Dr. Junius Johnson

It's not in any way self-indulgent.

It's absolutely tied deeply into the point of the whole thing.

And it sets the tone because what it's about is it's about mediation.

It's about what does it look like for God's glory and grace to be transmitted to folks in an ordered way by means of the hierarchy that he has set up.

And how do we become the type of vessels that can allow as much of that grace as possible to pass through to those who are ordained to receive it from us, right?

And he's learned this from Thomas Aquinas, who argues that the reason bodies have to be someplace is so that they can have a specific place in the order and therefore receive grace from the things above them.

So there's a lot going on right at the very beginning there that's sort of – he's giving us a grammar, as it were, for this text in the same way that love was the grammar of Purgatorio.

This is still love but now transfigured into a different vein, a mediatorial graced vein.

Yeah, that's right.

You know, that question of Trasumanad is one that a friend of Father Wesley's and I, Hans Borsma, has taken up in his book.

And before the book came out, he read that chapter at the Boston Colloquy on historical theology, and I was the assigned respondent.

And so I sounded a note of caution about running with this notion of transhumanizing because you don't want to get into the anthropological version of docetism in the way that you interpret your soteriology, right?

Which is so easy to do in a world where we think to err is human is a true statement that doesn't need qualification.

when it isn't, right?

Because that belongs to fallen humanity, not to humanity as such.

And so we've lost sight of Lewis's... What Lewis is always trying to remind us of is that humanity is something way bigger than we think it is.

I love in Paralandra when Ransom sees Tor and Tenadriel unmasked for the first time and he falls at their feet and he says, "'Forgive me.

Do not try to raise me.

I've never seen a true human before.'"

And I'm blown away, right?