Having recently gone through the devastating experience of having our beautiful 32-year-old daughter die, completely unexpectedly, of a pulmonary embolism, I was determined from Day One (January 11, when she was found dead in her home in Durham, N.C.) to be open to whatever positive thing there might be to glean from this.  I cling by my fingernails to the promise of Romans 8:28 that “God works all things together for good for those who love him….”

The first point that was immediately confirmed in my heart was theological: God did not do this to my baby.  God is not the author of evil.  God does not terminate sweet children’s lives with pulmonary embolisms.  Pulmonary embolisms are a result of human fallenness and the bent nature of this world.

One of the primary reasons I am not a Calvinist and do not believe in such predestinings from the hand of God is (1) because I find it impossible to believe that I am more merciful or compassionate than God.   Also, (2) the Biblical portrait of God is that God is pure light and holy love; in him there is no darkness, nothing other than light and love.  (3) The words “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away,” from the lips of Job, are not good theology.  They’re bad theology.  According to Job 1, it was not God, but the Devil who took away Job’s children, health and wealth.  God allowed it to happen, but when Job said these words, as the rest of the story shows, he was not yet enlightened about the true nature of where his calamity came from and what God’s will actually was for his life — which was for good, and not for harm.

So, for me, the beginning of good grief starts with the premise of a good God.  Otherwise, all bets are off.  If God is almighty and malevolent, then there is no solace to be found in God.  If God is the author of sin, evil, suffering, the fall, and death, then the Bible makes no sense when it tells us that (1) God tempts no one, that (2) God’s will is that none should perish but have everlasting life, and that (3) death is the very enemy of God and humankind that Jesus, who is life, came to abolish and destroy.

“He came that we might have life and have abundantly.”  If there are promises I cling to, as I weep for my sweet Christy, it is this promise, not the sorry solace and cold comfort of “God did this but we do not know why.”  No.  A thousand times, no!  God and his will are always and only for what is good, and true, and beautiful, and loving, and holy.

As I stared at my baby in the casket — who did not even resemble herself at that juncture — I was so thankful that the God of the resurrection had a better plan for her than that cold comfort that “It’s all God’s will.”  I believe in a God whose Yes to life is louder than death’s No — not because God likes to hold antinomies like life and death together in some sort of mysterious unity, but because God is in the trenches with us, fighting the very same evils we fight in this world, like disease, decay, death, suffering, sorrow and sin.

They don’t call him the Great Physician for nothing.  He too took the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.”

“He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” (Jn14:7)

“In beholding the Son, we see the Father.” (Athanasius)

Emmanuel – God with us. Jesus Christ is “the embodiment of the whole being of God,” the “perfect and proportionate image of God.” In The Crucified God Moltmann comments that the doctrine of the Incarnation holds that “God is not only other-worldly but also this-worldly; he is not only God, but also man; he is not only rule, authority and law but the event of suffering, liberating love.”

Torrance writes “that no human being has such a full and rich personal human nature as Jesus….Far from crushing our creaturely nature or damaging our personal existence, the indwelling presence of God through Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit has the effect of healing and restoring and deepening human personal being.”

In Christ we have both Deity and the fullest expression of humanness as God intended it, lived in a relationship of love, obedience and dependence upon the Father, completely filled with the presence of God through the Holy Spirit.

Emmanuel – God with us. Migliore writes, “[i]n Jesus Christ we do not have less than God’s very own presence in our humanity,” and God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2Cor5:19).

If God truly is fully revealed in the Son, then God is good of heart and beautiful of character, full of grace and truth (Jn1:14).

God as Trinity must be the interpretive ground of all Christian understanding, for it is only in the Trinity that we can know God as the the eternally kenotic, perichoretic ‘I AM’ of love that is forever with us.

Emmanuel – God with us. God with us. God with us.

Hallelujah!

So long as we imagine it is we who have to look for God, we must often lose heart. But it is the other way about – He is looking for us.1

Yes, this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son to be the reparation for our sin. (1Jn.4.10)

1. Simon Tugwell in Curtis & Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, 69.

In John’s gospel we read that the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father (17:21-23), that the Son and Father are one (10:30). Writing in the eighth century, John of Damascus called this mutual indwelling or interpenetration, this intimacy, between the Father and the Son, perichoresis. Traditionally this indwelling has been viewed as fellowship. But John, who was influential in developing this doctrine, described it as a “cleaving together.” Such is the relationship in the Godhead… that the Father and the Son not only embrace each other, but they also enter into each other, permeate each other, and dwell in each other. One in being, they are always one in the intimacy of their relationship. The doctrine of perichoresis expresses the divine unity in the distinction of the persons of the Trinity. Polkinghorne comments that there exists a “perichoretic exchange between the Persons of the Holy Trinity.”

Perichoresis should not be confused with coinherence. The doctrine of the incarnation emphasizes that Jesus’ two natures fully “coinhere” in one person (hypostasis); Jesus is both fully divine and fully human. The Nicene Creed established that the Triune God is one ousia in three hypostases. Perichoresis describes the mutual interpenetration of the hypostases of the Trinity who are individually and together of one ousia, while coinherence focuses on two ousia being present in one person. To describe the Trinitarian perichoresis in terms of coinherence risks implying that the persons of the Trinity are of separate ousia (natures), which the Nicene Creed explicitly denies.

As used currently, perichoresis “highlights the unity of purpose, fellowship, communion…self-deference, or just simply the love among Father, Son, and Spirit,” the “unity of will, purpose, action, and love.” “Indivisibility can be understood perichoretically, in the sense that the divine persons are volitionally undivided in purpose, life, and love.”

God will always be in his essential nature kenotic, perichoretic agape. But God chose to share himself beyond the intraTrinitarian relationships, with his creation, in order to draw that creation in to the delight of this all encompassing, extravagant agape.

God cannot ravish. He can only woo.

CSLewis, The Screwtape Letters, 45-46.

Of all the things that are required of us in this life, which is the most important? What is the real point of our existence? Jesus was confronted with the question point-blank one day, and he boiled it down to two things: loving God and loving others.

Somewhere down inside we know it’s true; we know love is the point. We know if we could truly love, and be loved, and never lose love, we would finally be happy. Gerald May wrote, “We are created by love, to live in love, for the sake of love.”1

What is the point of it all? Intimacy… intimacy with the triune God who is kenotic love… the One who emptied himself, who knows us intimately & wants the very best for us… who calls us likewise to empty ourselves, to relinquish ourselves to both his waiting embrace and for a hurting world…

1. in John Eldredge, “Waking the Dead: The Glory of a Heart Fully Alive,” 48.

“Christian theology has long attributed self-limitation to God in the very notion of God creating something other than Godself with a given degree of autonomy.” An all-powerful God must, of necessity, accommodate himself to the limitations of that with which he desires to be in relationship; otherwise, he remains unreachable, unknowable and unknown. But any limitation by God is only by his free will, is only in his freely made decision to share his eternal love beyond his triunity. While immutable in his being he can choose to limit himself as and when necessary, for example, to accommodate his infinitude to the finitude of his creatures. 

Kenosis means emptying and comes from Philippians 2:5-11 where Paul speaks of Christ “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (6-7). Paul also says that “being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (7b-8). “In his commentary on Philippians, Gordon Fee argues that this emptying and humbling of self of Christ and his death on the cross are to be understood as a revelation of the character of God.” Commenting on this passage, N.T.Wright states: “The real theological emphasis of the hymn…is a new understanding of God….Calvary reveals the truth about what it meant to be God.”

In both the eternal Trinitarian relations and the kenosis of Christ, God reveals his nature to be kenotic. Christ’s kenosis reveals that acts of self-emptying are key to understanding God’s nature. Out of love, Christ deliberately chose to limit some of his divine prerogatives. Kenosis speaks of self-giving, self-surrender, self-sacrificing, self-emptying; of giving all one has, holding nothing back; of self-limitation or better yet, of self-restraint. Bulgakov calls kenosis a voluntary “self-diminuation with respect to [God’s] absoluteness.”

Kenosis is the selflessness of the divine persons, the selflessness Christ both exhibits and calls his followers to demonstrate. Kenosis is entirely consistent with scripture and as Christ is kenotic, his followers are expected to be as well. His disciples are told to pick up their crosses, to set aside their own wills, their own desires, and to become servants, “in order to act as a channel for God’s will.” Following Christ’s example, we are to give up the rightful claim to power and authority and take on self-sacrifice. “A kenotic Christology…explains the Incarnation in terms of the Logos ‘giving up’ or ‘laying aside’ or ‘divesting itself of’ or ‘emptying itself of’ certain properties that normally belong to divinity.” “[It] is the act of free self-limitation and free self-expenditure.” Kenosis reveals the deep unity within the Trinity and demonstrates how a fully human life is to be lived – selflessly.

The triune God of love is kenotic.

Sources: Arthur Peacocke, George L. Murphy, N.T.Wright, Sergius Bulgakov, Ellis

There came a point in the evolution of Jesus’ religious development when he could no longer call upon God by the traditional Hebrew invocations – Adonai, Elohim, El Shaddai, Yahweh – but had to call him Abba, the very name implying tenderness. Henceforth, for Jesus and for his followers then and through the ages, God had a new name. He would be called Abba because he protects, cares for, understands, forgives, and fusses over his children. Adoration would no longer consist of covering the eyes and face with one’s hands but of surrendering oneself with boundless trust into the powerful and tender hands of the One who is forever “Papa.”

Brennan Manning, The Wisdom of Tenderness: What Happens When God’s Fierce Mercy Transforms Our Lives, p.28.