Facing Aft and Fore

(5/26/23)

O Lover,

In my anecdotage I have been musing over our human capacity for both the past and the future. You, O Lover, have evolved my sort so as to be able both to remember and selectively hold what has been, and anticipate what is not yet, to live between the given elements of origins and the not yet realized dimensions of destinations. In this respect we of the imágo Déi are like the Roman deity Janus facing both the past and the future.

My interest in this distinction has been deepened and rendered less abstract by a family dimension. I have been re-reading a book by my deceased younger brother Berry (1948-2018) entitled Water from Another Time: Today’s Questions / Yesterday’s Wisdom (2010), a study of the familial and religious journey of the Friesen (von Riesen until the early 19th C) family across the past four centuries from the Netherlands to North America via first Prussia and then imperial Russia. Conversations between the two of us shortly before his death confirmed my brother as more focused on Your guidance in the past for direction in contrast to my own leaning into the future and the new which You are ever unfolding. Yet our dissimilitude, vivid and occasionally conflictual, was not a matter of opposites, but rather of degree. Are there words for my side of this Friesen dissimilitude? And if not, will I not try to find them nevertheless? In this post I explore, ever in Your presence, factors contributing to my own inclinations summarized above.

First, whether for better or for worse, I became persuaded during my graduate studies of the historicity, the mutability, the developmentality/evolutionality of all having being including theology itself. Only much later did it became increasingly self-evident that this fixity of flux was Your M.O., an integral part of the finite package You ongoingly craft. All of Your mighty works, most notably Your Bethlehem Project, unfold within the confines of this changeability. I now hold evolution to be Your manner of choice. One of the innumerable implications of this conviction is that reversion to an earlier time or the building of communities insulated from transitoriness is illusory and thus not allowed. Heraclitus was right: no one can step into the same river twice. The laudable intentions of many of my forebearers notwithstanding, embracing such ahistoricism I cannot do. The human journey is an historical one, and we make it primarily facing the future.

Second, I am pondering my exposure to Luther in 1969 at the hands of theologian George Forell. One of his templates for the Lutheran perspective was the “three articles” of the creed. Article #1, You as Father, including the orders of creation, the demand of Torah, and natural law, all of Your “left hand.” Article #2, Your “right hand,” was the domain of grace via Your Christ where justification by Your grace through faith determined  our standing with You in addition to shaping our intra- and inter-relationships. Article #3, that of the Holy Spirit, focused on Your wildness as depicted by fire and, especially, wind, and had to do with Your surprising, unpredictable, unfathomable bent. (I would later add “ambushing” to this list.) While I would grow toward a more seamless rather than tripartite vision of You, I have retained a profound appreciation for Your wildness, a quality which augurs for a wide-open future more than an irrevocable past. It is my experience that the Pauline “Eye has not [yet] seen, nor ear [yet] heard, neither had it [yet] entered into human imagination . . .” (I Cor 2:9) demands the wide-openness of Your future.

Third, and most importantly, I experience You in Your beauty, immensity, and gravity-like centripetality to be drawing all of us finite beloveds into the lavish plentitude of Your all-in-All-ness (I Cor 15:28). While in heílsgeschichte, principally in the Incarnátio, You have definitively Self-disclosed Your Heart and forever established the trajectory of Your tent-pitching among us (Jn 1:14), the sheer scale, measurelessness, and grace-density of the blossoming of Your Arc is yet to be fully displayed or universally confessed. The Christian faith will thus always be for me more a wordless wide-openness to Your unencompassable Agápe not yet fully concretized than it is an attempt to replicate a faith deposit (or historical facsimile) “once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

While my family tree contains, Janus-like, both traditionalists focussed on the past and futurists of the apocalyptic or dispensationalist varieties, who Your Christ has disclosed You to be—Love Itself—has persuaded me that onIy Your wild and wide-open future is a sufficient venue for Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28) for which I pray daily.