a particular scandal: God is With Us

In brushing up for my theology final tomorrow, I read a series of slams on Unitarian theology in an article titled "The Scandal of Peculiarity" by none other than Cynthia Rigby, the APTS professor who usually teaches this class. The argument seems to go that only a triune God is actively and fully present in our world and is therefore capable of understanding and loving us as we are, of being "God with us" in solidarity (as one who was once human), and of "indwelling" us as challenger, shaper, and transformer of our lives. A unitarian God, she states in negatives, is distant, authoritarian, unloving, and incapable of understanding what it is to be human. 

She is seriously misunderstanding the unitarian God. Rigby's logic, and that of the people she cites for backup, only works if one sees a unitarian God through a trinitarian lens: in particular, Rigby seems to think that Unitarian Christians choose to keep the "Father/Creator" person of her trinity and lose the other two, maintaining the transcendent aspect of God at the expense of the immanent aspect. No! 

Neither Judaism nor Islam, which both insist on a unitarian Diety, has such an understanding. The Jewish scriptures speak time and again about a Diety who is present and involved in the world we live in, and the Sufi tradition of Islam says we have no further to look for Allah than in the living of our daily lives. 

While we Unitarian Universalists have many names for and conceptions of the Divine, I think it safe to say that we would largely agree on one thing: whatever the Sacred is, it is here among us in the midst of things, dwelling in and among all, present in our very Spirit and in every act of Love, stirring things up for the comfortable yet comforting those in pain. God doesn't have to be triune to be with us or to love us. God simply has to be and the with us is taken care of.

It seems no scandal at all to me, then, that such a God could become incarnate, dwelling fully in a particular human for the good of all. The scandal, for me, is the implication by Christians that Jesus of Nazareth was somehow the only time this ever happened; indeed, I believe that God does this all the time. What if God was one of us, right now? What if God was all of us?