"My grace is sufficient for you"

"where one is heading—somewhere else—cannot exhaust the divine truth of the present.  'Here' cannot only be a pneumatic moment in its futurist or eschatological orientation.  Yet if that is so, then 'here' must allow for a complete divine presence whose shape is itself sufficient without appeal to some yet-to-be-grasped divine form.  It is always enough that 'we see Jesus.'  The pneumatic corollary of this is that the Spirit is just this 'enough.'

     "We might wish to explain why 'seeing Jesus' is enough—that is, explain what is the nature of 'enough-ness.'  This is, in part, the burden of 'theodicies of intimacy':  to the extent that they are theodicies at all, they must show in what way knowing God or seeing God [in the 'here' and 'now'] makes the suffering somehow worth it.  One might, in this light, simply assert the equivalence between the encounter with God and 'worth':  'Whom have I in heaven [but thee]?  and [there is] none upon earth [that] I desire beside thee' (Ps 73:25); 'As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness:  I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness' (Ps 17:15).  But in fact theodicies of intimacy often shift, despite themselves, into the kind of [pneumatico-]instrumentalist claims that most theodicies share.  With or without the apparatus of some kind of therapy of the soul, the vision of God that theodicies of intimacy propose—as encounter, union, or relation—is valuable because this vision is itself a 'defeat' of evil.  To say that evil is defeated in Christ, which is clearly a central Christian claim, is not however to say that suffering itself is redemptive.  One must say more.  Suffering is redemptive, more foundationally, only because Jesus suffers.  We do not know exactly what it means that Jesus suffers, however, unless we follow with him, a matter that simply kneads the surds of life into the rising dough of our obedience.  Divine intimacy is certainly present here; yet it is present in a way that is sufficient to the moment itself."

     Ephraim Radner, A profound ignorance:  modern pneumatology and its anti-modern redemption (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2019), 241-242, underscoring mine.  Needless to say, "pneumatic" is almost a dirty word here, as throughout the book (11 par. 3), a cipher for the Incarnation- and Cross-avoiding temptations of the (admittedly legitimate) theodicy of intimacy.  The Spirit just is this "enough" (Introduction, too, for example at p. 11), nor should we be looking for something more.  That there is "something better 'waiting' beyond this life" is a "necessary conviction if we are to ward off despair or angry cynicism against God" (239).  But it must not become the focus of a kind of pneumatic escapism, for it is the Spirit's job to drive us deeper into an opaque but authentically Christoform life of cruciform suffering in the here and now.  However:  "Jesus suffers."  Note the present tense.  Is that orthodox?