Does Heaven Care About Catering?
Our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians broke its extended pause and will now be dropping the remainder of its season as per normal, beginning with its episode on persons.
In that episode, Daniel and I prefaced our exploration with an explanation of why a re-visiting of the topic is necessary, since it may feel like kicking a dead horse. So long as we presume that the locus of salvation was having the right ideas about God instead of entering into communion with God, we were sidelining the fundamental reality of our embodied personhood. Indeed, the notion of salvation through right thinking alone presumed a type of personhood anyway, just one that was not in keeping with the reality of persons.
Flowing from that, we looked at the conceptions of personhood around three words (though not explicitly or intentionally), and in turn explored how the person might be a locus of faith.
The first is “restlessness”, which flows from the fact that, as composites of body and soul, a person comes not only with thoughts but desires. Furthermore, I indicated elsewhere, our desire is manifested precisely in that restlessness.
The second word is “receptivity”, a disposition towards reality that flows from the fact that we are desiring beings. If we are driven by our restless desire, we find rest only when we adopt a posture of openness to the reality of things. More importantly, we find our rest in our being open to God who is the ground of the reality of things. The trouble is when we seek to be open but on our terms, which closes off not only the possibility of surprise, but our attunement to reality itself.
The third word is “relation”, which was a shorthand for our need for ecclesial accompaniment in our journey in growth towards communion with the Father. We based this not only because of the Trinitarian archetype, but also because our embodied personhood and our need for openness to something not set by ourselves. That openness has to have an object, someone completely other from from us. This makes the other not an incidental thing for our salvation. As Avery Dulles wrote all those years ago, our personhood means that there is an unavoidable “ecclesial dimension of faith”.
Our episode Does Heaven Care About Catering can be listened to in full on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts. To better stay updated, why not subscribe to the show on your preferred platform?
