Epilogue — Wonder as Permanent Posture (1 of 2)

The reader has been led through a lot of ground. Time as a created thing. Light as the constant. Mass that cannot ascend. The descent. The cross and the Harrowing. The resurrection body. The Spirit who is the bridge. The vine and the branches. The hours of Coram Deo. The poverty of spirit that is the door. The will that is kept rather than overridden. The communicable nature. The Lamb who is the Lamp of the cosmos. The disciples who will shine as the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. The book has been a heavy read because the territory it covers is heavy. The reader who has come this far is tired, and the tiredness is appropriate.

What was traced was one trajectory. The created order has limits — limits the engineer's mathematics can name with precision. The human, by his own ascent, cannot reach the One who made him. The asymptote is absolute. And the One who made him knew this and did the only thing that could be done. He came down. The Light came down. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The cross was offered. The Harrowing happened. The resurrection occurred. The Spirit was poured out. The bridge was opened. And on the other side of all of that, the bankrupt human has been brought, by gift, into the participation he could not have reached by climbing. The whole story is one story. God came down so that humans, who could not have come up, could be brought up by Him.

And the hope the reader is now allowed to name is concrete. It is not a wish. It is not a metaphor. It is what the Scripture has promised and what the tradition has held for two thousand years. The hope is a new heavens and a new earth. The hope is a resurrection body — the same kind of body the Son walked out of the tomb in on the third day. The hope is unmediated presence — the Lamb as the Lamp of the cosmos, no temple between, no veil, no distance. The hope is luminosity — the disciples themselves shining like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father. The hope is aevum — the unending duration in which the disciple grows and learns and rejoices and worships and is, finally, what he was made to be.

None of it is here yet in its full form. The disciple still in his Tuesday afternoon is in the body that runs down, in the recognitions that come and go, in the work that wears him out, in the family that needs more than he has to give. The participation is in seed form. The drift is real. The body is not yet the body of glory. The presence is not yet unmediated. The disciple is on the right side of the descent but on the prior side of the consummation. Both must be held. The disciple has eternal life now, in the John 17:3 sense of present-tense knowing, and the disciple is also still waiting for the resurrection and the new creation and the unmediated presence to be his lived experience. Both are true. Both must be held.

And the posture for the in-between is wonder. Not anxiety. Not striving. Not despair at how far the disciple has to go. Not religious performance. Wonder. The recognition that all of this is happening — that the participation is real, that the Spirit is operating now in the disciple's own body, that the Light has come down, that the cross was offered, that the descent was made, that the gift is being given and being received in every moment in which the disciple recognizes it.

Wonder is the recognition of gift. The whole architecture is gift. The volume has been describing what is being given. The descent was gift. The cross was gift. The Spirit's indwelling is gift. The participation is gift. The hope is gift. The future luminosity is gift. The reader did not earn any of it. The reader could not have earned any of it. The asymptote was clear about that from Chapter 5. And what the reader is being asked to do is not to earn what cannot be earned but to receive what is being given. Wonder is the appropriate response of the open hand to the gift that has been placed in it.

And wonder is what is missing in the modern modes the volume has named along the way. The Pharisee bringing his disciplines to the gate had no wonder. The framework that treats agency as the sacred has no room for wonder; agency is the achievement, and achievement is not wondered at. The prosperity gospel has no wonder; the transaction is a wage, and wages are not wondered at. None of these postures is the disciple's. The disciple's posture is wonder, because wonder is what is left to the one who has been given what he could not have produced.

The engineer who has been carrying the volume's analytical work does not abandon his engineering at the end. He stands at the whiteboard and recognizes that the equations point to wonder. The mathematics of the asymptote in Chapter 5 was not a barrier to faith. It was the confirmation of why the descent was required. The cosmology of Chapter 1 was not a competitor to theology. It was the convergence with theology, arrived at from a different direction. The constants and the architectures and the limits the engineer has spent his life working with all point, when followed honestly, to a Person whose visible glory now saturates the cosmos. The math leads here. The right response to the math is wonder.

And wonder is what the disciple does in his Tuesday afternoon when he remembers what he is in. Not religious performance. Not constant verbal acknowledgment. Just recognition. The catch of the breath. The pause at the threshold of the kitchen. The glance toward the One whose presence is the structure of the room. The small interior bow at the awareness that the Spirit is in the disciple's body doing the work of the participation. None of it dramatic. All of it real. Wonder is the posture of the disciple who, for one moment in the middle of a too-warm conference room or the kitchen at six or the parking lot at five, registers what is the case.

And the cosmos itself is waiting with him. Paul says in Romans 8 that the whole creation groans, waiting for the manifestation of the children of God. The trees, the seas, the stars, the matter the engineer has spent his life studying — all of it is in its own kind of wonder, anticipating the consummation in which the new earth will replace the old one and the new heavens will replace the old ones. The disciple's wonder is the small human instance of a cosmic wonder. The universe is, in its own way, leaning forward toward the day the Lamb will be its Lamp.