Episode 40: Anna Case-Winters – What Does It Mean for God to Be with Us?

Jared: You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God ordained podcast on the internet. 

Pete: I’m Pete Enns. 

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Pete Enns: Hey everybody, today on Faith for Normal People, it’s me, Pete, and I’m joined by Nerd in Residence Anna Sieges Beal as a co-host. Welcome back to the mic, Anna. 

Anna Sieges Beal: Thanks, Pete. I’m excited for our conversation today where we discuss “what does it mean for God to be with us?” with Dr. Anna Case-Winters. Dr. Case-Winters serves as professor of theology at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, where she’s been on faculty since 1986. She’s the author of four books, but the one that we’re focusing on today is called God Will Be All in All. 

Pete: Don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for quiet time when Jared will join me for a time of reflection on the conversation. With all that said, let’s get into the episode. 

Anna Case-Winters: “I think we have a small view of incarnation. We think of the incarnation, but there is so much more. Our history of interpretation has disincarnated, separating body from soul, spirit from matter, God from the world. These troubling distortions can be corrected if we really see God in Christ, God with us in Christ. We can claim, and with the full wealth of conviction, that Jesus is wholly divine without claiming that he is the whole of the divine.”

Anna Sieges Beal: Dr. Anna Case-Winters, we are so glad to have you with us today to talk about the incarnation. And my first question for you is, do you prefer cats or dogs? 

Anna Case-Winters: [Chuckles] Oh, I’m a cat person.

Anna Sieges Beal: Are you really? 

Pete: Okay. 

Anna Case-Winters: Yes. And Shadow the cat is in this very room with me, but I’ve told her that I’m recording and to please be quiet.

Anna Sieges Beal: She’ll be respectful. Cats always are. 

Anna Case-Winters: That’s right. She knows what to do. 

Anna Sieges Beal: Excellent. I love it. Well, a lot of times when we hear Christians talk about the incarnation, they tend to say that Jesus is truly God and truly human, but that seems like a bit of a contradiction. And so I’m just wondering how you would deal with that.

Anna Case-Winters: Uh, yes, indeed. It really is a problem. A central conviction of Christian faith is that God is with us. That’s fundamental. And that God’s presence is seen in a decisive way in Jesus the Christ. But early Christians did struggle to understand how and in what sense God was in Christ. And there was a resolution reached early on in the church that said truly God, truly human, two natures, one person…but how can that be?

And the claim has seemed to many contemporary believers to be paradoxical at best and contradictory at worst. I’m reminded of what theologian Charles Hartshorne said about paradoxes. Yeah, he said a paradox is what a contradiction becomes when it’s spoken by a theologian instead of some other person.

Pete: Amen. 

Anna Case-Winters: Yeah, I like that—

Pete: I appreciate too and how you talk about the struggle to talk about the nature of Christ and how, you know, the creeds gave language to it, but it’s even debated what that language means. 

Anna Case-Winters: Yeah. It’s a matter of filling that out. And unfortunately, we’ve not found within the classical tradition a satisfactory way of doing that. And the result is that many Christians resolve this by settling either for a Christology from above that will de-emphasize the human, or a Christology from below that will de-emphasize the divine. And both are problematic for different reasons. On the one hand, if we don’t see a true human being in Jesus, then his life can’t really be a model for our own.

We might be moved to worship him as divine. We might even form a cult of Jesus, but we can’t really be expected to follow him if he’s not truly human. Then, on the other hand, If we don’t see true God in him, then our view of who God is, and how God is related to us, can’t really be shaped by what we see in him.

There’s this ancient saying, if this is God, then thus is God. So if Jesus, in some way, conveys this, who God is, then that’s a true image of what God is like. But if he is not truly divine, as well as truly human, then that ancient saying doesn’t hold. We do think that in Jesus, something of God shines forth.

So we want to say this both/and, rather than the either/or that has plagued this ancient statement. A couple of things here from process thought that I think are helpful, and process thought is a way of thinking that focuses on process and relation and makes those the fundamental things. Much more could be said, but one of the gifts of process thought is to say that we need to rethink our worldview.

We’ve had a worldview that says the really real thing is substances. And if God and human beings are thought of along the lines of substances, then we’ve got a problem because how can one substance be inside another substance without displacing it? But if we shift to process thinking and relational thinking, the problem doesn’t arise in that way.

We know from science, for example, that two processes can occupy the same space. For example, electromagnetism and gravity can both operate in the same field. So again, this switch from substance thinking to process thinking opens a window to a different way of embracing this. The other thing I would add is our history of delineating the divine attributes over against the world and its attributes.

So you get a God that’s eternal and unchanging, and immortal and unable to suffer, whereas in the world and for human beings, we are mortal. We are changeable. We are temporal, and we are capable of suffering. So it’s like the one or the other in an absolute binary separation. But what if divine attributes include, rather than excluding, these features? If God is not, for example, in some sense temporal, how can God act in a temporal world? And if God can’t change, how can God respond? How can God answer prayer, for example, if God cannot be changing and responsive? So we could say that God is unchanging in God’s faithfulness, and yet changing in how that faithfulness is expressed, and that happens in ways that are responsive to world process. So, this is basically rejecting the setup of the binary opposition and the either or thinking to enable us to say with full conviction that this one is truly human and truly divine to nature’s one person and affirming that without contradiction.

Anna Sieges Beal: I’m just trying to wrap my head around this because this is different than the way that I’ve ever thought about the divine before. And so, what is it then about Jesus that teaches us how to think about God differently? 

Anna Case-Winters: Yeah, I think that his life and ministry was very much aligned with the divine intentions. So, if we look to him and the life of love for God and neighbor that he manifested, then we see something like a true reflection of who God is, of God’s love and self-giving. So it’s revelatory. And this is not to say that no one else can manifest divine intentions in fitting ways, but that this is a place where the light shines through for us because his life was so aligned with the divine intent.

We can see something of who God is and what God is up to everywhere and always. He becomes emblematic of that self giving, loving God. And then, um, people have said once we have seen God in Christ, we cannot help but see God in all things. This manifestation changes the way we view God. everything. 

Pete: So what I’m hearing you say, Anna, is that, but this idea of incarnation, it’s a Jesus thing, right? It’s Jesus of Nazareth, but it goes beyond that. 

Anna Case-Winters: Yes. Right. 

Pete: There’s, there’s more to incarnation than beginning and ending with Jesus. 

Anna Case-Winters: That’s right. 

Pete: That’s, I think that’s so important. I I agree with that. I don’t think as deeply about it as you do, but I agree with that and I think that’s gonna be a very new idea for people to see incarnation is not just Christmas Eve.

Anna Case-Winters: Now, I think we have a small view of incarnation. We think of the Incarnation, capital I, and, and that in itself is amazing. But there is, I believe, so much more to God’s Incarnation. Really, this way of thinking fundamentally changes how we think about God’s relation to the world. I personally resonate with the testimony of 13th century mystic, Mechthild.

When she says, I’m quoting, “the day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw, and knew that I saw, all things in God and God in all things.” That does begin to displace some traditional ways of thinking. It’s not foreign to our tradition. Could be named as panentheism. It’s not pantheism where everything is simply divine kind of thing, but it’s a God in all things…a good metaphor for this comes out of Augustine where he uses the image of the world as a sponge in the ocean, and that sponge is surrounded by and permeated by the immensity of the ocean. So God is like the ocean that surrounds and permeates the sponge, filling every part of it, but still stretching well beyond that finite spot. And so you, you still have a transcendence of God in this, but a presence of God in all things.

So, it was, you have that. Then there’s no contradiction in saying God was in Christ, if God is in all things, and it’s there that we see most clearly that God is in all things. And, oh, I didn’t really answer your question about incarnation being more than Jesus in a direct way. There are texts that point to this, and this is a back to the Bible moment.

I want to reference the Colossians text. Just hitting some highlights of that about Jesus, it says he is “in the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. In him all things are possible. In heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, that he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

It goes on to say, “in him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things.” So in this text you already have a vision of Christ that is cosmic, universal, the very foundation of the world and decisively present in Jesus of Nazareth, but more than that, you could even think of the word in John chapter 1, “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. All things came into being through Him.” If we could say, it goes all the way back to Genesis, the creation happening with the Word and the Spirit. So this is something that is more foundational, fundamental, and pervasive than we have really recognized. I don’t think we’ve gotten the full implications of incarnation until we see the big picture. And I think we see it best looking through the lens of the incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth. 

Anna Sieges Beal: So what you’re saying, it sounds like Jesus has implications for creation, all creation, all that there is. Sometimes when I’m talking to students about the Colossians passage and the John 1 passage, I’m like, yeah, you just have to kind of envision that like Jesus juice has infused everything. And I don’t, I don’t know if that’s a good metaphor or not, but it sounds a little bit like the sponge metaphor. Could you go back to that sponge metaphor and explain it to me one more time? 

Anna Case-Winters: Sure. I wish I had a visual. If you could, if you could picture a sponge in the ocean, there’s not a bit of it that isn’t filled with the water of the ocean. And yet it in itself, it’s a finite thing. And the ocean is way bigger than the sponge. So this way of talking about it, and of course it’s all metaphor, I don’t think there’s an easy way to understand the mystery of the divine presence in all things, but this helps convey it because you get both the real presence, the intimacy of God’s connection with the creation, and also the ultimacy of God as being beyond the creation itself.

Anna Sieges Beal: Okay. So God is the water and the sponge is creation.

Anna Case-Winters: Yeah, I, I think that’s the way it falls out for Augustine. I guess a lot of metaphors could be used, but that’s the one that has said it best for me. I can sort of picture that, it helps to have images, even if they’re inadequate—and they always are—our best concepts never capture a God, but they, they, these point in a good direction that helps our understanding, I think.

Pete: So this is the question that comes up for me now. Okay. Cool. Incarnation, very important. It’s bigger than Jesus. How, how might this help us understand maybe the crucifixion differently? Because a lot of people bring up, I think quite regularly, that it seems like a rather violent thing to do. And, you know, God causing, even glorifying and suffering and promoting sacrifice in ways that are unhealthy. I don’t think that’s a necessary thing to crucifixion, but you know, you get it, right? So, how does this way of thinking incarnationally affect that? 

Anna Case-Winters: Right. The critique you name here is a serious one, and I think it needs our attention. We need to make a better interpretation of the cross in order for it not to be misunderstood as a glorification of suffering and promoting sacrifice in ways that might be unhealthy. So it’s such a central symbol, the symbol without parallel for Christian tradition. So, I think it merits more careful interpretation so that we don’t fall into those misunderstandings. Delores Williams has been helpful—a womanist theologian—in her book, Sisters in the Wilderness, has pointed out that interpreting God’s saving work in Christ primarily through the lens of substitution and sacrificial suffering doesn’t play out well as good news for people that are accustomed to having roles of surrogacy and sacrifice and suffering forced upon them. These kinds of critiques merit an answer. I do think that some readings in our history and in ordinary practice even could glorify suffering and sacrifice and be harmful to people who have those roles forced on them.

It’s often used against oppressed people to cut the nerve of rebellion. Uh, Howard Thurman is helpful on this. He pointed out that Jesus religion was one of incarnation, but our history of interpretation has kind of disincarnated, separating body from soul, spirit from matter, God from the world. It’s become an otherworldly religion of pie in the sky by and by, and the faithful, especially the oppressed, are counseled to just bear their cross of suffering, like Jesus did, to identify with Jesus by simply bearing the suffering that is put upon them. And that does cut the nerve of rebellion. 

Anna Sieges Beal: Well, in so much of what you’re saying resonates with when I was growing up, the way that we talked about the crucifixion was as this horrifying, grueling thing. And it was something that Jesus took on that we actually deserve. Cause we’re just that bad, right? And so the way that you’re talking about it, like people who are suffering now are just receiving what they deserve anyway. And so, yeah, we need like a better vision for the crucifixion than that. 

Anna Case-Winters: Oh, yes, definitely. And I recognize that interpretation from our history is problematic on so many levels. It’s as if the human being ceases to be God’s beloved creation, that just this kind of lowly worm theology, that there’s nothing good in us. And I’m not sure that that is true to the fuller picture, biblically or otherwise, more broadly. I think while we do not always realize the divine intent for our lives, and indeed there is much evil that is done, we never cease to be God’s beloved creation. 

And it’s not as if God needs a blood sacrifice in order to forgive us. I don’t think that way. I recognize that there are others that might differ from us, but I think it is because God loves, forgives, and reaches out to us that Jesus comes into our midst in this way. I think these troubling distortions can be, uh, corrected if we really see God in Christ, God with us in Christ.

If we do, then the cross is a God event. It’s not something God does to Jesus in order to be able to forgive us and to love us. I just, I think rather we should see God’s own solidarity with us in our sin and suffering on the cross. I’m very much on board with Moltmann and his notion of the crucified God, that it is, Joseph Sittler used to say, if you don’t have a crucified God, you don’t have a big enough God.

Anna Sieges Beal: Oh, what does that mean? 

Anna Case-Winters: Kind of, kind of heavy there. But it’s, it’s to recognize that our, our reality is in a sense cruciform. There is much suffering and sin in our life. And God embraces us precisely in that situation. And Dorothy Zola, I was struck with something she said in her book on suffering. She noted that the remarkable thing about Jesus was not that he died on the cross, but the life that he led that led him to the cross, that life of resistance to the principalities and powers, that life of love for others that challenged the status quo in so many ways. She goes on to point out that suffering is all around us, that there are situations in which people are being crucified every day. So part of the work of following Jesus is to stop the crucifixions. 

Anna Sieges Beal: Oh, interesting. 

Pete: Yeah. Yeah. 

Anna Case-Winters: So it’s not in any way to glorify a crucifixion or to ask others to embrace it because it’s their hard reality, but to stop the crucifixions. I really like that. And I think that way forward could help us reclaim the cross not as a glorification of suffering, but as a scene of dangerous remembrance, empowering resistance, and emancipatory hope. 

Anna Sieges Beal: Wow, I love that quote. 

Anna Case-Winters: Okay, so that’s Joy Ann McDougal. I have to give her credit for that in an unpublished work. She spoke it at AAR, American Academy of Religion, and it just stuck with me. I said, yeah, that’s it. That’s the meaning of the cross. 

Anna Sieges Beal: And so you said dangerous remembrance, that part. 

Anna Case-Winters: Yep. Dangerous remembrance. We remember who Jesus was and the life that he led and our call to follow him, follow in the way that he set before us, which is different than just forming a cult of Jesus and worshiping him.

I think we are meant not just to have faith in Jesus, but to embrace the faith of Jesus that led him to this kind of life. So we remember it is in a sense of dangerous remembrance for us as it was for him and empowering resistance. The cross is a kind of resistance. His resistance to the political and religious elites and their ways of being with people was what led to the crucifixion.

When we see that God is present with us in our sin and our suffering, and loves and redeems and extends hope for more to us, then we have reason to hope. There’s just a lot there, and I think a lot better ways to think about the meaning of the cross than some of our history [provides].

Anna Sieges Beal: Yeah, it’s, it’s a total reframing of the cross, not as punishment, but like you say, as a life of resistance and that emancipatory hope that comes along with it. So, Anna, so much of your book laid the groundwork for this idea of human/creation suffering. What does it mean that God is with us when we encounter so much human suffering and even creation suffering? 

Anna Case-Winters: Yeah, that I think, people have reason to ask that. And in some ways, it seems that God is not with us. And I would say God is not with us in the sense of a dominating and controlling power that determines everything that happens in world process. Part of my work is rethinking omnipotence, sort of in the way I’ve been rethinking the cross. I’m asking, what is perfect power? And I don’t think perfect power is domination and control. I think perfect power is the power of love. And I, I take “God is love” to be the fundamental Christian affirmation and we should test all our other doctrines and concepts according to that conviction, and when we do, I think we would invest omnipotence with a different meaning.

It’s not a matter of how much power God has, but what kind of power. And so I’m saying, if we fill in what is the potence in omnipotence, if not domination and control, if you add omni to that, then you do get this all dominating, controlling power that seems like a puppet master. And I don’t think of God that way. I think of God as loving, and love does not control the beloved. And God not controlling world process sort of explains how the world is the way it is when a God is a good God. I think we need to think again about that question. When, uh, there’s this, uh, Snoopy cartoon I really like where Snoopy’s typing and Linus comes by and says, “What are you writing?” He says, “I’m writing a book on theology” and well, in his mind, you know, he doesn’t doesn’t talk. But Charlie Brown says, “I hope you have a good title for it.” And then the cloud above Snoopy’s head is, “I have the perfect title. Have you ever considered that you might be wrong?” And I think we’ve been wrong here in projecting onto God which is really rather a distorted human vision of how power is best exercised.

We don’t really honor tyrants as showing the best form of power. So why do we project that onto God? And when we do, it backfires because if we project it onto God and reify it in that way, then that gives it a blessing to operate in the realm of human affairs. So we get that pattern blessed in the human realm with autocrats. And, um, we seem to be, I think power of domination is our preoccupation, not God’s. Uh, and Charles Hartshorne, a process theologian, offered a helpful book entitled Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. 

Anna Sieges Beal: [Laughs] Well, if God is not this dictator and, and just kind of like calling all of the shots, then how is God present with us in our suffering?

Anna Case-Winters: Yes, yes. Multiple ways. Whitehead spoke of God as the fellow sufferer who understands. So this is, that picture is more like the crucified God, not one who is imposing the suffering or even permitting the suffering, but one who suffers with us when we do suffer. And I, I also think it’s more than that. I do think God is powerful and is exercising divine power in a way that is persuasive, that God is ever taking the wreckage that we make of our possibilities and redeeming what can be redeemed and luring the creation and us in ever positive and good directions, which we, in our freedom, may or may not realize and act upon, but that, you know, God never gives up.

This is an everlasting lure to the good that is God’s work in us, holding out possibilities, and that has a power to it. It’s just not a coercive power that can guarantee we will conform to what is best. So this, there is a kind of power that is a shared power that has a solidarity feature to it. But that is active power, allure to the good and is generative and positive. Different kind of power. 

Pete: So, um, we only have a few minutes left, Anna, but I want to return to something and I guess ask you a few questions sort of clustered into one big question. And the question is, you know, God with us, who is the us? Is it just Christians or is it everybody? Is it just people? Humans who are saved? Or, or is creation being saved, including your cat? And what about—exoplanets are becoming a thing. There are thousands of them out there. So, it’s, you know, and it’s gotten people thinking, you know, C. S. Lewis thought about this, you know, 70 years ago, but can you riff on that in just the short time that we have? Who the “us” constituted?

Anna Case-Winters: Yeah, I’ll start with the narrower scope and then broaden out. The question is, is it just us Christians that God is with? I really don’t think so. In fact, I will answer no to all those questions. So there’s my short answer, but I’ll elaborate. I think that in this context of religious pluralism, we need to grapple with that question and give some thought to it.

I don’t think that Christian claims about incarnation are unavoidably exclusivist, that the incarnation in Christ is revelatory of who God is, but that does not mean there are no other places of divine revelation. Some have even said the whole of creation is a theater of God’s glory and a revelation of God.

So I would say that we can claim, and with the full wealth of conviction, that Jesus is wholly divine without claiming that he is the whole of the divine. Perhaps another metaphor will help here. My colleague, Tom Parker, in theology, used to talk about the San Francisco Bay that he would swim in as a child. And he said, now that I think about it, that bay was wholly ocean, but it was not the whole ocean. Does that help us a little bit, uh, in recognizing that God is greater, God is always greater, but that in no way removes the conviction of our having found in Jesus, as Christians, found this is where I found the words of eternal life and I embrace that, but I don’t presume to say God is nowhere else.

The question of, is it just us humans? I don’t think so. We tend to be anthropocentric in our ways of thinking, but I believe God is with this whole creation. When you think about it, human beings are latecomers in cosmic history, 13.78 billion years of cosmic history. You may have seen on cosmos or nova the calendar—if the cosmos history was plotted on a calendar, then you don’t even have mammals until December 25th. And human beings don’t appear until late night on December 31st. So we’re latecomers. I have to ask, you know, what was God doing during all those other billions of years if we’re the whole picture? It seems so unlikely that God was just waiting for us to come along.

So I think God has love and purposes with the whole of creation and that this has bearing upon how we should be relating to the wider creation, that the universe as a communion of subjects, rather than a collection of objects. We’re beloved of God, surely, but we’re not the whole show. And we are all connected in this wonderful web, this convivial community that is creation.

Vaclav Havel put it beautifully, “We are mysteriously connected to the entire universe. We are mirrored in it, just as the entire universe is mirrored in us.” So I’m claiming ever widening divine embrace and I’m going to widen it to the furthest extent I can in this last comment related to, you know, is it just us earthlings given all those exoplanets?

Isn’t it possible that there might be other life out there? Even intelligent life. Ted Peters has it right when he says “we gaze on the magnificence of the sky” and I’m quoting him, “your mind fills to the brim and overflows with awe, your infinity fills your soul.” And I think most of us experience something like that when we look at the stars. I think there are way over 4,000 exoplanets currently. And we know that most stars do have solar systems, and so as you were saying there are more exoplanets than there are stars, some of which are in the habitable zone, what they call the Goldilocks zone. Not too hot and not too cold. But just about right even for human beings. And we’re not limited to The Goldilocks zone for lifeforms, all kinds of incredible forms of life are here on earth and who knows what’s out there given the number of the stars, which is, shall we say astronomical?

Is it not possible that somewhere out there there’s something and someone else? Scientists differ as to their sense of whether that’s likely. Some say, this is all speculation. We have not encountered any other beings. So where is everybody? This is what Fermi asks. It seems like the sky should be full of space travelers, given the eons that have passed and the numbers of those exoplanets. Someone said that the proof that there is intelligent life out there is that they have not come looking for us. The other side of the scientists is those that point out the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. So maybe they just are not here yet. And we have to recognize that we do not know, but given what we’ve seen of the exoplanets, the chair of astrobiology at the Library of Congress says it’s time to get ready.

Pete: Chances are, chances are that, you know, this is, this is sort of happening. 

Anna Case-Winters: So, we have to reflect on that theologically. 

Anna Sieges Beal: That’s true. 

Pete: Well, unfortunately, we need to bring this to a close. We could go on for hours talking about this. Unfortunately, we can’t. Maybe, we’d love to have you back and maybe expand on some of these things and maybe focus on one or two things and have a more in depth conversation about, but this is, I mean, your book’s wonderful and I just thank you for being on the podcast.

Anna Case-Winters: Yes. Oh, thank you kindly. Thank you for inviting me. It’s been fun. I’ve enjoyed myself. Thank you.

Jared: And now for Quiet Time…

Pete: …with Pete and Jared. 

Jared: All right, so help normal people here understand why or how process theology impacts the idea of the incarnation. 

Pete: Yeah, I’m coming at process theology, which was mentioned briefly, you know, and not really expanded on in the podcast. I’ve come at that sort of innocently through the side door just by thinking about things like incarnation. So I’m not an expert in process theology, although maybe one day I’d like to play one on TV. I don’t know. We’ll see how that goes. But basically, as I understand it, process theology does not begin with a God who’s sovereign up there looking down, but is very much in process like the rest of creation.

And that sounds somewhat controversial, but it answers some questions that have been nagging people. And one of them is what is the relationship between God and the world? And when you bring in things that process theology really loves to talk about, like science, like quantum mechanics or Einstein, and that’s how it got its start really by engaging how science gives us a different world.

And how does our theology come into discussion with our changing understanding of the nature of reality? Right? So that’s, that’s huge. That’s why process theology even exists. And the impact on the idea of incarnation is that incarnation is bigger than Christmas Eve. It involves all of creation. In fact, creation itself could be understood as an act of God, God’s self giving and incarnating into mass, right, into stuff that we see. So God would be a part of everything that exists from the smallest subatomic particles to the largest galaxies and black holes. God’s, I’ll use the word energy as somehow part of that. So, we have this God who’s not just at a distance, but is actually woven into everything that exists, which I think is a pretty amazing concept, Jared.

I don’t know, what do you think, Jared?

Jared: Yeah, yeah, and I have a follow up question about Jesus in that, you know, maybe we can talk about that some, but I think, same disclaimer for me, process theology is not my area for sure, coming at it more from a philosophical bent, or perspective than the theological, but Yeah, what you said I think is important, kind of the, uh, the way of thinking about God, the way I grew up thinking about God, and I think most of us, perhaps not coincidentally, related to a more of a static identity or a mechanistic understanding of God. God is out there. 

Pete: Meaning, mechanistic, what does that mean? 

Jared: Um, I’m thinking of, like, the physicists of the 18th and 19th centuries where there is mechanisms. Sort of the deistic God who’s out there, the clockmaker who starts the clock and it runs 

Pete: Planets orbits?

Jared: Everything is like a clock. It’s just mechanical, and in that worldview, things have identities that are stable. But when you fast forward to where science is now, kind of this quantum idea, things are dynamic, they’re ever evolving, ever becoming, ever changing, nothing is one thing and stays that one thing. 

Pete: And it’s not predictable either.

Jared: It’s not predictable. So, what implications does that have with God? And I think it’s another one of those ideas of if we don’t understand that context has a role to play in how we conceive of God, we might think that that static, mechanistic, out there transcendent God is true for all time. That’s absolutely true for how God is, rather than a product of the time for how people thought of God.

And we need to sort of update that as we go along. And the idea of incarnation seems to me tied to that very idea that if God is irreducibly connected to us and our material existence, then that our idea of God would have to change as our Ideas of the material universe and what it’s all made up of also change.

Pete: And I mean, some of the people listening, Jared may have come across process theology and You know, I used to back before I knew anything, I said, well, this just sounds wrong. This is just, God can’t be like this. But the thing is just so people understand, and this has helped me a lot to just know that these ideas didn’t just come out of crazy people’s minds because they felt like being weird.

They’re trying to account for literally a cosmic view, a view of the cosmos. Which is not final. There’s always more to learn, but it’s not Newton. You know, it’s not the 18th, 19th century. It’s Einstein and beyond. It’s a space time continuum. Things happen, you know, in ways that are not predictable. You know, where’s an electron in an atom?

You know, is it there? It’s not there. There, we don’t really know where it is. We can sort of predict it, but we’re not, we can’t really do that. So, so, okay. What kind of a God are we talking about then? How do we even talk about God and the universe like this? I mean, simply put, it’s really hard to say God is up there looking down, because there’s no up, right?

So maybe, and this came up with Anna in the interview, both Annas, by the way, we had our Anna, right? Very confusing. But the, it came up that Anna Case-Winters, very much has panentheistic leanings, that God is in all things. God is not equated with all things. But God is in all things. Because without the ground of existence and the ground of being, nothing is there.

So God is involved somehow. That is a kind of incarnation. And if people are interested, you know, Richard Rohr says something like this too in the Universal Christ. So this, this is not just an idea isolated in a few places, it’s, it’s a pretty big idea and, and it really makes you think differently about incarnation is not just the God up there making a cameo appearance 2000 years ago and God has not been involved intimately with creation until Christmas Eve.

What about a million years ago? What was God doing, if we can even talk like that, just sitting around waiting for things to happen? The energy of the creator involved. And again, this is all slippery language. I can’t explain it. Metaphorically was, was the creator involved somehow and embedded in this matter that has made up our universe?

And to me, that’s the kind of stuff—I love thinking about this. I don’t understand it. I mean, who does really, but it’s, it’s, it’s a way of thinking about God that takes into account what we understand of reality and that’s not a small thing. We don’t have to go back and just simply parrot language from, even biblical language, which doesn’t think like this either, of course, why would they, right?

But we have this major shift that’s happening and, and we have to account for it. And an incarnation for Anna is sort of like a thing that helps it hang together. That’s the way I work with it. 

Jared: It’s like a hook. Mmhmm that keeps it connected. 

Pete: Yes, that, that keeps God’s intimacy with creation is, it’s heightened example is Christmas Eve.

Jared: Okay. That’s what people would say. That was going to be my next question. How does Jesus, you know, how does Jesus fit into this from Anna’s perspective? But I’d be curious just for you. How do you make sense of that? Petey 

Pete: Yeah, I mean, the whole Jesus thing is, I think, honestly, and you hate this word, Jared, I’m going to use it anyway, because it’s my word just to get out of stuff. You know, incarnation is like a big deal in the Christian faith. It’s highly debated what it means, you know, and to ferret out all the details, I think, is frankly impossible. And anybody who says they understand the incarnation, doesn’t understand that they don’t understand the Incarnate. How can you actually understand that? So given all that, I see Jesus as a concrete expression of God’s presence and intimacy with creation that has been going on all along anyway, but just differently. 

Jared: And that’s kind of the universal Christ. 

Pete: That’s the universal Christ idea, right? So in Jesus of Nazareth, the universal Christ is made manifest in a first century Jewish troublemaker, right?

You know, um, but it’s in principle what has been going on ever since the big bang or however we’re going to explain ultimate beginnings, right? I mean, again, that’s what people would say, well, prove that. Well, I can’t prove it. I’m just, I’m trying to wrap my head around how people think about incarnation and the reality out there.

So, you know, this is Jared, a huge topic. I find it very satisfying that one of those core mysteries of the Christian faith is something we actually get to keep talking about and trying to understand its implications. It’s not just exhausted by one event. Very apologetically, I think we focus on that. Is Jesus fully divine, fully human?

We argue about that. But there is a principle at work that has, I think, been brought forward more directly over the last maybe 100 years because of how our view of reality has changed. And one thing, and I’ll just end with this, in Curveball there is a theologian that I quote a few times. He says, you know, what we need is a third millennium theology.

We’re in the third millennia now since, you know, the birth of the Christian movement. And theology has changed and shifted and grown. And with Newton, it got to be a certain way. You know, people thought about God in a very mechanistic way because science informs our theology. And process theologians are like jumping up and down saying, excuse me.

Excuse me. A lot of stuff has happened here in the past hundred years that has thrown into the shredder the way we used to think about certain aspects of reality. And for the Incarnation to come alongside that and sort of be a conversation partner for people of faith, I think is extremely important. I think for the, even for the continuation and viability of the Christian faith. That’s how strongly I feel about this. 

Jared: I’m happy for you. 

Pete: Good feeling. All right, folks. Thanks for listening.

Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you want to support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just want to give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give.

Pete: And if you want to support us and want a community, classes, and other great resources, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join. 

Jared: And lastly, it always goes a long way if you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com. 

Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of Faith for Normal People. Don’t forget you can catch our other show, The Bible for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People Team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O’Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.

Anna Case-Winters: And I would say God is not with us in the sense of, uh, dominating and controlling power that determines everything that happens in world process. 

Anna Sieges Beal: What? That’s crazy. What? Where’s John Calvin right now? 

Pete: I won’t, I won’t, I’ll stop, I’ll stop, I’ll stop praying for a parking spot at the mall then. 

Anna Case-Winters: Yeah. Yeah. This is my lover’s quarrel with Calvin, which was in my first book. 

Anna Sieges Beal: My takeaway from all of this is dinosaurs are saved, aliens are saved, and my cat Spanky is also saved. 

Pete: All right. Save it for the next podcast, Anna. Save it for the next podcast. 

Anna Sieges Beal: Sorry, sorry, sorry. 

Anna Case-Winters: Yes. Yes. The divine embrace is very wide indeed.

Anna Sieges Beal: Very, very wide.