Author: Paul Axton

Paul V. Axton spent 30 years in higher education teaching theology, philosophy, and Bible. Paul’s Ph.D. work and book bring together biblical and psychoanalytic understandings of peace and the blog, podcast, and PBI are shaped by this emphasis.

Jesus as Temple Recapitulation: Gillian Rose and the Transformation of Historical Good Friday into Speculative Good Friday

The Temple was not only the center of Jewish religion but of the society, culture, and of the law of Israel. Jesus as Temple recapitulation (see here), means that Christ in some way fulfills the various roles of the Temple within himself and the extended meaning of who he is (in the church and in his disciples). This is not simply Temple destruction though, but fulfillment and completion in process (thus recapitulation). The Temple is representative, one piece of the larger implication of the incarnation, that redemption is worked through history and society and that truth is not to be had apart from the socio-cultural orders which constitute humanness. The Temple is the concrete point, fulfilled in the incarnation, that Emmanuel (God with us) reveals and makes himself known humanly, socially, in relationship. God in Christ is not known on some other basis, a transcendent or apophatic unknowing. God can be thought, and this cognition of God in Christ has social import, and is first and above all else something of social and personal import. In Hegelian terms taken up by Gillian Rose, “The idea which a man has of God corresponds with that which he has of himself, of his freedom.”[1] Knowing God in Christ pertains to knowledge of self as part of the social order. Not that God decides to intervene historically, socially, and culturally as opposed to some other means, as if this is one arbitrary possibility. Christ intervenes in all things human, such as family, religion, and politics so as to reorder ethics, values, and truth itself. No longer are natural ethical bonds of family (the “natural” polity and public life) determinant of truth and value, as one who would be a disciple of Christ must “let the dead bury the dead” (Lk 9:60). Those worthy of Christ must reprioritize their definition of love, not in addition to knowing Christ, but this is knowing him.

On the other hand, if God is not known on this basis, then knowledge is not available in the human realm. “If ‘God’ is unknowable, we are unknowable, and hence powerless.”[2] But the way in which God is known, is the way in which truth about all things are discerned. The Pauline recommendation to “act as if not” (I Cor 7:29) in regard to marriage, mourning, and business, is of the same order as Christ’s, “let the dead bury the dead.” God cannot be known through the value system of a corrupt society, so money, marriage, and one’s station in the world, are to be treated “as if not” – or detachment, otherwise God is not known. It is “natural” to organize identity around capital, around death, or around race and status. Suspending this realm is on the same order as suspending the punishing effects of the law; the Temple, marriage, death, and law, are not abolished, but their priority is suspended. “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mk 12:17). Caesar, the state, and even the Temple, are not annulled, but their obligations are not definitive. Imperial rule, sacrificial religion, and state security, demand one’s life be invested in a false identity. The question may be what we owe this system and how we negotiate it? According to Rose, building on Hegel, this question cannot be answered apart from taking up the cross (speculative Good Friday) in response to historical Good Friday.

In Rose and her portrayal of Hegel, the distinction between religion and state puts everyone in the place of a “broken middle” from which we cannot be extracted, this side of the eschaton. Christ’s intervention into the social order creates a split, that is always impinging and shaping our grasp of the Truth. Marcus Pound describes this “middle” as a “third space, not a unitary space (e.g. the neutral space of secular liberalism) but a place of anxiety to the extent it is the sheer ‘givenness’ of the political and ethical situation which resists the retreat into sanctified beginnings or utopian ends.”[3] There is no simple unifying of difference through ethics or politics or religion.

God can be known but this knowing is never without the process of Temple-like recapitulation. Knowing Christ is not thinking ourselves out of the world but it is a reordering and an emergent understanding within the world. God can be known but this knowing presents a gap, a struggle, a suspension that is working toward a synthesis always in process. We are surrounded by and inundated with untruth, misrecognition, prejudice, greed, and desire, so that the ordering of our values and arrival at the truth is always in media res, or in the midst of the story. Destroy this Temple and a new one is being built; this death and resurrection are being worked out corporately and individually.

In this sense, Christ as Logos is not a discontinuation of law or the symbolic order, but the law of love takes up where the letter, the scriptures, the Temple leave off. The letter is required for the word, and the word is transformed and filled out by the Logos, and in the same way the social order, the legal order, the religious order, or simply the symbolic order are the medium but not the end. The letter is not ultimately determinative any more than the social order is final, which is not to say the aporia between politics and ethics and the universal and particular, are evaded in some postmodern atheism, or fundamentalist utopianism. The telos is at work in the “broken middle” where we live. Thinking occurs here, and thus there is no evading the symbolic, the law, or the social, by imagining the “expectant city” is already our address. Rose explains,  by comparing the choices offered by Mark Taylor and John Milbank, who put us between “ecstasy and eschatology, the promise of touching our own most singularity [Taylor] and the irenic holy city [Milbank], precisely without any disturbing middle.”[4] Pound extends this critique by appealing to Rose’s general critique of French thought as “melancholic” drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia in that “they see life as founded on absence that we’re always illegitimately trying to make present” (inclusive of Jacques Lacan’s and Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy).[5]

Rose claims we live in a time when philosophy has damaged and destroyed itself: “One by one all of the classical preoccupations of philosophy have been discredited and discarded: eternity, reason, truth, representation, justice, freedom, beauty and the Good. The dismissal of ‘metaphysics’ is accompanied by the unabated search for a new ethics.”[6] She sets forth her alternative in Mourning Becomes the Law: “The just city . . . is not built by the abandonment of reason or the proclamation of uncompromised virtue. It is built by faith in the achievements of even ruined reason and in the different chances of politics that are not ashamed of themselves.”[7] She begins with Antigone, illegally mourning her brother Polynices (declared a traitor) outside the city gates: “In these delegitimate acts of tending the dead, these acts of justice, against the current will of the city, women reinvent the political life of the community.”[8]

The death of Christ, the destruction of the Temple, and the resurrection of Christ (the Temple reconstituted), point to this mourning recognition of the injustices of the city. “To acknowledge and to re-experience the justice and the injustice of the partner’s life and death is to accept the law, it is not to transgress it – mourning becomes the law. Mourning draws on transcendent but representable justice, which makes the suffering of immediate experience visible and speakable.”[9] To not acknowledge the injustice of the city is to endorse its violence and injustice. The blood of Able, of Antigone, of Christ, cry out against the violence of the Temple, of the priests, of the Romans, of the city. Mourning acknowledges the injustice and the violence: “When completed, mourning returns the soul to the city, renewed and reinvigorated for participation, ready to take on the difficulties and injustices of the existing city. The mourner returns to negotiate and challenge the changing inner and outer boundaries of the soul and of the city; she returns to their perennial anxiety.”[10]

The disciples do not abandon the Temple, as if it is corrupt and finished after Christ, but they continue meeting in the Temple courts (Acts 2:46). To oppose the ethic of love against the law, is to miss that love incorporates, lifts up, corrects, and completes the inadequacies of the law. “To oppose new ethics to the old city, Jerusalem to Athens, is to succumb to loss, to refuse to mourn, to cover persisting anxiety with the violence of a New Jerusalem masquerading as love.”[11] The violence embedded in the structures of the city (the “principalities and powers”) are exposed by the injustice of the one killed outside the city, and to pass over this, is to let the injustice stand.

Rose sees this as the great failing of the church, as it has aligned itself with the state and as it has ceased to critique the injustices of the city. “The history of the Christian religion is the history of its relation to secular power and to ethical life, and this history is the history of the perversion of the Christian ideal of freedom. Christianity perpetuated the lack of freedom of Roman institutions, and the even greater bondage of feudal property forms and political institutions.”[12] The church became an ethical power by eliding the contradiction between state ethics and Christian ethics. Slavery, the oppression of women, military and judicial violence (the ethics of the state) were allowed to stand: “this cannot be acknowledged by a church which debases the ethical, and Christian doctrine has therefore justified both the evil and the just acts committed in its name.”[13] The possibility of Christian civilization was at the price of a degraded Christian ethic allowing for an oxymoronic “Christian barbarity.”

Rose traces Hegel’s presentation of history, as one in which Christian freedom and ethics are perverted, by Rome, by Germany, by France and then this failure is reified in the philosophy of Kant and Fichte. “It is like the Roman in that it has no vocation to impose itself on the state, for it serves the state. Just as in the time of the Roman empire political life [is] universally devoid of principle.”[14] Hegel describes a Gospel that is no longer salty, in which its very foundations have been removed: “The latter have, it is true, brought life to themselves by means of reflection, have found their satisfaction in finitude, in subjectivity and its virtuosity, and consequently in what is empty and vain, but the substantial kernel of the people cannot find its satisfaction there.”[15] This is the opposite of speculative Good Friday; a betrayal of historical Good Friday.

Rose’s philosophy, embracing “mourning” in the “broken middle,” might be read as a meditation on the how of Hegel’s recommendation to transform the historic Good Friday into the speculative or apprehended Good Friday. “To do this, philosophy must form ‘a sanctuary apart’, ‘an isolated order of priests’. Hegel draws attention to this status of philosophy in order not to impose its concept. The priests are not to act as Christian priests have done; they are to remain isolated.”[16] Her conclusion: “This is how the philosophy of history should be conceived, not as a teleology of reconciliation, not as replacing the exhausted attempt to create a Christian civilization, but as perpetual repetition, as the perpetual completing of the historic Good Friday by the speculative Good Friday. There is no end of religion and no end of history, but a perpetual ‘speculative justification’ to complete the faith which ‘justifies nothing’.”[17]

Temple building begins with “destroy this Temple” and acknowledgement of its death in baptism. Paul pictures the ‘body of sin’ as in process of being reduced to the ‘nothing’ from whence it came (Rom 6:6) through a reversal of the power it exercises. To die with Christ in baptism is to be joined to a form, bringing about an alternative conformity (Rom 6.5; Philippians 3.10-11, 21). He encourages his followers to live out their baptism, to realize the death they have died and to participate ethically (to live out) the reality of resurrection. The work of Temple building is an ongoing engagement in human brokenness achieving this resurrection life.

[1] G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophie der Religion, I, 83, tr. I, 79. Cited in Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, (New York: Verso, 2009) 98.

[2] Rose, 2009, 98.

[3] Marcus Pound, “Political Theology and Comedy: Žižek through Rose Tinted Glasses” (https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2015-02-09/pound.pdf) 183.

[4] Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) 285. Cited in Pound, 184-185.

[5] Pound, 186, citing Rose 1992, pp. 102-104.

[6] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 1.

[7]  Ibid, from the blurb by Michael Woods.

[8] Ibid, 35.

[9] Ibid, 36.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Rose, 2009, 124.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Hegel, Philosophie der Religion, II, 342–3, tr. III, 150. Cited in Rose, 2009, 126.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Rose, 2009, 127.

[17] Ibid.

Jesus as Temple Recapitulation in Matthew

Nearly every ancient people and culture has its own creation myth, which does not repair what was broken but simply starts again, in a sort of cosmic version of the film Groundhog Day, but the story of Christ as a recapitulation of the history of Israel may be the exception. This history recapitulates and in the process repairs, corrects and completes, what went wrong and is broken. But maybe as in the film version, getting it right is the true event and the failures turn out to have been dead ends which are erased and forgotten. So true creation, true Temple, true Adam, true Israel, in Christ precede the other versions in terms of reality. Irenaeus first recognized, or at least developed this doctrine of recapitulation, which may be most conspicuously on display in the book of Matthew. Matthew is recapitulating creation, the history of Israel, and the formation of the Temple, in his telling of the life of Christ.[1] The concept may be best illustrated in the case of the Temple; Christ is the true Temple replacing the model which served to point to him.

Jesus as New Creation and True Temple

Jesus as new creation and true Temple are the same idea, as creation and the cosmos are symbolized by the Temple, and so Jesus is the source of life, the realization of the presence of God and the perfection of creation. Just as the Temple symbolically pictured God emerging from his dwelling place into the world, so too Christ is filling the earth through his extended family. Most creation stories tell of the origin of the head of the race and then by providing a genealogy of the royal family, explain the formation of the people. Matthew begins his creation story with the genealogy of Jesus, “the book of the generation” of Jesus, the genesis of divine presence in all creation. This one “who is called Christ” (1:16b) will “make disciples of all the nations” (28:19) and will thus fulfill the mandate given to Adam and Eve to “fill the earth” (Gen 1:28). He fills all things, not through procreation but by endowing with his Spirit, made eternally present (Mt 28:20).

The Temple is not the dwelling place of God, and this was supposed to have been understood: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?” (Is. 66:1). Neither a physical city, nor a building, nor a host of rituals, produced God’s presence, but in Emmanuel what the Temple only represented is realized. God with us in Christ makes the Temple obsolete, just as it is unnecessary in the heavenly city: “I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Re 21:22). Emmanuel is the reality of the holy of holies, not through ritual but through his relational presence: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them” (Re 21:3). This is not a limited, mediated or interrupted access but is unrestricted.

Jesus as Universal Temple: As Demonstrated by the Magi

According to S.L. Black, this new “approach” (προσέρχομαι) to God’s presence is reflected in Matthews distinctive deployment of this unique term: “people ‘approach’ Jesus with reverence rather than merely coming to him.”[2] He is approachable, but the term carries the sense of awe before Christ’s majesty and divine dignity. The term is employed some fifty-two times by Matthew to describe the tempter (4:3), angels (4:11), his disciples (5:1) and a host of others who approach him. For example, “a leper approached Him and bowed down before Him, and said, ‘Lord, if You are willing, you can make me clean’” (Mt 8:2). It is the word used to describe approaching God in prayer (in Mark 11:17; Luke 6:12). In Matthew it is combined with bowing down, as in the above instance, indicating what might be typically done in prayer and worship in the Temple.

It is what the Magi do when they find the baby Jesus, and in fact the entire episode of the Magi reflects activity normally associated with the Temple: “After coming into the house they saw the Child with Mary His mother; and they fell to the ground and worshiped Him. Then, opening their treasures, they presented to Him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (Mt 2:11). Gentiles like the magi or the Ethiopian eunuch would normally come to Israel to worship at the Temple where they would offer up gifts. Elsewhere in Matthew, gifts (dṓron) “is used exclusively … for offerings to God” in the context of the Temple.”[3] Norman Francis argues that the gifts themselves are of the kind associated with the Temple: the inner chambers of the Temple are inlaid with gold (1 Kgs 6:20-21) and frankincense myrrh are offered up in the Temple. Pure frankincense was to be offered in the Tent of Meeting (Ex 30: 34-36) and was burnt with the meal offerings (“lay frankincense on it; it is a grain offering” – (Le 2:15)) and it was part of the weekly Sabbath bread offering (“And you shall put pure frankincense on each pile, that it may go with the bread as a memorial portion as a food offering to the Lord” – (Le 24:7)). Myrrh was sprinkled in the Holy of holies, including on the Ark of the Covenant: “Take the finest spices: of liquid myrrh 500 shekels . . . And you shall make of these a sacred anointing oil blended as by the perfumer; it shall be a holy anointing oil. With it you shall anoint the tent of meeting and the ark of the testimony” (Ex 30:22–26). So the magi are the beginning of the nations converging on the Temple (Is 2:2-3).

Ezekiel’s Vision of the Temple Fulfilled in Christ

At Jesus baptism there are a series of events echoing Ezekiel’s vision of a heavenly temple: the heavens are opened, God speaks, and the Spirit descends. The Spirit “lights” on Jesus like the Spirit hovering over the waters in Genesis (1:2) marking the new creation and its Temple described in Ezekiel. Both occur during a time of foreign domination at a river (Eze 1:1; Mt 3:13) and both are a direct revelation through the voice of God (Eze 1:3; Mt 3:17). Jesus though, is called the “Son of God,” while Ezekiel is called “Son of man.” The Spirit does not “light” on Ezekiel but lifts him onto his feet and speaks to him alone (Eze 2:2). The Spirit descends and lights on Jesus, like a dove. This “lighting” of the Spirit is unique to Matthew and is specific to God’s presence “lighting on the Temple.” According to N. Perrin, “where the Spirit settles, there one finds the Temple.”[5] The proclamation, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased” (Mt 3:17) gives divine notice that God is now with us.

In Ezekiel’s vision “The Lord is there” (Eze 48:35) is the name given to the city in his vision. This city of God’s presence is a picture of the cosmic Temple, which in each of its dimensions is impossibly squared: “The city (48:15-16), the Temple courtyard (41:13-14), its outer walls (42:15-20), inner court (40:47), holy of holies (41:4), and altar of burnt offerings (43:13-17), etc., are all perfect squares.”[4] The square is representative of perfect holiness, and in Ezekiel God departs from the defiled Temple but returns to the perfectly squared holy Temple (43:13ff): “Son of man, this is the place of My throne and the place of the soles of My feet, where I will dwell among the sons of Israel forever” (Eze 43:7). It is a “coming” eschatological city while at Jesus baptism, God has “come.”

In Ezekiel’s vision, waters of life flow from out of the Temple: “It will come about that every living creature which swarms in every place where the river goes, will live. And there will be very many fish, for these waters go there and the others become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes” (Eze 47:9). Along the river fruit trees sprout up, and they will never fail to provide fruit and their leaves are for healing (Eze 47:12). Jesus healing in the Temple (Matt. 21:12-17) and his healing ministry follow Ezekiel’s Temple signs. According to Francis, “Like the stream originating from Ezekiel’s visionary Temple, Jesus now becomes the source of healing, wholeness and abundance. Moreover, Jesus’ commissioning of his disciples to ‘make disciples of all the nations’ (28:19) is probably intended by Matthew to be read as analogous to the ever-expanding reach of the Temple’s healing stream in Ezekiel’s vision.”[6]

The Recommissioning of Israel in the Twelve

Jesus sends out his disciples, equipped as priests, serving the Temple rather than travelers: “Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts, or a bag for your journey, or even two coats, or sandals, or a staff; for the worker is worthy of his support” (Mt 10:9–10). In Alfred Edersheim’s description this fits preparation for serving in the Temple:

 Thus ‘no man might go on the Temple Mount with his staff,’ as if on business or pleasure; nor yet ‘with shoes on his feet’—sandals only being allowed; nor ‘with the dust upon his feet’; nor ‘with his scrip,’ nor ‘with money tied to him in his purse.’ Whatever he might wish to contribute either to the Temple, or for offerings, or for the poor must be carried by each ‘in his hand,’ possibly to indicate that the money about him was exclusively for an immediate sacred purpose. It was probably for similar reasons that Jesus transferred these very ordinances to the disciples when engaged in the service of the real Temple.[7]

The twelve disciples, the recapitulated tribes of Israel, are sent into Galilee and eventually the world to bring God’s kingdom to the world. In their preaching and healing they are carrying out the work of new creation: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give” (Mt 10:8). They are curing the world of fallenness as they radiate out from Jesus, the New Temple, the central presence of God.

Jesus as Lord of the Sabbath is the New Temple

The Temple is the place in which the Sabbath rest for God occurs: “Let us go into His dwelling place; let us worship at His footstool. Arise, O Lord, to Your resting place, you and the ark of your strength” (Ps 132:7–8). It is a symbolic place of rest, promising a true Sabbath. Jesus in proclaiming himself “Lord of the Sabbath” (Mt 12:8) also explains “that something greater than the temple is here” (Mt 12:6). He fulfills the role of the Temple in providing the promised rest: “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS” (Mt 11:28–29).

Jesus as the Shekinah

After six days, perhaps echoing entry into the seventh day of rest, Jesus is transfigured and shows forth his divine glory: “Six days later Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up on a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light” (Mt 17:1–2). Moses and Elijah appear with him, and the scene echoes God’s appearance to Moses: “The glory of the LORD rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it for six days; and on the seventh day He called to Moses from the midst of the cloud” (Ex 24:16). The shekinah refracts off a cloud for Moses, and then his own face shines as a result, but Jesus is the source of light in the transfiguration. “His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light” (Mt 17:2). He is the enduring shekinah represented in Exodus and associated for a time with the tabernacle and temple, but which was withdrawn. Jesus’ influence spreads throughout Israel and beyond (Mt 4:24-25) growing until he is all in all (I Cor 15:28) filling the world with his glory. As Edersheim concludes, “His feet have trodden the busy streets of Jerusalem, and the shady recesses of the Mount of Olives; His figure has ‘filled with glory’ the Temple and its services; His person has given meaning to the land and the people; and the decease which He accomplished at Jerusalem has been for the life of all nations.”[8]

Conclusion: The Body of Christ, the Church is the Temple

I have only begun to introduce the material in Matthew echoing and fulfilling the Temple, but in conclusion of part 1, it is enough to point to the commissioning of the disciples at the end of Matthew to go into all of the world to complete the Temple project: “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and he Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Mt 28:18–20). Christ, as the new Temple, seeks to expand God’s presence over the whole earth through the work of his disciples. As Paul describes, the church is the ongoing Temple project “being fitted together” and “growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit” (Eph 2:21-22).

[1] Joel Kennedy has developed the concept in the first four chapters of Matthew, as he describes: “the summing up of Israel’s history in Jesus’ early life; Jesus as the corporate representative of his people Israel; and Jesus as the embodiment of Israel in his recapitulation.” J. Kennedy, The Recapitulation of Israel: Use of Israel’s History in Matthew 1:1-4:11 (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 3-4.

[2] Stephanie L. Black, Sentence Conjunctions in the Gospel of Matthew: Kai, De, Tote, Gar, Oun and Asyndeton in Narrative Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2002) 221. Cited in Norman O. Francis, Jesus as the Fulfillment of the Temple and its Cult in the Gospel of Matthew (Edinburgh: Unpublished Doctor of Philosophy Thesis: The University of Edinburgh 2020) 141.

[3] Robert Horton Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Handbook for a Mixed Church under Persecution (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub., 1994), 32. Cited in Francis, 144.

[4] Francis, 152.

[5] N. Perrin, Jesus the Temple, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010) 70. Cited in Francis, 153.

[6] Francis, 153-154.

[7] Alfred Edersheim, The Temple–Its Ministry and Services (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library) 29

[8] Edersheim, 6.

The Sign Given in the Temple: Sacrificial Violence is Ended

When asked for a sign, Jesus says he will only give the sign of Jonah, but then in the Temple incident, when asked for a sign, he says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (Jn 2:19). Both signs refer to his death and resurrection, though in the Temple Jesus uses the active verb “destroy” to indicate the manner by which he would die. Both incidents are surrounded by violence: the violence of the sea, the violence of the Temple sacrifices, the violence of Nineveh, the violence of the Jews and Rome, and it is this violence in both the sign of Jonah and in the Temple incident that accounts for his death. The sign of Jonah entails the anger of Jonah toward his enemies, duplicated in the Pharisaical anger turned on Jesus (see here), the same anger directed at protecting the Temple, which will kill Jesus.

Jesus is like Jeremiah, who predicted the destruction of the Temple and whose life was then threatened: “When Jeremiah finished speaking all that the LORD had commanded him to speak to all the people, the priests and the prophets and all the people seized him, saying, “You must die!” (Je 26:8). In this sign, Jesus ties his death to the threat he poses to the Temple, and all that it represents. His claim of the Temple being a “robber’s den,” is not so much that bad people have corrupted a good system, but as in Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Temple itself is behind the robbery. The English word “robber” may not capture the meaning of léstés, an armed thief who steals by use of threat of violence. Cleaning up this system, is more than getting rid of the money changers. God, in Jeremiah, claims the institution is a den of “robbers” (7:11) and that setting up this system of sacrifices was not his idea: “For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Je 7:22). It is not that the moneychangers are charging unfair rates, but the Temple is incurring a violent debt and making thieves of all involved in its operation. God describes it as a place of institutionalized murder, oppressing “the alien, the orphan, or the widow, and shedding “innocent blood in this place” (7:5). The issue is destruction of the entire system, which Jesus intimates in saying “destroy this Temple,” and in describing its end.

As God says in Isaiah, “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle; And I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls, lambs or goats” (Is 1:11). God hates the system: “I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, they have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing them” (Is 1:14). He equates the system with murder: “So when you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide My eyes from you; Yes, even though you multiply prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood” (Is 1:15). We may tend to read these verses as saying they are killers in spite of the Temple, but what is described is a system that is inherently violent, obviously in the slaughter of animals but also in promoting scapegoating sacrifice. “Bring your worthless offerings no longer, incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies— I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly” (Is 1:13).

Jesus disrupts the sacrifices in the Temple, (echoing Jeremiah that it is a den of violent thieves), as the institution is robbing people of their life. It shelters murder and violence as part of Jewish identity.[1] The driving out of the animals is not simply concerned with money, but is a symbolic ceasing of the sacrificial economy; a momentary saving of the animals from slaughter as a metaphorical end to the murderous system. During his action in the Temple, Mark says “he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple” (Mk 11:16). Some translations call this “merchandise” but it is not items for sale but the items necessary for the sacrifices as in Hebrews 9:21: “all the vessels used in worship.” According to Anthony Bartlett, “In short, there is a whole paraphernalia necessary for the conduct of sacrifice – shovels, barrels, buckets, bowls, pans, trays, censers, etc. These would have been used to ferry wood, ashes, oil and grain offerings, grain cakes, and the animal body parts remaining in sin offerings, peace offerings/thanksgiving offerings sacrifices (cf. Leviticus 2-7).”[2] Jesus was disrupting the entire system of the Temple, of which the money changers were one small part. The sellers and consumers, patrons and priests, or all that are involved are interrupted. He symbolically halts the entire system, and in his person he makes it obsolescent. He predicts this will cause his death, but that is part of the point, so as to expose the violence at the heart of the system; the violence that killed him and which he defeated in the cross and the resurrection.

The driving out of the animals puts a direct focus on the sacrifices but all understood the animals are symbolic. The sacrificial victims Jesus is driving out of the Temple represent his sheep, delivered from sacrificial violence. In Matthew Jesus seems to accentuate the point, healing “the blind and the lame” who came to Him in the temple” in the midst of this incident (Mt 21:14). These are oppressed by the Temple system, but Jesus opens a new way for these “sinners” the Temple did not pretend to help. “All who came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (Jn 10:8–11). Jesus implicates all who were previously shepherding Israel: “All who came before Me are thieves and robbers.” His is a universal statement, but of course the bandits (those who would “kill and destroy” the sheep), along with all the patrons are saved from the robbery of this death dealing system. By the time John writes, the Temple, along with its sacrifices and priesthood, are long gone, but all understood even in the synoptics, Jesus had provided a door out of the sacrificial economy and entry into an alternative Kingdom. The Sheep Gate into Jerusalem accentuated the purpose of the Temple to sacrifice, and Jesus opens a new sheep gate: “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep” (Jn 10:7). This shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, driving them from the deadly system to which they were subject.

Halting the sacrifices, also entails an implicit political dimension involving Rome. When Israel decided to cease offering sacrifices in the Temple on behalf of the emperor in 66 AD, according to Josephus: “This action laid the foundation of the war with the Romans.”[3] An army, the size of the Roman Army that eventually destroyed the Temple, would have been necessary to permanently halt the sacrifices, but Jesus symbolically accomplished the same thing. The disruption produces a sacrificial crisis, of the sort which would eventually consume the Temple and Israel. The priests and Pharisees foresaw this possibility, which was behind their decision to kill him: “If we let Him go on like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation” (Jn 11:48). Jesus death would not ward off Rome’s eventual sacrifice of Israel in its own sacrificial economy, and Christ is aware he is potentially unleashing unprecedented violence: “The whole of archaic humanity, and one thousand years of intense Jewish religious history culminating in the present crisis of Roman occupation, would have risen up against him.”[4] The Jews momentarily forestalled the all-out violence by collaborating with Rome in Jesus death, but eventually a new round of sacrificial violence would consume the Temple, but Christ had made provision for a new Temple and a new, nonviolent, way of being human.

Combined with the imagery of the triumphal entry, it is clear the violent world of warring kingdoms, attached to Israel and the Temple, is being halted by a new kind of king and kingdom: “Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zec 9:9). This is not a king prepared for battle, but one equipped to end the sacrifices of war, religion and violence. He is described as (ani) humble, poor or oppressed. Elsewhere such a one is a victim of murder: “The murderer arises at dawn; He kills the poor and the needy, and at night he is as a thief” (Job 24:14). The humble are the victims, not the victimizers; one who must give up his coat as part of a pledge, and likely homeless and without another cloak (Deut 24:12-13). This humble and meek King does not come to sacrifice, but to halt violent sacrifice: “I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem; and the bow of war will be cut off. And He will speak peace to the nations; and His dominion will be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth” (Zec 9:10). This is the imagery Jesus is purposely echoing in his entrance into Jerusalem and the Temple.

This is also why John the Baptist marks the end of this violent type kingdom: “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Mt 11:11–12). John is the last in the line of those who, like Elijah, possess “the kingdom in a way that is alien to the kingdom itself.”[5] The violence of the kingdom, the sacrificial economy of the Temple, the warring destruction of Israel, was not the kind of kingdom God would establish. This violent sort of kingdom is finished with Jesus: “May no one ever eat fruit from you again!” (Mk 11:14). The fig tree representing the Temple is dead and finished. As he says right after the Temple incident, the Temple Mt. is subject to being cast into the sea, and the disciples can already live out their faith, in its absence (Mk 11:22-26). As Bartlett points out the two incidents are tied together in a mutual explanation: “It is much more intelligible to hear him referring exactly to this event, using the withering of the fig tree as a parable of what will now happen to the Temple and its sacrificial order.”[6] The fig tree will bear no more fruit, the Temple system is finished, and can now be discarded into the sea. “The mountain Jesus is speaking of is the temple Mt., and the movement is entry into a fulness of forgiveness, no longer dependent on the ritual of sacrificial violence.”[7]

Jesus is himself the alternative to the Temple, exposing its continual blood sacrifice and ongoing violence, made evident as that which sacrifices Jesus. He is sacrificed in an effort to preserve the Temple and its deadly economy, and in the process he displaces sacrificial religion. The sign of Jonah and the sign of the Temple, stand against the scapegoating sacrifice of Nineveh and scapegoating Temple sacrifice. Jesus knew that halting the sacrifices, would produce the sign of Jonah in his murder, the destruction of the Temple of his body and his resurrection, defeating this order of violence and sacrifice. Just as Jonah is three days in the earth symbolically delivered from death (sheol), Jesus, the destroyed Temple, is three days in Hades or Hell, cleansing the world of hellish violence and providing resurrection life, free of sacrificial violence in a new Temple order.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 167.

[2] Bartlett, 166.

[3] Josephus, Bellum Judaicum II: 408, cited in Bartlett, 142.

[4] Bartlett, 146.

[5] Bartlett, 155.

[6] Bartlett, 163.

[7] Bartlett, 162.

The Sign of Jonah as the Major Semiotic Shift of Scripture

“An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet” (Matt 12:39).  

Taking into account the context of Jonah, contrasting particularly with Nahum, and then accounting for Jesus’ direct and indirect references to Jonah, what unfolds in the Gospels is not just another sign but a semiotic shift, in which one order of signs and meaning is displaced by another (the sign of Jonah). Jesus’ singular sign is not the sort his hearers will recognize as such, because it is a sign of a different order; not another miracle, but a foundational shift as to how signs are constituted. The immediate contrast posed in Matthew is with the expected sign of an “adulterous generation,” judged by the men of Nineveh who “repented at the preaching of Jonah” (v. 41). This generation will also be judged by the “Queen of the South” who “came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon” (v. 42). There is a new order of wisdom, greater than Solomon, in the sign of Jonah. It exceeds the imagined wisdom of this crooked generation and even exceeds the pinnacle of Hebrew wisdom. The sign of Jonah taken up by Christ, in Anthony Bartlett’s description, “is a deliberate manipulation of familiar biblical DNA to produce a remarkably new mutation.”[1]

Jonah, like Ruth, stands against the prejudice and exclusivity of the Jews in its story of Jonah’s mission to Nineveh (the capital city of Assyria, the foremost enemy of the Jews), but it is also a reversal of the Hebrew view of God, in which God punishes the wicked and rewards the good. No one, in Jewish estimate, could exceed the evil of Nineveh, and yet in the book of Jonah, God cares for the Ninevites in the same way he cares for the Jews. Jonah counters the theodicy typified by Deuteronomy, that taken up by the Maccabees and inherited by the Pharisees in the time of Jesus, in which rewards and punishment can be traced in the rise and fall of nations. The problem is Jerusalem is threatened by Assyria but God would save Nineveh, the capital city of this enemy. To accentuate the problem the pagans, in Jonah, are more responsive to God than God’s prophet (serving perhaps as a typical Jew).

Having received his call to preach to Nineveh, Jonah flees toward Tarshish, the Timbuktu of his day beyond any known outpost of Israel and its God, and in the opposite direction of Nineveh. We only learn at the end of the book that he is fleeing, fearful that God would have compassion on the Ninevites (4:2 echoing Exodus 34:6-7): “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.” Jonah fears Nineveh will repent and God will relent in punishing them; an unusual problem for a prophet. Where Abraham argued that God should not destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, cities which received no prophet, Jonah wants the opposite response, which is probably the prevailing Jewish attitude, and seemingly a parody of this attitude (captured in Nahum). When the city repents, Jonah becomes downcast and angry (4:1), echoing the attitude of Cain before he kills his brother (the same word). The murderous anger of Jonah reflects a deep-seated violence which explains his original flight.

In response, “The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea and there was a great storm on the sea so that the ship was about to break up” (1:4). According to Bartlett, “The scene is reminiscent of creation itself where ‘a wind from God swept over the waters’ (Gen. 1:2). We are in the realm of primordial divine action, and in the biblical repertoire of signs the violence of the storm must echo Genesis, including the episode of the flood.”[2] The pagan sailors cry out to their gods, and question Jonah, urging him to pray: “So the captain approached him and said, ‘How is it that you are sleeping? Get up, call on your god. Perhaps your god will be concerned about us so that we will not perish’” (Jonah 1:6). While they are willing to scapegoat Jonah by throwing him in the sea, he makes for an odd scapegoat in his willing and detailed instruction: “Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become calm for you, for I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you” (Jonah 1:12). The sailors display an uncommon decency, doubling down in their efforts: “However, the men rowed desperately to return to land but they could not, for the sea was becoming even stormier against them” (Jonah 1:13). They even offer up a prayer to the Lord, seemingly having converted to the religion of Jonah: “Then they called on the LORD and said, ‘We earnestly pray, O LORD, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life and do not put innocent blood on us; for You, O LORD, have done as You have pleased’” (Jonah 1:14). The sailors, more than Jonah, are sensitive to spilling innocent blood, and rather than the usual release from guilt with the death of the sacrifice (Jonah tossed overboard) their fear is not assuaged: “Then the men feared the LORD greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows (Jonah 1:16) like true Israelites (Ex 14:31). The sailors and all of Nineveh are more quickly changed than Jonah, who shows no sign of repentance.

Jonah is angry at God’s mercy and would prefer to see his enemies suffer rather than have them repent and be saved. According to Bartlett, “Jonah fulfills textually and emotionally the very same character as the violent storm and the evil it brings about. The text has doubled back on itself, returning Jonah to the same murderous state he embraced when he was thrown into the raging sea – and beyond that to the very first murder of history, thus once more knitting together the themes of human and cosmic violence.”[3] The king and the Ninevites and God all turn from the violence, but the violence endures among the Jews. In identifying with the sign of Jonah, Jesus understands the poor light this shines upon the Jews’ murderous attitude toward him, but it is precisely this violence that constitutes his death and resurrection as the sign of Jonah. He brings the resolution missing in Jonah and the Jews.

Though John does not mention the sign of Jonah, he closely echoes the story (in 6:16-21). The sea, often equated with chaos (and as in Daniel, the gods of violence and chaos), is where Jesus reveals his divinity, tying the ἐγώ εἰμι to his power over nature in calming the storm and walking on the water (as if we now see YHWH trampling down the waves (Job 9:8 and Ps 89:10) and offering the comfort of his presence in the storm (Gen 26:24; 46:3; Jer 1:8; 1:17; 26:28). In the portrayal of the synoptics, the disciples panic in a storm while Jesus sleeps, and they double down on their rowing before waking Jesus, to save them from “perishing.” Much like Jonah is vomited by the great fish, Jesus and the disciples arrive suddenly at the distant shore of the Gadarenes where he encounters a horde of demons and sends them (back?) into the sea (Mark 5:1–20) and the demoniac becomes an evangelist to the Decapolis. Jesus defies the expectations of the Jews and even his disciples by saving the wrong people, like Jonah.

This Jewish understanding, on the order of the friends of Job, pictures the world as a closed system in which those who do good prosper and those who do evil are made to suffer. In this equation, good nations and individuals should thrive, and those that are wicked should suffer and be defeated. A “sign” in this closed system would accentuate the values of this system, by heaping miraculous favor on the chosen or by furthering the suffering of the wicked. A sign might be on the order of Joshua at Jericho, where the walls come tumbling down allowing the genocide in which “both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys,” were meant “with the edge of the sword” (Joshua 6:17–21).

Instead, Jonah depicts not only the people but all the animals putting on sack-cloth, fasting, and repenting (Jonah 3:7-8). It depicts God’s great compassion, a counter-sign to that of the flood, which brought total destruction to “animals and creeping things and birds of the air” (Genesis 6:7). Jonah cares more for his plant, providing him shade, than he does for the multitudes in Nineveh (Jonah 4:9) to say nothing of “the many animals.” For him, Nineveh’s evil should evoke divine wrath, as in the flood or at Jericho, but God fails to destroy Nineveh, the very people oppressing the Jews. God tries to evoke a bit of empathy from Jonah, noting that a plant, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow” (4:10) does not really compare to “that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals” (4:11), but the response of Jonah is an open question.

Jesus also elicits the sympathy of the Jews (in the same conversation he raises the sign of Jonah), using sheep to challenge their legalistic attitudes surrounding the sabbath: “What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath” (Matt 12:11–12). The Pharisees do not want sheepish signs, any more than Jonah wants a compassionate God. They need a sign on the order of Elijah’s fire from heaven, consuming their enemies. Fire from heaven burning up Romans, Samaritans or sinners, might be a good sign, but the sign of Jonah is precisely not a furthering of the scapegoating of Jewish enemies; rather it is an exposure and displacement of scapegoating sacrifice. It is counter to the Deuteronomic guilt, in which calamity is caused by human guilt, and in which God’s vengeance follows fixed laws, and by which he can thus be manipulated to achieve a calculated end. Jonah’s anger at the compassion of God is on the order of Jewish anger at Jesus’ compassion for sinners, for the lame and the sick. Neither Jesus nor the God of Jonah meet Jewish expectations.

Jonah, a parody of the typical biblical prophet, serves for Jesus as a parody of the Pharisees. Like Jonah, they are displeased and angry at Jesus, precisely because he is making a mockery of their narrow views of God. Jonah gets so angry he wants to die, not because God is vengeful, but because he is loving (Jonah 4:2). The Pharisees, like Jonah, would prefer unrelenting anger to unrelenting love and neither wants a God who will extend his love into the depths of hades, or who will take up the cause of all of humanity as the “suffering son of man.” The Pharisees want a real sign; in the same way Jonah wants the destruction of Nineveh, so Jesus evokes the end point of Jonah’s and Jewish violence, in that both overlap with death and hades: “just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt 12:40).

Jonah equates his journey to being trapped in the grave or sheol: “Water encompassed me to the point of death. The great deep engulfed me, weeds were wrapped around my head. I descended to the roots of the mountains. The earth with its bars was around me forever, but You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God” (Jonah 2:5–6). Jonah metaphorically goes to hell in the belly of the fish, which delivers him to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria (Jewish hell on earth), not for vengeance but for repentance. Though Jonah may not repent of his hellish attitudes, Nineveh repents of its violent evil, and Jesus, like Jonah, descends to sheol, he preaches to the dead (I Pet 3:18-19; 4:6), he harrows hell, and this is why the sign of Jonah is a non-sign for the Pharisaical. It is a discontinuation of one order of signs, and the establishment of new order of meaning. The orders of heaven and hell, punishment and revenge, fixed rules in which evil and good can be clearly sorted are thrown into question.

Jonah is ironic, rule-bending and rule-breaking, and is in some estimates a mocking jab at the narrow minded, vengeful understanding of God on display in the book to which it is adjacent, Nahum. Nahum has a very different understanding of God and of the deserved destiny of Nineveh. “The oracle of Nineveh: The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite. A jealous and avenging God is the Lord; the Lord is avenging and wrathful. The Lord takes vengeance on His adversaries, and He reserves wrath for His enemies” (Na 1:1–2). Jonah and Nahum, back-to-back, portray opposite understandings of the character of God and the plight of the wicked. In Nahum, a closed system of scapegoating justice, requires annihilation of the enemy: “He will make a complete end of its site, and will pursue His enemies into darkness” (Na 1:8). Rather than harrowing hell, God is hell for the enemy Nineveh: “Who can stand before His indignation? Who can endure the burning of His anger? His wrath is poured out like fire and the rocks are broken up by Him” (Na 1:6). Nahum presents a glorious image of the destruction of Nineveh, the sort of sign every Jew might expect: “Woe to the bloody city, completely full of lies and pillage; Her prey never departs. The noise of the whip, the noise of the rattling of the wheel, galloping horses and bounding chariots!” (Na 3:1–2). These people will get what they deserve because God is a known quantity, a warrior God, fighting on behalf of Judah. “Horsemen charging, swords flashing, spears gleaming, many slain, a mass of corpses, and countless dead bodies—they stumble over the dead bodies!” (Na 3:3).

This is not the sheepish God of Jesus and Jonah, but one who delights in the destruction of the wicked. Where Jonah pictures the possibility of repentance and salvation for the worst of sinners, Nahum closes this possibility: “There is no relief for your breakdown, your wound is incurable” (Na 3:19). This God delights in the smashing of the head of the infants (3:10), and there is no danger this God will relent in his anger until Nineveh is completely destroyed: “And the LORD will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. In whirlwind and storm is His way, and clouds are the dust beneath His feet” (Na 1:3). This God uses natural calamity, not for purposes of repentance, but for ultimate destruction. Where God in Jonah is too merciful, too loving, and too concerned for the least (in Jonah’s estimate) the God of Nahum and his people, have no room for grief: “Nineveh is devastated! Who will grieve for her? Where will I seek comforters for you?” (3:7). This is the sort of good news Jonah’s Jews like to hear. There is no question that God punishes with the same sort of violence and oppression leveraged against the Jews, and which Israel would, given the opportunity, use on her enemies. The cruelty of nations is not the issue in the holy wars but the victory of Israel and the Jews is the prime concern.

Considering the long rule of Assyria, from the ninth century until the death of Ashurbanipal in 626 B.C.E., and the fact that the Assyrians made Judah a vassal state and destroyed Israel, the hatred expressed in Nahum is understandable. The way in which the Jews understood God was thrown into question by their long subjugation, and the only explanation was for a future devastation. Warrior gods prove themselves in war, and by this standard the God of the Jews seems distracted or apathetic. Not only does Nahum not rebuke Judah (the usual prophetic explanation for their suffering is their sin) but he makes excessive promises: “For never again will the wicked one pass through you; he is cut off completely” (Na 1:15). Nahum has no sour notes about sin and repentance for Judah, but only bad news for Nineveh, the kind of sign to warm a Zionist heart.  

The book ends with a question, which along with Jonah as a whole challenges Jewish self-identity and the identity of God: “Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?” (Jonah 4:11). Could it be that God cares for all people, even Ninevites (or Palestinians), and that he even cares for animals? This is not normally open for consideration in the sacrificial, scapegoating world of the Jews. The danger is Christians too will miss the significance of the sign of Jonah, in maintaining a Pharisaical calculus, aimed at sending the good to heaven and evil sinners to hell forever, when the truth is God will search out hell itself for the souls of the perishing.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 126.

[2] Bartlett, 127.

[3] Bartlett, 129.

Daniel Versus Maccabees: Resolving the Contention Between Violence and Nonviolence

It is not that there is a God of the Old Testament and a God of the New, rather there are different streams of thought competing against each other in the Hebrew Bible, and the resolution to these competing views is found in Christ. An understanding of God that is opposed to Christ, opposed to the incarnation, opposed to the humanity of God, opposed to nonviolence, or opposed to a personal and humane understanding of God must be completed and corrected by the understanding of God in Christ. Comparing Ezra and Nehemiah with Ruth, shows that while the first two violently opposed intermarriage with gentiles and pictured God as retributive, Ruth is a gentile (of the “worst kind”) and yet bears the very character of God and serves as a model Jew (see here). In the stories of Jacob wrestling with the angel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, the prodigal son, and the book of Job, there is a fusion of the forgiving human victim with the face of God (see here). There is no paradoxical fusing of human means and God’s means, violence or nonviolence, or retribution and regeneration. By ignoring the contrasting images presented in the Hebrew Bible there is the danger of missing that Christ completes, resolves, corrects, and brings meaning that would otherwise be obscured. This transformational liberation reaches it culmination in the two views under contention in the books of Maccabees and Daniel.

Whether or not the Maccabean thesis of Daniel (that Daniel was composed primarily in the 2nd century and not the 6th century B.C.) is correct, the thesis brings out the contrast between the Maccabean violent solution and the nonviolent resistance in the book of Daniel to the challenge of empire. Daniel and the Jewish resistance to the empire’s demand for worship presumes a form of nonviolent martyrdom, though this possibility was also chosen by a large segment of the Jewish population resisting the Seleucid Greek empire.  A thousand persons chose to escape into the wilderness, but when challenged by the Seleucid army they offered no resistance: “But they did not answer them or hurl a stone at them or block up their hiding places, for they said, ‘Let us all die in our innocence; heaven and earth testify for us that you are killing us unjustly.’ So they attacked them on the sabbath, and they died, with their wives and children and livestock, to the number of a thousand persons” (1 Mac 2:36–38). From the perspective of Mattathias and his friends this was total defeat: “’If we all do as our kindred have done and refuse to fight with the Gentiles for our lives and for our ordinances, they will quickly destroy us from the earth.’ So they made this decision that day: ‘Let us fight against anyone who comes to attack us on the sabbath day; let us not all die as our kindred died in their hiding places’” (1 Mac 2:39–41). Having witnessed the slaughter, the Maccabees reject keeping the sabbath through nonviolence and choose extreme violence.

The contention between the two positions revolves around the sabbath, as it is not simply work but the violence of war forbidden on the sabbath, that may mean being slaughtered. These people were willing to die, along with their children, in what the text describes as their “innocence” or “singlemindedness” (ἁπλότης) and it is precisely this singleness of purpose embraced as the Christian ideal (Eph 6:5; Col 3:22; according to Jesus one’s eye should be single – Matt 6:22). These sabbath keepers are not legalists, but are shaped by the sabbath in a different relationship with God and a different way of being in the world. According to Anthony Bartlett, “The internal and symbolic content of sabbath is an earth of peace and blessing, where a fulness of life overtakes and displaces the need to work.”[1] Life comes from God, and this is not gained through human effort, whether work or war. This break-through stands out all the more, in that the tenor of Maccabees is a counter-argument to this brief episode.

The followers of Mattathias in choosing to fight on the sabbath do not want to be killed like their fellow Jews, and this is their prime inspiration. They set aside sabbath law, and begin an armed resistance. As William Farmer puts it, “once it is seen that as long as the heathen could attack the Jews on sabbath with impunity, just so long was the possibility of national independence out of the question.”[2] By attempting to save the temple and the law they miss the heart and character of the law. In violently defending Israel, they forsake the vision of a peaceful sabbath kingdom.

Where Maccabees poses the enemy and its defeat in literal terms, Daniel, through a figurative frame, poses a different sort of enemy. The four winds of heaven stir up four beasts from out of the sea, and these beasts have iron teeth, claws, tusks the wings of eagles, and the head of humans (Dan 7:2–8). They are killing machines given human pride and cunning, representing Babylonian, Mede, Persian, and Greek empires. The only resistance possible is heavenly, not simply through a new imagination but a new reality arising from within the human situation. God exercises sovereignty through “One like a Son of Man” and in his visions, Daniel describes this alternative structuring power.

Daniel’s apocalyptic vision focuses on divine intervention, not from without but erupting from within, fusing the divine with the human:

And behold, with the clouds of heaven One like a Son of Man was coming, And He came up to the Ancient of Days And was presented before Him. And to Him was given dominion, Glory and a kingdom, That all the peoples, nations and men of every language Might serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion Which will not pass away; And His kingdom is one Which will not be destroyed (Dan 7:13–14).

Destruction and war are absent in this unified kingdom of healing, teaching, and peace. This Son of Man from the Ancient of Days transcends human limitations in fusing divine and human. He has a human nature and yet comes with the clouds on the order of YHWH’s presence in various theophanies (Exodus 13:21, 19:9; 1 Kings 8:10-11). He is given universal dominion over all peoples, unifying them under a singular head, where the bestial kingdoms are multiple and violent, with one succeeding the other (Dan 7:24-25) while the Son of Man will establish an everlasting and singular kingdom.

This enlarged frame comes with the pronouncement of resurrection:

 But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever (Dan 12:1–3).

These “holy ones” (as Daniel describes them elsewhere) shine like the stars forever, having been made holy in a new way of being human. They have the characteristics of the Son of Man and are participants in his kingdom: “But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever” (Dan 7:18). Daniel pictures these holy ones as being “worn out” in martyrdom (Dan 7:25) through relinquishing one sort of life (struggling in and through death) through a death accepting resurrection life (inclusive of martyrdom). As Bartlett emphasizes, resurrection has to be tied to a successful vision and practice of nonviolence as this is not passage  beyond mortality, but its acceptance as part of eternal life, or part of a new sort of humanity sharing in divine wisdom.

Jesus taking up the title “Son of Man” from Daniel is the culminating resolution of the issue of sabbath keeping and violence: “For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (Matt 12:8). He is Lord of the sabbath in providing peace and life and final healing from sin and death. “’But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—He said to the paralytic, ‘I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home’” (Mk 2:10–11). Jesus combines the image of the suffering servant of Isaiah with Daniel’s Son of Man, reshaping the messianic hope of Israel in himself with His impending nonviolent suffering and death (Mk 8:31, 9:31), and future return in glory (Mk 13:26, 14:62).  

In this apocalyptic frame the immediate circumstance (persecution by empire) pales in comparison to an eternal perspective, and it is Daniels apocalyptic vision taken up by Jesus, referencing a Maccabean sort of desolating sacrilege, which account for his instruction: “So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains,” says Jesus (Matt 24:15–16). Jesus links the action of the nonviolent Maccabean martyrs (fleeing) with the wisdom and insight of Daniel.[3] The hope of the resurrection is the means of nonviolent resistance which recognizes the Son of Man reorders the world within a larger frame of meaning and wisdom.

This reordered reality is pictured in John’s apocalyptic vision of the Son of Man as alpha and omega and ruler of the cosmos: “In His right hand He held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and His face was like the sun shining in its strength. When I saw Him, I fell at His feet like a dead man. And He placed His right hand on me, saying, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last’” (Rev 1:16–17). The word of his mouth is sharper than any sword, and his life-giving human/divine radiance is the true light illuminating the fulness of a peaceable reality. Jesus fulfills the vision of Daniel as Son of Man, establishing everlasting sabbath rest.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 106.

[2] William R. Farmer, Maccabees, Zealots, and Josephus: An Inquiry into Jewish Nationalism in the Greco-Roman Period (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956),76. Cited in Sigve K. Tonstad, “To Fight or not to Fight: The Sabbath and the Maccabean Revolt,” (Andrews University Seminary Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1, 135–146. Copyright © 2016 Andrews University Seminary Studies), 145.

[3] Sigve, 144-145.

What is a Jew and Who is God?

Not only is the image of God under contention in the Hebrew Scriptures, but the meaning of what it means to be a Jew, and the two issues are very much interconnected. There is a Judaism focused on pure blood lines, linguistic purity, ritual obligation, and which presumes transgression in any of these areas results in God’s punishment. In this understanding the constant refrain is reform, separation, reinforced endogamy, rebuilding walls, sabbath keeping, protecting, purifying and preserving Jewish identity, and both the reform and the God who demands it are violent and retributive. On the other hand, there is a Judaism which presumes all people are invited into God’s family, in which God takes on the image of a servant, “the son of man,” and which names even foreign women as the truly faithful. We know these alien women (e.g., Ruth and Rahab) are the ideal through their identity as “kinsmen redeemers,” who are not only in the lineage of David and Jesus, but portions of the canon are dedicated to explaining their decisive inclusion in Jewish universalism. In this understanding foreigners can join themselves to the Lord (Is 56:6) and the temple is for all people: “For My house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples” (Is 56:7). In this alternative literature there are nonviolent martyrs, who are either slaughtered, miraculously delivered, or as with Ruth and Tamar are kinsmen redeemers through birth and new creation. It is in this context that there is development of the possibility of new life, resurrection, and a non-retributive, restorative God. This alternative Israel makes the work of Christ comprehensible, and it explains his crucifixion as the end point of two competing conceptions of God and Israel.

So, the contrast is between an exclusive, violent, God, focused on a human remnant, and an inclusive, peaceful, God, focused on all people and the cosmos. The point in setting up a clear contrast is to avoid papering over very different understandings of Jews and God. According to some readings, the violent, exclusive, and retributive understanding is to be incorporated into its opposite, which may miss that God is not on the side of those who killed Jesus (as in some doctrines of the atonement). By showing there is a long lineage of two understandings, the point is not to meld them but to make it clear that true Jews, true faithfulness, and a correct understanding of God are what is under contention and what is being worked out in the Bible.

The Tradition of Nehemiah and Ezra

Nehemiah would not only rebuild the physical walls of Jerusalem, but would reestablish the uniqueness of Jewish identity, as Hebrew children are failing to learn Hebrew and the people and priests are not maintaining markers of separation in marriage. So, Nehemiah takes it upon himself to try to curb or stop Jews from marrying the women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab so he “contended with them and cursed them and struck some of them and pulled out their hair, and made them swear by God, ‘You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor take of their daughters for your sons or for yourselves’” (Ne 13:25). For Nehemiah this is “great evil” and “treachery” against God (13:27). He prays for divine retribution against the Levites for having “defiled the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood” (13:29). He also locks the city gates at night, to keep out foreign traders on the sabbath and when the non-Jews camp outside the city he threatens violence: “Why do you spend the night in front of the wall? If you do so again, I will use force against you” (13:21). According to Nehemiah, this sort of transgression is why calamity came upon the Jews in the first place: “Did not your fathers do the same, so that our God brought on us and on this city all this trouble? Yet you are adding to the wrath on Israel by profaning the sabbath” (13:18).

Ezra is so appalled by this situation that he pulls out his hair: “When I heard about this matter, I tore my garment and my robe, and pulled some of the hair from my head and my beard, and sat down appalled” (Ezra 9:3). After sitting “appalled” all day he says, “I arose from my humiliation, even with my garment and my robe torn, and I fell on my knees and stretched out my hands to the Lord my God; and I said, ‘O my God, I am ashamed and embarrassed to lift up my face to You, my God, for our iniquities have risen above our heads and our guilt has grown even to the heavens” (Ezra 9:5–6). He too presumes it is intermarrying with foreign women that has caused God’s punishment: “Since the days of our fathers to this day we have been in great guilt, and on account of our iniquities we, our kings and our priests have been given into the hand of the kings of the lands, to the sword, to captivity and to plunder and to open shame, as it is this day” (Ezra 9:7).

At Ezra’s prompting and approval Sheceniah proposes a retroactive solution: “So now let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives and their children, according to the counsel of my lord and of those who tremble at the commandment of our God; and let it be done according to the law” (Ezra 10:3). The God of Ezra and Nehemiah is not concerned he might be creating widows and orphans (let alone care for them). Nehemiah would create an exclusive political space and Ezra an exclusive religious space, and the concern is not with the vast majority who fail these tests of exclusion, but only with those who are included. Exclusive holiness is the means to salvation, as God is that sort of Other. On this basis, Nehemiah can approach God with confidence of reward: “Thus I purified them from everything foreign and appointed duties for the priests and the Levites, each in his task, and I arranged for the supply of wood at appointed times and for the first fruits. Remember me, O my God, for good” (Ne 13:30–31).

The Alternative Posed by Ruth

Ruth, the Moabite widow, represents the opposite attitude to foreign wives found in Ezra and Nehemiah. Ruth is of the Moabites, the product of Lot’s incestuous relations (Gen 19:36-37), condemned by both Ezra and Nehemiah as a forbidden source for wives. Ruth accompanies Naomi, her Jewish mother-in-law, back to Bethlehem when her husband, Naomi’s son, dies. Naomi’s other foreign daughter-in-law returns to Moab, but Ruth insists on continuing to serve Naomi in her struggle for survival. According to Anthony Bartlett, she is described with two key terms: hesed, (with a range of meanings from “loving kindness, to mercy, steadfast love, loyalty and faithfulness”) and go’el (the kinsman redeemer) both of which are associated with the character of God.[1]

The God of Israel is full of steadfast love (hesed): “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love (hesed) and faithfulness keeping steadfast love (hesed) for thousands of generations. . .” (Exod 34:6-7). God is also redeemer, and it is the shape go’el takes in this story that marks it as messianic. Redemption may be from out of slavery, from out of debt, or the redemption of property (Lev. 25:25ff), and in the case of murder the go’el “redeems” by covering the spilled blood of the victim with that of the killer (Num 35:9-21). In Ruth, however, redemption is linked specifically with sex and marriage (as in Dt 25). The kinsman marries the widow of his brother in order to preserve her place in Israel, and where he refuses, there is a dereliction of duty: “his brother’s wife shall come to him in the sight of the elders, and pull his sandal off his foot and spit in his face; and she shall declare, ‘Thus it is done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house’” (Dt 25:9). The goal is that the widow give birth to a new family, and in this procreative act (life in the place of desolation and death), is redemption. So with Ruth: “It is a story of covenant kindness bringing new life, effected by the life of a woman who is a Moabite.”[2] Through Ruth there will arise the line of David and the ancestry of Jesus, but in the immediate context it is love and life in place of alienation and death which creates this messianic possibility.

Naomi blesses her daughters-in-law invoking the blessing of God’s hesed, and indicating they too have done hesed. In doing so “she is telling us in no uncertain terms that these Moabite women are capable of the core Israelite covenant virtue. Ruth, in refusing to leave Naomi, goes beyond Orpah and begins to manifest the deep radicalism and generative power of divine hesed.”[3] “But Ruth said, ‘Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried’” (Ruth 1:16–17). Ruth’s deep commitment to Naomi reveals her divine-like character. Rather than understanding God in abstract legal terms, the divine realm in Ruth overlaps with loving kindness experienced in personal relationship, through which Ruth transforms the world around her.

Under Naomi’s guidance, Ruth begins the elaborate wooing of Boaz a potential kinsmen redeemer, of great wealth. Boaz sees her gleaning the left-over harvest, and instructs his servants to care for her, and he tells Ruth to stay with the maids of his house and to only glean from his field. “Then she fell on her face, bowing to the ground and said to him, ‘Why have I found favor in your sight that you should take notice of me, since I am a foreigner?’” (Ruth 2:10). She refers to herself as nokri, not only a foreigner but a “harlot” or “adulterous woman” (as the term is used in Proverbs 2:16; 5:20). She is the corrupting foreign other, warned against by Ezra, Nehemiah and Proverbs, who puts Israel in danger through her alluring power. Idolatry after all, is equated with harlotry and adultery. The “corrupting other” whose rejection is often equated with acceptance by God, is equated in Ruth, with the divine character and redemption. “The irony could not be more marked: the very figure dreaded for her power to adulterate Israel in every sense, until it is no longer Israel, becomes an unsubstitutable source of Israel’s life.”[4] It is precisely this switching of one sort of Israel for another that forms the messianic link, and it is pointedly a scene of seduction that accomplishes this swap.

Boaz is the potential go’el of Ruth and Naomi, but he does nothing to enact his redeeming role, until Naomi instructs Ruth how to illicit loving action from Boaz: “Wash yourself therefore, and anoint yourself and put on your best clothes, and go down to the threshing floor; but do not make yourself known to the man until he has finished eating and drinking. It shall be when he lies down, that you shall notice the place where he lies, and you shall go and uncover his feet and lie down; then he will tell you what you shall do” (3:3-4). It is a seduction, but the point is not to entice Boaz away from but into being a true Israelite. He will fulfill his duties as a kinsman redeemer, first by making love, and then by loving and marrying Ruth. “May you be blessed of the LORD, my daughter. You have shown your last kindness to be better than the first by not going after young men, whether poor or rich. Now, my daughter, do not fear. I will do for you whatever you ask, for all my people in the city know that you are a woman of excellence” (Ruth 3:10-11).

Before redeeming her, Boaz must first make sure that another kinsman, closer in relation, will not choose to redeem her, but then he consummates his duties before all the people: “All the people who were in the court, and the elders, said, ‘We are witnesses. May the LORD make the woman who is coming into your home like Rachel and Leah, both of whom built the house of Israel; and may you achieve wealth in Ephrathah and become famous in Bethlehem’” (4:11). Ruth is compared to the mothers of the Jews, and with the birth of Obed, Ruth and Boaz’s son, she becomes the mother of the Davidic line. The whole city, the elders, and eventually all of Israel and the world will hear this story, not as one of God disqualifying a foreigner, but as one in which a faithful Moabite acts as model Israelite.

Yet it is Ruth’s steadfast and redeeming love which is valued above all else, as the town folk explain to Naomi: “your daughter-in-law, who loves you and is better to you than seven sons, has given birth to him” (4:15). Ruth is more the redeemer than Boaz, and even more than Obed, in her steadfast love, giving new life in the midst of possible death. Rather than an impurity in Israel, she reenacts the origins of Israel as hapiru, a dispossessed non-people as chosen by God for redemption. As Bartlett puts it, “Ruth is a generative woman who creates possibility for those around her. She is a mother of Israel precisely in her situation of outsider and contaminant, because in this situation she is able to reproduce Israel’s origins and give the purest – the most selfless and generous – version of hesed.”[5] Her unconditional love and steadfastness is life-giving and redemptive and this, as much as her giving birth to the line of David, marks her as in the line of the final go’el, Jesus Christ.

Conclusion

Ezra and Nehemiah do not have the last word in the Hebrew Scriptures, as Ruth presents a diametrically opposed understanding. One might consider Ezra and Nehemiah over Ruth, were it not for the lineage traced in Mathew, which signals the resolution to this contradiction: “Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz was the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of David the king” (Mt 1:5–6). Rahab and Ruth in a single sentence indicate the gospel marks the demise of the Jew and God as conceived by Ezra and Nehemiah. Jesus did not come as a reformer of Israel but as one who marks the telos of Israel, in the fulfillment of a meaning beyond law, temple, and the politics and institutions of an earthly kingdom. The Redeemer is not retributive but restorative through life-giving faithfulness and steadfast love, and this is the resolution to the contested identity of God and Israel.

(To be Continued)

[1]  Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 91-93. I am following Bartlett throughout, and have been inspired by his teaching with PBI.

[2] Ibid, 93.

[3] Ibid, 91.

[4] Ibid, 93.

[5] Ibid, 98.

The Synthesis of the Divine with the Face of the Human Victim

Reading the Hebrew Scriptures through Christ establishes that what is under contention throughout is the identity of God in anthropology or conversely, the identity of humanity in theology. That is, the two topics, which we tend to separate, are made one in Christ, and where they are not synthesized there are characteristic errors. There is a divinization of what are assumed to be the controlling absolutes, such as law, retribution, and violence, and the dehumanizing of God. In turn, this divinization of human absolutes, now deified and reified, makes human revenge, retribution, and violence an imitation of God. This spiraling and seemingly inescapable evil, is broken open by Christ and thus the Scriptures are opened (they are constituted as Scripture), and counter-examples of God are made evident in human suffering, struggle, forgiveness and compassion. The Hebrew Scriptures simultaneously trace both narratives (the transcendent God of legal retribution and the immanent redeemer of mercy and love) but they are a confusion (a hodgepodge of contradictory texts) apart from the insight provided by this Christocentric hermeneutic, which puts a very different human stamp on the divine. Given the light of Christ, we can read Scripture as the gradual synthesis of the human and divine culminating in Christ.

One of the most bizarre incidents, in which God is first recognized as taking on humanity, is in Jacob’s wrestling match with a mysterious man: “Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak” (Ge 32:24). This wrestling is a metaphor for what is at stake in the wrestling with God throughout Scripture. Jacob obtains his true identity in recognizing God in the face of his wrestling partner: “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved” (Ge 32:30). Contrary to the megachurch preacher who said “I can’t worship a guy I could beat up,” Jacob discovers a God who allows himself to be pinned down, and in so doing offers his blessing: “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel; for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed” (Ge 32:28). As Anthony Bartlett concludes, “the God whom Israel is in relationship with is a God who does not win by violent means, who in fact loses – and needs “a man” to signify as much![1] Jacob memorializes the event and the place calling it Peniel, meaning “face of God.” This is an odd sort of beatific vision, as Jacob is not transported out of the body, but it is very much an embodied, enfleshed, synthesis of divine and human. Spirituality and divinity are interwoven with being touched by this man/God who dislocated Jacob’s hip and transformed his identity (Ge 32:25).

This transformation is immediately evident: “Then Jacob lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, Esau was coming, and four hundred men with him” (Ge 33:1). From his actions, hiding the most cherished part of his family (“He put the maids and their children in front, and Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph last” vs. 2) it is evident Jacob presumed Esau would exact revenge. Rather than swaggering, Jacob is limping and humbled: “But he himself passed on ahead of them and bowed down to the ground seven times, until he came near to his brother” (vs. 3). Jacob the trickster was out of tricks before the brother from whom he stole the birthright, the hunter and son after his father’s heart – a man’s man, if you will. But rather than exacting revenge, “Esau ran to meet him and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept” (Ge 33:4). This is unexpected and unexplained, though it points back to the lesson learned in the wrestling match. Jacob says to Esau, “I see your face as one sees the face of God, and you have received me favorably” (Ge 33:10). Jacob is metaphorically pinned, and Esau now bears the divine visage, precisely because Jacob recognizes in his brother what he found in his visitor the previous night. “Esau’s face of love and nonviolence is the very face of God.”[2] As Bartlett explains, there is no explanation for Esau’s transformation from seeming armed avenger to weeping and loving brother, other than pure grace. “The man who wrestles with Jacob and loses and then becomes God is the same sememe (unit of meaning) as Esau who loses, who forgives, who is recognized as the face of God.”[3] Rather than God being identified with violence, he is identified in the victimized brother showing forgiveness and mercy.

Jesus, in the story of the Prodigal Son, plays on the story of Jacob and Esau, with the younger brother grabbing the inheritance and leaving the elder brother to work the farm, while he squanders his inheritance and is eventually forced to humbly return home. He expects rejection and servitude in his father’s house, but instead the father reenacts the response of Esau: “But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him and fell on his neck” (Lk 15:20). The Pharisees did not understand Jesus keeping company with sinners, and the point of the story is to change their image of God. The echoes of Jacob and Esau must have been obvious as Jesus directly ties Esau’s and the father’s action to the figure of God (rejoicing in heaven).

The pattern is repeated in the story of Joseph and his brothers, in which the brothers who are jealous of Joseph would kill him, but he instead becomes their savior in Egypt. Rather than becoming a scapegoated and perhaps a deified victim, Joseph is a type of Christ, exposing the scapegoating intent of his brothers through a long and agonizing process, in which they are put in the place of either sacrificing their brother Benjamin or of laying down their life for their brother. The brothers tell Joseph the story of the lost son (of course, he is the lost son) and explain their father could not bear it should he lose Benjamin, the second son of his beloved Rachel. Joseph plays out the game until he cannot stand it any longer: “Then Joseph could not control himself before all those who stood by him. . . He wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard of it” (Ge 45:1–2).  Then there is the scene like that between Jacob and Esau: “Then he fell on his brother Benjamin’s neck and wept, and Benjamin wept on his neck. He kissed all his brothers and wept on them, and afterward his brothers talked with him” (Ge 45:14–15). “Here Joseph becomes the single righteous individual who forgives and saves all his brothers.”[4]

In spite of the brothers agonizing experience, when their father, Jacob, dies, they assume Joseph will now exact revenge. Joseph, in response, calls up the words of his father upon seeing Esau: “Do not be afraid, for am I in God’s place? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive. So therefore, do not be afraid; I will provide for you and your little ones” (Ge 50:19–21). The betrayal of both Joseph and Jesus was the result of evil plotting, but God turned the evil into his purpose of salvation, not by confirming retributive justice, but by revealing himself in human victims, through forgiveness and blessing. The God of vengeance (or human vengeance as divine) is displaced by the God victimized and even demonized by vengeance. Recognition of the divinity of the crucified and forgiving Christ, accentuates this synthesizing throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.

While large sections of Scripture seem to stand against the non-retributive God of the forgiving victim, Job may be the book where these two conceptions are most clearly under contention. The friends of Job explain Job’s suffering as required by divine righteousness, and after seven days of silence before their suffering friend, they start demonizing Job. As Zophar explains, the wicked have it coming, and their triumph is short (Job 20:5). Soon they will be trashed like so much garbage (vs. 7), and will be turned to dust (vs.11) and will experience continual vomiting due to the poison they have swallowed (v.15). He waxes elegant describing the agony but the point is, “God will send His fierce anger on him” (vs. 23) and the implication is this is what is causing Job’s calamities. In fact, Job is not suffering enough, as “God forgets a part of your iniquity” (11:6). God is the cause of suffering and violence in their estimate, and Job has it coming.

The friends of Job want to account for everything according to the working of the righteous requirements of God and they cannot forgive Job’s illness. The law of righteousness separates them from afflicted sinners and this explains their relative prosperity. For Job, on the other hand, this law is in tatters. There is the realization of an excess of evil which cannot be accounted for by legal righteousness. In Job’s estimate, either evil reigns, and God and evil are indistinguishable, or there is another explanation

The story begins with God consulting Satan, and then He and the devil wager on Job’s response to random suffering (Job 1:6 ff). It is not a very exalted view of God, posing the possibility that God and Satan might collude in causing suffering and in fact might be confused for one another. Though some might feel uncomfortable putting God in league with the devil, Job does not feel such hesitation: “It is all one; therefore I say, He destroys the guiltless and the wicked. If the scourge kills suddenly, He mocks the despair of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covers the faces of its judges. If it is not He, then who is it?” (Job 9:22–24). Job is posing the possibility that God is evil, and there is no justice, as his suffering is unjust.

This false choice brings him to a Messianic realization: “This I know: that my Defender lives, and he, the Last, will take his stand on earth. After my awakening, he will set me close to him, and from my flesh I shall look on God. He whom I shall see will take my part: he whom my eyes will gaze on will no longer be a stranger” (19:25-27). He will see God face to face, in the flesh, not as adversary but as advocate. In place of Satan (the adversary which also includes his friends), Job pictures a witness for the defense who will address the problem of violence and bloodshed: “O earth, do not cover my blood, And let there be no resting place for my cry. Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, And my advocate is on high” (Job 16:18–19). “It’s as if the ancient biblical topos of Abel’s blood crying out to the Lord from the ground has leaped in the mind of the author and produced a second iteration of God, one who listens to victims.”[5] Job’s hope is for the blood “that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24).

Job wishes his words could be written down, chiseled in stone like the law, or gathered up in a book, as he sees his insight as a new order of meaning (19:23-27). As Bartlett asks rhetorically, is Job claiming that his words “serve to transform the meaning of God, so that one day that meaning will be established on earth?”[6] The Satan figure disappears from the book and God sides with Job against his friends: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right as My servant Job has” (Job 42:7). God stands against the calculus of a law of vengeance and wants nothing to do with it.

The confirmation in Christ of Job’s perspective indicates that retributive conceptions of God are human projections (arising from the adversary) and not worthy of the image of God grounded in his humanity. The identity of God is not with the victimizers, with the accusers, with the satan, but with suffering, forgiving victims. The character of God is under contention, and it is rightly reflected in the face of Jacob’s wrestling opponent, in the face of Esau, in the face of Joseph, and in the face of Job’s messianic defender, and this is confirmed through the interpretive frame of Christ: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15). In this divine/human synthesis the humanity of God displaces falsely deified human projections.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022), 35.

[2] Ibid, 36.

[3] Ibid, 37.

[4] Ibid, 38.

[5] Ibid, 57.

[6] Ibid, 58.

The Liberating Truth of Christ as an Eternal Fact About God

The point of Scripture is that history has a goal and an unfolding purpose in which change and development have an eternal importance, such that the eternal is not a static accomplishment separate from creation, time, and history. We learn that Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity, and that God is defined in relationship to the world. The eternal embraces the dynamic of time, so that God is always creator, God is always the Father of the Son, and the life of Christ, the cross and resurrection, are eternal facts about the identity of God. It is not simply that the eternal destiny of souls is determined in time, but eternity itself is inclusive of the outworking of time and history. This is the implication of there being a God/Man seated at the right hand of the Father, crucified from the foundation of the world, who is the alpha and omega. There is development, change, and an unfolding of revelation culminating in Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit, but what is this a development out of and in to?

Christ does not convey an already established meaning, perduring in the heavens, but in his relationship to the world and God he reveals a dynamic meaning of relationship and personhood, otherwise absent. The incarnation does not leave God and the world the same, but in their relationship, there is an unfolding transformation that is alive with the Spirit. This is not the encounter with an object, left unchanged by the encounter but it is meaningful in the change enacted, the life discovered, the freedom and openness of Spirit. This is transformational and living truth, in which God in Christ transforms the world through the incarnation, out of bondage and into liberation and this is the meaning unfolding and realized.

The unfolding of revelation is of liberation for the oppressed, for slaves, for the outcaste or for the Hapiru – an inferior social class made up of a shifting, unsettled underclass. As Anthony Bartlett describes, they are the landless underclass, the “displaced peasantry, disinherited clans, refugees, scattered warriors,” who could easily be enslaved, fall into thievery, or hired as mercenaries.[1] We learn in Genesis (14:13-16) that Abram had gathered three hundred eighteen men, with whom he attacked the “kings” and “brought back all the goods, and also brought back his relative Lot with his possessions, and also the women, and the people” (Gen. 14:16). It is in this context that “Hebrew” appears for the first time in the Bible, not to name an ethnic or religious group, but to describe this class, fitting the category of Hapiru, gathered around Abram. “So, when the text says, ‘Abram the Hebrew,’ it pretty naturally means ‘Abram the Hapiru.’”[2] 

Abraham’s willingness to prostitute his wife in moments of danger or insecurity (Gen. 12:10-20; 20:1-18) points to his desperate status. When Pharaoh discovers she is his wife and not his sister, he releases Sarai from his harem and sends them away, as breaking this taboo has brought on a curse: “But the LORD struck Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai, Abram’s wife” (Gen. 12:17). He casts them out, much as a future Pharaoh would drive out all of the Hapiru from Egypt. “’Why did you say, ‘She is my sister,’ so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her and go.’ Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him; and they escorted him away, with his wife and all that belonged to him” (Gen. 12:19–20).

While some among the Hebrews may share an ancestry, what molds them together, even under Moses, is their shared slave status in Egypt. “[T]he Egyptians could not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is loathsome to the Egyptians” (Gen 43:32). Like Abram and Sarai, it may be the Jews were liberated by being driven out. Outcastes have no caste, no place, no personhood, and this is how they are identified as a distinctive group. The point is not to locate how it is the Jewish people formed, but to show that the formation with which God is concerned is with the oppressed: “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware of their sufferings” (Ex. 3:7). God knows his people as those who are not taskmasters but those who suffer. It is to people that are not a people, without a distinctive genealogy, or a distinctive place, to whom God reveals his name and will become a name in which they can dwell. Exodus describes a mixed multitude (or “foreign mob”) “who went up with them” out of Egypt (Ex. 12:38).

The status of the Hebrews is not with their physical descent and God is not peculiarly aware of them due to their lineage. Concern with the outcaste and stranger, culminating with Christ, begins as the identifying mark of Jews and becomes a distinct part of Hebrew law. There are some fifty-two instances of “do not mistreat aliens (strangers)” in the law. Compared with surrounding contemporaneous law codes, which make provisions for the marginalized (such as widows and orphans), protection and care for foreigners and strangers in Jewish law is unique.[3] The reason given for this distinctive understanding: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 22:21). “So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the LORD your God; you shall serve Him and cling to Him, and you shall swear by His name” (Dt. 10:19–20). “You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 23:9). “’Cursed is he who distorts the justice due an alien, orphan, and widow.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’” (Dt. 27:19). The Hebrew people are constituted a people, first due to their outcaste, enslaved status, and then due to liberation: “When Israel was a youth I loved him, And out of Egypt I called My son” (Hos. 11:1).

The paradox is this homeless underclass, identified by their liberation, choose to become a kingdom, with a king, and to be re-indentured. To become a people there must be the constraints marking inside and outside, there must be class marking one’s place in the group, there must be a certain severity of the law so that by the weight of the law one feels the gravity of identity. People are individually and corporately masochistic, needing the group and the possibility of being an outcaste to gain recognition. Bondage is required, and mental and moral freedom are unknown quantities. There is no spiritual or rational freedom where nature and dominance are the highest value. Natural necessity, material might, and physical and political domination are the ruling logic, and in this logic the center and reification of power is in a king. Thus the Jews demanded a king: “Nevertheless, the people refused to listen to the voice of Samuel, and they said, ‘No, but there shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles’” (1 Sam. 8:19–20).

The prophet Samuel warns, a king will draft your men into his army as fighting men, to work his fields, to make his weapons, and he will indenture your daughters as “perfumers, cooks, and bakers” and he will tax your harvest, and confiscate your fields. “Then you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day” (1 Sam. 8:11–18). The turn to empower a king seems instinctive among primitive peoples, and unfortunately of a failed Christian people, unfamiliar with spiritual freedom.

Eventually, with the collapse of Israel, the Babylonian destruction and captivity, Hebrew kings disappear and the option of oppressive violence is no longer possible. The promise is given by Zechariah of a form of deliverance for which there was long preparation: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the LORD of hosts” (Zech. 4:6). After being shaped as a people and then destroyed a new possibility presents itself: “Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, Humble, and mounted on a donkey, Even on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zech. 9:9).

The world is not as it should be, and the structure of might makes right, or the law is the law, or the king is the king, can be challenged. In place of human reason (the Greek logos), there is divine reason and incarnate Logos. A humble king who promises divine power, indwelling every individual, is a new order of reason. History is not static, but the possibility of knowing God presents itself, though it is an alien idea when Jesus first announces it: “If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” The Pharisees explain, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never yet been enslaved to anyone; how is it that You say, ‘You will become free’?” (Jn. 8:33). They skip the enslaving circumstance of both Abram and the Hebrews in Egypt, and have no notion of the system of enslavement Jesus is describing. Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed” (Jn. 8:34–36). There is a development in the process of history, out of bondage toward the liberating work of Christ, culminating in the freedom of the Spirit: “that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you” (Jn. 14:17). People once enslaved, though they may not recognize their enslavement, learn of a new order of liberation, not requiring violence, oppression and revenge, but involving the indwelling of God.

Jesus Christ as truth, comes to maturity and full manifestation in history, where there was once immaturity or absence of the truth. The spirituality of truth (Jn. 4:23) does not exist full-grown at the beginning, so truth is not always available for human consciousness. The Bible speaks of times past, in which God overlooked human ignorance (Acts 17:30). There is a time before Christ, before the giving of the Spirit, before freedom, before the fruits of the Spirit, and there is growth and development revealing this end. Bondage to sin, darkness, oppression and violence are realities holding the world in bondage, then there is the liberating work of Christ and the introduction of the Spirit.

There is a developing realization of God, through the Hebrew Scriptures, to the Son, and culminating in the Spirit, and the text of the Bible is not isolated from this unfolding development. There are a series of semiotic shifts, foreshadowing the final shift in Christ, in which God is no longer identified as a tribal God, a warrior God, or the God promoting genocide and murder. The fulness of liberation, culminating in the freedom of the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17) is a developing concept through Abraham’s departure from the religion and strictures of his homeland, through Israel’s departure from Egypt, and culminating in the full freedom from violence and peace of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22). Christ as all in all (Col. 3:11) is being realized, though for many primary identity is still as Greeks and Jews, circumcised and uncircumcised, slave and free.

 The tendency is to reduce the story of the Bible and the story of Christ, so that it is all either human or divine. Theology can be reduced to a simplistic process theology, apart from the eternal point of view, but it can also be reduced to a crude Calvinism and mechanical predestination apart from naming real world developments. In the first instance everything is changing and moving and there is only process, and in the second instance, nothing changes and everything is set and history is static and its purpose, if there is any, is beyond comprehension. To say that history has eternal importance, is the key Christian claim, and yet this key claim is often neglected, leaving aside the why and how of the Christian faith and Christian life in the process.

If Jesus Christ is the second person of the Trinity, an eternal fact about who God is, it can also be acknowledged that we can see God in becoming without falling into the heresy of process theology. God embraces process, God can be found in history, God becomes human, and the incarnation, the birth, life and death of Christ are all divine facts describing the purpose of history. This deepens Jesus’ claim of truth, or in fact, makes sense of it. Jesus is often pictured as a finite manifestation of eternal and divine trues, but his claim is more immediate and personal. Christ is not the manifestation of a truth which might be manifest otherwise. He is the truth – the truth of God and the world. He is not simply a manifestation of a truth that could have come by means other than his incarnation and personhood.[4] His personhood, his incarnation, his life, are to be directly identified with the liberating Truth. This is not natural truth, but involves narrative, personhood, history, spontaneity, and unpredictability. This truth is not the eternal trues of a disincarnate reason, but the truth incarnate. History is made meaningful through Christ, above and beyond natural law, as meaning is through and in the actuality of Christ – meaning as life and Spirit. Christ is not conveying truth as propositions or facts, but he is truth in meaningful relationship, freeing from the bondage of the logic and law of this world.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022), 2.

[2] Bartlett, 3.

[3] Bartlett, 11.

[4] Natural revelation or natural philosophy is not an alternative to Christ.

Theology of the Name: Jesus Christ as the Ground of Language

Is there a direct correspondence between language and reality or is there a complete gap in which language does not refer to any extra-linguistic reality? The either/or answer to the question, more or less, sums up the history of philosophy and a great deal of theology. In an oversimplified telling, modernism and foundationalism presume language corresponds to reality and the questioning of how or if this is so, brought forth nominalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism which presume language is not grounded in exterior reality. Theologically the either/or answer, is not really two answers, as the presumption that there is direct correspondence results in propositionalism and legalism, but so does theological nominalism. Anslem presumes a direct correspondence between law and the reality of God, and he reifies the human word as if it is on a direct continuum with the divine Word, while Luther’s “imputed righteousness” has only the theoretical workings of the law, and does not presume direct engagement with the Immanent Trinity. In the first instance, law and propositions are determinative of access to the reality of God, and in the second instance law and language do not touch upon the reality of God, but this is all we have. Both fall short of the determinant role of Christ as the mediator of a new mode of meaning.

What is missing in the either/or answer is partially recognized in the linguistic turn, in that language can play a variety of roles in regard to meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein notes that meaning is grounded in use, so that embodiment and culture cannot be excluded from meaning (as in the modernist attempt), and in continental philosophy it was recognized the question of correspondence or non-correspondence is preceded by a non-cognitive “being in the world” (which Martin Heidegger will directly relate to the history of violence, see here). René Girard’s picture of language arising around the scape-goated victim, extends this embodied understanding, simultaneously grounding it in the body and culture (the culture arising around the slain victim) but the “transcendental signifier” posed by Girard (the scape-goated victim, giving rise to religious myth) is false. It does not secure meaning outside of time and history though it posits a connection between history and meaning (see the above reference). In the linguistic turn and Girardian theory, language is not on the order of Platonism or foundationalism, floating free of the world, as there is a presumed correspondence, but for Girard this is a false correspondence grounded in a false transcendence.

All of this to say, language, law, or the symbolic order, is not adequate, in and of itself, to attain to God. Language is not naturally imbued with the Spirit, and the word of man is not on a given continuum with the Word of God. Human words fall short of the fullness of the transcendent divine reality, and in Paul’s description (Rom. 3:10-18), like that of Girard, human speech is grounded in violence and murder. Language cannot escape finitude apart from an alternative or true “transcendental signified.” Meaning does not drop from heaven apart from embodied-contextual factors (pure idealism cannot be the case), and those factors as we “naturally” have them are not simply finite, but bound by the mortality and finitude of death in a murderous realism. But the other factor regarding language, revealed in the Bible, is that the word can be transubstantiated, regenerated, and transfigured, so that it is no mere empty human symbol system, but can be combined with the divine nature so as to reveal the divine presence. The Name of God contains God, and this is the primary fact about language.

Sergius Bulgakov finds in the Name of God, an alternative order of meaning, between the finite and infinite or which mediates between idealism and realism, as the stable transcendental signified (the true generation of final and full meaning). The meaning grounded in culture (the language arising around the cadaver or generated through death) is unstable, but this false consciousness is not the final truth of language. The Name of God reveals a transcendence, which gives predication and naming (the order of language) an ontological ground (a true metaphysics). The naming of God as a possibility in language makes all naming a potential predication of the divine order: “Every judgment is naming, and every judgment is a name, rather, is potentially a name, and can become a name.”[1]

Bulgakov is building upon the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, who describes human mind as made possible by “a Mind beyond the reach of mind” and human language as possible through “a Word beyond utterance, eluding Discourse, Intuition, Name, and every kind of being.”[2] Naming and nouns are possible as the original “substantive noun” or that which is both transcendent and immanent has revealed itself: “the grammatical subject of all grammatical subjects, and the grammatical subject par excellence, the foundation of all predicative value, the subject of all predicates, the Godhead, is disclosed as transcendent-immanent” so that all speaking and naming is an approach to that which is not reducible to predication.[3]

This does not foreclose either Girard’s notion that human language arises around the cadaver, nor Feuerbach’s idea that God is a human projection, “an objective projection of their own self.” According to Bulgakov, the truth of the Name, gives rise to the counter possibility: “This illusion is possible precisely because the naming of God takes place in and through human beings; it is their act, the awakening of their theophoric and theophanic potentials, the realization in them of the enclosed image of God, of their primordial theanthropism.”[4] The “theophoric” are words or names that contain the name of a deity, and the “theophanic” is the manifestation or appearance of God to humans (as in the burning bush), which makes possible theanthropism, interpreting divine actions or qualities in human terms. He sees the activity of language as always embedded in this unfolding divine reality working itself out in the human realm. It is not that language is first grounded in a lie (Genesis 3 or the Girardian scapegoat), but lying is made possible by truth. Predication arises through the possibility of universality and in the actuality of God’s revelation, which can be thwarted and perverted.

Where the Girardian or Feuerbachian word would seem to be exhausted by the finite scope of human need, predication is drawn by infinite possibility. There is no end to speaking, as everything can be named, and nothing is exhausted in the name. There is correspondence in the finite order in which every subject transcends its name, but this finite order is due to the transcendence of God: “Therefore, we have here the absolute revelation of the Principle, beyond the limit of the cosmos, in the cosmos, through the cosmos.”[5] Or as he puts it later, “Naming is the operation of God in the human being, the human response to it, the manifestation of the energy of God.”[6]

The Word made flesh is a possibility only for God, but given this possibility there is hominization, or the creation of man as a user of language. There are humans because God is human in Christ, and there is speaking because God has spoken in Christ: “the incarnation of the Word is accomplished not only in the divine incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ but also in the acts of naming that are accomplished by the human being in response to the operation of God.”[7] Bulgakov illustrates through icons, which are images made to reflect the Godhead, but these images are possible because the Name of God is the original and real icon of the Godhead. By the same token, in the Old Testament there are a series of names, Elohim, Sabaoth, Adonai, the Holy One, the Blessed One, the Most High, Creator, the Good – none of which is the proper name, Yahweh, revealed to Moses, but each is reflective of the fact that God has a proper name.

In this case, “when we have, as it were, the proper Name of God, God’s I, the proper nature of the word, its ‘inner form,’ or significance, seemingly evaporates.” With “‘I am Yahweh,’ the independent meaning of the word who is completely dissolves and becomes only a verbal form for containing the Name of God, for containing what is a super-word for human language while being a word that humans accommodate. . . . After this, it becomes transparent glass and only lets the rays through but does not reflect them.”[8] God is present in his Name, just as he is present in the sacramental bread and wine. There was always bread and wine, just as there was the “being” of “I am” (contained in Yahweh) but in the Name and in the Body, God completely reveals himself. “More than an icon, it becomes the temple, the altar, the shrine, the Holy of Holies, the place for the presence of God and of encounter with God.”[9] God is in His Name, beyond the icon and beyond descriptive names, making these reflections possible.

“I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:14). Only after giving his name does God order the building of the tabernacle for his dwelling (Ex. 25:8) through which his presence and revelation continue: “I shall be revealed to you, and above the lid between the two cherubim that are on top of the ark of revelation, I shall speak about everything whatsoever I may command the sons of Israel through you” (Ex. 25:22). The tabernacle and then the temple, are built as a dwelling for the Name of God. In this Name, spoken in human language, God chooses to reveal himself, to pour out his love, in the name revealed to Moses in the Old Testament and then in the name revealed to Mary in the New Testament.

In the Hebrew Scriptures God communicates his Name, but it is not to be pronounced (it is the unspeakable tetragrammaton), and is known only by Moses, and then the high priest, who articulated it only at the festival of purification at the entrance to the Holy of Holies. Moses knows God by name unlike Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (Ex. 6:23), and he can communicate the Name. This is not merely the idea of God, but God is in the Name, and this Name is his presence in both tabernacle and temple. The Name is united with the concept of the Glory of God: “and the Lord descended in a cloud and stopped there opposite him and proclaimed the Name of Yahweh” (Exodus 34:5). The “Name of God is taken directly as a real, living force, a Divine energy, which abides at the center of the life of the temple. The temple is the place of habitation of the Name of God; it is constructed for the Name of God.”[10] For example, “then it shall come about that the place in which the Lord your God will choose for His name to dwell” (Dt. 12:11). Prior to the building of the temple, “The people were still sacrificing on the high places, because there was no house built for the name of the Lord until those days” (1 Kings 3:23). Then he says of Solomon, “He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever” (2 Sam. 7:13). Solomon notes that David was disqualified to build a dwelling for the Name, due to violence: “You know that David my father was unable to build a house for the name of the Lord his God because of the wars which surrounded him, until the Lord put them under the soles of his feet” (1 Kings 5:3). But Solomon, due to his peaceful reign can establish a dwelling for the Name: “But now the Lord my God has given me rest on every side; there is neither adversary nor misfortune. Behold, I intend to build a house for the name of the Lord my God, as the Lord spoke to David my father, saying, ‘Your son, whom I will set on your throne in your place, he will build the house for My name’” (1 Kings 5:4-5). The Name of God is not merely a sign or substitute for God, but God is in the Name and his glory and presence are attached to the Name. God’s Name can be articulated, and he is in this word. “So they shall invoke My name on the sons of Israel, and I then will bless them” (Nu. 6:27). This is not only a revelation about the nature of God, but reveals the fulness of the power of human language to be made a fit dwelling for God.

Nonetheless, part of what is communicated around the Name, in the dwelling in the Temple with its walls of separation, and in the dread in which the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies, is the transcendence and separation still attached to the Name. In Christ, this wall of separation is broken down and Jacob’s dream will become a reality: “from now on you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending towards the Son of Man” (Jn 1:51). Jesus will open the Name of God to all, taking what was unpronounceable and dreadful and attaching it to his humanity, so that all can walk in the light of his Name.

Jesus connects the tetragrammaton “I am that I am” to himself: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). In this same passage in John 8 he also ties the “I am” to the light he gives (8:12) connecting it to the Logos of the Prologue called the light of men (John 1:4-9). He says, “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35, 48); “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12; 9:5; 12:46); “I am the door of the sheep” (John 10:7); “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11); “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25); “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6); “I am the vine (John 15:1). He tells Philip, that to see Him is to see the Father: “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me?” (Jn 14:9–10). It is particularly the “lifting up” which reveals Jesus’ identity as the “I am” (YHWH): “So Jesus said, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He’” (John 8:28). Here is the realization of Isaiah, that through the “lifted up” servant “you may know and believe that I AM” (Isa. 43:10; 52:13). “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (John 12:31-32). Sometimes the ἐγώ εἰμι (“I am”) is explicit reference to deity and the name of God (YHWH) and in others it is implicit.  For example, at his arrest he declares ἐγώ εἰμι (“I am”) and the guards fall to the ground (John 18:5) and walking on the water he calms the fear of the disciples, declaring “It is I; do not be afraid” (John 6:20).

In the name of Christ the presence of God is readily available: “And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’” (Acts 2:38). The nations are called to take up the Name (Matt. 28:19), to pray in the Name (John 14:13-14), and to abide in Jesus Christ (John 15:4). The dread of the transcendent name Yahweh is removed in the name of perfect love; “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).

God in Christ has spoken, lifting up speech to its transcendent purposes in himself:

God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:1-3).

Salvation is in and through the name of Christ, as this Word is God (John 1:1).

[1] Sergii Bulgakov, Philosophy of the Name (NIU Series in Orthodox Christian Studies) (pp. 292-293). Cornell University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Dionysius the Areopagite, Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, trans. C. E. Rolt (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920),  53.

[3] Bulgakov, 293.

[4] Bulgakov, 293-294.

[5] Bulgakov, 294.

[6] Bulgakov, 295.

[7] Bulgakov, 295-296.

[8] Bulgakov, 312-313.

[9] Bulgakov, 314.

[10] Bulgakov, 317-318.

The Erasure of Cosmic and Personal Trauma in the Lamb Crucified from the Foundation of the World

The Jews decide to stone Jesus in reaction to his statement, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am” (John 8:58). This statement is on the order of John 1, relativizing creation to the true beginning through the Logos (John 1:1). It is the priority of Christ that gives meaning to the story of Abraham and creation, and not vice versa. Christ’s time bending relativizes Abraham, the unfolding creation story of Genesis, and the unfolding of all history. In the immediate context, Jesus accuses the leading Jews of being subject to lying language and inclined to murder (8:44), including his own impending scapegoating murder, but this is not the first or final word. If, as René Girard argues (see here) language, sign making, and significance evolve around the scapegoated victim, John would subordinate this development (the evolution of language) to Jesus as the prior Word. Prior to the human word there is the divine Word, which is the origin toward which human language, history, and creation are moving. Language may have arisen historically around the scapegoated victim, but this is not the “true” origin of language, anymore than Abraham is the origin of Jesus. In Christ the unfolding of history (inclusive of the darkest episodes) and the unfolding developments of creation (evolutionary or otherwise) are relegated to contingencies, which are neither original nor enduring. The movement of history at its beginning and end, both cosmic and personal, is through the One behind and before all things (Col. 1:13) and in whom all things are summed up (Eph. 1:10).

Note that Jesus uses the present tense, “I am,” indicating it is as the incarnate and enfleshed human that he precedes Abraham. The one who is before Abraham, is the human Jesus who stands before them. He is not claiming his pre-existent, disincarnate spirit had prior existence, nor is he teaching Plato’s immortality of the soul, relativizing the significance of death and the body in comparison to the spirit (not a stoning offence). The “I” before Abraham is inclusive of the entire story of Jesus. There is no breaking apart of Jesus story or subjecting it to a flat chronology. It is not that the Word became incarnate and then suffered on the cross, but rather the One on the cross is the identity of the Word (Logos) and the “I” before Abraham.

This is the way the early church understood the Logos, not as a preincarnate existence, but as Jesus Christ, crucified and raised. Both Cyril and Hippolytus describe the incarnation as beginning, not from the conception or birth of Jesus, but as generated backward in time, having been woven from the sufferings of the cross.[1] It is not that the pre-existent Christ and God have a secret divine story or that the Son had spent a very long time in eternity before the incarnation. As John Behr notes, the early Church did not presume to start with the pre-incarnate Word – in fact he claims, the term “pre-incarnate” is absent from patristic literature.[2] Gregory of Nyssa, for example, begins with the cross and from the cross (in reference to Ephesians 3:18) the height, depth, breadth, and length, of all things unfolds and returns.[3]

The “I am” who faces down stoning has defeated death on the cross. The Jesus prior to Abraham is the embodied, historical Jesus, inclusive of his cross and resurrection. Death is at the center of the conversation, as for the Jews, killing Jesus would put a full stop to the conversation. Jesus is disrupting their control over meaning: “Now we know that You have a demon. Abraham died, and the prophets also; and You say, ‘If anyone keeps My word, he will never taste of death’” (John 8:52). Death is their first and last word, but Jesus would relativize and obliterate its significance. They would stone him and he will be crucified, but this murder, the ultimate trauma and shame in their understanding, is not determinate.

The cosmic futility and the human drama are not without suffering, but the resolution to this suffering precedes its development, in the hope toward which it develops. There is a darkness in the history of humankind, in violent, scapegoating religion, perhaps in the entry into the world of signs and religion (the religion and language of fallen humankind), but the darkness of this development through death is neither the beginning nor end. Christ is before all things and all things are through him. The development of this birth out of darkness is guided by the light in his defeat of death (Col. 1:13). As Gregory describes, the cross is divided into four parts because the One upon it binds together in Himself all forms of existence. The apprehension of all things and the reality of all things converge on the cross.[4] The reign of death, which may seem to hold sway over life and history, is rendered as empty as Jesus’ tomb. There is a retroactive effect, in the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8).

The precedence of Christ is the continual reality sustaining the universe: “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). The creation of the cosmos and humankind come through a cataclysmic explosion, the reign of darkness and the breaking in of light, the emergence of land out of the water, the springing forth of vegetation, and the emergence of woman through man and man through woman, but this beginning is preceded by the true beginning in and through the Logos: “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him” (Col. 1:16). There is a futility in creation, on the order of childbirth, but this futility is overridden, healed, or suspended by what is brought forth: “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom. 8:20–22).

In the same way Christ is the guiding cosmic significance, he is the significance of Abraham and Israel. Paul describes the faith of Abraham, as synonymous with that of Christ, and thus it is resurrection faith (Rom. 4:24). He reads the history of Israel as a participation in the work of Christ: “our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ” (1 Cor. 10:1–4). The meaning of Israel arises from the significance of Christ. The mana they ate is already the spiritual food of Christ, the water that nourished them springs from the rock that is Christ, and their passage through the Red Sea is already baptism into Christ. As Jude states, it was Jesus Christ who rescued Israel from Egypt (Jude 5).

If Christ is the “I am” before Abraham, the spiritual rock of Israel, the Lamb crucified from the foundation of the world, and Christians are those found in Christ, then there is a relativizing and erasing of the sin and death that would otherwise be definitive. In the same way the crucified Lamb precedes his nativity, so too every baptism, every entry into Christ, precedes birth. The new birth is the reality preceding birth, the resurrection is the reality preceding every death, the ascension is the reality preceding every journey through hell, so that our personal history with all of its failings is no more definitive of who we are, than the cross is the last word about Christ: “even when we were dead in our transgressions, [he] made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:5–7).

This is not simply a way of understanding the inherent suffering in the cosmos and in human suffering, but is a means to comprehend personal trauma. The darkness and futility of the world take on a particular expression in each of our lives, and that trauma may seem to permanently scar or misshape our lives. Some have experienced extreme evil, such that it may seem to be primary, but Paul relativizes the futility and pictures it as erased in the way the pain of child birth is forgotten with delivery of the child (Rom. 8:22). For Paul, this is an accomplished fact: “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified” (Rom. 8:29-30). In light of the already accomplished glory, the suffering is not comparable (Rom. 8:18). Just as the pain of childbirth is not primary in giving birth, so Paul places all futility in this fading category, in light of the glory of perfected humanity found in Christ.  “And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach” (Col. 1:21–22).

Sin is erased, the trauma is removed, death is no more, and this is the defining reality behind all the fading contingencies that may have once seemed definitive. As Jordan Wood puts it, “God’s salvation of the world will, in the end, involve the unmaking and remaking of every tragedy or trauma that ever occurred, even those that from our temporal vantage appear fixed in the past.”[5] He says this in light of the theology culminating in Maximus the Confessor:

[I]t is for the sake of Christ—that is, for the whole mystery of Christ—that all the ages and the beings existing within those ages received their beginning and end in Christ. For the union of the limit of the age and limitlessness, of measure and immeasurability, of finitude and infinity, of Creator and creation, and of rest and motion, was conceived before the ages. This union has been manifested in Christ at the end of time, and through itself bestows the fulfillment of God’s foreknowledge.[6]

Predestination is not bound by sequence or by cause and effect in time, but bends around Christ, in whom all things have been predestined or foreordained in an already accomplished fact to work for the good (Rom. 8:28).

[1] Cyril of Alexandria, First Letter to Succensus, 4. Hippolytus, Antichrist 4. Cited in John Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 17-18.

[2] Behr, 15.

[3] Gregory of Nyssa (c 335 – after 394): The Great Catechism, 32

[4] Ibid.

[5] Jordan Wood, “The End of Trauma: Trauma Theory and the Patristic Doctrine of Deification.” Thank you Jordan for sharing this insightful piece.

[6] Maximus, QThal 60.4 (CCSG 22, 75–7; Constas 429). Cited by Jordan, 13.