4 of 5 - The Incarnation formally, IMHO - for Dan and the radical protestants, David together with all the others

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living."

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The role of theology in faith is to put our best efforts into language for expressing the inexpressible experience of the presence and favor of God, and to deepen, with growing clarity and courage, our relationship to Jesus through the Spirit in the here and now, both within ourselves and with ourselves as part of the communion with the church.

A sloughing off of seeking understanding produces a weaker faith in the face of the world's suffering. A weaker faith is an unsustainable withdrawal from the challenge of joining with the wounded and hungry and lonely by bringing them hope, not just needed bandages.

Christian hope is needed at least from us Christians.

What follows is somewhat embedded in the traditions of faith that radical protestants - meaning those traditions that were written by Calvin, divergent Calvinisms, and separatist reforming Calvinist groups that were ant-Catholic but not agreeing with Calvin on this thing, that thing, and/or the other things. What follows is also somewhat embedded in American agrarian and mainline liberal protestantism.

What follows is unconsciously embedded in Dan and David's baggy theological process. In this way, they are homegrown American protestants. But the Dannites - and I - see the Davidites as holding to a Jesus that isn't all that compassionate toward human beings, ie, the divine Jesus isn't fully human. And the Davidites - and I - see the Dannites as holding to a Jesus that isn't all that powerful, ie, the human Jesus isn't almighty enough. I further object to the Davidites and all of christendom who gravitate the almighty power as analogous to human ideas of power. In the West, for 500 years, this analogy of Jesus as Almighty God For US has upheld White Supremacy.

But this is mostly unconscious to both sides because they do not take seriously enough the accountability of faith to seek understanding and to teach understanding, nor respect enough the life of the Holy Spirit teaching us through time ("he will teach you everything," Jesus says in his farewell) BY THE VERY DEVOTIONAL PRACTICE OF INTELLECTUAL REFLECTION ON GOD MARRIED TO CONTEMPLATIVE RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD.

The church everywhere, for 1500 years lived this bidirectional faith, inner and outer. Catholic reform in the 16th century fell into the hands of rationalistic lawyers just when everyone was starting to read books. Half of all Western christianity worshipped a book Jesus, a contained Holy Spirit, that became a manual for an army. The other half worshipped a remote God whose authority devolved onto one bishop in Rome and his oligarchy of advisors.

Both constituted a great chasm - and barriers against crossing that chasm - between our natural lives and the supernatural presence in our natural lives of God.

David presents passage of the NT that present a chasm for him in understanding. I've now detailed many ways in how this came to be the norm for American protestantism generally. 

Before that, what was rejected by the protestant rebellion and subsequent American primitivism, we have:

1. The early church, convinced by testimony from elders who were convinced by testimony their elders who were convinced by their elders who walked with Jesus, believed that only a person who was both God and man, both fully God and fully human, answered the best hopes of humankind. From Nicea to Chalcedon, any kind of idea like that Jesus was the Son of God clothed in just a human body or appearing to be and so did not really experience the crucifixion or any suffering (and so could not really provide the hope that God could relate to what it is to be human in the world on any given day) or any kind of idea like that Jesus was a human being adopted by God to serve as sacrificial victim (and so could not really provide the hope that each human person as such is worthy of glorious relationship with God) could never hold out hope to us that we could enter eternally redeeming relationship with God.

Only a Godman offers such profundity. Only a Godman makes it make sense. Only a Godman fully fits St Athansius (present at Nicea) perscription: "God became human so that humans might become divine." For the sake of restoring human nature to our original state, Athanasius writes,"but we say that the Lord Jesus Christ is very God and very man, one person in two natures, and two natures in one person."

2. Aquinas and other Scholastics sought to gain a hope-filled, expressible understanding of how Jesus was one person with two natures for their modern times and in the face of Islamic philosophic learning (Islam reintroduced the Christian West to Aristotle who was buried in monastic libraries).

They ironed out a notion that Jesus had a) the beatific knowledge of heaven [a kind of ocular, immediate knowledge of the divine, b) an infused knowledge of everything and eternity poured into the human soul of Jesus by God, and c) the progressively acquired knowledge of human experience in time and space.

This alone would help David parse and synthesize the passages of scripture that give him troubles. Sometimes we hear from the heavenly vision possessed by Christ. Sometimes the eternal grasp of all things. And sometimes we see the emotions and struggles and learning that the human Jesus has just like us.

But he would need to rely on the thinking life of the church as guided by the promised Holy Spirit in John 14. And that would demand he go beyond the barrier of the back imitation leather cover of his Bible. (Which, in his unconscious Christian assumptions, he already has. His protestantism, however, gaslights him.)

3. But as the church continues and as human learning and moral growth continues by the graces of our bearing the likeness of God, the love of God, and the aid and governance of the Holy Spirit toward loving back, this schema begins to appear as if there are two distinct persons, two subjects who are "knowing things", one divine and one human. And in David's passages, the human person Jesus himself seems to seesaw between immediately-given all-knowledge and acquiring partial knowledge by degrees across time and space. Jesus, in the medieval model, knows immediately upon conception that he is God - knows beatifically all things - and, at the same instance, knows he is a human being by virtue of God pouring all knowledge into the human soul, AND, but only in time, comes to know created reality by experience as a human being. 

How can this be? How can a person continue to exist with both divine grasp of all things and as a human with - both - immediate cognition of all things as well as developing "newly internalized" knowledge of human things in time and place? Is the divine Jesus partitioning or portioning off out of awareness 99% of everything for the sake of the human Jesus's sanity? Or is this part of of the "emptying", the kenosis, that the divine Son of God chose in order to be born as a human being.

These seem to be the modern struggling questions that David may be asking inchoately - unable to put language to it. Who knows? He hasn't tried to communicate his actual questions.

Doubtless, David, as a modern person formed with concepts already but unconsciously operating with post-Enlightenment assumptions of human psychology, human cognition, on the part of the human Jesus, as well as unconscious assumption of what must be, by faith, the omniscience of the divine Jesus, senses this problem. (Not only does his protestantism gaslight him by sealing over his awareness of accrued Christian thinking; it also gaslights him by sealing over his awareness of much of accrued secular thinking.)

4. [coming]