RT @nick_routledge: @RDGStout God is also given not as inference from existence, consciousness, beauty or order, but as immediate experience itself; theophany undivided from its apprehension. God and lived experience, distinct but not separate, one undivided actuality.
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Doing so in turn reinforces the unhelpful dichotomy between ‘rational’ modernity and ‘superstitious’ religion, when actually I think religion is and should be supremely rational and supremely (super) natural - if not in the sense that we tend to interpret those terms in the modern world. Striking a trans-cultural, planetarian as distinct from singularly Christian note, we might say the distinction ultimately falls into irrelevancy or, in a positive dialectic, dissolves in God—that is, God-experience. Rumi: "When you look for God, God is in the look in your eyes." [Painting, abstract image with calligraphy reading: “The search of the ego for transcendence passes away into the transcendence itself. - Rumi”] Subtweet: That second page, the cosmic elephant in the room. And yet, religious/spiritual culture is itself often no less estranged from experience or recognition of the unequivocally supernatural intelligence, power, presence and telos of the Living God, than its most cynical deprecators.
Open original document25/ Panikkar names it. Not a higher idea, but a deeper world, a new way of inhabiting matter, time, and relationship wherein nothing less than reality itself becomes its own method. What’s unveiled in apocalypse isn't a hidden doctrine but a previously inaccessible depth realm.
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4/ Barnhart names the pivot: “the unthinkable density of truth of the word of the Cross” only becomes fully true as it's metabolized in a radically activated regime of being—the Kingdom—where truth is not an object for study or possession but embodied in a cruciform life. 5/ The phenomenon eludes sapiential conception because it isn’t primarily explanation but activation: not an idea to grasp or a plane to "explain", but truth becoming operative—cruciform fidelity—immanence radically activated as God acts in and through the lived yes. 6/ Here apocalyptic theology stops being analysis of reality and becomes entry into reality. Not because theology is scrapped, but because its alibi is. The gospel isn’t owned, curated, or explained from a safe distance; if you enter as master, you falsify what you unveil. 7/ This is why the Kingdom can’t be reduced to the level of knowing. It isn’t mainly a picture of the world but a transfigured way of being in it. And the truth of the Cross becomes true only as it becomes a life enacted—truth borne and suffered, not used and wielded.
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