Remanations
Remanations is a combination of two ideas: rumination and remanation.
“To ruminate” is to chew on, consider, meditate, contemplate, and ponder. It’s what cows do with cud. Ruminations are the result of ruminating.
“Remanation” is an Edwardsism (as in Jonathan). In reflecting on the end for which God created the world, Edwards wrote:
“The emanation or communication of the divine fullness, consisting in the knowledge of God, love to him, and joy in him, has relation indeed both to God and the creature:.. In the creature’s knowing, esteeming, loving, rejoicing in, and praising God, the glory of God is both exhibited and acknowledged, his fullness is received and returned. Here is both an emanation and remanation. The refulgence shines upon and into the creature, and is reflected back to the luminary. The beams of glory come from God, are something of God, and are refunded back again into their original. So that the whole is of God, and in God, and to God; and he is the beginning, and the middle, and the end.”
To translate, a remanation is an emanation on the rebound. It’s what light does after it hits the mirror. God pours himself into the world such that his glory is pervasive throughout. “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and that’s just the beginning. Nature, science, politics, economics, culture, history–if you can name it, God is in it.
But the glory of God is not content to stay there. It (He!) always returns to the origin. Ad fons! From him and through him and to him are all things.
Putting these two ideas (rumination and remanation) together, we discover an intriguing possibility for a blog: contemplate, meditate, think, consider, ponder and think upon all the ways that God is present in the world, all the ways that he is reflected in the things that he has said and done, his word and his works. Find him in everything. Like a big game of hide-and-seek. Look for remanations. Be a remanation.
Reflections on God’s Spoken World
Reflections, again, carries the double meaning. I’ll be doing some reflecting and I’ll be looking for reflections. “Beholding as in a mirror,” said the Apostle.
The last phrase in the sub-title, I must confess, is a borrowed one. In a soon-to-be-released book entitled Notes from the Tilt-a-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World, Nate Wilson sets out to explore “the narrative nature of the world and the Poet behind it all.” The world is “His poem. His play. His comedy.” We live in God’s Spoken World.
So there you have it. God is a communicative being. He’s always speaking in his two books: the Word and the world. Which means we must learn to read.
This blog is an attempt to do just that
