“JESUS is Lord!” “Lift High The Cross!” These slogans stir me throughout my being. But my mind clicks in, to remember the people who have been forced to proclaim the first, or the people for whom the high-lifted cross was a banner of war and oppression. There is a real issue as to whether open militancy on behalf of God is either true to the Gospel of Jesus or indeed the will of God.
Should God, having Love at the core of God’s being, emptying the divine power into initiating and maintaining the whole creation, and thereby becoming hidden from all but the vision of faith, be regarded as monarchical in the human sense? God is hidden, because God is everywhere in. and underpinning, all the cosmos. God becomes known consciously to those who have consciousness, and perceived by them as Beauty, Goodness, Truth at the heart of things.
When we are raised to the peak of consciousness in which we encounter God in these ways, then we are able to apprehend the blessing and grace which is everywhere available, and knowable. This affects the heart of our action and way of life. By worship we express a response to this grace and blessing, and then it is natural to praise God and acknowledge the cosmos as a divine gift. So that degree of public proclamation is proper. But to insist on public powers for the worshiping community is to express the hidden and self-emptied divinity beyond bounds God has set.
God is both hidden and revealed.
There is a strong analogy to this in the world of science. It is a tribute to the hiddenness of scientific truth that much that has been discovered has been found for its own sake, rather than practicality, and yet practicality has ensued once the reality is grasped.
Even in the most intricate and abstruse scientific exploration, as in quantum and particle theory, or in the far from complete understanding of the origin of organic and more developed life, there is a sense that the sources of common reality are cloaked: we may see how energy may decohere into eventually useful elements in the periodic table, and we may see in molecular biology that the helices of DNA combine and so miraculously work to create new forms, and replicate existing ones, but in neither case do we know much of the secret of what sparks these mechanisms into action to create what they are potentially.
Perhaps a strong argument can be made, as by Lothar Shäffer and others, that the virtual energy patterns of the quantum field provide a lure and a nudge which shape raw energy into viable forms for the actual coherent and coherent world, but the process of these sparkings remains hidden.
Happily the lure and nudge of the energy of the quantum field are excellent metaphors for the divine action, hidden or revealed. The scientists’ “Eureka!” is a cry of joy parallel to the songs and dances of the creation order, human or wigglers, when the Source is recognized
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