I Was a Tweenage Blogger

Luther's three most famous solas were scriptura, fide, and gratia -- which frankly sounds a bit dim to Raccoon ears, but no less dim than all the modern and postmodern ones, e.g., sola physics, sola Darwin, sola existence, sola relativism, etc. 

Enough with the solas, since any and every sola is dynamically engaged with its complementary dance partner, which, if denied, becomes a kind of Jungian shadow -- the dark and dim kind.

Example. 

Okay, consider sola relativism. Every relativist covertly elevates relativism to a pseudo-absolute, which, on the political plane, redounds to tyrannical wokism and aggressive totolerantarianism. Just watch. Or crack a history book.  

Or, sola immanence ends with the violent repression of transcendence of fascism. Which is related to sola Darwinism, whereby we are enclosed in a violent struggle for survival, and may the most powerful prevail. Just watch.

To live in the Between means to reject solas at both ends, whether in the form of empiricism, idealism, rationalism, religionism, in fact, any ism at all; it is frankly to reject ismism in favor of the dynamic complementarities of reality -- which is always more complex than our simplistic, anti-Gödelian reductions. 

Expansionism? 

Yes, you might say that, to the extent that it is the cure for sola reductionism, without becoming its own ism, which I think the analogy of being accomplishes, for its "basic point" is

that the universe does not rest in itself or have its meaning in itself but is an analogy of being. For only then can we take the next step and see that it is meant to be a manifold explication of the One God whose Word is declared in it as beyond it (emphasis mine).

In and beyond, which is to say, between immanence and transcendence. Denial of transcendence -- sola immanence -- results in

the dark world of Nietzsche where power is the only real reality, where "might makes right"....

As a result, with no third eye (of contemplation) open to reality, our relation to the things around us is reduced to crass utility (emphasis mine).

The transcendent Real is reduced to a brute fact, and the immanent brutes take care of the rest. Just watch.

Thus, the analogy of being is not, as Karl Barth claimed, "the invention of the Anti-Christ," rather, its denial is, because it ushers in a "state of affairs in which nothing ultimately matters or means anything."

Nihilists, Donny. 

Such immanent "absolutization, to the neglect of every transcendent principle, will produce only more polarization, discord, and outbreaks of violence." Just watch. And don't forget the popcorn.

Reality -- which, first of all exists -- is "essence beyond existence," i.e., immanent existence pointing toward its own transcendent principle. Again,

we must speak of God's Being-beyond and God's Being-in.... it is not simply [sola] a matter of balancing the two aspects; it is rather because God is so transcendent that God can be so intimate.

Immanence and transcendence are complementary, but, as with all such primordial complementarities, one is ontologically prior, in this case transcendence, which transcends all the way into immanence, and here we are: in and beyond.

Which is to say above and below, rather like God himself, who is "inside and outside, Himself above and below." He "is so inside that he may become outside" (Gregory the Great, in Betz). God is "'indwelling transcendence,' where the emphasis falls on essence in existence." 

All of this -- or so we have heard from the wise --  

ultimately flows into the question of a primordial dynamic and "rhythm": from the rhythmic reciprocity, so to speak, of the persons of the Trinity.... to the rhythm of created being between a transcending immanence and an indwelling transcendence, which is reflected, in turn, in the dynamic of every living thing whose essence is in-and-beyond existence.

What a marvelous mystery!

Accordingly, nothing is univocally the same; all is more -- and infinitely more significant -- than it seems to be.

So much significance and signifyin! 

Not only is reality not meaningless, there's far more meaning than we can possibly assimilate, at least in a single post, but we're not done yet. Let's ramp up the intensity, max out the weird,  transpose the post into a higher key, and suggest that not only is "Christ the Logos"

creation's innermost "in" and its most transcendent "beyond," and thus creation's "entelechy," so to speak, [but] the eternal crossing of transcendence into immanence and of immanence into transcendence and, as such, the Way in whom all things hold together...

Can we buy some pot from this guy? 

No, this is a natural high. Or rather a supernaturally natural one, which discloses nothing less than "the crossing of Being into beings and of beings into Being," or, as in the title of a recent post, Being Becomes that Becoming Might Be.

"For obviously we exist in a state of tension between the essential and the existential, the ideal and the real." Obvious, among others, to Voegelin. 

BUT "for Christian metaphysics the end of a divine humanity has already been realized in Christ," thus the title of yesterday's post, The End Made Middle, "For the essence of humanity now exists not in the abstract only but really and concretely,"

so that life henceforth is now the realization of the life of Christ, which has been given to be, like the yeast that leavens the whole batch of dough. 

But we can take this yet deeper and higher? We'll try. 

For "to be"

admits of degrees; and "to be" in the fullest sense of the term is to be one with God who is Being... anything less would be a falling away from Reality into a land of illusions...

AKA various solas and isms, for "we cannot 'get real' unless we are rooted, so to speak, in Reality; and we cannot be rooted in Reality unless we know where to find it."

I'll bite: where is it? 

We're just about at the end of our daily 1,000. How about a picture of the post? Do your best, my artificial friend -- maybe two pictures, one before and one after reading it: