DEMYSTIFICATION OF IMMANENCE
(Wednesday) It sounds esoteric, but Robert Webber, in his latest newsletter, is really just asking, where is the point of balance?

Here is the dilemma. Traditional worship, with its emphasis on hymns, creeds, and stained-glass windows, makes God remote. Contemporary worship, with its casual "bring your coffee to worship and slap your neighbor on the back as you sing, shout and sway with your hands in the air," makes God too common.

Remote does not make God transcendent. Familiarity does not make God present. Have we demystified both transcendence and immanence?

...The experience of God's transcendent immanence never provokes a "Golly, gee-wiz! Hi there, God" response. Rather it incites awe, wonder, and an overwhelming sense of the mysterium tremendum. The believer, engulfed by the numinous and moved by the reality of an encounter with the divine, experiences speechlessness.

The solution, says Webber, is found in the "paradox of the incarnation."

The truth of the Incarnation is not an either/or but a both/and. The same is true for transcendence and immanence. When transcendence and immanence are brought together, God is present; it's a true divine-human encounter.

But practically speaking what does that look like? Link