These two concepts are kind of opposite each other when thinking about God. Immanence is the nearness of God; the closeness of God to humanity, as we seek purpose and fulfillment. Transcendence is the idea that God is wholly Other, above what he made, and some would say, uninvolved with creatures and the world. The Greeks absolutely believed this. You’re going to hit a wall with Greek philosophy, strictly speaking, for this reason.
If the Church had not “baptized” Plato and Aristotle, it’s possible they get forgotten.
Joseph Ratzinger, AKA Pope Benedict XVI, essentially says that the Incarnation is this nearness of God. Mankind’s reason vainly reaches as high as it can go, but God in Christ came down. This is who the unknown, unseen God is. Or, as he put it and St. John recorded it, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”
Our culture is quite messed up, but we’re so used to what Jesus actually did that we mock it in entertainment. The “Buddy Christ” statue from the film Dogma is quite trivial, but it does contain this truth: Jesus came down here in human flesh to be friends with us. Friendship doesn’t sound like much today, because we’re really into the romantic and the erotic. But all that is just a kind of friendship. It’s quite powerful to say, “I don’t need anything from you, but I want to be with you.” In this way, God is the Friend par excellence. This is kind of what people are after, when they talk about “chosen family.” Setting aside the times when it’s just selfishness or leaving obligations unmet, people want to know that they have someone somewhere who isn’t just going to use them up. There is absolutely no guarantee that two people who had coitus know anything about selfless love. Children are a beautiful gift, but children who aren’t taught about selfless love grow up to be adults who don’t know it, either.
Personally, I don’t think I’m overly fond of theocracy, integralism, or anything close. But I see the appeal. I begin to think if Jesus doesn’t save us all and teach us, we’ll be doomed. As a somewhat unfortunate Christian rock band put it when I was a teenager, “They don’t serve breakfast in Hell.”
This probably started out as another ill-tempered defense of “On Eagles’ Wings.” But it got me thinking: When I am grieving a loved one, I need the Jesus who wept over a death he reversed a few minutes later. I need some kind of song that even kinda sounds like that. There is time to remind people that God is serious business, that Hell is real, and that judgment is final. Not to mention that Purgatory, though it is surely a place of mercy by the nature of the case, doesn’t sound like a trip to Dave & Buster’s.
All that said, I have known enough people who think that compassion and humanity in even the smallest degree is weakness. Like they have something to prove to the wrathful God. We shouldn’t have ever wanted to pull the switch along with Lee J. Cobb’s Juror #3, but even less so should we want it to be done for eternity.
Others will go much further and say, “Why even believe in Hell?” and take an easier path of believing in universal salvation. But as the great actor Sir Patrick Stewart had it, playing his most famous character, “Wishing for a thing does not make it so.”
If I accept what the Father reveals literally in the compassionate Christ, I must also accept what he reveals as the consequence for absolute and final rejection of God and His mercy.
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