God Glorifies Himself in the Human: A Christological Anthology
God Glorifies Himself in the Human (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology Lectures)
He is God, He is All Things (Melito of Sardis, On Pascha)
God Could Not Not Save Us (Athanasius, On the Incarnation)
What Happens with Jesus is How God is God (Jenson, Systematics Vol 1)
He Does Not Suffer the Fact That He Suffers (Cyril, On the Unity of Christ)
Christ is Not a Principle (Yannaras, Elements of Faith)
The Israelite Heals—That’s All You Need to Know (McCarthy, The Passenger)
Jesus is Not Christ without Us (Symeon the New Theologian, First Ethical Discourse)
Empty Tomb, Empty Throne (Williams, On Christian Theology)
Holy Jesus, Gentle Friend (Broom of Devotion)
He Makes Us by Simply Being Himself (Eriugena, Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John)
The Father Did Not Want the Son to be Crucified (McCabe, “The Mystery of the Cross”)
The Cross Enfolds All Possible Love (Nicholas of Cusa, “Moreover, For Our Sake He Was Crucified”)
This selection is from the testimony of C.H. Mason, Pentecostal pioneer, published March 1907 in The Apostolic Faith (the magazine for Seymour’s Azusa St Mission). I was reminded of it recently while reading Frank Macchia’s systematics. For an introduction to Mason’s life and legacy, start here, here, and here:
As I arose from the altar and took my seat, I fixed my eyes on Jesus, and the Holy Ghost took charge of me. I surrendered perfectly to Him and consented to Him. Then I began singing a song in unknown tongues, and it was the sweetest thing to have Him sing that song through me. He had complete charge of me. I let Him have my mouth and everything. After that it seemed I was standing at the cross and heard Him as He groaned, the dying groans of Jesus, and I groaned. It was not my voice but the voice of my Beloved that I heard in me. When He got through with that, He started the singing again in unknown tongues. When the singing stopped I felt that complete death, it was my life going out, but it was a complete death to me. When He had finished this, I let Him hold my hands up, and they rested just as easily up as down. Then He turned on the joy of it. He began to lift me up. I was passive in His hands, I was not going to do a thing… He lifted me to my feet and then the light of heaven fell upon me and burst into me filling me. Then God took charge of my tongue and I went to preaching in tongues. I could not change my tongue. The glory of God filled the temple. The gestures of my hands and movements of my body were His. O it was marvelous and I thank God for giving it to me in His way. Such an indescribable peace and quietness went all through my flesh and into my very brain and has been there ever since.
A few reflections:
Daniel Castelo has argued—rightly, I believe—that Pentecostalism is a mystical tradition and just so not Evangelical. Mason’s testimony might be taken as proof of the point.
As Dale Coulter explains, Pentecostal mysticism is a form of “bridal mysticism,” evident here in Mason’s allusions to Song of Songs.
This reminds me not only of what Sarah Coakley has said in God, Sexuality, and the Self about “the messy entanglement of sexual desire and the desire for God,” but also specifically what she says in defense of Donne’s “Batter My Heart.” Love is not violent, does not violate. But it is forceful. For our good, it can and must at times “take over”—not as vices do, of course, but nonetheless. Mason, like Donne, describes himself as having been overthrown, forced to break, and exactly so, made new. Like Paul (Gal. 2:19-20), Mason finds he is most himself when he is most “passive in His hands.” We should not try to downplay or brush aside the erotic charge of these claims. There is a reason that the Song of Songs is “the holy of holies” of Scripture!
The oneness Mason experiences with Christ creates a sacramental state, if only momentarily: his voice, his gestures, his awareness become Christ’s—union without confusion.
The effect, finally, is peace, self-control, settledness. It goes deep—to the bone, as we say. Or, as Mason puts it, “into my very brain.” This is the effect of sanctification. Graham Ward is right: “To be transformed into His likeness—to be transubstantiated—requires an inner working of His Spirit: our sanctification.” And this transformation/transubstantiation cannot be what it must be if it happens only at the levels of knowing and doing; it must happen at the level of being. As Ward says: “learning the way of Christian love—which is learnt always under the guidance of the Holy Spirit—physiologically will and must affect the operation of the limbic realm; that oldest part of the brain associated with the amygdala. This learning will and must engender a biological transformation in our survival instincts and reflexes; even if, for us human subjects, there is no conscious access to such areas of our emotional memory unless things are revealed to us in prayer.”