A missing Christmas preparation ...
Preparation for the feast calls for decorations and cooking, gift-giving and charity, prayer and candle-lit (and in my case, lots of incense) services.
But there is another, probably more serious preparation. It involves difficulty in thought.
It is a conundrum, and it is an "unsolvable" one. Not a paradox (which seems to be an irrational fundamental of strict rationalism), but rather an antimony.
Despite its transcendent "un-solvability," it is required ... almost to the extent that it is an intellectual ascesis, a personal sacrifice.
So here it is. If "God as not simply 'one giant being among other beings” but rather as ipsum esse subsistens, 'the subsistent act of to Be' Himself" (as was recently well summarized by Taylor S Brown in Patheos), then what does that mean with regard to the Incarnation?
I fully agree with the premise. God cannot be reduced to a Being amongst beings, as if He were the biggest, even infinite, entity on the same plane as other entities (like us and the angels). It is not possible to ascribe to Him the same language that we use to describe our existence.
After all, St Paul said (quoting Epimenides), "In Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17.28). If we believe in creatio ex nihilo, then He is certainly not "one giant being among other beings."
So if we exist solely in constant reliance upon God at every (even quantum) moment, then Who is the Word that becomes flesh?
Is every apprehension of time and space now contingent upon the Incarnate Word?
Does He frame and inform every created noetic thought now?
What does materiality mean now that the ipsum esse substistens has articulated Himself into the human world?
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