Some notes on Jesus and Being

You can reconcile the two rough positions on Christ with a slightly more subtle metaphysics and a basic knowledge of what actually set Hebrew religion apart from the pagan religions of the gentiles.

The two rough positions we now see fought over.

*Liberalism. Jesus as a great man, you get into heaven/you are good by emulating his acts.
*Fundamentalism. Assertion of the absolute divinity of Christ. You get into heaven/are good through total submission to his direct intervention.

One side is smart and consistent but doesn't capture your soul. The other is populated by empty signifiers, scary proper nouns bereft of quality and content. This is because the chief function of any fundamentalism is to destroy the self against an Absolute Other. To bash the self upon a sublime sea wall.

It serves a purpose though, the destruction of ego that sometimes allows for connection to a genuine holy spirit. Often enough not, because rule by nouns does not lend itself to open embrace of the living word/world.

The Hebrew idea of God was unique because it was identified generally with the living force of the world. It was essentially a God equivalent in meaning to Being or living Being. That's a big fucking deal.

It means that the actual milieu of the advent of Christ and Christianity was not focused around God as an empty proper noun, a sky-god modeled on Zeus and used as the symbolic representation of Empire.

It means that the divinity of Christ refers back immediately to a notion about the divinity of the world, of Being and Becoming, and of the nature of transcendence of the powers of the world that prevent love of that world, i.e. agape.

So Christ is more than a man and more than a Romanized, pagan god. He is a method of engaging the world, of engaging Being, such that God becomes present and visible in the day-to-day world around us. He is the method for knowing God in the world. SImply emulating his acts doesn't reveal this per se because it neglects to point out the ontological quality of the God Christ refers to. It isn't just a vague idea of the good, it is the ontological grond of creation in the world.

So a third meaning becomes clear. Neither man nor Roman demigod, but method of directly acessing the Hebrew God of Being, the world as a fluid act of joyful self-creation. More than a man- a singular point of reference for the whole of the the world as Event, an ecstatic rupture. That is what the liberal interpretation fails to see and that is what the fundamentalists inadequately interpret.

This third model requires a dialog between both metaphor and literalism to become present in Christian ritual and understanding.