosity overtakes them. They quickly turn into investigators of the baby Messiah. The glory of God that exited the temple during the Babylonian exile of Judah has returned in the Christ child, the baby king. The fire of God (his essential being), his love, his creative power, is a transcendent fire unlike anything on earth. This fire and light brings peace, perspective, and hope for renewal, in effect a whole new creation. It is like a new dawn. This is the right moment for the Hallelujah Chorus, as all creation voices its praise.
‘The night could not contain their boundless praise. We thought that just a poem – until the night a song of solar glory……’
The Song of the Shepherds by Richard Bauckham
We were familiar with the night.
We knew its favourite colours,
its sullen silence
and its small, disturbing sounds,
its unprovoked rages,
its savage dreams.
We slept by turns,
attentive to the flock.
We said little.
Night after night, there was little to say.
But sometimes one of us,
skilled in that way,
would pipe a tune of how things were for us.
They say that once, almost before time,
the stars with shining voices
serenaded
the new born world.
The night could not contain their boundless praise.
We thought that just a poem —
until the night
a song of solar glory,
unutterable, unearthly,
eclipsed the luminaries of the night,
as though the world were exorcised of dark
and, coming to itself, began again.
Later we returned to the flock.
The night was ominously black.
The stars were silent as the sheep.
Nights pass, year on year.
We clutch our meagre cloaks against the cold.
Our aging piper’s fumbling fingers play,
night after night,
an earthly echo of the song that banished dark.
It has stayed with us.
“In our lives we are familiar with disturbing sounds, unprovoked rages and savage dreams, and often there is little to say, particularly for people who have tedious jobs, who pack our food on production lines, who deliver our parcels or clean up our streets. But occasionally, we may experience the ‘Glance’, spoken about in the poem. Those are the moments when the veil is drawn back from our eyes and we see the great wonder of our being. Maybe we cannot explain that surge of sweet joy that lasts for only a moment before we return to our humdrum lives, but it is often an unforgettable and incomprehensible moment of pure grace. These strange moments remind us that God is always around us and in us, and our part is to prepare an opening for God who may be seen or unseen, but who wants to irradiate us and will only be constrained by our own refusal.” ~Malcolm Guite on Epiphany
Handel’s Halelujah! Chorus at the Sydney Opera House
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