How Will We Know Jesus? His Presence known shall be by the holy harmony that it makes in thee!

The reflection, below, was evoked by Robert W. Jenson Asks the Question, Where Is the Risen Body of Christ?

and Tom Belt's Where is Jesus?

It addresses, perhaps, a different focus than was under consideration in those articles. For starters, I subscribe to Jenson’s Logos Ensarkos & JDW’s Creation as Incarnation, along with rather robust notions of multiple incarnation. I look forward to a personal encounter of the Son, Jesus, in his glorified human body, theophanically. And with the Trinity, supra-theophanically, per our divine noetic identity. I’m committed to the belief that these encounters are possible, eschatologically, but not much concerned with how, metaphysically.

Theologians have drawn distinctions such as between a divine personal disposition & particularization, a constitution & manifestation, a theogony & theophany, a Christogony & Christophany and the divine esse naturale & intentionale.

These divine particularizations, manifestations, theophanies, Christophanies & logoi, multiple incarnations even, have been characterized in terms of luminosity, variously as lights of nature, experience, reason, grace, faith & glory. These revelatory modes have been further distinguished as variously mediated or immediate, as theophanic & supratheophanic, each differing - not in their Object of knowledge, but - in their formally or modally distinct ways of knowing, which can grow everlastingly.

Tom Belt writes that "Christ’s resurrected body now just is the entire material cosmos (dispositionally speaking), and in a more accomplished sense as the Church embodies God’s intentions for human existence."

Tom's dynamical reference to an ever more accomplished ecclesiological Christ-embodiment properly entails that the divine distinctions we discussed above function as far more than mere epistemic or phenomenological categories, abstractly. They are rather, as the pragmatists say, "distinctions that make a difference." In a real sense they represent the divine indwelling as the very means, i.e. being mutually constituted, to our divine theotic ends, unitively, i.e. becoming increasingly intimate.

Thou shalt know Him when He comes

Not by din of drums--

Nor the vantage of airs;

Nor by anything He wears.

Neither by His crown, nor His gown

For His Presence known shall be

By the holy harmony

That his coming makes in thee.

~ 15th Century Anonymous

Concretely, then, we are talking about more than epistemic categories, experientially, cognitively & discursively. We are talking about nothing less than theosis, where relationality functions as a real mode of being (becoming) realized through a knowing that's operative.

For the dynamically becoming rational creature, then, our modes of knowing, such as via the lights of experience & reason, faith & glory, are successive - not only epistemically & phenomenologically but - operatively & interrelationally. Specifically, such successive modes of operatively knowing God are sublative, where, per Lonergan, “what sublates goes beyond what is sublated, introduces something new and distinct, puts everything on a new basis, yet so far from interfering with the sublated or destroying it, on the contrary needs it, includes it, preserves all its proper features and properties, and carries them forward to a fuller realization within a richer context.”

Each novel set of epektatic dynamics, per each new horizon of human concern, can attain its own sort of rest, what Nyssen called “stability in the good,” which I like to map to what we would call “sustained authenticity” in Lonerganian terms. This is to suggest that each horizon offers its own unique opportunities to co-self-construct various habits of self -transcendence, habits that become stable in their perpetual self-progression (not static in terms of mere self -possession).

Our successive modes of knowing gift us novel subjective experiences of beatitude, which are concomitant with ever increasing levels of divine luminosity (objective theophanic manifestations). Our growth in subjective beatitude & objective theophany does not merely reflect our growth in being (substantially, relatively & accidentally); our progressions in degree of divine luminosity reflect ever more accomplished senses of ecclesiological Christ-embodiment, intersubjectively.

As Anthony Baker suggests, then, "immortality for humans is not simply a conditional gift, but the truth of who we are. We are God’s bodily manifestations of life. This drives Bulgakov not only to a rich account of resurrection, but all the way to apocatastasis: universal reconciliation with God. This is our end not because God abolishes the freedom of creatures to rebel, but instead because 'freedom does not exist in an ontological contradiction with the divine plan of creation' (Sophiology of Death, 96)."