Unconditioned Glory: Faith, Hope and Love

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The Apostle imparted wisdom discerning the glory of release, folly to the powers that be, but liberation of vainglory into glory when wisdom turns and sees. The Logos of the cross of unselfish love, apparently powerless against these powers, crucifies their pretentious parodies of God.  The Name conceals unconditional glory unbinding whatever powers have bound, unveiled by wisdom so that boundless unbinding may abound.  The life-world of glory is glory’s hallowing form of life, unbinding what is bound wherever it is found.  Glorification is not vain inflation but glorious release, unloosing vain sophistry into humble radiance in the Name.  The wisdom of the cross is love’s glorious folly: impossible impasse breaking open what narrow conditioning doubly binds. The Kingdom of glory dethrones powers that be, releasing all worldly conditions conditioned by their rule.  Unconditional glory undoes all falls from glory by releasing glory, glory unbinding glory without end.  

Glorification unseats the constricting conditioning of all conditioned powers, releasing glory from all worldly conditions, rupturing the conditioning of conventional powers that be.  The reign of glory dethrones every God-substitute that usurps God, deconstructing addictive idolatries that obstruct release.  Unconditional glory is wisdom’s ultimate concern, unbinding the double binds with which conditioning conditions bind.  The Name does not enforce; it frees.  The Kingdom to come is the coming of eschatological glory, unconditionally coming but never conditionally bound.  The Kingdom is not a conditioned future but unconditional glory breaking in, unbinding what is bound.  The Name is hallowed so the Kingdom comes, not as a conditioning condition but as glory unconditioned and unconditioning.  Faith, hope and love, centred in the Name, undo the conditioning that is empowered by powers that be.  

The Name veils the heart with what looks like folly, in order to unveil unconditioned glory to wisdom, unconditionally releasing every conditioned confusion into God, to let Godhead, in God, be God.  The Logos of the cross dissolves conditioned God-substitutes into unconditioned Godhead, freeing icons of glory from idolatry, transmuting doxa as opinion into doxa as glory.  The radical unconditionality of unconditioned Godhead appears to fall from unconditional glory when it is confused with something conditioned or conditional.  Forgiveness is unconditional that undoes this fall, just as trust is unconditional that welcomes the inversion of this fall.  Glory unbinds conditioned bondage unconditionally, in the Name of the radically unconditioned.  The life-world of glory releases the conditioned into the unconditioned with unconditionally generous grace, letting the wisdom of the unconditioned reveal glory in its radically unconditional grace.  The Logos of the cross remains folly to powers that be, futile weakness to powers who rule this present age.  But the Apostle affirms that the wisdom and the power of  glory remain hidden in the Name, a mystery inspiring unconditional trust, hope and love.  The unconditional glory of wisdom calls for unconditional trust in the Name, infusing hope and love that respond unconditionally to the call within the Name.  Glorification is wisdom’s form of life, once turning turns and seeing sees the unconditioned glory of the Name. 

Wisdom discerns love’s glory in double kenosis, God’s self-emptying into us and our self-emptying into God, deep within the hidden ground of the hallowing Name.  Glory releases all will to power through the Logos of the cross, unveiling radical self-emptying both in God and in us.  This is the Name’s glory, undoing the power of powers that be, renewing prayer in prophecy and prophecy in prayer.  A poetics of prophecy renews the tradition with wisdom songs, restoring a radical hermeneutics of glory to sustain wisdom.  This opens up the possibility of a phenomenology of wisdom that attends humbly to what is arising within the hallowing Name.  Wisdom works with the metaphors and symbols of Scripture in order to uncover the paradoxes and parables of living prophecy.  She listens to the songs and stories of the Apostles in order to uncover the meaning of the poems and aphorisms of the Fathers.  The dazzling images and baffling double-binds of wise elders inspire many of the rhetorical flourishes and apophatic utterances of the saints.  Wisdom works with these wondrous inversions of vainglory and the profound reversals of the Kingdom that disempower powers that be.  

A poetry of glory opens to release after release, unveiling a Logos beyond binary logic that grounds logic in wisdom.  It witnesses the last being first and the first last, turning insiders out, welcoming outsiders in.  A fool’s logic turns out to be the wisdom of pure Logos, a cross of weakness undoing powers that be.  It meets the enemy with a kiss, inverting the inverted kiss of Judas, which is love in Gethsemane unconditionally embracing hope, hope on Golgotha unconditionally embracing trust.  Such wisdom is the Name in action, unconditionally releasing the conditioned.  Conditioned gods usurping God dissolve in this unconditioning, consuming fire.  But nothing sound or real is consumed, leaving wisdom awake in transfigured ascension, glory alight in descending translucence.  Wisdom enfolds what glory unfolds, transfiguring in the midst what translucently releases all conditioning.  The Name of glory is liberating release, unconditioned glory deifying knower and known, wisdom renewing faith in hope and hope in love.