THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
145
However, Fr. Keefe says, that's not how it goes at all. The
Eucharistic Event, not a dehistoricized cosmology, is the center of all
reality. There is no time-less place, and putting God there is
automatically to assign God himself to Mr. Minsky's middle box.
However much we yearn for the time-less, it doesn't exist, and Christ
calls us to 'time-full,' "radically historical," covenantal existence. We
live solely in and through our 'private' appropriation of the public
worship of the Church, the Bride of Christ her Head. So, we have to
categorically reject the standard picture that we all have learned,
because here is what that picture really assumes, in its very first step:
1. First there was God in a time-less place.
However cozy with familiarity that picture seems, it must therefore
be categorically rejected from its very first step as unreal and un-
Catholic by the fundamental argument of Fr. Keefe's book.
Thus any 'before' the New Covenant is a flight to the time-less,
because any 'before' assumes that God exists in a time-less place.
Taking this seriously, Fr. Keefe draws the following conclusions.
* God did not send his Son to give the Spirit "propter peccatum,"
because of Adam and Eve's sin. That would imply a 'before,' a time-
less place where God 'really' is.
* God sent his Son to give the Spirit, and that sending was itself
both the Creation of the world and the New Covenant. Creation was
therefore not Creation from a time-less 'before' but Creation in the
New Covenant, for "Through Him all things were made." As the Book
of Revelation makes clear, he is the Lamb of God who, by His One
Sacrifice, is the Alpha and the Omega. How can there be a 'before' the
Lamb of God who is the Alpha and the Omega?
The Catholic faith is a 'time-full' Event and the free response to that
Event, not any time-less Thing. Trying to 'understand' that 'time-full'
Event and the free response to it in the light of a time-less framework
supposedly prior to both is the problem, as ever.
One of the age-old resorts to a time-less 'explanation' of the
Eucharistic Event is purportedly based on the first words of John's
gospel.
"In the beginning" was the Word. Of course, any dehistoricized
cosmology would more than assume, it would dictate, that "in the
beginning" that Word had to be the time-less Logos (word) of the
philosophers, because of necessity there has to be a time-less
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.