The Origin of Language and the Nature of Salvation

The theory of Noam Chomsky and of René Girard set forth a different focus on the origin of human language, with Chomsky focused on the necessary preexistence of a “language module” (a black box containing the capacity for language) and Girard focused on mimetic rivalry, and through the scapegoat the rise of a symbolic and sacred order. For Girard the capacity for language would be driven through the need or circumstance in which symbolization resolves or suspends generalized violence, while for Chomsky the leap to language and symbolization requires an already existing innate capacity. For Girard, the societal need would give rise to the capacity, which should be traceable through its unfolding grammatical impact, but (as discovered in the wake of Chomsky) syntactic complexity is equal across all known languages and there is no residual sign within language of an evolving capacity or complexity. There are no “primitive” languages, which supports (though not decisively) Chomsky’s picture of an already existing capacity necessary to language. This may be a long way around to posing the question of whether, with Girard, we can trace the origins of language to its implication in violence, or whether as with Chomsky, there is no determined origin for language, violent or otherwise? Are humans always negotiating the problem of violence as part of what it means to speak, or is violence subsequent to and not a necessary part of human language?

 In theological terms, are humans stuck in a violent metaphysics because their language fosters this singular orientation? Are we so steeped in a meaning derived from violence, whether conscious or unconscious, that there is no conceptual ground from which to make out or discern an alternative? Or can Girard be supplemented with Chomsky so that, as in the biblical depiction, humans begin with an uncorrupted capacity for language which is corrupted by what is done with this capacity.

 In Anthony Bartlett’s depiction, Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry and the discovery of the scapegoating mechanism, are a necessary step in evolutionary development,[1] which would seem to be on the order of Hegel’s depiction of the necessity of the fall for cognition or the Calvinist notion that sin and evil are a necessary step in salvation. The nearest equivalent is Lacanian psychoanalysis which attaches human personhood to a primordial but necessary lie. Is Girard’s depiction of human deception, in mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism, a necessary step in human evolution or a misstep in human de-evolution? It is a question that Bartlett makes worthwhile, but even his own cumulative evidence points to a more nuanced Chomsky-like biblical depiction. In fact, his book can be read as giving clearer support to this slightly different premise.

 Either way, revelation would necessarily entail a radical departure and breaking in, and to the degree that theology has girded itself with a Greek philosophical understanding it has a hidden and necessary violence at its origins. This is the charge Bartlett levels at the Thomistic understanding of God (along with Anselm or any theology which would employ Greek philosophical thought). As first cause of everything (being), according to Bartlett, “God here reinforces a hierarchical order of origin, authority, and, necessarily, violence.”[2] Only the unadulterated Word intervenes so as to foster transformation beyond scapegoating and violence, and it is only the cross which brings about this semiotic transformation (an alternative meaning with an alternative center).  In Bartlett’s description, the concept of god carries the metaphysical baggage of violence (with all this entails in terms of religion and human institutions), while the God of revelation infiltrates and challenges this conception.

Bartlett lines up the linguistic turn in 20th century thought to make the case that semiotics, or the study of signs, reveals a dependence on negation, otherness, absence, or nothingness, which is inherent to the sign system. The theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and John Deely, converge on the notion that “being,” which cannot be posited apart from its apprehension in language, already contains the antagonistic otherness of the sign. There is no being apart from its sign, and the sign contains or sets forth meaning in its separateness from the biological world. Both being and the sign refer to an extended, infinite, otherness. “The world itself is the ‘other,’ rendered present in a sign, yet strange, infinite, congenitally open itself, by virtue of the mysterious, ‘nihilating’ event of the sacred.”[3] In Girard’s terms, the original murder is hidden in the sign as that which is negated and this compelling emptiness or otherness requires another sign, so that the signifying chain covers over the original absence (murder), as in Derrida’s “deferral” of meaning (to define one word requires a multiplicity of words – ad infinitum), or Heidegger’s and Hegel’s nothingness (the other over and against which all else, something, derives its meaning). The conclusion: to imagine God on the basis of the sign of being is to project violent mimetic desire and sacrifice onto God.  

The question is whether Bartlett’s notion of the origin of language actually fits his Girardian reading of the Old Testament, or does it fit better with Chomsky’s model combined with Girard and a more traditional reading of Genesis. Is there room in violently determined language for the understanding that the Old Testament already fosters, in part and in shadows, the understanding culminating in Christ (e.g., in the story of Joseph and his brothers, in the depiction of Solomon’s wisdom)? Bartlett pictures the creation account in Genesis as containing an original peace which stands in contrast to other creation myths and he quotes from the prophetic tradition depicting the revelation of God as completely over and against human understanding. As he puts it, “How could the experience of violent mimetic crisis leading to sacrifice give any authentic sense of the God who said, ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts’ (Isa 55:9).”[4] The question is, how can God’s voice break through to his human prophetic vessels? If, in the words of Giambattista Vico, the world of human beings, including their deployment of signs, is made by human beings, then what room for the voice of God in human language.

A differently nuanced understanding, which would accommodate both Girard and Chomsky, is to picture the human predicament, not as endemic to the origins of language, but concerning, rather, the orientation to language. The biblical picture poses the possibility of an original image or an original language untainted by violence (an image we can see in every child). The original connection to nature and to God, however one might read Genesis, points to something other than a total incapacity or a total lack of access to reality. This fits what we find in both people and the Bible. Humans are inherently capable, no matter their race, religion, or place of origin, of developing deep and abiding insights about reality, though they are still given over to violence and the world of unreality indicated by Girard. The biblical nuance is of a capacity that is obscured by assigning to language (the knowledge of good and evil) an inherent capacity for the divine (for being like God and escaping death) that displaces God. But what the biblical picture (aligned with both Chomsky and Girard) allows for and points toward is human agency (self-deception) at work in the deception and displacement.  

Bartlett’s theory, like the notion of total depravity, considers human understanding tainted at its source. In turn, what God has brought about is not simply a reorientation to or within language but a whole new mode of code making. “If there is a God and this God cares for the world, then it is by changing the actual root dynamic of our codes that God intends to save us.”[5] If he means by this that the orientation to law and language, and not language and law per se, are the root problem from which we are saved, this is a deep insight that accords with the New Testament. But if he means that language per se is the problem, one wonders if this fits his own semiotic picture of meaning as something which arises between signs (within language) as part of the dynamic of language.

As both Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss conclude, it is not the signs or the terms themselves, but the relationship between terms which bear meaning. This moveable or transposable middle (between terms) allows for meaning in the opening to the possibility of a lie. Both possibilities arise as there is no necessity, biological or ontological, in the arbitrary sounds or signs that make up language. There is an arbitrariness to language and human culture which is “inevitably” codified into laws, which make the arbitrary “essential” to the culture and to what it means to be human. The big lie is to imagine this arbitrary and ever dynamic sign system can be frozen into law and made to serve as an unchanging stairway to heaven. The biblical depiction of a stone tower reaching to the heavens captures the notion of language set in stone as the avenue to God and life. It is not a problem that people speak, make laws, and build towers, it is that they imagine their arbitrary and limited understanding is of eternal, life-giving significance.

 Lévi-Strauss applied Saussure’s insight to kinship relations, to indicate that what was important was not any specific relationship but pairs of relationships or oppositional pairs which control other pairs in endless correlations and inversions. For example, a familiar relationship between father and son was paralleled by a rigid taboo between brother and sister; or this could be inverted among a different people with a close relationship between brother and sister and a rigid one between father and son. As Lévi-Strauss explains, “A kinship system does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation.”[6] Yet, by definition the arbitrary kinship system of a particular culture is protected by sacred immovable boundaries definitive of a people and equated with what it means to be human.

 In biblical terms, the problem is not a particular law or set of laws, but the problem arises when these laws are equated with sacred boundaries marking off life and death or “we the people” from the surrounding non-people. These laws, by their very nature, were subject to being inverted and subverted among other people or tribes. This arbitrariness and human origin of law is a continuous refrain among a segment of the prophets. The laws regarding sacrifice, marriage (polygamy, divorce), food laws, or the code surrounding the Temple and its priests, are pronounced non-essential in this minority report. “For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.  But like Adam they have transgressed the covenant; There they have dealt treacherously against Me” (Ho 6:6-7). The covenant concerns a loyalty and knowledge which cannot be codified, and the failure to keep covenant involves mistaking the arbitrary for the essential and losing what is essential.

Bartlett develops this semiotic nature of language, or the relation between terms, as key to his understanding of the work of Christ. In a meditation on John, the book of signs, he demonstrates that Christ reconstitutes the human sign system by emptying it of violence. This culminates in his intervention into the sign or taboo of consuming human flesh and blood. “The primitive semiotic boundaries against eating human flesh and drinking blood could only be undone by a revolution in human and theological meaning, when a particular flesh and blood became an event of absolute nonviolence and peace.”[7] The shift from a sacrificial system which would feed God (human flesh, animal flesh, etc.) to one in which God is the food, marks the ultimate intervention into human prohibitions. The point is to overturn a fixed, law-bound meaning attached to violence and to open a semiotic register free from violence. “’Eating and drinking Jesus’ are signs then of an entirely new semiosis and anthropology, and it is only by meditating continually on the total collapse of the old human way that they are saved from being simply an outrage.”[8] As Bartlett points out, this was quickly returned to the sacrificial form of sacred by Anselm and a major portion of the Western church, so that the gospel is veiled. (This veiling seems to fit with a truth that was not an impossibility, which Paul describes as veiled by the law, but which is permanently unveiled by Christ (2 Cor 3:14).)

In conclusion, Bartlett explains the work of God is to bring about a semiotic shift, “Because human meaning is constructed originally out of violence, its inversion and subversion in the nonviolence of the cross constructs at once a new fundamental relation and, therewith, a completely new possible universe.”[9] This conclusion does not make allowance for human agency as portrayed in the OT (indicated in the arbitrariness demonstrated in language and culture) and it assigns a necessary role to violence in the development of meaning and language. I would question whether Bartlett requires this origin story for the key part of his argument. One could concur with the latter half of his statement (which includes most of the argument of his book), that it is the inversion and subversion, a necessary possibility within language, which Christ enacts in his incarnation. Perhaps this is not “a completely new possible universe” but the completion of creation realigned with its foreordained purpose found in the original Logos.

To state it plainly, Girard’s theory still holds in my understanding, but not omni-competently (an explanation of everything) so that it may describe universal historical developments which are not tied to syntactic or semiotic evolution (an explanation for language) but to a universal human failure overturned by Christ.


[1] Anthony Bartlett, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard (Cascade Books, 2020). I have to thank Tim, again, for the gift of this fine book. Bartlett unifies and makes accessible the turn to semiotics as itself a significant theological indicator. So, this initial critique is in no way a dismissal of the book or even the theory Bartlett is setting forth, but I think the theory needs slight revision.

[2] Ibid. 91

[3] Ibid. 97.

[4] Ibid. 98

[5] Ibid. 129

[6] Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, 50. Quoted in Bartlett, 35.

[7] Ibid. 171

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid. 162

Revelation as the Exposure and Defeat of a Violent Concept of God

Scripture records a progressive revelation of God culminating in Christ which ends up pitting an obscure earlier understanding, with its own tradition and cultic development, against the fulness and truth of Christ. My argument (here) was that Christ bore this difference in his death. My argument below is that this development of two competing concepts of God, coming to a final conflict in Christ, is what constitutes revelation and that to miss this point is to miss the word of the cross and the nature of inspiration.

The two biblical uses of “God breathed” illustrate the point that God’s life or breath animates human-kind (Gen. 2:7) and stands behind biblical inspiration (2 Tim. 3:16) in a similar way. In both instances the human impinges upon, is allowed to act upon, the divine gift.  The human bearer of the divine breath or image is capable of obscuring that image in a way that the rest of creation cannot. That is, the rest of God’s creation bears his fingerprint but it is only humans, those who directly bear his image, that are empowered to erase it. They might erase the image within themselves as individuals, corporately as part of societies, or as part of their religion. This is brought home most starkly by the cross in the one who was “the exact representation of his nature” (Heb. 1:3) who was tortured to death in an attempted annihilation. I presume that there is no divine breath that is not marked by this deadly human impetus to erasure. If the person of Christ, God incarnate, is acted upon by evil men, how can there be any word that does not bear the mark of this encounter. If the God breathed revelation in Christ bears the human attempt at erasure (murder, violence, deicide) in his flesh, is Scripture miraculously protected where the Word was not?

There are occasions, such as when his hometown synagogue tried to assassinate him, that Jesus “passed through their midst” (Lk. 4:30) unharmed. He had the ability to escape, but we cannot see how he did it and the mode of his passing is such that it leaves no trace. He might have carried out his entire ministry, passing through their midst and “going on His way” so that he slips through their hands and minds. But the implication is that his ministry and teaching would have passed, as he did on this occasion, undetected through their midst. Apparently, a word that is untouched by human hands will also not touch upon the human mind. The revelation occurs when they get their hands on him. The height of revelation occurs when humanity acts upon him and shapes the Word to the contours of the cross. Far from the cross silencing or erasing revelation, the Gospel message is this “word of the cross.” But the cross is revelation because the message pertains to what they would do to him. Their murderous intent is the condition that is exposed as what always acts upon revelation but it is only in Christ that the Word exposes and defeats these conditions.

We might call the cross an accommodation of the message to those who have received it, and incarnation certainly indicates God willingly submitted himself to the human condition, but the cross ends the shadowy form of revelation which preceded it, as Hebrews describes it. Perhaps as Novation put it (c. 200-258), God has allowed himself to be fitted to a “mediocre” state of belief so that in Israel he was understood “not as God was but as the people were able to understand.” It is not, Novatian concluded, a problem with God but with human limitations: “God, therefore, is not mediocre, but the people’s understanding is mediocre; God is not limited, but the intellectual capacity of the people’s mind is limited.”[1] Perhaps we could agree with Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-390), that God allowed aspects of fallen understanding to get mixed in with his self-revelation, as they could not have otherwise received it. Like a wise physician he blended flavorful juice with the nasty-tasting medicine so they could stomach it. As they were able to endure more, he gradually peeled away their fallen beliefs so as to reveal more and more truth about himself. As Gregory notes, God first “cut off the idol” though he “left the sacrifices,” and then we learn in the latter prophets that he doesn’t approve of animal sacrifices. He allowed for sacrifices and even stooped to a level of spiritual immaturity which pictures him as enjoying the great smell (Gen. 8: 21; Exod. 29: 18, 25; Lev. 1: 9, 13; 2: 9; 4: 31) but which he clearly reveals he never enjoyed or wanted (Psalm 50:8; Hosea 6:6; Psalm 51:16; Psalm 40:6–8; Isaiah 1:11–31; Jeremiah 7:21–23; Hebrews 10:4–10).[2] In Christ, while there is still a form of subordination to the human condition, there is a revelation of the whole truth without the former admixture or impurity.

With Christ, the accommodation has given way to conflict between God and Israel’s conception of God. While God in Christ is addressing the human understanding, he is also challenging it as it has never before been challenged. Now God is commanding all men everywhere to repent, as he is finished with overlooking the times of ignorance. The cross marks the contradiction and difference with this former time as it is now being challenged. It is a challenge to every aspect of human understanding. It pits the human power of death against the divine power of life and it pits a human conception of God against God incarnate. Jesus will die because of the threat he poses to the Jewish Temple, the Jewish Nation, the Jewish religion, and the Jewish conception of God. And of course, the Jews are simply the best of humankind, so that Roman, Babylonian, American, or the universal is represented in what is Jewish.

The cross, then, reveals divine communication in an odd sort of dialogue, a reciprocal give-and-take, in which human agency is given free reign and Christ is willing to bear this sin. The sin, in this instance, is a form of thought, a state of mind, a belief system, or simply the symbolic order in which meaning is attached to violence and death. The violent symbolic order and religion (the Jewish religion which is the prototype of human religion) conceives of God in its own image, so that the worship of this God requires sacrifice and it results in killing God in the flesh.

This misrecognition of God is one that Israel’s Scriptures describes as slowly evolving. God has accommodated their desire for a king, their desire for polygamy and divorce, their desire for sacrifice, and even their desire to take the promised land violently. Indicators are that he planned for a slow movement in which he would remove the population by angel power (Ex. 33:2), by his own divine means (Ex. 34:11; Lev. 18:24), or by a gradual expansion of borders (Ex. 34:24). The land itself would spew out its inhabitants due to their own moral wickedness (Lev. 18:25) but also due to a hornet infestation (Ex. 23:28). But for God’s nonviolent means to be realized, patience would be required: “I will not drive them out before you in a single year, that the land may not become desolate and the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. I will drive them out before you little by little, until you become fruitful and take possession of the land” (Ex. 23:29-30). The picture is of a gradual migration, in which one people moves off the land while another occupies it.  

Throughout Israel’s Scriptures there is a tension between God’s original ideal and the actual execution of the plan. It is not always clear that God has accommodated as much as he has been made to accommodate.  For example, there is a clear record of his warning against having a king and the curses that will be bound to follow. Nonetheless, he accommodated their desire for a warrior king and then succumbed to their notion of a warrior God. All of these accommodations are codified into the law, so that what was “allowed” becomes what was legal. But contained in Israel’s Scriptures is also the evidence of God’s true desire.  Yahweh concludes, you were mistaken: “you thought I was just like you” (Ps 50: 21). The end result is that they do not know or recognize God: “An ox knows its owner, And a donkey its master’s manger, But Israel does not know, My people do not understand” (Is. 1:3).

Would it be too much to suggest Israel made a mistake fostered by their religion and recorded and challenged by their Scriptures?  Though, modern conservatives believe the Bible is a progressive revelation and even a revelation which passed through human vessels, it imagines this involves no errors or misconceptions (that it was inerrant). To save the Bible from error the trade-off is an illogical flattening out into something worse than Novatian’s mediocrity. Without the possibility for the sort of critique, which the Bible allows itself, no distinction can be made within the various prophetic traditions and portrayals of God. The result is to ignore the counter-prophets who maintain God never desired key elements codified in the Law, which cumulatively serve to misrepresent him. In order to accommodate the notion of an inerrant Bible, rather than the Bible accommodating human failing, the trade-off is to fit belief in a violent God to the person and work of Christ. Thus, doctrines like penal substitution or divine satisfaction not only hold that Christ satisfies God’s need for violence (to restore his honor or to assuage his anger), but historically mark the reshaping of atonement to fit Constantinian nationalism and the just war tradition, in which God is turned into something like a tribal deity.

 As Jeremiah describes the false prophets and priests, “They have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, Saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ But there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14). This false peace is promoted by the prophets who imagine God’s blessing is achieved through wars for national interest and they inaugurate and sanctify a nationalism which goes on into the Maccabees and to the various parties which challenged Jesus. The Sadducees would collaborate, the Zealots would rebel, the priests and Pharisees would appease, but they agree upon the need for the violent sacrifice of Jesus that the nation might survive. Jesus refusal to wage war for national independence and his revolutionary non-violent peace, in turn succumbs in large measure, in Constantinianism to the lie which put him on the cross.

Between the Edict of Milan (C. E. 313) which established toleration for Christianity within the Roman Empire and Augustine’s master work, The City of God (circa 410), which argues that Christianity is responsible for Rome’s success, the church became identified with the Holy Roman Empire. No longer is Jesus teaching conjoined, as it had been for three centuries, with the obedient nonviolent, anti-sacrificial, line of the true prophets but it is made to serve national interests through cultic means (Jesus as one more sacrifice) which, according to the true prophets, had corrupted Israel’s religion. As John Howard Yoder puts it, “The church does not preach ethics, judgment, repentance, separation from the world; it dispenses sacraments and holds society together.”[3] It is no longer a matter of discerning the will of God in a corrupt society, as now all of society is Christian (i.e., all are baptized) and the most that one need be concerned with is personal sin and attaining the lesser evil. Augustine imagined the Roman church was the millennial kingdom and that the conquest of the world had been achieved and all that was left was a clean-up campaign. As a result, the Roman state as God’s agent in the war on evil is set (by the beginning of the new millennium in 1096, the first crusade), not to preserve peace (the purpose of kings, I Tim. 2), but to wage war for faith and Empire against the heathens.[4]

Just as Jesus enemies would have annihilated him on the cross, the symbol of the cross in the Crusades, in The Thirty Years’ War and in the multiple “Christian” state wars, comes to represent the demonic force which killed him rather than his defeat of this power of death. Rather than the cross depicting God’s willingness to bear violence, it is now justification for the state to pronounce God-like judgments on its enemies. The state can now enact its own hell in exterminating all it deems to be evil. As a result, we continually hover on the brink of world annihilation as a theologically inspired nationalism, a reenactment of Jewish nationalism, mistakes the Father of Christ for the father of the nation state.

Is there the possibility that this violent image of God is mistaken and we know that it is mistaken due to the Word of the cross? Isn’t the message of the cross precisely the Word encountering and overcoming this death dealing human condition?


[1] Novatian, De Trinitate, 6, cited in Gregory Boyd, Cross Vision (Kindle Location 1563). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Gregory of Nazianzus, “Fifth Oration: On the Holy Spirit,” in Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, trans. P. Schaff and H. Wace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d.), 326. Cited from Boyd, (Kindle Locations 1564-1565).

[3] John Howard Yoder, The Royal Priesthood: Essays Ecclesiological and Ecumenical (Kindle Locations 3312-3317). Herald Pr. Kindle Edition.

[4] Yoder, (Kindle Locations 3322-3326)

Revelation as Cognitive Dissonance

The God of the Old Testament who commands that the Jews slaughter every living creature (e.g., Dt. 20:16), who tells soldiers they can take Midianite virgin women captive (if they find them sexually attractive) but to slaughter everyone else (Num. 31:1-17), who specifies that Amalekite children, infants, and women are to be slaughtered (I Sam. 15:3), who commands the stoning of disobedient children prone to too much drinking and eating (Dt. 21:18-21), who portrays himself, using the instrument of Babylonian warriors against Israel, as indiscriminately slaying both the righteous and wicked Israelites (Ezek. 21:3-4), who promises he will dash Israelite fathers and sons together (again using Babylon) so as to slay them without pity or mercy (Jer. 13:14), who depicts himself as crushing virgin Judah like grapes in a winepress (Lam. 1:15), who depicts both the fetus and the pregnant women of Samaria being “ripped up” and newly born infants being “dashed in pieces” at his behest (Hosea 13:16), and who causes parents to eat their children and children to eat their parents (Lev. 26:28-29; Ez. 5:10), bears a striking difference to the one who defeats death rather than deal in death, who is a gentle shepherd providing rest for the weary (Matt. 11:29), who is so gentle so as to not break a bruised reed (Matt. 12:20), who commands an end to any form of violent resistance or any type of violent thoughts but instead, insists upon loving the enemy (Matt. 5), who as Lord of the universe (“knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands”) models absolute humility by washing the disciples’ feet (Jn. 13), who depicts his Father as filled with such love and compassion that he runs to meet the prodigal son (Luke 15:20), who even as king is gentle, riding on a donkey (Matt. 21:5), who does not inflict violence or death but weeps at the tomb of his friend and raises him from the dead (Jn. 11), who heals the lame, the blind, the paralytic, the lepers (e.g., Lk. 4), who commands Peter to put away his sword, and who bears the lash and torment of violent men and ultimately dies a torturous death on the cross. What one does with this sharp contrast is not only determinative of their view of God, of the Bible, of the meaning of Christianity, but ultimately it is an insight into how they view themselves and the world. What one does with the violence of the Old Testament indicates what would be done with violence in general, whether it is to justify it or ignore it. What one does with the former picture of God in light of the revelation of the latter, is the very question which the revelation of Christ raises.

The attempt to reconcile the two perspectives has resulted in a dual notion of God, in which the Father is angry and violent and the Son absorbs this violence. No matter the extremes to which one might go to explain the violence (it is a hyperbolic description, it was a temporary necessity, etc.), the tendency to justify the violence presumes violence is necessary even for God. On the other hand, one might dismiss the Hebrew scriptures (with Marcion), or reject belief in God or belief in biblical revelation, but perhaps the very point of inspiration and revelation is a long hard look at the contrast, and though we might be tempted to turn our heads or to skip over the unworthy and ugly portrayal of God in light of Christ, could it be that dwelling on the contrast is part of recognizing Christ as the final and full revelation of God?

 Jesus identifies himself on the basis of this contrast. He declares John the Baptist the greatest spokesman for God up to that point (Matt. 11:11; Luke 7:28) but then says, “the testimony which I have is greater than the testimony of John” (John 5:36). There is an unfolding progress in revelation culminating in John, but then the revelation of Christ completes this progress. As the writer of Hebrews describes, what came before Christ was a shadow but now the full reality has come (10:1). To blend the two things as if they bore equal weight will reduce the reality to its shadow or it will relinquish the fulness of the Gospel by harmonizing it with what is incomplete.

The thesis of Hebrews is to spell out this difference: “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son” (1:1-2).  J. B. Phillips translates the “many portions” (polymerōs) as “glimpses of the truth.” This previous message would not hold up in a court of law as “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” as it is a portion or glimpse of the truth. The implication of the difference, which Hebrews draws out but which is summarized in this opening verse, is that the previous messengers brought a message lacking in glory, lacking in what it represented (God, life, salvation), lacking in substance (it left the Israelites dying in the wilderness), lacking in coherence, lacking in power, lacking in its challenge to sin, or lacking in reality.

To suggest that the previous message is partly wrong or mistaken does not get at the profundity of the difference. It is not simply that God gave a message that was distorted by the messengers, but the world in which this communication occurred was distorted and distorting. It is as if the entire field of gravity, that which holds all things together, has been disrupted. What is needed is cosmic correction. So, this messenger is he “whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power” (vv. 2-3). The world distorted by sin and violence cannot be undistorted with new information, as what is needed is new creation. The problem of the message of the fathers and prophets concerned the message, the messengers and their world, and what is needed is of cosmic proportions. To speak of this previous word as mistaken then, misses both the depth of the problem and the solution.

It is not simply information about God but the nature of God, truth, and the world that suffer from distortion apart from Christ. Jesus says as much, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him” (Jn. 14:6-7). To imagine that you know God apart from Christ, on the basis of the Hebrew Scriptures is, according to Jesus, on the order of mistaking the evidence for the reality. “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life” (Jn. 5:39-40). What is at stake in this misidentification is to take mere testimony as the thing itself; it is to mistake the evidence pointing to God as God himself; it is to imagine a dead letter is the same as the living Word.

Partial truth or glimpses of the truth are better than no truth but only the Son is the truth itself. God cannot be discerned in shadows or partial truth, but as Jesus explains to Philip: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” (Jn. 14:9). Jesus as the way, the truth and the life, and as the one who resolves the problem of sin, overcomes the distortion of the Law of sin and death, but as Hebrews explains, the previous message is shaped by this field of distortion: “After saying above, ‘Sacrifices and offerings and whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You have not desired, nor have You taken pleasure in them’ (which are offered according to the Law) then He said, ‘Behold, I have come to do Your will.’ He takes away the first in order to establish the second” (Heb. 10:8-9). The writer puts in the mouth of Jesus the long counter-prophetic tradition which explains that it was not God who wanted sacrifices and offerings and the notion that he enjoyed their smell or delighted in their slaughter is denied – he finds no pleasure in them. Though sacrifice is offered according to the Law, the Law is not identified with the will of God. In fact, Christ as the one who has come to do the will of God, exposes the false premise upon which the Law is built. The writer explains, “For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion sought for a second” (Heb. 8:7). There was something wrong with the first covenant. It dealt in shadows, it did not penetrate to the heart and mind but left these untouched and it falsely purported to establish a relationship with God (8:10), and for these reasons this covenant is declared “obsolete” and will “disappear” (v. 13).

This declaration of the faulty nature of the Law and its need for correction more or less characterizes the ministry of Jesus. His continual refrain, “You have heard it said . . . but I say unto you” makes it apparent that Jesus was not simply supplementing the Law but was pointing out its errors. Though a great deal of ink was spilt explaining clean and unclean foods, Jesus dismisses the very concept: “And He said to them, ‘Are you so lacking in understanding also? Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and is eliminated?’ (Thus He declared all foods clean.)” (Mark 7:18-19).  The failure of the food laws is like the failure of the sacrificial system and of the law in general; they did not change either the heart or mind. 

Keeping the Sabbath holy, the fourth commandment, was a key consideration, as breaking Sabbath law was punishable by death. Even gathering necessities like firewood on the Sabbath resulted in death (Numbers 15:32-36). The presumption of the Law is that since God rested on the seventh day, this day should commemorate His rest (Exodus 16 & 20). Yet, here too Jesus questions the very premise of Sabbath Law: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Whether it was healing on the Sabbath or picking grain on the Sabbath, Jesus presumed he was not constrained by Sabbath Law as “the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:28).

Jesus contravened the Law of stoning for adultery (John 8), he declared invalid the Law of oath taking from Deut. 6 (teaching that we are not to make oaths at all (Matt. 5:34)) and declares that more than yes or no “comes from the evil one” (Matt. 5:37). He pronounces James’ and John’s suggestion that fire be called down from heaven on the Samaritans (which was to emulate Elijah, who had used fire to incinerate a hundred people in this same region (2 Kgs. 1:10-12)), as deriving from another (evil?) spirit (in some manuscripts). He directly contradicts and undoes the law of retaliation (the lex talionis). No more will it be an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.  “But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (Matt. 5:38-39). Where the OT presumes wealth is a sign of blessing, Jesus pronounces a curse on the rich. Where the OT presents victory in battle as a divine blessing, Jesus presumes it is only the nonviolent peacemakers who are God’s children.

As Greg Boyd concludes, “To follow Jesus and be considered a ‘child of the Father,’ one has to be willing to violate this law. Indeed, Jesus taught that to be considered a ‘child of the Father,’ a person has to commit to doing the exact opposite of what this law commands!”[1] The implication Boyd draws out, in the light of Jesus command to refrain from violence and to love one’s enemies, is that Jesus contradicts and displaces the portrayal of God and ethics found in the Law. He concludes, “We have compelling reasons to interpret the entire Mosaic law, together with the law-oriented portrait of God it presupposes, to be an accommodation.”[2]

The price of this accommodation and the stark contrast it poses, culminates in the one who embodies the truth of the Law being crucified by the protectors and keepers of the Law. The High Priest, the chief Jews, the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees, in alignment with powers of Rome, saw Jesus as a threat to their Law, religion and Temple. Though he was the fulfillment of the Law, though he was the true Temple, though he was the glory of God, the price of accommodating sin in the Law was the distortion that made God incarnate unrecognizable. Though every Jew understood that love of God and neighbor, as in Jesus two great commands, is the summation of the Law, this love was also distorted beyond recognition. Jesus concludes that they cannot recognize the word of God because of their traditions (Mark 7) and though these traditions might be thought to refer to something other than OT Law, it is specifically the food Laws and the accompanying ritual washings he targets. As Paul describes it, the law and the old covenant can function to veil or obscure reality, creating a dullness of mind (2 Cor. 3:13-14). Christ lifts the veil or undoes the obscuring effect of the Law (v. 16).  The Law, in Jesus’ critique, concentrated on non sequiturs, yet accommodated every form of human violence (even against one’s own parents in this case). This violence was projected onto God, so that the Law’s center and purpose was obstructed and made impossible.  Of course, to imagine that Law is the problem is to miss the distorting effect of human sinfulness, the real problem.

The distortion of God posed in the OT, the distortion of love, the distortion of ethics, the distortion codified in the Law, stands in sharp, irreconcilable contrast with the truth of God in Christ, and this difference is what killed him. This difference, this curse of the Law, is sin itself. To cover over this difference, to live with the dullness of mind induced by the obscuring of the Law, to rid oneself of all cognitive dissonance, is to miss the cross. The cross is the final and full revelation of God, in contrast to the Law of sin and death, and it is on the cross that he bore this difference. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Cor 5: 21). The difference between the Law that killed him (the curse of the Law) and the truth of the Law (unadulterated love, even of the enemy), the difference between sin and love, is the difference he bore. By doing so “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal 3: 13). Where the power and wisdom of this world puts people on crosses and equates this violence done to the enemy, this redemptive violence, with salvation, Christ bears this curse. It is the curse of capital punishment (Dt. 21:22-23), the curse of Law sanctioned homicide, the curse of Lawful execution, the curse of holy war, the curse of crosses, which he bore.

His death is an act of love, not because he bore the legal weight of sin, but because the violence done to him in the name of Law, God, and nation, was itself sin under the guise of Law. He is afflicted with the core of evil – religious violence carried out in the name of God – and in his divine identity he exposes the fact that God is not on the side of Herod, Pilate, the Jews, or the Law, but God, in Christ, is their victim. God is not the one who victimizes and oppresses, he is not the one who commits genocide, or the one who approves sex slaves and sexual assault, or the one who slaughters infants, God is the one who rescues the victims of murder, oppression, and assault by identifying with them.

God is love, and the love of God is enacted in doing what he did. “We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (I Jn. 3:16). This passage into self-sacrificial love entails passage out of death into life and out of a lie into the truth (3:14-19). I suppose there is an inevitable cognitive dissonance in recognizing how deeply engrained our world, with its laws and religion, is in this lie but this is the dissonance of revelation.  


[1] Gregory, Boyd, Cross Vision (Kindle Locations 633-637). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition. I am relying on Boyd’s summary of the biblical depiction.

[2] Ibid, Kindle Location 1763

Is Nonviolence Essential to the Gospel?

Justin Martyr assured Emperor Titus that he need not fear that Christians were insurrectionists as they have, by definition, forsworn all violence. They have, he explains, turned from violence to “cultivating piety, justice, and love” and “they have turned their swords into ploughshares and their spears into farm tools.” In a recent video, the Capitol insurrectionists pause on the senate floor, led by the horned man (Jacob Chansley), to pray and dedicate their invasion to Jesus. Frank Schaeffer also released a video explaining that he and his father, the famous missionary Francis Schaeffer, were to blame for the events that unfolded in Washington. He explained that his father had declared a kind of holy war and that in his last book, A Christian Manifesto, he had called for a potential revolution against the government if Roe V. Wade was not overturned. Schaeffer blames himself, his father, C. Everett Coop (Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General), Jack Kemp, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and Ralph Reed, as leaders and creators of the religious right. He claims, “America does not have a political problem but a religious fanaticism problem.” Certainly, the Christianity which Justin defended to Emperor Titus is not that which Schaeffer describes or that of the insurrectionists dedicating their invasion of the Capitol to Jesus. Which raises the question, is there a violent form of the Christian faith, a violently insurrectionist Christianity?

Since we have just recently celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, it is fitting that he serve as a counter-example, as one who has enacted a revolutionary-peaceful gospel, but also as someone who gives testimony to profound personal courage provided by the gospel of peace. His life is a portrayal of the nonviolent revolution at the heart of the gospel but what may be less well understood was the depth of his personal dependence upon the peaceful gospel and the peaceable vision he gained from the Hebrew Bible.

King’s epiphany at his kitchen table, perhaps the central spiritual experience of his life, is on the order of the epiphany of Isaiah during a time when Judah faced the possibility of obliteration at the hands of Assyria. Isaiah calls for Judah to trust in God and not in weapons of war. King, like Isaiah, would realize God’s power and presence in his life, and both would recognize God’s power to determine the course of history, in spite of the terrible events of the present moment.

King’s encounter came during the Montgomery bus boycott. It had become a months long affair and he had expected it would be over in a few days. As the economic threat of the boycott began to hit home, he was receiving up to 40 phone calls and threats on his life daily. After being pulled over for speeding and taken to jail, he feared he would be lynched. In his description, he was overcome with fear. He had reached the breaking point on Friday night, January 27, 1956. Then, he once again received a death threat: “N, we’re tired of your mess. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow up your house and blow your brains out.”  

With the Assyrian army bearing down on the tiny Kingdom of Judah, Isaiah called on the people of Israel to trust in the Lord and not in horses and chariots. The basis of this trust is spelled out in Isaiah’s vision of a future which, to paraphrase King, Egyptian children, Assyrian children, and Jewish children would hold hands in one accord. It is a trust which came to King that night, Shaken by the continual threat, he buried his face in his hands and began to pray aloud:

I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone. Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right … But … I must confess … I’m losing my courage.”

The great sense of comfort and courage that came to him at that moment is what strengthened him a few days later when his house was bombed. “Strangely enough, I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.” As he writes years later, “It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.”[1]

Isaiah’s understanding of God’s peace came from an encounter while he was officiating in the temple. Just as King’s “kitchen table epiphany” revealed God’s comforting presence and power to determine the course of history, Isaiah had a temple epiphany (in the temple and concerning Zion, the temple Mount).

And in the last days the mountain of the Lord shall be manifest, and the house of the Lord on the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall come unto it. And many people shall go and say, ‘Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, unto the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us his way, and we will walk in it.’ For out of Zion shall go forth a law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

(Is. 2:2-3)

Isaiah 2 reflects a central theme in the Hebrew Bible, in which Zion is the center of the world and as it is lifted up this center of new creation heals the nations by removing what wounds and divides. As the nations of the earth “stream” to Zion (v. 2) they come together in a unified worship. As the “mountain of the house of the Lord” is “established as the chief of the mountains” (Is. 2:2) there is deconstruction of the counter religions – the “oaks of Bashan,” the “lofty mountains,” along with all the instruments of war – “every high tower,” “every fortified wall,” “all the ships of Tarshish,” or in summary, all “the pride of man will be humbled, and the loftiness of men will be abased” (Is. 2:13-17). The instruments of war and worship or all that goes into nation building and violence are undone. With the participation of all nations in Israel’s worship, there is a simultaneous movement “up to the mountain of the Lord,” an enabling to “walk in His paths,” and a movement outward as this teaching of Zion “will go forth” downward and outward (v. 3). As a result, “the court of YHWH will replace the battlefield of the world” as “people will use the scarce and valuable materials of earth to cultivate life instead of crafting death.”[2]

God’s reign, in Isaiah’s vision, culminates in a series of reversals: where the Edenic garden-world was turned into a blood-soaked burial plot (Abel’s blood cries out and, with the generation of Noah, the earth is filled with violence), now warriors are turned into gardeners as swords are beaten into ploughshares; the worlds languages had been confused and this confusion (the etymological and literal root of war) is synonymous with the scattering and enmity of violence, but as all gather in the singular place of worship on Zion they are instructed in the singular word of the Lord.

This Temple restoration sets the cosmos revolving around a new order of peace (shalom among men and even within nature), brought about by the branch of Jesse. This messianic figure will establish righteousness upon the earth and nature herself will be relieved of all violence. It is Isaiah 40, the culmination of the prophet’s kingdom vision, which King will quote in his most famous sermon:  “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight, and the glory of Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together” (Is. 40:4-5). From verse 1 we understand that this straightening of the rough places and the lowering of the high places is synonymous with the fact that earth’s “warfare has ended.” 

In Isaiah’s depiction, peace is the purpose of the religion of Israel, and this purpose is fulfilled in the branch of Jesse: “Then a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse” and “The Spirit of the Lord will rest on Him” (Is. 11:2-3). As a result, righteousness will be established in all the earth (vv. 4-5) and “the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little boy will lead them” (v. 6).

The lesson of Isaiah brought to culmination by Christ (the true cosmic Temple), is that the children of God need to put their confidence and trust in the Lord and not in violence (chariots, horses, or swords). Jesus taught that peacemakers are the children of God and he demonstrated in his wilderness temptation the refusal of violent power or the temptation to become a violent messiah; he demonstrated the peaceful healing of the nations in his healing ministry; in his casting out of the violent demons, and in feeding and liberating the hungry and oppressed he embodied the cosmic vision of peace in which each will sit under his own vine and fig tree. He called for love of neighbor and of enemies and he called for his followers to offer no violent resistance. He sent his followers “as lambs sent among wolves” to carry out a mission of peace in a violent culture. He would enter Jerusalem as a nonviolent king, “a just savior is he, meek, and riding on an ass…He shall banish the war chariot from Ephraim, and the war horse from Jerusalem…and he shall proclaim peace to the nations” (Zechariah 9:9-10). He commands Peter to put his sword away and the command stands. He nonviolently challenged the Temple system and then submitted, without resistance, to those who put him to death precisely due to this challenge to the Temple and religion of Israel.[3]

The understanding of the early church consistently placed the nonviolence of Jesus at the center of their life and discipleship. The Christian community refused to participate in the insurrection against Rome (66-70 CE), it resisted most any form of military service. Christians refused to kill on behalf of Caesar, and discipleship was aimed at preparing followers of the Way for martyrdom or witness. The practice of forgiveness, the application of the works of mercy, the cultivation of patience, all had as their center the nonviolent, nonretaliatory, gospel of Jesus.  Prior to the conversion of Constantine there is no Christian writing supporting “Christian warfare” as such a concept would have been oxymoronic. There were a few Christian soldiers, those who converted while in the service of the emperor (as testified by discovery of eight epitaphs to Christian soldiers). Tertullian (in 197) informs us that there were soldiers who converted, but the implication is that following Jesus meant they would quit the army. Nearly a century after Tertullian, St. Maximilian refused conscription into the Roman army and he was beheaded. His testimony during his trial would become, for centuries, a standard part of the mass: “I cannot serve. I cannot do evil. I will not be a soldier of this world. I am a soldier of Christ.”

St. Maximilian is a saint because the early church sought out those modeling the nonviolent Jesus. It was understood that Jesus broken body was celebrated not simply as another religious sacrifice, but as a model that accepts brokenness rather than to break the bodies of others. Christ submitted to torture and execution so as to overcome the violence and death which has the violent kingdoms of this world in its grip. [4] Christ rose from the dead and sends his disciples into the world so as to defeat death and the violent way that deploys death.

The early Christians understood the Church as the place where Isaiah’s vision is to be enacted. According to Gerhard Lohfink, the swords into ploughshares vision (of 2:3) is the most quoted text from the Hebrew Scripture in the early church. Origen (writing in the 240’s), presumed that every catechist would be familiar with it as the text was, apparently, a part of the catechism of every candidate for baptism. Justin employs the text in his explanation to Emperor Titus that Christians could not possibly be insurrectionists: “We who were filled with war and mutual slaughter and all wickedness have each and all throughout the earth changed our instruments of war, our swords into plowshares and our spears into farm tools, and cultivate piety, justice, love of humankind, faith and the hope, which we have from the Father through the Crucified One.” The testimony against violence and for peace is the consensus, as demonstrated by Christian writers such as Tatian, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian, Minucius, Felix, and Lactantius.[5] The peaceful kingdom of Isaiah, inaugurated by Christ, deployed by the early church, and taken up by modern disciples like Martin Luther King, breaks the chains of violence and death, the very point of being a follower of Christ.

Where this peace is not the means and end, can this be said to be the faith of Christ or the Christian religion? Rene Coste summarizes the broad consensus of church history and gospel criticism in affirming, “It is an incontestable fact that Christ did preach nonviolence, both as a condition and a consequence of the universal love that he taught us. To pretend, as is sometimes done, that his directives are only meant to be applied to individual relationships is a supposition nowhere to be found in the New Testament.”[6] Peace is the primary marker of the faith of Christ and it is unclear what remains of the religion of the New Testament in the absence of this understanding.


[1] Dr. Martin Luther King, recounted in his Stride Toward Freedom, quoted from https://lisasingh.com/southeast-travel/martin-luther-kings-defining-moment-a-kitchen-in-montgomery-alabama-past-midnight/

[2]Ralph P. Smith, Micah–Malachi. Word Biblical Commentary 32. (Waco, TX: Word, 1984)

[3] Fr. John Dear and Ken Butigan, “An overview of Gospel nonviolence in the Christian tradition,” in Nonviolence and Just Peace 11-13 April 2016 Rome, Italy at https://nonviolencejustpeacedotnet.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/nvjp-conference-background-papers.pdf The understanding of Lohfink is found in •Kreider, Alan. The Patient Ferment of the Early Church (p. 92). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

The Love of Knowledge and Why Josh Hawley Can’t Think

Prominent among the many incapacities on display in the Capitol and country this past week, the incapacity for thought is most striking. It was not just the rioters in favor of the Holocaust (according to their shirts), in favor of murdering the vice president, willing to do violence to the media, and demonstrably willing to kill police and politicians, but the impenetrable and apparently imperturbable presumption that the election was stolen. The long line of conspiracy theories circulating among Trump supporters: that the coronavirus is a hoax or a Chinese lab product, that a group of Satan-worshipping elites running a child sex ring are in control of our politics, that there is no climate change, that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, and most recently, that the insurrectionists invading the Capitol building were Antifa radicals imitating Trump supporters, compounds the stupidity. Given this exuberance of stupidity, it is futile to hope distinctions might be made between legitimate protest (e.g., against racial injustice and police brutality) and insurrection and violence. From my perspective in rural Missouri, it seems futile to even imagine that there might ever be a consensual willingness to wear masks, to socially distance, to take active measures to end this plague. But the core and more enduring problem is not COVID-19, but the epidemic of stupidity which is proving to be the deadliest foe this country has faced.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

While there are multiple (endless?) sources for stupid, conservative Christians are clearly the key resource for energizing the base of stupidity.  Since I am speaking from inside the problem of conservatism, it should be clear, it is not a matter of my prejudice against the orthodox tenets of Christianity.  In fact, I would suggest that Christian orthodoxy is the remedy for the stupid that has gripped evangelicalism and that there is an incapacity for thought linked to a particular theological failing. Which brings me to the case of Missouri’s native son, Josh Hawley.

Hawley, with degrees from Stanford and Yale, is not lacking in mental capacity but his inability to distinguish truth from fiction is, I would argue, connected to his version of the Christian faith. His clenched fist support of the pro-Trump rioters and his objection to the results of the election on the floor of the Senate, can, to a large degree, be chalked up to the peculiarities of his reformed fundamentalism, though, certainly, his own craven ambition has played a role. His Lutheran/Calvinist understanding of the role of government and his convoluted notion of the protections required against “free will,” go a long way in both demonstrating a lack of depth and something like a religious commitment to shallow forms of thought.

In his widely circulated Christianity Today article, it is the Augustinian/Pelagian debate, or the argument over the role of free will to which Hawley attributes societies present problems and it is here that he sees his special contribution. For the uninitiated, this may seem like an obscure reference but for the initiated it is an even more obscure reference, as the true role of Pelagius (as the loser, heretic, in the argument) has undoubtedly been exaggerated and mythologized and the position of Augustine was inconsistent. To connect modern notions of freedom and individualism to Pelagius is a stretch, which conveniently passes over the true source of the problem. The hardening and reaction against free will, as occurs with Martin Luther and John Calvin, is in response to Catholic and Anabaptist notions of free will more than any survival of Pelagius and his doctrine. So, Hawley’s true point of reference is a thousand years removed from what Hawley imagines is the point of origin, but this also enables him to ignore contemporary scholarship which would credit the Reformation with key elements of individualism, capitalism, and modern notions of freedom. Nonetheless, he lays at the feet of Pelagius blame for most all modern ills surrounding the notion of freedom and individualism. It is his “particular philosophy of freedom” with its “liberation from family and tradition, of escape from God and community” that Pelagius got going some 1700 years ago, that is bearing fruit in America today.

Hawley points to Pelagius’ notion of perfection as the root cause of the problem, but he misses both Pelagius and the New Testament. He exaggerates even the myth of Pelagius, in maintaining “Pelagius believed he could save himself” (he is a Christian Monk, after all) and he misunderstands the notion of perfection. Jesus, in fact, commands perfection (Matt. 5:48), but in Hawley’s Christianity this is to lend too much credibility to human capacity. Hawley and evangelicals imagine God uses necessary evils, such as Trump and all this entails, precisely because people are not to be trusted, as original sin has stolen their true agency.

It is the Reformed concern to separate out the heavenly kingdom and the role of the earthly civil government (Luther pictures it as God doing one thing with his left hand on earth, and another with his right hand, kept busy with the spiritual realm in the heavenly kingdom), which requires governmental restraint (e.g., against globalism, for protectionism, and isolationism) and utilization of worldly oppression by God and his human instruments (capital punishment, war, trust in chariots and horses). The fallen nature of humanity means that human nature requires the guidance and constraint of civil government, and certain key teachers and civic leaders who are saved, will be the best choice. On the other hand, it is this sort of two-kingdom separation that has allowed evangelicals to give up concern with the morality of leaders like Trump. God can use a tyrant for his purposes, and thus the foibles of Trump can be overlooked. They would maintain, we need a strong force for God, and morality is beside the point, and as has been argued by some (e.g., Robert Jeffress), it will only get in the way.

The logic of his argument escapes me at key junctures, but the conclusion is that Pelagian individualism “leads to hierarchy” and his notion of individual responsibility “produces elitism” and though he “proclaims liberty, it destroys the life that makes liberty possible.”[1] Overlooking the leap to modern notions of freedom from Pelagius, the leap from free will to hierarchy and the destruction of liberty, Hawley seems to be using theology, not in any serious engagement with history or the issues, but as the vehicle for his populist political realism (or his own form of elitism).

In the end, Hawley seems to be saying that only those with his interpretation of Christianity are to be trusted. Only Christians, like himself, can speak for the masses. There is no room for an open society, religious or cultural pluralism, or notions of equality, but, of course, the implicit argument is that only a religious elite, like Josh Hawley, has the correct theology so as to control society from its ever-present impulses. Evangelicalism, with its view of an ineradicable evil, an ever-angry God, a looming eternal hell, and total human depravity, requires the sort of hidden elitism that Hawley is promoting. There is a limited atonement allowing salvation (going to heaven) only for those elected by God, the rest are damned, and human will and agency do not figure into the calculations of God. Hawley’s peculiar trick is to finesse this into anti-elitism.

What Hawley and his evangelical cohort are missing is the Gospel message: real-world salvation, not just in some future kingdom, but in an-all embracing cosmic salvation. The notion that human agency or human freedom (even the false kind) is the source of all our problems does not exactly accord with Hawley’s notion of original sin, and inasmuch as the Gospel teaches that there is a restoration of human freedom and agency, his notion that there is no such thing misses the goal of salvation. The problem, as portrayed in Scripture, is not connected with an absence of human agency, but it’s opposite. It is willful self enslavement and deception – belief in a lie – from which Christ delivers. Christ does not give up on freedom and agency but aims for their restoration. Unfortunately, Hawley’s gospel preaches against what Christ presumes: the human capacity for freedom. This is not Pelagian or American or modern, it is simply the teaching of the New Testament rejected by the Reformed tradition.

His belief in the stolen election is obviously a lie aiming to establish his own power, his own potential run for president, but it is a lie easily incorporated into a gospel which does not concern itself with real world morality and salvation. The shape of the “gospel” that Hawley believes is the shape this lie always takes. Given special knowledge (the presumed elite understanding of salvation given to a few select individuals) these chosen individuals are in a place to dictate truth and to take the reigns of power. Hawley, in his drive for power, misses a key point of Christianity, which outside of its Calvinist enclave, is aimed at producing freedom, to enable human agency, and in the words of Jesus to bring about perfection or fullness (human thriving), especially the fullness of knowing God.

In his gospel lite anti-elitist, anti- intellectualism though, Hawley is true to his roots. As has been noted by a series of authors, the scandal of the evangelical mind (Mark Noll), in which there is no place for truth (David Wells), is a long simmering crisis which has led to the anti-intellectualism and formulaic populist notions of American evangelicals. Worst of all, I believe it can be directly connected to the epidemic of stupidity literally killing our fellow countrymen.

I have spent most of my life in pursuit of education, a transformation of the mind, and one of the great obstacles, which took me many years to overcome, is that posed by certain (I would claim heterodox) forms of the Christian faith. Systematic theology, especially of the Reformed bent, can be such a neat package, a closed case, a doctrinaire understanding that no further thought is allowed or called for. No one puts it like that, but that is the way that dogmatic religion functions. It is dependent on perverse forms of authority, it cannot extract itself from the heavy weight of tradition or an imagined tradition, and the end result is a deadening of thought. Christianity, for many, functions as a closure of thought, a departure from reality and facts, and may require, as with Calvin, a violent confrontation (burning some 50 heretics at the stake) so as to establish the “truth.” This violent grab for power so as to establish an alternative truth exposes the lie. The force for unthinking violence, the promotion of the necessity of evil, and the embrace of the abomination of immorality and violence (e.g., Donald Trump), as if it is the way of God, is antithetical to the loving knowing engendered by Christ.

The Love of Knowledge and Freedom

The Gospel truth shows itself as that which establishes peace and love, and the way of violence (according to Paul) it does not know. A personal universe created by a personal God means that all true knowing is further entry into the freedom of interpersonal relationship. “It is for (this) freedom that Christ has set us free” (Ga. 5:1). “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (Jn. 8:36). Far from a lack of free will or agency, the whole point of Christ’s message is the full restoration of human freedom and agency.

All of this is summed up in a few verses in James 3, which describes what course to pursue for wisdom or right understanding. The reason for Luther’s disdain for the book of James (“it is,” he claimed, “a book of straw”) is evident in its clear teaching that people can rid themselves of sin and that they are on the road to fullness/perfection (the same biblical concept) through their works and agency. The straightforward teaching of James (and the New Testament) is that people can be righteous, they can produce good works, they have the capacity for freedom of thought. Certainly this freedom can be perverted, but that is part of James’ point.

Step 1, the one who has understanding will demonstrate this in his gentleness and good behavior (v. 13). But jealousy, selfish ambition, and arrogance are a lie against the truth and this sort of knowledge is not from God but is “earthly, natural, demonic” (vv. 14-15). The disorder that results from selfish ambition and jealousy exposes the evil origins of this false wisdom (v. 16). Step 2, the wisdom from God shows itself in that there is no admixture with immorality. It is pure and purity, without evil, is a real possibility, where the earthly sort of wisdom shows itself in its immorality and impurity (evil is a necessity).

Step 3, this heavenly wisdom is peaceable (v. 17). Violence is not true and cannot contain the truth. Step 4, heavenly wisdom is gentle and humble as it is accepting of the other and can listen and receive from the other (v. 17). Humility is its own epistemological method.

Step 5, heavenly wisdom and knowledge are reasonable (v. 17), which means that this sort of knowing is not contradictory, it is not a dialectic, but it coheres into a singular frame of understanding and does not collapse into two contradictory logics for two different kingdoms. Step 6, this wisdom is full of mercy and grace as it is a gift to be received and given, circulated without expectation or cost. Mercy or grace is characteristic of this knowing as it is a personal giving. God gives himself and every one who would know receives himself in the gift. Grace is not a limited possession given to a few by a stingy God, but is the characteristic form in which God comes to all of humanity in the knowing that is characteristic of this gifted reality.

Step 7, this knowing produces good fruit as it is an integrated, growing knowing (v. 17). There is a knowledge that is truncated, which halts thought, which dampens curiosity, and which is mere impersonal information. Good fruit or good works is salvation. Step 8, this knowledge is unwavering in that it contains no double mindedness (v. 17). James warns about the double minded man who seems to be pitted against himself or to wear an actor’s mask, depending on the occasion (hypocrisy). One need not switch roles or moralities or methods, depending on the kingdom.

Step 9, the summary and sign of true knowledge is that it produces righteousness (v. 18) which is often equated with salvation. This righteous knowing is out of court in a Calvinist system, yet it is the summary of both James’ and Paul’s picture of the end goal of the Gospel. This is no imputed righteousness but one literally knows it and experiences it. Step 10, James triples down on peace in that he has already mentioned it above (step 3) but here (v. 18) he mentions peace two more times as both the method (the means of sowing) and what is sown by those who make peace.

Freedom, peace, and virtue are not delayed for a future heavenly kingdom, they are the goal of this present earthly life. Further, this loving sort of knowledge gives rise to community as pursuit of true knowledge draws us together into a fellowship of those who would pursue understanding together. Rather than the sort of alienating community of dissent, or communities drawn together by what they oppose, loving knowing integrates us into the lives and thought world of other people. Just as God is ever moving outward in the processional love of the Trinity, so too pursuit of his sort of wisdom integrates us into an ever-expanding community of persons.

As a picture of how true knowledge functions, I conclude with what would normally be a footnote but which deserves to be front and center – how a community of knowing works. The adventure in peace and love that is the community of Forging Ploughshares, is to an equal extent an adventure in communal knowing. This blog is the direct fruit of class and conversation with Tim, Matt, and Tyler. Tim suggested the passage in James and gifted me with the book, A Little Manual for Knowing, by Esther Lightcap Meek, from which I drew some of the ideas on knowing. Tyler suggested the understanding of integration and Matt made the point, on several occasions about humility. My friends are my best teachers from whom I draw understanding. This is a concrete example of how love and knowledge must go together.


[1] Josh Hawley, “The Age of Pelagius,” Christianity Today – https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/june-web-only/age-of-pelagius-joshua-hawley.html

The End of Naïve Evangelicalism: Exposing the Word of Death

With the storming of the Capitol building, it is clear that we have reached the end of a naïve era: a four-year long indulgence of right-wing politics, and a decades long linking of evangelical religion to nationalism. The exposed underbelly of this religion has shown it to be antithetical to the teachings of Christ. The President’s deployment of his Christian base and the fact that it serves his strategy, indicates the shape of the religion that would serve him. It exceeds guilt by association, as the very possibility of association (with white nationalism, the KKK, or the raw grab for power) is a blasphemous implication of the Prince of Peace in violent nationalism.

 I cannot help but link recent events to an emptying out of the religion, which Faith and I have witnessed personally, since we returned to this country 15 years ago. We came back to work for a Christian College here in Moberly, and it was there we recognized that the religion had morphed into something unrecognizable. The microcosm of the rule by fear and intimidation witnessed at the national level, we witnessed in this institution. The misogyny and maltreatment of women, the commitment to a hellish Christianity built upon fear, and the commitment to a violent God and violent faith, produced systemic abuse which we did not encounter in twenty years in Japan. The forms of violence directly pitted against the rule of law in the Capitol, in this little institution were pitted against basic humane and legal treatment. The same forces that put up a JESUS sign during the storming of the Capitol, the forces that put Donald Trump into office, have transformed what is called “Christianity.” The religion has been turned inside out, along with the nation state, set to destroy what it is meant to uphold and protect.

 In other words, the deployment of the religion in support of the nation state is imploding. The endless sex scandals, the attachment to the cult of personality, the commitment to consumerism over principle and ethics, describes both church and state. It is as if the worst elements of the religion have come to a head in this political period, and the religion connected to the political right has been exposed for the misshapen anti-Christianity that it truly is. The lawlessness of the rioters on Wednesday did not arise in a vacuum, as they were clearly egged on by the President, but this President has been egged on by religious supporters and advisers.

I have pointed to the broad, two-kingdom sort of theology which enabled national socialism (Nazism) in Germany, and which is embraced by American Christian nationalists (here), but I think there is a more specific element in Nazi ideology which coincides with American evangelicalism. The escapism, the “going to heaven when you die,” the otherworldly nature of the American form of the faith, allows death and alienation to reign here upon earth. This was accomplished for Germans in many ways, but archetypically by Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger, the premiere philosopher of the Nazi period, might as well have been declared “Official Nazi Theologian” for his subtle separation of the insights of the Christian faith from the tenets of the teaching of Jesus. He deploys key vocabulary of the New Testament in a negation of the religion. This negative Christianity, instead of trading in resurrection life, presumes the primacy of death and the strategies that deal in death. The religion and philosophy might be summed up in Heidegger’s conclusion that the defining characteristic of humans is death:

Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. It can, however, beckon us toward the way in which the nature of language draws us into its concern.[1]

Heidegger’s linkage of language and death may be a flash of insight worth dwelling upon – he continues to dwell upon it and little else – but left in isolation this focus supports and coincides with one of the most destructive periods in human history. At the same time, Heidegger’s singular focus reveals the shape of a Christian theology which allows death to stand in this life as the controlling factor.

Heidegger’s singular link of death and language, which is certainly serious and worth developing, is only one instance of an infinite number of similar links with language. “Humans are they” who can experience life as life because they speak. Humans are they who can tell jokes because they speak. Humans are they who can experience sex as more than mere animal copulation because they speak (etc. etc. ad infinitum). Certainly, humans appear as “mortal and speaking” but they also appear as liars and speaking, as jokesters and speaking, as lovers and speaking, and as potentially immortal and speaking.

The point is not to trivialize the link between language and death but to recognize the many faceted nature of this relation so as to draw out what it must mean to be “constantly delivered to death” (2 Cor. 4:11), or to defeat death through the peculiarity of the Christian orientation to the word.  Heidegger seems to picture deliverance to death as a one-way street, but Paul is here recognizing and moving beyond where Heidegger stops short. More than that, he is describing an impetus behind language – to take up the word and speak – where Heidegger seems to make the case for silence. Paul is describing a reconnection to the world, to human relationships, which is not obstructed by death, due to participation in the death of Christ. The power of the word of the cross is the power of fellowship, the power for life, the power for preaching.

In contrast, a faith which pictures the cross as a death to benefit God (divine satisfaction, penal substitution) or a deliverance from hell, and not a defeat of death and an opening up of the world, leaves death and violence as a world orientation and strategy. Heidegger and evangelicalism share a singular, flat link to death. Heidegger maintains that death is the main thing about humans and evangelicalism allows this singular emphasis to stand.  

Paul is suggesting that all of life is opened up in rightly understanding the link between the word and death, not because the orientation to death is denied, but because it is displaced. In one instance (in both Paul and Heidegger) language and being human might appear deadly and death dealing but in the other (the Pauline alternative to Heidegger), every facet of life, including death, takes on the aura of revelation. Christ’s death defeats death, baptism inaugurates this victory for all, and communion in the body of Christ describes a life that continually overcomes death. As Paul describes the Christian life: “always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10). The Christian embrace of immortality is not meant to be an escape from the connection to death, language, and the world, but it is meant to reverse the sinful orientation to death and to open up life and love in the world.  

Think here, again, of my previous reference to Helen Keller (here), who pictures her entry into language as an opening to the world on the order of a divine revelation.  “The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” For the first time Helen experiences “water,” “earth,” “teacher,” “baby,” and some 30 odd things she names in an afternoon. Language acquisition, for Helen, is on the order of divine revelation, but what Heidegger demonstrates is the human barrier to this equation. There is a link between language and death which may characterize people and which is spelled out in philosophy and psychology, but the point of Christianity and even the possibility indicated in language is the opposite of this stunted link.

 I do not mean simply that people have the possibility for future eternal life, but that there is a specific orientation to law and language which is deadly and death dealing and that there is an alternative orientation implied even in this stunted negative orientation. Christian engagement with death is aimed at defeating this deadly orientation here and now.  The point of Christianity, the power conveyed through resurrection faith, takes us beyond he word of death to the word of life.

Heidegger does not note the necessary positive side, which makes the negative appear. He only recognizes the negative aspect, the absence and negativity, and he imagines this absence and nothingness is final ground. Heidegger’s philosophy concludes to a pure negativity and nothingness, which presumes with Hegel that to be human is to be founded on negativity. Heidegger is following Hegel, for whom the human is a negative being who “is that which he is not and not that which he is.” He is a “placeholder of nothingness” as death is definitive. I would suggest, Heidegger and Hegel are partly correct in their assessment. Absent a Christian reorientation to the law of sin and death, humans are driven by death as if it were the force of life.

Paul presumes death, like the word, holds out a series of links and possibilities. His understanding of the truth of death, is that death, like language, is peculiar for humans because it holds out a different, an enduring, possibility. Just as mortality is constituted by the possibility of immortality, death is only death where it is presumed to be something other than ground or end. What I mean here is not that death is necessarily linked in reality to immortality, I just mean that human death is constituted as death because the peculiarity of language necessarily opens up another possibility.

Paul is describing a reorientation to both death and language in which neither is presumed as its own end, and he is presuming upon this inherent possibility within language. This might be taken as a trivial reference to a future possibility, but Paul is describing a present actuality, in which death threatens but this very threat opens the mortal to the immortal. He is linking the inherent possibility of language to the realization of a different reality. Certainly, this is realized through Christ, but this should not be separated from everyday life. Paul is describing the “mortal flesh,” the feeling of being “abandoned,” of being “destroyed,” or of “slowly dying,” with the life of Jesus being revealed. As he puts it, “So death works in us, but life in you” (2 Cor. 4:12). Paul is focused on both sides of the valence of the word – it is joined with death in one instance so as to be joined to life in the other instance.

What Heidegger misses, is that while death and mortality appear as primary in human orientation, it is on the same basis that their opposites also “flash before us.” Immortality, too, is not a consideration for unspeaking animals and it is precisely this possibility that constitutes the peculiar human experience of mortality and death. Death taken as life, immortality folded into mortality, or the enchantment of religion lent to nationalism, describes the human tendency to immortalize the tomb and the religious and “secular” systems which worship the tomb. In a pervasive but bizarre reversal, death takes on the patina of life and immortality, as the human condition is not simply bent to death but to immortality – to immortalizing death. What the Bible calls the covenant with death and links to the lie of the serpent and the lie of idolatry, Heidegger identifies with Dasein, with the house of language, with “being there” or waking up to being, which only death and nothingness can make shine. Heidegger is selling his philosophy on the basis that death and nothingness serve in place of life.

This is not simply the accomplishment of a subtle philosophical mind, but I believe it is the articulation of the human condition outside of Christ. It is the reality that is left standing, one way or another, where death is not dethroned as the point of life. A Christianity focused on the problem of God, the problem of hell, the problem of the law, and which misses the way in which the world is entangled with the lie oriented to death, lets death have the last word. It has failed to enact the reign of the living word.

The sign that authentic Christianity has been traded for a counterfeit is the violence this entails, as violence is the necessity where death reigns. As Heidegger’s philosophy fits national socialism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, in the same way evangelicalism is a fitting theology for American nationalism and the death of hundreds of thousands sacrificed to Mammon, as both transfer the glow of life and truth to death and violence.

As Hitler needed Heidegger and German Christians, so Trump is dependent on evangelicals to lend a religious aura to his violent grasping after power. Heidegger was Hitler’s favorite living philosopher precisely because of his nihilistic embrace of violence and death. Nazi Christianity (the German Christians who embraced Hitler and the Nazi party as opposed to those who did not) was shown up as hollow and empty, just as the religion which led to the storming of the barricades at the Capitol is now exposed in its promotion of death and violence in place of life and peace. This exposure of the religion, spent as it has been on the coin of the realm of a deadly nationalism, is clearly an empty word, a bankrupt form of the faith.  


[1] Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, (trans. Peter D. Hertz, New York, 1971), 107-108.

Helen Keller and the Discovery of a Trinitarian Reality

The story of the world opening to Helen Keller through her discovery of words and language, the discovery that everything has a name, contains the movement from indiscernible objects and sensations to a connectedness to the world, to other people, and to a profound spirituality. It also contains the discovery of herself as a particular subject and actor, as she becomes self-conscious (guilty) for the first time. In short, Helen Keller’s story (which I assume most are familiar with but which is related below) describes not only passage, in her words, out of the darkness of slavery into the freedom of the light, but it describes what must be the “common” passage into personhood, and my presumption throughout is that the complete realization of this personhood is fully Trinitarian in scope. As with the Trinity, so with the story of Helen Keller, the entire event is mysterious, and yet out of this mystery arises every form of awareness and knowing. Reality – the reality of God, I presume, is not only accessible but is the means and mode of all access and all experience.

The Sacrifice  

The first movement in Helen’s opening to the world of language, to her realization that letters spelled out in her hand related to the world, occurs prior to where many would take up the story, but she, no doubt, felt that the sequence of events was interrelated. At first, she had enjoyed the new game that Anne Sullivan, her new teacher, was playing, trying to spell out words in her hand, and she describes trying to imitate this – she compares it to a monkey’s imitation. But then she became tired of the game and takes it out on the doll Anne had given her and which was the word (d-o-l-l) she was spelling out in her palm:

I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed.[1]   

The doll had not really been special to Helen, prior to her breaking it apart. As with an infant, her world did not contain the sort of differences and differentiation resulting in affections and attachments, which language introduces. Helen describes it as a world without sentiment or tenderness, and explains that she had not really loved the doll. With the doll’s shattering the concrete and undifferentiated world will also explode and become animated with significance – the signs of language.

Helen, two times over, remarks on the “keen sense of delight” she felt at the shattering of the doll. As Lacan and Freud will describe, there is an imaginary violation the child passes through, in which there is a relinquishment of a sort (the castration complex) in the process of language acquisition. Though Helen felt neither sorrow nor regret at having broken the doll, as soon as she makes the leap into language, it will be the doll that she remembers. Even at this early stage in the story, Helen feels “satisfaction” at Anne sweeping the broken pieces of the doll into the hearth. There is already a foreshadowing of the full subjectivity that is slowly arising.[2]

Every child seems to pass from an original, undifferentiated state, in which mother and child and the child and the world are all part of a monolithic whole. An infant slowly discovers its own hands and limbs, but they seem to appear, at first, as objects somehow part of and yet removed from the child, and then with the acquisition of language the integrity of the body and the individual take shape. But prior to recognizing the body as the self, is the realization of separateness and the possibility of disintegration and dismemberment (the first stirrings of death). The linguistic medium, connecting the child to the world, establishes at the same time the subject/object or self and world between which an exchange is made possible. Helen’s passage into the symbolic world is not a displacement so much as an opening, and it would be hard to name what she has relinquished or out of what stuff any sort of choice is constituted.

Religious sacrifice hints at the economy of language acquisition, as in sacrificial religion there seems to be a replaying of the child’s entry into the world of signs. Animal sacrifice, which is already a symbolic displacement, perhaps of human sacrifice, violates the integrity of the animal body, splitting it open either for a reading of the entrails or for setting up a path to negotiate with the gods. Meaning is quite literally, in this instance, in the murder and dismemberment of the thing. Sacrificial practices seem to reduplicate passage into the establishment of signification with the goal of manipulating, pleasing, appeasing, etc. This reentry or reestablishment of meaning seems to objectify and reify (divinize) the symbolic system, but it is this reification which Freud and Lacan presume are present in the child. The Oedipus complex will reify the father, representative of the symbolic order, and service of this father describes the dynamic interplay between the superego or symbolic and the ego or imaginary.

 There may be a difference between the child’s entry into language and the religious attempt to reorder and manipulate the signifying economy, or perhaps sacrificial religion illustrates the characteristic mistake of the child. This is the Freudian assumption, which explains his great interest in primitive religion (along with early childhood development) as an insight into human neurosis and sickness. He presumed the religion reenacts the presumptions of the child. The father the child admires and imitates, is taken up into the child’s own self-consciousness, but both the inner child or the ego that serves this father figure and the father that is served, are mere fabrications, a primordial deception, which gives rise to the split within the human psyche (ego/superego). Sacrificial religion, Freud presumes, reifies both the father figure, as god, and the service that can be rendered by the child worshiper.

What is clear is that the acquisition of language is a necessary step in the constitution of human reality. There is no option, no alternative reality, but the question is if there is a characteristic mistake which marks humanity. Freud’s answer was to provide a scientific escape from religion, while both Lacan and Slavoj Žižek are content to manipulate, apart from religious mystification, the various sacrificial drives set up within the symbolic order. But what if the problem is not so much in the medium of language the child or the religionist takes up or even in the general contours of the economy? What if they have in fact stopped short in their constitution of reality, so that by delimiting it they might control it?

Could it be that in a biblical depiction of sacrifice what is being illustrated is not an economy of exchange, in which worshippers can simply appease and make amends, but more than that, the order of the divine reality and human participation in that reality is depicted as an open possibility. As Jacob Milgrom notes, it is God who is playing all the parts in the Hebrew sacrificial system. As in the story of Abraham, God himself provides the animal, lights the fire, and receives the gift. Entry into the Hebrew sacrificial system, or into the world represented by the Temple, is not simply a point of exchange between God and humans but is an invitation to full participation in the kenotic Trinitarian reality of divine life. It is not that humans can manipulate the exchange and that the exchange impacts them like an object, but they are, like God himself, constituted in the movement of giving, pouring out, donation, self-emptying.

Helen describes a rapidly expanding world which had once been closed off to her. She illustrates her life prior to meeting Anne, as if she were a ship at sea, enclosed in a fog and without means of navigation. Even upon meeting Anne she describes an initial “barrier” or something holding her entrapped. It is unclear what barrier held her back, but perhaps it was the fear of losing the little control and integrity which her isolated world afforded her.

Ironically, her blind and deaf isolation describe the typical understanding of God’s relation to the world – apophatic, impassive, immoveable, and unreachable. Typical sacrificial religion, even that which has come to describe the sacrifice of Christ, is an attempt penetrate some wall or barrier that seems to mark the very character of God.  One may need to get his attention, arouse his desire, break him free of his antipathy, or redirect his anger. The presumption is that God is in his own closed world and that the only way of breaking into this world is to somehow break down the barrier behind which he is hidden. But what if is not on the God side of things that something is required? What if, like Helen, the obstacle that needs to be broken open is one’s own (willful?) isolation.

This is the paradigmatic question which God and God’s prophets continue to raise. In Psalm 50 the worshippers are frustrated because God remains silent (v. 21). Israel has made the childish mistake of assuming God needs sacrifice and God corrects this characteristic misunderstanding: “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, For the world is Mine, and all it contains. Shall I eat the flesh of bulls, Or drink the blood of male goats?” (Ps. 50:12-13). The point of sacrifice, in the Psalmist’s explanation, is not to feed or to satisfy God’s hunger. They need to offer, not blood and meat, but thanksgiving: “Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving. And pay your vows to the Most High; Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I shall rescue you, and you will honor Me” (Ps. 50:1-15).

Where their sacrificial economy allows for the sacrifice of the neighbor, God would enact an ethic of sacrifice for the neighbor and thanksgiving to God. As Katherine Sonderegger describes the lesson of Levitical sacrifice, God is not one who would maintain his integrity, like an unbreakable or impenetrable object, but God is continually open and moving outward in the processions of the Trinity, portrayed in sacrifice. Israel is invited into this circulating economy of mercy, gifts, and thanks, as this is who God is. It is through this opening that Israel is established, and it is in this the model in which the full constitution of Personhood is modeled.[3]

The Words of Life

As Helen describes it, the sacrifice and dismemberment of the doll was her entry point into a world of signs and significance:  

She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure. We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As a cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.

As Helen walks down the path her sense of warmth and smell seem to be heightened. She feels a certain joy. As the “cool stream” of water gushed over her hand, simultaneously her teacher spells out w-a-t-e-r into her other hand. Her graphic portrayal is of one who was formerly dead to the world being brought into freedom as the “living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free.” This one who is literally blind and in the darkness is enabled to see and to enter into a new freedom. Her “misty consciousness” is delivered to a capacity for thought as “the mystery of language was revealed to me.” What has broken open for Helen is the wall of separation between her and reality.

Helen begins to literally reach out to the world once the “barrier” was broken down. In the description of Anne Sullivan, she began to reach out and touch and name all the objects and persons around her.

I spelled “w-a-t-e-r” in Helen’s free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed. A new light came into her face. She spelled “water” several times. Then she dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked for my name. I spelled “Teacher.” Just then the nurse brought Helen’s little sister into the pump-house, and Helen spelled “baby” and pointed to the nurse. All the way back to the house she was highly excited, and learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours she had added thirty words to her vocabulary.

Her world is growing exponentially, as she describes, her “soul is being brought to life.” She has entered into the possibility of exchange with the world which very much resembles the divine invitation to Israel to share in ultimate reality, the life of God. This is the very metaphor Helen utilizes: “Thus I came up out of Egypt and stood before Sinai, and a power divine touched my spirit and gave it sight, so that I beheld many wonders. And from the sacred mountain I heard a voice which said, ‘Knowledge is love and light and vision.’”  The gift of reality opened to Helen, something like the voice of God. The question might be, why not the voice of God or something on a continuum with revelation?

 It is precisely at this point that there are hints that something might potentially go wrong.

The Subject

The destruction and loss of the doll has somehow opened up the symbolic dimension. Helen has entered a world of differentiation in which she is literally reaching out and touching and realizing the nature of the world, the objects, and the people surrounding her. At the same time, Helen enters a depth of self-awareness and subjectivity she had not yet experienced. In her description the chain of signification linked her to the world and gave birth to an unending series of thoughts, until she came back onto the porch and through the door where she had shattered the doll and then she turns inward:

I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.

Strangely, the broken doll has seemingly ushered her into the human world of full personhood, subjectivity, and morality. Her first notion of repentance and sorrow and her attempt to put the doll back together seem to indicate that in her own mind there has been, in Lacanian terms, a “murder of the thing.” Her own isolated and individual world seems to have splintered and opened with the shattering of the doll. The smashed doll may be functioning as the violation of Helen’s previous sense of wholeness, closed off as she was in her own world. Her attempt to recover this lost object may hint at the primitive religious impulse, the desire of the child, which haunts human subjectivity.

The interchange with the world holds out a lost object of desire, which Lacan will identify with the ego. The ever-elusive object of the self, held out in the mirror image or in the bodily image of others. Helen has no capacity to gaze into the mirror or to witness the bodily integrity of others offered up by sight, but what she has now realized is the breaking open of a former integrity or completeness which she had attached to the doll.

Helen describes her former life as a kind of animal like existence. She was fully enmeshed in the darkness of her immanent, silent, world like an animal, fully enmeshed in the immanent order so that it can be said to be in the world like water in water.[4] This must describe Helens unseeing, unhearing world, but doesn’t every human begin in this completely integrated order? The broken doll seemed to enact a space of separation into which the world of language entered. For the first time Helen desired to put together that which has been broken.

Earlier, she describes how she had become attached to a doll and enjoyed putting the doll in its crib. One day she discovers her baby sister in the crib, and in a fit of rage she overturns the crib and indicates the child might have been killed had her mother not been there to catch her. Helen feels no remorse or sorrow, and yet she seems to have some awareness of what she has done. Strange then that this doll, which unlike her own baby sister was hers alone, would evoke remorse.

The moment of guilt and the attempt at payment, in the explanation of Freud and every biblical indication, seems to become a permanent aspect of failed human subjects. The pervasive, if not universal bent toward masochism indicates a self-induced suffering offered as immediate punishment for the pleasure of the symbolic father figure. The symbolic enacts a price paid through masochistic sacrifice and heightened desire.

In the mode of desire, as the Psalmist explains on behalf of God, “You thought that I was just like you” (50:21). The cycle is one in which there is giving and receiving but the interchange gives rise, not to satisfaction, but to heightened desire. They honor thieves and adulterers and they practice deceit, and in their mistaken focus they have forgotten God (v. 22).

 The point of Psalm 50, and in Sonderegger’s portrayal, the point of Leviticus and the point of Jewish cultic sacrifice, is a direct portrayal of the immanent life of God as a resolution to the corrupt economy of sin. “In Trinitarian Sacrifice, Almighty God gives Himself, His Life as the Distillate, the Concretion, of Deity. He is Molten Gift.  The costly Breaking, the Plunging Down, the Life that is Blood: that is the Divine Generation, the Hiddenness poured out and made Manifest.”[5]

The great exchange which the sacrificial system of the Hebrew Bible may be opening up, is not simply a transaction between God and humans, but the exchange of a mode of subjectivity built on immanent wholeness (a self-contained punishment and pleasure) to one built upon an ever-expanding reception and gratitude. In Sonderegger’s description, “Israel’s cultus is an exchange, a rescue, just because it follows and imitates the Holy Life of God: the life of the sinner and the Divine Life of the Holy God meet on the altar of Israel.”[6]

Hellen Keller’s journey seems to indicate that there is a potential direct trajectory from the house of language to recognition of the person and work of God. According to Sonderegger, Helen illustrates how the child’s acquisition of language may take on a theological tone as “in the encounter of the intelligible in the concrete, the mastering of that explosive relation, we are brought into the house of language but also, and more powerfully, into the House of Being.”[7] She will spend a good portion of her book demonstrating that Being simply is the Being of God, and in Helen’s ever-expanding realization of the essence of things through language, the recognition of God is natural and immediate. We seem to have more than language acquisition demonstrated in the life of Helen Keller’s memoir, as the spiritual richness “tells us that we stand in a larger domain,” something on the order of spiritual enlightenment.

It is a spiritual enlightenment that flows naturally from the orientation that Helen demonstrates, subsequent to the singular sacrifice of her doll. She describes her expanding world granted through the capacity to name and then the passage into abstraction and community: “the more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world.” She remembers distinctly her first encounter with and growing capacity for abstraction and her realization of a capacity for love: “The beautiful truth burst upon my mind—I felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirits of others.” This connecting Spirit of Love would seem to be none other than the all-powerful Divine Love of God.

What every child, every person encounters in their growing awareness must be this same Divine order opening up to them.


[1] Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, (New York, Doubleday) available online at http://cbseacademic.nic.in/web_material/doc/The%20Story%20of%20My%20Life,%20by%20Helen%20Keller.pdf All quotes of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan are from this source.

[2] The shattering of the doll is similar to the cooing satisfaction Freud first notices in his grandson as he learns his first words, here/gone, as he plays with a spool.

[3] Katherine Sonderegger, Systematic Theology Volume 2, The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: Processions and Persons, Fortress Press.

[4] Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan, (Routledge) 187.

[5] Sonderegger, 465.

[6] Sonderegger,464.

[7] Sonderegger, 280.

Salvation as a Realization of the Resources of Personhood

Nestled within the Christmas story are a series of presumptions that may have come to order our own lives, such that we do not notice how strange they are. The overwhelming and most obvious accent of the Christmas story concerns the notion of who and what are important. Historically we have no record of peasant life, poor life, teenage girl life, or carpenter life. It is kings and warriors who live lives worth recording, and even here the accent falls upon public life and not interiority. There is no record of Darius I struggling with a guilty conscience after his ill treatment of Bardiya, about whom he fabricated the story that he was an imposter king. Being important was always a function of hierarchy, and if you were at the top you got to make the rules. Those at the top of the hierarchy were accorded all of the attention, and meaning (ethics, value) was garnered from the same circumstance. Public deeds of valor or heroism were not only what were important but in a scale of enduring meaning, this was all that was important.

In the birth story of Jesus this is reversed, as God visits a teenage girl in a country town, Nazareth, of a backwater region, Galilee, of a people that have no political importance on the world stage. We know as readers that there is no more important event in world history and by extension, at this moment the weight of meaning of world history falls upon this one who is all but a non-person by any standard measure. Something strange and subtle happens as we focus in on Mary, as even her thought life is opened to us and we are clued in to her reactions to this circumstance which is being revealed to her. “Mary was greatly troubled” at the angel’s words “and wondered what kind of greeting this might be” (Luke 1:29). The drama takes an inward turn, we are so used to, that we may miss its significance.

The earliest biographical records, hieroglyphic inscriptions on Egyptian monuments (c. 1300 B.C.E.) and cuneiform inscriptions found in Assyria (c. 720 B.C.E.) and Persia (c. 520 B.C.E.) for example, say nothing like, “The slave Asclepius wondered about the futility of life. Do this, do that, run here, run there, and he wondered what it all means.” There is no such inscription, no such record. What we have instead are commemorations of the deeds of the kings. Whether runic inscriptions in England or anecdotes or character sketches in ancient China, they follow something like the work of Homer in recording archetypal subjects. There were biographies of great men’s deeds, but they were men and it was their deeds that was the sole focus. No biographer of the great men bothered to record their misdeeds and no one recorded the inner life of the great men.

Among the earliest surviving biographical literature are those contained in De viris illustribus (On illustrious men), by Cornelius Nepos (c. 100–c. 25 B.C.E.), which would become a model for subsequent serial biography. Though not too far removed from the life of Christ, the literary technique unfolding in Scripture and the focus of concern on the inner life, the obscure, the poor, are completely absent. Plutarch (c. 46–after 119 C.E.), who comes after Christ, is perhaps the most famous ancient biographer, and he is unusual in his focus on his subject’s moral character, but what is lacking is both the technique and the focus on internal thought life.1

The question is whether the technique and the sense of agency are somehow being changed up before our eyes in Scripture and particularly in the birth narratives? There is a significance attached to human agency and choice which is set before Mary as she is presented with God’s plan, which seems incomparable even in biblical literature. Perhaps the scenes in which God is trying to persuade Moses to go to Egypt, or the opening episodes in Genesis in which the singular decision of Eve is weighted with world consequence, might compare but with Mary we are concerned with the redemption of the world. She is quite literally the means by which God is going to be incarnate, and as never before there is a focus on human agency as history is turning on the thought life of a teenage girl.

The text does not indicate that her consent was required but it is notable that she presumes that her approval of and obedience to God’s plan is one that she is expected to offer up. “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled” (Luke 1:38). The story seems to require her consent or at least willing acquiescence, which is much more than ancient societies ever record granting to a teenage girl. As my daughter indicated when I told her the subject of my blog, maybe there were many girls who said no to God’s plan prior to Mary. Given the choice of the red pill or blue pill, maybe a return to the matrix of culture, to following the rules, is the common outcome.

It is not simply that there is an undeveloped literary technique outside of Scripture which, as in painting, has yet to capture any but two-dimensional figures. What is unfolding around Mary is both a unique technique and sensibility. Literary specialist, Robert Alter, suggests these developments can be partially traced out in the literary developments of Hebrew Scripture, which he was surprised to find resembles modern literature more than the parallel literature of the time. Biblical narrative, from its opening chapters makes use of interior monologue. He notes that this was expected in modernists such as Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, where the monologues run on for pages, but it was a surprising technique and sensibility to encounter in ancient literature. He points to the example of how Saul devised a scheme to have David killed on the battlefield as recorded in the interior monologue of I Samuel 18:17: “And Saul had thought, ‘Let not my hand be against him but let the hand of the Philistines be against him.’” Instead of the characters being marionettes pulled by the web of expectation of the culture, Alter finds plot development, the evolution of character, and exposure of human interiority. We are told that Michal, Saul’s daughter, loved David (the only woman in the Bible of whom this is said), that the people loved David, and we are given detailed descriptions of the thought life and jealousies of Saul – a dangerous transparency, Alter notes, in the Machiavellian political world of the Book of Samuel.[2]

A consistent element Alter does not explicitly name, but which he seems to be tracing, is that as long as characters are following the rules and doing what is expected their personhood remains closed to us. David remains largely opaque until he too, having fallen for Bathsheba, plots to kill Uriah. As David’s life and his family’s life fall apart, we are let in on the lusts, murderous plots, and failed expectations of David, his children, and his commanding general. His adultery with Bathsheba and murder of her husband unleashes a series of dark tragedies: David’s son Amnon rapes his half-sister Tamar; her brother Absalom exacts a bloody vengeance; Absalom flees and returns to court, only to usurp the throne; his death is engineered by the cold pragmatist, general Joab; and the strangeness of David’s reactions are notable and a deep insight to his personhood. He never stops loving Absalom and refuses to give up on him until Joab forces his hand. David mourns inappropriately (washing his face and ceasing mourning at the death of Bathsheba’s first child), he loves excessively, he is an embarrassment to his wife, an object of jealousy to Saul, and like most of the characters in the Bible and unlike the characters in the surrounding literature, he is deeply flawed, profoundly contradictory and a complexly realized individual. The question this begins to evoke is, how is this full development of personality pertinent to the religion as it is presently practiced?

In the short sketches we have of Joseph, the initially revealing information given to us is that he is of the line of David. Perhaps this is the needed hint as to how his story is to be read. We might imagine, here is un-David, but there is a similar opening of the personality of the man, in contrast to the expectations of the culture. However, a reverse course begins to be traced.

The bulk of the Christmas story is about God getting the human agents to cooperate with his plan, but his plan does not in any way fit with the law or Jewish expectations. Joseph does not need to consider whether or not he will go ahead with the marriage when his bride turns up pregnant, as the dictates of the society are clear. Matthew only need inform us, Joseph “was faithful to the law.” Joseph is willing to bend the law and to silently end his engagement but he has not yet broken free of the constraints that are placed upon him. We have indications he was a kind soul, but his only choice was whether to halt the marriage quietly or publicly. It would not have occurred to him to enter into an illegal marriage, and it certainly would not have occurred to him that God wanted him to marry illegally. “Because Joseph her husband was faithful to the law, and yet did not want to expose her to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly” (Matt. 1:19). This challenge of law and cultural norms frames and fills out the life of Christ: it begins through an illegal marriage, culminates in a law defying death, and ends with the breaking of the seal of Roman law placed upon his tomb. With Christmas and Christ, we are stepping outside of a rule governed cosmos in which persons are but an extension of the cosmic order.

Matthew tells us what Joseph has “in mind” or what his internal dialogue and intention are. In turn, the concern of God and his angel is not only with what Joseph plans to do but the attitude or emotion attached to his plan: “But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit’” (Matt. 1:20). We enter into Joseph’s internal thought life – what he had “in mind” and his “consideration” – and this is all exposed in sharp contrast to God’s intention expressed to him in a dream. Much like his son’s future challenge to the law, Joseph’s kindness, his love for Mary, and his humanity are not revealed to us because he fits the pattern expected of him, but because like his forebear David, he begins to defy expectations – only in a different direction. Both Joseph and Mary are disclosed to us internally and in the fullness of their personhood, not because they are exemplars of their culture, but because they are God’s human agents involved in overturning cultural expectations.

 The problem with this literary/personal focus is that it does not fit with either the way that we normally read sacred literature nor with our expectations of how it functions in the religion. David is no spiritual example and it is hard to imagine how he prefigures the Christ, except in the vaguest sense as a king who was promised an eternal reign. This does not explain the need for the fullness of his story and of the other stories of the Hebrew Bible. Of course, the same problem is going to repeat itself with the coming of Christ, in that doctrine, especially in which Christ is simply a sacrifice, has no real need for the full story of the life of Christ.

What gets passed over in the focus on doctrine and propositions is the peculiar literary art, the development of fully embodied personhood, the rise of human agency to a central level of importance. In Alter’s description, the Hebrew gift to the world does not reside in material culture (archeology, ceramics, jewelry, sculpture, or painting) but in its literary art. He maintains “the ancient Hebrew writers altogether eclipsed their neighbors, producing powerful narratives that were formally brilliant and technically innovative and poetry . . . that rivaled any poetry composed in the Mediterranean world.”[3] He does not presume to know how or why this literary achievement came about, but what is strange is that the purveyors of the religion have traditionally not even noticed. This overwhelming fact about the unique nature of the Old and New Testament is the one element that the religions, Jewish and Christian, have not traditionally accounted for or even accommodated.  

The thing that links Christ to Joseph and David and to the peculiar nature of the Hebrew Scriptures, and apart from which only the vaguest doctrine can seem to apply, is the full-blooded nature of a shared humanity. That is, it is not just that there is a deep literary portrayal of an already present humanity, but what Eric Auerbach may have been the first to recognize, the Bible unleashes a new literature and a new form of human sensibility. The Bible is not apart or simply a part of the Western literary tradition and its new sense of humanity but it is a generative force within it. As Alter describes Auerbach’s contribution, it is his recognition “that it is not Homer but the Bible that is the precursor of the representation of problematic quotidian reality that passes through Dante and Shakespeare to culminate in the realist novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”[4] Add to this the insight of Charles Taylor, who traces out the sources of the modern self, and we see the unfolding fulfillment of the words of Simeon to Mary in regards to the work of Jesus: “the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed” (Luke 2:35). This revealing of what was formerly concealed unleashes not only a new sense of freedom and equality (all have equal and free access to the saving work of Christ) but a new sense of what it means to be human as human choice and agency takes on an added depth of meaning.

Maybe this new sensibility is revealed as much in the range of negative possibilities it opens as in its immediate positive benefits. It is doubtful the ancients struggled with the existential questions that seem to be a by-product of the sort of freedom and egalitarianism which develop out of a Judeo-Christian heritage. Taylor, suggests that the notion that we are deep individuals with hidden well springs of feeling and perhaps of talent, is a late development occurring somewhere toward the end of the eighteenth century. Certainly, in the typical traditional society meaning and value are a direct by-product of a tightly woven web in which it could not have occurred to someone to chart a completely alternative course. As a result, all sorts of identity crises and the recognition of chance and fate and human choice will all be seen in a different light.

It is hard to imagine, even in the near modern setting, say a warrior under Cochise (stories with which I was fascinated as a boy) having an identity crisis. “Chief, I am just not feeling the whole raiding and stealing and macho warrior scene. I may sit this raid out and lay back at the teepee and play my flute and reconsider my options in life.” There were official contraries and clowns among the Plains Indians, yet theirs was a highly regulated opposite to the norm. The weight of searching out one’s true identity and living an “authentic” life true to an inward reality seems to require a different order of humanity.

This is not simply a literary device but, in the description of Charles Taylor and others, what unfolds from the biblical understanding is a new concept of personhood, a new focus on the importance of human interiority, and this will have ramifications great and small, good and evil, which constitute our present reality. This was first brought to my attention in the case of the Japanese novel, called the “I” novel, as it explored the heightened emphasis put upon inner dialogue (which is all that some of these novels consist of) and personal suffering as in some way inherently meaningful. All of this unfolds in a very short time span in Japan as the traditional culture gives way to Western and an inadvertent Christian influence. The destructiveness this new art form and new sensibility had on its first practitioners in Japan (with very few exceptions suicide is the common fate of early Japanese novelists), indicates that the focus on interiority is not neutral, but holds out both potential freedom and harm.

It is in the modern period, Clifford Geertz tells us, that we all begin with the capacities to live a thousand kinds of life, and this can be taken as a great opportunity or call for endless crisis and questioning. Choice of career, choice of spouse, choice of identity, are open as endless possibility and endless doubt about the “proper” course. The philosopher, Elizabeth Anderson, notes that people now have the freedom to have “crosscutting identities” in what she describes as new levels of freedom. “At church, I’m one thing. At work, I’m something else. I’m something else at home, or with my friends. The ability not to have an identity that one carries from sphere to sphere but, rather, to be able to slip in and adopt whatever values and norms are appropriate while retaining one’s identities in other domains?”[5] She asks if this is not what it means to be free in the modern period?

At the same time, both the cataclysmic and utopian possibilities of human choice are laid bare before our eyes. We now recognize that Chin Woo or some obscure individual in Wuhan must have had a hunger for pangolin steaks or fried bat, such that his dinner choice will unleash a global pandemic. What might have once been assigned to the gods or to karma, we now recognize is a product of human choice. If Adolf Hitler had been just a little bit more confident as a painter, is it possible he would have pursued mixing water colors rather than dictatorship? Is it possible that World War I and even World War II could have been avoided if Gavrilo Princip, who would shoot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, had died only a few years earlier of tuberculosis?

On the positive side, we now recognize that what was once presumed to be the cosmic order or the natural state is the product of human culture and hierarchy which can be manipulated or changed up entirely. Freedom is a possibility which can, in part, be manipulated and controlled. But this does not mean tragedy and futility are easier to take, knowing they are the product of human choice. As Simeon tells Mary, “And a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Luke 2:35). The depth of human suffering is perhaps only aggravated in recognition that most all of it can be laid at the feet of human cruelty. At the same time, the reality of a salvation focused on revealing the full depth and possibility of human personhood, can be seen as holding out realization of a different cosmic order.


[1]Biography – Ancient Biography – Lives, Biographical, Biographies, and Illustrious – JRank Articles https://science.jrank.org/pages/8462/Biography-Ancient-Biography.html#ixzz6hSdTeH2u

[2]Robert Alter, “A Life of Learning: Wandering Among Fields” Christianity and Literature, Vol. 63, No. 1 (Autumn 2013) https://www.christianityandliterature.com/Robert-Alter

[3] Ibid, Alter.

[4] Ibid, Alter.

[5] Nathan Heller, “The Philosopher Redefining Equality”, in an interview and article in The New Yorker (December 31, 2018).

Apocalypse as Overcoming the Deception of Misenchantment

It has been suggested (here), from a variety of sources, that the problems and solutions posed within an apocalyptic theology (hereafter “AT”) are either contradictory or ambiguous. The unified difference of AT with contractual theology or a salvation historical approach, focused as it is on cosmic bondage and liberation rather than personal guilt and payment, is clear but what, exactly, constitutes the cosmic element of this bondage and liberation? Is it literally demonic or does the demonic serve as a metaphor for the systemic nature of a humanly generated enslavement and, in either case, does the demonic serve in place of articulation and understanding? What role is there for faith or human agency in a system that puts the emphasis on superhuman agencies (demons and God). AT has been accused of being so cosmically minded that it is of no individual good? So, what role for faith and individual agency and precisely what power is it that Christ defeats and how?

I have suggested that the ambiguities and questions raised by AT might be addressed in development of the notion of self-deception, which, in the abstract, may seem either unlikely, or if duly considered, may seem inescapable. That is, to claim that we are fostered in deception and darkness might seem to be a religious abstraction of such magnitude that it is a sort of meaningless metaphor, but then descriptions of how we are captive to culture or to capitalism, nationalism, sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, might paint a picture of inescapable determinism. This parallels the proposal of the demonic in apocalyptic theology: it may seem unlikely that satanic forces (literal or metaphorical) control the world and if they do, best leave that mysterious predicament to an equally mysterious in-breaking of God. The recognition that this enslaving force consists of the elementary principles of the world, thrones and political powers, spiritual and human forces, the very way we think and are constituted in our thinking, might result in the counter-inclination to claim this matrix constituting the Subject is impenetrable and irredeemable. In describing the problem, however, isn’t there already the sense that we may have become enmeshed in a lie which does not have us completely in its grip, as we have named it and, by extension, through our own agency we may be part of its generation.

To illustrate how self-deception might help negotiate the problems posed in AT, let me propose the work of Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, as an example of the machinations of a cosmic-like deception and active human agency. McCarraher’s starting proposal is that the world is the “sacrament” through which the power and presence of God were meant to be mediated. This opening recognition simultaneously approaches how it is that a failed religion or a failed imagination might “misenchant” the world, as the power of God is assigned to subordinate or created powers (as in Paul’s description in Romans 1), and how it is that this failure is overcome only through rightly recognizing God.

McCarraher is following and refuting the story of Max Weber, in his supposition that capitalism and secularism have disenchanted the world, so that in ridding the world of spirits and deities, reason and science now rule. Haven’t we broken the shackles of dutiful worship, the subordination to the past, the slavish subjection to this vale of tears in hope of a future reward, so that now we are set free to fulfill the self? In the words of Michael Lewis, capitalists are “practitioners of liberty” who “do not suffer the constraints of their private ambition” and who “work hard, if unintentionally, to free others from constraint.”[1] Has capitalism evacuated sacredness from material objects so that the enchanted forces which were once revered no longer structure our devotion and desires?

McCarraher musters a long line of witnesses to suggest there is no difference between the enchantments of mammon and religion.  Journalist Naomi Klein writes of the “the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets” and claims, “corporate business has always had a deep New Age streak,” with branding as the most advanced form of “corporate transcendence.” These neoliberal totems of enchantment (the Nike swoosh, the Starbucks siren) indicate, in the estimate of Barbara Ehrenreich, that despite its reputation for focus on the bottom line, corporate business is “shot through with magical thinking,” inspired and mesmerized by New Age quackery and bunkum. Jesus Christ, Lao-tzu, Buddha, or Carl Jung, provide the keys to the “seven habits” or “four competencies” or “sixty-seven principles of success,” as arcane as end-times prophecy. According to David Brooks, acquisitiveness stems from a “sacramental longing,” a desire to enter “a magical realm in which all is harmony, happiness, and contentment.” Or as historian Steve Fraser puts it, in the stampede for consumer goods slumbers “a sacramental quest for transcendence, reveries of what might be.” Thomas Carlyle, speaking of 1840’s industrial England, perceived “invisible Enchantments” which left owners and workers alike, “spell-bound” by “the Gospel of Mammonism” in which money possessed and bestowed its “miraculous facilities.” Marx and Engels wrote of the capitalist, in The Communist Manifesto, as “like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world he has called up by his spells.” In the first volume of Capital, Marx writes of “the fetishism of commodities,” and of the attribution of human or supernatural qualities to manufactured goods. Even Weber, after tracing the supposed disenchantment which arises with the Protestant Reformation, writes that “many old gods ascend from their graves” avatars of the “laws” of the market animated by the spirits of “the gospel of Mammonism.” Capitalism, Walter Benjamin informs us, is a “cult” with its own ontology, morals, and ritual practices whose “spirit . . . speaks from the ornamentation of banknotes.”[2]

McCarraher maintains this is not hyperbole or metaphor but that capital bears similar enchantments to a world animated by spirits and deities. He proposes that that capitalism, with its perversion and parody of enchantment is not a disenchantment but a misenchantment. As he explains, capitalism is its own sort of cult with its own liturgical codes and high priests, or those who have mastered the arcane art of the deal.

 Its sacramentals consist of fetishized commodities and technologies— the material culture of production and consumption. Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism. Its clerisy is a corporate intelligentsia of economists, executives, managers, and business writers, a stratum akin to Aztec priests, medieval scholastics, and Chinese mandarins. Its iconography consists of advertising, public relations, marketing, and product design.” Capital is “the mana or pneuma or soul or elan vital of the world, replacing the older enlivening spirits with one that is more real, energetic, and productive.[3]

Though “secularists” imagine they are free of the enchantments of ideology, in Slavoj Žižek’s estimate, which accords with McCarraher, there is a very particular reason that the world, sacred or secular, glows with the same ideological enchantment. He maintains that in capitalism and not religion, resides the “archideological” fantasy, in that one might imagine he can simultaneously play this game and withhold commitment. Where the religionist may bow down in fear before his gods, the modern ideologue imagines that his is a voluntary consent to enchantment.[4] Žižek argues that the most successful ideology makes room for this “distancing” (even the religious sort). We all know money has no intrinsic value, but this supposed distancing allowing for an “inward conscious freedom,” is itself part of being fully interpolated into the ideology. In religious ideology there is an obscuring of the origins of the idol which closes off the supposed freedom of choice. Like Aaron’s explanation to Moses, the golden calf was not shaped by human hands, it miraculously emerged from the fire and all were forced to worship. Where religion played the role of obscuring the reification of the symbolic, capitalism proves the lie still works even when exposed.  Everyone may know that money has no intrinsic value but, according to Marx, “they know it, but they are doing it anyway.”

The fetishist knows full well that the shoe is only a shoe, but this does not dissolve the need or pleasure of the fetish. In the Matrix, Cypher knows that the Matrix is a computer-generated virtual reality but this does not subtract from the pleasure of his virtual steak or for his desire to “be someone” virtually important in the virtual world: “someone like an actor.” The Matrix is the big Other, and in the end, there may be nothing more satisfying than to be reinserted into a warm vat of embryonic fluid and to once again become part of its ordering of reality. To be “somebody” in the Matrix will mean being literally reinserted (interpolated) into its energy of enchantment.

In the Lacanian version of misenchantment, misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the self is engineered through the register of the symbolic order (the law, the father). One “sees” himself, the ego or “I” as an object through the matrix of the Other or the symbolic order. Whether this Other is God, the Party (as in Stalinism), the People (as in communist China), or the State, the Subject is only constituted in the struggle to be recognized by this agency. (The struggle before the law described by the Apostle Paul in Romans 7.) To be interpolated into the law or to find satisfaction through whatever “master signifier” one may serve, is the peculiar form of human enslavement. This master signifier works by holding out the glow of enchantment (its being, its significance) to its Subjects, but this god must be obscure, unknown, or mute as the master signifier works by simultaneously withholding and promising meaning.

To be a Subject in this order is to “make one’s mark,” to leave a legacy, to accumulate significance, whether that of zeros and ones or just the accumulation of numbers (Anselm’s doctrine of divine satisfaction makes direct appeal to both money and a heavenly calculus in which there is a limited space creating a quantifiable amount). Though they “do not know what they do” in a first order of belief or understanding, the significance of enchantment is that the Other (God, the heavenly calculus, the symbolic order) knows and sees. The worshipper presumes the priest understands the Latin of the mass/matrix, and if neither priest nor laity comprehend, the magic/enchantment still registers with God/the big Other. Every society depends upon this structuring symbolic order, whether it is presumed to be ordained by God or “secular” powers is not determinative of the degree of misenchantment.

If knowledge, whether self-knowledge or knowledge of God, is to be freed from ideology or misenchantment, it must be freed from the dualism between self and Other or between the ego and law/superego by knowing the unified Subject of God.  Where alienation is the structuring principle of the failed Subject and her world, knowing God as the living, personal Word, cannot accommodate this mute deity. Knowing God overturns this impenetrable Other and its alienated subjectivity. The true Subject, the self-communicating God, in the act of communication frees from the bondage of dualism – the servitude of striving to be interpolated into the law – as there is no distance between the subject and object of knowledge. God as the object of knowledge is also the Subject who knows, first in Christ but in all who are “in Christ.”

Do we learn this truth, Kierkegaard asks, as if we are constituted a learning Subject prior to the founding of this subjectivity? This knowing does not reason to the truth but from the truth. The truth determines the form of reason. The truth, Kierkegaard concludes is in the relation to God, who constituted the whole relation, and falsehood or the sickness unto death is to imagine that this one who relates would found the relation within himself. In Lacanian terms he would create a subject-object relation within himself through the Other of the law. Kierkegaard comes closer than any other thinker prior to Lacan, in The Sickness Unto Death, in laying out the empty death dealing nature of this relationship to an empty Other. At the same time, he points to the apocalyptic nature of knowing God. His so-called “fideism” is simply the refusal to subject God’s self-revelation to a method incapable of receiving knowledge of God. God has acted in his Self-revelation to make us (complete?) Subjects, so that this revelation is the act of reconciliation and this soteriology is an epistemology.

As Thomas Torrance describes a Barthian approach to AT, both “how God gives Himself to be known” and “how one receives and knows what is given” are revealed in Christ.

“In short Jesus Christ is Himself both the Word of God as spoken by God to man and that same Word as heard and received by man, Himself both the Truth of God given to man and that very Truth understood and actualized in man. He is that divine and human Truth in His one Person.”[5]

If, as Samuel Adams puts it, “we prioritize the theological sense of ‘apocalyptic’, then we (methodologically?) subject all worldviews and contexts to the freedom of God’s sovereignty over his own self-revelation. This event of self-revelation is the apocalypse, in subjectivity and objectivity, of Jesus Christ.”[6]

The alienated subject/object relation is a misenchanting lie, empty in both poles of the relation, and only overturned and filled out by Christ. This seems to clarify the hue of the supernatural (the seemingly demonic) in every form of human enslavement while tracking human agency in the generation and overcoming of the lie through the truth.


[1] Eugene, McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon (p. 3). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] McCarraher, 3-5.

[3] McCarraher, 5-6.

[4] But even this description is not entirely accurate or always the case. It is very doubtful that an upper-class Roman of the first century directly believed in the Roman gods, anymore than a modern-day Japanese directly believes in his religion. He does not believe it, but he does it anyway as it seems to work.

[5] T. F. Torrance, Theological Science, 50. Quoted from Samuel Adams, The Reality of God and Historical Method: An Examination of Theological Historiography in Critical Dialogue with N. T. Wright.

[6] Adams, 124.

Sorting out Apocalyptic Theology

Apocalyptic theology, as an alternative to what is referred to as a Lutheran (a useful misnomer) reading, or a salvation history approach (represented by N. T. Wright and others) to Paul, presents a largely unified front in what it is not. While this departure is key, there has not been as much work done in providing a full coherence to an apocalyptic approach. Beverly Gaventa’s criticism of Douglas Campbell, that in throwing out the tepid bathwater of justification theory or Lutheranism, he seems to have forgotten the baby altogether, is not altogether accurate or fair but the point is well made that in doing the hard work of showing the failings of other theories, a great deal of work still has to be done in describing exactly what sort of force sin, death, and the devil constitute. Is the problem primarily anthropological or does the emphasis fall on the satanic and demonic, and exactly how is it that Christ breaks in and undoes this system?

While apocalyptic theology has a genealogy through Albert Schweitzer and Wilhelm Wrede, which emphasized demonology as the problem and eschatology as the solution, this sort of reduction has mostly been abandoned. There is still an appreciation of the cosmic nature of this focus but there has been a mass departure from reduction of the power to demons and the solution as future. However, the present emphasis on an inaugurated eschatology and a folding of demonology into an animate sin and death, does not mean that there is a unified or clear agreement on the meaning of apocalyptic theology. Disagreements and ambiguities prevail in both descriptions of the problem and solution. What I will suggest in the conclusion is that my work on Romans 6-8 may provide a bridge between disparate descriptions of the problem and solution and how, specifically, the plight of sin is addressed by the death and resurrection of Christ.

Following the format, which I have already criticized, it seems necessary to begin to describe apocalyptic theology by describing its departure from other approaches. The failures and inconsistencies in salvation history, Lutheran theology, and the insufficiencies of the new perspective on Paul, point to the need for something like an apocalyptic understanding.

As Douglas Campbell explains it, an apocalyptic understanding stands in sharp contrast to a contractual or Lutheran theology. (I have explained this in some detail here.) A Lutheran Plan A/Plan B approach is one in which one must travel through Plan A to get to the better plan B. In this understanding, trying to observe the Law teaches one that she is a guilty sinner and so needs to move on to plan B with Jesus. This contractual or Lutheran approach has inherent contradictions (e.g. there is the simultaneous need to rationally recognize one’s failure yet this sin entails rational incapacity), it contradicts Paul (e.g. Paul, as a Pharisee, had a clear conscience and never seems to pass through Plan A), and it seems to entail inherent anti-Semitism (Jews are the prototypical sinners and Judaism is the archetypical failed religious system, and they should be smart enough to realize their sinfulness so they must be the most recalcitrant or most unreflective of people).[1]

The New Perspective on Paul has attempted to mitigate several of these elements in that “works of the Law” are not equated with works righteousness but with boundary markers of being Jewish, such as circumcision and food laws. Wright has attempted to take this insight and apply it to his own version of the problem, in that his Plan A is not about the individual but it pertains to all of Israel. His salvation history project does not so much reject, as expand upon the Lutheran project. For Wright, Plan A is now the story of Israel’s historical and corporate journey to arrival at Plan B, the church. He attempts to fully incorporate the Old and New Testament, intertextually and progressively, making the Old necessary for the New: the church’s story is told in relation to Christ’s story; Christ’s story is told in relation to Israel’s story; Israel’s story is told in relation to Adam’s story. The focus on knowledge of God’s presence and activity within history imagines history must always be read in one direction – from Adam forward till we come to Christ. As Campbell points out, there is no clear explanation as to how a still unstable Plan A, now focused on sociological boundaries in the new perspective, points to belief in Jesus. The Lutheran model, with its relief of guilt from sin etc., at least made sense.

The critique of Wright by other apocalyptic theologians, beyond his overdependence on the particular unfolding of Israel’s history, is that he seems to bypass the need for God to break through the world so as to give his own person as the subject of knowledge. Jesus claims that he is the way, the truth, and the light, yet Wright has collapsed divine self-disclosure into history, identifying that disclosure too simply with the objective consideration of the historical events behind the texts of Scripture. God is known by our “critically realist” knowledge of his historical activity, given to us by the accounts of Scripture, behind which it lies. Scripture records and bears witness to these events, but the question is if its own disclosure and communicative character are obscured?[2] The New Testament, in an apocalyptic understanding, reads history and reality the other way round, from the vantage point of Jesus Christ, who is not explained by history but serves as the interpretive key for history.

In the American context, the work of Louis Martyn has been central in setting up the parameters upon which most apocalyptic theologians will agree. In his work on Galatians, Martyn maintains Paul’s argument is not intended to describe the progress of salvation history but to say you can live in one of two relationships: a relationship with law or a relationship with God. You can be a slave to the law and what is the same thing, to the fundamental principles of the world, or you can be a son or daughter of God (4:6-7). The focus is not on history but on what world a person occupies, and transference from one world to the other depends upon God’s intervention into the first world and delivery to the second.

Though historical or temporal categories are present in Galatians they serve the purpose of illustrating the problem of cosmic bondage. Paul recounts his personal history and alludes both to the history of Israel and to the history of the Galatians to illustrate the problem of slavery in each instance. Paul conflates the history of Israel and the history of the Galatians, as he and his fellow Jews were enslaved under the elementary principles, and he associates these same elements with the Galatians’ former life in idolatry. If the Galatians were to embrace circumcision, it would constitute a return to the very same elements to which they had been enslaved when they were pagans.

Paul was transformed through a direct intervention by God on the road to Damascus, revealing his Son to him, just as the Galatians were transformed as God intervened and gave his Spirit when Christ was portrayed as crucified before their eyes (3:1). Paul’s purpose is not to provide an overview of salvation history, but to explain the nature of the Galatians’ transition from slavery to freedom as they have been transferred to a new world “in Christ.” Paul is not interested in the history of Israel for its own sake, and he is not trying to show how Israel’s salvation history would benefit either Jews or Gentiles. Paul may think Israel was in a different situation than the pagans in that he distinguishes between the child and the slave but this is in no way a description of some sort of intermediate state, as is revealed in his focus on explaining the similarities. All suffered a form of oppression and all in Christ have received adoption as children.[3]

Sigurd Grindheim maintains, time in relation to world history, salvation history, or cosmic history is not interesting to Paul. The Galatians’ history, their move from slavery to freedom is the only history Paul is interested in. Paul’s references to his personal history and to the history of Israel serve to illustrate the nature of this transfer and to describe the two domains that the letter intends to contrast: slavery under the law and adoption to sonship.[4] The Galatians and Paul have been liberated from slavery by God’s direct intervention through Christ’s act of redemption and, by extension, so have all Christians.

To summarize Martyn, in his own words, and the parameters he lays out:

Paul’s view of wrong and right is thoroughly apocalyptic, in the sense that on the landscape of wrong and right there are, in addition to God and human beings, powerful actors that stand opposed to God and that enslave human beings. Setting right what is wrong proves then, to be a drama that involves not only human beings and God, but also those enslaving powers. And since humans are fundamentally slaves, the drama in which wrong is set right does not begin with action on their part. It begins with God’s militant action against all the powers that hold human beings in bondage.[5]

•J. Louis Martyn, Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 87.

In Campbell’s depiction, “The unconditional, revelatory, transformational, and liberational aspects of this event mean that it is appropriately described as ‘apocalyptic.’”[6]  The world has been taken captive, and Christ is the liberator from this captivity.

In the words of Beverly Gaventa;

Paul’s apocalyptic theology has to do with the conviction that in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has invaded the world as it is, thereby revealing the world’s utter distortion and foolishness, reclaiming the world, and inaugurating a battle that will doubtless culminate in the triumph of God over all God’s enemies (including the captors Sin and Death).  

Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Our Mother Saint Paul (Louisville: John Knox, 2007), 80.

Apocalyptic clearly refers to cosmic bondage and liberation but what, exactly, is the identity of the cosmic power that has enslaved? Where Ernst Käsemann assumes Paul means the demonic, in a literal sense, Martinus C. De Boer assumes Paul speaks of sin in this way to make an anthropological point.[7] Though Martyn speaks of “real enemies” and “genuine powers,” Shaw suggests the phrases are ambiguous. As he says, “he identifies the curse of the law as chief among them, which, given his account of the law, can hardly be a demon by another name.”[8] There is an “ontological incompetence,” in Campbell’s words, but its cause is not clear or agreed upon. As Shaw concludes, deploying the words of Colin Gunton, the contemporary apocalyptic interpreters appeal to the demonic for its power of metaphorical characterization “which would otherwise defy expression.”[9]

Demonizing sin may at times serve in place of explanation of both the problem and its solution. The role of faith, for example, and how an individual comes to faith are not clear. As the question was put to  Käsemann, “If God’s intervention on the human stage, exorcising the world of its demons, is 100% of the equation, where is human subjectivity in any recognisable form?”[10] As Gaventa has put it in her critique of Martyn, “Martyn’s avoidance of conversion language and earlier individualistic readings of Galatians has taken us too far here, so that even the function of Paul’s self-reference in the letter’s argument (or re-proclamation) does not become clear.”[11]

As long as the demonic is in view the tendency is to see the solution in terms of a purely future eschatological solution (e.g. Schweitzer, Wrede). Where sin and death are the focus, as in contemporary apocalyptic theology, there is focus on a realized eschatology in the death and resurrection of Christ, but the burden becomes one of saying how the work of Christ defeats these powers and how the individual incorporates or is incorporated into this victory.

There is a near equal divide among the apocalyptic theologians with some suggesting there is an ontological release (e.g. Gaventa) from the powers and the others suggesting it is a revelational epistemological release (e.g. Martyn), but even here the explanation is considered wanting. According to Bruce McCormack, readers “are left with a rich battery of images and concepts. But images and concepts alone, no matter how rhetorically powerful, do not rise to the level of adequate explanation. How is it that the ‘rectification’ of the world is achieved by Christ’s faithful death?”[12] While participation in Christ through the Spirit (e.g. Campbell) and revelation or an epistemological release (e.g. Martyn) are pointers, explanation is left wanting.  

What I would point to in conclusion, is that the role of deception which has certainly been noted in an apocalyptic understanding, can potentially bring together the ontological and epistemological divide. I believe sin as a lie, oriented to death by deception in regard to the law, can also go some way in detailing exactly how Christ’s death is a defeat of the power of sin and death and it can help resolve the continuing question and divide over the law.

In the original debate between Käsemann and Bultmann, part of what was at issue was the role of the body and the corporate or individual implications of embodiment and language. As Käsemann would note, in a very Wittgensteinian mode, communication of the self with the self is rendered possible by an already existing communication with and in the environment (language is an embodied capacity). At the same time, this poses the possibility for a simultaneous disruption within the self and between the self and the environment, where communication is broken through deception. The biblical term “body,” as with Wittgenstein, is inclusive of the linguistic capacity that sets man simultaneously into communication and poses the possibility of confrontation or a split within himself, with others, and with God.

In Paul’s depiction, within deception lies the simultaneous possibility for cosmic and personal alienation and enslavement. The fact that the satanic and demonic are consistently linked with the lie of Genesis, but also the lie of religion (the covenant with death, in Isaiah), and that this lie is equated with sin, points to how Christ’s exposure of this lie is both ontological and epistemological in its cosmological import.

In brief, Paul pictures creation and the Creator as containing an infinite depth of communion and communication that has been displaced by a world of deception. In my next blog I will spell out in detail how this understanding fills in the gaps in contemporary apocalyptic theology.


[1] Campbell spells this out quite brilliantly in Deliverance, but is available in his review of Wrights Volumes on Paul and The Faithfulness of God – https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/douglas-campbell/

[2] “History, Providence and the Apocalyptic Paul” – https://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2164/7574/History_2c_Providence_and_Apocalyptic_Paul_SJT.pdf;jsessionid=FA0FD8F9F020B597D401884CE00C1150?sequen

[3] Sigurd Grindheim, “Not Salvation History, but Salvation Territory: The Main Subject Matter of Galatians,” New Test. Stud. 59, pp. 91-108 © Cambridge University Press, 2013, doi:10.1017/S0028688512000264 accessed here – https://www.sigurdgrindheim.com/Salvation%20History.pdf

[4] Ibid, Grindheim

[5] I am here utilizing the fine dissertation by David Anthony Bennet Shaw, The ‘Apocalyptic’ Paul: An Analysis & Critique with Reference to Romans 1-8, Fitzwilliam College.

[6][6] Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 66.

[7] Shaw, 139.

[8] Shaw, 143

[9] Shaw, 144

[10] “A Tribute To Ernst Käsemann and a Theological Testament,” 391. Shaw 145

[11] Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “Review of Galatians by J. Louis Martyn,” RBL, 2001, Ibid

[12] Bruce L. McCormack, “Can We Still Speak of ‘Justification by Faith’? An In-House Debate with Apocalyptic Readings of Paul,” in Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter, ed. Mark W. Elliott et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 167. Shaw, 160.