The following is an excerpt from a paper I presented in 2019 in the unofficial Pentecostal/Orthodox dialog. The topic for that year’s discussion was sacraments. The paper was titled “‘If I Could Just Touch the Hem of His Garment’: Mediation in Pentecostal Spirituality and Theology,” and a version was published in 2021 in The Journal of Pentecostal Theology (you can download the full paper and others from the dialog here.)
Pentecostals need to rediscover our own tradition’s sacramental theology, fragmentary and inchoate as it was, and to give it the attention it deserves. But we must do more than merely rediscover that early sacramentality. We need to resource it critically. And that means we need to work toward a better understanding of and appreciation for traditional sacramental theologies, as well as the philosophical metaphysics that make those theologies intelligible. Right now, too many Pentecostals either assume polemicized caricatures or hold to half-understood generalizations, which for obvious reasons not only paralyze ecumenical conversations but also warp our theological reflection and construction and, most troublingly, distort the proclamation of the gospel in our worship.
We need scholars to help us articulate a coherent metaphysics, one that enables us to grasp that there is no contrastive duality, no fundamental competition between the divine and this creaturely because God is not one object among many, one cause among other causes. God is not an other than us, living a life apart, only engaging with us from time to time as he sees fit or as we provoke him to respond. God is not one more person in my life, not even the most important one. God just personally is my life, so that my life is for now “hidden” in his, waiting to be “revealed” in his own self-revelation (Col. 3.3-4).
To say the same thing another way, creation and God do not exist in a subject-object, cause-and-effect relation. God is altogether beyond all subjectivity and objectivity, beyond causation and efficacy. God does not exist at all, in fact, but is the uncreated creative origin of existence, creating both cause and effect, subjects and objects. Consequently, we are not in relation with God so much as in relation with one another and with all things because God is in us and them. So, when we talk about the ontology of mediation, we must maintain that God is the source, guide, and goal of all things, and that because in the end he will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15.28), he can now be everything in anything.
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