{"id":2509,"date":"2021-12-14T12:41:21","date_gmt":"2021-12-14T18:41:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/?p=2509"},"modified":"2021-12-25T12:26:00","modified_gmt":"2021-12-25T18:26:00","slug":"god-descends-into-dust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/2021\/12\/14\/god-descends-into-dust\/","title":{"rendered":"God Descends into Dust"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left\">&#8220;Majesty compressed himself to join to our dust the best thing he had, which is himself.\u00a0 God and dust, majesty and weakness, utter lowliness and utter sublimity\u00a0 were united in a single person.\u00a0 Nothing is more sublime than God, nothing is<span style=\"background-color: #ffffff\"> lower<\/span> than dust&#8211;and yet God descended into dust with great condescension and dust ascended into God with great honor, so that whatever God did in it, the dust is believed to have done, and whatever is the dust bore, God is said to have borne in it by a mystery as ineffable as it is incomprehensible.&#8221; Bernard of Clairvaux, \u201cOn the Eve of the Lord&#8217;s Birth, Sermon Three\u201d in <em>Sermons for Advent and the Christmas Season\u00a0 <\/em>(Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 2007), p. 66.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Bernard of Clairvaux, the famous twelfth-century Cistercian preacher, describes the Incarnation of Christ as the union of God and dust.\u00a0 God descends into the dust of humanity to redeem the dust itself. Notice, the dust ascended into God and received credit for whatever God-in-dust did.\u00a0 Previous to this section Bernard described how God created human beings from the dust of the ground then endowed them with sensation and reason.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">\u00a0<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Majesty compressed himself to join to our dust the best thing he had, which is himself.\u00a0 God and dust, majesty and weakness, utter lowliness and utter sublimity\u00a0 were united in a single person.\u00a0 Nothing is more sublime than God, nothing &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/2021\/12\/14\/god-descends-into-dust\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,82,106,145,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-bernard-of-clairvaux","category-christ","category-christmas","category-incarnation","category-theology","post_format-post-format-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2509"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2764,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2509\/revisions\/2764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.cune.edu\/matthewphillips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}