Worth the effort of reading carefully...
It is to be emphasized that the triune God not only gives ... "something" but as a "someone" he gives himself. In, with, and under the gift the Giver gives himself and communicates himself with his power. The gift can in no way be isolated from the Giver—that would be a reifying misunderstanding. The Formula of Concord thus rightly rejects the opinion that, "not God himself, but only the gifts of God dwell in believers." The converse is likewise valid: that the Giver may not be isolated from his gift—that would be a personalistic misunderstanding. God does not give himself, without giving something—without giving himself together with our fellow-creatures: "the Father gives us himself with [!] heaven and earth, together [!] with all creatures," [Luther, Confession Concerning Christ's Supper] through which he addresses us; creation is speech and gift to the creature through the creature.
(bold = me, the "[!]" belong to Bayer, p. 456, Oswald Bayer, The Ethics of Gift, LQ Vol XXIV (2010))
God is the Gospel, resurrection is the Gospel and new Creation is the Gospel.
God with the life he brings, together with the church and all creation is the Gospel.
[NB for those readers not up on Lutheran theology, the formula "In, with and under" is Luther's classic way of describing the Christ's presence in the Lord's Supper]
Surely God isn't present in his gift of creation?
ReplyDeleteGood point. You must be right to some degree.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I would say that he is "in" creation, except certain specific parts of creation (e.g. the church, the bread and the wine). Nevertheless I would say he is present "with and under" the whole of creation. He is omnipresent after all. But there are different types of presence (which I guess is what you're getting at) and I don't think you can say that his Spirit in-dwells all creation as he does the Christian.
gosh. michaelangelo's creation of adam came to mind - not just giving life via the point of connection but through it, along with him, all things. compare the barren land on the left and the teeming life on the right
ReplyDeleteI am not referring simply to the first few hours, or the first few weeks of the Resurrection. I am talking of this whole huge pattern of descent, down, down, and then up again. What we ordinarily call the Resurrection being just, so to speak, the point at which it turns. Think what that descent is. The coming down, not only into humanity, but into those nine months which precede human birth, in which they tell us we all recapitulate strange pre-human, sub-human forms of life, and going lower still into being a corpse, a thing which, if this acending movement had not begun, would presently have passed out of the organic altgether, and have gone back into the inorganic, as all corpses do. One has a picture of someone going right down and dredging the sea bottom. One has a picture of a strong man trying to lift a very big, complicated burden. He stoops down and gets himself right under it so that he himself disappears; and then he straightens his back and moves off with the whole thing swaying on his shoulders. Or else one has the picture of a diver, stripping off garment after garment, making himself naked, then flashing for a moment in the air, and then down through the green, and warm, and sunlit water into the pitch black, cold, freezing water, down into the mud and slime, then up again, his lungs almost bursting, back again to the green and warm and sunlit water, and then at last out into the sunshine, holding in his hand the dripping thing he went down to get. This thing is human nature; but, associated with it, all nature, the new universe.
~C.S. Lewis, "The Grand Miracle", God in the Dock (1st preached by Lewis in St. Jude on the Hill Church, London, and afterwards published in The Guardian on April 27, 1945)
"The Grand Miracle" has to be my favourite thing from Lewis I've ever read. Wonderful.
ReplyDeleteInteresting observation on Michelangelo. I would never have observed that.
I think I ought to bolt on the end here, although it doesn't relate to your comments, that in my mind when I read this was the false dichotomy in the cliche "do you love God for his gifts, or for who he is?"