author says, “He has given us something very great and wonderful...you are
able to share the divine nature!” This is Christianity’s core good news and only
transformative message.
Most Catholics and Protestants still think of the incarnation as a one-time and
one-person event having to do only with the person of Jesus of Nazareth,
instead of a cosmic event that has soaked all of history in the Divine Presence
from the very beginning. This implies, therefore
That God is not an old man on a throne. God is Relationship itself, a dynamism of
Infinite Love between Divine Diversity, as the doctrine of the Trinity
demonstrates. (Notice that Genesis 1:26–27 uses two plural pronouns to describe
the Creator, “let us create in our image.”)
That God’s infinite love has always included all that God created from the very
beginning (Ephesians 1:3–14). The connection is inherent and absolute. The
Torah calls it “covenant love,” an unconditional agreement, both offered and
consummated from God’s side (even if and when we do not reciprocate).
That the Divine “DNA” of the Creator is therefore held in all the creatures. What
we call the “soul” of every creature could easily be seen as the self knowledge of
God in that creature! It knows who it is and grows into that identity, just like
every seed and egg. Thus salvation might best be called “restoration,” rather than
the retributive agenda most of us were offered. This alone deserves to be called
“divine justice.”
That as long as we keep God imprisoned in a retributive frame instead of a
restorative frame, we really have no substantial good news; it is neither good nor
new, but the same old tired story line of history. We pull God down to our level.Faith at its essential core is accepting that you are accepted! We cannot deeply
know ourselves without also knowing the One who made us, and we cannot
fully accept ourselves without accepting God’s radical acceptance of every part
of us. And God’s impossible acceptance of ourselves is easier to grasp if we first
recognize it in the perfect unity of the human Jesus with the divine Christ. Start
with Jesus, continue with yourself, and finally expand to everything else. As
John says, “From this fullness (pleroma) we have all received, grace upon grace”
(1:16), or “grace responding to grace gracefully” might be an even more accurate
translation. To end in grace you must somehow start with grace, and then it is
grace all the way through. Or as others have simply put it, “How you get there
is where you arrive.”