Reach

The world often seems exactly as it would if there were no God. I don’t need to say why—any reader will know what I mean. Many argue that the human imagination fills this godless void of a universe with myths, symbols, and deities born of cultural habit rather than any kind of supernatural reality behind it all, so to speak. But this view overlooks a deeper truth: the way God has chosen to act in the world is not through obvious spectacle but through a deliberate inversion of the world’s expectations—not by erasing chaos but by redeeming it; not by obliterating myths but by transforming them into something we would not have imagined.

Consider this: Dionysus mirrors Christ not because the Second Temple Period was suffused with religious pluralism or cultural syncretism, but because God in Christ is an intentional and deliberate inversion of the way of the world. We, God’s image-bearers, dreamt-up Dionysus; God answered with the Truth. And when the Dionysian vine that produces chaos, evil, and death meets the true Vine who gives everlasting life, such contrasts are neither coincidental nor arbitrary but reflect the struggle that exists in each of us between the flesh and the spirit; between what God makes and what we make as a pale mockery. This, then, is the planned outworking of God’s redemptive purpose: to gather all things—myths, symbols, imaginations, and even chaos itself—into perfect order.

Supernatural myths and symbols may not only be mere figments of ancient storytellers’ imaginations. Perhaps they actually do hover around spiritual realities, like sin-distorted echoes of them. The vine of Dionysus, a symbol of intoxication and chaos, contrasts with the true Vine of Christ, who brings life and communion. Pagan myths of death and rebirth grope toward truth but are fulfilled only in Christ, where death is conquered not by endless cycles—as we might imagine—but by resurrection, which exceeds our imagination. The gods of wine and frenzy propose superficial and limited happiness; the one true God turns water into wine at a wedding feast and invites His followers into a deep, steady, everlasting, joy that transcends the world’s chaos.

From the earliest days of the Church, Christians have recognized the living and transformative nature of Scripture. It is not a book confined to the past but a dynamic, ongoing dialogue between God and His people. For Origen, Scripture’s human authorship was not a limitation but a vehicle for divine revelation, capable of addressing the universal longings of the human soul. For Luther, the central figure of Scripture is Christ, who speaks to humanity through the Word, calling sinners to repentance and faith. This dynamic view of Scripture as living and active (Hebrews 4:12) ensured its place not merely as a historical record but as an ongoing encounter with the divine.

This living quality of Scripture also enables it to reinterpret and redeem the myths and symbols of human history. Just as Christ fulfills the Jewish law and the hopes of Israel, He also fulfills the deeper spiritual instincts of humanity, evident even in pagan myths. Festivals like Easter, Pentecost, and Epiphany illustrate this principle. Easter transforms the Jewish Passover into the ultimate celebration of redemption, while Pentecost reinterprets the Feast of Weeks as the moment when God’s Spirit empowers the Church to bring His message to all nations. Epiphany, often debated in its origins, incorporates themes from pagan and Jewish traditions alike—water, wine, light, and kingship—yet places them in the context of Christ’s revelation as the true God. The story of the Magi, for example, ties together ancient astrology, royal symbolism, and prophetic fulfillment, demonstrating how even the fragmented wisdom of pagan traditions finds its completion in Christ. Similarly, the miracle at Cana transforms the Dionysian association of wine with chaos and revelry into a symbol of joy, communion, and the abundance of God’s kingdom. Christ’s baptism in the Jordan reclaims water rituals from ancient myths and makes them sacramental (read: truly mysterious), a means of union with the living God.

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I have encountered two problems that seem unrelated to the topic of this essay at first blush, but that I will try to demonstrate to be entirely relevant: aliens and hypocrisy.

First, let’s tackle the possibility of extraterrestrial life of a vastly superior intelligence, and its implications for a theology according to which God is incarnate as a human being and not as some other more advanced intelligence that could well be interacting with us in UAPs or other widely-attested phenomena (if you haven’t been watching the news, then this may sound ludicrous). Let me emphasize that this is not merely an intellectual puzzle or dilemma. It shakes assumptions about God, humanity, and the place of Christ in creation because if intelligent beings exist who surpass us in knowledge or power, then the incarnation of Christ as human seems startlingly provincial, even absurd.

This question opens into something far deeper: the scandal of particularity. God did not reveal Himself as an abstract principle, comprehensible to all intellects at all times. Instead, He entered history—human history—as a particular person, in a particular place, with all the limitations that entails. This is uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable to admit that the universe might contain intelligences beyond our comprehension, and that God still might not choose them. But this discomfort is also the point. The incarnation defies the neat solutions we might prefer, where God manifests as some idealized, universally recognizable being. Instead, the incarnation confronts us with something scandalous and disarming: God’s choice to enter the world as one of us. The Christian claim remains stubbornly grounded in the particular, not the grandiose. If extraterrestrial life challenges this, it also asks me whether I really trust the mystery of God’s ways or whether I prefer a God that conforms to human reason.

Now let’s treat the second problem I mentioned: hypocrisy. I have long suffered the suspicion that I may not be living-out the same religious life as anyone around me. What I mean by that is that I’ve felt a stronger and stronger tug on my conscience that my faith has nothing to do with my actual life whatsoever—not the way I talk, what I say, what I do, what I do for a living, how I am a husband and father to my family—nothing. I have suspected that all of this theologizing is basically just a pet theory that goes into an elaborate personal diary of a blog here which I tinker with as a hobbyist. It’s an unsettling feeling that my faith may be untethered from my life, and it threatens to sever the very connection between the extraordinary truths (theological or otherwise) that I explore in my writing and the ordinary life I’m living.

The answer and relief for both of these tensions—the possibility of higher intelligences not mentioned in the Bible and the disconnect between intellectual faith and lived faith—may be found not in merely contemplating the incarnation of Christ, but in the historical fact of the incarnation itself. God chose humanity—not angels, not higher intelligences—and entered into the chaos of human life to restore it to divine order. That there may be other lifeforms that exceed us in technological advancements or in raw intelligence does not render the God-man story any more absurd than it sounded before—especially given that God is not just more intelligent than any of his creatures already but is infinitely so. With regard to the problem of the disconnect between my inner life of the mind and how I live, it must be answered that intellectual reflections on Christ fulfilling the myths of the world ought to lead not just to intellectual satisfaction but to concrete transformation; the Word made flesh meets us not in the abstract, but in our actual lives, our families, our work, and so on.

God redeems all things in history—even the anxieties about extraterrestrial unknowns or the gnawing sense of disconnection between my faith and my daily life. Returning to the image of Christ as the true Vine, He grafts me into Himself through my receiving his gifts in the Word and Sacrament. Faithfulness in vocation—however faltering—is likewise not trivial or disconnected but one of the very means by which God draws my fragmented life into His redemptive order.

Yet, a third problem deepens my disquiet: without a direct, revelatory experience of God, all we have is interpretation of this redeemed history for belief. None of us knows better than anybody else, or with any greater degree of certainty, what has actually happened in history. Every belief, every theological construct, stands on layers of interpretation. This unsettling reality threatens to reduce faith to mere opinion, dissolving its grounding in truth. How, then, can we move forward with any confidence, let alone conviction? If all we have is interpretation, and no one among us holds ultimate certainty about what has happened in history, then the anxiety is real: Is faith nothing more than the product of our projections, our need for meaning? This draws us back to the opening salvo I made at the start of this essay: it seems like there’s no God. The answer I gave before applies here, too, in that what looks like a void, the absence of God, is the very space in which He works.

I must remember that the unknown within me—the positive, uncharted potential that draws me beyond myself—is greater than the negative void that haunts me. This potential is Christ in me working-out my salvation and redeeming a fallen man. This, perhaps, is what it means to live by faith: to stand tall and loom larger above my anxieties, not because I possess certainty, but because Christ is in me, and because the tension itself reveals that there is more to me than my doubts. The incarnation means that God entered the chaos of human life and remains present in it.

Yes, the positive unknown in Christ looms larger than the negative space of doubt. Faith becomes not an escape from doubt but a way of living within it, allowing the struggle to refine and reshape us in light of Christ’s redeeming work. Through our gift of faith, we lean into the positive unknown in Christ—a reality that surpasses our comprehension and draws us beyond ourselves into something infinitely greater. The disquiet within us—the unresolved questions, the lingering doubts—is itself a kind of evidence that faith is alive, like a sort of sign that we’re being drawn into something better that can’t be reduced to mere intellectual assent or abstract principles. The incarnation is not merely an event in history; it is a living, ongoing reality.