After Crucifixion. Craig Keen

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After Crucifixion - Craig Keen

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Here everything is. There simply cannot be an outside. If we thought that we had identified an outside, it would by the very act of identification be inside; and an outside with no place inside is literally unthinkable.59

      Yet the church’s sages again and again struggled to find ways of thinking at once both the God at work in the Gospels and the “nature” that has neither work to do nor an outside in which to do it. It struggled to think them at once without forgetting the difference between the things of this world and the things of God. Certainly they recited the Creed of Chalcedon with gusto, forsaking all to follow the incarnate heavenly Logos. Certainly they knew in their bones that God is sharply different from this world. They sang doxologies to that God. And yet . . . it was so very hard to resist the temptation to gather all their thoughts on the way to a profitable vision of a more magnificent, integrated physis, one finally with everything inside.

      What is impressive is the way this temptation was resisted time and time again in the work of the church’s doctors. Thus, though Francis of Assisi was certainly unlikely and exceptional, he was not even among intellectuals without foreshadowing. Yet it is perhaps telling that the revolt he heralded arose above all as he gave himself in naked prayer to the particular, human Jesus. That there might be revolution in this signals among these people the extent to which authorities (even ecclesiastical authorities) tend to pass by particularity—even that particularity—in order to get at the stable, integrating principles of which any particularity is by default taken to be an instance—and this, all the while rending a crusty, brown loaf of bread (bread the color of the skin of a tired young mother crossing the Sonoran Imperial Desert) and lifting a cup of deep red wine (wine the color of her thick blood starving for food, water, and air).

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