Paul Axton

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 2^nd century and not the 6^th 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.

The Greek Logos Versus Jesus as Logos: Anthony Bartlett’s Completion of the Girardian Philosophical Project

It is not simply that Christ offers a new meaning, built on the same foundation as human religion, philosophy, or culture. There is the exposure of the violent origins of human language (e.g., as in the history of the Greek logos) and the setting forth of a peaceable alternative (Christ as Logos). The thinker who brings this out most concretely is René Girard, but the contemporary thinker who has completed the work of Girard, in his philosophical implications and expression, is Anthony Bartlett. Bartlett (who is now teaching a class with Ploughshares Bible Institute) tells the story of presenting his findings in a seminar, in which Girard was in attendance. Girard responded after the presentation, “Very impressive,” but immediately left. His singular genius in textual hermeneutics, seemingly left him uncomfortable to engage in discussion of its philosophical implications.[1] Bartlett however, through a close reading of Martin Heidegger (who plays the role of summing up the Western philosophical tradition and who fails in his attempt to escape metaphysics and violence) picks up where Girard left off.

Why Heidegger Fails to Discern the Johannine Logos

Girard notes both Heidegger’s tracing of the Greek logos into an originary violence and its contrast with the Johannine Logos, but Heidegger does not draw out this difference as violence opposed to nonviolence but as a difference of violence. According to Girard, “Heidegger obviously means there to be a difference between the violence of the Greek Logos and the violence he attributes to the Johannine Logos. He sees the former as a violence committed by free men, while the second is a violence visited upon slaves.”[2] It is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role (“the violence visited upon slaves”) to the Greek Logos. What is to be noted in Heidegger, is that Greek “Logos brings together entities that are opposites, and it does not do so without violence.”[3] In the end, according to Girard’s reading of Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition (the original development of the Greek logos).

There is an incapacity to distinguish, and thus the Christian understanding is relegated to a continuation of Greek thought, but Girard considers the contrast between the Greek and Christian Logos as definitive. Christ “interrupts” the Greek logos, it interrupts the grounding in mythology (the scapegoated and deified victim), and it displaces the grounding in violence, but for this very reason the Logos of Christ is cast out of human culture and religion: “The Johannine Logos is foreign to any kind of violence; it is therefore forever expelled, an absent Logos that never has had any direct, determining influence over human cultures.”[4] The incapacity to discern and apply the peace of Christ, as shown in Heidegger and the Western tradition, is pervasive.

Part of this incapacity is explained by Heidegger’s starting point in Being and Time, which is a philosophical articulation of the sense that things are the way they are, and this reality is the necessity within which we work. The primary thing is that man speaks or dwells in language, which does not mean Heidegger’s goal is an intellectual or propositional explanation. “Being there” (Dasein) is the given presupposition and determination, such that one can “take a look” at the meaning of Being, but the point is not to arrive at some “axiom from which a sequence of propositions is deductively derived. It is quite impossible for there to be any ‘circular argument’ in formulating the question about the meaning of Being; for in answering this question, the issue is not one of grounding something by such a derivation; it is rather one of laying bare the grounds for it and exhibiting them.”[5]

As Heidegger puts it elsewhere, “Language speaks”[6] and so too the ground of Being reveals, but there is no penetrating this fact. Rather, what is shown in language is a “relatedness backward or forward”[7] and the question is to spell out the nature of this relatedness. “The speech of mortals rests in its relation to the speaking of language.”[8] The capacity for difference is drawn together in language. “Man speaks in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing.”[9] He finds himself in language, and this is the primary fact about him, which cannot be penetrated but must be allowed to make itself manifest. (Thus poetry is the truest and highest art form, in that it allows language to speak.) Human speech locates Dasein not so much in what is said but in the speaking, in the relatedness to language. Heidegger reifies language as the essential relation shaping human reality and he does not presume to go beneath or above this speaking.

Thus, Heidegger presumes Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek thinker who first develops the history of logos, in his view that “war is the father of all,” has hit upon the origin of logos. Referencing Heraclitus he concludes, violence (German, Gewalt) or war (Polemos) is synonymous with the logos; it is the transformative and creative center. “Confrontation” is the “sire” of all that comes to presence. The gods, humans, slaves and free, arise through “strife” (polemos), as this opposition is what first allows hierarchy, status, discreteness, intervals, and distances. “Confrontation does not divide unity, much less destroy it. It builds unity; it is the gathering (logos). Polemos and logos are the same.”[10] As he says later, “Who the human being is, according to the word of Heraclitus, first comes forth (edeixe, shows itself) in the polemos, in the disjunction of gods and human beings, in the happening of the irruption of Being itself.”[11] Heidegger locates entry into Dasein with “deinon,” designating one who is “violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein.”[12] Heidegger, who fully embraced and never repudiated the Nazi project, sees violence as the creative center from which meaning arises.

In short, humans come into being (Dasein) through the violence of logos. Heidegger locates essential being (phusis) in logos, and raises the question as to how this unfolds into being. “Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming.”[13] The human comes into being as what is distinguishable (out of the indistinguishable) through the emergence of opposition in logos, which brings one thing into presence against the other.[14] Logos is this gathering together, the original differentiating, which marks Dasein.

The Differentiation Proposed by Girard

Heidegger recognized and commended the inherent violence of the logos and of Western thought,while for Girard human meaning has violent, irrational, origins in the scapegoat mechanism but Christ poses an alternative meaning system escaping violent origins. Girard agrees with Heidegger in his focus on myth, his picture of an originary human violence, and the presumption that language, writing, or the oracular contains a hidden truth. Heidegger is right about something concealed in language but the “un-concealing” is only possible through the revelation of Christ: “I propose that if today we are capable of breaking down and analyzing cultural mechanisms, it is because of the indirect and unperceived but formidably constraining influence of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.”[15]

The Logos of the Prologue to John, and the whole Bible must be re-read “in a genuinely Christological light, we must recognize the Word of truth to be the true knowledge of the victim, continually eluded and rejected by mankind.”[16] Genesis portrays God expelling the first couple from his presence, and then Cain slays Abel and establishes the first city, while “in the Prologue to John it is mankind who expels God.” The God who inflicts violence is replaced with “the God that only suffers violence, the Logos that is expelled.”[17] This Logos that has been cast out by his own and by the world, is the rejected truth (with the rejection signaling the nature of this truth). “Pascal writes somewhere that it is permissible to correct the Bible, but only in invoking the Bible’s help. That is exactly what we are doing when we re-read Genesis and the whole of the Old Testament, and the whole of culture, in the light of these few lines from the Prologue.”[18] The truth of the Bible is summed up in the new beginning proclaimed by John, in which all truth and meaning is “ready and waiting.”

Bartlett’s Completion of Girard

As Bartlett notes, the gospel consists of transformative news delivered in simile and figures of speech: “Christian faith depends on the popular use of words, with their built-in potential for metonym, allusion and suggestion, rather than strict conceptual-propositional agreement.”[19] According to John “these [signs] are written in order that you may believe” (John 20:30–31), suggesting “it is the overall writing of Jesus’ deeds and teaching that makes the effective gospel.”[20] There is an immediate identity of signs and mental activity (appreciated in Western or Latin study of signs), but what is missed is the identity of Christ as Logos, completely differentiated from the Greek logos.

Jesus Christ, not the slain scapegoat, is the “true transcendental signifier,” the generator of a peaceable order of meaning. In the Logos of Christ there is a defeat of the violence structuring the world, and this involves a “semiotic struggle, comprising stories, law, prophecy, poetry and, last of all, the singular fact and figure of the cross.”[21] This one rejected by men “must always have itself expelled from a world that cannot be its own.”[22] This is the error on which Jewish thought and the whole of Western thought is founded: Jews who believed “they could keep Yahweh in the Temple” or capture Him in the Law, or Christians who imagine there must be sacrifice and at least one scapegoat (necessary violence).

In Bartlett’s summary, “Another way of saying this is that the logos of Christianity is non-violent, is non-violence itself, and will never retaliate. It is precisely by being ‘driven out’ that it reveals itself: a paradoxical, subversive, world-overturning revelation amounting not to the continually misrecognized double valence of the human good, but to a generative new human meaning.”[23] The Christian Logos not only overturns myth but subverts the ground of Western metaphysics and thought. Christian truth is not to be set along side other truth systems but is singular and overturns the tables of human religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. (In this the project of the poststructuralists, such as Heidegger and Derrida, is brought to completion in the exposure and overturning of the violent metaphysic at the root of human meaning.)

The deep existential choice, posed by Heidegger (summing up the Greek religious and philosophical tradition) and Girard (summing up the Christian exposure of this tradition and offering an alternative) is between a violent and a non-violent (peaceable) organizing center for human existence. As Bartlett emphasized in his lecture, this shift requires total commitment: “You have to go to the heart of it – this is the idea of going to the desert, of changing your life the way Paul changed his, of really taking this thing to heart, because everything is at stake.” Violence is the organizing principle of human civilization, and the empty tomb is a “cataclysmic shock” that provides “no real resolution yet” – “just the radical deconstruction of all familiar structures.” Heidegger retreated into Naziism and Girard did not arrive at total nonviolence, toward which his work pointed. The legacy of the Christian logos is hard to take, hard to assimilate as a way of being human. The vast majority of people, including great thinkers, shrink back from the radical implications of choosing the non-violent path, because it requires nothing less than a complete transformation of how we understand human existence and meaning-making.24

[1] This is too brief and inadequate of a summing up but this is my feeble attempt to capture some of the profound significance Anthony Bartlett is setting forth. His work deserves a wide exposure and I hope this class is the beginning of a wider and much deserved recognition.

[2]René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 266.

[3] Things Hidden, 265.

[4] Things Hidden, 271.

[5] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 28

[6] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans., Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 207

[7] Being and Time, 28.

[8] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 206.

[9] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 207.

[10] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 65.

[11] Metaphysics, 149.

[12] Metaphysics, 160

[13] Metaphysics, 160.

[14] Metaphysics, 132.

[15] Things Hidden, 138.

[16] Things Hidden, 275.

[17] Things Hidden, 275.

[18] Things Hidden, 276.

[19] Anthony Bartlett, “Theology and Catastrophe A (Girardian) Semiotics of Re-Humanization,” (Forum Philosophicum 23 (2018) no. 2, 171–188 ISSN 1426-1898) 178.

[20] Theology and Catastrophe, 178

[21] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.

[22] Things Hidden, 272.

[23] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.

[24] Thank you Jim for the notes.

Girardian Evolution of Language and the Semiotic Shift with Christ

Religions focused on death, by sheer quantity, point to René Girard’s claim that significance or making signs begins with death and killing (the scapegoated victim). Ancestor worship from ancient Egypt, in African traditional religions and in modern Japan, and the veneration of the dead in Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism, or the Mexican Day of the Dead, all point to the primacy of death. A new world unfolds from the body of the victim, as is graphically displayed in religious myth. The violence between Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian Creation Epic (Enuma Elish) results in the body (the canopy of the heavens) and blood of the god Tiamat (slain by Marduk) providing the raw material for the created order. In Norse creation, the giant Ymir is slain by Odin and his brothers and his body becomes the earth, his blood the seas, and his bones the mountains. In Aztec myth, Quetzalcoatl, and his trickster brother, Tezcatlipoca, tore a goddess (or god in some accounts) Tlaltecuhtli in half to make a new heaven and Earth and from the divine body sprouted everything that was necessary for the life of human beings. In Hindu mythology, the Rigveda describes the cosmic being Purusha, whose sacrifice leads to the creation of the universe and all living beings from his body parts. In African mythology, the Dogon people believe that the god Amma created the world from his own body, emphasizing the interconnectedness of life and the cosmos. In other myths there may not be as direct a connection, but as in the Japanese myth the death of Izanami precedes and indirectly is connected with the creation of the Japanese Islands. A world of meaning arises in these myths through the dead body of the god.

Girard explains the rise of the sign as directly connected to the cadaver of the victim: “The origin of symbolic thought lies in the mechanism of the surrogate victim . . . It is a fundamental instance of ‘arbitration’ that gives rise to the dual presence of the arbitrary and true in all symbolic systems . . . To refer to the origin of symbolic thought is to speak as well of the origin of language.”[1] The symbol of the sacrificial victim, carrying the guilt and violence of the community, gives rise to the first sign and entry into language: “there is the cadaver of the collective victim and this cadaver constitutes the first object for this new type of consciousness.”[2] The crisis of all out violence and then the resolution in the victim, Girard speculates, brings on the evolutionary leap into language: “As weak as it might be, the ‘consciousness’ the participants have of the victim is linked structurally to the prodigious effects produced by its passage from life to death, by the spectacular and liberating reversal that has occurred at that instant . . .”[3] Around the cadaver, perhaps connected with a cry or meaningful utterance in death, there arises the linguistic ordering of the world: male and female, inside and outside, and good and evil. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly the myth points to the reality of a murder in which the victim is the “transcendental signifier” constituting meaning and from which all potential meaning will arise.

Girard provides a key to the bizarre and otherwise mystical religious myths. They are not reasonable but they give rise to a peculiar order of reason. Reconciliation, community, and communication arise through the original and ritually repeated act. Out of chaos and murder there arises a system of order, held together by signs, grounded, not in some arbitrary arrangement but in warding off violence through the very possibility of signification given in the scapegoated victim. Language has its roots, according to this view, in the possibility of peace through violence, the possibility of inside through casting out, the possibility of friend and family through enemy and stranger. There is an explanation of the binaries in the act from which they are generated.

But doesn’t this originary violence paint a dark picture of the evolution of the species, as it requires violent death and the worst forms of evil (e.g., scapegoating, discrimination, murder, victimization)? Though Girard is a Christian with a deep belief in the primacy of revelation, he reinterprets the biblical story of the fall through originary violence on a human scale. Does it really matter though, that what comes first is not binaries and opposition (as in structuralism), but a transcendental signified, if this signified is a murdered cadaver? There may be no immediate answer to this question, but the reality of human violence structuring meaning is not speculation, faced as we are with the pervasive reality of violence and evil, but in the Girardian system the darkness is not only offset by Christ but transformed. Meaning is at first grounded in the reality of violence, pointing to the violence which Christ endured, but the teaching of Christ and the work of Christ, displace and transform human systems of meaning, grounding them in a divine order.

This is a move beyond both the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, in that Girard “grounds” signs in the scapegoating mechanism. Structuralism does away with metaphysics as ground and in its anthropological version (developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss) culture is unmoored from metaphysics. According to Anthony Bartlett, culture is set “adrift on a sea of purely semiotic relationships, that is, a kind of language; and, yes, this language was as mobile and uncertain as the sea itself.”[4] The incest taboo for Lévi-Strauss is simply an ordering and arbitrary construct, but Girard points to its prevention of revenge and violence among fathers, brothers and uncles, fighting over daughters, sisters, mothers, and nieces.

Girard grounds symbolic meaning or language in empirical realities of foundational violence. Meaning is embodied, literally and historically. Signs are not simply an endless interplay with other signs, with meaning fabricated in différance (deferral, opposites, sameness and difference), but the original sign or the transcendental signified is the scapegoat victim. If there is no transcendent or stable meaning (no grounded meaning), then there is no representation of reality or “truth” but only the sign system (the point of deconstruction and poststructuralism). The Girardian system escapes the arbitrariness of an endlessly circulating system of signs, existing only in human consciousness, but it is not that Girard directly rescues truth.

As Bartlett points out, “none of this demonstrates anything real.”[5] The sacred cadaver, or the deified victim – the god, is a necessary fiction falsifying murder and hiding the destructive and cathartic role of violence. “It is a falsification of a real event which, in today’s terms, boils down simply to group murder and a kind of misrecognized foundational PTSD implanted in the collective hominid brain.”[6] The victim, after all, is arbitrary and his significance is false (e.g., he is not the singular cause of trouble) but Girard points to how significance may have evolved through blood and murder. “Girard offers a scientific demonstration of how meaning comes about, how something acts as a transcendental signifier, but not that it really is so, that there is metaphysical truth”[7] but there is the possibility for truth and uncovering truth.

There is the creation of a sign system, a reserve of meaning with a false significance. The tomb and death, grounding the system, refer to a pure absence and nothingness. Death is not restorative and the magic of the scapegoat depends upon a lie. Scapegoating is historically real, following the contours of mimetic desire, rivalry, and violence – so it comes through a certain reality, but it obscures this reality in human consciousness. If it is binaries and linguistic structures all the way down, then there is no intersection with reality and no ground, nor truth (though the transcendental signified of the scapegoat is hardly the “truth”). There is the recognition in Girard of a historical reality and a metaphysic, false though it is. He recognizes the binary function of meaning, but does not presume this alone contains meaning but offers an order of meaning grounded in the realities of human relationships and community. He explains the rise of religious meaning in the scapegoating mechanism as the source of meaning per se, but this false meaning is best understood, according to Girard, against the background of biblical revelation. That is false religion or failed religion provides the context for what is happening in the revelation of Christ.

The body of Christ symbolically presented in the Lord’s Supper is the first instance of a meaning system arising from the living body. He breaks bread symbolizing his body, and offers the cup symbolizing his blood (both before and after his death), with the promise of a new order of significance, not in the reification of the cadaver but in the living body of the crucified and living Lord. Christ reveals the workings of the scapegoating he undergoes, but also establishes a reordering of all meaning and Truth around himself.

Christ takes over the meaning fostered by religion in the same way he gives meaning to the law, the temple and indicated in the original Passover. Christ casts truth backward as well as forward, showing how it is that in him death would Passover, and the covenant with death would be broken. As John Behr writes, “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it.”[8] Throughout, Christ is duplicating and fulfilling or giving final meaning to the history of Israel, which would otherwise have no clear reference. The Exodus of Israel and the original Pascha (or Passover) is the type of the true Passion of Christ (Christ is the true Passover Lamb). The tabernacle and temple are grounded in the reality of Christ as true temple. Moses warded off the deadly snakes in the wilderness but this event finds its true meaning in Christ: “Just as Moses raised the snake in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, so that those who believe in Him may have eternal life” (John 3:14). The true bread from heaven (John 6:41–42), the heavenly King and Truth (John 18:36–38), and the true prophet (John 7:47–52), resonate with and complete the prior understanding of the Scriptures.

According to Behr, “the antinomies of the old creation (male/female, slave/free, Jew/Gentile—circumcised/uncircumcised) are now done away with, as belonging to a different era; with the revelation of Christ, the world is structured anew, indeed is a ‘new creation’, with its own antinomies—the Spirit and the flesh—resolved and brought together in Christ, the Church, and the Israel of God.”[9] In the words of Bartlett, “there is implied a Christian signifier at work in the world: its truth arrives like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky.”[10] As Girard writes, “What [Christ] brings us cannot come from human beings, and therefore can only come from God . . . the thought that underpins the Gospels must stem from a reason more powerful than our own.”[11] The meaning and reason of Christ transforms human meaning, grounding it not in violence, but in the divine peace that defeats and displaces violence.

Girard provides a deep technical explanation of Christ’s “regenerative semiotics.” “It is from within the biblical system of signs that truth is found, by reason of the quality of the semiotic reversal itself.”[12] “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (Jn 1:18). Christ, the innocent scapegoat, reveals the truth of victimhood and God, generating a new significance, not grounded in violence but in an originary peace and self-giving love.

[1] René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Translated by Patrick Gregory ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 235. Cited in Anthony Bartlett, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard (p. 36). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] René Girard, et al., Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) 99-100. Cited in Bartlet, 39.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bartlett, 35.

[5] Bartlett, 46.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Bartlett, 41-42.

[8] John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology: The Way to Nicaea, Vol. 1, (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 27-28.

[9] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 116. Behr is referencing Louis Martyn, ‘Apocalyptic Antinomies’.

[10] Bartlett, 47.

[11] René Girard, When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer. Translated by Trevor Cribben Merrill. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014) 92-93. Cited in Bartlett, 48.

[12] Bartlett, 48.

Universal Salvation After Death?

My neighbor, who is a good Christian man, who has raised four of his own children and then raised three more grandchildren, is dying. He has been suffering and his family is sad but seem to feel some relief, but I had another feeling. I have not always felt this (e.g., at especially painful or terrible deaths) but did at both my father’s and mother’s death. A certain sense of completion, and dare I say, satisfaction. I have never spoken of such things or tried to articulate it, but I have come to understand what may be behind this feeling.

If salvation is being made like Christ, becoming full participants in the divine likeness, ridding ourselves completely of sin and taking on the perfection of Christ, then this process inaugurated now must continue after death. Death is not expectation of fear and judgment but of being perfected, of being brought to fulness, “age after age.” There is a stretching out, a striving toward completeness, that in Paul’s picture is never ceasing (Philippians 3:13–14). There is a progression from glory to glory, a continual moving beyond to the ever-greater, the ever-fuller, and the ever-higher (2 Corinthians 3:18).

This Christian hope of being brought to completeness after death, makes sense of the striving toward maturity in life. It is not cut short, but death will be an extension and acceleration of the good work begun in Christ. The ideal is before me, but my love of neighbor or love of enemy is in no way perfected, though I believe this is the goal toward which life now and in the future is converging. This love is at work in me, though I am a hard nut, but nonetheless I believe this work is the completion toward which death is a next step. The failures are shameful, the slip ups so numerous, the creatureliness sometimes disturbing, but I feel I am improving and will do so into eternity. But could it be that, as severe as the improvements I require, that there is nothing or no one beyond God’s redemption?

There are many passages of Scripture that indicate as much: “The LORD’S loving kindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail” (La 3:22). “For no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone” (La 3:31-33). This verse appears in the midst of a time when the Jewish world was falling apart, Jerusalem and the temple destroyed, and Jews sent into exile in Babylon (around 587 BC.). The temple was the microcosmos ordering the Jewish world, so for Jews this was a disaster of cosmic proportions, but in the midst of this universal disaster is assurance of an unfailing love. God does not, and because of his character cannot, reject forever. Judgment and heartache and destruction are never the end of the story but always followed by mercy. God’s judgment, we learn from Lamentations, is not retributive but restorative.

Ezekiel tells us that in the worst case, that even the people of Sodom will be restored: “I will restore their fortunes, both the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters, and the fortunes of Samaria and her daughters, and I will restore your own fortunes in their midst” (Ezekiel 16:53). There is no people worse than Sodom in Jewish estimate. Jude says they will suffer “eternal fire” (Jude 1:7). This fire must not be retributive but purifying and cleansing as God says, “I will restore the fortunes of Sodom.” The only thing that burns forever is God himself, who is a “consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:30). As David Artman puts it, “The eternal fire of God is the fire of God’s holy presence which finally burns away everything that is not holy.”[1] God’s presence cleanses of sin.

According to George McDonald, “God will never let a man off with any fault. He must have him clean.” Likewise: He “will have you clean,” and “will neither spare you any needful shame, nor leave you exposed to any that is not needful.”[2] Everything about you must be saved. There is an all-inclusive depth to salvation that is universal in that it includes everything about each of us and everything about all of us and the world. The perfection required may be terrifying in its thoroughness, yet outside this universal completeness there is no salvation. Thus, the cleansing “worm does not die” and the purifying “fire is not quenched” (Mk 9:44). There is no end to the restorative action of God. “For love loves unto purity,” though this is often experienced as wrath, “as the consuming fire that will not be content until our sinful nature, everything that separates us from God, is burned away.” According to McDonald, “God’s anger is at one with his love.” Mercy and punishment, love and justice, are not opposed, “for punishment—the consuming fire—is a means to an end, that we might be the creatures he intended us to be. God’s punishment, his justice, can be his most merciful act.”[3] The singular work of God in his fiery love is that we should be as he is, and for this he ascended the cross and he descended into the depths of hell so as to retrieve everyone. God is not satisfied with anything less than total salvation, as heaven would be hellish if it is, as Aquinas pictured, an eternity of watching our loved ones burning in hell.

Peter describes the common belief of early Christians that Christ descended to hell or hades to preach to the dead, proclaiming the liberation of the Gospel to those imprisoned by death: “He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water” (I Pe 3:19-20). As Peter goes on to say, “For the gospel has for this purpose been preached even to those who are dead, that though they are judged in the flesh as men, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God” (1 Pe 4:6). Paul indicates that not even death can separate us from the love of God (Rom 8:35-39). Neither death nor judgment limit God’s grace but are in fact a means of grace. As William Barclay argues, “Jesus Christ not only tasted death but drained the cup of death, that the triumph of Christ is universal and that there is no corner of the universe into which the grace of God has not reached.”[4] God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4) and nothing can thwart God’s desire. He is “not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Pe 3:9) and thus “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Php 2:10-11).

Death holds out the possibility of completion, of total reconciliation, of reunion with God and family, and final universal reconciliation. McDonald, has the murderer, Leopold, in one of his novels describe the possible salvific properties of death: ‘Oh!’ he sighed, ‘isn’t it good of God to let me die! Who knows what he may do for me on the other side! Who can tell what the bounty of a God like Jesus may be!’[5] McDonald describes death as “that blessed invention which of itself must set many things right.”[6] For some death may mean relief, for others reunion, and for some death may be the last resort. Of the miserable reprobate, the suicidal, the insane, the hopeless it might be said, “He has gone to see what God could do for him there, for nothing more could be done here.”[7] For everyone death must mean the next step in ongoing perfection toward which he is drawing all things.

[1] David Artman, Grace Saves All: The Necessity of Christian Universalism (p. 25). Wipf and Stock, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

[2] George MacDonald, “Justice,” Unspoken Sermons, III (London: Longmans, 1889), p. 147; “The Child in the Midst,” U.S., I, p. 25. Cited in David M. Kelly, The Treatment of Universalism in Anglican Thought From George McDonald (1824 – 1905 ) to C.S. Lewis (1898- 1963 ), (Unpublished Dissertation, University of Ottawa, 1988) 135.

[3] McDonald, “The Consuming Fire,” from Unspoken Sermons – http://www.online-literature.com/george-macdonald/unspoken-sermons/2/

[4] Barclay, Letters of James and Peter in New Daily Study Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) 280. Cited in Artman, 29.

[5] MacDonald, Thomas Wingfold, III, p. 157. Also, Robert Falconer, pp. 291, 325, 337-8; Wilfred Cumbermede, pp. 208, 329. Cited in Kelly, 148.

[6] MacDonald, Wilfred Cumbermede, p. 208. Cited in Kelly, 148.

[7] MacDonald, Sir Gibbie, p. 35. Also, “The Hardness of the Way,” U.S., I I , p. 29. Cited in Kelly, 148

Understanding McGilchrist Through Paul, Hegel, and Lacan

Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary, in his approach to left brain/right brain theory, presumes “each hemisphere is involved in everything” but nonetheless he argues there is a predominant form of thought attached to the different spheres of the brain.[1] It is not that there are absolute differences or that the two spheres of the brain are not continually interdependent, but this does not mean that there are not necessary differences. Afterall, as he points out, “every known creature with a neuronal system, however far down the evolutionary tree one goes, and however far back in time, has a system that is asymmetrical.” This raises the question of his research, “Why on earth would that be, given that the world they are interacting with is not asymmetrical?”[2] This asymmetrical world shows up continually in “subject versus object, alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole,” with either the objective and impersonal or the subjective and personal, tending to win out.[3] What I demonstrate throughout is that the categories in which McGilchrist sets his dichotomies (between the two hemispheres) easily convert to the Pauline differentiation between law and Christ with the “incarnation” overcoming “alienation” in the “particular life” of a “singular” man in which the antinomies posed by the two hemispheres, or simply by life, are overcome. I also make the case that the completion of McGilchrist’s theory, the ultimate right-brain synthesis, lies in a particular theological understanding toward which his theory points. Throughout the second half of the book he describes two forms of thought or two ways of “being” reflected in the brain and the mind, one of which I argue, culminates in Hegel’s notion of “absolute knowledge” in and through Christ.

The “master” is supposed to be the brain’s right hemisphere, which is the side most connected with the holism of personhood, as it relates vitally, and humanly to the world, taking in what is “new” without concern for objective closure. The left hemisphere is focused on detail and analysis, and rather than connecting to living things, tends to focus on the static and lifeless, on machines, numbers, and abstractions, and while both sides of the brain are involved in language, the left brain tends to reify the word. Rather than recognizing the metaphorical, emotional, and integrating role of language (connected to the right hemisphere), in the left hemisphere there is rejection of the metaphorical for the literal, and a rejection of the personal for the impersonal. The left brain is the organizing bureaucrat which is all about procedure, organization, predictability, abstraction (decontextualization), and which has no room for uniqueness. Justice, in this realm, is not a sense of making things right so much as making everything equal. In this realm, “Increasingly the living would be modelled on the mechanical.”[4] Production, speed, scale, and quantity are the focus, and not quality. Those “with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology, and administration” which have become the shaping forces of our time.[5]

Ideally the master or the right side of the brain is served by the left side of the brain, but there is a tendency in history and in the individual to cut short this integrating holism and to become focused on dissecting the details as an end in itself. Modernity, with its focus on scientism, industrialization, mechanics, materialism, information processing, or perhaps a neuro link in which the machinery is inserted directly in the brain, demonstrates how the servant can usurp the role assigned by the master.

As with illness or brain damage, there is a general trend for the left brain to close in on itself and to shut out the world beyond its own projections:

But what if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings—so that the realm of the actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering, not ‘the Other’, but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere. It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that truly was ‘Other’ than, beyond, the human mind. In essence this was the achievement of the Industrial Revolution.[6]

The mirror stage in Lacanian psychoanalysis can become terminal, in its focus on the self, to the exclusion of all else. Rene Descartes is a key example of one who turns to focus on his own thought, attempting to get at the “thinking thing” behind the thought, dissecting, isolating, refusing the body, and focused completely on interior thought. His philosophical focus follows the pattern of modernity, and betrays the same characteristics of (new) forms of mental illness which would arise in this period. In Pauline terms one is enclosed and isolated in the sinful orientation to the law.

One might extend McGilchrist’s theory to suggest a left-brain theology and atonement as well, in which Christ is made to serve the law and his death makes up for any lack or failure in regard to the law, with the law defining and determining Christ. The sickness of the left brain, the bureaucratic disease that would achieve perfection and power seem perfectly illustrated by Pharisaical Paul: one can be a perfect Jew and keep the law blamelessly (Philippians 3:6), which Christian Paul explains, was what made him the chief of sinners (I Tim. 1:15). Power through language or law presents the possibility of a limited whole which can be manipulated, but to maintain this realm it is necessary that it be complete in itself. The tendency is to see all of reality, even God and Christ, as constituted in a closed space, so that there must be an obstacle, warding off the right brain or warding off the limited nature of language and law. In McGilchrist’s description this gives rise to violence and in the case of Paul it accounts for his arresting and killing Christians. The letter, or primary attachment to Scripture and law, functions as an obstacle, killing off the unlimited vagaries of the spirit, in the Pauline sense (2 Cor. 3:6).

Rather than an embodied and social language (as in Wittgenstein) the tendency is toward a disembodied Platonism, Cartesianism, or legalism. In a Lacanian sense the symbolic order becomes a realm unto itself, with language taking the predominant role over the imagination, reducing the ego to an object. The symbolic register is the organizing center – the possibility of a subject. The “obstacle cause of desire” is the impossible desire of a desiring self. That is, one is blocked from achieving the desired object and this creates the frustrated agon, that for Lacan is the very definition of the human subject. In Paul’s picture, one serves the law, and imagines law is an end in itself, and there is a basic confusion between God and the law, which is inherently alienating. Paul describes an irresolvable split within himself (Rom. 7:15). This Pauline bilateralism within the ego is reflected in McGilchrist’s picture of how it is that we become an obstacle to ourselves. The left brain cuts off the integrating powers of the right brain in the same way the law cuts off from the person of God or the absolute personal reality of Christ.

The work of Christ, is to suspend the law, sublating or suspending while also preserving and fulfilling. Through Christ Paul escaped the delimited world of the law as in Christ the law is delimited (pointing beyond itself), and human brokenness is not a failure in regard to the law, but the failure, and incompleteness of the law as a guide. Christ does not complete human obligations in regard to the law, but suspends the punishing effects of a defective orientation to the law.

The fact that McGilchrist uses the Pauline word describing the suspension of the law in Christ (aufgehoben) indicates that imposing a Christian or Pauline understanding is not foreign to his project. He uses the word in the context of the Hegelian synthesis, in which Hegel deploys Luther’s translation of Paul’s καταργηθῇ, which is a suspension of the punishing effects of the law and its simultaneous preservation. The right brain cannot function apart from the left brain but at the same time it tends to pose an obstacle to its integrating powers. Christ is recognized through the law, through Judaism, through the Scriptures, but taken as their own end these are an obstacle to Christ. The ill effects of sin are when the emissary is thought to be the master. The sin condition, which is a misorientation to the law or a reification of the law, amounts to something like the obstacle the left brain often poses to the right brain. One cannot get rid of the law, any more than function with half a brain, but the ill effects of the law can be suspended in Christ (while the law and Judaism are preserved).

By the same token, it is not that a more holistic (right brain) Romanticism abolishes the Enlightenment or that any particular age is a complete departure from the one that preceded. McGilchrist specifically sights the Hegelian synthesis to express the full integrating power of the right brain. “The movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism therefore is not from A to not-A, but from a world where ‘A and not-A cannot both be true’ is necessarily true to one where ‘A and not-A can both hold’ hold (in philosophical terms this becomes Hegel’s thesis, antithesis – synthesis).”[7] Elements of the Enlightenment are found in Romanticism, just as elements of the Hebrew Scriptures frame understanding of Christ. This synthesis found in Christ is precisely not supersessionist or anti-nominalist, though in the thought world of the left brain and the law this must necessarily be the case.

As Jordan Wood notes, Hegel distinguishes two kinds of thinking: there is finite thinking in which antinomies such as subject/object (along with all of the Kantian antinomies) hold as the one always implies and depends upon its opposite and this “permanent opposition” is definitive of the terms.[8] In Lacan and Žižek’s Hegel, this antagonism and ultimate negativity (death drive) is what gives the appearance of truth and a human Subject. Truth inheres in a lie and the subject arises as a result of this power of negation. In McGilchrist’s definition, this would be the ultimate left-brain materialism and sickness (which Žižek would acknowledge in his notion that the best we can do is “enjoy our symptom”).

Jordan provides a more orthodox reading of Hegel: “Infinite or “rational” thinking is thinking in itself—or better, thinking thinking itself—since here the thinking subject and the object thought are one, and are directed to an inward identity that brooks no definite term.”[9] Hegel has in mind the divine Subject and his thought, shared in Christ, in which there is a move from finite to infinite thinking. As Jordan describes, the theological picture of Hegel’s “knowing” is not the finite but an infinite ground, both subjective and objective. In the subjective, “human reason ‘from below’ is in truth God’s self-knowing “from above” as the Spirit in us.” The objective ground is “God’s Incarnation as a single human individual establishes the conditions for intuitive certainty that the divine nature is such that it can communicate its entire identity as the concrete oneness of abstract opposites, of the infinite and the finite, subject and object, etc.—and this communication is also the form of speculative logic.”[10] This integrating unity of the knower and the known is Hegel’s “absolute knowing,” the goal and means of his “speculative thinking.” That is, this absolute is not closed but open to continual speculation, incorporation, and synthesis.

McGilchrist describes a left-brain failure in theology – reification of the word, focus on the book or the letter as opposed to the integrating factors of the right brain. He argues, the Reformation is a refusal of the metaphorical, and in this the Reformation preserves the Enlightenment rejection of the mysterious and a turning of the imagination to the word. “In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty.”[11] There is a loss of a sense of the “real presence” of Christ in “an endlessly repeated and deferred” symbolism, devoid of its signified. Though he does not explicitly connect the fulness of the right brain with the person of Christ, he does note the “real presence is displaced by a sign, “re-presentations not presentations.”[12]

Where the Greek and Hebrew logos or the law is an entity apart from God, the incarnation enfleshes the Word – which seems unthinkable in the left-brain world. The incarnation of the Word is the ultimate synthesis which personalizes all things and which demands an infinite openness to the new, the unique, and the different. The Word is not that which reduces to sameness but it preserves difference. As long as the left brain, the law, or the symbolic order is predominant, subject-object opposition, bilateralism, dichotomy, dualism, or what Hegel refers to as finite knowing, are clearly in place. Synthesis, integration, or participation in the Word does not obliterate difference but it passes beyond, not through sameness or obliteration of difference, but through recognition that God has made himself available to thought. This Hegelian picture of the role of Christ seems to be the natural implication toward which McGilchrist’s theory points.

For McGilchrist, perhaps in the spirit of Maximus or Origen, we are cocreators, in many senses, of the world we inhabit, as our understanding or perception is shaped by our perspective, our theory, our hypothesis, or even the apparatus of the brain through which we apprehend but this this means of apprehending is not neutral but is itself shaped by our thought. That is there is continual feedback between the mind and brain, and it may be impossible to separate the interplay between the two. McGilchrist recognizes that his theory may serve only as a metaphor, which floats free of cerebral hemispheres, and point to two ways of being in the world. As he puts it,

If it could eventually be shown…that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but of being in the world, are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres, I would be surprised, but not unhappy. Ultimately what I have tried to point to is that the apparently separate ‘functions’ in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent entity; that there are, not just currents here and there in the history of ideas, but consistent ways of being that persist across the history of the Western world, that are fundamentally opposed, though complementary, in what they reveal to us; and that the hemispheres of the brain can be seen as, at the very least, a metaphor for these.[13]

His work is pointing to the primacy of metaphor, connectedness, and synthesis, so he is content if his work serves this purpose. The Christological conclusion, which he does not name but which seems a natural extension of his work, is the Personalism of Hegelian Christology.

Afterall, it is the refusal of the primacy of the personal, of narrative, of metaphor, of openness, that describes the human disease. Only in brain damaged patients, or those who suffer mental illness, can it be said the physical brain is controlling thought but what can be seen in these instances (such as autism or schizophrenia) is the trend which McGilchrist sees as characteristic trends of modernity; narrow focus, reification of language, and depersonalization, but these are precisely the symptoms Paul describes as entrapment to the law. In Christian terms, the disease is addressed and cured in the Person of Christ, as the personal depth of creation, and participation in personhood open up the left-brain to infinite knowledge and synthesis of the right-brain.

[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) Thank you to Jim for acquiring this book for me.

[2] Ibid, 2.

[3] Ibid, 462.

[4] Ibid, 430.

[5] Ibid, 408.

[6] Ibid, 386.

[7] Ibid, 353.

[8] Jordan Wood, “Hegel as Alexandrian Christian: Or, Against False Piety,” from his Substack: Words in Flesh, Sep. 3^rd,2025. This wonderful piece just appeared as I was writing.

[9] Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline [Enc hereafter], Part I: Science of Logic. Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Dnaiel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]), 28. Cited in Wood.

[10] Ibid, Wood.

[11] McGilchrist, 315.

[12] Ibid, 317.

[13] Ibid, 461.