Transcendence-Immanence-Incarnation
I had trouble this morning focusing as I approached this reading. I was trying to read Psalm 99, and I was thinking about elementary school, a classmate from that time, and my friend, Barry. Barry resembles the classmate I was thinking of, incidentally, in appearance, ability. and existential leven. In Barry’s vocabulary, both are thoroughgoing turkeys, which is more positive than it sounds. Both grew up in strict religious environments, but their immanence demanded that they reject religion and faith, which, Barry says, lets people soar like turkey vultures. I also feel the pull of immanence.
Funny then, that as I read Revelation 4, those two kept obtruding. Nothing could be more exalted than Revelation 4: a throne room in heaven, with One like a jasper stone and sardius in appearance upon it. Before the throne is a sea of glass like crystal, and around it stand four creatures—one like a lion in appearance, a calf, a man, and an eagle. I wonder how limited John’s vocabulary was in describing his vision. Would a more modern lexicon have been able to report something more recognizable to us? Or would more advanced language merely garble the imagery more?
These two competing sets of images—turkeys and this literary object of turkey vulture fascination—represent something of what it means to be human. We are strung between transcendence and immanence, and it is an unhappy arrangement. Pious talk of God’s holiness annihilates all that we know and naturally love, though that is not necessarily bad. We love some destructive things. But utter immanence eventuates in meaninglessness, hopelessness, and death. If Christianity left us here, with Raphael’s painting, The School of Athens, and the disagreement between Plato’s ideals and Aristotle’s particulars, I would not be able to embrace it. But it does not leaves us with that irresolvable tension. It synthesizes it.
Christianity is neither immanent nor transcendent. It is both. It is incarnational. It begins with transcendence: “In the beginning God.” And it proceeds to immanence: “created the heavens and the earth.” The Fall of man broke the unity that inhered between these two realms. Man plunged into immanence. And God slowly revealed himself to man, in increasingly incarnational ways: angels, burning bushes, stone tablets, tabernacles, victories, land, a temple, prophets. I don’t know what this tension would have felt like for the ancient Hebrews. The Old Testament depicts such an immanent human experience and many transcendent encounters with God. But he deals with his people on a largely material plane, giving them land, riches, and abundance—as a rule, Job being a notable and essential exception—for their honoring Him.
But the full revelation came in Christ, when the transcendent God himself entered his immanent creation by taking on flesh like his creatures. Though God is transcendent, he created immanence. Therefore, it is not bad in and of itself. Although fallen man takes immanence and exalts it without transcendence, and though religious fallen man takes transcendence and exalts it without immanence, the Lord synthesized the two by becoming a man and esteeming both poles of being.
Jesus demonstrated by his life the proper way to navigate this Scylla and Charybdis of humanity. He did not reject immanence by refusing to eat, wear clothing, or drink wine, but neither did he reject transcendence by gluttony, materialism, or drunkenness. He did not love his immanence so much that he could not lay it down to go to the cross; and he did not abhor immanence by being reckless with his life when it was not his time to die. Because he was properly related to transcendence, he could embrace the end result of all immanence by itself—death. For he knew that the power of heaven was his, and that God would resurrect his body.
Christ’s form after the resurrection is crucial to us. Though he ascended into heaven, leaving us with the responsibility of working out the meaning of his incarnation, death, and resurrection, we know that we will be given new bodies. God’s plan is not that our souls will be finally freed from materiality. We will have perfect bodies, like Christ’s. And like him, we may even bear the scars that sheer immanence once inflicted on us.
This scene in Revelation, however, is so beyond the ken of mundane experience that it is almost utterly transcendent. And yet there are objects in heaven, and John chooses to describe the heavenly realm with earthly comparison. I’m reminded of the angel Raphael’s speech to Adam in Paradise Lost, when Adam asks for an account of the war in Heaven:
“High matter thou enjoin’st me, O prime of men,
Sad task and hard, for how shall I relate
To human sense th’ invisible exploits
Of warring spirits…
….Yet for thy good
This is dispensed, and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms,
As may express them best, though what if Earth
Be but the shadow of Heav’n, and things therein
Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?” (5.563-576)
A fascinating prospect. What if earth is but the shadow of heaven? Rather than denigrating the earth, this thought exalts it. It is not superior to heaven, but it did proceed from heaven, and it would seem that things there resemble things here more than we would expect. On the other hand, it is so marvelous that we may suspect John’s inability to render it in detail.
Nevertheless, the Spirit inspired the apostle to render it as he did, and we must be content to imagine and to wonder.
Until we see for ourselves, we must look to Christ, who saved us by movement from transcendence, to immanence, to synthesis, to ascension. By his power and his grace, we will follow in his footsteps.