FROM DIVINITY TO INFINITY
Thomas Sheehan
Department of Religious Studies
Stanford University
At the turn of the millenium we ask what Jesus might mean in the future that opens before us.
By "Jesus" I mean his message: the "reign of God" that this itinerant prophet-sage preached in his
parables and aphorisms, enacted in his wonders and signs, and celebrated in his manner of life.
Some, of course, would go further and claim that Jesus was the very content of what he
preached, the ontological embodiment of his message, or as Origin put it centuries ago, the
kingdom-of-God-in-person, ho autobasileia.1 This affirmation in fact lies at the heart of the
Christian tradition, and if the guardians of that orthodoxy were to answer the question we are
posing today, they would say: What the Christ of faith will be is the same as what the Jesus of
history was: the incarnate presence of the self-communicating God.
But this is the Jesus Seminar. Over the years the members of the Seminar have bracketed,
methodologically, the legitimate claims of the Christian faith that many of its members hold, in
order to establish first the most accurate historical information possible about Jesus' words and
deeds, and second (though more recently) to investigate the possibilities of a religious (or for that matter non-religious) appropriation
of those historical words and deeds in our own days. Using Heidegger's terms we might describe
the second task as a "retrieval" of the still living possibilities latent in the prophet's message of the kingdom of God.
This hermeneutical task with focus on both past history and present meaning parallels the
program that David Friedrich Strauss, that pioneering giant in Jesus-research, laid out in his classic work, Das Leben Jesu (1835-36).2 Strauss was quite young -- barely twenty-seven years old,
having just begun lecturing at Tübingen University -- when this ground-breaking work vaulted him
overnight into fame and no doubt into more notoriety than he wanted (he was fired forthwith from
his university position and never allowed to teach again). Strauss' book was an attempt to confront
the dramatic crisis that Jesus-research was going through in the early nineteenth century, and it
would be helpful to review his program to see if it sheds light on the even deeper crisis that we are living through at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the pathos of a world of religious
certitude that is fast slipping away and being replaced by a world that knows no such certitude at
all.
Strauss laid out a twofold program that is still viable today, but if we follow it as radically as I argue we should, much of what Christianity is about will be lost. Today we are in a worse case
than Strauss was in 1835. He kept assuring his readers that they need not fear his critique of the
New Testament, that they would get their Christianity back unharmed at the other end.
The author realizes that the inner core of Christian faith is completely independent of his
critical investigations. Christ's supernatural birth, his miracles, his resurrection and
ascension, remain eternal truths no matter how much their reality as historical facts may be
called into doubt.... A treatise at the end of the book will show that the dogmatic
significance of the life of Jesus remains intact.3
Today, however, we can make no such promises. If we perform the radical surgery that is
required, not only will certain traditional formulations of faith fall by the wayside but also much of the presumed content of Christianity, and rightly so. Our only consolation is that, if we do not intervene radically and soon, the patient will die. The question right from the beginning, therefore, is how seriously, thoroughly, and decisively one wants to act. Strauss hardly went far enough. He claimed that the problem with traditional Christology lay in insisting the Incarnation pertained to one person only, Jesus of Nazareth. The thesis of the present essay is that Christianity's original sin is to think it is about God.
I DAVID STRAUSS: A PROTRETPIC
Strauss' program unfolds in two steps, the critique of history followed by the critique of
dogma. Why the two? Strauss saw himself not just as a critical historian but above all as a
theologian who reflects on the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith insofar as these two issues
can be distinguished in the Gospels. The subject matter of his critique was never the Gospels
merely as texts presenting the (true or false) history of Jesus of Nazareth but always as texts
embodying early Christian faith-affirmations, from "Jesus is Lord and Christ" in the Synoptics to
"Jesus is God incarnate" in the Gospel of John. That latter and normatively orthodox sentence is
made up of the subject, "the historical Jesus," and the predicate, "God incarnate." Strauss, as a
theologian, had to make sense of both the subject and the predicate, which means that he had to
train his critical guns on both elements of that affirmation.
In analyzing the subject of the sentence (a task that takes up most of his book) Strauss asks
whether the New Testament stories about Jesus' supernatural deeds are historical or not. Here he
attempts to separate out the bed-rock historical events of the life of Jesus from subsequent mythical and legendary faith-extrapolations -- the same task that the Jesus Seminar has long and famously carried out.
However, Strauss argues that doing only this much is not enough. Despite the historical critique
of the Gospels, the myths live on as received dogma and find a refuge in the souls of believers as
objects of faith. That is why Strauss feels compelled to take the next step and focus his criticism no longer on the allegedly historical data of the Gospels but now on the presumed supernatural meaning of the data. In the concluding fifty-eight pages of the book ("Concluding Treatise: The Dogmatic Meaning of the Life of Jesus"4) Strauss no longer asks whether the Gospel stories accurately record miraculous supernatural happenings (he has already argued that they do not). He asks instead what meaning those stories -- radically reinterpreted, of course -- might still hold for Christians in his own day. Hence, from the "critique of history" to the "critique of dogma."
Struss' critique of dogma does not intend to destroy the content of faith but to question its
unquestionedness and retrieve from it the latent truth it harbors. Such a critique, he says, appears to -- and in fact is -- negative, but not because it seeks to annihilate Christianity. The negativity is that of a Hegelian dialectic. Precisely in order to retrieve the still viable truth of Christian faith,Strauss must attack its "immediacy" of Christian faith, by which he means holding to beliefs intuitively and naively, without questioning, unfolding, and thus adequately comprehending them; in a word, without "mediating" belief through understanding. Against the immediacy of dogma, as against any immediacy, criticism has to arise in the form of negativity and the struggle for mediation. Now the critique is longer that of history, as heretofore, but of dogma; and only when faith passes through both critiques has it been truly mediated, i.e., has it become knowledge.5
To carry out merely the critique of history, Strauss says, is to fail to achieve the complete
understanding required of a responsible Christian. It is not just that the critique of history leaves us with the subject of the sentence bereft of a usable predicate -- the Jesus of history without contemporary relevance -- but that without the critique of dogma we might end up presuming a set of predicates about the meaning of Jesus, based on unclarified philosophical and theological
presuppositions. For an intellectually responsible theologian -- one who emphasizes the logos in
theo-logy, the understanding of faith -- the critique of the Jesus of history inevitably entails the critique of the Christ of faith. The critique of faith is not an optional add-on but, in Strauss' words, "the ultimate object" of the critique of history.6
What is it that brings people like David Strauss, and us, to the point where we cannot avoid reinterpreting the contemporary relevance of the Jesus of history? What generates the perceived need for a radical hermeneutics that almost inevitably rattles the cage of traditional orthodoxy? Strauss offers a phenomenological description of how one might come to that point.

7 Struss offers the need for radical hermeneutics, he says, arises from an acute sense of crisis, a feeling not just of one's distance from the ancient texts but, more importantly, of the discrepancy between the spirit and culture of the New Testament and that of one's own world and culture. At first one notices the distance and discrepancy only in incidental matters: we do not understand a certain biblical expression or a specific cultural practice mentioned in the New Testament. In this way we tend to overlook just how radical the crisis is, and we continue to muddle through. But eventually, he says, we see clearly that the discrepancy pertains to the essential content of the New Testament and that its fundamental ideas are felt to be radically incommensurate with today. The immediate intervention of God in history and human affairs comes to seem improbable,perhaps even repellent. We end up denying that divine events could have happened the way the New Testament alleges and affirming that whatever did happen could not have been divine. In short, we reject the historical validity of the Bible and explain away what Strauss calls "the absolute content" of faith that is presented in these texts.
One response would be to blissfully deny the crisis, whether out of ignorance or bad faith, and
"close our eyes," as Strauss says, "to one's own awareness of the discrepancy" between the
world of the New Testament and our world today.8 Such denial remains the default position in
many of the Christian churches, certainly in a good deal of preaching and catechesis but even in
some high-level scholarship that occasionally seems to encourage a schizoid embrace of cognitive
dissonance in order to save the phenomena. One is reminded of what one prominent exegete has
written about the possible discrepancy between the findings of history and the affirmations of
Christian faith:
The Catholic approach has one advantage -- the clear distinction between what is
known through historical research and reason and what is affirmed in faith. The
historical Jesus belongs solely to the former realm. Moreover, for a Catholic, what
is affirmed in faith does not rest on the Bible alone; church tradition, official
teaching and theological development all play a part. Consequently, my faith in
Christ does not rise or fall on my fragmentary hypothetical reconstruction of Jesus
through historical research.
9 Such convenient distinctions between subject and predicate may well lend believers temporary
shelter in the hurricane now ripping through Christianity, but one wonders how much longer this
lean-to can last. Strauss' option was quite different -- not to seek refuge in the accumulation of
Christian tradition, ecclesiastical pronouncements, and theological speculations, but simply to face into the storm -- "to unequivocally acknowledge and openly avow that the issues narrated in [the New Testament] have to be viewed in an entirely different light from that in which their authors regarded them." He calls for a radical salvage effort by way of a new hermeneutic that will hold to the essential while surrendering the non-essential.
10 From the beginning, the Jesus Seminar has self-consciously taken its stand, as did Strauss in
his times, at the center of the hermeneutical storm that defines contemporary culture, historical
science, and thus Jesus-research. However, until recently and for good reasons, the Seminar has
focussed almost exclusively on the critique of history rather than engaging the critique of dogma.
But even apart from that, there are two important differences between Strauss' program and that of
the Jesus Seminar.
First, Strauss was entirely forthcoming about his religious position -- something that is much
more difficult for the Seminar, since its many members hold such diverse beliefs in this regard.
Second and more important, Strauss was completely candid about the philosophical
presuppositions undergirding his critique of dogma. This was particularly true with regard to his
"speculative Christology," which argued that the incarnation of God was not a one-time, oneperson
event but took place from all eternity and within the entire human species. Strauss'
philosophical presuppositions were, of course, Hegelian and no doubt are uncongenial to most
researchers today. But it would be erroneous to think that the members of the Jesus Seminar
operate without any philosophical presuppositions guiding both their historical work and, to the
degree they chose to follow Strauss's twofold program, their critique of dogma as well.

11. THE KINGDOM OF GOD: A SERMON
In the service of the critique of dogma that makes up the second step of Strauss' program, I
wish to sketch out some of the presuppositions that guide my own position on this matter. This
will be only a sketch and no more: I will not lay out the arguments supporting those views (any
more than Strauss did for his presuppositions in Das Leben Jesu). Rather, I would simply like to
enact them in the form of a popular sermon (the way Strauss enacted his in the conclusion to his
treatise), that is, put them to work while discussing what the future of Jesus' message might be.
This sermon, unlike others that one might hear, is meant less to convince anyone -- it is only one
possible reading of the the message of Jesus -- than to raise questions about how presuppositions
work and what they can do.
In the sermons that follows I shall stay within what some theologians call the "anthropocentric
paradigm," which follows out the dynamism of human spirit towards the possibility of its ultimate
fulfillment. The first principle of such an approach is that, in second-order reflections on the
possible relation of God to human beings (and a sermon is such a reflection), we must begin with
ourselves, not with God -- because there is no other place for us to begin. By the nature of the
case, God is not an on-hand, readily available entity; if we believe in God and think we have been
touched by him, it is we believe in him and claim to have been touched by him. We relate to God
from a human place and in a human way; and this is so even if we claim that we have known God
through his self-communicating revelation.
In the name of asking what the message of Jesus might mean today, let us take a journey -- "let
us go, then, you and I" -- and let us make it an "anthropocentric" journey, one that insists on
remaining in the only place where we find ourselves and the only place where God, should he
choose to do so, could reveal himself to us in Jesus: the human world of language and experience.
At the risk of being corny, I will make this journey be a train ride. This train will be making
regular stops along the way, where you can get off whenever you have had enough. As we travel
between stations, I will sketch out one possible anthropocentric approach to the question of God
and his revelation in Jesus. After each such segment of the journey I will announce an up-coming
station at which you are free to get off the train -- but please don't forget to take all your baggage with you.
A. Finite infinity
The train slowly pulls out of the station. The first segment of the journey is about finite infinity.
One of the most fundamental and arguably obvious facts about human being and human
consciousness is that they -- that is, we -- are radically finite. This might seem unproblematic
enough; but there is a slight paradox here. Once one establishes the radical finitude of human
being, one likewise establishes its radical infinity. However, this paradox can be easily resolved by distinguishing two kinds of infinity. On the one hand there is the infinity of God, who has
everything together: he knows everything, controls everything, and has endless power. God's
infinity entails that he does not have to do anything, to work at anything, to search for anything.
As perfectly self-identical or coincident with himself -- as Aristotle put it, an act of thinking that thinks of nothing other than of itself as an act of thinking: noesis noeseos -- God already has everything. We may call this infinity a "perfect" or "good" infinity.
Human beings, on the other hand, precisely because they are not God, do not have everything
together. They have to search and question, they need to learn things and work to control them.
And because they never will have everything together, they must search and question and learn
endlessly, that is to say, infinitely. Of themselves, these efforts are never over and done with. Like a mathematical infinity, you can always add one more on to the series, and one more again,
endlessly, or at least until death. We can call this endless or imperfect infinity a "bad" infinity. Whereas God's perfect infinity means that he is perfectly self-contained without losing or excluding anything that exists, our imperfect infinity means that we are never complete and closed in upon ourselves but, within the limits of our finitude and mortality, always open, always able to become more. This constitutes the "up-side" of imperfect infinity: we are open to everything, able to be question, be interested in, and search for everything, able in principle to know something about everything, if we never fully possess everything. This is what Aristotle was affirming centuries ago when he declared that the human psyche or soul "is in some way all things."11
We may envision the unfolding of human knowing as a progression through the world of
whatever there is, in the direction of an ever receding horizon. With every step forward in knowing
and managing this or that, with every new acquisition within the world of the knowable and
doable, the horizon moves backwards, opening up an even broader vista of what we can know and
do. Thus, in principle we have access to and contact with everything in the world, even if only by
questioning it. We are open to the endless intelligibility and accessibility of everything. And as we go forward, we never hit a final unsurpassable wall except our death. Not even the existence of
God puts restraints on human capabilities.
Likewise with every step forward, we transcend our previous selves, and yet always bring
those transcended selves along with us as our inheritance (what we have been and still are) even as
we transcend ourselves again. In short, we are ever becoming ourselves without ceasing to be
ourselves. Another name for our finite infinity is endless self-transcendence bordered only by our
finitude and mortality.
This affirmation of the human being's finite infinity and endless self-transcendence contrained
only by its intrinsic limitations is an affirmation of radical humanism, even if that is a de-centered humanism, a way of being human that is ever projected beyond itself into a future that never completely arrives. There is nowhere in the universe of being where we are not at home. The Latin motto "Nothing human is foreign to me" (nihil humani a me alienum) becomes simply "Nothing at
all is foreign to humans" (nihil humano alienum). So too there is no tree in the Garden of Eden
whose fruit we cannot eat. And if there is some fruit we should not eat, that is not because of a
heteronomous command from the God beyond, but only because eating it would harm or constrict
our finite infinity. The only sin is to refuse to be the mortal, finite, and thus endlessly selftranscending infinity that we are. In principle there is nothing we cannot know and manage
endlessly (and in principle completely), unbounded by divine restrains. There is no way in which
God's perfect infinity could ever function as a break on our finite infinity -- and this is not some hybristic defiance of God's creative power but the very gift of that power.
We are pulling in to the second station. All those who object (understandably!) to this
admittedly sketchy notions of finite infinity and radical humanism may want to get off here -- but
please don't forget your baggage. Among those who choose to disembark might be all who insist
on putting an in-principle limit upon the human ability to know something about everything, and to
have access to everything about anything in a mortal but infinite odyssey of intellect and will. Also, all off who think God has to be the final restraint on our finite infinity, that he is the wall we eventually will hit. However, those who believe in creation may want to stay on board since, on one account at least, that doctrine is precisely the tracks on which this train is running.
B. The ever-receding horizon
All aboard who are staying on for the next leg of the journey. The train pulls out of the second
station. Next topic: the goal of infinite infinity. Within the anthropocentric paradigm as I understand it, one of the jobs of philosophy is to figure out the correlate of our finite infinity, the objective or goal of our human striving. The correlate of human knowing is the humanly knowable, the correlate of human desiring is the humanly desireable. But what is the correlative of human becoming as a whole? What is the ultimate objective of the human odyssey?
In the traditional version of this correlation, the final objective of human becoming is God.
Think of St. Augustine's Confessions: "You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is
restless until it rests in you."12 In this view, the troubled journey of the soul will some day end in the quieting embrace of God -- in fact, our restlessness has already begun to end, if only by way of anticipation. We are already proleptically at the end of our journey, and in God's embrace, but not yet fully. And the tradition would insist that these are ontological facts that in principle can be established not just by revelation and faith but by philosophical reason alone, without supernatural aid or information.
In the vision that I propose, however, all we can affirm phenomenologically, i.e., experientially
is this: Every step we take forward is answered by the horizon moving a step backward. If human
being is endlessly open, then its correlate is the endlessly open-ended. It is not that human beings face toward a vaguely glimpsed God who awaits us up ahead, just beyond the end of the world.
(To say this is not to deny that God exists but to deny that the "up-ahead" model is an adequate
way to speak of God.) Rather, we face endless possibilities of self-realization within the world, in a progression bordered finally only by death as the end of the world.
As we face an endlessly receding horizon and thus the inexhaustible possibilities of human
knowing and doing, there is no guarantee that the horizon, as it backs up, will hit some wall
behind it (God, let us say) and stop receding. No, we never hit the wall. (Our dying is not a matter of hitting a wall but of just dying.) All we perform are endless acts of self-transcendence; and in that way we endlessly "humanize" the world, learning to be at home everywhere within it. In fact, if improbably we were to reach the horizon, the point where there was nothing more in the world to be known because we had come to know every worldly thing in its complete intelligibility, there would be no guarantee that we would be shouldering up against God, at least not the God of Jesus of Nazareth.
If you have had enough of this, you may want to consider switching trains at the up-coming
station. There will be another one pulling in on track two, and on that train they believe that the
constant receding of the horizon is the action of the hidden God, who, as he recedes, calls us
forward into his final mysterious presence. As T. S. Eliots put it in Four Quartets:
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.13
This beautiful poetic vision of the human odyssey weaves together the notions of Aristotle's
God as final cause, Plotinus' return of the soul to its source, and Augustine's God of
homecoming. However, it is a different journey from the one on this train. We are pulling into the third station now -- and there it is! The T. S. Eliot Express over on Track 2, ready to take off in what seems to be the same direction as ours.
If you transfer to the T. S. Eliot Express you will soon notice that the people on that train have a tremendous advantage over us. Over there they believe that the correlate of our finite infinity is the hidden God who stands beyond the horizon, drawing us onwards towards himself. The
passengers over there are able to have it both ways. They get history now and eternity later; they
operate on faith during the journey but attain to the vision of God once they pull into the final
station. Most importantly they know that their train, while being governed to some extent by the
secondary causality of nature, science, and technology (Newton's laws of motion, diesel power,
and so forth), is ultimately being pulled to its final destination not by the secondary causality of the locomotive up front but by the final causality of God up ahead. And over here on this train? No, we are not going in the same direction to the same final station. And no, the difference between this train and the T. S. Eliot Express is not that they know the final
correlate of their movement to be God whereas we are undecided whether the correlate of our
movement is God or the endless humanization of the world.
No, on this train we are not confused about our goal. Rather, we know that the goal we are
moving towards is not God but more of our finitely infinite selves. The endless open-endedness
that is the correlate of our self-transcendence is really our own territory, not God's; it is the realm of our own possibilities. You may want to call the receding of the horizon a mystery, but it is the mystery of ourselves as finite infinity. What the receding horizon makes available to us is our world; and what constitutes the receding of the horizon is our own finitude -- not God, or God's drawing power, or our alleged progressive itinerary toward God. (Nor will we settle for some
facile undecidability between "God" and "justice." We know the difference between the two. To
say this is not to deny that God exists but to deny that the God-or-justice/take-your-pick model is a responsible way to think about God's relation to us.)
Our finite infinity means we are always a lack of fullness. We may try to fill the lack up forever,
but we will never succeed: it's an abyss. To cover over that endless lack with the face of the distant God, or to hope it will be finally filled with the presence of the parousial God would only be the last example of Bonhoeffer's God-of-the-gaps. In the final analysis our endlessness bespeaks not God but our present mortality and our future death; and to fill in that emptiness with God would be to deny our mortality. It would be the final blasphemy: "You certainly will not die: you will be like gods" (Genesis 3:4,5).
Rather, we should celebrate that lack as the form of our lives, as what gives us whatever
measure of being we have. Why hope and pray for rescue from it? God is not the final filling-in of
our lack, the ultimate supplement that completes our finitude, because, by the very laws of our
creation, our lack cannot be filled and our finitude can have no supplement. Thus it is out of a deep sense of piety in the divine creator that we should refuse the name of God -- much less the name "Abba" -- for that emptiness.
Last chance to disembark and transfer to the T. S. Eliot Express, especially if you get motionsick
just thinking that the horizon keeps receding as we move ahead and that this train will never
reach a final destination. All aboard who are staying aboard.
C. Long day's journey into co-openness
Looking around as we pull out of the station, I can see there are very few of us left on the train.
Most of our fellow passengers did transfer to the T.S. Eliot Express (let's hope they took their
baggage with them). So as the remaining few of us, the anawim, pull out of the station on the
final, unconcluding leg of this journey, we may want to collect our thoughts about where we are
going and why we are still together.
Despite the beauty, comfort, and assured destination of the Eliot Express -- the train of the Godup- ahead, drawing us onwards as he recedes into mystery -- there are a few reasons for declining to ride it.
The first reason is that the Eliot Express has gotten it all wrong about the directionality of
human vision. (That is why Thomas Aquinas is still riding with us on this train and not on the
other one.) Over there they promise us an illusory metaphysical glimpse into the Beyond as a
supplement to our ordinary vision of this world -- something that Aquinas has showed to be
impossible. He argues conclusively that we human beings have only one legitimate line of vision,
the view that our senses have of this world of physical data, which we make sense of by means of
our spiritual faculties. According to Aquinas we cannot look over and beyond sense data -- cannot,
as it were, stick our heads out the train window and peer up ahead into the metaphysical future,
catch a glimpse of God waiting for us at the final station -- and then return, assured and comforted,
to our seats and to our normal vision of the world.
On this train, no hanging out the window to get a view up ahead, no metaphysical vision added
on as a supplement to our worldly knowledge of things, no deep-back-up certitude that our train is
heaven-bent. Likewise, no double vision whereby we (1) love the God who awaits us at the end of
the line and then, for his sake, (2) love the neighbor sitting next to us on the train. Not two
visions, two loves, two movements, the one directed beyond towards God, the other directed back
into the world. That may work on Plato's train or T. S. Eliot's but not on this one. Here you face
only the physical things of this world, and you make intellectual and spiritual sense of them only
within the ever-expanding horizon of human possibilities. Everything else lies outside your range
of vision and is not covered by your ticket.
There is a second reason for not switching trains. Not only is it true that the horizon keeps
receding, but we can never peer beyond it. And least of all should we ever attempt a leap of faith
over it -- because we would only land in nothing. The horizon is something like the expanding
universe that keeps offering us more world to explore; but we cannot reach ahead and touch some
"membrane" that defines the edge of the universe of experience, much less cut through it and
penetrate to the other side -- because there is no such "membrane" and there is no "other side,"
only more and more of this side. In fact, in the normal course of events we do not even look
directly at the horizon. Instead we mostly tend to forget it, and rightly so. Apart from rare moments of what Plato and Aristotle called "wonder," we usually see the finitude of things on this side of the horizon rather than any finitizing darkness on the other side of things.
If you tried to pierce through the horizon, you would get caught up in a cyclone that hurls you
back into this world and lands you right here among the rest of us finite self-transcenders. You can no more peer beyond the horizon than you can climb inside your own consciousness, for the
nature of both of them, the horizon and your consciousness, is to rebound you back into the
world. The mystery of the ever-receding horizon is about more of yourself beyond yourself; and
the job of that ever-receding horizon is to give you more of this world, this realm of meaning,
these things, this life.
The third and most important reason for refusing to change trains -- that is, for declining to say
that the correlate of our finite infinity is the God who draws us on as he recedes -- is that it is very dangerous.
Consider this: The fact that our ultimate correlate is an ever-receding horizon (and the
correspondingly ever-expanding world of human knowing and doing) means that we are not God
(God has no horizon and needs no world), we are not perfect, complete, and already in possession
of everything. Unlike God, none of us is a self-contained unit; each of us is extended and plural,
not the whole of humanity but always a part of the human whole. By our very nature as finite
infinity we are social, not atomistic (much less Adam Smith-istic) but always one of the species
without losing our singularity, inevitably part of a multitude that lives in common, each one of us
bound to all the others and to the common good, no one of us ever finally free or fulfilled until the whole community is free and fulfilled.
The ever-receding horizon bespeaks not only the generic "radical humanism" that we mentioned
above but also and more specifically a radically social humanism. Our endless co-openness -- our
sociality or "species-being," as some have put it -- is never an add-on to an otherwise atomistic self sufficient unto itself. Instead, our sociality and how we relate to it defines our individuality. But notice some consequences. If the ever-receding horizon bespeaks endless possibilities for realizing our human powers in the world, limited only by mortality; and if our openness is always social co-openness; then what we are moving towards in self-transcendence is social selfrealization, perhaps asymptotic but nonetheless an immanent rather than a transcendent realization. This is why it is dangerous for those who are riding the T.S. Eliot Express to call the correlate of human becoming "God." For if one does choose to use the word "God" to name the open-ended correlate of human openness, then "God" would be a name for the perhaps asymptotic but
nonetheless immanent fulfillment of the whole human species across history. The word "God"
would be a marker for the full unfolding of all the natural and social powers of humankind. Then
we really would be in bed with David Strauss, along with Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, and
wouldn't that be fun. . . .
Now a thought-experiment: What if, while still declining to ride the Eliot Express, we
nonetheless chose to call the correlate of our social co-open-endedness by the name "God"?
A first thought: In this vale of tears, what really needs love and care and reassurance, what
really requires respect and attention, is not God (who is doing quite well, thank you) but
humankind. Wouldn't it be bizarre to think of God as some neurotic Roman Emperor who is
forever getting annoyed when he fails to get enough attention? No, it is human beings who need
nurturing, attention, respect, and fulfillment; and they deserve that for their own sake, not as a
second-order reflux from another's love of God, and not as a mere stepping stone towards some
higher good.
A second thought: Can we imagine the following? What if God, without reserve and without
expectation of return, were to lend his name as a stand-in for, and a protection of, the intrinsic and unending fulfillment of the human community? What if God allowed his name to be used for the
open-ended correlate of our socially co-open infinity?
If that were so, then on our train the word "God" would name the possibility of the asymptotic
unfolding of our social powers precisely as immanent natural powers. The word "God" would
hold open that space of possibility for social self-realization and would protect it against the ever encroaching forces of dehumanization that seek to reduce us to something less than our full social freedom, to make us into (for example) mere consumers, or bean-counters, or "profit-maximizing animals," or the like. If God did lend his name for this purpose -- without reserve and without expectation of return -- then in saving the name of God we would be saving ourselves.
But we would also have finally lost the God up ahead and up above, the Supreme Being who,
even after the Incarnation, continues to rule history from beyond history, who reveals himself to us from his supernatural heaven, and then draws us as he drew his only begotten Son, onwards,
upwards, and outwards to our transcendent fulfillment.
It is not be that we declare, out of pride or hubris, that we have outgrown our need of the
traditional God, no longer find him useful, but rather that the very meaning of "God" would have
revealed itself to be kenosis, a self-emptying self-communicating God poured out without
remainder, not clinging to the form of a transcendent divinity but emptying himself into the form of finite infinity, happily dying as transcendent in order to be reborn in the endless mortal struggle to live our co-openness in common, to endlessly enhance each other, to humanize nature and
naturalize the human -- not for any transcendent divine motive but for no other reason than itself.
If (continuing the thought-experiment) we can at least imagine God might do that, then to what
would we liken the kingdom of God? It would be not a gift from God but the gift of God entirely
given over without remainder. Not the hypostatic incarnational union of the divine and human
natures coming together from opposite poles of the ontological universe, but the end of the need
and ability to make such distinctions.
But surely that could not be the kingdom of God! Doesn't the kingdom require a transcendent
Abba, all powerful, who gives us our daily bread, forgives our sins, whose will shall someday be
done on earth as it is in heaven, when his kingdom comes? Or could the kingdom of God be the
end of transcendence, the end of "God" and the beginning of co-open-endedness, which means
our resolute living in common for justice and mercy?
But what a labor this would be to reinterpret every category and attribute of "God" as a marker
of our infinite co-openness; and above all, to take the highest name for God -- the Holy, the
Blessèd One -- and read it instead as "making holy, making blessèd" -- in a word, "anointing" --
such that the title meshiah or christos, "the anointed and blessed," would become an ontological
designation of our finite infinity, and such that the doing of justice and mercy would become (to
use the name the early Christians used for their way of living) the holy and blessed Way.
What then would faith be? Would it mean believing the unbelievable? holding to propositions
that we cannot fully comprehend? Or might it be trust in and commitment to the endless tasks of
justice and mercy without need of transcendent motivations or sanctions? What would hope be? A
yearning for the end of history and the fulfillment of our final fantasy of living forever in God's
heaven as pure, post-mortem souls with eternal consciousness? Or might it be hope against hope in
the unending struggle for that justice and mercy on this side of death? And what would love be?
Would it be that double-visioned love of the transcendent God and worldly human beings, the
latter for the sake of the former? Or would that distinction disappear?14
And the Jesus of history? What would any of this have to do with him? Imagine that only half
of what we know of the Jesus of history were true: common table fellowship, overturning the
dominant social hierarchy, consorting with outcasts, challenging the empire and the religious
establishment. Then postulate that Jesus somehow found out that he had no Abba in heaven gives
us our daily bread, forgives our sins, and promises to realize his heavenly kingdom on earth. On
that premise, can you imagine Jesus giving it up, throwing it all over, eating only with the rich,
joining the conservative establishment, reaffirming the old hierarchies, kissing the wrist of Rome?
Did Jesus' message of the kingdom stand or fall with his faith in the transcendent God?
We cannot speak for him, of course, and the question might even seem foolish and trivial,
perhaps even offensive. But what is not foolish and trivial (though it may turn out to be offensive)is what we know we must do, based on what we think we are and where we think we are going.
***
The sermon is over. As I promised, it has been nothing more than a very idiosyncratic
enactment one set of presuppositions. The intent is not to convince anyone to share these
presuppositions but to suggest that each of us has some such story, a proto-anthropology and a
proto-theology, mostly unthematized, which guides his or her interpretation of Jesus' message.
The future of that message will depend in good measure on how we clarify our views on human
being and its relation to its final end, and use them to reinterpret the kingdom of God.
ENDNOTES
1. In Origen's commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Patrologia Graeca XIII (1862), p. 1197.
2. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, Erster
Band, 1835; Zweiter Band [beginning with chapter nine], 1836. On the title page of volume
Strauss is identified as "Dr. der Philos. und Repeteten am evangelisch-theologischen Seminar zu
Tübingen" and the volume, ironically bears the "imprimatur" "Mit Königl. Würtembergischem
Privilegium gegen den Nachdruck"! The fourth edition of the work (1839) was brought into
English as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, translated by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans),
three volumes, London: Chapman Brothers, 1846. Eliot's translation, edited and introduced by
Peter C. Hodgson, has been republished under the same title, in a one-volume edition, by
Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972. In this lecture I follow the first German edition, with its often idiosyncratic spellings.
3. "Den inneren Kern des christlichen Glaubens weiss der Verfasser von seinen kritischen
Untersuchungen völlig unabhängig. Christi übernatürliche Geburt, seine Wunder, seine
Auferstehung und Himmelfahrt, bleiben ewige Wahrheiten, so sehr ihre Wirklichkeit als
historischer Fakta angezweifelt werden mag. ... Den dogmagtischen Gehalt des Lebens Jesu wird
eine Abhandlung am Schlusse des Werkes als unversehrt aufzeigen...." "...Ueberzeugung...dass
alles das den christilichen Glauben nicht verlezt." Das Leben Jesu, "Vorrede," I, vii-viii.
4. "Schlussabhandlung. Die dogmatische Bedeutung des Lebens Jesu," Das Leben Jesu, II, 686-
744.
5. "Erwacht daher allerdings auch gegen das in seiner Unmittelbarkeit auftretende Dogma, wie
gegen jede Unmittelbarkeit, die Kritik als Negativität und Streben nach Vermittlung: so ist diese
doch nicht mehr, wie bisher, historische, sondern dogmatische Kritik, und erst durch beide
hindurchgegangen, ist der Glaube wahrhaft vermittelt, oder zum Wissen geworden." Das Leben
Jesu, II, 688.
6. "ihr leztes Ziel," Das Leben Jesu, II, 689.
7. Das Leben Jesu, I, 2.
8. "wenn sie gegen das Bewusstsein der Differenz zwischen der neuen Bildung und der alten
Urkunde sich verblendet," Das Leben Jesu, I, 2.
9. New York Times Book Review, December 21, 1986, p. 16.
10. Cf. "...wenn sie klar erkennt und offen eingesteht, dass sie das, was jene alten Schriftsteller
erzaehlen, anders ansieht, als diese selbst es angesehen haben. Dieser letztere Standpunkt ist
jedoch keineswegs schon ein Sichlossagen von den alten Religionsschriften, sondern es kann auch
hier noch bei Festhaltung des Wesentlichen das Unwesentliche ungescheut preissgegeben
werden." Das Leben Jesu, I, 2-3.
11. Respectively, Aristotle, On the Soul, III, 8, 431 b 21 (he psyche ta onta pos esti panta); and
Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, qu. I, art. 1, responsio, in Thomas Aquinas in Quaestiones de
veritate (in Quaestiones disputatae et quastiones duodecim quodlibetales, III-V [Turin and Rome:
Marietti, 1942]), p. 3A (quod natum est convenire cum omni ente).
12. "Tu excitas, ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec
requiescat in te." Confessiones I, 1.
13. T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," V, (Four Quartets), The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S.
Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 197.
14. Is it possible that those who have learned something from the Jesus' message of the kingdom
of God might choose to celebrate sacraments and liturgies, eucharists and feasts, to solemnize the
mystery of endless co-openness? Could the churches ever be what Nietzsche called them, "the
tombs and sepulchers of God," but now in a positive sense: the temples of justice and mercy? The
most probable answer is: no.