In this chapter, I turn to the fundamental framework of the Asian American theology that I have been articulating. What God is ultimately aiming at in creating the world and in God’s providential rule needs to be spelled out so that the ultimate meaning of what I say regarding God’s redemptive work and Christian discipleship may be clear.
Second, it is important to understand how God’s entrance into a liminal space in Jesus Christ is rooted in a liminality within God’s internal life and being. By speaking about the immanent Trinity as the foundation of God’s activity in history, one may affirm that what God does in history is not incidental to God but is grounded in the very nature of God’s own being and life.
Speaking about these most basic matters is not to engage in a speculative, deductive, or “from above” kind of theology that says things about history and human life on the basis of certain abstract presuppositions which are removed from concrete historical process. What I say about God’s end in creation and God’s internal life is actually read off of God’s actions in history—most centrally, in the life, work, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as reread in light of the concrete context of Asian Americans. Although I do not explicitly deal with the question of how the doctrine of God is “read off” of God’s actions of history, in discussing the way of Jesus the Galilean as the Christ I will deal with the material that is the basis for articulating the doctrine of God’s internal life.
Jonathan Edwards’s conception of the end or purpose for which God created the world provides the ultimate meaning of his understanding of all that God does in human history. I borrow Edwards’s understanding of God’s end in creation as the temporal repetition of God’s innertrinitarian communion, because it comports well with Asian American theology’s need to spell out how marginalized and liminal Asian Americans can attain a life of belonging and communion in America.
Edwards’s conception of God’s end in creation must be understood in conjunction with his highly original formulation of the being of God as at once fully actual and also inherently disposed to increase in actuality. The exercise of the divine disposition in God’s knowing or loving represents the movement from the possibility of that to which the disposition is disposed, to the actuality of that possibility. Thus, the exercise of disposition results in an ontological increase.
For Edwards, God’s essence is the eternal disposition to bring about and delight in communal love and beauty, and this disposition is fully and perfectly exercised within God’s internal life. God in God’s internal being, therefore, is all that God has to be in order to be God. God’s internal “fullness” is the full actuality of the divine being plus an infinite increase of that being within God’s own being. God’s self-communication among the Trinity, Edwards says, is the full actualization of the divine being that is “completely equal to” the eternal disposition. There is no lack in God’s actuality as God.1
God is actual. However, God also remains essentially the eternal disposition to bring about and delight in communal love and beauty. The paradoxical truth is that in God actuality and disposition coincide. Now, the question is, How can the divine disposition that is fully exercised within the Trinity be further exercised? Edwards’s answer is ad extra, that is, outside of God’s internal being.
God creates the world, according to Edwards, so that God’s dispositional essence could now be exercised outside of God’s internal fullness. But a question arises: Anything that God aims at must be the highest good, and God alone is the highest good. But if God as the highest good is fully actual within God’s own being, what could be the end God could aim at in exercising God’s disposition outside of God-self? Edwards’s answer to this question is: God’s internal fullness itself “repeated” in time and space.2 The world is to be a repetition of God’s internal being. Since the world is a “repetition” of God’s prior actuality, God’s perfection in actuality is safeguarded. But “repetition” also is something that happens in time and space. So the notion of repetition protects God’s prior perfection and at the time bestows an ontological significance to what God does in time and space. Since God’s internal beauty of being is infinite, its repetition in time and space will take an “everlasting” time through the eschaton and into the unending time in heaven. The world will have true and real repetitions of God’s beauty in time and space, but will never be a complete “increase” of God’s internal being. The “repetition” or “increase” continues for an everlasting duration. Therefore, the God–world distinction will never be abolished.3
Edwards’s achievement is that he is able to see God as involved in time without subjecting God’s prior actuality to temporal process. God’s repetition in time and space of God’s intra-trinitarian communion is achieved through the sanctified human being’s loving communion with God and with others. What human beings do in time and space can be a participation in God’s own work of repeating in time God’s internal communion. In short, Asian American theology can appropriate Edwards’s notion that one’s primary task in following Christ is to help establish loving communion with others and that striving for such a goal is nothing less than a participation in God’s own work in history.
The Christian faith affirms that Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God. What Jesus is is what God is, and what Jesus does is what God does. In Jesus the Galilean, we meet God Godself, not some representative of God and not some God-like being. If this were not so, our salvation wrought in Jesus Christ would not be salvation from God Godself.
So when Jesus the Galilean chose the liminal and marginalized Galilee as the place of his ministry, God Godself was making this choice. When Jesus lived the life of a liminal and marginalized Galilean, God Godself lived a liminal and marginalized human life. If this is the case, then do the incarnate Son of God’s liminality and marginalization correspond to any aspect of God’s internal life as God? If Jesus is God Godself, there must be at least liminality in God. There must be liminality in God as the basis of Jesus’ liminality and as the possibility of marginalization here on earth.
Marginalization, unlike liminality, is not what Jesus willed for himself. Marginalization is part of the fallen condition of God’s creation and, as such, cannot be rooted in God’s own inner life. Nevertheless, there must be something in God’s own being that is the ground of the possibility of Jesus’ act of taking marginalization upon himself. Liminality in God is the ground of the possibility that God in time may participate in the condition of being marginalized.
One enters liminality by leaving behind for a moment his or her structure and status. Liminality is the room into which one is ready to let the other come as the other. Liminality is receptivity and thus also vulnerability. Liminality as a means of God’s expression of God’s love for the other, therefore, is also God’s “capacity” to take marginalization and even death upon Godself, as God did in Jesus the incarnate Son.
Is Jonathan Edwards’s conception of God’s intra-trinitarian life capable of accommodating liminality? Liminality among the persons of the Trinity is really a further elaboration of the distinction between them. To the extent that Edwards, as the theological tradition itself, affirms a real distinction between the persons, his doctrine of the Trinity, in my view, is capable of accommodating liminality. Edwards wrote, “If God beholds himself so as hence to have delight and joy in himself, he must become his own object: there must be a duplicity.” Further, “And I suppose the Deity to be truly and properly repeated by God’s thus having an idea of himself … and that by this means the Godhead is truly generated and repeated.”4 Edwards’s insistence that there must be a “duplicity” between the Father and the Son can be taken to mean that there is a real otherness and a “distance” between them, and the Father delights in and loves the Son as truly Other. This otherness and distance between the Father and the Son are the liminal space between them. The Father out of love for the Son enters into a liminal space in meeting the Son. Out of the liminal space between them emerges (proceeds) the communion of the Father and the Son—namely, the Holy Spirit.
What I am claiming in the above interpretation is only that placing liminality in the intra-trinitarian life at least would not be inconsistent with Edwards’s actual exposition of the Trinity. For an articulation of liminality in the Trinity in a quite clear fashion (though without actually using the term “liminality”), I turn to the conception of the Trinity in Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology.
In theologies utilizing substance-metaphysics, such as Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of God, there is an emphasis upon divine immutability and simplicity. Within such a theology, there are limitations upon conceiving the relations among the three persons of the Trinity in a dynamic way. But in a theology that is informed by dynamic ontologies of love, it is easier to conceive of God’s inner life as involving movements, processes, and transitions. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theology, just as that of Jonathan Edwards, is a fine example of such a dynamic and relational perspective. I believe von Balthasar’s conceptions of the Father’s self-emptying (kenotic) act of begetting the Son and of the mutual relation between the Father and the Son provide insights that support our claim that there is liminality within God’s inner-trinitarian life.
According to von Balthasar, the Father’s generation of the Son is an act of complete self-giving to the Son. Von Balthasar writes:
We shall never know how to express the abyss-like depths of the Father’s self-giving … [which is] an eternal “super-kenosis.” … Everything that can be thought and imagined where God is concerned is, in advance, included and transcended in this self-destitution which constitutes the Person of the Father, and at the same time, those of the Son and the Spirit.5
In generating the Son, the Father gives over the divine substance in such a manner that, in handing it over to the Son, according to von Balthasar, the Father nevertheless retains it at the same time.6
Von Balthasar characterizes the Father’s “self-giving” also as “ ‘letting-go’ of his divinity,” “self-surrender,” and “stripping” himself of his Godhead.7 This self-giving is the expression of the Father’s love for the Son and as such constitutes the Father’s being as the first person of the Trinity. Von Balthasar’s language about the Father “not grasp[ing] the divinity” corresponds to Paul’s words in Philippians: “[Christ,] though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited” (Phil. 2:6). The Father’s “original kenosis” also corresponds to Jesus’ experience of being “forsaken” by God on the cross (Mark 15:34).
Now, liminality is a space in which one is out of structure by being freed from one’s status, role, and place in the hierarchy. The Father’s not grasping his divine status by completely giving it to the Son, then, places the Father in a liminal space, just as Christ’s not grasping his being in the “form of God” puts him in a liminal condition. The Father’s love of the Son that leads the Father to empty himself for the Son places the Father in an “abyss,” which is again a liminal space.
According to von Balthasar, the Father does not create a clone of himself in generating the Son but, rather, brings into being a genuine Other with all the otherness entailed in an other. The Son is the Father’s Thou, “infinitely Other,” with all the autonomy of freedom required of a distinct person. In generating this Son out of love, according to von Balthasar, the Father posits “an infinite distance” between himself and the Son. This distance is a necessity in order to maintain “the personal peculiarity in the being and acting of each Person.”8 Of course, the Father is always with the Son out of love, but at the same time, and also out of love, the Father withdraws from the Son and maintains the personal distance. This distance between the Father and the Son, according to von Balthasar, is the ultimate ground of the distance the incarnate Son experiences from the Father on the cross.9
Von Balthasar further characterizes the Father’s generation of the Son out of love as an act of “leaving-free” the Son. This “leaving-free” the Son involves the Father’s allowing “an area for his unique personal mode of divine autonomy.” The Father’s withdrawal from the Son allows for “a mode of glory distinctive to the Son’s mode of being God.”10 The Father, according to von Balthasar, is of course always in the Son out of love, but at the same time the Father withdraws from the Son out of love as well as out of respect for the Son’s free choice to give himself completely back to the Father. Margaret Turek sums up von Balthasar’s point, as she writes, “God the Father is the ‘greater’ One who not only ‘makes space’ for filial freedom over against himself, but also remains hidden in this ‘space’ as the engendering source of the Son’s ability to give himself in love.”11 By implication, then, the Son also gives himself to the Father out of love. And in doing so he experiences a leaving behind of his divine status, thereby placing himself in liminality. What occurs in the space of liminality that both the Father and the Son experience together von Balthasar clearly indicates in the following passage:
The Father’s act of surrender calls for its own area of freedom; the Son’s act, whereby he receives himself from and acknowledges his indebtedness to the Father, requires its own area; and the act whereby the Spirit proceeds, illuminating the most intimate love of Father and Son, testifying to it and fanning it into flame, demands its own area of freedom. However intimate the relationship, it implies that the distinction between the persons is maintained. Something like infinite “duration” [Dauer] and infinite “space” [Raum] must be attributed to the acts of reciprocal love so that the life of the communio, or fellowship, can develop.… True, all temporal notions of “before” and “after” must be kept at a distance; but absolute freedom must provide the acting area [Spiel-Raum] in which it is to develop—and develop in terms of love and blessedness.12
It would not be far from the truth to say that von Balthasar could just as well have used the concept of liminality in the above discussion. The “acting area” and “room” in which the persons of the Trinity exercise their freedom is the space created by the persons’ mutual acts of “letting the other be.” It is a space to which the persons “withdraw” themselves. It is an open area in which new possibilities are allowed. It is a liminal space.
It should also be recalled that, according to Victor Turner, communitas or communion emerges out of the liminal space experienced together by two or more persons who are out of structure. And von Balthasar associates the Holy Spirit with the communal love that is generated from the liminal space experienced by the Father and the Son. Von Balthasar writes:
Inherent in the Father’s love is an absolute renunciation: he will not be God for himself alone. He lets go of his divinity and, in this sense, manifests a (divine) God-lessness (of love, of course).… The Son’s answer to the gift of Godhead (of equal substance with the Father) can only be eternal thanksgiving (eucharistia) to the Father, the Source—a thanksgiving as self-less and unreserved as the Father’s original self-surrender. Proceeding from both, as their subsistent “We,” there breathes the “Spirit” who is common to both: as the essence of love, he maintains the infinite difference between them, seals it and, since he is the one Spirit of them both, bridges it.13
In sum, we can summarize von Balthasar’s discussion of the Father’s generation of the Son using the concept of liminality. As the Father’s love moves him to give himself (while also remaining himself) to the Son, the Father moves into a liminal space by letting go of his divinity and his divine status (while also retaining them). As the Father withdraws from the Son (while also remaining in the Son), he allows an “action room” (Spiel-Raum) or a space of possibilities for the sake of the Son’s being a genuine Other to the Father, that is, One who can exercise absolute freedom.
The Son also is the Son “only as he who utterly surrenders himself to the Father.”14 Out of the “abyss,” “infinite distance,” and what we would call “liminality,” experienced by the Father and the Son together in their acts of loving self-surrender, emerges the communitas or communion of the Father and the Son, the person of the Holy Spirit.
What happens within the immanent Trinity is reflected in God’s trinitarian acts of redemption in history. To speak about liminality within God’s own life is to affirm that God’s experiences of liminality in history are God’s expression of God’s own nature and being. What God does in history is not what God does only in history but is the way God is eternally and without which God would not be God.
THE INCARNATION AND LIMINALITY
Liminality belongs to the internal life of God. In a similar way, liminality also belongs to the order of creation and not to the forces that resist God’s end in creation. The experience of liminality in human life is the way human community emerges; therefore, liminality in human existence is meant to be used in humanity’s participation in, and contribution to, God’s reaching the end for which God created the world: namely, the repetition of the inner-trinitarian communion of love in time and space.
But humanity did not use liminality in this way, as the story of Adam and Eve tells us. Instead of facing the uncertainty and openness of liminality with faith and courage, human beings began to live by the idolatrous and prideful thought that they “will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). Instead of being open to the new ideas, human beings absolutized certain finite principles and condemned different ideas as false. Instead of forming community and solidarity through liminality, human beings clung to the human-made borders, living in an alienation from each other. Instead of providing the absolutized centers of societies a prophetic criticism from the liminal space, human beings joined with those at the dominant centers and became oppressive to those at the periphery. In these ways, human beings began to elude the challenge to face their liminal experiences and exercise the creative powers of liminality to promote God’s project of repeating loving communion in human history.
In order to put humanity back on the track, so to speak, of participating in God’s project, God first established a covenant with Israel, because the people of Israel as the nomadic children of Abraham lived in a situation of an accentuated liminality and were—at least in principle—more open to the new, capable of forming community, and prophetically critical of the status quo.
In God’s incarnation in Jesus, the eternal Son became liminal in history itself. Just as God chose to work through the children of Israel in the days of the Old Testament, now in becoming incarnate in Jesus the Galilean, God became liminal in Jesus the Galilean and appealed first to Galileans because Galileans were living in an accentuated liminality. All human beings, in spite of their fallen condition, are capable of experiencing liminality. But Galileans were in a more explicit way liminal in the religious, political, sociocultural, and economic aspects of their lives. It was strategic, therefore, for God to become incarnate as a Galilean and appeal first to Galileans.
The incarnate Son’s (that is, the Galilean Jesus’) liminality reached its climax in Jesus’ death on the cross. The response that is appropriate for Galileans and other human beings would be for them to become personally conscious of their liminality and meet Jesus in his liminality on the cross. Out of the meeting of Jesus and sinful human beings in the liminal space of Jesus’ cross, a transforming communitas would emerge in the power of the Holy Spirit, and God and the world would be reconciled (2 Cor. 5:19).
A loving communion between the incarnate Son and fallen humanity and the transformation of wayward human beings into a new existence began occurring in a decisive way through the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But the completion of this work of the incarnate Son is eschatological.
So, through the incarnation, God the Son entered into human liminality because liminality belongs to the order of creation and is an inherent part of human existence. In Christ God became a marginalized Galilean human being because, in the words of Gregory of Nazianzus, “That which he has not assumed, he has not healed.”15 Jesus did not marginalize others, and he did not evade the human experiences of liminality even when that liminality was the liminality of death. However, he participated fully in the human predicament in the sense that he did not run away from becoming marginalized and oppressed by self-absolutizing humanity.