The God who condescends to time and space.
R. C. H. Lenski on Colossians and Christ’s eternal presence.
I think I will blame the following post on the late Episcopal theologian Robert F. Capon. After all, it was he who often encouraged theologians to shed their dogmatic stiffness and (re-)discover the playfulness of grace within the Christian faith. This, of course, doesn’t mean we should go hog-wild with theories and analogies. But it does mean that the discipline of theology and the pursuit of the knowledge of God is not, inherently, a stuffy academic exercise. The buttoned-up approach to doctrine certainly has its place, but that place doesn’t have to be “everywhere” and “all the time.” Not to belabor the point too much, but I think this is part of what the Lord implied when he chided his apostles for turning away the children and, instead, said to them, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14). With these words, Christ revealed that his kingdom not only belonged to those who were humble and as lowly as “little children” but also that it was occupied by those who were simple enough and gullible enough to bank everything on grace.
The image that always comes to my mind when I read that passage is that of a three-year-old on the edge of a pool being encouraged by his dad to jump in. Even if she doesn’t know how to swim, her daddy’s reassurance that he’ll catch her is enough for her to dive into the deep end. There is a lowliness and humility in this trust that doesn’t require lengthy reasons or well-articulated arguments to win you over. Call it simplicity, call it gullibility, call it innocence, or call it faith, whatever the case, there is a tremendous amount of grace in such unadorned trust, which, I maintain, is what Christ was after. For those wishing and hoping to find a place in the kingdom of heaven, all that’s required is a faith that’s childlike enough to trust in what the enfleshed Word makes possible through his death and resurrection. But before I digress on that point any further, let’s engage in a little theological playfulness.
I’ve been engrossed in researching, preparing, and writing sermons for my new series through the Book of Colossians, which has brought me to Paul’s unparalleled Christological chorus in Colossians 1:15–20. As the apostle rhapsodizes about the Christ of God, he, of course, articulates far more than mere Christological dogma. His intent is to engage the Colossians themselves with the all-surpassing wonder of “God’s mystery, which is Christ” (Col. 2:2). In particular, he impresses upon them the divine marvel that “the word of the truth, the gospel” is that which gives them Christ himself. The Christ of God is the subject and the substance of the euangelion. This fact alone ought to be enough to leave us gobsmacked, but the apostle’s penetrating yet exulting expressions bring the concomitant astonishment even closer to home. After all, the one who makes peace for every sinner “by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:20) is none other than he who “is before all things” and in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).
Setting aside the Nicene and Chalcedonian disputations concerning the deity and humanity of Christ, especially since I have already addressed the latter elsewhere, it is clear to me that Paul’s Christology was already robust enough to affirm not only Christ’s co-equality with the Father, as he affirms elsewhere (Phil. 2:6) but also his full participation with the human condition. The fullness of what it means to be human was on display in the person of Jesus even as the “fullness of God was pleased to dwell” in him as well (Col. 1:19). This is significant and more than a little mind-bending since, mathematically, it doesn’t compute that a person could be 100 percent God and 100 percent man at the same time. Yet, biblically, this is our confession. As our forefathers at Chalcedon put it, “We then following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess, one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in Manhood; truly God, and truly man of a reasonable soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood” (Hammond, 82–83).
To say that Christ “is before all things” brings up another point that exceeds in incomprehensibility — namely, that the Son of God is situated outside the bounds of time and space. Unlike mankind, which cannot imagine, let alone articulate something, without the traces of time and space attached to it, the Godhead is not so fettered. “In the beginning, God” endures as one of the most fundamental confessions of God’s timelessness (Gen. 1:1). So, too, does John’s Gospel begin, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1–3). God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in the glorious timelessness of eternity (2 Pet. 3:8). Here’s how the twentieth-century Lutheran theologian and scholar R. C. H. Lenski put it in his commentary on Colossians:
The Creator of time is not bound by differences of time; our minds are chained to succession and limitation of time and cannot even conceive of the relation of the timeless God to events occurring in time. Before a thing occurs it is non-existent to us, then it occurs, and we date it and look back upon it as past. God and Christ are above anything like this. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world, Rev. 13:8, not ideally merely but in fact. It is useless for us to try to conceive this. All the saints stood before God ere the creation of the world as we shall see them after time shall be no more, not merely as a mental picture in God’s mind but in a reality that was as factual as that of the last day. (48)
As Lenski admits, it is “useless for us to try to conceive this,” let alone be dogmatic about it. But, for the sake of theological playfulness, allow me to indulge even further on this point. When I read those words from Lenski, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about a wild theory I first came across via a snippet of the eloquently named Ninjas Are Butterflies podcast, in which the hosts riff about a scriptural hypothesis that understands the revelation of God’s glory at the heart of Exodus 33, 1 Kings 19, and Mark 9 to be essentially the same event. (I don’t, for the record, subscribe to where the hosts land with theory, what with their comments on “portals” and whatnot, but it allows for a fun thought exercise, nonetheless.)
In Exodus 33, of course, Moses is on Mount Sinai receiving the covenant of the Lord from the Lord himself, an event that culminates with Moses asking to see God’s glory and God acquiescing by showing him his “back” while situating him “in a cleft of the rock” (Exod. 33:17–23). Afterward, Moses descends not only with new tablets containing the Lord’s commands but also with a face beaming with light because of the glory he had witnessed (Exod. 34:29–35). In 1 Kings 19, we are told the story of Elijah’s escape from Queen Jezebel, who was on a warpath to extinguish the land of every prophet of Yahweh. As Elijah runs, he is nourished by an angel who summons him to journey for “forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God” (1 Kings 19:8), a.k.a. Mount Sinai. It is there, in a cave, where the despondent prophet is greeted by the glory of the Lord, which passes by him in “the sound of a low whisper” (1 Kings 19:12) or, as it is in the King James, “a still small voice.”
In both of these Old Testament accounts, it is generally accepted that they are occasions on which God’s Son, prior to his incarnation, intruded into time and space to confirm his word of promise for his people. Not for nothing, of course, is the intriguing fact that both revelations of God’s glory occur in the same location and even, perhaps, in the same “cleft of the rock.” But where does Mark 9 fit into this? Mark 9, of course, is the account of Jesus’s transfiguration, where the Lord discloses all of his divine glory to Peter, James, and John on the top of “a high mountain” (Mark 9:2–8; cf. Matt. 17:1–8; Luke 9:28–36; 2 Pet. 1:16–18). The same themes of glory being revealed by accompanying light are present, as in the Exodus passage, with the overriding point that Jesus of Nazareth is none other than God’s “beloved Son,” the very one whom Paul describes as “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). Mysteriously, though, two other figures also appeared on that mountaintop alongside the transfigured Christ — namely, Moses and Elijah.
According to the guys from Ninjas Are Butterflies, the theory goes that the transfiguration represents a moment in which three different timeliness of human history, those of Moses, Elijah, and the apostles, collapse and, for a brief moment, converge in the person of Jesus. The glory that Moses saw and the glory that Elijah heard constitute, then, the same transfigured glory that Peter, James, and John witnessed. This is what we might call the “Christopher Nolan interpretation” of events, which is masterfully represented by the conclusion of his 2017 film Dunkirk, where three cinematic timelines of the same event dramatically converge. Admittedly, the geography of Exodus 33 and 1 Kings 19 precludes us from trying to aver that the same “cleft of the rock” was also the venue for Mark 9. But, even still, for the sake of theological playfulness, there is something transfixing about the notion of Christ’s transfiguration stretching back through time, at least we conceive of it, to enthrall and enrich his saints for all time.
This brings us back to consider the wonder of the fact of Christ’s incarnation, which, as we are told, constitutes the “whole fullness of deity dwell[ing] bodily” in the person of Jesus (Col. 2:9). The one who is outside of time and space enters into it for our sake. In the Christ of God, God himself collapses into the succession of human history, even as he condescends to it, to redeem and reconcile it to himself. While I cannot prove this biblical hypothesis with any amount of dogmatic rhetoric, it is, at the very least, fun to think about. For me, it is reminiscent of the marvelous mystery with which I am possessed — namely, that the one who occupies this realm of sin and death in order to relieve and rescue sinners from the same is the one who sends his Spirit to dwell in the redeemed and to show them the glory of the crucified one (John 16:14–15).
Grace and peace to you, my friends.
Works cited:
William Andrew Hammond, The Definitions of Faith, and Canons of Discipline, of the Six Œcumenical Councils (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843).
R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians, to the Thessalonians, to Timothy, to Titus, and to Philemon (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg, 1961).