Before God - George W. Stroup
"[W]e live in a time when many people... no longer understand their daily lives as lived before God" (ix). Though many "spiritual" people believe in mystery and transcendence, this is "vastly different from believing that one's life, from beginning to end, is lived daily before God" (2). One can believe in God with no real sense of living life before God. And the good news is that “[i]n the language of the New Testament, that reality before whom people live is neither faceless mystery nor sheer otherness, but an intentionality described as ‘love’” (17). Stroup demonstrates how the entire biblical narrative is structured around life before God. He then argues that Jesus is "the one person who lives fully and authentically before God and before neighbor and in so doing is the epitome of true humanity or full human flourishing" (3). Our goal, then is to live before God - in the light and in the dark, whether we experience God's presence or absence - for all along the way our experience will be partial. We "know but in part" but one day we shall know "face to face" (1 Cor. 13:12). Our prayer - Come, Lord Jesus - acknowledges "both the reality of absence and a presence that is at least deferred and at best a trace” (184). Thus, we journey on: “Where there may be some sense of God’s presence during the pilgrimage or journey, that presence can be only partial, provisional, and momentary. If at any stage along the way God’s presence were full and complete, then the journey would be finished; it would have reached its final destination, life before God and life in the presence of God. The Christian life is both a journey before God and a journey to the God who is coming – the God who is coming to meet those who are both on the way and people of the way, who are becoming what they will be, in part, because they have engaged in that pilgrimage” (187).