Author: Paul Axton

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

God With Us: The Shattering of the “Idea of God” and Discovery of His Presence

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? … And most are offended by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.” CS Lewis[1]

Last night we finished a course on the Holy Spirit through PBI, and each of the participants (all seasoned pastors and theologians) described experiencing (at some point in their lives but reappreciated in our time together) something on the order of what Lewis describes as the shattering of former ideas and the realization of God’s presence in the realms of marriage, fatherhood, friendship, prayer and ultimately every order of being. The class brought home the recognition that centering, contemplative prayer opens a continual awareness of divine activity pervading our world. We are so attuned, in this secular age, to a disenchanted mechanical universe (the “God-forsakenness” of the world in Charles Taylor’s description) that it takes conscious effort to wake up to the endless iconic nature of the world. In continually looking for God to show-up, it may be we have missed the still small voice beckoning through friendship, contemplative prayer, and married love. The ordinary course of human suffering and love, the questions of a child, and even a rescued cat (continually present in class), testify, we realized, to the divine presence. The recognition requires a relinquishing of settled (limited) notions of God which then opens us to the unsettling realization of the pervasive presence of the Spirit.

The seeming tension between a settled idea of God and continually attempting to conjure up God’s presence are not opposed but consist of the same failure. To divinize an idea is to miss the enfleshed manner in which God comes to us. An “idea” is not enfleshed, it is not felt, it has no presence, and it gives no comfort but at the same time it offers no threat. Isaiah pictures Immanuel (God With Us) as shattering human ideas, human religion and human plans, precisely because they depend on death, darkness and absence. If the music is intense enough, the lights and smoke adjusted just right, and the medium is appealing, it may be that “whisperings and mutterings” may seem to conjure up God’s presence, but Isaiah warns the real thing shatters this conspiratorial belief system.

Mathew announces that Christ as Immanuel brings about this shattering presence of God, and it is Israel and her institutions who will stumble over God With Us. But is Jesus the same one who “will sweep into Judah” and “fill the breadth of your land”? Is God With Us on the order of water which “will overflow and pass through” reaching “even to the neck” and is it his metaphorical wings which will cover the land (Isaiah 8:8)? Mathew also quotes Isaiah to say the Messiah is one who will cause no disturbance: “He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets; a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory; and in his name the Gentiles will hope” (Mt 12:19–21, ESV). How will he bring about a revolutionary justice and provide universal hope without causing a disturbance? How is it that from the womb of a humble peasant girl, as a baby in a manger, working in a carpenter’s shop, teaching a few disciples for three years, and dying on an implement of torture reserved for slaves, Christ changes the world order?

God With Us in the womb, in ordinary life, on a cross, and in the resurrection has, in Irenaeus image, recapitulated all things, so that the world is opened to Trinitarian fellowship. Hans Urs von Balthasar describes Christ as convening a “cosmic liturgy” as he has opened up the world to divine love: “the essence of all being has become visible in Jesus Christ” who reveals the Father, as “a wellspring of reciprocal love.”[2] The fellowship of friends, the love of marriage, the birth of a child, and quiet meditation bear the presence of Immanuel. As Julian of Norwich pictures it, “everything is penetrated, in length and breadth, in height and in depth without end; and it is all one love.”[3]

Many of us have tended, perhaps due to the combined influence of modernity and patriarchal religion, toward a settled idea of God. A static God, a stale theology, a world emptied of the grandeur of God, passes over the unsettling dynamic of God With Us. The incarnation opens to us the interdependent relations of the Trinity, and the fact that Jesus displays the dependence of an infant upon his mother, the dependence of a child on his parents, dependence upon other people’s generosity (e.g., the wealthy women who provided him support), and just the basic human dependence on culture, demonstrates an interdependent reality on a continuum that extends into the Trinity. To be dependent on God and others or to be an interdependent part of a community is part of the mediating reality of knowing God. In Jesus we see the divine in every area of human life: his healing touch, his thirst, his sorrow at death, his love of children, and his tiredness, are mediating realities in which he is known as “I am.” This relational understanding of God revealed in Christ is not a departure from the “I am that I am” revealed to Moses, but its completion; the fulfillment that goes ahead into Egypt and the world.

The Bible knows nothing of the Unmoved Mover but pictures God in dynamic interpersonal relationships such as deliverer, father, mother, husband, beloved, companion, friend, advocate, liberator, king, and judge. God is interpersonal relatedness and this reality extends to his relationship to the world. The God of the Bible gets his hands dirty shaping earth (adamah) into his likeness. Rather than God being unmoved, unoccupied, and settled he is pictured as a shepherd, farmer, laundress, construction worker, potter, midwife, physician, baker, artist, writer, nurse, and homemaker, busily going about the tasks which occupy people and in which we can recognize his activity. Far from an uninvolved patriarch or distant king, God is pictured as giving birth, nursing the young, and is particularly concerned with children, the poor and the weak. The world is alive with the activity and grandeur of God but it may be that the idea of God blinds us to the reality. The Bible points to the constellations, the wonders of nature, the constancy of the seasons, as bearing the fingerprint of God. A she bear protecting her cubs, a mother hen hovering over her chicks, the work of ants, the stealth of the badger, the fragility of birds or even inanimate objects such as running water, light, fire, rocks, or clouds point us to his presence and activity.[4]

Elizabeth Johnson lists the variety of names in the Mishnah as a further example of the dynamic identity of God. In this post-biblical Jewish usage he is the Living God, Friend of the World, Mighty One, Searcher of Hearts, the One who knows the thoughts of all, Lord of Consolations, Height of the World, Eye of the World, Life of the World, Beloved, the One who dwells in hidden places, the Heart of Israel, the One who understands, the One who spoke and the world was, Justice of the World, Home of the World, Rock of the World, the Holy One, Holy Spirit, the One who hears, Peace of the World, Strong One, Merciful One.

In the spirit of Paul on the Areopagus referencing an idol to the “unknown god,” God may also be approached through the myriad of names and activities found in traditional religions: Alone the Great One, the Powerful One, Wise One, Shining One, the One who sees all, the One who is everywhere, Friend, the Greatest of Friends, the One you confide your troubles to, the One who can turn everything upside down, the One there from ancient times, the One who began the forest, the One who gives to all, the Rain-giver, Highest of the Highest, Unknown, Queen of Heaven whose glory shines in mist and rainbow, Great Spirit, Great One of the Sky, Protector of the Poor, Guardian of Orphans, the Chief, the Almighty, Watcher of everything, Owner of everything, Savior of all, the One who loves, who gives birth to the people, who rules, who makes children, who embraces all; the One who does not die, who has not let us down yet, who bears the world, who has seen many moons, who thunders from far-off times, who carries everyone on her back, who is heard in all the world; the One who blesses. The world knows something of the God revealed in Christ, and just as Christ reappropriates and gives new meaning to the Hebrew names for God, he appropriates and fulfills human expectations of an ultimate interpersonal reality.

There is not one settled concept which is adequate for God but what is required is an inexhaustible variety of names and concepts which allow for a dynamic unfolding of the divine reality. Even “Abba,” the name revealed by Christ, does not sum up or amass the Truth in one stroke. As expressed in the metaphor of Henri de Lubac, one can only keep afloat in knowing God in the way that a swimmer keeps afloat, through a continuous stroking of the water. As Johnson puts it, referencing de Lubac, “They are forever brushing aside the representations which are continually reforming, knowing full well that these support them, but that if they were to rest for a single moment they would sink.” As Aquinas notes, if you imagine you have understood God, then what you have understood is not God. [5]

Even the world (in all of its parts), which is open to understanding, seems to require infinite exploration and explanation. I spent some twenty years teaching scientists English in Tsukuba Science City in Japan, and among my students, one was spending his career studying the circulatory system of the silk worm, another was studying the genome of rice, another was a specialist in the human intestine. Several meteorologists passed through my classes and I discovered there are forest meteorologists, desert meteorologists, and those who specialize in ocean currents, but there was no accurate working model of world wide weather as the variables and factors are too great. Tsukuba boasted a small particle accelerator but it was well known that the subatomic world was proving bottomless and the only hope was for larger accelerators. There was no area of science, no matter how small its area of study, that was settled or finished. Just the opposite, the tiniest realm, to say nothing of the rapidly expanding universe, is proving to have infinite depth so that the world seems to consist of an endless number of, what Jason Baxter calls, finite infinities.

In Baxter’s explanation, there was a window between the 12th and 15th century, prior to the secular age but subsequent to the reign of Greek notions in which infinity was equated with incomprehension, in which beauty began to be experienced in terms of the infinite. Where classical philosophers strove to whittle down diffuseness to a tapered and simple whole (the One despite the plurality), the “Gothic aesthetic,” as Baxter dubs it, found a new point of analogy between the world and its maker in the infinite. Thierry of Chartres, for example, discussed how each creature potentially functioned as a mirror of God, with the world consisting of an infinite variety of mirrors reflecting one face: “Just as a single face, when casting its reflection off many mirrors, is still one” (Commentum super Boethii librum De Trinitate, II,48), so God looks at the world and history and sees his face reflected in an infinite number of mirrors. Nicholas of Cusa, in his treatise, On Searching for God, “tells a spiritual brother that the path to God is a paradoxical ascent accomplished by a descent into the world.” He deploys the mustard seed as an example, which grows into a tree which then drops thousands of seeds, each potentially becoming a tree such that “if its potential should be unfolded in actuality, this sensible world would not suffice, nor indeed, would ten or a thousand or all the worlds that one could count.” Nicholas then performs a thought experiment unfolding the infinity immediately available in the mind:

All capacity of the whole sensible word, and not only of this one world but also of an infinite number of worlds . . . How great a magnitude there is in our intellect! . . . through similar ascents, you will be able to ascend from the power of the millet seed and likewise from the power of all vegetable and animal seeds. The power of no seed is less than that of the mustard seed, and there are an infinite number of such seeds. Oh how great is our God, who is the actuality of all potency!

As Baxter notes, “That last part is important, because even if all the potentialities in every seed were unfolded into their infinities, the world would still be but a shadowy explication of God.” [6]

If we settle upon a static image, an idea, a limited whole, a distant and perhaps patriarchal notion of God, then we miss the iconic dynamic of God With Us in the boundless finite infinities. He is with us in creation, in history, in time, in the human circumstance, which mirrors his infinity. We can see him at work in the infinite depth of friendship, in the ever unfolding love of marriage and in the bottomless fellowship and relationship in the world all around us. Immanuel, in shattering the settled finite idols, offers up the infinite icon of the world as the mirror of his image.

(Thank you to Allan, Matt, David, Rob, Dan, Trenton, and Justin for exploring these possibilities together.)

[1] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber, 1966), 52.

[2] Theo-Logic, III, 438.

[3] Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 296-97; see Joan Nuth, Wisdom’s Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich (New York: Crossroad Pub., 199 1). Quoted from Elizabeth Johnson, “Naming God She: The Theological Implications” (2000). Boardman Lectureship in Christian Ethics. 5. http://repository.upenn.edu/boardman/5

[4] See Johnson, Ibid.

[5] Henri De Lubac, Discovely of God, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: I?]. Kenedy, 1960), 120-2 1. Johnson, Ibid.

[6] Jason Baxter, “The Nine Billion Names of God” in Church Life Journal (December 8, 2021) https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-nine-billion-names-of-god/?fbclid=IwAR22nJYREsZNhrTDkBOusl2B6OjvVUK36tOFiBUKZl0bKD4qiIMrRxRgXbk

Abba – Father as Fulfillment of Cosmic Incorporation

“What is God to man, that is man’s own spirit, man’s own soul; what is man’s spirit, soul, and heart – that is his God. God is the manifestation of man’s inner nature, his expressed self; religion is the solemn unveiling of man’s hidden treasures, the avowal of his innermost thoughts, the open confession of the secrets of his love.” Ludwig Feuerbach – The Essence of Christianity

Ludwig Feuerbach’s notion that God is a projection of human values and needs is a key modern theme. Nietzsche maintains God and religion are a product of the resentments of the weak; Freud teaches us that God-language is really about sex; Marx teaches us that it is an instrument of economics, and Carl Schmitt teaches us that God-language is the structuring principle of the state. Psychoanalysis, atheism, Marxism (Communism and Socialism), fascism, and nationalism, all turn theology on its head, claiming that the theological and divine are really about the human.

The proper theological move is to turn theology back round by reclaiming secular insights: instead of God language being for the weak, weakness is really about God and how God comes to us; instead of God language really being about sex, sex is really about God – the erotic is not over and against agape love but is woven through it and indicates its proper end; instead of religion being an opiate to numb economic oppression, economics and economic justice is all about God; instead of allowing for the modern theory of state to occupy theological concepts and structures, the theological must challenge the sole sovereignty of the state.

This final point, Schmitt’s recognition of the sovereign as the exception which establishes the law and the order of state power, pinpoints the unified theme underlying all of these realms. In each instance, God was marked out as a point of exception, the means of escape, the point of oppression, a tool of legitimation, so that the transcendent concept of God came to occupy the supreme place of power, emptied out of immanent categories and these categories were then turned, in secularism, against his transcendence. “God is dead, and we have killed him,” is not an admission of defeat but a claim of power. The power of state, the power of sex, the power of money, the power of the human psyche, each unleashed from its sun have proven deadly and out of control. Capitalism, nationalism, the state as sovereign, sex as an identity, or simply the manipulation of psychic categories, each have claimed their own legitimating frame in pure power, but in their own way each realm has bottomed out. Which is to say God cannot simply be dropped back into the formula as a continued resource for exploitation. Inasmuch as the God of modern religion is a stop gap, a legitimating source for state power, the exception which establishes the law, the gold standard of capitalism, modern religion is atheistic in its practice.

To truly believe in the Trinitarian God, the Abba of Christ, and the Spirit of love, has economic, sexual, ascetical, psychoanalytic, political, and environmental requirements. God With Us, comes to us in and through the realms of the world and where deity has been evacuated from these realms both God and world are lost for us. Where there is no horizon beyond the economic, the sexual, the ascetic, the psychoanalytic, the political, and even the environmental, this becomes sole horizon. There is no proper ordering of these realms, no telos, but only a random groping as in each instance in money, in sex, in the psychoanalytic, etc. we live and move and have our being and this is not a realm apart or a distinct entity in our life but is our life. On the other hand, to picture God as accessible apart from these realms is not to elevate God, but is to demean him to a projection, an instrument, a justification, an opiate, an abstraction who leaves the world to our power.

The point is not that we understand God on the basis of the categories of the world but the categories of the world are mediated to us on the basis of our understanding of God. For example, we do not understand God as Father on the basis of human fatherhood, but we grasp the meaning of human fatherhood as it mediates to us the Fatherhood of God. But, of course, it is not simply fatherhood per se that pertains to recognizing God, but all things, all categories, all ordering of the world, must pertain to being able to rightly realize the identity of God. We understand what children are, what fathers are, what sex is, what a healthy psyche is, what a proper politic is, and what love is on the basis of rightly integrating God and world in Abba (as in Ro 8:15 and Gal 4:6). I presume the realization of this truth of God and world integrated, is what is conveyed in the proper name given to God, communicated by his Son, and realized through the Spirit. God is integrated into our lives and world, not on the basis of the world but on the basis of who he is in Christ in the world, and it is also on this basis that we receive the world. In the incarnation we receive God in the world and the world and all of its categories are transformed in light of Christ. The world is not too low for God; the womb is not beneath God; eating and working and growing tired and living and dying are transformed by Christ. All that is of the world is taken up by Christ and through the world we are now given divine insight.

God has poured himself into the world and into human experience due to his yearning and love, and he draws all things back into himself through this same yearning. So, for example, we can say with Dionysius, that human desire originates in divine yearning and that the basis and end of eros is agape: “let us not fear this title of ‘yearning,’ nor be upset . . . for, in my opinion, the sacred writers regard ‘yearning’ (eros) and love (agape) as having one and the same meaning.”[1] The desire of love pertains to ultimate reality, to God himself, as source and substance (as I have described it here). But this is an understanding that opens up every phase of human subjectivity and experience. The erotic or embodied as agape points to the deepest and earliest phases of human subjectivity as the groundwork of the divine. Just as the erotic rightly ordered is the root of agape, so too all unconscious/conscious origins of development, though we may know only of their disorder, must serve as ground and structure of divine love. As Dionysius puts it, through excessive yearning of his Goodness he is transported outside Himself “to dwell with the heart of all things”:

hence this universe, which is both One and Many; the conjunctions of parts together; the unities underlying all multiplicity, and the perfections of the individual wholes; hence Quality, Quantity, Magnitude and Infinitude; hence fusions and differentiations, hence all infinity and all limitation; all boundaries, ranks, transcendences, elements and forms, hence all Being, all Power, all Activity, all Condition, all Perception, all Reason, all Intuition, all Apprehension, all Understanding, All Communion—in a word, all, that is comes from the Beautiful and Good, hath its very existence in the Beautiful and Good, and turns towards the Beautiful and Good.[2]

All perception, all intuition, all development is in and through and drawn toward His goodness. It is only where this flow and development is stopped short or stunted that the disorder of sin enters in. This principle of sin, a misorientation toward the law, would interject law in place of God and might be described as a misperception of God’s fatherhood. God or the law is pictured as a delimiting factor or a point of proscription. The law is taken as an end in and of itself and God perceived through this law does not beget, desire, or engender but forbids and disrupts. Just as rightly ordering the world is summed up in the realization of Abba-Father, so too the disordering of sin is summed up in the failed orientation of perceiving God through the law.

Without recounting the details of this failure, I presume this stands behind Paul’s culminating point of the Gospel found in the name Abba. The realization of God as Father puts right, not simply the failure of earthly fathers and mothers, but it completes compliments and teaches a true form of subjectivity by locating the human subject in the Trinitarian Subject. Just as Christ calls God “Abba,” we take up this relationship through the Son and the Spirit and this relationship re-appropriates and fulfills the worldly order. This order displaces the monism and pantheism of the world as mother (the law of oneness), and it escapes punishing patriarchy (the binary law of difference). It is in the Trinity, in the place of the Son that brings out the cry “Abba,” through the Spirit. This is not a law-like relationship imposed from outside but describes an interpenetrating realization of true subjectivity. Kittel notes, “Jewish usage shows how this Father-child relationship to God far surpasses any possibilities of intimacy assumed in Judaism, introducing indeed something which is wholly new.”[3]

As John explains, No one has seen God at any time but God the only Son who abides in the bosom of the Father has made him known or explained him (Jn 1:18). As both Galatians and Romans explains it, the Son is born under the law so as to deliver the future sons and daughters from enslavement to sin under the law. In both Romans and Galatians, the shift from slave to adopted child is realized in the heart cry induced by the Spirit: “Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, ‘Abba! Father!’ Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God” (Galatians 4:6-7). The explanation and the adoption accomplished through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, in Paul’s explanation, confronts the lie of sin in regard to the law and defeats the enslaving death dealing orientation. The Abba relationship to God involves all of the work of Christ but it must also involve every aspect of human subjectivity. Paul pictures it as involving the conscious and unconscious self; it addresses the punishing and enslaving aspect of the law taken up into the self and replaces this form of subjectivity with one who is able to imitate Christ.

The Abba relationship and naming of the Father is specific to the work of the Son and the fulfillment of the Spirit, such that to change the name (for example, to Mother) would seem to miss both the universal father problem of the law and the cosmic answer to this problem found in Christ. To erase, evade, or change the name would seem to create the danger of falling back into or failing to be extracted from the original predicament. This in not to occlude the feminine characteristics of God, as it is precisely where we encounter the mothering, birthing, nurturing images of God in the Holy Spirit that the Abba relationship is made possible. This Abba relationship must be a fulfillment of the child’s early concept of mother/father as the unified source engendering one’s individuality. The child’s development is not unlike Paul’s depiction of the Spirit’s (feminine) engendering of sonship as enabling the Abba relationship.

 In conclusion, the development of human subjectivity in all of its stages, known and unknown, along with “all Being, all Power, all Activity, all Condition, all Perception, all Reason, all Intuition, all Apprehension, all Understanding, All Communion” comes from God and turns all things toward God. This pull of divine desire is realized in the Abba relationship, a fulfillment of the specific work of Christ as it overcomes the universal problem (a perceived problem of father) in a cosmic and universal human incorporation into the family of God.    

[1] Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, IV. 12.

[2] Dionysius, IV. 10.

[3] Kittel, G. (1964–). ἀββᾶ. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 1, p. 6). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Engendered Female by the Spirit of Thanksgiving

The primary issue in relating God and gender pertains to God’s engendering qualities, which necessarily refers to both male and female characteristics. The issue is not God’s gender but whether God begets, brings about, catalyzes, creates, effectuates, generates, produces, spawns, or breeds or whether he primarily impedes, limits, restricts, squelches, quashes, represses, smothers, stifles, punishes, and arrests. There is a gendered quality to the two sets of actions but the word is deployed differently in each instance. Gender in the first instance refers literally to producing and propagating and in the second instance the words are metaphorically gendered masculine as these are connected to qualities associated with a father or with God perceived primarily as lawgiver.

The problem in trying to speak of God without gender or in terms of a singular gender is that the engendering quality of God tends to be traded for what is death dealing rather than life giving. That is, God viewed simply as Father or as law giver will be primarily perceived in negative terms of punishing and restricting. God perceived as female, apart from the masculine, does not engender in others but enfolds all multiplication and propagation within herself. In the first instance (God as male), God might be perceived as absolutely transcendent on the order of the Aristotelian unmoved mover. In the second instance (God as female), God is completely immanent and perceived in a pantheistic monism as the womb and consumer of all things. God as purely male or female loses engendering power.

The contrast between Romans 7 and 8 might be characterized, as I have pointed out (here), as a contrast between male and female but this is not entirely accurate. Romans 7:7-25 is about sin and the law and the implication is that God perceived through the law will take on masculine characteristics of dividing, punishing, alienating, and ultimately of being a cold, inaccessible, transcendent figure. Of course, this is not God in reality but God misperceived (due to the deception of sin) as equated with the law. Romans 8 displaces this law of sin and death or this false understanding of God (the law of sin and death) with the reality of God (the law of life in the Spirit). The feminine qualities of the Spirit are accentuated in this exchange, but it is only with this accentuation that the proper role of God as Abba – Father is realized.

The real issue is the receptivity and openness of those who are the objects of God’s engendering activity. Should they take the law as the orienting factor in their relationship to God, then theirs will be a Romans 7, and not an engendering, sort of experience. To conceive this as an experience of God is to miss Paul’s point, as experience of the self is the focus. Where God is presumed to be known through the law what occurs is a relationship to the law which alienates, proscribes, and punishes – God does not really enter into the picture. It is not simply that God is excluded or that the law is felt as an outside and oppressive force, but the force of the law excludes one part of the self from another part of the self. The “I” experiences his own body as if he has a body rather than as if he is his body. The opposite of engendering occurs.

Where God’s birthing, engendering, fructifying activity is realized, the recipient of this activity takes on a feminine openness. Christians become metaphorically female as the bride of Christ, as they become impregnated with life from God and give birth to the fruits of the Spirit (Romans 8:23). The indwelling Spirit engenders life and peace (8:6), and is equated with the indwelling of the Son (vs.9-11). The Spirit incorporates into the familial relation with the Father and Son (vs.15-17), and the believer becomes womb-like in bearing fruit for God (v. 23). As each of the persons of the Trinity converge upon her, with the Father searching the mind of the Spirit who has interpenetrated the mind of the believer (vs. 26-27) as it is being conformed to Christ (v. 29), the believer groans in the Spirit in the pangs of childbirth (v. 23).

I am not sure we need go so far as Gregory of Nyssa who imagines that prior to the fall humans were non-sexed and angelic like, and that in redemption they will no longer bear sexualized bodies but will all become quasi-female in relation to God. The imagery of becoming the bride of Christ, of bearing fruit for Christ, of being the subjects of the incorporating activity of God, may not literally involve the sexual organs but it does refer to a feminine receptivity. This receptivity however, may simply contrast with the impenetrability of one oriented to the law. This masculine sort of orientation is not subject to being conformed, shaped, or reoriented or re-conceptualized. The possibility of being conformed to Christ and of receiving the indwelling of the Spirit may simply reference gender in that there is a feminine receptivity to the character of Christ.

In both Romans and Thessalonians, the shape of this reception is described in terms of a reversal of the way in which we may conceive of prayer. We often picture prayer as an articulation, originating in our own minds, directed at a distant deity, who may or may not hear or answer. Paul pictures prayer as a dynamic exchange in which the persons of the Trinity intermingle, converge, and bring about the incorporation of the believer into the life of God. Even this imagery may be too weak, if we are simply thinking of the cold breath of speech. Prayer, for Paul, is a constant, which already indicates it is not a constant articulation but a constant openness giving rise to a characteristic emotion calling for and flowing out of a continual gratitude.

In I Thessalonians (5:16-18) Paul describes the Spirit as a flame which is not to be quenched, but if allowed to burn, rather than consuming oxygen, produces the breath of life. If the flame is not quenched or suppressed, or stilled, or restrained – that is if the flame of life is not doused by the death dealing law – it lights up the various seats of human personality – the will, the mind, the emotions, the character. Paul aligns a series of exhortations regarding one’s continual state of mind which fold into a singular command, not to quench the Spirit. The way to let the Spirit flow in life is to “rejoice always, pray continually, and give thanks in all circumstances.”  The engendering reality of life in the Spirit shows itself as one is caught up in a continual dynamic of life flowing through the individual – receiving and gratefully acknowledging life.

Conceiving God: The Veneration of Mary and the Denigration of the Spirit

Privileging The Feminine Work of the Spirit

Romans 8 pictures a birth in progress, in which the Holy Spirit, all of creation, and humanity share in the groanings of travail which culminate in the incorporation of the children of God into the divine family. There is a conception in progress, the prime reality Paul is conveying, and his readers are simultaneously being conceived and conceiving. The two conceptions are interwoven, as incorporation into the divine order is inclusive of human realization. There is a dynamic of prayer, in which those praying do not know rightly; they cannot formulate their requests but the Spirit intercedes in the communion-communication-conception, so that engendering them into the divine intercommunication is birth in progress. The imagery is of the Spirit interpenetrating, indwelling, coalescing, incorporating, empathizing, so as to bring about the fulness of a love relationship. This binding together in the Spirit of love is an unbreakable bond in which all of created and uncreated reality converge, and while God is beyond gender, the imagery here privileges the feminine-like role of the Spirit. Even the fatherhood of God, or the Abba relationship enabled through the Son, is accessed and completed through the Spirit.

Confusing the Law with God

Chapter 8 contrasts with the masculine, commanding, principled, punishing, alienating, depiction of the law in chapter 7 (vs. 7-25). The implicit question of chapter 7 (answered in chapter 8), concerns the role of the law in perceiving God. Where God is known through the law, he is separate and dangerous. He dictates, prohibits, proscribes, and inscribes on stone and there is no sharing or incorporation. His Theophanous appearance is repellent to the senses, such that he cannot be looked upon, and only through special permission can Moses, from the cleft in the rock, view his trace.  He then disappears behind an impenetrable veil, leaving nothing for the eyes or the senses.

So too in chapter 7, everything proves ungraspable: the good or right action, the enactment of the will, understanding “what I am doing,” even the principle of the law. Though desire or coveting concerns the senses, the only object of desire which presents itself is the law. In verse 23 he sees this law, or at least its effects in his body, but even here it is not really an object of sight or any positive object for the senses, as it is felt only in its antagonism with the law of the mind. The depiction of 7 is of an ego who would reappropriate himself through the law, yet the law divides even from his own body. Where chapter 8 depicts an incorporating unity of all creation into the life of God, chapter 7 lacks any space other than the law and the law acts only as a point of division. The only portion of the created order to appear in chapter 7 is the body, but even this body is written over with a law that makes it inaccessible. Where chapter 8 is infinitely expansive and incorporative, chapter 7 describes the opposite movement of reduction, restriction, dis-communion, and uncommunication. Nothing is conveyed, nothing is grasped, and nothing is seen.

The key turn in chapter 7 is perhaps, verse 10. The expectation of this law was that it would produce life, but this proved to be the entry point of the deception of sin, which “killed me.” In Genesis 3, the deception of sin was that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would produce life, and so could displace God. The prohibition was not to eat of this tree, but this prohibition was not life-giving per se, as the tree of life, representing the presence of God, was the source of life. In Paul’s argument, the Jewish and Gentile type of person constitutes a singular form that can be summed up under Adam (so that the Jewish encounter with the Decalogue also falls under Adam’s encounter with God’s prohibition).  Due to sin the Jews attempted to establish their own righteousness through the law and failed to combine it with faith (10:3ff).  Paul’s argument throughout the letter is that the law is not an end in itself; at its origin is the faith and example of Abraham and at its end is the fulfillment of Christ.  Law alone, apart from this faith, is void and nullifies the promise (4:14). The work of sin is to skew the perception of the promise of life in the law, so as to remove the necessity of God and leave only the reality of the law. The Mosaic law, like the prohibition in the garden, may have been a pointer or guide, but to imagine that it contains life is to confuse the law with God.

The Law and Gospel as Masculine Incompleteness

This principle of life in the law reduces life to a singular principle which, if one can grasp or obtain it, enfolds all of reality into this singularity – which is, of course, the lie of sin.  This mistake is gendered masculine in the story of Babel and Abraham, in that Abraham is turned away from the Babel notion that he can make a name for himself through his towering (pro)creative powers. Circumcision marks the spot of the accepted incompleteness and dependence on God. This castration cut short exposes the satanic lie (you won’t die), which might otherwise have been repressed. The function of the law and of circumcision was to open the reality of death and mortality and to point to God as the source of life.

The law stood against idolatry but idolatry simply enacts the proclivity to displace God with human creative powers. The typical idol was phallic; a male ordering of reality. The problem is not maleness or procreation, but it is to imagine this alone produces life.  In turn, to imagine that circumcision or the law contains life is to make the law into an idol. It is to miss the counterpoint of the mark of circumcision. The mark means life, procreative power, endurance in the face of death, is only possible with God. For Abraham, this was a reality he committed himself to in his journey of faith.

The question Paul raises in Romans 7:7, might be translated as, “Is the law the Thing? Can’t all things be summed up in this Singularity? Aren’t all things reducible to this Symbolic Order?” Here is a disavowal of the meaning of the mark of circumcision and a return to the original sin. By giving oneself completely over to the symbolic order of law (the knowledge of good and evil), death is denied and sexual difference refused. The naked and ashamed condition of the first couple must relate to their genital difference which exposes the lie, “You will be like gods.” Likewise, beneath the denial of the meaning of circumcision (law) is the denial of death and a refusal of the contingencies of sexual difference. Nothing is lacking as the law is sufficient and “I” can enact the law (the law of sin and death). The question Paul poses is impossible for those who have already presumed that they have life in the law. The law is sin; it is the denial of death and sexuality, and there is no questioning of the all-encompassing order of the law. In this law ordered reality, God is masculine, singular, transcendent, and hidden behind and accessed through the law. This traditional masculine account of God subordinates any trace of difference – difference within the God-head and difference between the sexes (the bearers of the image of the Godhead).

This indifferent God is displaced in Trinitarian difference. As in Romans 8, this difference is an enacted realization in which “the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you” (8:11) and the law of life in the Spirit displaces the law of sin and death (8:2). The image is of the Father’s Spirit raising Jesus and incorporating believers into an egalitarian unified Trinitarian community. The Trinity incorporates difference into unity, so that male/female, slave/free, and Jew/Gentile are all given an identity that surpasses former modes of identity. Romans and a large portion of the letters of the New Testament, are written to ward off the legal, idolizing tendency, of Judaizers who would make the law absolute and so return Christians to this former mode of doing identity. This continued struggle with the masculine principle of idolatry characterizes the subsequent Christian age.

 Though there are abundant signs that in the early church women were apostles, prophets, deaconesses, missionaries, ministers, and were counted equal to men, the tendency was to gradually subordinate the feminine aspect of God, and this was marked by the simultaneous denigration of women.[1] Where God is masculine the male is most divine-like, and women are completed by men, so that theirs is a complementary role lacking its own substance. Patriarchy, monarchy, the privileging of fathers and sons, and a society premised on male sameness flowed from this masculine God. At the same time, the incorporating, birthing, empathetic groaning, qualities of the Spirit, tended to be written or drawn over (literally in iconography) by masculine images of God.

The Iconographic Subordination of the Spirit

When the Greek East and Latin West began to divide, primarily over their different understandings of the processions of the Trinity, Western iconography focuses on the Father and Son with the near loss of images of the Spirit. As Sarah Coakley describes it, “The simultaneous ‘feminization’ of the Spirit in some paintings, and the regular replacement of the Spirit by the Virgin Mary, represent important implicit relocations of female power and presence, but arguably serve more to shore up cultural stereotypes of ‘femininity’ rather than dissolve them.”[2] While it could be argued that the adoration of Mary, reflected in the art, represents an appreciation of the feminine, Coakley’s point is that it seems to reflect a reduction in status of feminine characteristics from the divine to the human.[3] The reduction of the power of the flaming Holy Spirit, first to a soft cooing dove and then to a woman, indicates that the greater the feminization the more the redundancy. The focus is no longer on God giving birth, incorporating, and indwelling as part of his saving action, as these attributes are relegated to a human female stand-in.

With the emphasis in the West on substitutionary atonement, in which Christ’s death satisfied the Father and secured forgiveness, male images of the Father and Son complete the edging out of the Spirit. The dove, where it does make its appearance, is often small and hard to find so that one has to go dove hunting to locate the Spirit. As Coakley notes in typical British understatement, this “witnesses to a less than vibrant pneumatology in the theological thinking that attends the type.”[4] For example, in Hans Holbein the Elder’s memorial for Augsburg (on the eve of the Reformation), punishment and pain are accentuated with the vengeful Father sheathing his sword only upon the pleadings of the wounded Son and the Virgin, who is baring her breast and begging (above her are the words): “Lord, sheathe thy sword that thou hast drawn and see my breast where the Son has sucked.” Here the Virgin has displaced the Spirit and even in this reduced role she only pleads to the Father on behalf of the Son.

Coakley’s comments on a miniature in an eleventh-century Winchester manuscript serve to sum up what she calls “the subterranean pathology of Western ideas of inner-trinitarian relations.” The Father and Son huddled together on the right side of the picture are trampling on the devil, Arius (a heretic) and Judas, while all things feminine (i.e., a dejected looking dove and the Virgin holding a fragile baby) are excluded from the inner divine council. Coakley concludes, “For it is clear where the real power, the real locus of salvific activity, resides in this remarkable manuscript miniature: the left-hand figures, in contrast, strain to gain entry into that salvific realm of eternal male spiritual authority. Has the sense of ‘feminine’ exclusion from the realm of male divinity ever been more masterfully expressed?”[5]

Reconceiving God

Those images which best represent a Romans 8 mutual reception and procession, often depict a circular incorporating movement. In the mystical vision of Hildegard of Bingen, a silver outer circle, representing the Father, and a golden inner circle, representing the Spirit, encompass the figure of Christ. In her theology and iconography, the Spirit is a central theme – picturing, perhaps, Jesus’ explanation to Philip, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9), and Paul’s understanding, “No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12. 3). Likewise, William Blake depicts the Father humbly bending to embrace the Son, who is lying as if on the cross (the cross or any orientating feature is absent). The Spirit forms an all-encompassing background, with outstretched wings mirroring and extending beyond the Son’s outstretched arms. The lack of any grounded perspective, makes it seem “the turned-around Christ is veritably leaping into the Father’s arms, in an ecstasy of simultaneous joy and costly gift.” The movement is from death into the waiting arms of the Father and the enfolding wings of the Spirit and thus a leap into life.[6] A final modern sketch that, in Coakley’s opinion best captures the imagery of Romans 8, depicts a Christ like pray-er with his palms turned upward in supplication, with a flaming dove receiving the prayer from the heart and channeling it into the vortex of the “Father,” represented in arms reaching toward a downward embrace. In Coakley’s words, “The downward movement is thus returned – balanced – by an upward one; and both are taken up into the ‘apophatic’ whirl of a circular tunnel reaching out and up to the unknown.”[7]

The biblical depiction of the law as a warning against and displacement of phallic idolization, and then the New Testament deliverance from the idolatry of the law (Paul equates the turn to law to a return to idolatry) directs us to an incorporating Trinitarian conception of God. The danger, illustrated in the iconography, is of returning to the masculine idolizing principle and of losing the birthing, indwelling, interpenetrating, bond of love, enacted by the Spirit.

[1] Noteworthy here is the recent find of a cathedral, dating to the 5th century, honoring women ministers. “The Holy Mother Sophronia. Theodosia the deaconess. Gregoria the deaconess. These are some of the women lovingly memorialized at a magnificent Byzantine basilica that Israeli archaeologists have uncovered in the southern city of Ashdod.” https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/MAGAZINE-byzantine-basilica-with-female-ministers-and-baffling-burials-found-in-israel-1.10387014 Thank you Matt.

[2] Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (197-198). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

[3] The feminization of the Spirit may already indicate relegation to a secondary status.

[4] Coakley, 211-212.

[5] Coakley, 247-248

[6] Coakley, 255-256.

[7] Coakley, 258-259.

Sarah Coakley’s Confusion of Sinful and Redemptive Suffering

Some conceptions (popular and academic) of Christian experience fail to distinguish between the suffering experienced due to sin (as depicted in Romans 7) and the prayerful groanings compared to childbirth (as depicted in Romans 8) connected to the redemption of all things. The former is a complete futility which gives rise to a living death, while the latter is a joyful, hope filled, experience of a new form of human subjectivity, no longer defined by the old order of oppression and suffering. Paul spends most of chapter 7 describing a form of suffering that is definitive in its all-consuming alienating agony. This suffering is the product of being separated from the love and life of God, and apart from the remedy of life in the Spirit, this suffering reduces one to complete wretchedness and death (7:24). There is suffering in chapter 8 but, in light of the hope of glory, this suffering is in no way definitive. Paul suggests it is not worthy of comparison to the hope of glory (8:17) and it is not a suffering of death but is likened to labor pain. Paul goes so far as to list the possible sufferings of the Christian – tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword (8:35) – but the point is that, unlike sinful suffering, this suffering cannot separate from the love of God. No matter the type of suffering or its source (death, life, angels, principalities, present and future, powers, height, depth, created thing (8:38-39)) this sort of suffering is not of the same order as that which can, indeed, separate from the love of God. Confusing the two forms of suffering can result in a practical misunderstanding of the normative tenor and experience of the Christian life, a misunderstanding of both suffering and redemption, and ultimately a misunderstanding of God.

At both a popular and academic theological level, the failure to delineate forms of suffering results in the valorization of suffering per se, such that it can be presumed one must continually contend with poverty of spirit, depression, darkness, or even abuse and oppression, so as to be spiritual. The compounding of the problem of mental illness and depression by well-meaning Christians (a common experience I witnessed with several friends and students in a Christian college) is bad enough, but more troubling is that the best of theologians (the very ones I admire and depend upon), are guilty of the same error. In both instances there is a tendency toward sacralizing suffering, as if suffering per se is redemptive.

Sarah Coakley is one of the most nuanced of contemporary theologians and while avoiding the cruder forms of heterodoxy, she nonetheless reifies suffering, making it integral to salvation. She speaks of a “productive suffering” and “a productive or empowering form of ‘pain’.”[1] What we learn from John of the Cross, according to Coakley, is that “physical and spiritual pain are inexorably welded together” and the “subjective experience,” whatever happens to him “neurologically or physiologically,” is of “a progressive transformation into God, even if only retrospectively understood.”[2] While we might agree that suffering is a “necessity” in one sense, in that it is tied to human experience and Christian experience, the error is to speak of it as a positive necessity, integral to salvation and Christian maturity. As Linn Tonstad has put it, Coakley’s depiction of being vulnerable and open to God “continually, inextricably, and intrinsically involves suffering.”[3]  

I am presently using Coakley’s, God, Sexuality and the Self, as a text in a course on the Holy Spirit and am in enthusiastic agreement with her description of contemplative prayer as a point of entry into reflection on the Trinity.  Her innovative examination of Romans 8 and focus on the key role of the Spirit make her text one of the best of contemporary resources, and my critique in no way undermines the basic premise of her work. But the tone of her depiction of contemplative prayer and her peculiar attachment to suffering of a particular bent, bear the mark of not having delineated the two varieties of suffering Paul is describing. Even where one might completely agree with her description of Christian suffering, the question concerns the integral necessity and quality of the suffering and the fact that there is no counterbalancing joy, peace, or simply resting in God’s presence from which one might begin. Suffering seems to be, for her, the point of departure into the deeper Christian life.

Take for example her opening description of the work of contemplative prayer:

Such deepening of vision will eventually also involve at some point a profound sense of the mind’s darkening, and of a disconcerting reorientation of the senses – these being inescapable fallouts from the commitment to prayer that sustains such a view of the theological enterprise. The willingness to endure a form of naked dispossession before God; the willingness to surrender control (not to any human power, but solely to God’s power); the willingness to accept the arid vacancy of a simple waiting on God in prayer; the willingness at the same time to accept disconcerting bombardments from the realm of the ‘unconscious’: all these are the ascetical tests of contemplation without which no epistemic or spiritual deepening can start to occur.[4]

As she makes clear further on, she is not simply presuming suffering is part of growth, but she is positing a necessary dereliction of the sort which caused Christ to cry out in forsakenness on the cross. That is, every Christian will have to pass through the dereliction of abandonment experienced by Christ. If Christ’s Spirit is that which is “breathed out of his scarred body” then this “fire of purgation (T. S. Eliot’s ‘flame of incandescent terror’, if you will)” must be allowed for along with “the refreshment of the comforting dove.” She concludes by asking, “Could it be that the acceptance of Christo-morphic pain is part and parcel of the full acceptance of trinitarianism in the ‘church’ type of Christianity?”[5]

Though she does not describe the contrast and means of passage from sin (in Romans 7) and life in the Spirit (in chapter 8), Coakley recommends a prayerful life of purgation as the/a means of transition. She says as much in her appeal to St. John of the Cross, where she describes the necessity of “negative pressure, causing disturbance, deep uneasiness, the highlighting of sin and even the fear of insanity. Such are the death throes of the domineering ego.”[6] As Cha Boram describes it, she equates “dark experiential vulnerability,” such as that found in Christ’s cry of dereliction, with a turn to dependence on God. She simultaneously sets aside the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (suggesting it is not biblical) and turns to what she calls “noetic blankness” or “that-without-which-there-would-be nothing-at-all” as the point of ultimate dependence.[7] Jacques Lacan, an atheist, would concur as he too sees the subject as arising via a reified nothingness (an atheistic creation ex nihilo). His is a subjectivity circulating the power of negation (referencing Romans 7 in his argument). It is not clear how one would distinguish Coakley’s dependence on “that-without-which-there-would-be nothing-at-all” and Lacan’s dependence on a reified nothing. Rather than a recognition of dependence on next to nothingness overcoming or destroying the ego, Lacan, in his reading of Romans 7, sees death, nothingness and anxiety as the very substance of the ego.    

The ego of Romans 7 cannot be overcome by being starved, dissolved, dispossessed, or denied, as this defines the very energetics which give it reality. The “negative pressure, causing disturbance, deep uneasiness, and the highlighting of sin and even the fear of insanity” describes the power of this ego. It is anxiety, fear, and insanity by definition. Of course, this is not anything real or part of God’s good creation. It is the substance and dynamic of a lie that has the failed subject in its grip.

Coakley’s imagined defeat of this ego (through negation, disturbance, etc.) duplicates Paul’s description of the substance of the ego. Both are a description of the energetics of the body of death. The difference is, she lends a reality to this domineering ego which Paul would deny. In Paul’s description, one does not get rid of this lie by engaging its negative pressure but by being joined to the truth.

Coakley describes negativity as if it is part of the reality of being conformed to Christ, on the order of the agony in the garden, or the dereliction of the cross, making no distinction between the suffering of Christ and sinful human suffering. She concludes that the “all too human experiences of anxiety and desolation” are indicators of “the most powerful and active presence of God.” I fear this failure to discriminate pictures redemption in the language of Paul’s depiction of sin in its reification of suffering and death.

Coakley misses the stark contrast between the human subjects portrayed in the two chapters (Romans 7 & 8). The “I” split within himself, colonized by sin, in continual agony due to an oppressive orientation to sin, is deceived and this deception is definitive. This “I” does not arrive at life in the Spirit through intensifying his struggle, as this struggle is deadly and marks “I” as wretched and hopeless. The subject of 7 is without hope, without the Spirit, without prayer, without Abba Father, without Christ, and all he has is law and a desire which has overtaken him in deception with death. This subject is suffering, but this suffering is not redemptive but deadly. The intensification of the suffering seems to be its natural trajectory but no matter how intense, this suffering does not produce the Christian subject of chapter 8.

The only way to move from the deadly suffering of 7 to the birth pangs of 8 is through a change of subject. The passage from the subject of chapter 7 to that of chapter 8 has already been detailed in chapter 6 (verses 3-4): “Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

Paul’s call is for the Roman Christians to live up to their baptism and to the fact that they have been joined to the death of Christ. Having been joined to him they now have his resurrection power, so that they might “walk in newness of life.” They are not joined to the death of Christ through their own dereliction but through his. It is not their capacity to overcome sin but his which enables them to reorder their lives. Paul is calling them to act like who they are. He calls them to take up a cruciform and resurrected life because this is already the reality into which they have been inducted. “For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin” (Rom. 6:5-6). Their life is no longer defined by an alienating, oppressive orientation to sin and death. Certainly, their will, their practice, and their discipline are called upon, but this is not the point of departure but a reality enabled by Christ and the gift of his Spirit. “For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:10-11).

What we should learn in the contrast between Romans 7 & 8 is that the human tendency to valorize and reify death and nothingness induces the suffering originating in a form of failed human subjectivity, and to separate out this sort of suffering from the groanings of the Spirit and groanings of creation will put a different emphasis and tenor on prayerful participation in the Trinity depicted in Romans 8. Both 7 & 8 might be linked to different versions of creation ex nihilo, but in 7 the nihil and nothing serve as an abiding resource, so that the failed subject might be described as channeling the force of negation and death as if it is life. The gift of the Spirit depicted in 8 brings creation ex nihilo to bear directly on human subjectivity, so that the redeemed subject has life as a direct gift from God.

[1] Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 36.

[2] Sarah Coakley, “Palliative or Intensification? Pain and Christian Contemplation in the Spirituality of the Sixteenth-Century Carmelites,” in Pain and Its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture, ed. Sarah Coakley and Kay Kaufman Shelemay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 91.

[3] Linn Tonstad, God and Difference: The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude, (New York: Routledge, 2016) 114. The above are quoted in Cha, Boram (2019) Suffering, Tragedy, Vulnerability: A Triangulated Examination of the Divine Human Relationship in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Rowan Williams, and Sarah Coakley, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/13372/

[4] Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition) 19.

[5] Ibid, 180.

[6] Coakley, “God as Trinity: An Approach through Prayer.” In We Believe in God: A Report by The Doctrine Commission of the General Synod of the Church of England, 104–21 (London: Church House, 1987) 109-110. Quoted in Boram, 157.

[7] Coakley, Powers and Submissions, 56. Boram, 155.

Primal Desire: The Desire to be Recognized

O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; You understand my thought from afar. You scrutinize my path and my lying down, And are intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O Lord, You know it all. You have enclosed me behind and before, And laid Your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I cannot attain to it.

Psalm 139:1-6

Desire is the primary concern of psychoanalysis but it is also front and center in the biblical portrayal of human failure and redemption. The web of experience, conscious and unconscious, symbolic and beyond, is woven into the ordering and structure of human desire.  In psychoanalytic treatment, the goal is to lead the analysand to articulate their desire or bring it into consciousness or into full existence – which is an unending process.

In biblical terms, there is an effort to channel or rightly order desire as there is the presumption that it can be misdirected and destructive. In both psychoanalysis and the Bible desire cannot be fully articulated as there is a fundamental incompatibility between desire and speech. Speech and cognition cannot fully grasp desire.

Unlike a need, which can be met and satisfied, desire is a constant pressure which both theology and psychology call eternal, but there is a crucial difference in these two eternities. In psychoanalysis desire is a relation to a lack and this is its eternality. Though the Bible and theology distinguish a failed desire – a covetous or exponential desire of lack – there is also the description of desire as it relates to God and is primarily God’s own desire. So desire in the Bible takes on a positive eternality.

One of Jacques Lacan’s oft-repeated formulas, confirmed in the Bible, is: “man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (S11, 235). This can mean that basic desire is to be recognized by the Other or it can mean that one’s own desire is an imitation of another’s desire. In the first case, all humans want to be “desired” or “loved” or “recognized.”[1] The second meaning is partially tied to the first, in that desire is learned or mimetic, arising from the Other. The subject desires what the other desires or she desires from the perspective of someone else. It is not the intrinsic quality of an object but the vested quality of its being desired by another which makes it desirable. In Alexandre Kojève’s explanation, this second possibility is tied up with the first, in that imitating another’s desire is still an attempt at being counted worthy of recognition. To desire what another desires, goes back to the former point about desiring recognition, as possessing what is desirable the subject becomes desirable.

This mediated desire however, can take on a bad eternality in several senses. There is no end of the objects to be desired or of the models of desire. Since this desire is for what one does not have it will always be desire for something else. To have it is not to desire it. The impossible nature of desire may be Oedipal, or desire imitating the father’s desire for Mother – the primordial Other. As long as desire remains unconscious it is likely to take on this consumptive tenor of lack or impossibility in which one is continually climbing a ladder of desire and never getting off the ground.

To get rid of the bad eternalization of desire, not a clear possibility in psychoanalysis, requires recognizing the nature of primal human desire. The Apostle Paul names desire for recognition and places it front and center – trumping even one’s knowledge of God: “But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.” This is parallel to Galatians 4:9: “But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world?” To be chosen, recognized, or loved by God speaks to a reckoning with desire which psychoanalysis never clearly approaches. Paul names this an alternative or resolution to the world’s elementary principle. Isn’t this the desire that drives the world, but in going unnamed it simultaneously orders the world and creates the consumptive drive destroying it?[2]

[1] This insight can be traced through Lacan to Alexandre Kojève and Hegel.

[2] The case could be made that this is the primary movement in redemption – to be known and recognized by God. 2 Timothy 2:19: “Nevertheless, the firm foundation of God stands, having this seal, ‘The Lord knows those who are His,’ and, ‘Everyone who names the name of the Lord is to abstain from wickedness.’” John 10:14: “I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me.” John 10:27: “I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me,”

The Cultural Formation of the Failed German Church and American Evangelicalism

Who said it: Bonhoeffer (about Germany) or Wehner (about the United States)?

In The Atlantic this week, in an article by Peter Wehner, evangelicalism is depicted as falling apart. There is not only a mass exodus of members but pastors are being driven from the ministry by the prevailing mean spiritedness that has invaded churches. While many factors may be part of the problem (including Covid and the resulting isolation) the primary problem, the article claims, is that Christians are influenced and shaped more by social media and secular politics than by Christ.[1] The depiction could come directly from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, which describes the failure of the German church in the face of the rise of National Socialism. To make this case (that the German and American church failure follow a similar course), below I reference the Atlantic article, which is in each instance quoting church leaders and experts (whose names I have omitted), and Bonhoeffer’s depiction in Ethics. There is an overlap in the two descriptions such that, minus the references provided in the footnotes, it is nearly indiscernible who said it: Bonhoeffer (about Germany) or Wehner (about the United States)?

There is an “aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset” characteristic of the politics of the day making its way into churches in their treatment of pastors and teachers. The same toxic culture, the domineering leadership and bullying on the national scene is now predominant within churches in their internal politics. Churches and Christians “have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics” so that churches are polarized and politicized as they have become “repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized.”[2] On the national scene, the catalyst is a leader with a “profound distrust of all people” who depicts himself part of the community of common people, “he praises himself with repulsive vanity and despises the rights of every individual. He considers the people stupid, and they become stupid; he considers them weak, and they become weak; he considers them criminal, and they become criminal. His most holy seriousness is frivolous play; his conventional protestations of solicitude for people are bare-faced cynicism. In his deep contempt for humanity, the more he seeks the favor of those he despises, the more certainly he arouses the masses to declare him a god.” [3] The leader “was able to add open hatred and resentments to the political-religious stance of ‘true believers,’ with “tribal instincts” becoming overwhelming. The result is that many Christian followers of (Hitler?/Trump?) “have come to see a gospel of hatreds, resentments, vilifications, put-downs, and insults as expressions of their Christianity, for which they too should be willing to fight.” [4] Which is it, The Atlantic or Ethics?

Both describe a similar social development. The church “has been held together by political orientation and sociology more than by common theology.” Discipleship is displaced by propaganda: “What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure.”[5] Success by the culture’s standard is the formative factor, “the majority fall into idolizing success. They become blind to right and wrong, truth and lie, decency and malice.” With the successful person as model, “Ethical and intellectual capacity for judgment grow dull before the sheen of success and before the desire somehow to share in it.”[6] There has been a church wide failure “to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.”[7] Which is it, Germany or the United States?

The message in each instance is, “culture catechizes.” “Our current political culture has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing . . . People who want to be connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.”[8] And with this catechesis there develops a forced tolerance in which “evil is reinterpreted as good, meanness is overlooked, and the reprehensible is excused.” It becomes very difficult to resist the majority and so “one shies away from a clear No, and finally agrees to everything.” Admiration for the individualist “a self-made picture of human beings that has little similarity to reality” takes hold, and the result is deadly.[9] Is it Bonhoeffer or Wehner?

The way in which the culture catechizes is through the manufactured consent of propaganda. “Catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them.”[10] The culture has produced its “untouchables” like “a black person in a white country,” or like the poor the ill and the disabled.[11] The propaganda scapegoats a particular group and this becomes the basis for identity formation, with hatred as the common denominator. To stir up hatred is to stir up engagement and blind passion. “What all those media want is engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred. . . And so that hatred migrates into the Church, which doesn’t have the resources to resist it.”[12] “Too often, when (Americans?/Germans?) look at the Church, they see not the face of Jesus, but the style of (Donald Trump?/Adolph Hitler?). The leader “normalized a form of discourse that made the once-shocking seem routine.”[13] In either case, “Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power and with its apologia for the weak.”[14]

Christians “have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.” Christian nationalism is “the belief that America?/Germany? is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such.” This “is a powerful predictor of attitudes toward non-Christians . . . on issues such as immigration and race.”[15] Over against the masculine, rugged, Jesus, “God sanctifies pain, lowliness, failure, poverty, loneliness, and despair in the cross of Christ. Not that all this has value in itself; it is made holy by the love of God, who takes it all and bears it as judgment. The Yes of God to the cross is judgment on the successful.” This is the great mystery, that the sign of Christ’s seeming failure in the world, the cross, is the marker of his success.[16]

Perhaps the only difference in the two descriptions, as in the above paragraph, is that Bonhoeffer weaves warning and solutions throughout Ethics, but these too would seem to apply in both cases, as he is describing an alternative ethical formation centered on Christ. Christian “formation,” Bonhoeffer explains, means not “formation of the world by planning and programs, but in all formation it is concerned only with the one form that has overcome the world, the form of Jesus Christ. Formation proceeds only from here.” Formation does not happen by striving “to become like Jesus” but “as the form of Jesus Christ himself so works on us that it molds us, conforming our form to Christ’s own (Gal. 4:9).” As Paul indicates, it is God’s action over and against the world and not through world formation.

Bonhoeffer describes the atmosphere of Nazi Germany as imbued with an idolization of death., “Nothing betrays the idolization of death more clearly than when an era claims to build for eternity, and yet life in that era is worth nothing, when big words are spoken about a new humanity, a new world, a new society that will be created, and all this newness consists only in the annihilation of existing life.” Hitler had planned for a thousand-year Reich or an earthly kingdom without limits. To accomplish this goal “unworthy lives” were to be destroyed, as happened in the “euthanasia” murder action in 1940–41 and then in the mass slaughter of the Jews. “Where death is final, earthly life is all or nothing. Defiant striving for earthly eternities goes together with a careless playing with life, anxious affirmation of life with an indifferent contempt for life.” As the Atlantic describes it and as the disregard for life indicates, “More than most other Christians, however, conservative evangelicals insist that they are rejecting cultural influences . . . when in fact their faith is profoundly shaped by cultural and political values, by their racial identity and their Christian nationalism.”

The atmosphere of fear seems to be the common denominator in the compliance of German Christians to Hitler and American evangelical compliance to a politics of hatred. Fear of the foreigner, fear of the minority, fear of poverty, fear of the future, fear of liberals, fear of conspiracies. Such that “for more than half a century evangelical leaders have found reason to deem the situation sufficiently dire. They rallied their congregations against the threats of communism, secular humanism, feminism, gay rights, radical Islam, Democrats in the White House, demographic decline, and critical race theory, and in defense of religious liberty.” Just as Hitler created fear of the communists and fear of the Jews, evangelical militancy is a response to fear. However, as with Hitler and Trump, “it’s important to recognize that in many cases evangelical leaders actively stoked fear in the hearts of their followers in order to consolidate their own power and advance their own interests.”

Fear explains both the “explosion of conflict” and the resulting spiritual deformity. Germany experienced a fear of international humiliation after W.W. I, and in the United States there is a regional fear and shame. “What we’re watching right now in much of our nation’s Christian politics . . . is an explosion not of godly Christian passion, but rather of ancient southern shame/honor rage.” It is a fear and passion “stirred up by the Trump presidency, the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and the January 6 insurrection; the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and critical race theory; and matters related to the pandemic, such as masking, vaccinations, and restrictions on in-person worship.” The biblical depiction of grace and gratitude, but most especially of love, describes an emotional life in which fear is not formative. As Scripture says, “Perfect love drives out fear.”

In Bonhoeffer’s description, it is only Christ’s resurrection that breaks through this culture of fear and death. “Christ is the one who has become human, who was crucified, and who is risen, as confessed by the Christian faith. To be transformed into his form is the meaning of the formation that the Bible speaks about.” This enables a new sort of formation: “Transfigured into the form of the risen one, they bear here only the sign of the cross and judgment. In bearing them willingly, they show themselves as those who have received the Holy Spirit and are united with Jesus Christ in incomparable love and community.”[17]

Love and not fear marks this new community who, though they live in the midst of death, are not controlled by death. In this the followers of Christ are are enabled to be fully human, resembling everyone else in many ways, with one key difference. “They are not concerned to promote themselves, but to lift up Christ for the sake of their brothers and sisters.”[18] Christ conveys what it means to be fully human. “Christ was not essentially a teacher, a lawgiver, but a human being, a real human being like us. Accordingly, Christ does not want us to be first of all pupils, representatives and advocates of a particular doctrine, but human beings, real human beings before God.”[19]

Perhaps Bonhoeffer’s prescription for the failed German church is the only remedy for a rapidly failing American church; to be fully human by being conformed to Christ and not culture.

[1] Peter Wehner, “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart,” The Atlantic (October 24, 2021).

[2] Ibid

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, trans. Clifford Green, (Published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2008) from the edition published online by Project Muse file:///C:/Users/Paul%20Axton/Downloads/Ethics%20as%20Formation.pdf, 86.

[4] Wehner.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Bonhoeffer, 89.

[7] Wehner

[8] Ibid.

[9] Bonhoeffer, 87.

[10] Wehner

[11] Bonhoeffer, 90

[12] Wehner

[13] Ibid.

[14] Bonhoeffer, Ibid.

[15] Wehner

[16] Bonhoeffer, 90-91.

[17] Bonhoeffer, 93, 95.

[18] Bonhoeffer, 95.

[19] Bonhoeffer, 98.

The God of Empire Versus the God of Passion

There is something of an endless debate about God within the major branches of the Christian faith – What role for Greek conceptions of God? Does the Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Father and the Son? How is the Father involved in the work of the Son and how do we conceive their difference, etc. etc.? East, West, Protestant, Lutheran, Calvinist, are largely defined by the perceived differences (real and imagined) in regard to fundamental issues about how and what we know about God. These divisions though, may be shaped by more subtle sociological concerns. Sarah Coakley, following Ernst Troeltsch, divides the sociological contexts between church, sect, and mysticism and sees the sociological as throwing additional light on theological emphasis. She sees certain forms of trinitarianism as cohering with particular types of ecclesiastical organization. For example, focus on pneumatology is unlikely to accompany strong patriarchal social and political contexts – given the individualistic, mystical, and “feminine” role of the Spirit. [1] Throughout the history of the church, the more settled the institution (the church type), the more unmoved, settled, and distant, the conception and perceived experience of God. The focus on the Spirit and the experientialism of mysticism have tended to be segregated from the theology of the church type. The adaptation of the Aristotelian concept of God (the Unmoved Mover), came with adaptation to empire, hierarchy, and institutions meant to endure by dint of their alignment with worldly power.

Giorgio Agamben describes the rise of two orders of church, each consisting of its own conceptual and experiential reality. In the biblical mandate, the church is to dwell on the earth as an exile or sojourner captured in the Greek verb paroikein, as in the description of I Peter 1:17 – “the time of sojourning.” In this imagery truth is discovered along the way – or truth is the way (viatorum). The sojourner church stands in contrast to the settled church, which takes on the look of a city, state, kingdom, or empire – captured in the Greek verb katoikein. The katoikia church is built to last, and as opposed to the paroikein church, is not geared to the parousia or the coming of Christ, as it has put down roots in the world. The parousia, in Agamben’s conception, is not in the future or deferred but speaks of the immediate experience of time (fundamental human experience).  In the true church (Agamben counts the institution as we have it an imposter), every moment bears the possibility of the inbreaking of the Messiah, made impossible by the katoikia church.[2]

Agamben locates the point of departure from the biblical church within early debates about the Trinity. The distinction between the immanent (ad intra – or God’s self-relation) and economic (God’s relation to creation) Trinity accounts for the development of western politics and economics. However, according to Agamben, this secularizes theology even before there is a secular order: “from the beginning theology conceives divine life and the history of humanity as an oikonomia (economy), that is, that theology is itself ‘economic’ and did not simply become so at a later time through secularization.” Where the political order can lay claim to a first order power relation, Christian’s (through this theological maneuvering) only have to do with an economy (a second order of experience).[3] While one may not agree with the sweep of Agamben’s critique, his depiction parallels Coakley’s sociological contextualization of theology.  

In the 20th century there have been a variety of attempts to correct this theological failure precisely where it had the greatest impact. Where the church (at least the church type, with its institutions) failed in Germany with National Socialism, this gave rise to striking theological innovation. Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer turn from the characteristic church type dogmatic speculation to a Christocentric point of departure.

 Bonhoeffer in his lectures on Christology locates the Logos, not in the realm of the transcendent. He claims “this will inevitably constitute that Logos as an object for human logos, locating it within the territory of things about which we can ask ‘how is it possible?’ or ‘how does it work?'” As Bonhoeffer puts it, “the question is no longer ‘how?’ but ‘who?’ Who is it that I confront when I look at Jesus? But also, and equally importantly, ‘Who am I?'”[4]

Bonhoeffer depicts the question of the person of Christ as challenging his self-understanding: “When a human being confronts Jesus, the human being must either die or kill Jesus.”[5] The reality of Jesus creates its own context and terms of engagement. Jesus is not Socrates, reminding us of what we already know, but he creates the conditions for knowing him as these conditions do not otherwise exist. He is what he teaches.

Picturing the Logos as on the order of the Aristotelian difference (the apathetic God) is simply to accommodate divine revelation to the human word. “The divine revealed as overwhelming power or unconstrained agency as we understand those things will not recreate us, re-beget us; it will not require the death of our logos.” This sort of God simply accommodates our instincts about the absolute Other, the humanly conceived difference of divinity. If we do not accept the death of the human logos, we will deploy it in defeat of the divine Logos.[6]

Of course Christ allows for his death. He is not a rival to my will or my word. It is precisely his kenotic humility – “taking the form of a slave” (not just being incarnate) that challenges the foundation (foundationalism) of my selfhood. Though it is not as if there is any actually existing foundation – this is simply the “poisonous fiction” that must die or the pride that must fail.[7]

 One of the sharpest German attempts at a revisionist understanding came from Jurgen Moltmann, who begins his book on the Trinity by recounting how Greek notions of God effectively corrupted the Christian faith. He suggests that where Greek philosophy has been deployed in conceiving of God, “then we have to exclude difference, diversity, movement and suffering from the divine nature.” He names the resultant heresy of nominalism (God cannot be known in his essence) as giving us a God that is so far from us (impassible and immovable in his remoteness), such that apathetic portrayal of God has trumped the importance of the person and work of Christ. He concludes that, “down to the present-day Christian theology has failed to develop a consistent Christian concept of God? And that instead . . . it has rather adopted the metaphysical tradition of Greek philosophy, which it understood as ‘natural theology’ and saw as its own foundation.” By allowing the “apathetic axiom” to prevail over the person and work of Christ, God became “the cold, silent and unloved heavenly power.”[8]

Moltmann poses the following choice: either the apathetic God prevails and the passion of Christ is seen as “the suffering of the good man from Nazareth,” or the passion of Christ prevails and divine apatheia is no longer determinative. Within this second alternative, Moltmann points out that his depiction of suffering entails a two-fold rejection: the Greek depiction of the divine incapacity for suffering, and suffering defined as incapacity or deficiency. “But there is a third form of suffering: active suffering – the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love.”

Without passion God would be incapable of love. Moltmann develops the two-fold meaning of passion – inclusive of passionate desire and the suffering passion of Christ. If God were incapable of suffering in every respect, then he would also be incapable of any form of passion or love. As Aristotle puts it, he would at most be capable of loving himself, but not of loving another as himself. But if he is capable of loving something else, then he lays himself open to the suffering which love for another brings; yet, by virtue of his love, he remains master of the pain that love causes him to suffer. “God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is ‘apathetic’. But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is ‘pathetic’.” [9] God is love and his is not a cold love (as if there is such a thing), but the passionate love revealed in Christ.

Sarah Coakley cites Moltmann as an influence in her turn to desire, sex and gender in conceptualization of the Trinity.[10] However, what Coakley avoids and Moltmann spells out, is the historical and theological challenge to notions of divine apathy entailed in discussions of passion. Moltmann finds in Jewish theology and Origen precedent for his depiction of the suffering of the Father as a necessary part of the love of God.

Origen describes the suffering of God in his exposition of Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.”  “In his mercy God suffers with us, for he is not heartless.” In his explanation, Origen equates the love of God with the necessity of suffering:

He (the Redeemer) descended to earth out of sympathy for the human race. He took our sufferings upon Himself before He endured the cross – indeed before He even deigned to take our flesh upon Himself; for if He had not felt these sufferings [beforehand] He would not have come to partake of our human life. First of all He suffered, then He descended and became visible to us. What is this passion which He suffered for us? It is the passion of love {Caritas est passio). And the Father Himself, the God of the universe, ‘slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy’ (Ps. 103.8), does He not also suffer in a certain way? Or know you not that He, when He condescends to men, suffers human suffering? For the Lord thy God has taken thy ways upon Him ‘as a man doth bear his son’ (Deut. 1.31). So God suffers our ways as the Son of God bears our sufferings. Even the Father is not incapable of suffering {Ipse pater non est itnpassibilis). When we call upon him, He is merciful and feels our pain with us. He suffers a suffering of love, becoming something which because of the greatness of his nature He cannot be, and endures human suffering for our sakes.[11]

As Moltmann explains, Origen’s talk of God’s suffering means the suffering of love; the compassion of mercy and pity. The merciful person taking pity on another participates in the suffering of the one he pities, “he takes the other’s sufferings on himself, he suffers for others.” For Origen this is the suffering of God, “the suffering of the Father who in giving up his ‘own Son’ (Rom. 8.32) suffers the pain of redemption.” The Father is not removed from the suffering of the Son, anymore than he can be said to be removed from the passion or desire of God. Origen depicts the divine passion of Christ as inclusive of the divine passion between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. “The suffering of love does not only affect the redeeming acts of God outwards; it also affects the trinitarian fellowship in God himself.”[12]

Origen predates the distinction and Moltmann and Coakley, in varying forms, would equate the economic and immanent Trinity. Moltmann notices in Origen what Coakley notices in Romans 8, that it is precisely in conjunction with suffering that the Trinitarian nature of God is most clearly delineated.  Like Coakley and Paul, Moltmann also locates the apprehension and participation in the suffering of God in prayer.

Moltmann though, references a Jewish mystical tradition in which praying the Shema is the uniting of God: “To acknowledge God’s unity – the Jew calls it uniting God. For this unity is, in that it becomes; it is a Becoming Unity. And this Becoming is laid on the soul of man and in his hands.”

Franz Rosenzweig takes up this notion to describe an Old Testament and Jewish conception of the suffering of God:

Mysticism builds its bridge between ‘the God of our fathers’ and ‘the remnant of Israel’ with the help of the doctrine of the Shekinah. The Shekinah, the descent of God to man and his dwelling among them, is thought of as a divorce which takes place in God himself. God himself cuts himself off from himself, he gives himself away to his people, he suffers with their sufferings, he goes with them into the misery of the foreign land, he wanders with their wanderings . . . God himself, by ‘selling himself to Israel – and what should be more natural for ‘the God of our Fathers’! – and by suffering her fate with her, makes himself in need of redemption. In this way, in this suffering, the relationship between God and the remnant points beyond itself.”[13]

Just as in Romans 8, so too in the Jewish conception, prayer inserts the one praying within the communion of God. The Jewish depiction is an estrangement or suffering into which God enters, and the estrangement is overcome through those reflecting the Shekinah to God through prayer. Moltmann explains, estrangement is also overcome “through the acts of the good, which are directed towards the overcoming of evil and the establishment of the future harmony of the one world. That is the meaning of the Hebrew word tikkun (world repair).”[14]

Theology proper (talk of God) cannot begin in the abstract, which inevitably depends upon the human logos, but in the fact that God has opened himself to human experience and human suffering, becoming human that humans might participate in the divine. But it is the primacy of God’s love and not human suffering that determines the course of God’s suffering love. The passion of Christ as point of departure suspends talk of an economic and immanent Trinity, with the first order (the ontological reality) of God removed from the contingencies of the second order (the economic). The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, though as Coakley notes, this does not mean that God is reduced to what is revealed, as “there must be that which God is which eternally ‘precedes’ God’s manifestation to us.”[15] However, speculation about what “precedes” Christ cannot be given precedent over the revealed truth given in Christ.

[1] Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (p. 156-157). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom, trans. by Leland de la Durantaye (Seagull Books, 2012).

[3] Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (p. 3). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.

[4] The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford]. Green and Michael P. Dejonge, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation, (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018), 185.

[5] Reader, 268.

[6] Williams, 187-188.

[7] Williams, 190-191.

[8] Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (First Fortress Press edition, 1993) 21-22.

[9] Moltmann, 22-23.

[10] Sarah Coakley, “The Trinity and gender reconsidered,” in God’s Life in Trinity (ed. Miroslav Volf and Michael Welker, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006).

[11] Homilia VI in Ezechielem (MPG XIII, 714 f). Cited in Moltmann, 24.

[12] Moltmann, 24.

[13] F. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, III, 3rd ed., Heidelberg 1954, pp. 192ff. Cited in Moltmann, 29.

[14] Moltmann, 29.

[15] Coakley

The Love of the Spirit as Fulfillment of the Erotic

What is up for question or doubt in believing (or not) in the teaching of the New Testament, does not primarily concern the existence of a deity but of immediate experience. What order of experience is true? What is the nature of the reality to which I should entrust myself? God as love, in John’s definition, translates into an immediate ethic and experience. The real question is whether I give priority to this experience. It is not that I do not otherwise have access to the experience but is this a reality which should shape the course of my life, my ambition, my sense of self, my desire?

To state it in these terms, the question is no longer simply an issue of belief in God, as the priority given to a particular experience factors into conception of God and vice versa. Even the picture of God in the Bible might be construed as focused on his righteous requirements, on his honor and respect, or on his omniscience and omnipotence. This focus may give rise to a very different set of ethical priorities and prioritize a very different sort of experiential reality. My “getting right with God” might be such that focus is upon being rightly aligned with the church, being a believer, being upstanding, etc. God might be perceived as beyond experience and experience itself (no matter what it might be) rendered secondary to belief, doctrine, or ethics.

However, if we are made for love, and it is in love that we come to know the ultimate reality of God and ourselves, this means if we miss this, we have been duped about our immediate experience. We are accorded the opportunity to enter into the presence of God, to experience the very depths of glory, to know the world as a paradise, and to fail in this is the human tragedy.

If we read the Gospels in this light, then the various episodes and characters can be read as opening the facets of the problem and cure. So, for example, in John the episode of Nicodemus and the Samaritan Woman are set side by side, with the Samaritan woman at a marked advantage over Nicodemus, from which we can draw definitive conclusions.

Nicodemus, a “teacher of Israel” a “leading Jew,” seems incapable of understanding the language of desire, conception, and new birth. He is at the height of success and he seems to be an example of why those shaped by the norms of society are the most deceived. One must earn a living, find security, achieve fulfillment and success; this “immediate reality” does not lend itself to cultivating love or the traits and characteristics aligned with love. Jesus requires of Nicodemus a radical change (which he fails to make according to the end of John), where the Samaritan Woman is depicted as entering immediately into belief.

Her thirst/desire problem is not an obstacle per se, as it is her thirst which causes her to share a cup with Jesus and by which means he directs her to himself – the singular means of quenching her thirst/desire. In a sense, she is well prepared for hearing Jesus’ message as she has been looking to fulfill her desire. Maybe she has presumed sex or marriage are the ultimate means of satisfaction, when she needed to look further.

As Dionysius the Areopagite notes, there is no necessity to keep eros and agape separate: “let us not fear this title of ‘yearning’, nor be upset . .  . for, in my opinion, the sacred writers regard “yearning” (eros) and love (agape) as having one and the same meaning’.”[1] Physical love or eros, according to Dionysius, may be “partial” and “divided” or a “lapse” falling short of divine yearning but nonetheless it is a point of entry into agape love. “The fact is that men are [initially] unable to grasp the simplicity of the one divine yearning, and, hence, the term is quite offensive to most of them.”

In fact, doesn’t this describe the difference between the Samaritan Woman and Nicodemus? His is a repressed desire, such that he is totally cut off from the inherent reality – the divine reality contained in the erotic. Her open desire is easily directed to Christ. “The divine Wisdom” teaches what true yearning is through erotic love: “it is clear to us that many lowly men think there is something absurd in the lovely verse: “Love for you came on me like love for women.” Where discussion of sex and marriage lead naturally, in the woman’s discussion with Jesus, to having this desire of hers fulfilled, there is no such opening in Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus.

Though her yearning may be misplaced or divided (between five men), Dionysius teaches that “touched thereby” with desire one no longer belongs to themselves but have come to belong to the object of their affection. The trick is locating the proper object and source of affection. Dionysius pictures Paul’s statement “I live, and yet not I but Christ liveth in me” as the end point of being constrained by the “Divine Yearning”: “true Sweetheart that he was and (as he says himself) being beside himself unto God, and not possessing his own life but possessing and loving the life of Him for Whom he yearned.”[2]

This sort of yearning is not simply human but has its origin in God:

we must dare to affirm (for ‘tis the truth) that the Creator of the Universe Himself, in His Beautiful and Good Yearning towards the Universe, is through the excessive yearning of His Goodness, transported outside of Himself in His providential activities towards all things that have being, and is touched by the sweet spell of Goodness, Love and Yearning, and so is drawn from His transcendent throne above all things, to dwell within the heart of all things, through a super-essential and ecstatic power whereby He yet stays within Himself.

The desire of love pertains to ultimate reality, to God himself, as source and substance. To love is to experience God. So, even divided and partial yearning is a primer to this undivided and complete reality. “In short, both the Yearning and its Object belong to the Beautiful and the Good, and have therein their pre-existent roots and because of it exist and come into being.”[3] In the one instance, “God is the Cause,” “Producer,” and “Begetter,” and in the other he is the thing itself: “He moves and leads onward Himself unto Himself.” He is the Object of Love and Yearning, as the Beautiful and Good, but he is also Yearning and Love – the “Motive-Power” leading all things to Himself. Dionysius pictures an endless circle “for the Good, from the Good, in the Good, and to the Good, with unerring revolution, never varying its centre or direction, perpetually advancing and remaining and returning to Itself.”[4]

It may be, as with the Samaritan Woman, desire needs to be redirected and reordered but hers was an experience upon which to enter into the “endless circle of love.” Certainly, her conception of the erotic is turned round – sex is no longer ultimate but is a pointer to God. Desire for unity, love, merging with others, is a more basic reality than sex and gender but the ontological reality toward which she/we are drawn is interwoven throughout the earthly and physical.

It is Christ that transforms and redirects the erotic to “spiritual worship,” summed up by John as love and made possible by the Spirit: “The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (I John 4:8). And “By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit” (4:13) – the Spirit of love.

(Join us for our class on the Holy Spirit starting October 18th by registering here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/student-applications/new)

[1]Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, IV. 12..

[2] Ibid, IV, 13

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid, IV, 14

The Primacy of the Spirit in Experiencing the Trinity

In certain portions of Scripture, such as the Prologue of John, and in the creeds spelling out the work of the Trinity (such as Nicaea), there is a linear description or an unfolding of the working of the Trinity which allows (indirectly) for subordination of the Spirit. John’s focus on the work of the Logos may seem to privilege the Father and Son, with the Spirit portrayed more as a consequence. So too, the Council of Nicaea was focused on the equality of the Son with the Father and creedal clarification of the Spirit was subsequent to this primary concern. [1] There may be several issues at work in muting a primary role for the Spirit: Paul, who will describe the primacy of the Spirit in Romans, records the difficulty incurred at Corinth when the immature are carried away by both the erotic and emotional excesses of an unbalanced view of the Spirit; the early heresy of Montanism records similar emphasis and excesses that the early church found peculiarly dangerous. Nonetheless, in Scripture and church history the Spirit is accorded full divinity as one of the persons of the Trinity, but in both instances this giving full place to the Spirit is developed in an unabashed conjoining with the erotic and experiential. That is, to understand the equality of the persons of the Trinity, what scriptural and historical precedent calls for is not esoteric abstractions about three in one, but a turn to human experience at its most personal. While the tendency may be to separate out the “high and mighty” things of God from what may be considered the base things of man, the biblical and historical precedent indicates that human sexuality, for example, is not an obstacle but a means of contemplating God. Implicit is the assumption that human experience – the experience of desire, the experience of prayer, the experience of the world, the experience of self, are all part and parcel of right understanding and experience of God. Stated in this way, it is hard to imagine that it could be otherwise. To imagine, as moderns have, that language transports beyond embodied experience and that right understanding can be based on what is not knowable in experience is precisely the fallacy refuted by giving primacy to the Spirit.[2] The Spirit is experience of life in God.

The Incorporating Work of the Spirit

Romans 8, one of the clearest depictions of the work of the Trinity, focuses on the incorporating work of the Spirit, drawing all creation into the life of the Son, bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of the Father (Romans 8:15-16). Using this passage as a guide, the work of the Spirit is given its immediacy, not just in an objective “bringing to mind” of revelation, but bringing about conformity to the substance of life in the Son. Paul’s continual refrain in the opening of chapter 8 is that the embodied realization of the work of the Spirit sets aside fractured experience. In chapter 7 he describes the impossibility of ipseity: his mind and will are disengaged from one another, with his mind, body and ego producing three levels of discordant experience. Chapter 8 resolves the discord depicted in chapter 7.

In place of three discrete realms of experience (the law of the mind, the law of the body, and the experience between these realms), Paul describes the Trinity as bringing about a unified experience. The Spirit unifies desire of the mind and the law of God (what pleases God), while the alienated experience pits one against God and his law (in a necessary hostility), creating the respective experiences of life and peace (in the Spirit experience) and death (in the flesh experience). Life in the Spirit is immediately life and peace and, by the same token, life in the flesh is immediately death (Romans 8:5-8). Just as death is the direct experience of being divided and alienated, so too life in the Spirit is immediate experience of (Abba) the presence of God. So, Paul’s is a prayer-based, embodied, and experiential logic, which is not to say it is experientialism, but it is the experiential realization of the incorporating power of the Spirit.

Sin as Exception to the Law

At the opening of chapter 7 (1-6) Paul uses sex and marriage to describe both alienated and unified experience. A woman who might desire to consort with another man experiences the split Paul describes as existing in himself (later in the chapter). On the one hand, if the woman’s husband is alive and she consorts with another man, this pits her union with her lover against the reality of her living husband. Perhaps Paul has in mind an experience in which “true love” or the “deepest” part of the self is felt to stand outside of the law. Isn’t normal society, with its laws, only an externally imposed norm? Am I supposed to recognize myself in this objectified norm? Isn’t my experience of myself more immediate and doesn’t the standard of the law threaten to interfere with who I am in this immediacy? As Woody Allen explained, after he married his adopted daughter, “The heart wants what it wants.” Being an exception is itself an authentication. The law or social norms cannot account for either true love or the deepest part of self. Aren’t these realms apart from who I am, so it is only in being outside of the law that I arrive at my true self?

This perverse notion of exception, the temptation to transgress to obtain what lies behind the obstacle of the law, is sin.  In the case of Adam and Eve, true knowledge is thought to lie in partaking of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In the case of the woman who would consort with another man, true love is posited outside of the law. Throughout the chapter, Paul is playing off the experience of Adam and Eve in their temptation and fall. As displayed in this prototypical sin, sin is to go beyond the law in order to obtain what the obstacle of the law seems to create (true knowledge, true love, an authentic self). In the lie of the serpent, God seems to be tricking Adam and Eve by luring them away from true knowledge with the prohibition. Paul’s description of sin is this transgressive allure which constitutes fallen desire.

The Unity of the Spirit as Suspending the Exception

The point of Christianity is to break free from this notion of an obscene God or a perverse law, always holding out on us. This is not accomplished by thwarting desire but by reordering desire by suspending the perverting effect of the law. In Paul’s description, one must die to the law (7:4) and this is accomplished by a union which extends sexual like incorporation beyond gender and sex: “you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another” (v. 4). The sexual metaphor now depicts consummation of desire through union with Christ, giving rise to conception and birth. The fruit of this labor (in chapter 8 he explicitly appeals to childbirth) is the fruit for God of a new sort of offspring.

In chapter 8 Paul continues to deploy the language of desire (“those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires” v. 5), conception (“we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit” v. 23), birth (“groaning as in the pains of childbirth” v. 22), and incorporation into the family of God (“the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship” v. 15) to describe the work of the Spirit. The Spirit is the one who incorporates into the family of the Father, who engenders life in the Son, who draws into the realization of life and peace. The Spirit is not a consequence but the experiential reality of God blended with our spirit (v. 16). The Spirit is simultaneous in our experience with the Son and the Father (“the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” v. 15), and this simultaneity is the basis for recognition of equality of the persons of the Trinity.

This unified experience stands in contrast to the split experience in the body (“this body of death”). In sin the “I think” (the law of the mind) is never joined with the one thinking (the law of the body). In chapter 8, the will of God is is in the immediate experience of the Spirit testifying with our spirit (there is no objectified mediating law). This Spirit draws together what was formerly held apart in the law of the mind, the law of the body, and the experience of death.

Paul’s description of contemplative prayer fills the formerly empty, discordant spaces of self with the persons of the Trinity. The law of the mind is now occupied by the will of the Father, and the alienated body is displaced by the body of Christ, and the cry of death (“who will rescue me from this body of death” (7:24) is displaced by the deep groanings of the Spirit and the cry, “Abba, Father” (8:15).

 The Spirit as God’s Self Bringing to Fulness the Human Self

By focusing on the Spirit and the role of the Spirit in the Trinity, Paul is describing divine ipseity in which God’s Trinitarian Self-hood enables human self-hood. This prayer based ipseity of the Spirit with the Son and the Father is the reflexive reality we enter in prayerful participation in the Trinity: “the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God” (vv. 26-27).

(Registration will open October 11th for the PBI Class on the Holy Spirit. As the catalogue describes, “This module is an advanced theological study of the Holy Spirit as a practical outworking of lived salvation as it looks forward to the telos, or end goal, of the kingdom of God in Christ.” The course will begin October 18th and run through December 17th.)

[1] See Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self (p. 101). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] To imagine language is capable of taking us out of embodied experience is the fallacy refuted by Ludwig Wittgenstein.