Here is the ready-to-answer question of Christian theology
January 27: Rigby, Speaking of God (chapter three on Incarnation)
Question: Drawing on Rigby's observations on pp. 86-90 (on Chalcedon), what difference does Jesus being fully divine and fully human make to how you live your everyday life as a person of faith? If you don't identify as Christian, how do you think the identify of Jesus should influence Christian choices?
In her book Living by Fiction, Annie Dillard points out, along these lines, that most of what we have to say to one another is about "artifacts"-that is, specific things that have already been made by human beings that can be created, managed, examined, known, and mastered. 86 Dillard seems to include, in her understanding of artifacts, not only physical objects we make and use, or make and admire. She includes, also, the systems we develop that frame what is beyond our scope-perhaps the periodic table, the color wheel, or, even, a birdwatchers' guide. What is lacking in our world and our lives is not intriguing discussions of artifacts. What is lacking, she says, are those who are courageous enough to say something immediate about existence itself. "Who will interpret the raw universe?" she asks. "We have a shortage of metaphysicians." 87 This is a problem, Dillard thinks, because "if we confine our interpretive investigations to strictly bounded aspects of culture ... we miss learning what we most want to know."88
But what is it that we most want to know? Influenced by Dillard, I have come to think about it this way: what we want to know most, I believe, is not everything about something, but something about everything. We want someone to say something that makes sense of the cosmos, of creation, of God, of love, of suffering, of existence. We are impressed with those who know everything there is to know about the periodic table, but we also want someone to risk saying something meaningful about the raw universe, even while acknowledging it will never be possible to say everything about it. The question is: Who among us is willing to risk speaking about what matters most?
Theology is committed to knowing and saying something about everything. It is in the business of articulating what matters most to our lives, and the life of this world. As such, it is a discipline that risks engaging in conversations outside of its presumed expertise. The perimeters of the theological enterprise are delimited not by what theologians can most ably navigate, nor even by the specific callings of God to engage particular needs of the world. Bill Placher, reveling in the wide expanse of possibilities for theological discourse as they are reflected in the writings of Barth, writes: "From a Christian perspective one can engage in conversation with anybody about anything-from Mozart to Nietzsche to Pure Land Buddhism." 89 This, again, is not because Christians are expert in all subjects but because they are free to discover and articulate whatever something about everything is life-giving for all.
The key, of course, is knowing what to look for and being able to discern it. How do we discern God's Word in this world so packed with both beauty and discordance? How do we go about exploring all that is around us in ways that get lost in the wonder of it all while still making judgments about meaning, value, and truth? Why is it so hard to get to what matters most, and how are we going to surmount these obstacles in our quest to discover and articulate the right words to say about God?
TO WHOM Is GOD DISCLOSED? GENERAL AND SPECIAL REVELATION
Calvin gives us a couple of categories that can help us frame our search for meaning in relation to God's self-revelation. In brief, he distinguishes between general and special revelation. By general revelation, he is referring to how God is self-revealed equally and to everyone in the world shared by all of us-in nature, in our philosophies, and in the way we conceive and develop governmental, ethical, and social systems. By special revelation, Calvin is referencing how God reveals Godself to particular individuals in particular ways not common to everyone. God's self-disclosure to the Israelites, for example, is a story of God selecting one particular nation to be God's people. God chose to love Israel, the biblical witness attests, not because of any virtue or merit of their own, but just because God wanted to. 90 God brought the father of Israel, Abram (later to be called "Abraham") outside to see the fact that Abraham was called by name, in the context of a particular event not experienced in general and by everyone.
When we consider how the doctrine of special revelation hits the ground in relation to our day-to-day lives, we will likely raise concerns about the sense in which it seems to endorse exclusivity even as we give thanks for the ways in which it affirms God's self-disclosure as personal and intimate. There is no question that, historically, this doctrine has been used to advance the idea that some are "in" and some are "out." in relation to God's favor. 92
