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7 The Concurring of the Divine with the Human Participation, Personhood, and the Concursus Dei in a Christopraxis Practical Theology The last chapter concluded by recalibrating practical theology so that it might run not on the Aristotelian framework of human actuality to possibility but rather on the biblical and theological rails of possibility through nothingness—it is possibility through nothingness that embeds my Christopraxis perspective in the theologia crucis. On these rails, I argued, practical theology is not only allowed to move deeply into human experience (through nihilo) but also into divine encounter. In the framework of possibility through nothingness, eternity and time are joined while remaining differentiated. This joining of the divine and human is the act of ministry itself. God acts, eternity breaking into time, for the sake of ministry. God’s being comes to humanity as God’s ministry, as redemption from Egypt. God’s name is “I am who is becoming” (Exod. 3:14), who is in ministry, grasping nothingness with both hands so that a new possibility, a promised land, might break forth. God’s being is given in the act of ministry in and through the possibilitythrough -nothingness framework: the Israelites have no potential or potency in their human action to create an actuality for themselves of freedom (Deut. 7:7). However, the eternal remains distinct from time—divine encounter as ministry cannot be conflated with human action in time, for all human action needs the justifying act of Godself given in ministry, most fully seen in the perishing of the cross (again, the theologia crucis). This differentiation remains: God is minister and humanity remains always in need of justification, needing again and again for the ex nihilo to be 147 reinstated so that God’s ministerial act might come in and out of it. Nevertheless, there remains a sense, an invitation, a gift, of human participation in the divine, and this participation is shaped by God’s being as becoming in ministry itself. It is shaped by Christopraxis; in and through the ministry of God through the humanity of the perishing Jesus we participate in God’s being—that is, we experience redemption—as God participates in our own being. Participation and Practice through Ministry We have pointed in the direction of participation a number of times in the last two chapters. I have asserted in both chapters that we share in God’s being not by taking on God’s actualized form (this is to confuse the Creator and creature) but by taking on the form of God’s action, by sharing in it, by ourselves entering into ministry. Ministry itself opens up the possibility of the divine and human encounter. Christopraxis asserts that concrete and lived communities encounter the living Christ not as ideology or doctrine but as minister, as the one who comes to them as the event of new possibility in and through nothingness, ministering to them through the Spirit so that they might live in and with God. This is what Shirley, Lynn, and Margo describe when they state their sense of being “cared for” by God’s presence. Practical theology is fundamentally, at its disciplinary core, a field that studies living human documents. It must do so for the sake of ministry, yes, for the sake of health, revitalization, and justice, but these possibilities must be imagined not through the actuality of human effort but in dispositions of prayerful petition.1 This means that practical theology studies living human documents first and foremost for the sake of articulating divine encounter, to confess and proclaim how human beings experience and participate in the event of God’s becoming among concrete people like Ken, Ron, and Rachel. Practical theology constructs and examines practices, but these practices must be formed around the possibility-through-nothingness framework, freeing them from human actuality (we’ll see how Archer does this in part 1. Karl Barth shows how prayer is the linking of divine and human action but, as such, through ex nihilo. “Therefore Christian prayer is inevitably a confession of his own weakness and inability and unworthiness, of the whole lost condition in which he is discovered in the sight of God. It is an indication that his utterly empty hands are the only offering which he can bring before God and spread out before Him. . . . To pray in the Christian sense means to renounce all illusions about ourselves, and openly to admit to ourselves our utter need. The man who will...

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