Confessions of a Theologian of Glory

Title page from Luther's Deudsh Catechismus, 1659

I have been reading through a book by Gerhard O. Forde, entitled “On Being a Theologian of the Cross.” Forde works his way through Martin Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation of 1518, juxtaposing a “theology of glory” with a “theology of the cross,” categories which he borrows directly from Luther.  The contrast between these ways of doing theology has shed light on my past year of theological training.  It is now apparent that I am functioning as a theologian of glory (again); for subtle shifts in my thinking have already occurred so that I no longer depend on the grace of God but rely on my own capacity to be faithful and to become more faithful.  Indeed, one of the chief claims of the theologian of the cross is that, by nature, every person is a theologian of glory.  We are in bondage to operate according to Scholastic Nominalism’s proposition to “do what is in one’s self” and let God do the rest.  This maxim encapsulates humanity’s unrelenting resolve to be “the master of [our] fate[s]/ the captain of [our] soul[s].”  We are, therefore, tragically bound to the insatiable thirst for our own glory.

As a theologian of glory, I operate as though my will were in control, free to choose between good and evil.  Under the assumption of “free will,” I attempt to reason myself into a more virtuous existence, or I try to make theology and virtue attractive so that it will appeal to my free choice.  My other strategy hinges upon my effort to discipline myself, to practice virtuous habits in order to reconfigure the years of sinful behavior patterns (e.g. impatience, anger, lust).  But an optimism about the elasticity of the will–that it may be bent toward faithfulness–says Forde, is the root cause of despair.  Telling a narrative that misrepresents the reality of human nature only leads first disillusionment then malady.

The cross is an attack on sin “that reveals the real seat of sin is not in the flesh, but in our spiritual aspirations, in our ‘theology of glory’” (1).  That is, the cross seeks to unmask optimism placed in human ability.  The real locus of sin lies not in our evil works, but in the good things we do; the theologian of the cross targets the “pretension” that accompanies what we do well.  Thus, the theology of the cross is offensive, for it reveals our rejection of God precisely through our good works.  This narrative upends and shocks us, pursuing us to the end of our rope, to surrender and cling to the cross.  This story claims that hope rises out of despair, that life comes only through death.

Luther organizes the Disputation according to the logic behind the division between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross: “The question of the knowledge of God is directly related to the claim that we can, by our natural powers prepare for grace by ‘doing what is in us’…A fault in the estimation of works [Theses 1-12] is based on a false estimate of the power of will [Theses 13-18], which in turn presumes a knowledge of God’s judgment on such works [Theses 19-24]” (70).  Theses 25-28 conclude the Disputations arch from the law of God to the love of God, arguing for the sole agency of the grace of God in the life of the theologian of the cross.

I will devote some space in the blogosphere to a series of reflections outlining the Disputation’s theses as they relate to my own grappling with Luther’s (and Forde’s) assertions.  Reading the book through the first time was convicting, confusing, challenging, and I am still unsure what it means to be a theologian of the cross in light of recent Biblical scholarship, e.g. more accurate views of “the Law” in ancient Judaism and the abounding critiques of Reformation exegesis of Paul, as well as some of modern theology’s push back on Luther’s ordo salutis and his definition of faith.  Finally, I hope these posts will help me work out how a theologian of the cross faithfully proclaims the ethical components of the gospel, the Christian vocation of justice and peace.

For What Its Worth: A 2009 Ranking of Graduate Programs in Theology

R.R. Reno, Professor of Theology at Creighton University and an editor at First Things, ranked the best places to do Theology in North America.  This is an explicit evaluation of graduate schools engaged in Orthodox theology.

It is difficult to distill his rankings into a simple, ordered, linear list.  I suggest you read the article:

Duke University

Here is a rough distillation:

1. /2. DUKE University  2./1. Notre Dame (Reno makes a case for why each school is perhaps better than the other)

3. Princeton University/ Princeton Theological Seminary (if considered as a package)

3. Wycliffe College/ Toronto School of Theology

5. Marquette

Other notable mentions:

- University of Dayton

Notre Dame

-Perkins School of Theology

-Baylor

-Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at Berkeley

-Harvard, Yale, Chicago

Reno refers to a previous article undergirding his rationale, which he published a few months ago.

As for my thoughts:

I am happy to see that Reno praised two of my professors this semester: my OT professor, Dr. Stephen Chapman (AKA: Chaps) and my church history professor, Dr. Warren Smith.   Both are excellent.

The Creed: Forming A Posture of Trust

A wily Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

Rowan Williams, in Tokens of Trust, asserts that the Christian’s faith is a matter of trust, not belief. Although throughout Christian history the words ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ shared synonymity, in modern use the words describe two very different postures for the way we engage God’s existence. Our language is important as it directs our engagement with what we ultimately hold to be true. It is therefore vital that the distinction is made between ‘trust’ and ‘belief’ if we are to allow the existence of God to impinge upon our lives. A sketch of each posture, then, is necessary if we are to explore the significance of Williams’ claim. This will provide a foundation to explore the ways in which a posture of trust gives shapes to how we “take up” the Christian faith. And so we shall see that trust is the vehicle through which the reality of God penetrates our existence, affecting the way we feel about ourselves and about the world .

For Williams belief is primarily a relationship to an abstract idea or thing. Belief answers the question of whether or not something exists out there. It regards the objects it probes as magical or mythical in nature, and so the question of belief in God is similar to, “Do you believe in ghosts or UFOs?” This is a rather impersonal question which is unconcerned with the consequence of whether or not something exists. That is to say, if a ghost really did exist, it would hardly make a difference in the grand scheme of things. This kind of belief cannot conquer the crippling effects of suspicion, because it forms a posture incredulous to hope, meaning, and relationship. Suspicion prevents one from participation in celebration, love, hope, and trust. It forms a posture closed to the possibility of God affecting the way we feel about ourselves and the world around us. This kind of posture rests on fallacious assumptions about God.

God is not the kind of being that is out there or ambivalent to what is going in the world. Belief for Christianity is not a question of opinion concerning whether or not God exists, but it is rather whether or not God is to be trusted. Williams makes this plain by turning our attention to the Creed, which draws for our imagination a radically different visage of God—one in whom we are invited to trust from the onset. The Creed is composed of statements that reveal God’s agenda by what God has done. It is therefore impossible to stand with neutrality in relation to God. Belief in God’s existence is inextricably tied to questions like, “Is God reliable? Does God have our best interest in mind?” The very nature of God thus demands that we not think of God in the same category as UFOs or ghosts. Belief is the wrong kind of posture for a God who is proximate and good. It is, then, a categorical mistake to approach God’s existence like one might an abstract being, such as a ghost. To do so is to relegate God to impotence and irrelevance. A posture of trust, however, invites God to make a difference in the way we feel about ourselves and the world around us.

Williams’ insistence on trust, not belief is rooted in the conviction that God is entirely other than that from which concept, theory or principle is constructed. Every mode of knowledge is defined by the nature of its object. Therefore, a God who is wholly other than creation necessitates a different kind of touching, seeing and hearing. Intellectual assent and conceptual postulation will not do. God is eternal and transcendent, but not impersonal or unknowable. God is not an impersonal force like gravity which pushes toward the center of the earth without reason or care; neither is God like a theory, a body of impersonal information to master. We must consider the proper mode of knowledge, or posture that accounts for the Creed’s proclamation of a God who cares, listens and speaks—a God who actually revealed Godself by entering our history as the human, Jesus Christ.

Since God lovingly cares for us, we are faced with the decision to receive or ignore God’s love for us. Care is the kind of thing that is only received when the source of care is trusted. It doesn’t matter how much God loves us, if we do not trust him, we cannot receive God’s love. A posture of trust is one of dependence and vulnerability in a relationship. Trust is germinated by its object when there is evidence that the object is working for one’s good and— of course—possesses the power to bring that good to fruition. We are compelled to trust that God is for us when we see God’s agenda made clear: peace and praise. This is most prominent in the cross where God suffered as a human in this world to set people free from fear and guilt to live a new life.

How then does a posture of trust shape the way in which we take up the Christian faith? If God is not an object of neutrality, but one who is relational and active for good, then abstract belief or intellectual assent will not do. And if the Christian life is a function of trust, not merely belief, then the task of spiritual and theological formation is to entrust our lives into the holy hands of God instead of amassing a framework of information. For this reason, the Creed’s theology is ultimately concerned that we entrust ourselves to the God it articulates. As we live our daily lives then, we must be attentive to situations in which we fail to trust God. We are often aware of external sin, but Williams’ emphasis on trust begs us to turn a critical eye to whether or not we, at a given moment, trust that God is perfectly loving, infinitely wise, and totally sovereign. We must ask ourselves, “Are my thoughts and actions indicative of trust in the God who is always and wholly for me?”

Let Justice Roll Down: Evangelicals & Civil Rights

Retro cover. Forever sassy.

John Perkins’ autobiography is a glimpse into the black struggle for equality, opportunity and justice against the formidable social structures of oppression.  Set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, it’s also the story of a black Christian caught between two churches polarized by color, and his devotion to the whole Gospel revolutionizing both.  Moreover, it is an account of the Gospel disarming the powers and authorities, making a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross (Col. 2:15).

——————-

Soon after his conversion, the rumblings of conviction surfaced.  Perkins knew that his own plans for a “good” Christian life were not God’s good plan for his Christian life.  His life was no longer his own and God quickly issued a decree: Return to Mississippi with the whole Gospel for your people, those you know are “zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge” (Rom. 10:1-2).

So, John Perkins moved his family back to a very familiar place of segregation, hollowed out by injustice and blighted by oppression.  His goal was to use the Bible to teach to a church devoid of knowledge of God that same truth that captured his heart.  First, Perkins founded Bible classes at several local black high schools and a junior college, none of which had ever been exposed to the Scriptures.  In conjunction with this, he traveled around the county using a tent as a meeting place where the Bible could be expounded.  Throughout all of these endeavors, Perkins ministered to the problems of those who sat under his teaching.  After all, he and his family shared their same economic and political woes.

Perkins also knew that in order for the Gospel to take root in this community, it would have to become a visible truth.  The collection of believers with Bible knowledge would need to become a church, the body of Christ; a witness of Jesus Lordship fleshed out in social action.  This led to the organization of Voice of Calvary Bible Institute (VOC) and the creation of community development initiatives, such as: food and housing co-ops, voter registration, free healthcare, fair lending, and an effort to boost the quality of education.

Procuring the funds from both white and black churches in California to finance these projects proved to be a laborious effort.  Perkins laments the absence of the evangelicals during the civil rights movement:

“How sad that so few individuals equally committed to Jesus Christ ever became a part of [the civil rights] movement.  For what all that political activity needed–and lacked– was spiritual input.  Even now, I do not understand why so many evangelicals find a sense of commitment to civil rights and Jesus Christ an “either-or” proposition.

One of the greatest tragedies of the civil rights movement is that evangelicals surrendered their leadership in the movement by default to those with either a bankrupt theology or no theology at all, simply because the vast majority of Bible-believing Christians ignored a great and crucial opportunity in history for a genuine ethical action.  The evangelical church–whose basic theology is the same as mine–had not gone on to preach the whole gospel.”

This was the evangelical response to what was perceived to be a liberal movement.  Perkins’ interaction with black evangelicals reluctant to join the civil rights movement lays bear the true reason for evangelical precaution:  this was just a pretext to avoid personal involvement, to escape responsibility.  Christians invented this perception as an excuse for our inaction, to escape the gospel’s call to answer the question: What should the Church do?  What should I do? The stark reality of evil necessitated that Christians do more than sigh, sympathize, vote, or give money.  What was needed then–and is still needed today–is a life oriented around the self-donation of the cross.

Evangelicals continue to employ this tactic to elude the Lordship of Jesus Christ, to keep their lives rather than loose it for the sake of the gospel (Mark 8:35).  Are there things today that you and I, in a surreptitious attempt to maintain security and control, label as “liberal” to evade the truth that Jesus is Savior and Lord?  For me, it is an ongoing battle to surrender entitlement, no longer hiding behind theological quandary, to follow Jesus into the radical ordinariness of nitty-gritty, everyday living of loving my neighbor.

And to do this, maybe we must emulate God’s love  for us , who as Eugene Peterson puts it,  “became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14).

At the very least I cannot shirk John Perkins’ pointed inquisition:

“Well, what are you doing to correct these bad things with your ‘good’ theology?”

Death for Life

Dionysius!

The doctrine of substitutionary atonement can often be an abstraction.  But the idea that Jesus intentionally and willingly took the sinner’s place of judgment on the cross is profound and quite practical.  Its not merely theoretical figment, but a theological reflection on the significance of a historical event.  In Jesus on the cross, we see the supreme act of God’s love to reconcile to himself those who are alienated enemies.  In Jesus’ self-donation, we are compelled to love God in return; we have the intellectual and the spiritual resources necessary to trust that God is good.  Furthermore, Jesus’ sacrifice is also the impetus for our loving action toward our neighbor.

The early church took to heart the conviction that Jesus’ suffered death in the sinner’s place so that he might live.  It was the very soil of out which grew the Christians response to the great epidemic that decimated Rome (251-270 A.D).  Dionysius, the bishop of Alexandria wrote this of the pagans (those who observed Roman polytheism):

“At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treated uburied corpses as dirty, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease.”

In contrast, Dionysius’ Easter letter is a tribute to the heroic nursing efforts of the local Christians, many of whom lost their lives while caring for others:

“Most of our Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another.  Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead.“

Christ, in curing us, transferred our death to himself and died in our stead so that we might live.  That reality of God’s gracious love embedded itself so deeply in the hearts of Christians that they were willing to die for strangers–just as Christ died for them.  The cross is the vista by which God’s love confronts us, slowly reconfiguring the very structure of our hearts and minds, our worship and action.

[Quotes from "The Rise of Christianity" by Rodney Stark]

A Reflection on the Empty Tomb: Jesus and his Disciples

To say that Jesus suffered is an understatement.  He crumpled on the cross under the weight of cosmic affliction: the apocalypse of divine judgment and the loss of his most intimate love, God.  Yet on Resurrection Sunday, I was struck by the hardship Jesus endured before he was pinned up on Calvary.  Betrayal bereaved Jesus of his disciples and the friendship of those with whom he shared life.

We find a robust picture of Jesus’ lonesome journey to the cross even in Mark’s economical account of the Gospel story.  In Gethsemane, Jesus’ tribulation is inaugurated:

“he began to be deeply distressed and troubled.  ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death!’”

The foretaste of Golgotha wrenched Jesus’ soul, but his closest companions lay asleep while he suffered in solitude.  Three times his dreaming disciples failed to engage with his agony.  Immediately, Jesus was double-crossed for a paltry sum of money by another in his trusted inner circle, Judas, who sealed his arrest with a kiss.

Next, his sleepy friends forsook with the sword all that Jesus had taught them.  The students had abandoned the teacher’s promise that his kingdom would come by way of the cross.   Then in an act of spontaneous determination, his followers fled.  From the prayer vigil that never was to the vigilante resistance that should have never been, desertion marked Jesus’ last hours with his disciples.

Jesus’ captors subjected him to an unjust trial where he was condemned to death by murderous lies.  Peter faced his own trial, but by his murderous lies, he disowned Jesus and exonerated himself.  Jesus’ sentence brought beatings, whippings and humiliation.  He was mocked, tortured and scorned.  He did all of this alone.  It was a stranger, not a friend, that helped Jesus carry his cross to Golgotha; neither were his disciples involved in the burial process.  Jesus cried out alone, and alone he died.

Yet, nothing deterred Jesus’ love for his disciples; betrayal could not squelch his compassion for his friends.  At the tomb, Jesus left an angel with a message for the women who found the empty tomb:

“But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee.  There you will see him just as he promised.”

Jesus message is concerned with one objective:  to make it crystal clear that his chosen disciples are still his chosen–especially Peter.  Jesus wants to teach his disciples a lesson.  He loves them so much that he cares about their feelings of  insecurity, failure, and shame.  In the angel’s message, we see the way Jesus relates to those who have failed him; we see Jesus intentionally protecting his friends from public scrutiny and taking initiative to quell any doubts that his friends might have about where they stand with him.

On the cross, Jesus forgave his enemies, but he also forgave his friends who treated him like an enemy.  Jesus’ absolution is unlike ours.  We forgive in a polite, legal, and customary fashion as we try mightily to restrain disdain.  Jesus’ pardon is generously heartfelt, bursting with compassion and sympathy.  He gushes joy and friendliness with a promiscuity that is uncomfortable for a betrayer to accept.  Jesus goes out of his way to not only forgive, but to affirm the betrayer’s unique place as God’s beloved.  He loves tragically disloyal followers with perfect fidelity.

If while we were his enemies, Christ died for us to bring us to God, how can we not also love our enemies at the cost of our own lives?  And if while we were still his betrayers, Jesus took special care to make it known that we are really forgiven and loved, then how can we not also reinstate our betrayers with that same earnest care.  After all, if Christ no longer counts their sin against them, how can we?

The Political Dilemma of Faith

Hauerwas asks, "What do I need, or what do we need, to be a community of friends that can not only tell one another the truth, but want to be told the truth?"

This appears to me to be one of the tenets of  “Hauerwasian” thought:

“The call to be part of the gospel is a joyful call to be adopted by an alien people, to join a countercultural phenomenon, a new polis called church…The challenge of Jesus is the political dilemma of how to be faithful to a strange community, which is shaped by a story of how God is with us.” Resident Aliens, Pg. 30

Our living is dictated by the way in which we frame the problem of faith.  What part of me is being confronted by faith?  God and his Gospel is demanding something of me, but what?

The locus of faith does not reside in right belief; it is not an intellectual problem, but a problem of trust.  The compulsion of the Gospel is not to believe a worldview or adopt a series of propositions, but a summon to entrust my whole self to a good God, a merciful Savior.  The challenge is not to believe the right thing, but to trust in the right person.  Let me be clear, it is precisely because faith it is not an issue of “what”, but a matter of “whom”, that it is imperative what we believe.

Hauerwas contends that while Christianity is not a system of belief, unbelief (atheism) is a problem.  He defines the problem not as intellectual unbelief, but socio-political unbelief.  In other words, the Christian faith is a matter of right living not right thinking. Therefore, atheism cannot be defined in the terms of wrong thinking; it must be defined as wrong living. The problem is not intellectual, but political. The Christian must act on the presupposition that he is a part of God’s people and his plan for history.

The Gospel, as a result, is an invitation to entrust my whole life to God.  Consequently, I now also trust that being adopted into his family (the Church) signifies a new allegiance and with it, a new dilemma: to be faithful to the promise that God is with us.  The moment I ask, “What does it look like to live with a trust that God is with his people in a special way?” faith becomes a sociopolitical predicament.   How do I arrange my life in fidelity to a God and his community to reflect who he is and that I believe in him?  Hauerwas, of course, suggests that to do this is to embrace the oddity of being a Christian.

The Sermon on the Mount is a call for the church to be faithful to who God is and to believe that he is with his people in a way that means something.  The Christian life should be noticeably odd if a person’s values are prioritized around the those Jesus marked in the beatitudes: “blessed are the poor, those who hunger, those who weep, those who are persecuted”.  Certainly, the command to “love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” and to “turn the other cheek” is a sociopolitical challenge.  Jesus says that the world loves those who love them, and the world worries about what they will eat, drink and wear; but this is not true of those who seek the kingdom first.  To seek the kingdom first requires odd living in the eyes of a society that believes each person has the right to make the most of his life.

I Pledge Allegiance?

Hauerwas' theology makes for an uncomfortable read.

Stanley Hauerwas’ classic work, “Resident Aliens,” explores the implications of the church as polis. That is, those who are called out by God are to embody a social alternative that the world cannot on its own terms know. What does it mean for the Christian to be a stranger, to live in community with other believers as an alien colony amidst society?

Is society fundamentally opposed to the church? In particular, is the American axiom, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” antithetical to the Cross of Jesus Christ? Democracy is rooted in the belief of unalienable rights. Our society exists to serve the individual’s needs, wants and desires. Our supreme value is freedom: each person as the individual right to choose and to pursue whatever is wanted as long as she does not impede upon that same right in another. Consider the prophetic assessment of Hauerwas:

“The primary entity of democracy is the individual, the individual for whom society exists mainly to assist assertions of individuality. Society is formed to supply our needs, no matter the content of those needs…It has thus become our unquestioned assumption that every person has the “right” to develop his or her own potential to the greatest extent, limited only by the parallel rights of others.”

The primary entity of the Church is Jesus Christ, for whom the Church exists to mirror the very nature of God as revealed through Jesus Christ. The church was formed in and through an all encompassing act of self-donation: the cross.  And on the cross, Jesus forfeited his agenda, his rights, his health, his future, and even his own blood.  If we are a to be a witness, a carrier of our Savior’s costly cross, maybe Jesus’ exhortation to “deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34-38) is more than a privatized “spiritual” allegiance.  Perhaps this pledge constitutes a person’s whole life in such a way that he or she becomes very peculiar in society that values “freedom” above all else.

After all, the followers of Jesus relinquish EVERY personal right, and he calls them “blessed” (Matt. 5:3-10).

What consonance is there, then, between the life of the Christian and the rhythms of a society that presumes to be human is to have unalienable rights?

Here and Now | The Proclamation of Jesus Christ

Karl Barth, the pride of the Swiss Confederation and emphatically orthodox.

Karl Barth delivered a fascinating lecture on the relevance of the Christian perspective on “a new humanism” to a secular convention of Western European intellectuals in 1949. His introduction calls attention to the surprising flow of history. It was unthinkable fifty years earlier to invite a “superstitious” theological perspective into conversation with a strictly intellectual field. As Barth introduces the Christian faith to its dialogue partners, he explains that he will not be able to conceal the peculiar nature of God’s revelation to humanity:

“The Christian proclamation would be misunderstood today, as it always has been, if it were presented as one among many theoretical, moral or aesthetic principles or systems, as one ‘ism’ in competition, harmony or conflict with other ‘isms’.”

Barth’s stance is rooted in the belief that the Christian proclamation is composed of a different substance than that from which concept, theory or principle is constructed. Every mode of knowledge is defined by the nature of its object. Therefore, the nature of God necessitates a different kind of touching, seeing and hearing than something that is simply of temporal origin.

God is eternal and transcendent, but not impersonal or unknowable. The God of orthodox Christianity is not an impersonal force like gravity which pushes toward the center of the earth without reason or care; neither is God like theory, a body of impersonal information to master. This truth requires that we wrestle with the Christian proclamation in a mode of knowledge that accounts for a God who cares, listens and speaks- a God who actually revealed himself by entering our history as the man, Jesus Christ. The idea of the incarnation is at the core of the Christian proclamation of God’s humanism: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

The Christian proclamation is that God is “here and now.” This means, according to Barth, that God is living, practical, and effective as opposed to distant, abstract and impotent. Is this true? If God really revealed himself in Jesus Christ, and if the nature of God requires a particular mode of knowledge then, Barth is right when he concludes:

“Above all, we shall not be able to conceal the fact that this very question of the ‘here and now’ of the Christian proclamation of God’s humanism [Jesus Christ] has the bittersweet character of being always and ever of being answered, whether positively or negatively, in the form of the most comprehensive, personal, and responsible decision.”

The form (or mode) necessitated by God’s humanism can be likened to the way in which a person decides to love and know another person. This is because love is the most comprehensive mode of knowing because it engages the whole being. For this reason relating to another through love is the most personal sense of knowledge. And finally, love is a decision for which each person is most responsible. It takes work, intentionality and action or it is not actually love. Cultivating a loving relationship with Amy through which I have a revelation of who she is has been, at least for me, a quite different process than the way in which I came to know that the quadratic formula is true. The nature of Amy the object dictated a very particular, exclusive and rewarding mode for knowing her.

God is an eternal being not subjugated by the properties of our world.  At the same time, God is a personal being who revealed himself, in love, through Jesus. This is good news! For Jesus said:

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”