God. After the incarnation of Jesus, we could more easily imagine a give-and-
take God, a relational God, a forgiving God. Strobe light revelations of Christ,
which Bruno Barnhart calls the “Christ Quanta”*5 were already seen and
honored in the deities of Native religions, the Atman of Hinduism, the teachings
of Buddhism, and the Prophets of Judaism. Christians had a very good model
and messenger in Jesus, but many outliers actually came to the “banquet” more
easily, as Jesus often says in his parables of the resented and resisted banquet
(Matthew 22:1–10, Luke 14:7–24), where “the wedding hall was filled with
guests, both good and bad alike” (Matthew 22:10). What are we to do with such
divine irresponsibility, such endless largesse, such unwillingness on God’s part
to build walls, circle wagons, or create unneeded boundaries?
We must be honest and humble about this: Many people of other faiths, like
Sufi masters, Jewish prophets, many philosophers, and Hindu mystics, have
lived in light of the Divine encounter better than many Christians. And why
would a God worthy of the name God not care about all of the children? (Read
Wisdom 11:23–12:2 for a humdinger of a Scripture in this regard.) Does God
really have favorites among his children? What an unhappy family that would
create—and indeed, it has created. Our complete and happy inclusion of the
Jewish scriptures inside of the Christian canon ought to have served as a
structural and definitive statement about Christianity’s movement toward
radical inclusivity. How did we miss that? No other religion does that.
Remember what God said to Moses: “I AM Who I AM” (Exodus 3:14). God is
clearly not tied to a name, nor does he seem to want us to tie the Divinity to any
one name. This is why, in Judaism, God’s statement to Moses became the
unspeakable and unnameable God. Some would say that the name of God
literally cannot be “spoken.”*6 Now that was very wise, and more needed than
we realized! This tradition alone should tell us to practice profound humility in
regard to God, who gives us not a name, but only pure presence—no handle
that could allow us to think we “know” who God is or have him or her as our
private possession.
The Christ is always way too much for us, larger than any one era, culture,
empire, or religion. Its radical inclusivity is a threat to any power structure and
any form of arrogant thinking. Jesus by himself has usually been limited by the
evolution of human consciousness in these first two thousand years, and held
captive by culture, by nationalism, and by Christianity’s own cultural captivity
to a white, bourgeois, and Eurocentric worldview. Up to now, we have not been
carrying history too well, because “there stood among us one we did not