The Resurrected Body of Jesus: A Viable Launching Pad for Mysticism

Gertrud of Helfta (1256-1301) was a Christian nun whose sensitivity to mystical experience can be characterized as a bridal mysticism within a Christ mysticism. Think of Christ; turn yourself over to Christ. She brings in the related theme of light, which is salient in the Gospel of John, with Christ saying, I am the light of the word. Yet her mystical sensitivity was such that she could transcend even Christ’s resurrected body, which can be said to have been her favorite mask of eternity through which love, which, as Paul and Augustine had claimed, is God. This does not mean that the mask is finally tossed aside as somehow erroneous; rather, it is to say more generally that people who have an enhanced sensitivity to the mystical in a religious, or transcendent, sense, are oriented to going beyond God in our likeness to experience God as wholly other—as radically transcendent—and thus leave oneself behind.

The full essay is at "The Resurrected Body of Jesus: Mysticism."

On God’s Holiness and Mystery in Judaism

In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume claims that the human mind has difficulty holding on to the pure (i.e., unencumbered) idea of divine simplicity, and thus tends to apply familiar (i.e., human) attributes or qualities onto that idea (i.e., anthropomorphism), as if hanging ornaments on a naked Christmas tree. Eclipsed or compromised, or even lost entirely, is the quality of God being wholly other, and thus being qualitatively different than us and anything in our world. The Christian theologian Dionysius grasped this idea in his claim that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., human emotions). The Biblical claim in the Book of Job that God is angry with Job’s “friends” for making statements about God’s ways without knowing them can be analyzed with an eye towards both viewing anger as only going so far with respect to God and being critical of the “friends’” presumption in assuming that God’s ways are within the limits of human cognition (i.e., theories). Rather than go to a negative theology wherein God is thought to be ineffable, I want to stress the value of recognizing both distance and mystery as being indispensable with respect to our relation to God lest we reduce God to our various masks of eternity.

The full essay is at "Holiness and  Mystery of God in Judaism."