Note: From Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues (Baker 2022). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
The ordinary can be understood only in comparison to the extraordinary. The extraordinary consists of those rare, at times unrepeatable, occasions that break the repetitious and expected. It is this rupture that sustains and gives the ordinary its significance and texture….Discerning the theological importance of the extraordinary also requires contrast. To invoke a supreme understatement, God is the extraordinary reality that casts light on our ordinary lives as creatures. In God, we encounter the source of our being, and we are drawn out of ourselves into a realm that is far vaster than ourselves. In God, we face the eternal that transcends the temporal; the beginning and end of all that has been, is, and shall be. Extraordinary! And yet the commonplace and mundane activities of our daily living are not unrelated or unimportant to God. Before exploring what this relation and importance entails, we first need to visit three extraordinary acts of divine love.
Ordinary Flourishing in Light of God’s Extraordinary Creation
First, it is extraordinary that there is a creation. God did not need to create the world that you and I inhabit. God was not unfulfilled or incomplete until God created. God is simple, which means that God is complete simply by virtue of being God; to be God is to be without needs or desires that can be fulfilled only through subsequent acts to fill the voids. Humans, however, are complex. They have many needs and desires they strive to meet through their own creative acts. There are many voids to be filled – and many, if not most, remain empty. Humans, on their own initiative, can never attain a godlike simplicity that is full and complete in itself. Consequently, borrowing from St. Augustine, our hearts are restless.
Why, then, did God create? It was, and is, an act of gratuitous love. But if creation is an act of God’s love, does this not challenge the concept of divine simplicity? If God is the only pure object of love, then shouldn’t God’s undivided attention be rightfully directed not outward but inward – that is, toward loving God? Doesn’t creation imply a lack in God that God is trying to rectify? This is a good question, and to answer it we must try to be clear about what love is – or at least about how we understand it from our limited, creaturely standpoint. The “flow” of love, so to speak, is not unidirectional. Love may be said to have both inward and outward trajectories. There is love of self, and there is love of the other. It is hard to imagine a genuine love that is entirely self-contained; narcissism, after all, is a behavioral disorder.
The love I described in the preceding paragraph is admittedly the kind experienced by incomplete creatures striving to satisfy unfulfilled cravings and desires. What does this love, then, have to do with God? It is important to keep in mind that for Christians, God is not monistic but triune. When we refer to God, we mean Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Within the Godhead, love is shared among three persons. Admittedly, this love is not identical to that which humans experience, but the two are not entirely unrelated. There is giving and receiving, and there is a strong relational component – there can be no Father without the Son. But the love shared among the persons of the Trinity is a perfect love that is not directed toward correcting any deficiency. The sharing of such perfect love, however, is not necessarily perpetually cyclical or self- contained. Perhaps such love cannot resist an impulse to create something other than itself for no other reason than to express itself. To use a crude analogy again, the love shared by the persons of the triune Godhead spilled over to create the world as something other than God.
A Fitting Response to Creation
Gratitude is a fitting response to this gratuitous act of love. Life is a gift to be cherished, and its giver is acknowledged and worshiped as its creator. The fact that God did not need to create but did so nonetheless should elicit a joyful astonishment, for we are created literally for no reason. And humans carry within their being the mark of this gratuitous love – namely, the image and likeness of their creator. This is not to suggest that each person carries a divine spark, implying that humans are lesser gods. Rather, the imago Dei serves to remind humans of the creator who created them. Existence is a gift that humans can only receive and never reciprocate in kind to its giver.
This extraordinary and gratuitous act of divine love also offends because it is utterly undeserved. No one is entitled to be created, and life is therefore an unqualified and unmerited gift of love. This insults our sensibilities, however, for we want to be loved because we are deserving; we strive to earn the love of others. This is an imperfect expression of love that tries to rectify the deficiencies and fill the voids of our being, but has no standing before God’s perfect love. There is nothing we can do to merit God’s love; it is simply given. This tension between the joy and offense of a gratuitous creation shapes, in part, the fabric, purposes, and importance of ordinary, everyday living as examined in subsequent chapters. It suffices at this juncture to indicate that it is in the mundane that we learn to love people who do not deserve to be loved, and in turn we learn to receive the unmerited love of others. In other words, it is in the ordinary that we often encounter grace.
Ordinary Flourishing in Light of God’s Extraordinary Incarnation
The second extraordinary act of God’s love is the incarnation. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). God became a human being. The incarnation is a core Christian conviction, requiring elaborate doctrinal exposition. For the purpose of this book, however, noting two implications will suffice. First, the incarnation of the Word reaffirms what God has created. Creation is good, but it is fallen, no longer enjoying an untroubled relationship with its creator. The underlying cause of the fall is a failure to trust God, exhibited through willful disobedience. God forbids Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but they do so anyway (see Genesis 3). The consequences are disastrous. The easy liaison between creator and creature is broken. When God visits Eden, Eve and Adam try to hide, for they are ashamed of their nakedness, which they had never noticed before. The tranquil bond between Adam and Eve is also severed. They refuse to take responsibility for their actions and are at odds with each other. The rapport between humans and the earth is ruined. No longer is their gardening a carefree activity; it becomes painful and tedious toil. The fall exacts a heavy cost.
Presumably, God could have reacted to this disobedience by abandoning or destroying creation. Instead, God enters into covenant with these fallen, deeply flawed creatures, as attested in Scripture with the people of Israel. Within the Christian theological tradition, this covenant culminates in the incarnation. God does not choose merely to be in covenant with the human creatures God created; in Jesus, God decides to become one of them. In becoming one with us, God undoes the fall, healing the resulting brokenness of creation and its creatures. Additionally, the incarnation affirms the love that created us in the first place. It is a steadfast and unwavering love: a love that will not let us go, regardless of how unlovable we may be.
It is also a costly love. To undo the fall, God in Christ must take on the brokenness of creation and its creatures. Or, to use a theological concept that is no longer very fashionable in some circles, Christ must take on the sins of the world to redeem the world, to recreate its proper relationship with its creator. Jesus must die to accomplish this end. Regardless of which doctrinal account of atonement one employs, there is no escaping the necessity of Jesus’s death. There can be no Christianity without a cross, for the crucifixion is the paramount act of God’s love. It is only in and through Jesus’s death that creation can be emancipated from its sin and have its ruptures healed. In short, love, especially love of the other, entails suffering. It entails death.
Ordinary Flourishing in Light of God’s Extraordinary Resurrection
But love does not end in death, which leads us to the third extraordinary act of God’s love: Jesus is raised from the dead. If there can be no Christianity without the cross, then so too there can be none without the empty tomb. The church does not remember a dead founder but worships and serves a living savior. Good Friday has no significance or meaning without Easter. The risen Jesus is the centerpiece of the singular but tripartite culmination of the incarnation, entailing crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. The crucifixion is God’s simultaneous pronouncement of no and yes to the human condition. A no is pronounced against disordered human desires stemming from the fall, while a yes is uttered in favor of reordering our desires in line with Christ’s work of reconciling us with the triune God. In a related manner, the ascension moves this reordering beyond historical and temporal limitations. Together, the intertwined events of crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension create a pattern of ordering human life to which we should aspire to conform. When the gospel is proclaimed in ways that diminish or ignore any of these related moments, it becomes distorted and incomplete.
Content taken from Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues by Brent Waters, ©2022. Used by permission of Baker Publishing.
Brent Waters, Stead Professor of Christian Social Ethics and director of the Stead Center for Ethics and Values, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
