Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Good morning, everyone.
It is so good to see you all this morning. I'm Thais Carter. I'm a member of the Adult Ed Committee. And we are so excited to be kicking off our new series, Faith Seeking Understanding.
If some of you are in small groups that are also taking on this topic through the season, we are asking, what do Christians believe and how does that, what we believe, shape the way that we live?
And we are using this wonderful book by Dan Migliore as kind of an organizing way of how we're thinking about this conversation.
And we are so excited that today to help kick things off, we have Mark Edwards. I feel like oftentimes there is a moment of like and who needs no introduction.
I think especially for those of us who have kids whose Mark's influence and leadership has been deeply meaningful. Mark. Mark is no stranger to me, but one thing that I want you all to know is it's not just part of the work that he does here, but Mark also teaches at the College of New Jersey Religion and Philosophy. And so it really is, I think, the way that his call manifests in lots of different ways to help people, and young people in particular, understand how their faith and belief can shape how they show up in the world. We are so fortunate to have him here and to have him with us this morning. So before I turn things over to Mark, please join me in a word of prayer.
God, we are grateful to ask these questions together, to do this in community, to do this with joy and with curiosity. We ask God that you would open our hearts and our minds and our ears to what you have for us this morning. God, we thank you for Mark. We thank you for his leadership. We thank you for the curiosity that he models every day.
And we pray God that we would hear a good word from him this morning. In your name we pray. Amen. Mark.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you.
Systematic theology, Karl Barth's doctrine of revelation, the nature of scripture, faith seeking, understanding.
It's great stuff. It's great stuff.
We might also just call it the Gospel According to Emoji because that's what we're going to try and do today.
I do want to just paint a picture or represent a picture that's already been painted of Karl Barth. And my gratitude for Dan Migliori. I had Dan as a professor at the seminary coming in my second year. I came to the seminary just wanting to saturate myself in deep and hard texts.
And around the second year, I started to wonder, how do you learn?
What does it mean to learn And I got into a class with Dan Migliori and he started throwing Bart at us.
And that's when I felt like, oh, my gosh, here is something that is big, significant, difficult, challenging, and quite, quite engaging. I didn't like it at first, but maybe that's how you learn.
And so I have a great appreciation for Dan Migliore.
I hope that he presented here at Adult Ed.
He was a masterful teacher.
We were honored and blessed to have him in our congregation.
So I do want to, in some ways, dedicate with gratitude not only those who have gone, but in many ways, all the students that I'd love to be able to talk and tell this to who aren't here.
So there is a.
There is a.
This is more than you want to know and probably more than you want to see. But at this moment, over on the seminary campus in Erdman hall, there's an art installation of 100 portraits of Karl Barth. This is one of them. It's in honor of George Hunsinger's retirement. George is also an immense influence in my life, so this is one of them. I bring Bart up partly because I'm a little addicted, but also because if you read Dan Miliori's book, you'll realize he's talking about lots of people and he's referencing his colleagues in important books.
And then he'll make a reference to Karl Barth, and then he'll talk about other people and other colleagues and other ideas and influential movements, and then he'll make a reference to Karl Barth. And just in these opening chapters, there's lots of names, but there's one that keeps popping up again and again, and it's Carl.
And it may seem silly for us to talk so much about one person, except Barthes really does do things that other people weren't able to do, didn't have the time to do, didn't have quite the perspective that he had coming as he did at a period in time where he could look back.
And he really is a bit of a mole who just tunneled back through the whole history of Christian theology and builds, in some sense, a new house.
So I think that we will be reading Barthes in 500 years like we read Calvin and like we read Augustine hundreds of years later.
I, at least hope it's the case. I'm doing what I can.
I'm not the only one who thinks Barth is significant.
I had a big week. So in prepping for this lecture or this presentation, I'm using material that I'm so well prepared for. I wrote 15 years ago in the realm I wrote a book, I'm sorry, you may know the Gospel according to Karl Barth. So in the realm of Christian theology, and this is what the opening chapters of Dan Miliori's book are about. In the realm of Christian theology, for most people the word revelation and is thought of either as the last book of the Bible, capital R or the whole collection of books in the Bible.
But for Barth, revelation's main definition is neither. For Barth, God's revelation is not the Bible.
This means the word of God, which is so often used to describe the Bible, at least in American Christianity, is not its primary proper referent.
For Barth, revelation is the event of the presence of Jesus Christ, giving primary emphasis to John 1. Jesus Christ, not a collection of texts, is the Word of God. In the beginning is the word boom.
This simple corrective of relocating the word of God from a set of documents of the Bible onto the person of Jesus means that revelation is God's self disclosure.
It hasn't always been understood that way.
Revelation was often understood as collection of facts, truths, indisputable things, cognitive ascent to that which you should agree to in order so that you can get saved. Barth changes all that. It turns revelation into a present tense God showing up, God doing something, God showing you face to face who and how God is.
Now, as the radical black theologian James cone says, revelation is the holy other God. That's a famous Bart line, the holy other God descending on humankind like a bolt from the blue, radically transforming the human situation.
James cone also agrees in Protestant Christianity. This is the block quote is James cone in the Protestant Christianity. Because of the influence of the so called Barthian school, the first half of this century will be remembered radical reinterpretation of the idea of revelation, largely understood as divine information about God to humans or communicated to humans through reason, natural theology or through faith assent to biblical truths. Barth's going to change that.
Revelation is Jesus.
So it looks something like this.
We have a world and we find ourselves on it.
There is this barrier to this world, this limit. You tell me where it is, when it is, what constitutes it. Barthes will just call it the line of death.
You're not going to get past it.
If it's out there, fine. If it's in here, fine. If it's up ahead, there is a limit to this world. It is the line of death. And the problem is we can't get through it.
It's a self Contained system.
It's a small world, it's a bubble. You decide how you want to refer to it. It's a vast world. It's an infinite world. There's still a line of death.
Now, the human situation is such that we in some sense latch onto things.
We have a flame, we have a chick, we have a lamb. We have a religious symbol. We have books and we have religious practices.
These things are happening to us in this world.
Some of them are very strange.
Moses encountering a flaming shrubbery, A child being born, a life being lived in the first century.
The torturous state, sanctioned crucifixion and execution of a criminal in the most humiliating and cheapest ways they can think of.
We have books. We have all kinds of books. There's books everywhere.
We've got Daniel Steele and we've got Stephen King and we've got all kinds of books. And of course, people invent all kinds and practice all kinds of practices.
In some sense, what's going on is an attempt to escape the line of death.
We're looking for something. We're trying to add meaning. We're trying to add stability. We're trying to live beyond ourselves. We're trying to sustain our will to power.
The problem is they're all part of the system.
Doesn't really matter if it's a fancy polite thing or a bit of a crass and foul thing. If it's a sacred thing or a profane thing. They're all part of the system.
And you could just call all of this all kinds of things.
One thing that Barthes calls it is religion.
This is religion.
Many forms. Sunday night football, Islamic, Protestant, Christianity.
It's all a form, in some sense of religion. It's all within the line of death.
Of course we try other things. We try science.
We try the beauty of the natural world to transcend us. Out of this world, we try power.
White power, White supremacy, male power.
God bless America. We love it. This is manifest destiny.
It's taking us beyond the history of this world.
It's giving us a kingdom of a thousand year.
You know these terms. And speaking with a degree of respect, polite, but also degree of necessity. These things manifest themselves with various scales and at various times, in various places.
We try love.
All these things, however fundamentally psychological, human. It's religion. For Karl Barth, religion is sin.
This is part of the problem.
Now, the line of death has something on the other side, but you don't know it.
There is a God, but the problem is all the gods that we invent for ourselves are religion.
They're human manifestations.
They are human projections up onto the sky.
A strong, white male, patriarchal American God. Yeah, But there is something out there.
Barth's going to cash that out in terms of the tri unity of the will of God.
One will manifested in three persons.
A primary, a father, a son. Being united in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Augustine famously says the love of the Father for the Son is. Well, that just is the Holy Spirit.
That love is so real. It's real. It is its own manifestation.
Barthes will talk about the triune God, a God that so wills to love another.
It posits another, it begets another and other so willing to love another.
It allows itself to be begotten, to be posited, to be an other that loves the other in such totality and unity, but also with differentiation, distinction. And I'm not going to be what you are. I'm going to allow you to make me into what I am.
But being united in that love, it's the tri unity of the three persons.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Recycling triangle. Triangles are kind of famous for being a crass representation of the divine being. But I'm staking my money on the theological accuracy of emojis. And the recycling triangle doesn't do too bad of a job.
Now, you wouldn't know any of this is there. You just wouldn't. You couldn't.
You might guess, you might project. You might.
Maybe some person says there's one. Maybe some person says there's a thousand. Maybe one person says there are three.
Even if you got it right in some sense, kind of by a roll of the roulette wheel, you wouldn't have any confirmation that you actually got it right. It'd be like looking at a dead clock stuck at 3:30.
When it happened to be 3:30, you might just get lucky.
What you really need is some sort of interactive verification that something is out there.
All our attempts just bounce back and fall on ourselves.
This is the incarnation.
When the second person of the trinities shows up, starts to do something.
0 to 30 A.D.
let's call it the birth of Christ, the life of Christ and the death of Christ.
That's revelation.
We had a collection of documents giving witness to some.
We might call them bizarre children's stories.
We'll call it Hebrew scripture. We'll call it the Old Testament.
This event happens.
You have a collection of documents looking backward. Now, one looked forward. Now you have a collection of documents looking backward to what should we call it? Let's call it a bizarre collection of children's stories, Whales eating people.
New Testament story.
Jesus walking on the water.
One's looking forward in some sense. One looking back.
Revelation is the life of Christ.
That's the word of God being lived out in time in history, in the dirt in Israel.
Here's the funny thing about that word of God living itself out in time in history in the dirt in Israel.
All kinds of people are bumping into this guy.
All kinds of people are seeing him.
Crowds of people.
Some people see something, some people see nothing.
Some people see a man. Another person says, a man. One person says, that was just a man. The other person says, oh my God, you're God himself.
That that person is there requires just slightly another element, the work of the Holy Spirit to reveal and disclose that this one.
Oh, oh, oh, you are the living Son of God. You are the Eternal One. And you can think of the stories that give witness to that.
That means that revelation is veiled in something.
Pretend like I didn't push that up, we'll get there. That means that revelation is veiled in something.
Remember that God is not an object, he's not a thing. He doesn't have mass and take up space in its primary form. In its primary form, there's this triune relationship, this independence from the world, this transcendence from the line of death.
What I really want. Yes, that's the one.
Barthes will say, God is wholly other. It's a famous line, you've probably heard it. He actually gets it from his friend Edward Ternason. They're both pastors, they need something different, they need something new, they need something kind of fresh for their ministries. Edwards like we just need something wholly other. They start reading the book of Romans.
Barth's never read Romans. He's been a religious student, he's been pastor, he's gone to. And he's never really read Romans.
Strange new world of the Bible kicks his socks off.
Barth will run with this holy other, but really later on, in his later formulations, he'll get a bit toute. A lot he'll just say God is God. Which principle of non contradiction looks pretty good. Whatever God is, it's God.
He'll actually work this backwards. But he'll say, well, what that really means is just God is.
What that really means is there's nothing like God.
The philosophical term is a saty. It's independent, whatever that thing is, it's completely independent from all the other things.
It's self sustaining. It doesn't need wawa or a tank full of gas or, or a world of time, space, history.
The biblical word is holy.
Set apart. I mean really set apart. Like totally set apart. Wholly, completely, utterly set apart.
What that means is that when God enters the system, in some sense God is equidistant from any material thing.
Some things aren't intrinsically better than other things.
God can use anything.
We'll keep going.
Revelation is in the primary sense and Barth gives us this. I think it's just a tremendous massive corrective that American Christianity especially is just in desperate need of. Revelation is the life of Christ. The Bible isn't the word of God in the primary sense. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was God. That's the living Word of God. That is Jesus Christ. That's the word of God. Revelation is God showing up as Jesus. 0 to 30, the lifetime.
But you don't really understand what's going on in that lifetime until you look from the cross and the resurrection, from the resurrection, back through the cross onto the life of Christ, onto his birth. That's the vantage point that the Gospels are written from.
They're giving witness to that revelation.
And when the Holy Spirit illumines these texts to reveal the word of God who is Jesus Christ, it also can become.
It's a duct taped Bible. It's been a few places.
Let's say I bought it at Kmart back when there were Kmarts.
All kinds of profane things in this world.
God can take them up and use them.
Might be a flaming shrubbery, might be a text, might be a whale.
See, is this.
The consequence of God's holiness? Aseity is the philosophical term or otherness is that in the revelation there is a dialectic of veiling and unveiling God. Veils so that God can unveil God, hides within so that God can reveal, unhide. And in that veiling and un unveiling of God there is an indirect identification of God with an object. If God speaks, it's a famous line. So pardon, but Barth says at one point God can speak through a rose bush, a Mozart concerto, Russian communism, or even a dead dog.
If God speaks through a dead dog or a flaming shrubbery, then God makes it clear that God is not simply that dead dog or flaming shrubbery.
Moreover, taxidermying the dead dog or uprooting the shrubbery and bringing it home would not put God in your hands, garden or living room.
Even if these are objects that God speaks through, they are like a megaphone or a radio and are effectively mute once the broadcast has ended.
They are the speakers, literally the poop, poop, poop through which the voice comes. They are not the voice itself. Epistemologically speaking, God is mediate and indirectly present through them, not immediately and directly present in them. This prevents us from grabbing a hold of revelation, freeze drying it, and then serving up later whenever we decide we think we need it, popping it in a microwave to satisfy our own purposes, or keeping it in the freezer so we don't have to deal with it.
God's simply not under our control.
Preaching when it uses the Bible to invite God to speak through the fallen, broken, profane thing that I am, that also can become the word of God.
Bible is a unique witness. Preaching is a unique witness. The Word of God is living.
Jesus will use the Bible. Jesus will use Dave Davis.
God be praised. He'll use ninth graders. You've seen it.
You kind of hope he'll even use me.
Now this is what I have called the noetic order up here. This is kind of how we know about it. We started with ourselves standing on planet Earth.
But Bart's going to give you really the ontic order, the proper order of which it actually takes place.
Noetic means how you know about it.
Noasis.
I walked into the room and then I came to know that there was this part of it. But Bart's going to actually start with the room before I walked into it.
In the beginning was the Word, and the word was pros tontheon going toward God. We always translate it as in the beginning was the Word and the word was with pros is not properly with.
It's a vector. And if there was a New Testament scholar in the room, they back me up. You go to Greece and you see a subway and it's saying pros athene. It's going towards Athens all over process, all over the New Testament. It always means I'm going towards. It's a vector.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was moving toward God, which means it's already kind of been separated and has some distinction from, has an autonomy. But that autonomy is bridging right back into it.
Electrical arc almost.
That ark is real. It really is the Holy Spirit. Of course, that's the triune relation. They're in this relationship with each other. The Son willing to be different from the Father, the Father positing the Son, the Father not wanting to keep all this stuff for himself, but to give it to another. And so giving a son an Inheritance to that one, the one the prince, the king to be.
I don't want it. I'm not keeping it. I'm giving it away back to you. It's a bit of an eternal hot potato.
That game still makes sense, right?
You could think of this, the triune relationship as a relationship of loving others. And the others are capital T's, or I mean capital O's, capital T's. They're divine.
They're divine persons. But they have distinction and personhood in a unique way from each other. They just use that distinction and personhood to love each other. And it's this great harmonious, perpetual repetition.
They will to love others. Hey, what do you say?
The Son might have a special role here.
Been given everything from the Father not wanting to keep it to himself.
Give it back to the Father. I ain't taking it.
Keeps going around, right?
Let's share it with the world that isn't.
Let's make other others to bless them.
Well, be careful because that would mean that you'd leave your own divine hood. You'd leave your own divine kingdom. You'd cross a threshold.
All that is is divine.
Now you want to share it with something not divine.
The line of holiness wills that there be a line of death.
Puts a parameter on its own being.
I'm going over that edge. I'm going over that river. I'm going over that crevasse. I'm going into that hole.
Why is it doing that? Why are they doing that? This is election. This is predestination.
All that will be matches, chicks, books, human religious practices, all that will be.
We will will that it can be so that we can then roll it back into ourselves.
The second Person of the Trinity has already willed that there be a distinct realm already in some sense willed that he would be the other one to go into that distinct realm already willed that he would cross that line into death for the sake of reconciliation. And the Word became flesh.
Election precedes all things.
So that kind of all temporal things. It's an act of the internal decision of the triune God to go out and create this world. To go out and redeem the world that it will create and it's creating so that it can redeem it and draw it back in.
Of course, everything in that world is still kind of stuck within itself and will collapse back into itself. Maybe that line is out of order, but whatever.
All the things, science, rationality, human activity, the great nations of the world. Ladies and gentlemen, our beloved brothers and sisters to the north. Even this thing called love. They're all great things.
The Holy Spirit will be redeeming all these things.
Paul keeps using that word, all. Paul keeps using that word, all. Paul keeps using that word, all threefold word of God, Jesus showing up.
Oh, and here's the funny thing about this.
This triune relationship that's in perpetual repetition and perpetual remanifestation and a fresh variation, always of its own primary relationship that's called eternity.
This willingness to share that relationship over and over again, again and again and again. God one time again, and now a third time. That's the tri unity of the Holy Spirit, Father, Son. That's also eternity. And then it works outward and gives this world itself again and again and again.
And that's called time.
It's a dark world.
The light shines in the darkness, and it's a fallen world full of all kinds of crazy things. Zombies and fairies and maybe in the middle, some humans. It doesn't really matter what's out there.
God loves them.
His loving them posits them in their complete distinctions from each other. Whether it's moss or zombies or fairies or children or elephants. The whole variation is loved by God, and in some sense even mosquitoes is being redeemed back into the triune relationship.
God has entered the world of not God in order to do something with it so that it can then bring it back into that eternal.
I don't know what you might call it. The New Testament imagery is mostly a party.
It's a party. It's a garden. It's a garden party.
That's the ontic order.
We show up on the scene kind of as zombies. Late in the game we realize, oh, our life is actually hidden in Christ. He's the source of our life. I've kind of been stumbling towards death this whole life.
And then this thing that is already actualized in him gets to change us into something that we fundamentally art. But that's our future and the power of God is behind it. So it's kind of hard to stop it, because God's patient and he's clever and he's willing to take all kinds of routes to get there.
The word of God came to Jonah a second time.
That's the slide without any animation. I could just stop here and.
Do we want a minute for questions? Because that's basically the bulk of my presentation, except I just have a few pretty pictures to end.
You want the pretty pictures or you just want to ask a question real quick?
Okay, that's not pretty. Come on. I worked so Hard for that.
Okay, here's part of what this is. This should sound offensive.
If it sounds offensive, it should.
This is my attempt to prove that I can think beyond emoji and have sophisticated text actually prepared in advance. Now, if this sounds offensive, it should. For Barth has just ripped God out of my control.
Out of your control?
Indeed, out of all human control.
This is the reason why we cannot front when Revelation comes. That's a great line from a Beastie Boys song. I'll spare you the 90s pop music.
This is why we can't front when Revelations comes. For God alone is God and we are not God.
This means we cannot control when, where or what God uses to disclose God's self. A lesson Flannery o' Connor brilliantly exploits in her short story Revelation.
We cannot control God or summon God on command.
Dang it. Do it now.
I said the right word magic doesn't work.
We cannot summon God on command, but because to do so would make ourselves more than the divine. No longer can we flip open the Bible and hit somebody with revelation.
No longer can we claim objective, pure, true revelation on behalf of our own religion, political ideology or social strategy.
No longer can we style ourselves as unambiguous bearers of God as truth. I alone will show you.
What Barth wants to do is to put God in charge of God.
God gets that prerogative and priority.
What Barth wants to do is put God in charge of God's self disclosure, which he believes in faith happens as Jesus Christ. That's revelation.
Christ alone is the kingdom of God.
Not these texts, not our interpretations, not our translations, not our churches, not our seminaries, not our political ideologies, not our governments, not our communal societies, not our theologies, not our philosophies or even our blank. I put a blank right there. You get to out figure in the blank.
If the heavens ever do speak.
To quote Hosea with a bit of a Jesus Christ is the last true mouthpiece. He alone is the vocal poet. He alone is the word of God.
That's not a picture either. That's Barth's Doctrine of the church. Gosh, it's good. We read it this last week in the Barth group.
Pretty pictures.
Dan Meliory letter to my readers.
Welcome to a challenging inquiry called Theology.
As you embark on what I hope will be for you a lifelong adventure.
That's me 30 years ago.
That's me this summer in the same dang place getting wounded by theology.
Here's some clips from Migliori's letter To the reader, what you could be in for a lifelong adventure. For me, in some ways, it started at this place called Beyond Malibu. And as a college kid, 30 years later, getting rocked in the rainstorm while Niko's in a tent staying warm and dry and singing songs like Kumbaya with the guys.
It was a little rough, wasn't it, Nico?
Could have been worse.
It's a faith journey. That's Elias.
Milioy wants to introduce you to something that will shake the theological world.
He talks about his own experience as a youth and the ministry he saw his dad having with youth and his own ministry and teaching with. You're going to have to skew a loner's approach.
You're heading into a realm where you're going to need other people.
You really are.
You're going to have to change your mind.
And you're going to have to change your mind again.
There is a beauty out there.
Dynamic motion is great.
You kind of have to find something to anchor yourself to so that you aren't only blown by a leaf in the wind.
You're in for some dramatic changes. That's really.
You might not see anything at first, but something's going to reveal itself.
And you look long enough and you live long enough. And it might just be that Jesus Christ, even when he's not supposed to be there and I can't tell you where he is, will show up.
That's a dolly from.
Is that a dolly or Picasso? Might be a Picasso.
It's a dolly. I have it. We saw it in Madrid.
He talks about loving the Bible, not naively or uncritically, but trying to interact with it in a sophisticated way. In some sense trying to learn every stroke. So in some sense you could write your own.
Amidst the turmoil of human history, Political and environmental, Finding something that has a prophetic dimension amid human confusion. Oops. With grace and judgment, something that's going to involve risk.
In fact, there might be no greater danger. But the beauty, the beauty, the beauty, the beauty.
Thank you.
[00:40:27] Speaker A: Thank you, Mark.
What a wonderful time this has been. And we have a great one, two punch from the author of the Gospel According to Karl Bart and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to the author of Deadheads and Christians. Tom Coogan will be in this spot next week talking about Trinity, matter and time. I hope you all join us again next week. Mark, thank you. Thank you so much again.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: Good. Are we. No. No questions? Are we out of time?
I have five minutes.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: Oh, good. Well, then let's do it, everybody. Questions?
[00:41:00] Speaker B: I Like questions?
[00:41:01] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:41:02] Speaker B: Okay, Mark, that didn't make perfect sense. I should have prayed harder.
All right, so if God is unknowable, what then is the task of theology?
Come, Lord Jesus, come.
Come, Lord Jesus, come.
[00:41:26] Speaker A: Okay, expand on that.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: Break through the profane. Break through my own ignorance. Break through my own darkness.
Show me the way.
Give me the strength to follow you.
That's. It's a relational knowing.
It's not just cognitive. A sense that A equals in a number.
It's an encounter with the divine other in time, through the world. That's journey. That's discipleship. That's following Jesus through the dust to the beauty. To the beauty. To the beauty.
[00:42:10] Speaker A: Thank you. We're so grateful for you.
And the BART group is so grateful for you and helping us in the journey of understanding Barth. I'm going to hit you with a hard one.
Not hard for Barth.
Can you elaborate a little bit how he addresses one of the pillars of theology, the. The notion of election in Calvin?
[00:42:38] Speaker B: Yeah. For Calvin, election is twofold.
Some are elect to heaven, some are elect to not heaven.
For the glory of God, he gets the prerogative. Cannot a potter do what he wants with his own clay?
Barthes will restyle that double predestination.
He'll change the order of goes back into.
Even before creation, Christ wills that the other be lifted up, raised up, clothed with glory, holiness, and the crown and the robes of the divine Son. And the divine Son is willing to go anywhere to do that, even to hell.
In fact, he damns himself to hell with an assurance that makes everybody else's intent on going there by their own stubbornness quite questionable.
Because he's always willing to go lower than whoever else is.
And Christ takes on that intent and double predestination even before that kind of line of death gets. I will go into that realm and do anything to pull the others out.
At Dan's memorial service, one of the lines that brought me up a little bit short was, and I forget who was offering the reflection, but it was about Dan's.
Affection for preoccupation with the beauty of God.
And I wonder if. I mean, you're provoking us with beauty.
Lots of beauty in creation.
What about the beauty of God?
Christ discloses it. He lives it out. It's an act. It's an ongoing act. It's a relationship.
It's not static.
And he invites us into it, both so that we can experience it, so that we can share what we experience it and we can create it where there isn't it.
But what beauty is.
With an eye towards the artist over there, the art theologian. What beauty is, we don't really know. All these things get thrown up against the line of death and many conceptions of beauty are corrupt.
God alone will reveal to us what true beauty is. Strange thing. Christ on the cross. Beautiful, beautiful.
That's the portal into true beauty.
[00:45:37] Speaker A: Can we get one more round of applause for Mark?
Thanks so much, everybody. We'll see you next week.
[00:45:47] Speaker B: Thank you.
