A View From Beginning To End
By John Gavazzoni
Rehearsing....probably mostly for my own sake....the paradigm that underscores the structure of my theological thought: There is a Nuclear Family which is the "Ground of Being" (Tillich), i.e., that Family that natures all being and is the life of all being. I recall a moment when I was given the understanding that communion is the life of that Center of all being. Life=communion; communion=life, as can be seen in the interaction of all flora and fauna in the natural world. At all the levels of man's being, spirit, soul, and body, communion is what makes us alive, and the lack of the same=death.
Isolation, or deprivation of connectedness, is life-destructive. "And this is life eonian, that they might know Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent." To know (Greek, gnosis: experiential, intimate knowing) is the Life (Greek, zoe: a word quite evidently reserved in the New Testament for life lived in communion with God), joined to "aionios" indicating the Life of God at work in us and among us in the here and now, i.e., pertaining to, and enduring through the age or ages, was affirmed by Jesus to be that Reality that supported Him as He faced, in His passion, the most insidious attack against that Reality.
Within that Nuclear Family, "from which every family in heaven and earth is named (natured)" (KJV, explanatory addition, mine), a mutuality of delight exists: a circularity of Parental and Filial mutual delight that is the central joy of Godness , as "....the Son of His love" (KJV) implies. "His" is to be understood as implying a complementary Her, which union is the Core of the Center that natures all being.
From that Core of the Center of all things exists a pure, passionate attraction that results in the holy Conjugal Uniting of Being which is the Source of all life-reproduction. Deity begets, and from the substance of that Divine Birthing, all materiality is created. This is why Paul called Jesus, "the first-born of all creation," for all creation derives from His birth, and as the first-born all creation is His inheritance.
This truth is at the heart of why creation is dependent upon the manifestation (unveiling/uncovering) of the sons of God for its deliverance from decay, for it is specifically the Spirit-Substance of God's sons from which God created all things. Therefore, as go the sons so goes all creation, according to and by "the liberty of the glory of the children of God." There are brethren who think of me as a theologian, and if there is a theological category or school to which I belong as such, we would need to come up with a category which...at least to my knowledge....doesn't exist within formal theological academia.
As certain theologians, for instance, are referred to as incarnational theologians, I would be pleased to be thought of as belonging to the romantic school. I see, for example, a great love story, a great romance, unfolding as the biblical story moves forward from the depiction of a man and a woman in a Garden of Delight (Eden) in the beginning, to the end described to John in a vision on the Isle of Patmos as, "the holy city (garden-like in its layout) descending out of heaven as a bride adorned for her Husband." Now, if that ain't romantic, I don't know what is. In fact, if I may dare to say so, I find "...as a bride adorned for her husband" to be a downright sexy description!
What is included in Jesus describing Himself as "the Beginning and the End," is all of the above.
