and Freud reiterated, that the human animal, from the first, seems to have this insatiable longing, this great yearning. The infant demands attention from the world, insists on being noticed. The human is a fragile animal who cannot survive alone, who must make connection first with the mother, then with one human being after another. Plato said that this was the beginning of all human thought and culture, the explanation for all human achievement, and much human misery too. We must connect.
Yet here's the great mystery: The God of Israel and the church also connects. It is not so much that God must connect but there is something about this God that seems, from the first, exuberantly to desire us, to want to communicate with us, abundantly to self-reveal to us. God's generativity doesn't end with Genesis 1. The kingdom of God comes near. In his Miscellanies, Jonathan Edwards marvels that though the Son is the complete, self-sufficient image of the Father who wants for nothing, the Son is for us a vivid sign of the Father's determination never to be completely alone. Edwards says, "The Son has an inclination to communicate himself, . . . and this was the end of creation, even the communication of the happiness of the Son of God. . . . And [humanity] . . . is the immediate subject of this."10 The point of the whole world is to be the Creator's dialogue partner in conversation, in connection. Calvin said that God could have created us for God's usefulness but the great thing about God is God created us for God's sheer delight.11 God delights in having conversation partners, even poor dialogue partners like us. The Revealer who delights in revelation desires recipients for the revelation. So a first response to the question, "Who shall be saved?" might be, "Well, who is created? What creatures are so beloved by the Creator that the Creator cannot let them alone? Who is God's favorite conversation partner? These are the ones God saves."
Will you accept this as a fair summary of much of Scripture—God's got this thing for us? God is determined—through Creation, the sagas of the Patriarchs, the words of the prophets, the teaching of the law, and the birth and death of the Christ—to get close, very close, too close for comfort, in fact. Sorry, if you thought when we said "God" we had in mind an impersonal power, a fair-minded, balanced bureaucrat who is skilled in the dispassionate administration of natural law from a safe distance in eternity. Our God is intensely, unreservedly personal. The God of Israel and the church refuses to be an abstraction or a generality. In the Bible, God gets angry, repents, threatens, promises, punishes, takes back, and resumes the conversation. Only persons do such things and, when we do them, it is a sign of our personal worth, the highest of our personhood, our passionate valuing of something over nothing, not of our grubby anthropocentric imperfection.
The most important decision in Christian theology is to decide whether you will speak of God as a person or as a concept, as a name or as an idea. Talk about God as, to use Paul Tillich's term, "ultimate reality," and you will get a safe, dead abstraction that you can utilize in whatever salvation project you happen now to be working. Name God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and God will enlist you in God's move upon the world. That's one of the things we mean when we say that "Jesus is Lord" or "Jesus is God's only Son." This God is shockingly personal, available, and present. It's also what we mean when we say that "Jesus is Savior." This is in no way detraction from the Father's immense deity. There are gods who could not risk getting close. We are killers who tend to resent our would-be saviors. Anybody who would love me risks great pain because of me. So most "gods" are careful to keep their distance through abstraction and idealization. "Gods" are, by definition, distant, high, and lifted up.
The one whom Israel calls Yahweh and the church knows as Trinity is so great as to be utterly personal, available, and richly present to us. This God is against detached reserve. "God never rests," says Luther, constantly pursuing, presenting to us. You can't get much closer to us, to the real us, than a cross.
Christians are witnesses to a great cosmic incursion, an invasion in which God, rather than being distant from the world, has daringly entered the world (Gal 4:4). The world is God's contested territory in a vast program of reclamation.
Furthermore, God not only refuses to be God alone, not only makes a move on Pilate and on all the principalities and powers of this world but also enlists us in God's salvific work. Whereas God is author and agent of our salvation, God refuses to work alone. John Wesley shocked the Calvinists and Lutherans of his day by asserting divine-human synergy in our salvation. God graciously saves us and graciously invites our active participation in the drama of salvation. Salvation and vocation are thus linked.
Consider the story in Exodus 32, the golden calf. While Moses receives the Ten Commandments upon the mountain, down in the valley his brother Aaron violates the First Commandment by offering a golden calf as a means of salvation. (Exodus mocks such idolatry—some pagans worshiped the fertility of the sacred bull—the best Aaron and the Israelites could muster is a mere sacred calf!) The author of the First Commandment is understandably furious at this act of blatant disobedience and threatens punishment.
When Moses pleads in behalf of the wayward Israelites, God refuses to be placated, telling Moses, "Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn" (Exod 32:10). Moses continues to beg, arguing with God for the sake of his people. Amazingly, God's rage is for a time held in check due to Moses' pleading, even though Moses is not the most eloquent of public speakers. We see this sort of dialogue elsewhere, with Abraham, with Jeremiah, and with Job. The God of Scripture is not an impersonal, absolute sovereign with whom there is no argument. God is free to be dissuaded, free to be in conversation even with a tongue-tied earthling like Moses, free to change God's mind and repent, because God is determined to be God for us, determined to be the means of our salvation.
At certain key moments, Scripture is thus a kind of dialogue, not by equal partners, but still a dialogue that is God's grace. We must therefore be suspicious of abstract, impersonal, generic notions of God that make abstract claims that God is omnipotent, utterly free, and transcendent. Abstractions mean nothing apart from the specific narratives of Scripture that tell us what true power, freedom, and transcendence look like now that God looks like a crucified and resurrected Jew from Nazareth. God is the loving Father, Son, and Holy Spirit whose great sovereignty is that self-elected freedom to be in conversation, even free to be dissuaded by the pleas of someone like Moses, in order to be who God really is—God pro nobis.
When Christians say that God is "transcendent," this is what we are trying to say. The hiddenness and distance of God are precisely in God's nearby self-revelation as God on the cross. God's difference from our ex-pectations for gods makes God hidden to us. We are resistant to the near God on the cross because of our assumption that if there were a true God, that God would be somewhere a long way from us, not here before us, naked, exposed and bleeding, certainly not one with us, not pro nobis. A righteous God would be aloof from us sinners, certainly not intrude through our locked doors (John 20) to show us his hands full of holes and to make us touch the gash in his side, to breathe his Holy Spirit upon us and thereby make his betrayers also his Body, his church, this God resurrected pro nobis.
Scripture's curious story of salvation is the story of a God who makes a world and delightedly calls it "good," though the Creation gives little indication—right from the first, with its fratricide and relentless head bashing—that the Creator's verdict is accurate. From the majestic cadences of Genesis 1, "Let there be," "and God saw that it was good." everything tends to go downhill once we go to work. The Creator has something other in mind, in calling all life into being and calling it "good" than what the Creator gets. Disobedience, rebellion, and blood are what the creature has in mind, "from youth" (Gen 8:21). And though the Creator gets angry, wreaks wrath, and storms off in a huff from time to time, for some reason the Creator keeps coming back to the creature, keeps resuming the conversation, keeps working with the creature who is, despite periodic bouts of good intention, hostile toward the very same God who gives life.
Because the story continues beyond our first rebellion in Genesis, we see that salvation is what God does from the beginning: "all things have been created through him and for him" (Col 1:16). Salvation is not some tactic that God had to devise after
