Absolute freedom – Forging Ploughshares

Between Calvin’s notion of double predestination and the idea of a fully developed human agency freely choosing (either heaven or hell), is the biblical picture of humans emerging in their fullness only in and through the work of Christ. Michelangelo’s sculpture, Awakening Slave, in which a human form appears to be emerging from stone, illustrates the biblical picture of this slowly emerging humanity. The slave is missing his head and the stone itself seems to have imprisoned the man. The dust (adamah), like the stone from whence the slave emerges, is both the substance and that which constrains Adam (humankind) – the tendency or pull is one of return to dust. Just as the sculpture is incomplete, Adam is declared incomplete apart from Eve yet, Eve is the foreshadowing of an emerging new humanity (the Church). The completion of man by the creation of woman, means creation is an open-ended process in which the whole inner basis of humankind (contained in the name Adam) is an ongoing realization. The Second Adam completes the emergence of the human capacity for image bearing but the dust constricts, in varying degrees, those passing from the first Adam to the Second. Paul pictures it both as an accomplished fact (“through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men” (Ro 5:18, NASB)) and an unfolding process (“through the obedience of the One the many will be made righteous” (Ro 5:19)). Continue reading “Emergent Freedom Versus Hellish Sovereignty: With Michelangelo”

Organized acts of evil, such as those witnessed over the weekend in Charlottesville, demonstrate the unleashing of ethics turned on its head. Organized evil driven by an ideology endorsed (with a wink and a nod) by the Commander in Chief means evil serves in place of the good. This is not the lawless evil of a random act; rather it is “radical evil” in which a perverse moral law is officially endorsed. The drive toward a pure race, the perfect socialist revolution, or making America great again, may not overtly promote genocide, mass murder, and white supremacy, but the latter is implicit in the former. The walls must be built, the foreigners expelled, and the “inferior races” subdued in a world in which the ultimate good is a moral law constituted in the reigning ideology. The neo-Nazis and the white supremacists are at the service of an ethic that has now been voted into place and which indeed hearkens back to an earlier era. The American electorate has created the space, through the election of this administration, for these groups to do the dirty work of maintaining the very atmosphere which we breathe[1] – the implicit presumption of white supremacy which is at the foundation of the American idea. Continue reading “The Heart of Darkness: The Appeal of Donald Trump”