Ave Maria - The Prayer: Background, Source, Text, and Music

La Purisima Inmaculada Concepcion de Maria con Artista Ribera.
Por la gloria de la Iglesia Santa Romana Catolica. By Lloyd Baltazar.

Ave Maria - The Prayer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_maria

The Hail Mary, also commonly called the Ave Maria (Latin) or Angelic Salutation, is a traditional Christian prayer asking for the intercession of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Roman Catholicism, the prayer forms the basis of the Rosary and the Angelus prayers. In the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches, a similar prayer is used in formal liturgies, both in Greek and in translations. It is also used by many other groups within the Catholic tradition of Christianity including Anglicans, Independent Catholics, and Old Catholics. Some Protestant denominations, such as Lutherans, also make use of a form of the prayer.

Based on the greeting of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary in the Gospel of Luke, the prayer takes different forms in various traditions. It has often been set to music, although the most famous musical expression of the words Ave Maria by Schubert does not actually contain the Hail Mary prayer.

Biblical source

The prayer incorporates two passages from Saint Luke's Gospel: "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,"^[1] and "Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb."^[2] In mid-13th-century Western Europe the prayer consisted only of these words with the single addition of the name "Mary" after the word "Hail," as is evident from the commentary of Saint Thomas Aquinas on the prayer.^[3]

The first of the two passages from Saint Luke's Gospel is the greeting of the Angel Gabriel to Mary, originally written in Koine Greek. The opening word of greeting, χαῖρε, chaíre, here translated "Hail," literally has the meaning "rejoice" or "be glad." This was the normal greeting in the language in which Saint Luke's Gospel is written and continues to be used in the same sense in Modern Greek. Accordingly, both "Hail" and "Rejoice" are valid English translations of the word ("Hail" reflecting the Latin translation, and "Rejoice" reflecting the original Greek).

The word κεχαριτωμένη, (kecharitōménē), here translated as "full of grace," admits of various translations. Grammatically, the word is the feminine present perfect passive voice participle of the verb χαριτόω, charitóō, which means "to show, or bestow with, grace" and, in the passive voice, "to have grace shown, or bestowed upon, one."^[4][5]

The text also appears in the account of the annunciation contained in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 9.

"Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee."

Angelic visitation of Mary

Meaning and Contexts (a large section) -

Greek, Western, Eastern, Slavonic, Roman, Anglican, Lutheran

Musical settings

See also: Roman Catholic Marian music

The Hail Mary, or Ave Maria in Latin, has been set to music numerous times. Among the most famous settings is the version by Charles Gounod (1859), adding melody and words to Johann Sebastian Bach's first prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier; and Franz Schubert's Ave Maria (Ellens Gesang III, D839, Op 52 no 6, 1825), Ellen's third song in English, as part of his Opus 25, a setting of seven songs from Walter Scott's popular epic poem "The Lady of the Lake," loosely translated into German. It has become one of Schubert's most popular works under the title of Ave Maria. Antonín Dvořák's version was composed in 1877. Another setting of Ave Maria was written by Giuseppe Verdi for his 1887 opera Otello. Russian composer César Cui, who was raised Roman Catholic, set the text at least three times: as the "Ave Maria," op. 34, for 1 or 2 women's voices with piano or harmonium (1886), and as part of two of his operas: Le Flibustier (premiered 1894) and Mateo Falcone (1907). Settings also exist by Mozart, Liszt, Byrd, Elgar, Saint-Saëns, Rossini, Brahms, Stravinsky, Lauridsen, Franz Biebl, David Conte and Perosi as well as numerous versions by less well-known composers, such as J. B. Tresch. Anton Bruckner wrote three different settings.

In Slavonic, the text was also a popular subject for setting to music by Eastern European composers. These include Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Bortniansky, Vavilov (his version often misattributed to Caccini) and several others.

This text was also very often set by composers in the Renaissance, including Josquin des Prez, Orlando di Lasso, and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Before the Council of Trent there were actually different versions of the text, so the earlier composers in the period sometimes set versions of the text different from the ones shown above. Josquin des Prez, for example, himself set more than one version of the Ave Maria. Here is the text of his motet Ave Maria ... Virgo serena, which begins with the first six words above and continues with a poem in rhymed couplets.

Ave Maria, Plena Gratia. "In thanksgiving
for  many petitions granted."

Hail Mary (Annunciation)

Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, Chantilly Museum

Ave Maria, gratia plena,

Dominus tecum, Virgo serena.

Ave cuius conceptio,
solemni plena gaudio,
celestia, terrestria,
nova replet letitia.
Ave cuius nativitas,
nostra fuit solemnitas,
ut lucifer lux oriens
verum solem preveniens.
Ave pia humilitas,
sine viro fecunditas,
cuius annunciatio
nostra fuit salvatio.
Ave vera virginitas,
immaculata castitas,
cuius purificatio
nostra fuit purgatio.
Ave preclara omnibus
angelicis virtutibus,
cuius fuit assumptio
nostra glorificatio.

O Mater Dei, memento mei. Amen.

The much anthologized Ave Maria 'by' Jacques Arcadelt is actually a 19th-century arrangement by Pierre-Louis Dietsch, loosely based on Arcadelt's three part madrigal Nous voyons que les hommes.

Franz Schubert's Ellens dritter Gesang (D839, Op 52 no 6, 1825) is often performed with the Ave Maria prayer sung in place of the original text; this is misidentified as "Schubert's Ave Maria."^{[17] [18]} The original text of Schubert's song is from Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake and was translated into German by Adam Storck; it opens with the greeting "Ave Maria" ("Hail Mary"), but is not a setting of the traditional Ave Maria prayer. In Walt Disney's Fantasia, the tune is used with yet another text beginning with the phrase.

Even though Protestant Christianity generally avoids any special veneration of Mary, access to the beautiful and culturally significant tradition of Marian music is facilitated by substitution texts. These texts are intended to replace the words of the standard "Ave Maria," preserving word boundaries and syllable stresses, so that music written for the former text can be sung with the latter. An example is the Christ-centric Ave Redemptor:

Even though Protestant Christianity generally avoids any special veneration of Mary, access to the beautiful and culturally significant tradition of Marian music is facilitated by substitution texts. These texts are intended to replace the words of the standard "Ave Maria," preserving word boundaries and syllable stresses, so that music written for the former text can be sung with the latter. An example is the Christ-centric Ave Redemptor:

Latin text                                                 English translation
Ave redemptor, Domine Jesus:                    Hail the Redeemer, Lord Jesus,
Cuius ob opus                                            By whose work
Superatur mors, enim salvatio                      Death is defeated, for salvation
Nunc inundavit super universam terram.       Has now overflowed upon all the world.

Sancte redemptor, reputata                         Holy Redeemer, our faith
Fides est nobis peccatoribus,                       Is reckoned to us sinners,
Nunc et in morte, ad iustitiam.                     Now and in death, as righteousness.

A famous setting for the Orthodox version of the prayer in Church Slavonic (Bogoroditsye Djevo) was composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff in his All-Night Vigil.

Ave Maria, sung by Maria Callas

Hymn to the Virgin
by Sir Walter Scott

Ave Maria! maiden mild!
Listen to a maiden's prayer!
Thou canst hear though from the wild;
Thou canst save amid despair.
Safe may we sleep beneath thy care,
Though banish'd, outcast and reviled –
Maiden! hear a maiden's prayer;
Mother, hear a suppliant child!
Ave Maria
Ave Maria! undefiled!
The flinty couch we now must share
Shall seem this down of eider piled,
If thy protection hover there.
The murky cavern's heavy air
Shall breathe of balm if thou hast smiled;
Then, Maiden! hear a maiden's prayer,
Mother, list a suppliant child!
Ave Maria!
Ave Maria! stainless styled.
Foul demons of the earth and air,
From this their wonted haunt exiled,
Shall flee before thy presence fair.
We bow us to our lot of care,
Beneath thy guidance reconciled;
Hear for a maid a maiden's prayer,
And for a father hear a child!
Ave Maria.



Singer Maria Callas Wikipedia Bio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Callas

Images of Maria Callas - see link here

Ave Maria. An arrangement by composer Franz Schubert.

Exploring Evolution Series: Is Character Displacement the Only Driver in Species Diversity?

The red-billed scythebill, a woodcreeper from the ovenbird family, has a long, curved beak. Photo: Joseph A. Tobias

Competition May Not Be the Driving Force of Species Diversity After All
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/bird-evolution/

by Emily Singer, Quanta Magazine

March 18, 2014

In 1982, a few large ground finches took up residence on the tiny island of Daphne Major in the Galapagos. Compared with the island’s existing population of medium ground finches, the invaders had an advantage: large beaks that could more efficiently crack open the seeds of the Jamaican feverplant, one of the island’s biggest bird food bounties. The newcomers began to flourish, eating many of the seeds and forcing the diminutive natives to forage for smaller options.

The two kinds of birds lived in relative harmony until 2003, when a two-year drought decimated the food supply for both species, pushing them to the brink of starvation. The bleak conditions favored a subset of medium finches that had smaller beaks; they had never been able to crack feverplant seeds, and their diet consisted solely of small seeds. Free from competition with the large ground finches, the smaller-beaked members of the medium finch clan survived the drought and passed along their petite features to the next generation. The average beak size in medium ground finches shrank in a swift and lasting change to the species. Peter and Rosemary Grant, biologists at Princeton University who have been studying Galapagos finches for 40 years, tracked the change, publishing their results in Science in 2006. It became a textbook example of an evolutionary tenet known as “character displacement.”

In Darwinian evolution, organisms compete for resources, and the winners get to pass their genome to future generations. According to these rules, two similar species using the same resources in the same environment will be forced to compete with each other. If both are to survive, they will need to become more distinct from each other over time. The famous naturalist E. O. Wilson, along with collaborator William Brown, dubbed this pattern character displacement in the 1950s and proposed that it explains much of the diversity among the world’s organisms.

Joseph Tobias, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, suggests

that character displacement may not be as common as previously

thought. Photo: Andre Baertschi

“It’s one of the main Darwinian ideas for explaining why species are different,” said Joseph Tobias, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University. But some scientists, including Tobias, are now questioning the data supporting character displacement as a driving force in the evolution of diversity. A report published last year examining 144 studies found that few met the strongest criteria for character displacement. Scientists often failed to rule out other possible explanations, for example, or to show that the change resulted from a heritable trait. And in February, Tobias and collaborators published a large-scale study in Nature that questions how widespread character displacement is in nature. Focusing on ovenbirds, a family of birds that, like Darwin’s finches, have evolved different beak sizes, they found little evidence that character displacement was responsible for differences in the species if the ages of the species are taken into account. That is, given enough time, species tend to diverge, or become more different from each other, even without interspecies competition.

Tobias and Peter Grant, among others, contend that robust examples of character displacement are relatively rare. If that indeed means that the phenomenon itself is rare, rather than just difficult to reliably detect, scientists would need to reconsider the role of competition in the evolution of diversity.

“We’re not saying that character displacement doesn’t occur, but it’s probably rarer than people think,” Tobias said. “The implication of our study is that almost all of the species differences [in ovenbirds] that people have attributed to character displacement are actually the result of time.”

Home in the field view the provocative claim with skepticism. “I don’t think this spells the death of character displacement,” said Daniel Simberloff, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville who wasn’t involved in the project. “We need a lot more studies to know if this is a general phenomenon.”

A Swinging Pendulum

Like many scientific theories, character displacement has gone in and out of favor. After Wilson and Brown coined the term in the 1950s, “just about everyone saw it everywhere,” said Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University whose 144-study review published last year examines the history of character displacement. “Any difference between coexisting species was attributed to competition.” But often there was little supporting it, and by the 1980s, the pendulum had swung the other way.

“It was a contentious period,” said Yoel Stuart, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, and co-author of the review with Losos.

In response to some of the criticism, scientists adopted more stringent criteria for concluding that character displacement was truly driving two species to become more different from each other. According to these guidelines, researchers should rule out other drivers of diversity, such as random chance or subtle differences in the two species’ habitats. Studies of character displacement should also show that the species under study truly compete, and that the differences among species, such as smaller beaks, are a heritable trait. In the 1990s, character displacement regained popularity as more rigorous studies emerged.

Anolis lizards in the Lesser Antilles tend to be medium-size if they live on an island without lizard competitors,

like this Plymouth Anole, but either small or large if two species share an island. Photo: Jonathan Losos

Losos’ studies of Anolis lizards in the Lesser Antilles highlight a major challenge in studying character displacement — different evolutionary histories can result in the same ecological pattern. In work published in 1990, Losos reported strong evidence that character displacement among lizards in the northern islands had resulted in the islands having one smaller and one larger species. The southern islands similarly had habitats with one large and one smaller species of the lizards. However, the likely explanation for this situation in the south was that the animals were two different sizes when they arrived. Without knowing the history of when two species come together, determining the forces at play can be difficult. The end result of both processes looks the same. “That’s one of the biggest sticking points in these studies,” Losos said.

Character displacement remains popular today, but some scientists insist that stronger evidence is needed to show that this phenomenon is the true driver of differences among competing species. “I think people have gone overboard and returned back to the state of play in the ’70s where people see character displacement everywhere,” Losos said, though he thinks that today’s studies present better evidence than their 1970s counterparts. Despite a huge proliferation in the number of potential examples of character displacement, conducted more rigorously than earlier efforts, fewer than 40 percent of the 144 studies that Stuart and Losos reviewed met most of the gold standard criteria. “With 20 years of rigorous research, we still have few cases,” Stuart said.

Peruvian Glaciers to Bolivian Deserts

An avid bird watcher from the age of 11, Tobias has traveled to the plains of Patagonia, Bolivian deserts and the high cloud forests of Panamanian volcanoes and has spied on about 5,000 species, more than half of the world’s birds.

These explorations revealed a pattern familiar to any naturalist: Where two similar species live in the same habitat, they are generally more different than species that live apart, said Tobias, now 44.

“The underlying assumption is that it’s because of character displacement,” he said. But Tobias began to doubt that assumption after coming across exceptions to the pattern. A study of Amazonian antbirds, for example, revealed that two species that compete for resources use very similar songs. “There may be many scenarios where competition does not produce divergent selection” and may in fact drive the opposite pattern, in which a specific characteristic starts to converge, Tobias said.

In 2007, Tobias and collaborators launched their in-depth study of ovenbirds, a diverse family of small, insect-eating birds that live mainly in South America. Different ovenbird species have adapted to rocky ocean shorelines, snowy mountains, scorched deserts and tropical rainforests. Like finches, ovenbirds have a variety of beak sizes and shapes, an important indicator of food preference that makes them ideal for studying evolution. In ovenbirds, “some [beaks] are long and down-curved, like a scythe, for probing into crevices in tree bark,” said Jason Weir, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study. “Others have short dagger-like bills.”

Most studies of character displacement have focused on only a few species, but Tobias’ team compiled information on 350 ovenbird lineages, including species and subspecies, culling data from a vast set of resources: bird specimens from museums; recordings of bird songs, some more than a century old; geographical data collected during expeditions and from other sources; and a highly detailed evolutionary history of ovenbirds. “The scope of the study is pretty amazing,” said Stuart, who was not involved in the research.

To study the role of competition in evolution, Joseph Tobias and collaborators mapped out the evolutionary

relationships and variation in beak size among 350 lineages of ovenbirds. Image: Joseph A. Tobias and D. Seddon

For each lineage, the researchers compared the youngest, most closely related species living in the same area and the youngest, most closely related species living in different areas. When they looked at the data, they found a pattern that Darwin and most biologists would have predicted — the lineages living together were more different than those that lived apart.

But Tobias and colleagues suspected that species that cohabit tend to be older than those that live apart. That’s because new species usually form in isolation, so it makes sense that the youngest don’t typically share habitats, Tobias said. This pattern was familiar to some evolutionary biologists, but Tobias said few ecologists had considered the implications. “You can’t just compare things living together with those living apart,” Tobias said. As a species ages, it has more time to evolve, so “you have to take into account how old they are,” he said.

When the researchers accounted for the age of each ovenbird lineage — an unusual step in studies of character displacement — the differences vanished. “We find no evidence there is any kind of bump up in differences between lineages that come together,” Tobias said.

Instead, they found that the youngest species living together tend to be much older than the youngest species with distinct habitats; the former split from their common ancestor an average of 10 million years ago, compared to approximately 4 million years for the latter.

he researchers concluded that diversity isn’t driven by competition between cohabiting species. The differences they see may simply be the result of species having more time to evolve. “An important finding of their study is that it takes a long time for these species to diverge enough to be able to invade each other’s geographical range with little or no competitive interaction,” said Peter Grant, who was not involved in the study.

Indeed, previous research by Tobias’ team suggests that ovenbird species only start to overlap geographically once they are different enough to peacefully coexist. Species with the most similar beaks and ecologies took longest to cohabit, Tobias said. “It’s not necessarily that evolution isn’t happening; it’s just not driven by interaction among species,” Tobias said.

Evolution in Action

Having plunged itself into an evolutionary debate, the ovenbird study has received mixed reviews. Many experts applaud its unprecedented scope and the effort to look at the large-scale effects of evolutionary forces. “The overarching question they pose is an important one in evolution,” said David Pfennig, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. One of the biggest issues in evolutionary biology is understanding how microevolutionary processes, mechanisms that happen within species, influence larger ecological patterns, he said. To what degree do they explain broad observations, such as the diverse range of body shapes we see? By looking at many species of ovenbirds, “this is one of the few studies that gets directly at this issue,” Pfennig said.

But some say it’s too soon to conclude that the findings will hold true more broadly. “All we can say is that there isn’t a strong signal for [character displacement] in this taxonomic group,” Weir said. “But it’s an extremely interesting starting point to explore this in other groups.”

It’s also difficult to rule out character displacement in this group of birds entirely. Pfennig points out that the traits that Tobias’ team examined in ovenbirds are mostly morphological — beak and leg size. But it’s possible that competition among species has driven the birds to evolve different behaviors, such as foraging during different times of day. “Many species undergo this kind of divergence,” he said.

The one behavior that Tobias’ team studied — bird song — did appear to shift in response to competitive species, but in the opposite direction than traditional character displacement would predict. Birds with overlapping ranges tended to have more similar songs, a pattern of convergence rather than divergence. Ovenbirds sing for largely territorial reasons, warning other birds to stay out. Tobias theorizes that a signal recognized by both the singer’s species and related competitor species deters more birds. This may represent a different flavor of character displacement, in which certain characteristics are driven to become more similar.

The findings also highlight the need to take evolutionary history into account in studies of character displacement, an issue that has been ignored in the past, largely because that data was hard to come by, Weir said. Many of the existing studies held up as examples of character displacement “are invalid without a time component,” he said.

Catching evolution in action, as the Grants did with their finches, is a powerful alternative, because researchers don’t need detailed evolutionary histories. “The real advantage is that you can actually see what happens,” Losos said. Theirs and other recent studies have demonstrated just how quickly evolution can occur, making it feasible to measure changes as they unfold. “Years ago, we thought evolution was too slow to see these things change, but it’s not,” Losos said. “Evolution can occur rapidly when natural selection is strong.”

One of the best opportunities for catching character displacement in the act comes from the study of invasive species. “We have inadvertently set up situations where character displacement might occur by introducing species that might be competitors,” Losos said. Despite the shortfalls of many existing studies, he said, “I am convinced that character displacement is a common phenomena.”

Scientists predict that the ovenbird study will provoke a round of similar research in the next few years to test whether the same pattern — that species differences are mostly linked to the age of the species rather than competition among species — is true in other groups. Tobias and collaborators are already expanding their approach to many more of the world’s birds, including other members of the roughly 1,200 species group known as suboscines. (Ovenbirds belong to this group). They also plan to study character displacement and other evolutionary questions for the 5,500 species of passerines, which encompass more than half the world’s bird species. The effort will rely on evolutionary maps currently under construction by researchers at Louisiana State University and elsewhere.

Scientists hope that in the next 10 years, studies that take species age into account, as well as the invasive species efforts that Losos describes, will clarify the role of competition in the evolution of diversity.

“My overall opinion is that character displacement may be fairly common,” said Peter Grant, whose studies of Galapagos finches are considered one of the strongest demonstrations, “though far from universal [and] generally small in magnitude.”

---

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

God and Time: The Mystery of the Incarnate God Eternal

Jesus - Incarnate "Immanuel" ("God with us")
see also, The Names of God in Scripture

In response to Tony Jones' earlier article on "God is Not Eternal" (posted further below) and the Biologos article "What is Time, and How Does God Relate to Time?" I thought I might reflect on each and pose some further questions and insights that seem to have generated additional thought and comment to my mind. - R.E. Slater

God and Time: The Mystery of the Incarnate God Eternal

"Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh" means "I will be that who I have yet to become."

- God (Ex 3.14)

An Eclectic Doctrine

Sometimes there are areas in Christian doctrine that you may properly be an eclecticist. I think the doctrine of God and time may be just one of those doctrines. I'm reminded of that every time we sing Troy Hatfield's song Matchless at Mars Hill where Troy unconsciously jumbles up the classical idea of God's unchangeableness with God's imputed changeableness: "A God who was, and is, and will be, constantly unchanging, immutable, unspeakable, full of grace, the God-man who came." A God who entered into our time and space and became. And there's the crux of it. "God was, and is, and will be."

A God who came into time and out of eternity. Into creation's experiences of time, and out of time's timelessness as the Greek Classicists and early Church Fathers had conceived of it. A God who became incarnate; Who lived with us and died for us. Who would renew all creation and mankind by His lived life and experiential death. Who was Himself, the timeless One, became the corruptible One - in the sense of bearing a dying body, and not bearing a sinful soul. Who became the changeable One at the time of His incarnation forward through to His death. Who now lives with all of creation's temporality as the eternally incarnated Redeemer of creation.

The Metaphysics of Becoming and Being

This ontological truth (ontology = speaking of God's being, attributes, and character) cannot be explained, understood, or imagined. It just must be accepted. A God who Himself had become and now is - mutable, changeable, temporal. Forever affected by the very creation He created within time and space. We cannot understand it. We cannot explain it. We can only state it and present it. The idea that a holy, eternal God can forever now be the Incarnated, holy, eternal God. No less divine but wholly glorified by His incarnation (which is what you would expect when finding anything touched by God's own presence). Who is both creature and Creator. Who is timeless Saviour become willful Redeemer. It is a paradox which is beyond our experience and metaphysical categories (metaphysics = simplistically, anything "spiritual." Something that is not physical but can be decribed meta-physically). We just know God is. Who once was and has become. Who, like us, was, is becoming, and will be, in the past, present, and future tense of our understanding.

It is this God that is the God who has entered into creation's time and become a God who is in process like we are today (a simplistic description of "process theology"). Who is in Himself experiencing the eternal process of "becoming and being" as the incarnate, resurrected Saviour of man. Who is no less flesh and blood than we are today. Whose future is our future when we die. And like us (anthropomorphism = bearing man's image) has become us, even as we are like Him (theo-morphism = bearing God's image) and are, and will be, in both the past-present-and-future sense of the word. We each share the other's image because of God's incarnation through Christ Jesus our Saviour. It is a mystery but one we must be mindful not to forget less we make of God an idol untouchable. One too holy, too distant, too unfeeling, from our own experiences. But whom we do understand can be all this and more if it were not for His holy incarnation that bridges the gap between our humanity and His divinity.

What Do We Mean by "God Being in Process?"

Now the question. Actually two.... If we have a lover, spouse, or friend, who forever was fixed in time from the first day we had met him or her, would that be satisfying to us today? To know someone who never changes. Never grows old with us. Whose experience of time is forever fixed in what was once was? Would this be satisfying to us? Would that friend, lover, or spouse, be able to meet our needs? Or match our experiences? Or breach our understanding of time and death? In a limited sense, yes. And in another sense of providing to us the comfort of our past, yes. But it would be akin to something similar to our fond memories of past loved ones who had died but are no longer with us today. Who were but who are no longer present with us in the continuing experience of our flesh. It's trials and travails.

However, loved ones who are in the process of dying (there's that word again. It speaks of both life and death and life beyond).... Who are remembered - perhaps like my father's long illness or, as a beloved child we once remember from many years ago as a parent - they are forever fixed in time and space and no longer able to reach out to us in meaningful ways that our current timeful experiences of life will demand. We would share ourselves with them but find a gap, an emptiness, there. An experiential gap that is unbridgeable - unless they were able to move forward with us in time and space to appreciate our experiences in the now. The here. The present. This is what we call relationship. Relationships must be living, not dead. We cannot share with a dying parent or loved one as they let go of this mortal veil of flesh to push onwards. We cannot commune with a pleasant memory of a past childhood or family life that no longer lives with us except in the past. This things are mortal. They are past. They continue forward only in our minds and hearts and not as living present relationships.

Thus, if we only had the memory of a dead God and Saviour than it is only that. A dead memory and not a living relationship. For God to be a living God is to be a God who must continue in His relationship with us into our future tense. And not only with us but with all of His creation in its future tenses. If He had only died and remained in the grave than there would be no present tense "I-Thou" relationship which could continue. To do this God must be resurrected from the grave, and raised into glorification, as the divine, but incarnate (not re-incarnated), God of the universe. (Pauline sidetrack: in a sense God is re-incarnated in us even as our past is re-incarnated in us. But not ontologically. But existentially = as something that is "live out through our past experiences." That is, we are not God. Nor are we other people. However, our relationship with God, or with others, will reproduce their mind, their heart, their passion, in-and-through us. Just not themselves, excepting God's Spirit of course, who lives in us, and through us, and permeates all creation, infilling it with His presence). A God of the universe who would continue with us alongside our time-and-experience, even as He would continue alongside of our own past when having died to it and parted from it. Otherwise there is no now, no here, no future promise, no there, is, and will be. All would be nothingness and nothing. Without future, hope, or promise.

This God must be a living God. Not a dead God only beheld from the grave. And not a timeless God who had never known incarnated. Or walked this earth as a flesh-and-blood but very mortal human. This God must be a God who continues forward both within time and space, and without (or outside) of time and space. Even so, it is this latter part that we seem to mangle and confused. For it is the "within" part that we do seem to understand more readily than the "without" part... that we do now have a living Saviour who is with us, but who is apart from us as divine Spirit.

Hence the concept of process.... Process theology is a dynamic (and not static) concept of God that says that God continues to live though dead - and not impassionately apart from His creation (sic, deism, pelagianism, in all their gnostic forms). But passionately. Who continues to become and be through creation's experiences. Or our own. Or the church's experiences in this world. Which is part two of our question. How can a dead God remain with us? At Calvary's cross He did die. A place where He was forever affected by His humanity by His divine death. A death that became as a result of His incarnation. A death that He would meet - as we each will - simply because He lived even as we do now today live, and breath, hunger and thirst, know tiredness, suffering, aches, and pain of heart. In this mortal flesh we do know that every living thing dies. We see it everywhere about. We know of only one man that never died - Elijah. A prophet of God who was raised up as a living, non-dead, being. But it is through Elijah's story, and that of Lazarus'  miraculous "raising from the dead," that we would understand Jesus' resurrection. An "alive-but dead-but made alive again" resurrection into the heavens by the hand of God.

Enter Radical Theology's "God is Dead"

It is this kind of Process Theology that can better inform us of God's continued presence with us which a Radical Theology will then acknowledge as an event described as the "Death of God" when reflecting on this momentous event. Which is quite unlike the movie depiction of the "God is Dead" movement that serializes a Hollywood charicature of the "Death of God" movement. In reality, a true theology will take this event's implications very seriously. That God did die and that we must now know what it means for our present tense society, humanity, creation, church, Christianity, and future expectations. But we've strayed off topic again and must return to the topic at hand....

A Process Theology can better handle God's death when coupled with His resurrection, and not apart from it. Even as we can best understand God's death when beheld in the light of His resurrection. But it is the "without" part of God dwelling "outside of" time and space that we may have the greatest struggle with. And in fact, we must now admit into our definitions and classical ideas of "eternality" that God is no longer the unaffected eternal God. But the affected eternal God who must now dwell within all time and space. Who no longer is separate from it - if He ever really was. That perhaps classicism itself is to blame for making this God we worship so timelessly eternal that we see Him too far away from ourselves. If we say that God is love than how do we know that this God can love?

The very idea of God's "love and grace" seems meaningless without its actual experience of love and grace (whether before God's Incarnation or after it). Have you noticed that platonic love is seldom written about or moanfully sung?. But romantic love - deeply entangled love - is. It fills all the music industry with its messiness and frailty. Its crucible of a heaven-and-hell painfully experienced deeply within the souls of our being. Our anger and frustrations. It affects everything we say and do - our passions, drives, and nature. However, divine love cannot be meaningful if it dies in the grave, or never lived at all. It must somehow live in the present and future tenses of its expectations of being and becoming.

And yes, spirits, even divine Spirits, must admit some form of eternality because spirits by our very definition and ideas are seemingly "unaffected" by timeful events.... Or so we think. However, it is that very idealised human idea of "spirit" that must change from its classical sense to its process sense. We can no longer think of God as Spirit without thinking of God as an affected and affecting Spirit. It would be both biblical and right to aver that God ever loved in eternity even as He will ever love throughout eternity everlasting. But even more so, as our Incarnate, glorified God, He now is one with His creation. This divine love has been made plain to us through Jesus God's Son and very Self come among men.

Otherwise how can a dead God continue to love if we are to take the "Death of God" seriously? How can a dead God be alive and present with us now? How can His grace and mercy, peace and justice, hope and force of life, be our present guide and salvation? Nay, this God who is dead must somehow live. And live both within and without eternity as both divine Spirit and incarnated God. He must be resurrected from the grave. From hell. From the separation of Himself from Himself even as the Son was forsaken by the Father. He must be a God who is glorified on the basis of His incarnation and defeat of death, grave, and hell, by penalty and resurrection. Even as the believing son or daughter of God must even so live beyond death. He must be a God who lives with us in this life even as He will live with us in the next life to come. In eternity everlasting.

Which doesn't mean that our dead loved ones might commune with us now in this life as they once had.... But for the Christian, there is the strong knowledge that those dead loved ones will be communed with again on the other side of the grave. And until then they rest in God. They remain in Him even as we shall someday rest in God. And know that by the saving work of Christ our Saviour - based upon His own death and resurrection - that we will likewise rise with Jesus into the fellowship of God everlasting. Who in Himself was, and is, and ever will be, the Prince of Life. Our Prince of Life. Our Promise and Keep. Our strong fortress that prevails over death, the grave, and even hell itself.

The Incarnate God Who Died and Lives Again

Which brings us back to thought number two... how does a God who died now live? We have answered it on a Spirit level (or metaphysical), but we must also answer it on an existential level (an experiential, knowledge level, on the plane of our being). The short answer is that God is dead and we must acknowledge His death (back to Radical Theology again). This too is a paradox which forces us to admit that the Eternal, Unchanging One is no longer eternal and unchanging. That He has died and no longer lives as He once was apart from Calvary's Cross. And this is the part we will struggle with so firm our convictions that He walks with us "in the garden alone" as the old hymn says. That His Spirit does ever live and is with us by His eternal presence. And yes, this is true. But it is also true that His discourse with man is not like it once was in the Old Testament. And here is the tricky part then. Just what is it now since the days of the New Testament? Since the days of His death and resurrection?

I might offer one suggestion. That God continues today with His church (and with all of mankind) through His infilling Spirit of Pentecost. That is, it is through God's very Spirit that He communes with man today (though I suspect that even in the Old Testament He did so when speaking to the saints and priests of old, and beholding their commune with God). For this old world to see God means that it must see God through us, His church, His body and bride. How? By His own wounded hands and feet which act through us by His living miracles of healing, prophesying, evangelizing, of doing good works through us. We are His tongue and words (logos). His presence (spiritos). His feeling and composure (pathos). His nurture and grace (agapos). Truths which will place a lot of responsiblity upon our shoulders when we think of it in this way. Which doesn't mean that God by His Spirit can do nothing alone apart from us. But that, like with the Patriarch's and Israel's spiritual responsibility in their day, even so the church must now bear the love and grace of God, and the burden of the Lord Jesus Christ, through us, His living church.

Henceforth, and forever now, do we know that the God who lived, and who has died, must now live again in the resurrected sense of His living church. Who is a God who still reaches out through His Spirit to infill, transform, and conform, our very lives so that they may reach out to friend and family, foe and enemy, in the love and grace and divine power of His Almighty, Holy Spirit. We are not alone. We have a living God who is not dead. But a God who did die and lives again. Who is our pattern for both life and eternity. Who is in Himself the unexplainable One. Our mystery and paradox. Our enigma and riddle. But One whom we trust, and know, and desire to live and serve though all our mortal-immortal life. Even so dear Lord come. Come into our lives and help us die to sin's deaths and live to graces sustaining affects. In all our weakness. In all our frailty. By your strength and help and Spirit. Amen.

R.E. Slater

March 19, 2014

Jesus - Incarnate "Immanuel" ("God with us")

Aaron Niequist live at Willow Creek Church singing Matchless -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGF-Q-6EmbM

Matchless
by Troy Hatfield
Mars Hill Church, Grand Rapids, MI

Long before
Our time began
Long before I was

Heaven rang--creation rang
The matchlessness of God

Majesty unspeakable
We boldly bless Your name

In awe of love--in awe of grace
The God, the man who came

Praise to the constantly unchanging

You were
You are
And You will be

You were
You are
And You will be

God even though immutable
Revealing still today

The story moves--our parts still prove
Significant in ways

We praise the constantly unchanging

You were
You are
And You will be

You were
You are
And You will be

Beauty, glory
Just and holy
Righteousness and truth
Faithful leader, gentle healer
Matchless God are You

Beauty, glory
Just and holy
Righteousness and truth
Faithful leader, gentle healer
Matchless God are You

You were
You are
And You will be

You were
You are
And You will be

Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

©2003 zonkeydonkeytunes




continue to subtopic and discussion
under "God and Time" here -

Index to past articles on "Particle Physics, Quantum Science, and the Universe"

* * * * * * * * * * *

God is Not Eternal

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2014/02/12/god-is-not-eternal/#more-9825

by Tony Jones

[additional remarks by r.e. slater]

February 12, 2014

Writing a book on the atonement is like peeling the layers of an onion. Every theological dilemma you [think you] solve only brings up two more dilemmas. So it was that I needed to write a section in the book on God’s relationship to time, because it seemed to make no sense to talk about God’s relationship to Jesus’ crucifixion unless I could explain God’s relationship to time.

So a couple weeks back, I wrote a post arguing that God is not outside of time [that is, in the classic description of time. But that God is alongside of, or within time, in the process sense of time. - r.e. slater]. When reading that, Keith DeRose sent me Nicholas Wolterstorff‘s classic essay, “God Everlasting” (in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, New York: Oxford, 1982).

In that essay, Wolterstorff argues that God is not eternal, God is everlasting.

His argument proceeds thusly:

1) The biblical narrative clearly tells of a God who changes, and any hermeneutic that denies this is tortured.

2) Any being who changes is necessarily, in part, temporal.

3) “Eternal” is a totalising characteristic. It is not possible for a thing to be partly temporal and partly eternal.

4) Therefore, God is not eternal.

Money quote:

What I shall argue is that if we are to accept this picture of God as acting for the renewal of human life, we must conceive of him as everlasting rather than eternal. God the Redeemer cannot be a God eternal. This is so because God the Redeemer is a God who changes. And any being which changes is a being among whose states there is temporal succession. Of course, there is an important sense in which God as presented in the Scriptures is changeless: he is steadfast in his redeeming intent and ever faithful to his children. Yet, ontologically, God cannot be a redeeming God without there being changeful variation among his states.

Some will argue that God could be eternal and still involved with time. Wolterstorff debunks that claim in a section that begins,

As with any argument, one can here choose to deny the premisses rather than to accept the conclusion. Instead of agreeing that God is fundamentally noneternal because he changes with respect to his knowledge, his memory, and his planning, one could try to save one’s conviction that God is eternal by denying that he knows what is or was or will be occurring; that he remembers what has occurred; and that he brings about what he has planned. It seems to me, however, that this is clearly to give up the notion of God as a redeeming God. And in turn, it seems to me that to give this up is to give up what is central to the biblical vision of God. To sustain this latter claim would of course require an extensive hermeneutical inquiry. But lest someone be tempted to go this route of trying to save God’s eternity by treating all the biblical language about God the redeemer as either false or misleadingly metaphorical, let me observe that if God were eternal he could not be the object of any human action whatsoever.

For me, in solving the enigma that is the crucifixion of Jesus, God’s relationship to time is essential, and Wolterstorff opened a new vista of understanding in this essay. It’s that last sentence that really seals it for me. I don’t see any logical way that an eternal being could be engaged in temporal human affairs, and surely not in the way that’s described in the Bible.

What do you think is God’s relationship to time?

- Tony

Common Sense Christian Wisdom from my friend Rance...

I have a Facebook friend by the name of Rance who occasionally will rattle off a string of his beliefs on the popular social media site. As I read them I find myself simply nodding my head and thinking, "Yup, yup, yup, ok, yup, got it, check... and so on" in a long list of agreements like we were old friends from way back when really we're quite new friends from not so long ago.

What Rance has that I admire is his simply-said, common sense Christian wisdom, that tells it like it is while refusing to buy the popular line of Christianity that the media would have us believe (if not the Christian presses themselves). Its a kind of street wisdom that doesn't pull any punches unless they're headed right for your nose, and when you get back up off the ground you would mostly likely say, "Thank you. I needed that," in as kindly a manner as you may.

So, from time-to-time, with Rance's permission, I'm simply going to rattle off a "Rance segment" to allow his heart and mind speak to us from a long life of living, serving, conversing, reading, and "figuring things out." Kinda like a "thinking man's" list of proverbs and observations that have been hard won and had gained.

At the last, I would simply like to say "Thank you Rance" for being willing to ramble so we might gain a little insight into a Christianity that has become too harsh, or uncaring, to the guy or gal on the street. Jesus spoke plainly... and when He did He spoke in love. In tenderness. In humility. And with a lot of wisdom.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

March 18, 2014

* * * * * * * * * *




A Common Man's Journal

Quotes from my friend Rance

I suppose, in broad sense, I should be viewed as a conservative Evangelical, but not as an Evangelical conservative. My conservatism shows up mainly in my solid core commitments to orthodox theology. I believe in the Apostles Creed and affirm faith in the one Creator of heaven and earth, the saving work of Jesus Christ, and the gracious enabling of the Holy Spirit in my life and the life of the ...entire church. I await the renewal of the world and the resurrection from the dead at the future royal appearance of God's Son.

However, unlike many of my good friends and colleagues, I am no longer an Evangelical conservative. Politically, I fit more comfortably in the intellectual company of folks like Ron Sider, Greg Boyd, Tony Campolo, N. T. Wright, Roger Olson, Rachel Evans, and Jim Wallis than I do with folks like Marvin Olaski, Franklin Graham, Doug Wilson, and Carl Thomas.

In addition, I find myself affirming of the following 10 ideas:

1. That the biblical theological view of creation is not incompatible with the theory of evolution.

2. That the Bible can be primary and inspired without being infallible and inerrant.

3. That one can somehow be both pro-life and pro-choice.

4. That one can believe in wealth distribution without believing in Socialism. 

5. That one can find many strong examples of Christians from the past who were politically, theologically, socially, and economically progressives.

6. That one can affirm both the sanctity of traditional marriage and the freedom for same-sex unions.

7. That one can believe in debt forgiveness for poor nations. 

8. That one can be patriotic without being nationalistic.

9. That one can be loyal Americans while refusing as Christians to bear arms or go to war. 

10. That one can peaceably share this great country with atheists, agnostics, humanists, Muslims, and foreigners.

- Rance