-conservative railing against change...
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| a model tesseract created in two dimensions by a sequence of three dimensional diagrams displayed in the right linear order |
The reality is that God does not exist. Existence is dependent upon time and space. Existence is what flows from God, in creation, it is something which God can experience and within which be experienced as fully as existence allows, but it is not something upon which God depends.
To say that God is the same today, as yesterday, and tomorrow is to place God in a box... a box we do not even recognize we are placing God within because it is the Box of Linear Time within which we confine the vast majority of our perspectives. To that end, while still ultimately faulty, we must take God out of the Box and strive to put God in the Tesseract.
We all know how to draw a square on a piece of paper, a two dimensional object, and we handle various types of cubes, three dimensional box shaped things, everyday. A tesseract is this type of object in four dimensions. We can only experience it as a cube, because we move through time in a linear way, but the tesseract itself consistently has characteristics of which we are not aware but might become aware as we shift forward in time. In more familiar terms the Holy Spirit will continue to teach us new things.
Now this is still a broken metaphor, the tesseract is nothing but a more advanced box that limits the nature of God... but it is a less broken metaphor than one that speculates God as a held constant within the confines of time, which is what we so often are trapped into doing by our limited perspective.
There are two options about what occurred at this moment. The first is that there is a simple box about who God is and that we have to stay in that box whose lines are known. If this is the case then the Rev'ds Hall and Tim-Oi broke a wall in this simple box and walked outside of God's purview. I continue to find this a rather sad and simplistic construction of God more like unto an idol than anything requiring an actual depth of faith. The other option is that an ontological reality always possible but simply not manifested within our linear context fully manifested itself.1 To put this more simply, something that always could have been happened. Or, to go back to our initial model, a shift occurred in the tesseract which shifted the nature of the cube we can reference within our spacial and temporal reality and thus revealed a deeper truth than the one previously known.
The second possibility, the one I hold to, is a bit scary. It requires faith in a God whose nature is not only at points unknown but who is in reality unknowable. It requires a constant humility in the face of the erosion of understanding and the potential shifts of the box of who God is and what is of God. It holds up faith in a process of discernment and understanding, but is doubtful and suspicious of the static set of known facts considered immovable and set. It does not deny the unchanging nature of God but does recognize the problematic viewpoint by which we have to grasp said nature... more than anything it is prepared to encounter points of intense revolution where pastoral necessity upends historic boundaries of what is pastorally appropriate or theologically sound. It recognizes the Rev'd Florence Li Tim-Oi not only for the pragmatic reality of her blessed life and service with us but the fulfillment of ontological realities brought into our keen by that blessed life and service.
1 It is important to note that in all probability this was not the first manifestation of this ontological reality within our perception of linear time. Earlier manifestations from the first centuries of Christianity were simply ignored, repressed, and forgotten by later centuries.
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