Flesh That Reveals the Father

“The majesty of biblical poetry always lifts our thoughts up. Biblical poetic expression is incarnational, which means that there is a body of ‘flesh,’ but it is a body which reveals the Father. Idolatrous poetic expression reveals nothing from above, and spends its energy in rearranging matter down here below. Idolatrous images of the divine are consistently bad metaphor because they are so truncated, and they drag our thoughts down to the level of man, giving us ludicrous and twisted images of God. Consider just a few grossly inadequate statements about God, and reflect on how they make one feel that our Open god is soon to appear as a guest on Oprah. ‘God is the best learner of all.’ We expect to read in the next line that he plays well with others and does not run with scissors.” (“The Loveliness of Orthodoxy” in Bound Only Once, pp. 24-25).