I was listening to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Meet Me Halfway,” which was much better than I remember. I listen to them pretty regularly, but this somehow slipped my mind. I’m glad I rediscovered it.

There was a comment there: “It’s what Jesus does.” Meaning, Jesus meets us halfway. He does some things; we do the others. I appreciate the sentiment, but I was struck by how much people misunderstands the Gospel. Jesus does not meet us halfway. Jesus did everything. He did everything and then some—the fact that what he accomplished exceeded what any ordinary human could accomplish reflects the fact that man’s debt to God also exceeded what any person could pay. This is the glory of his passion. We cannot meet Jesus halfway because, as in Zeno’s paradox, even half of half of half of half, and so on, of that debt is an insurmountable infinitude. To atone for our sins, we would have needed to sacrifice not only ourselves, or even all of us, or even all the world ten times over. We would have needed to sacrifice a God—and he did that for us, though we deserved nothing.

Meeting Jesus halfway seems at first blush to be a concession of humility: That we should not expect Jesus/God to do everything for us. That we should work towards salvation, too. I suppose in this regard I am a Lutheran. Or something of a Lutheran, in terms of the bondage of the will… Attempts by humans to effectuate the divine in any way are doomed to fail. In the Scala Natura, man is represented as a half beast, half divine. We flatter ourselves because we experience the divine, and we have interacted with the divine, and so we think that part of us must be. But I think that the world already has a divine aspect, and as being in the world, then we will inevitably meet it. That does not mean we ourselves are divine; anything here on Earth could. Swine encountered divinity when Jesus expelled demons from within them.

For a bit there, I considered myself a Calvinist, believing that because of the ineffectual nature of human striving, those saved must be saved via the arbitrary/unfathomable will of God. My problem with Calvin is that he takes this to mean those damned were chosen by God to be damned as well—which is absolutely unacceptable. It is totally nonsensical for God to extend any of his Creation toward evil, whether it is by withdrawing his grace or any other mechanism. It makes more sense to me that his act of incarnating as man, through Jesus, represents salvation for all.