Christ is the act of producing a symbol of God’s righteousness only to give people access to his and its benefits. But since God is giving sinful and unrighteous people that access, the means of access is by faith in his righteousness through the symbol he produces of it, not directly to God. This operation is called mediation. Now, are we speaking only of Christ, the person as a mediator, or what he biblically signifies as well?
Now, a pause on this symbol thing. A symbol mediates meaning between one person and another person. It’s not the person or some cursory appearance, however, and it also not, strictly speaking, the meaning, but its the whole thing at once. It’s an abstract device, a strategy, and an event of information that gives the meaning of one person intelligibility, acceptance, and presence within another after its acceptance. The symbolic is the object and the phenomenon of its revelation. It’s the moment of the happening of the transfer of knowledge by something between one entity and another, which is the knowledge and the transmission. It’s the symbol and signification together as a mediator triggering a transfer of knowledge and an agreement over it. When this is applied to Christ, it only starts to become problematic when you single out meaning and symbol and apply either one or the other to him. But together, it looks a lot like a powerful entity of information an apparent and an abstract core, just as any person. It comes to accomplish a mission of revelation. Doing so, it leaves the scene.
Furthermore, not only does the symbol encompass something deeper among its parts. Every symbol is in a hierarchical relationship with other symbols that are more fundamental and foundational to its operation of getting the knowledge from its source of obscurity to clarity and effectiveness within another.
The Microsoft logo is a symbol, but only so in the sense of being a recreation of its real symbol, which is a vision and attitude and belief of the company specially tooled to give it power and presence within the mind as the company intends.
The company is a product, but also a distant, vast organization of many moving parts and people. The company aligns with the signification of its created symbols meant to summarize and token that organization in a simple form. Microsoft gets stuffed into a graphical shape and color. The intention of the graphical is to recreate in your mind the original fundamental “abstract” reality of the company. But the only symbol of the company in this is not physical.
This symbol, which is not material and which is in its original form, is the idea of Microsoft informed by that tangible symbol and everything you know about it. Such knowledge as your personal experiences, news article, gossip, exchanged opinions, and any other data. But, still, even that idea is not the original symbol for which an external, tangible one was created to influence and modify it. There is another one.
It is not there except for the nanosecond needed to open a hole in your awareness of that external company, the creator of the outer symbol. This opening is so that information will start to flow between them about Microsoft according to Microsoft’s wishes, and it’s tied to that event that began it, which is the real symbol, and real mediator here. A symbol is an object of knowledge and an event of the transfer of knowledge.
The merchant wants to tell you its there and its good. The consumer wants to know what’s there and is good. Microsoft creates the logo. It carries a particular emotion about what is extant and good for which the company wants association. To the extent that the logo already aligns with what you already know or can absorb about goodness, the conceptual symbol of the Microsoft of the extant and good, triggered by the physical logo, is re-instantiated in you. It’s transferred to your consciousness so your relationship with the company may positively be secured by a changed attitude about it in line with theirs.
What is first effected is your symbol of attitude by the knowledge of Microsoft that it is transmitting. But the new symbol that is changed and existing within consciousness by the external Microsoft symbol is one thing. The moment that this occurred is another, which is a fusion of the two lobes of the emblem, its form and its meaning — the fusion of the word of “Microsoft” with yours. Now, since symbols are in a hierarchy, and we believe that the hierarchy is external-to-internal-to-transcendent, this moment of communication, as well as instantaneous transference, is most importantly between man and God, then a man and himself and man and man. So what does this imply? To me, it looks a lot like conversion and evangelism.
First, don’t look for the symbol, because it’s not there except for a second, and it’s irreducible. The symbol is as much a phenomenon of connection as it is a carrier of information through which that connection it will pass. It is the real-time instantiation of knowledge, dynamically joining you to another, or you to your brain, or anything so obscure, big, complex, and confusing that it needs a means of simplification, summarization, and remembrance tagging. This strategy allows you to find and prioritize that information in a vast matrix of lower forms, collate, and make sense of it all. Recalled is the symbol, the connection made to that knowledge, and it recedes back into the ether after its work concludes. We know they all must exist objectively in the mind of God somehow, almost like spirits, and never destroyed, but everything else we call a symbol is only a copy, a facsimile of this real one. It’s not art, nor metaphor, nor word, nor analogy, nor any appearance, but a token, a second in time, a comprehensive and straightforward piece of knowledge and, by acceptance of another entity, an opening of worlds just before it retreats, having done its job. Everything else is a mere copy but a hard and inseparable link to it. It underscores again the truth about how far away we naturally are from doing this in our own power from the beginning. You can think you are the creator and destroyer of the fundamental symbols and meanings of existence. However, where God is concerned, a symbol is first a moment of revelation that is as unique and unreproducible as the proprietary Truth that it carries.
I think this symbolic fusion of knowledge and event into a person is a much more accurate picture of Christ, rather than to separate him in consciousness into either a physical presence and form, a person or an idea, or a mere collection of data and “truth” about him. It forces us to take into account the crucial importance of understanding that Christ is both Person and revelation. When he is not here physically his being is transferred to us in the form of an idea of transcendence linked to the specialized, revealed knowledge of him that he brought. That knowledge being paramount, with its exclusive personal idea a means of its spiritual control. The moment of the salvation of man instantiated by Christ is the same symbol understood as the moment of linkage, a moment where this Christ of God joins them because man’s spirit that corresponds with God’s. In return, God sees Man in his highest possible moral state and act of wanting that fusion.
Looking for the Transcendent Solution
I know—I’ll get to Irresistible Grace in a moment.
Philosophy, like a blind squirrel, occasionally stumbles upon a nut. But when it comes to the symbol—as existential fulcrum, as bridge between subject and object—it invariably reverts to human fabrication. Even at its highest, when it calls this bridge “reason” or “essence” or “noumenon,” it remains a symbol of man. Not of God. And thus, inevitably, it collapses under relativism or abstraction. It becomes a system of deferred meaning, a maze of mirrors reflecting only what is already within.
The philosophical attempts—transcendental realism, transcendental idealism, empirical idealism, empirical realism—are all essays in fusing immanence with transcendence, reality with appearance. But each begins with the same fatal presupposition: that the two can only meet through thought. That mind must mediate being. And that what is above us must submit to our categories before it can be known. And so, nothing ever is known—except the categories.
Theology, for all its claims to revelation, faces the same crisis. It does not possess a single, necessary symbolic object that can—by its very structure—fuse the divine and the human in a mutually intelligible, mutually consenting act of knowledge. Its symbols are doctrinal, propositional, abstract. They do not self-identify as transcendent—they merely claim to be. And so they hover. They instruct, but do not reveal. Or worse, they collapse into emotionalism, intuition, or mere private certitude.
The dilemma is this: the object is either too man-centered, and so God is reduced to sentiment; or too God-centered, and so man is obliterated beneath transcendence. Either way, the symbolic mediator fails. Nothing carries the weight. Nothing unites the ontological extremes. Doctrine is too brittle. Emotion is too self-referential. Intuition is too vaporous.
What is missing is not just a symbol, but a miracle. Not just a mediator, but one whose very essence fuses meaning and event, immanence and transcendence, in a way that neither abstraction nor experience can counterfeit.
Attempts to pair “reason” with “emotion,” “Bible” with “faith,” or “text” with “spirit” all run into the same epistemic dead-end. Faith becomes generic, Bible becomes everything, and nothing becomes demonstrative. To resolve this, one would need to isolate within Scripture something particular—something miraculous—and re-define faith solely as trust in that. But how, when Scripture itself is treated as an undifferentiated field of theological options, and faith is reduced to sincerity?
So again the question: what is a symbol that is also meaning? That cannot be separated from what it signifies because it is what it signifies? A symbol not of mental projection or physical referent, but of miraculous information—an event of revelation, not a pointer to one?
I am not speaking of the symbolic claim “God created the universe,” or “existence is material.” These are assertions, not manifestations. They are linguistic. But what I seek is a symbol that exists—that happens—as the very knowledge it transmits. A revelation that does not just say something true, but is the truth it says.
This is the difference between theology and revelation. Theology speaks of the divine. Revelation is the divine, arriving. And when that revelation arrives in a form both human and divine—both contingent and absolute—it becomes the symbol that all symbols are trying to be.
This is what I mean: the fount of divine knowledge, pure spiritual reality, Truth itself, sends out a facsimile—a lesser but exact projection—into the world of contingent objects. That symbol walks among us. It bears the fullness of knowledge, veiled in limitation. But its purpose is to open a path—to render the communication between God and man actual, not metaphorical.
Prior to this, the relationship is precarious. The glue is speculation. The connection is fabricated from the same brittle materials that constitute the subject and the object. We need a bridge built from something else entirely. From what is not here. From what is beyond. And that bridge must demonstrate itself as such. Which means: it must act. It must fulfill. It must prophesy and then walk into its own prophecy and become its meaning.
Faith, then, must emulate this. It must respond not to generalized intuition, but to that symbolic event—that revealed truth whose origin is clearly “not from here.” Only such a thing can grant peace. Only such a symbol can unite the poles of being and knowledge.
But where is this today? Where, in our churches and classrooms, is this meeting point? Where is the moment where man and God are truly reconciled in real knowledge—not in sentiment, not in syllogism, not in arbitrary moralism? It is not found in God alone, nor in man alone, nor in some agreed-upon theory. It is found only in the symbol that God himself gave of himself. The one that walked between heaven and earth and now, having vanished, leaves behind not a theory but a memory, a presence, a knowledge that stands in both worlds.
It cannot be called “alive” or “dead.” It is a manifestation. A shadow thrown across time from the shape of someone who fulfills prophecy and then disappears. A moment where knowledge is moral and miracle is intelligible. A point of contact so clear and so foreign that it can be accepted or rejected—but not misunderstood.
A symbol is like a lubricant between surfaces, an outlet between power and function. It is not part of either pole—but without it, the current doesn’t flow. It is the thing that makes incompatible worlds compatible for just long enough to transfer truth. What is needed, then, is a symbol so morally symmetrical, so ontologically confident, so resistant to replacement, that theology itself must either call it “God” or give up the search.
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