of my thoughts and that there will be effectively nothing there that a professor might give and no professor there to give it. And yet I will not be alone in that place either. Among the wonders of the gospel is that Jesus is there as well—shining with the light of God’s glory. Still, as long as I have eyes to see, I am called on each new day to look for the small round things that God has placed on the face of the wilderness where I sojourn, to pick them up and eat them, to hold out in the freedom of grace the works they enliven me to do, and to say right out in public with the plagiarizing Wesley, “I come, Lord, to restore to thee what thou hast given; and I freely relinquish it, to enter again into my own nothingness. For what is the most perfect creature in heaven or earth in thy presence, but a void capable of being filled with thee and by thee; as the air, which is void and dark, is capable of being filled with the light of the sun, who withdraws it every day to restore it the next, there being nothing in the air that either appropriates this light or resists it? O give me the same facility of receiving and restoring thy grace and good works! I say, thine; for I acknowledge the root from which they spring is in thee, and not in me.”117
90. Stookey et al., “Old Coat.”
91. Anymore than this essay is an autobiography.
92. There is some circumstantial evidence that the first “Keen” of my clan was in fact a German mercenary soldier of the Thirty Years’ War who settled in New Sweden. He changed his name from Jürgen Schneeweiss to Jürgen Kuhn (from “Snow-White” to the compensatory “Bold”), which over time degenerated eventually to “Urine Keen.” Nonetheless, the Scots-Irish predominate in our family.
93. My father’s father, decades older than my grandmother, his third wife, died in his early seventies in 1926, leaving my six-year-old father and his five siblings, the youngest a babe in arms, to be cared for by their mother. My mother’s father was an unchecked alcoholic who neglected and abused his family and was in many ways worse than no father or husband at all.
94. See Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree, 19.
95. Rogers, After the Spirit, 98–99:
Mary’s eyes beholding Eve
and looking down on Adam, were impelled to tears;
but she stays them and hastens
to conquer nature she who para phusin gave birth to Christ
her son.
Yet her entrails were stirred in suffering with her parents
—a compassionate mother accorded with the Merciful one
So she tells them —Cease your lamentations,
and I will be your ambassador to him born from me.
So Romanos the Melodist, the greatest liturgical poet of the Greek Church, speaks of something para phusin. . . . The Greek preposition para is well suited to contain the ambiguities of excess. Its root meaning is spatial: beside, alongside, as in the word “parallel.” If the lexicon lists the meaning “against,” that is best understood as “compared against,” as in “paragon,” “paradigm,” “parable,” which indicate no opposition. It would be misleading to indicate contrariety rather than comparison. No one supposes contrast in such words as “paraenesis” or “Paraclete.” Even “parasite” is one that “feeds beside,” while “paradox” and “paranormal” connote what is beside or in addition to the normal, rather than against it. A “paraphrase” is supposed to say the same thing, not something opposed. Modern coinages such a “paramedic” and “paralegal” continue the correct understanding of those who work with or alongside, not against others.
96. See Moltmann, Future of Creation, 41–48, for the difference between extrapolation and anticipation. Also see Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God, 63, 139–41; and Basic Questions in Theology, 2:241–49.
97. I am thinking, of course, of Otto, Idea of the Holy.
98. Kierkegaard [Climacus], Philosophical Fragments, 37.
99. Luther, De Servo Arbitrio, 200–239; the direct quotation is found on 234.
100. Neither Wesley nor Kierkegaard is an escapist mystic, however. They are both children of the earth, practical people who (unlike Luther) love the book of James, who love the way a command of God takes shape in the concrete evenings and mornings of ordinary women and men. Kierkegaard has a better eye for the ambiguity of all human works; Wesley for their definiteness as they become good news particularly for the poor. But the earthy concreteness of the work to which they both give themselves is inspired by a vision of the New Earth that we cannot see without the miracle of new eyes (cf. Heb 11:1). Kierkegaard may stress the “cannot” of this miracle and Wesley its “new eyes,” but in doing so they both bear witness to the impossible event in which we come to yield to an other who simply will not become our property. Indeed, as we perform the works that bear witness to this other, Kierkegaard and Wesley would have us let go of those works as well, as formerly Rich Young Rulers who, without grieving, follow Jesus through the eye of a needle (Mark 10:18–27). To keep the works of love, the works we have done, to hold on to them as our property, is to be poisoned by them, sickened unto death. See Wesley, Plain Account, 112[25.38.8]; “Repentance of Believers,” 352 [III.4]; “Original Sin,” 182–85 [III.1–5]; “New Birth,” 188–94 [I.1–II.5]; “Good Steward,” 296–98 [IV.1–4]; Kierkegaard [Anti-Climacus], Sickness Unto Death, 18; Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 40–43, 246–63.
101. And found out too many times that I had gotten it all wrong and had to begin again from the beginning. Perhaps that simply shows that even when one has gotten it all wrong, one might still pray. See Barth, CD 3/3, 265.
102. Von Rad, “ouranos, Old Testament,” 507; Traub, “ouranos, New Testament,” 520–21, 525.
103. See Gundry, Matthew, 106. “Hallowed by thy name” makes a similar point, it seems to me, that we do not name God; God does. This strikes me as an answer to Derrida’s account, in Gift of Death, 95–115, of the apparent investment logic of obeying the command of God.
104. See Husserl, “Phenomenology,” 700; and Ideas, 105–7.
105. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 215.
106. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mystery, n.1”: “In later Christian use mysterion became equivalent to sacrament (in several passages, e.g., Dan 2:18, the
