Author: Paul Axton

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

The Sophiology of Death as Explanation of Salvation and Trinity

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might; for there is no activity or planning or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.” Ecclesiastes 9:10

There is nothing more personal than death. Death is a failure of personhood, a loss that cannot be abstracted, as it happens to concrete persons who can only know of this pervasive reality as it happens to “me.” Death isolates and individuates so that we all die alone. While life and love are shared experiences, death is the opposite. Death is a pure negation, a complete absence, a total loss. It is a loss of connectedness, of love, and obviously of life and the effort and struggle of life. As Koheleth records, struggle with all your might now, for the grave ends all possibility of strategizing. Death, in the small doses that we all experience it, is familiar. The moments of shame in life are small bits of dying, while the total loss that is the shame of death is an undoing and loss beyond comprehension. We cannot think our own dissolution and undoing, and so denial of death is not a conscious choice but an inevitable orientation, but this orientation comes at a price in its reifying and absolutizing of the finite and mortal. The transcendent and immortal cannot be accommodated in the “immortalization” of the mortal. The incarnate and fleshly, immortalized, is a refusal of the world – a striving toward the disincarnate – and this is dying. The dying begins where embodied, incarnate, fleshly living, is refused. Struggle then with all of your life against death – this is dying. So, death is not simply a problem at the end of life, but an ending that pervades all of life. This orientation to death marks all of life as a dying. The unconscious struggle to have life, to hold onto life, to gain a fulness of life, as an insurance against the grave, is to submit completely to the orientation to death.

This orientation and this dying are against God and his intention for humans: “God didn’t make death. God takes no delight in the ruin of anything that lives. God created everything so that it might exist. The creative forces at work in the cosmos are life-giving. There is no destructive poison in them” (Wisdom 1:13-14). God permitted death, which means he permitted free will refusal of himself and of life and of love. He permitted sin, and death entered in through sin. It is not that all sinned in Adam, in spite of the Latin translation of Romans 5:12. Rather: “just as sin entered into the cosmos through one man, and death through sin, so also death pervaded all humanity, whereupon all sinned” (Rom. 5:12, DBH). For Adam, the order was sin to death, but for the rest of sinful humanity (which is not all of humanity in Paul’s explanation – Rom. 5:14) it is ordered from death to sin.

As Sergius Bulgakov describes, “Death entered the world through the path of sin, which destroyed the stability of human existence and as it were separated within man the uncreated from the created. The created, since it did not possess in itself its own power of being, became mortal, having acquired an undue independence from the uncreated. Such is the nature of death.”[1] This “undue independence” is nothing short of a lie. It is the presumption of life where there is death and the presumption of being where there is nonbeing. The separation of the created from the uncreated is an unreality. As Jordan Wood has summarized Bulgakov in conjunction with Maximus: “Rational creatures by definition actualize themselves in the mode of self-determination, of freedom, and somehow that mode can and is in fact misdirected to absurd and absolutely irrational proportions: we make ourselves unmade, we incarnate pure fantasy, we interpret the world and give our very selves, parasitically, to breath (sic.) life into a world that is against the divine will; and anything against the divine will is no creation of the divine will.”[2]

Jordan recognizes in Bulgakov the same refusal of abstraction as he found in Maximus. There is no dying in the abstract – it is always personal. “So the ‘problem’ of sin and its wages is that actual persons are in an actual state of pseudo- and anti-actualization, ‘discarnate or ‘anti-incarnate.’” The work of fallen humanity in its pursuit of life through death (the disincarnate) is countered by the work of the Trinity which, always and in all things, is Incarnation. The work of Incarnation counters the anti-incarnate or false incarnation which is the lie of sin. Incarnation always and in all things (or recapitulation) meets “the actual persons to be saved precisely where and how they are: in a state of anti-incarnation.”[3]  

It is not as if death has the final word, as in the image of Ecclesiastes. In Christ the limitation of the power of death is disclosed. As Bulgakov describes it, Christ’s death reveals the limitation of death: “Death is neither absolute nor all-powerful. It can only tear at and fracture the tree of life, but it is not invincible, for it has already been conquered by the resurrection of Christ.”[4] To realize this defeat of death in the resurrection of Christ, the death of Christ must become the manner of one’s life. He took our death upon himself, so that the “death of humanity is precisely Christ’s death, and we must take part in the fullness of this death, just as he partook in our death after becoming enfleshed and human.”[5] Death and dying and thus living become His manner of death and life.

Bulgakov pictures the full realization of Christ meeting us in death as occurring only in our actual dying. He ends his article on the Sophiology of Death with a description of his near-death experience due to cancer, and then in the pain of having his throat sliced open without anesthetics, having the feeling of being suffocated. The feeling of complete helplessness that is the experience of dying, is the place Christ meets us. The place we would refuse, out of fear, is the place of revelation.  

And to the extent that we know, or rather, will know our own particular death, in it and through it shall we know the death of Christ too. But until we have reached the very threshold of death and have drunk the cup of death, we can only foreknow our death, and in it and through it Christ’s death as well. Such foreknowledge is accessible to us and necessary, for it reveals to us our own— as well as Christ’s— humanity, in its depths and in its terrible abyss; in the light of death it manifests to us our very selves. And to whom it is granted by the will of God to approach this edge of the abyss, let him from thence become a herald, that thence which for each person will at some point become a thither and a there.[6]

The mystery of God and the incomprehensible mystery of death are conjoined in the God-man. In his humanity there is the dying, but his humanity is completely united with his deity. Our dying with him is not a point of separation, isolation, and forsakenness, because he has taken upon himself forsakenness and defeated it. Thus, that which defeats and destroys God’s good creation becomes the point of life, love, and being joined to God. “The God-man dies in the image of man, and man dies in the image of the God-man, in a marvelous mutuality.”[7]  This “impossibility” that God would die in Christ – this point of incomprehension in which incomprehensible death and incomprehensible God takes up dying, this becomes the moment of enlightenment and comprehension. Jesus meets us at the edge of the grave. He is there in the dying and this is the assurance that imparts a new form of living.

This is salvation, atonement, expiation and new life. His being poured out, his kenotic self-giving, is organically tied to the problem and its resolution. His incarnation and dying joins him to the dying of all persons. “(If) Christ redeems and raises every person, then it is only because he co-dies in every person and with every person.”[8] His being with us in his humanity is the point in which he imparts the uncreatedness and life of his deity. “Clearly, we can speak here of “dying” only in a completely unique sense, different from human death; specifically, it is some kind of passivity, an inactivity, which permits the death of the human nature on account of a certain incompleteness in the latter’s divinization.”[9] Christ undertakes divinization in his life’s journey, through death and resurrection, and imparts to all the path he has taken. “Divinization comes into its fullness only in the resurrection and is accomplished only by the Father’s power through the action of the Holy Spirit.”[10]

Bulgakov approaches the possibility of the death of the God-man, the possibility of human entry into the divine, and the divine entry into the human, in his picture of Sophia (wisdom) or what he calls Sophiology. The Psalms picture wisdom as consisting of both a created and uncreated aspect: “The LORD created me as His first course, before His works of old. From everlasting I was established, from the beginning, before the earth began” (Psalms 8:22-23). Wisdom, in both of its forms, according to Bulgakov, is Wisdom embodied in Christ.

The humanity of Christ is created Sophia, permeated by Divine Sophia and in this union with it already pre-deified. . .. Created Sophia, as the human nature of Christ, admitted of further sophianization or divinization, which is exactly what was accomplished through the resurrection of Christ and in his glorification. The latter is the fullness of divinization, the sophianization of created Sophia in Christ, its full penetration by Divine Sophia, perfected divine-humanity.[11]

The course of Christ’s life bringing about the fulness of the Divine Wisdom in his life contains the order and course of the universe – “the union of eternity and time, of fullness and becoming.”[12]

Bulgakov, like (or with) Maximus, not only avoids abstraction surrounding death, but also abstractions which would explain the humanity and deity of Christ. Theoretically or abstractly deity and humanity, time and eternity, God and death, cannot be joined, but what are opposites theoretically are brought together concretely in the person of Christ. The theoretically impossible is not impossible in Christ. Bulgakov expresses this in terms of the peculiarity of what has occurred in Christ. This human and divine life and death is one of a kind. The kenosis of Christ is a possibility for divinity but it is temporary and transitory, and it is a death like no other. Bulgakov admits that the decaying condition, of being turned over to the grave is an impossibility in the death of the God-man. He is susceptible to dying but: “Nevertheless, this dying, while not representing the genuine death of decay, is still that condition of death in which the Lord rests in the grave. The God-man fully experiences death, he partakes of it, although he is not handed over to its power in his divinity and in his divinized humanity. His divine-humanity enters into the fullness of power and glory precisely through dying.” The manner of his death is not being left in a state of death, though he is turned over to the power of death but death cannot hold him.

Kenosis is nothing more than a state that may be adopted by divine being— temporary and transitory, as the path to resurrection. But kenosis is not mortal existence itself, which is what divine existence would be transformed into in such a case. In the depths of kenosis there is a weakening, as it were, of divinity, but only until the end of kenosis, when this weakness is overcome. Such is the immanent dialectic of kenosis in divine-humanity. In its kenosis it is capable of dying, but the death of the God-man can only be a victory over death: “having trampled death by death.”[13]  

Through Divine Sophia, Bulgakov explains the joining of deity and humanity in the person of Christ. Where otherwise one might pose some form of Docetism, or (in the case of Rowan Williams) an “asymmetrical christology” in which the deity of Christ is privileged over the humanity of Jesus. (In Williams description, the divine Word could be apart from Jesus, who “contributes nothing extra to that identifying esse” of the Word.)[14] In Divine Sophia the fulness of the humanity and deity of Christ, including the death of Christ and glorification at the right hand of God, not only exist in one person but are the constitutive aspects – the full deity and humanity – of this person. Sophia explains how, the apparent and necessary division between deity and humanity, are conjoined in a singular person:

In the divine abandonment of Christ, the Divine Sophia becomes, as it were, inactive in him; what remains in full force is only the human nature, created Sophia, although in a state of suffering and mortal frailty. This sophianic kenosis— which prima facie appears to be a division of the natures, as it were, in the humanity’s loss of divinity— is the path to their fullest union in the resurrection. Humanity, created Sophia, needed to be revealed in the depths not just of the positive power belonging to it as the image of Divine Sophia, but also in its Adamic nature, weakened by the fall and communing with death. But in this union with Divine Sophia, created Sophia communes in this divine nature, and in this union she reaches the greatest depth of kenosis: the depth of human frailty is disclosed to the utmost through Christ’s voluntary acceptance of humanity’s fall for the sake of humanity’s restoration and salvation.[15]

Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, both divine and human natures in one person, and because this is who he is there is the possibility of restoration and salvation.  

So too, what Christ reveals about the Trinity, is that God in three persons is involved in the kenotic giving of the Son: “the Father sends the Son, and this sending is an act of Fatherly sacrificial love, the kenosis of the Father, who condemns to the cross the beloved Son, who in turn takes on himself this feat on the cross. The feat of the Son is also the self-denying love of the Father who, in ‘sending’ the Son, condemns his very self to co-suffering and co-crucifixion, though in a manner different than the Son.”[16] The Father and the Son “possess one life, one joy and suffering, although in a different manner.” The Father does not remove himself from the suffering of the Son – “both co-suffer together.” “The Son accomplishes the will of the Father, and this unity of will and of mutual knowledge (“no one knoweth the Son, but the Father, neither doth anyone know the Father, but the Son” [Matt 11:27]) testifies to the unity of life and the unity of suffering in their common— although distinct for each— kenosis of love.”[17]

The person of Jesus Christ involves the fulness of the Trinity. Bulgakov distinguishes the economic and immanent Trinity, but not so as to make a division within the person of Christ or within the persons of the Trinity:

The love of the Father through the Spirit in the life of the Son “is unbroken and there can be no room for any sort of mutual abandonment. But “economically,” in the relationship of God to the world, as Creator to creation, there occurs, as it were, a division of the hypostases because the very hypostasis of union, the Holy Spirit, in “abandoning” the Son, ceases, as it were, to unite the Son with the Father and instead remains with the Father.[18]

The Spirit, which “blows where it wills” (John 3:2), momentarily and manifestly (economically) “stops blowing on the Son.” But this death of the Son is experienced by each of the persons of the Trinity as the “Father co-dies” and the “Holy Spirit co-dies” with the Son. Bulgakov assures that this is not a division, though it has that appearance, but a union: “a union in dying for each of the hypostases in its own way, true both individually and for all of them in conjunction.”[19]

The movement of salvation in Christ is not then, an event removed from who God is, but is bound up with the Trinitarian reality. The revelation exposing the fiction of a life oriented to death, the life giving revelation, simultaneously is a revelation of God as Trinity. The one does not exist apart from the other.

[1]Sergius Bulgakov, The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal (p. 117). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] Jordan Daniel Wood, “The Lively God of Sergius Bulgakov: Reflections on The Sophiology of Death” (Eclectic Orthodoxy Blog, December 15th, 2021). https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/12/15/the-lively-god-of-sergius-bulgakov-reflections-on-the-sophiology-of-death/

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bulgakov, 117.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 133.

[7] Ibid., 118.

[8] Ibid., 132.

[9] Ibid., 122.

[10] Ibid., 123.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., 130-131.

[14] This is Jordan Woods description in reviewing Rowan Williams’, Christ the Heart of Creation. “Against Asymmetrical Christology: A Critical Review of Rowan Williams’s ‘Christ the Heart of Creation’” (Eclectic Orthodoxy, August 4th, 2019) https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2019/08/04/against-asymmetrical-christology-a-critical-review-of-rowan-williamss-christ-the-heart-of-creation/

[15] Bulgakov, Ibid., 131-132.

[16] Ibid., 124.

[17] Ibid., 125.

[18] Ibid., 128.

[19] Ibid., 129.

Zen Versus Jesus

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think. —Hannah Arendt

Philosophy may safely be left with intellectual minds. Zen wants to act, and the most effective act, once the mind is made up, is to go on without looking backward. In this respect, Zen is indeed the religion of the samurai warrior. —D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture[1]

The humble appreciation that God is working through all peoples, cultures and religions does not mean relinquishing the critical faculty of thought. While it is true the Christian can learn about Christ more completely through encounter with other cultures and religions (this is the very point of mission), it is also true that this humility still calls for a fulness of understanding. It was not uncommon in my experience to encounter in Japan (having spent more than twenty years there), the westerner (or even the western missionary) infatuated with all things Japanese, particularly Zen Buddhism, but what these connoisseurs of all things Japanese usually failed to understand was the xenophobic nationalism often attached to Japanese religion and identity. This in no way cancels out some of the insights to be gained in Zen but it also severely qualifies those insights should one be willing to critically examine the religion, yet the uncritical acceptance of the authority of the Zen master and Zen teaching (particularly about the critical faculty) is the ground for Zen practice.

It is not just that wholesale acceptance of Zen practice entails acceptance of a diagnosis of the human predicament and its solution based on a worldview very much counter to an orthodox Christian understanding, but this practice has been involved from its inception in Japanese militarism, colonialism, and ultimately war crimes (which Japanese Buddhist and Zen authorities have acknowledged and for which they have apologized). As Brian Victoria notes, “The fact is that Zen leaders who supported Japanese militarism did so on the grounds that Japanese aggression expressed the very essence of the Buddha Dharma and even enlightenment itself. Thus, until and unless their assumptions are closely examined and challenged, there is no guarantee that Zen’s future, whether in the East or West, will not once again include support for the mass destruction of human life that is modern warfare.”[2]

Far from Zen being only peaceful it is directly connected to Bushido (the Way of the Warrior) and Bushido and Zen are thoroughly enmeshed in “the essence of Japan.” In the description of Nitobe Inazō, in his book Bushido: The Soul of Japan, Bushido and Zen are integral to one another: “I may begin with Buddhism. It furnished a sense of calm trust in Fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, that stoic composure in sight of danger or calamity, that disdain of life and friendliness with death. A foremost teacher of swordsmanship, when he saw his pupil master the utmost of his art, told him, ‘Beyond this my instruction must give way to Zen teaching.’”[3] Nitobe, a Christian, describes Zen as awakening one “to a new Heaven and a new Earth.”[4]

Victoria details the key instances when Zen was used to mobilize the country to war. The Chief Abbot of Eiheiji, Sōtō Zen master Hata Eshō (1862–1944) wrote on behalf of the “national spiritual mobilization” the following:

Buddha Shakyamuni, during his religious practice in a former life, participated in a just war. Due to the  merit he acquired as a result, he was able to appear in this world as a Buddha. Thus, it can be said that a just war is one task of Buddhism. Likewise, achieving the capitulation of the enemy country may also be counted as the religious practice of a Buddhist…. I believe the brilliant fruits of battle that have been achieved to date are the result of the power of the people’s religious faith [in Buddhism].[5]

Two Zen scholars, both affiliated with the Sōtō Zen sect, put forth a doctrinal understanding of the relationship between Buddhism and war which enabled institutional Buddhism to directly support Japan’s war effort:

In order to establish eternal peace in East Asia, arousing the great benevolence and compassion of Buddhism, we are sometimes accepting and sometimes forceful. We now have no choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of “killing one in order that many may live” (issatsu tashō). This is something which Mahayana Buddhism approves of only with the greatest of seriousness…. We believe it is time to effect a major change in the course of human history, which has been centered on Caucasians and inequality among humanity. To realize the true happiness of a peaceful humanity and construct a new civilization, it is necessary to redirect the path of world history’s advance from this false path to the true path. Rooted in this sublime view of history, the mission and responsibility of Mahayana Buddhists is to bring into being true friendship between Japan and China.[6]

Zen and Buddhism in general were utilized to mobilize Japan’s invasion and colonial domination of China and much of east Asia. In this mobilization Zen teachers appealed to a long history in which Zen supported warfare and it was common in the process to claim as Furukawa Taigo did, that Japan was not simply the most advanced Buddhist country but the “only Buddhist country.” Thus a means of spreading Buddhism most directly was through colonization, since all of Japan’s neighbors were lacking in true Buddhism. Japan is “presently using the sword in Manchuria to build a second divine country [after Japan], just as it would go on to do in China and India.” Furukawa appealed to all of his fellow believers: “All Buddhists in the country! Resolutely arise and participate in this rarest of holy enterprises. What difference does it make what the League of Nations does? Just who do England and the United States think they are anyway? The arrow has already left the bow. Do not hesitate in the least. A firm will makes even demons run away. The only thing is to push on resolutely.”[7]

Nonetheless Japanese Zen Buddhism is often perceived to be nothing more than a peaceful set of practices through which one can attain an enlightened understanding bringing about harmony and healing.[8] It is not unusual for western Christians to believe that Zen (which accords with both claims of Zen Priests and also Shintoists, who will also claim the same thing about Shinto) is so lacking in doctrine that it can be melded without disturbance with Christian faith. The focus on practice, of course, is not unique to Zen but is the way most religions (outside of the Christian west) are perceived by their practitioners but the mistake would be to imagine that practice does not entail an implicit or explicit worldview. As Bernie Glassman writes, “So if your definition of enlightenment is that there’s no antiSemitism in the state of enlightenment. If your definition of enlightenment is that there’s no nationalism, or militarism, or bigotry in the state of enlightenment, you better change your definition of enlightenment.”[9]  

The Zen practitioner begins with acceptance of “Buddhist” understandings of “enlightenment,” based on the authority of the Buddha (to even use terms like “Buddhist” and “Buddha” is already to have taken a modern stance in regard to the religion which will tend to cover the explicitly polytheistic world assumed by the Buddha).[10] Belief in Buddhist “enlightenment” entails belief in the authority of the Buddha who claimed:

Nobody is my teacher. Nobody is comparable to me. I am the only perfect buddha in the world. I have attained supreme enlightenment. I am conqueror over all. I know everything. I am not contaminated by anything at all… I have all the powers of the omniscient. I am an arhat (someone who has attained the goal of enlightenment) in the world. I am unrivaled in all realms, including those of the gods. I am the victor who conquered Mara.[11]

Being a practitioner at a minimum means taking the Buddha at his word: “Accept what I did not explain as ‘unexplained.’ Accept what I did explain as ‘explained.’”[12] Enlightenment begins by holding to the authority of Sakyamuni’s words; thus, one must rid themselves of metaphysical speculation or any subject the Buddha did not explain. This   subjugation to the authority of the Buddha will be utilized by the Japanese State in its creation of imperial-way Buddhism which translated subjugation of the Buddha into unquestioning subjugation to the Japanese Sovereign.[13]

Setting aside for the moment the fact that the New Testament claims Christ is the light that enlightens all men (John 1:9), one might wonder if the Buddha’s absolute claims are warranted? Buddha spoke these words to Upagu, who if he had caught the vision could have been Sakyamuni Buddha’s first disciple, but Upagu thought the man was a megalomaniac. Richard Cohen raises the possibility of two responses: “Would you have recognized the man as enlightened? Would you have discerned a spirit of universal peace, beyond politics, in words that valorize hierarchy, celebrate raw power, and speak well of battle?” Or would you be “puzzled that anybody would answer these questions in the affirmative. . ..”[14]

Sakyamuni’s claim is beyond the political or the religious as he alone dominates the world, and the claim is that his domination opens the way to full enlightenment. The question, particularly as it works out in the Japanese context, is whether the supposedly apolitical and areligious nature of Japanese Buddhism is simply a means for demanding its universal acceptance. As Victoria notes, “The ‘selflessness’ of Zen meant absolute and unquestioning submission to the will and dictates of the emperor. And the purpose of religion was to preserve the state and punish any country or person who dared interfere with its right of self-aggrandizement.”[15]

Zen has largely been received in the west from writings and evangelism of D. T. Suzuki, who is revered as the “true man of Zen,” yet Suzuki wrote that “religion should, first of all, seek to preserve the existence of the state.” Suzuki was thinking of the state’s invasion of the Chinese mainland and used Zen as a motivating factor as, “the Chinese were ‘unruly heathens’ whom Japan should punish ‘in the name of religion.’”[16] The oft quoted (in both east and west) Zen master Harada Sōgaku wrote, “[If ordered to] march: tramp, tramp, or shoot: bang, bang. This is the manifestation of the highest Wisdom [of Enlightenment]. The unity of Zen and war of which I speak extends to the farthest reaches of the holy war [now under way].”[17] The uncritical seeker after enlightenment must shoot and bang away, not pausing to consider the morality of what he is doing or the strange exclusiveness and inevitable “uniqueness” of the Japanese faith.

Japanese Buddhist practitioners, who are not alone in the pantheon of buddhisms claiming uniqueness throughout Asia, claim to be the one and only true purveyors of Buddhism. Fukuda Gyōei notes “that it was in Japan where “pure Mahayana [Buddhism]” was to be found. According to him, this is because Saichō (767–822), the eighth-century founder of the Tendai sect in Japan taught that “all Japanese had the disposition of bodhisattvas.” As bodhisattvas they were both “treasures and benefactors of the nation.” According to Gyōei, Buddhism in Japan was not Indian or Chinese Buddhism transplanted. The Tendai sect had been established “based on a deep understanding of the Japanese national character . . . as a religion to pacify and preserve the nation,” and this was made possible by the “gracious wish” of successive Japanese emperors.[18]

Dr. Shiio Benkyō (1876– 1971), a Jōdo sect priest who later became president of Taishō University declared that the Buddhism left in India and China is a failure and only in Japan is it “possible to draw near to a Buddhism like that of the time when Buddha Shakyamuni was alive.”[19] Benkyo explains, “Buddhism in India collapsed due to [the nature of] Indian culture. Buddhism in China collapsed because it ran directly contrary to the history and nature of the Chinese state, and was therefore only able to produce a few mountain temples. On the other hand, thanks to the rich cultivation Japanese Buddhism received on Japanese soil, it gradually developed into that which the Buddhist teaching was aiming toward.”[20] Japanese Buddhism is the only authentic Buddhist teaching, precisely because it has grown up in Japanese soil and has been shepherded by the Emperor: “The priceless customs and manners of our country are the fundamental reasons for this occurrence. These customs and manners are to be found throughout the land, but their heart lies with the emperor and the imperial household, through whose efforts they have been guided and fostered.”[21]

Thus all Japanese Buddhism is called “imperial-way Buddhism.” Since the emperor embodies the state, and Buddhism and the state are one, then the emperor and Buddhism are one.

In looking at the past we see that imperial edicts from successive emperors taught us the proper way to make offerings of even a single flower [to the Buddha], or offer even one stick of incense, or read the sutras with the correct pronunciation, or worship in the Buddha Hall. The power to select and protect each of the sects, to determine each and every temple observance—all have their roots in imperial edicts. Japanese Buddhism acts on the basis of imperial edicts. This is what distinguishes it from the Buddhism of foreign countries.[22]

In turn the practice of Buddhism entails a reverence for the edicts of the successive emperors “To venerate the Three Treasures [of Buddhism] means to revere imperial edicts without question.”[23] Japanese Buddhism is melded with Japanese imperialism, xenophobia, and nationalism.

Cohen claims Buddhist enlightenment is on the order of the “Enlightenment” of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe which “provides the political context for understanding Buddhist enlightenment as the simultaneous, coequal, perfection of rationality, religiosity, morality, and humanity, beyond politics.”[24] Just as western enlightenment is the occasion for marking other peoples and times as part of the darkness (to be set aside or forcibly enlightened), so too in Japan, Buddhist enlightenment is beyond questioning and the politic connected to this enlightenment, associated as it is with the Japanese Emperor, is beyond question. As Saeki Jōin, a Hossō sect priest and chief abbot of Hōryūji, one of Japan’s oldest and most famous temples, writes, “If you receive an imperial edict you must revere it, for the ruler is heaven and the people are the earth.” Jōin concludes: “The emperor, being holy and divine, is inviolable…. The emperor’s edicts, being holy and divine, are inviolable … and they must always be revered.” Jōin defends this on Buddhist grounds,

As expressed in the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha in his compassion regards [beings in] the three worlds [of desire, form, and formlessness] as members of his family. That is to say, he doesn’t think of his family as composed of just his blood relatives, or only the few members of his immediate family, or simply those in his local area. No, his family includes everyone in the whole world, in the entire universe. For him, everyone in the world is a member of his family. In fact, he does not limit his family members to human beings alone. Even animals and all living things are included…. There is nothing that the Tathagata [fully enlightened being] in his great compassion does not wish to save…. There is no one who he does not consider to be his child…. When this faith in the great compassion and mercy of the Tathagata is applied to the political world, there is not a single member of the Japanese nation who is not a child of the emperor…. This expresses in the political realm the ideal of a system centered on the emperor.[25]

Being apolitical and areligious is the means of asserting an absolute and universal hegemony. The Zen practitioner may or may not be fully aware of submitting to the final authority of the Buddha, but anything less than total submission disenables the practice. One either steps into the path of enlightenment, suspending critical thought concerning Buddhist enlightenment, or one does not enter that path. Accepting the practice is itself a metaphysical presumption in that the pragmatic, practical, surface, is given priority.

Cohen compares it to Martin Luther’s nominalism: “surfaces are able to sustain the burden of reality because, in fact, they do re-present an occult reality” beyond comprehension.[26] As he concludes, “let us recall how Luther coaxes readers to adhere to the surface of the Word, thereby avoiding a dangerous fascination with the transcendental unknown.” The commands and practices of the Buddha are like the literal plainness of Scripture. The good Calvinist also, has “the ability to take scripture at face-value, without wrapping it in enigmas,” and this “is possible only for one illumined by the Spirit. Only the elect can accept that god saves some and damns others gratuitously; only the elect can praise this god as perfectly just, when from a human perspective, he appears cruel, random, and malicious.”[27] In the Japanese code of the warrior, the cruelty and bloodletting of the sword must be understood as the loving prerogative of the master, and the Zen Samurai can no more question than a Calvinist the morality of his god.

Cohen defines a Buddhist, “as someone for whom a buddha is an ultimate authority; a Buddhist trusts that, because a buddha is perfectly enlightened, his command dharetha must always lead to beneficial results.” One may have to endure, like the good Calvinist, the seeming contradictory, but there is no questioning of enlightenment as set forth by the Buddha. “Insofar as one is a Buddhist, one’s abstract ideals, concrete cosmologies, economic pursuits, clothing and bodily comportment, even diet, can be traced back to one’s trust in enlightenment.” There may be disagreement among Buddhists over the details, but all agree there is a Buddha who realized unexcelled and complete enlightenment.[28]

This is not to say the Christian should not expect to find God at work in other cultures and religions, but this expectation should not include suspending critical judgment. Too often nationalism, religious fanaticism, and genocidal violence, are overlooked (perhaps set aside as having nothing to do with the religion), and Zen is a key example. The reality of Japanese Zen has a very different history than the popularized version of the religion which accords it only peace and healing.

[1] Brian Daizen Victoria, Zen at War (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2006) quoted from the epigraph.

[2] Victoria, x-xi.

[3] Inazō Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, 11. Cited in Victoria, 114.

[4] Nitobe, 11-12, Cited in Victoria, 115.

[5] Buddhist magazine Daihōrin, 36-39. Cited in Victoria, 111-112.

[6] Hayashiya and Shimakage, Bukkyō no Sensō Kan, 4. Cited in Victoria, 104-105.

[7] Taigo Furukawa, Rapidly Advancing Japan and the New Mahayana Buddhism (Yakushin Nihon to Shin Daijō Bukkyō), 51. Cited in Victoria, 110.

[8] For example, Ruben L. F. Habito, The Healing Breath of Zen (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2006).

[9] Bernie Glassman Buddhist magazine “tricycle” (1999) Cited in Cohen, xi.  

[10] As Richard Cohen remarks, “What are we to say of a doctrine which is sometimes represented as one of almost perfect Theism; sometimes as direct Atheism; sometimes as having the closest analogy to what in a Greek philosopher, or in a modern philosopher, would be called Pantheism; sometimes as the worship of human saints or heroes; sometimes as altogether symbolical; sometimes as full of the highest abstract speculation; sometimes as vulgar idolatry?” Richard S. Cohen, Beyond Enlightenment: Buddhism, religion, modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2006) 151.

[11] Raniero Gnoli, ed., The Gilgit Manuscript of the Sakghabhedavastu (Rome: ISMEO, 1977), 1:132. Quoted in Cohen, xii.

[12] V. Treckner, ed., The Majjhima-Nikaya (London: Pali Text Society, 1935), 1:432. Cited in Cohen. 154.

[13] Victoria, 95.

[14] Cohen, xii.

[15] Victoria, xiv.

[16] Victoria, Ibid.

[17] Victoria, Ibid.

[18] Quoted in Ōkura Seishin Bunka Kenkyūjo, Gokoku Bukkyō, pp. 185-209. Cited in Victoria, 97.

[19] Gokoku Bukkyō, 33, Cited in Victoria, 98.

[20] Gokoku Bukkyō, 50, Cited in Victoria, 98.

[21] Gokoku Bukkyō, 50, Cited in Victoria, 99.

[22] Gokoku Bukkyō 50-51, Cited in Victoria, 99.

[23] Gokoku Bukkyō, 130-131, Cited in Victoria, 100.

[24] Cohen, xiii.

[25] Gokoku Bukkyō, pp. 159-160. Cited in Victoria, 97.

[26] Cohen, 157.

[27] Cohen, 157.

[28] Cohen, 161.

Gregory of Nyssa: The Liberating Work of Salvation

For our sakes, who had lost our existence through our thoughtlessness, he consented to be born like us so that it might bring that which had left reality back again to reality. This one is the only begotten God, who encompasses everything in himself, but also pitched his own tabernacle among us. [1]

The theme of Scripture as the liberating work of God is captured in the central motif of Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt, which the New Testament explains as completed in the liberating work of Jesus from sin. The presumption is that Christ deepens and expands this liberating work to include overturning every form of enslaving power. Gregory of Nyssa develops a definitive link between the liberating work of Moses and Jesus in his theology. He (as in the epigraph) equates the imagery of Moses’ tabernacle with the incarnation and will appeal to the life of Moses (as one of continual progress in virtue) as key in understanding the incarnation (providing for direct participation in the divine nature). It is no accident then, that Gregory (after the Apostle Paul) makes one of the earliest arguments against slavery.

Gregory, like Paul and Origen, presumes that the Word that Moses encountered is the incarnate Christ. “The much desired face of the Lord once passed Moses by, and thus the soul of the lawgiver kept ongoing outside its present condition as it followed the Word who led the way.”[2] He sees the life of Moses as a journey toward learning to be like Jesus: “He was always becoming greater and never stopped in his growth. He had attained growth even at the beginning when he considered the reproach of Christ more exalted than the kingdom of Egypt, and chose to be ill-treated in company with God’s people rather than to enjoy for a time the pleasures of sin.”[3] In tying the journey of Moses (and exodus from slavery) to the Christian journey, Gregory is focused on the development of virtue but he is also focused on the acting and doing of God, especially in his creative and liberating activity through Christ.

In short, Gregory’s Christocentrism (focused on the incarnation) develops a particular understanding of participation in God through Christ, a particular metaphysic, and in the titles of Christ, a particular set of virtues and liberating power, which would serve to counter the failures of modern theology, both Catholic and Protestant. Before turning to Gregory it may be necessary to point out where exactly the sort of corrective he brings is needed.

If the theme or thesis of Scripture (the very meaning of Christianity) is liberation, then measuring where Christianity has or has not been enacted can be measured by where liberation has or has not occurred. Obviously, there are many forms of enslavement and oppression, but a simple test of a particular theology or form of Christianity is to ask, what form of the faith is most responsible for the modern trans-Atlantic slave trade? The fact that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was introduced by “Christian” Europeans and the Church was the “backbone of the slave trade” would seem to indicate there may have been a theological as well as a moral failure.[4] The added fact that most slave ship captains and slave traders were “good Christians” illustrates the blindness of certain forms of theology. “For example, Sir John Hawkins, the first slave-ship captain to bring African slaves to the Americas, was a religious man who insisted that his crew ‘serve God daily’ and ‘love one another.’” His ship, ironically, was called ‘The Good Ship Jesus.’[5]

Stacy Brown argues that Catholicism was the primary culprit in the trans-Atlantic slave trade as, “The five major countries that dominated slavery and the slave trade in the New World were either Catholic, or still retained strong Catholic influences including: Spain, Portugal, France, and England, and the Netherlands.” (Brown also notes that in 2016, Georgetown University offered a public apology after acknowledging that slavery saved the school, when 188 years prior, Jesuit priests sold 272 slaves to save the school from financial ruin.[6])

On the other hand, the Anglican Church invested in slavery and profited directly from the slave trade: “A report commissioned by the church found last June that a predecessor of its investment fund, called Queen Anne’s Bounty, invested significant amounts in the slave-trading South Sea Company in the 18th century.” Gareth Mostyn, chief executive of the Church Commissioners said, “There’s no doubt that those who were making the investment knew that the South Sea Company was trading in enslaved people, and that’s now a source of real shame for us, and for which we apologise.” As a result, the Anglican Church “plans to spend $121m to take action to address ‘our shameful past’ for involvement in the 18th-century slave trade.”[7]

Beyond the slave trade, slave owners represented a number of different denominations. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, came into being in 1845 as the church of Southern slaveholders. Alexander Campbell, one of the founding leaders of the Restoration Movement wrote concerning slavery in 1845: “There is not one verse in the Bible inhibiting it, but many regulating it. It is not, then, we conclude, immoral.” Frederick Douglas, describes one of the men that owned him as a devout Methodist. Edward Covey “would make a short prayer in the morning, and a long prayer at night; and, strange as it may seem, few men would at times appear more devotional than he.”[8] Covey would take the slaves of other masters and break them for slave service (mainly by regularly whipping them), which is how Douglas came under his service. “Added to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion–a pious soul–a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church.”[9] This is Douglas’ ironic way of indicating he was a religious brute.

Other than groups like the Quakers and Seventh Day Adventists, most every denomination was complicit in slavery. The point may be simple and even crude, but it seems clear that Jesus’ continuation of the liberating action of God in Moses seems to have gotten lost among those who could enslave and oppress their fellow humans in the name of Jesus. There were and are several ways of getting around this accusation: slavery is not sin itself but a metaphor for sin; the enslaved are improved in being exposed to their Master’s Christianity, etc. Or maybe, as I pointed out in my last blog (here), Jesus saving activity is concerned primarily with the kingdom of heaven, and the temporal kingdoms are left to violence, coercion, and slavery, as part of God’s plan (as in Luther’s two-kingdom theology). White supremacy and Christian nationalism, like Nazi National Socialism, work out of the same theological matrix of two-kingdoms that arises originally with Augustine, and may have seemed a necessary conciliation with Constantinianism. At any rate, the crudest of markers for the success or failure of particular forms of Christianity, indicates the church has mostly failed. But I presume this crude failure is indicative that many forms of sin’s enslavement have been left unaddressed. Sin enslaves morally, psychologically, socially, and arises in various, more subtle forms than chattel slavery, but a theology that cannot prevent literal slavery is probably not up to preventing or countering its more subtle forms. In other words, white Christians in the United States have inherited a theology that is more enslaving than liberating.

To put a finer point on it, virtue, discipleship, and being made in the image and likeness of Jesus, does not figure into the western, white, theological inheritance. Whether it is the fault of the reformers or the failure of a corrupt Catholicism, the loss of the development of the virtues, the loss of a practical discipleship, the loss of enactment of a real-world righteousness as part of salvation, creates a fundamental shift from the New Testament, not only in the texture of the Christian life but in the perception of God. The notion of two kingdoms, the legal theory of atonement promoted by Anselm, or Luther’s shift to an imputed righteousness or a faith that saves apart from “works,” creates a fictionalized version of the faith in which the forces of oppression – the personal forces of sinful oppression and the structural forces of societal oppression – are left unaddressed. As a result, being Christian is no predictor of one’s moral aptitude or manner of life. This stands in sharp contrast to New Testament Christianity and the Christianity of the early church. It may be that it is Gregory of Nyssa who best sums up this early form of the faith.

Gregory presumes that to be called a Christian means that one becomes like God through Christ. Not only the name of Christ, but all the various titles and names of Christ, are taken up by the Christian. He illustrates with the title of “king”: “authority over all things is hinted at by the name “kingship,” while purity and freedom from all passion and all evil are specified by the names of virtue, each one both thought and spoken in a higher sense.”[10] The Christian then also inherits the title and virtue of kingship or rule over the passions. By the same token all of the characteristics of Christ, included in his various descriptions and titles, are transferred to the Christian: “so Christ is righteousness itself (cf. Heb 7:2) and wisdom and power (cf. 1 Cor 1:24) and truth (cf. John 14:6), both goodness (cf. John 7:12; Mark 10:18) and life (cf. John 11:25; 14:6), and salvation (cf. acts 4:12) and incorruption (cf. 1 Cor 15:53–57), both immutability and changelessness, and every lofty concept whatever indicated by such names—all these Christ both is and is called.”[11] Each of these titles and characteristics are included in the name of Christ and by extension in the one calling herself a Christian.

For if we, united to him by faith in him, are named together with him who excels the names interpretive of the incorruptible nature, it is entirely necessary that as many concepts concerning that incorruptible nature as are contemplated with the name should also become those conforming to our having the same name. For just as we have obtained the title of Christian by participating in Christ, so too it is fitting that in conformity we should be drawn into sharing all the lofty names.[12]

One puts on Christ by putting on the virtues of Christ or by doing what Christ did and participating in who he is. It is not that one is left to do this apart from Christ: “Certainly whoever pursues true virtue participates in nothing other than God, because he is himself absolute virtue.”[13] God in Christ shares salvation and virtue with his followers and this is the meaning of the name Christian:

For just as by participating in Christ we are given the title ‘Christian,’ so also are we drawn into a share in the lofty ideas which it implies. Just as in a chain, what draws the loop at the top also draws the next loops, in like manner, since the rest of the words interpreting His ineffable and multiform blessedness are joined to the word ‘Christ,’ it would be necessary for the person drawn along with Him to share these qualities with Him.[14]

The name “Christ” and the various titles and descriptions which go with the name are not just inclusive of the incarnate Lord, but what is found in Christ (and these titles) is the revelation and perfection of the divine nature. As Jonathan Bailes states it, “Those who are called to become like God must imitate Christ because Christ himself is the perfect manifestation of divine perfection and, therefore, the names that are given to him are not simply descriptors of his humanity.”[15] Gregory assumes a direct equivalence between the titles given to Christ and the divine nature and the perfection of that nature. His Christology is such that God is not who he is apart from the perfections of Jesus Christ found in the incarnation. God’s perfection is the perfection of Jesus Christ. As Bailes concludes, “it is for this reason that Gregory sees no tension whatsoever in saying that whoever imitates Christ by conforming herself to his various titles—kingship, righteousness, wisdom, power, goodness, life, salvation, etc.—has fulfilled the goal of Christianity and the virtuous life, namely, imitating the perfection of God.”[16] The Christian becomes perfect as Christ is perfect and thus  becomes perfect like the Heavenly Father.

If one does not imitate the virtue of Christ, Gregory wonders if such a one truly shares in the name: “If, therefore, someone puts on the name of Christ, but does not exhibit in his life what is indicated by the term, such a person belies the name and puts on a lifeless mask . . .. For it is not possible for Christ not to be justice and purity and truth and estrangement from all evil, nor is it possible to be a Christian (that is, truly a Christian) without displaying in oneself a participation in these virtues.”[17] The incongruity of taking the name Christian without participating in the reality of Christ was inconceivable to Gregory and early Christians.  

Gregory writes point blank: “If one can give a definition of Christianity, we shall define it as follows: Christianity is an imitation of the divine nature.”[18] He understands this may sound difficult, but this putting on of the divine nature in Christ is the defining point of Christianity:

Now, let no one object to the definition as being immoderate and exceeding the lowliness of our nature; it does not go beyond our nature. Indeed, if anyone considers the first condition of man, he will find through the Scriptural teachings that the definition does not exceed the measure of our nature. The first man was constituted as an imitation of the likeness of God. So Moses, in philosophizing about man, where he says that God made man, states that: ‘He created him in the image of God,’ and the word ‘Christianity,’ therefore, brings man back to his original good fortune.[19]

It brings him back to his original goal not simply through (though not exclusive of) imitation, but through participation in Christ. Gregory speaks of both imitation and participation and seems to mean the same thing by the two terms. As Torstein Tollefsen observes, “ontological structure” of the imitation of God in Gregory’s writings is indistinguishable from Gregory’s theology of participation, so that when Gregory speaks of the imitation of God, he does not intend by this to imply merely an imitation of an external model, but a genuine participation in divine activity.”[20]

The imitation of the divine nature, as Gregory explains, is the definition of what it means to take on the name Christian: “Now if humanity was originally the likeness of God, I shall probably not have missed the mark in my definition by claiming that Christianity is the imitation of the divine nature.” The Gospel “commands the imitation in our way of life of good actions, as far as that may be possible.” The actions this involves are clear: “Our being made strangers to every wickedness as far as may be possible, to be pure from its defilements in deed and word and thought—this is truly the imitation of the divine perfection and of what has to do with God in heaven.”[21] God commands that his children be perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect, and with the command the possibility presents itself: “For it is just as impossible to make ourselves equal in appearance to heaven’s greatness with the beautiful things in it as to liken humanity from earth to God in heaven.’ But the explanation of this problem is clear, because the Gospel does not command the comparison of one nature to another, I mean the human with the divine.”[22] The original image was set to receive the divine likeness, not due to its own nature, but because God’s nature is one that can be shared.

Along with this imitation, participation is that which makes imitation possible: “This is because the divinity is equally present in all things and in like manner pervades the entire creation, and nothing would remain in existence if it were separated from the One who is. Instead, the divine nature takes hold of each one of existing things, as of equal value, since he encompasses all things with his own inner all-embracing power.”[23] By “minding the things of heaven,” one not only thinks of heavenly things but participates in the heavenly virtues: “Consequently, the person who wants it has the life of ease in heaven, even though he is on earth, just as the gospel explains by telling us to mind heavenly things (cf. Col 3:2) and to store up in the treasuries there the wealth of virtue.” This participatory ontology not only indicates the avenue to God but indicates that Christ is an extension to humankind of the divine nature. Thus, the Christian is called to the perfection of God: “’Be perfect, as also your heavenly father is perfect’ (Matt 5:45). For when he called the true father the father of those who believed, he wanted also those born through him to be like the perfection of goods contemplated in him.”[24]

This notion of obtaining the perfection of God is blocked by a great deal of modern theology. It is counter to Catholic and Protestant nominalist conceptions of God (in which the divine nature is inaccessible) and amounts to an alternative understanding of salvation. This form of salvation is no mere legal fiction, nor is it strictly tied to the church’s sacraments, nor is it concerned primarily with escaping hell and going to heaven, but it is a putting on of the righteous nature of God. Gregory’s Christology is his soteriology in that Christ’s person entails salvation. What God is doing in Christ in turn, is not extraneous to the nature of God, but is part of who God is. Gregory and the early church left no room for an immoral Christianity consisting of failed virtues.

There is no room, for example, for slavery in Gregory, who considers it the height of pride to presume one can own fellow humans. “So, when someone turns the property of God into his own property and arrogates dominion to his own kind, so as to think himself the owner of men and women, what is he doing but overstepping his own nature through pride, regarding himself as something different from his subordinates?”[25] He is among the earliest of the church fathers to speak out against the institution providing a scathing criticism of slavery in his homily on Ecclesiastes entitled: “The evils of slave-owning.”[26] As Chris de Wet argues, “This homily is probably one of the most potent late ancient reactions against institutional slavery.”[27] Gregory argues that one cannot live a virtuous life while participating in the prideful practice of slaveholding and slave management. “For what is such a gross example of arrogance in the matters enumerated above – an opulent house, and an abundance of vines, and ripeness in vegetable-plots, and collecting waters in pools and channeling them in gardens – as for a human being to think himself the master of his own kind? . . . This kind of language is raised up as a challenge to God.” As Gregory describes it, the slaveholder denies the human nature of the slave and presumes to play God:  

I got me slaves and slave-girls. What do you mean? You condemn man to slavery, when his nature is free and possesses free will, and you legislate in competition with God, overturning his law for the human species. The one made on the specific terms that he should be the owner of the earth, and appointed to government by the Creator – him you bring under the yoke of slavery, as though defying and fighting against the divine decree.[28]

The slaveholder has forgotten the first command of God and has forgotten his own place in God’s creation:

You have forgotten the limits of your authority, and that your rule is confined to control over things without reason. For it says Let them rule over winged creatures and fishes and four-footed things and creeping things (Gen. 1,26). Why do you go beyond what is subject to you and raise yourself up against the very species which is free, counting your own kind on a level with four-footed things and even footless things? You have subjected all things to man, declares the word through the prophecy, and in the text: it lists the things subject, cattle and oxen and sheep (Ps 8, 7-8). Surely human beings have not been produced from your cattle? Surely cows have not conceived human stock? Irrational beasts are the only slaves of mankind. . . . But by dividing the human species in two with ‘slavery’ and ‘ownership’ you have caused it to be enslaved to itself, and to be the owner of itself.[29]

Gregory’s conclusion is decisively clear:

I got me slaves and slave-girls. For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put: on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling the being shaped by God? God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image and likeness’ (Gen 1,26). If he is in the likeness of God, and rules the whole earth, and has been granted authority over everything on earth from God, who is his buyer, tell me? who is his seller? To God alone belongs this power; or rather, not even to God himself . For his gracious gifts, it says, are irrevocable (Rom 1:1,29). God would not therefore reduce the human race to slavery, since he himself, when we had been enslaved to sin, spontaneously recalled us to freedom. But if God does not enslave what is free, who is he that sets his own power above God’s?

. . . He who knew the nature of mankind rightly said that the whole world was not worth giving in exchange for a human soul. Whenever a human being is for sale, therefore, nothing less than the owner of the earth is led into the sale-room. Presumably, then, the property belonging to him is up for auction too. That means the earth, the islands, the sea, and all that is in them. What will the buyer pay, and what will the vendor accept, considering how much property is entailed in the deal?[30]

Gregory’s theology proves itself in his abhorrence of slavery. To arrive at this understanding entailed a theology set upon imitating and participating in Christ as integral to the Christian life. As Bailes concludes, “The virtuous life consists in the imitation of Christ, in conforming oneself to all of the distinct virtues that are attested to in the biblical titles of Christ, and only by doing this can one attain to the goal of Christian virtue, which is to become like God.”[31] This definition of Christianity leaves no room for the failed (immoral, virtueless) forms of the faith but liberates from every form of enslavement.

[1] Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. Translation and Introduction by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978) 97-98.

[2] Quoted in the Introduction to the Life of Moses,  20. In Cant. 12, Vol. 6, pp. 354, 8—356, 16

[3] Ibid.

[4] This is the point of Stacy M. Brown, “The Major Role The Catholic Church Played in Slavery,” New York Amsterdam News (September 18, 2018). Brown is Referencing the website AfricaW.com.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Aljazeera, “Church of England admits ‘real shame for us’ over slavery ties” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/1/11/church-of-england-says-it-knew-of-slavery-links

[8] Frederick Douglas, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Electronic Version, 1999) 62.  https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/douglass.html

[9] Douglas, 57.

[10] Gregory of Nyssa, One Path for All: Gregory of Nyssa on the Christian Life and Human Destiny, Compiled and introduced by Rowan A. Greer and Assisted by J. Warren Smith (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 2015), 19.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid. 20.

[13] Life of Moses, 31.

[14] Gregory of Nyssa: The Ascetical Works, trans, Virginia Woods Callahan (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 84-85.

[15] Jonathan Michael Bailes, “Becoming Like God in Christ: Nicene Theology and Christian Virtue in Gregory of Nyssa” (Boston: PhD Dissertation, 2020), 142-143.

[16] Bailes, 144.

[17] The Ascetical Works, 85.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Torstein Tollefsen, Activity and Participation in Late Antique and Early Christian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 163. Cited in Bailes, 133. As Tollefsen notes, “Gregory’s works abound in the terminology of imitation. When he speaks of likeness and archetype, the likeness is an imitation or reflection of the archetype…I think this is just another way to express the central idea of participation. To imitate God is to participate in God. In principle, the logic is the same.”

[21] One Path for All, 20-21.

[22] Ibid, 21.

[23] Ibid, 22.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version with Supporting Studies (New York and Berlin: Waiter de Gruyter, 1993), 73.

[26] Ecclesiastes, 73.

[27] Chris L de Wet, “The Cappadocian fathers on slave management” http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/she/v39n1/17.pdf

[28] Ecclesiastes, 73.

[29] Ecclesiastes, 73-74.

[30] Ecclesiastes, 74-75.

[31] Bailes, 145.

Bonhoeffer’s Christocentric Answer to Empire

The focus of the Book of Revelation, along with other apocalyptic literature in the New Testament, is aimed at resisting empire. The Roman Empire is pictured as the Beast doing the bidding of the Serpent (Rev. 13) and the means of defeating this power is through the Lamb who was slain (Rev. 12 and 19). No entity today explicitly identifies as empire or would recognize itself as the Beast, so the nature of empire may not be readily evident to its subjects. The United States, born as it was in resistance to the British Empire, may not acknowledge that instituting slave labor, partaking of genocide of native peoples, colonization of other lands (e.g., Hawaii, Alaska, the Philippines, etc.), constitutes its identity as empire. Empire enfolded within the church may make naming the Beast even more difficult. The MAGA cult would equate American greatness with Christian greatness, melding church and empire. Or, it may be that it is not any particular national entity but global capital that represents empire in our day and age. If empire is equated with power and money, transnational corporations now control the bulk of wealth, including the power of the media (the news media, but also marketing and advertising). Media, in all of its various forms, shapes and determines the perception of reality (e.g., the case of Rupert Murdoch in his support of Margaret Thatcher, Rudolph Guliani, and Donald Trump, and his simultaneous support in Hong Kong of the central communist government). Perceptions may vary, but the point is reality is obscured by the matrix of empire which always undergirds the powerful.

 To maintain Christocentrism contains the answer to empire may not be very helpful (apart from explanation and qualification), considering the failure of Lutheran Christocentrism in its resistance to German National Socialism. Luther affirmed the centrality of Christ, captured in his slogan “Christ alone” (solus Christus) which is the culmination of “Scripture alone,” “faith alone” and “grace alone.” Luther laid the foundation of Christocentrism in acknowledging God suffered in Christ and in his insistence the cross is the only approach to God. As he explains in the Heidelberg Disputation, “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened (Rom. 1:20; cf. 1 Cor 1:21-25).[1] Rather,  “He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.”[2] The theologian of glory would begin with his own wisdom and imagine he can come to God on the basis of the invisible things of God rather than the suffering of the cross. This results in confusing good and evil: “A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.” [3]

A major problem though, is that like Augustine, Luther held to the notion of two kingdoms, and his Christocentrism applied to the kingdom of God and not the temporal/secular realm ordered through God ordained government. The Sermon on the Mount may work in church but it will not work on the battlefield, in the courtroom, or in the government’s suppression of evil. The Christian lives in both of these realms and so, must sort out the one from the other so as to avoid conflicted obligations. The way to do this, is by recognizing Christian ethics and obligations are for the kingdom of heaven and not the kingdoms of this world.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, faced with the failure of the German church, accused it of being a silent witness to “oppression, hatred, and murder,” and of failing to aid “the weakest and most defenceless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.”[4] The church was only concerned, he argued, with its safety and material interests and had become, by its silence, “guilty for the loss of responsible action in society.”[5] Faced with this failure, Bonhoeffer takes Luther’s Christocentrism beyond Luther by grounding all of reality in the incarnation. The incarnation is definitive of the center of God’s activity, constituting a singular reality: “The most fundamental reality is the reality of the God who became human. This reality provides the ultimate foundation and the ultimate negation of everything that actually exists, its ultimate justification and ultimate contradiction.”[6] Christian life and Christian ethics are not to be centered on some other world, but in this world. Bonhoeffer sees the split as giving rise to a split in ethics and a dividing up of Christian commitment. The Christian life becomes a means of escape – a kind of “redemption myth.” “Unlike believers in the redemption myths, Christians do not have an ultimate escape route out of their earthly tasks and difficulties into eternity. Like Christ . . . they have to drink the cup of earthly life to the last drop, and only when they do this is the Crucified and Risen One with them, and they are crucified and resurrected with Christ.”[7]

Christ gives himself completely for the world and the Christian is called, not to another world or another kingdom but to this world: “The world has no reality of its own independent from God’s revelation in Christ. It is a denial of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ to wish to be ‘Christian’ without being ‘worldly.’”[8] By “worldly” Bonhoeffer means a commitment to this world: “The earth that feeds me has a right to my work and my strength. . . . I owe it faithfulness and thanksgiving. . . . I should not close my heart . . . to the tasks, pains, and joys of the earth, and I should wait patiently for the divine promise to be redeemed, but truly wait for it, and not rob myself of it in advance, in wishes and dreams.” As Peter Hooton comments: “Bonhoeffer does not give up on heaven, but he thinks it wrong—indeed unchristian—to divert ourselves with thoughts of another world until we have fully satisfied the demands of this one.[9] As Bonhoeffer writes, “Only when one loves life and the earth so much that with it everything seems to be lost and at its end may one believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new world.”[10] Christ’s death and resurrection do not point to life in some other place, but speak of redemption and new life in the place he died and was raised. Only with this understanding can we recognize we are not to flee this world and its suffering, but we are to face it and so share in his suffering and thus share in redemption.

An ethics willing to use evil on earth for the greater good in heaven, is neither incarnational nor Christian. Rather than a divided reality or a division between heaven and earth, Bonhoeffer pictures all of reality centered on the incarnation of Christ. Christ opens up the world to us, in a new way. We are no longer bound by alienation and isolation but we are graced with a new form of human relatedness and community. As Brian Watson writes, “Now that Christ has redeemed the world, a new humanity restored by the grace of God and exemplified by Jesus is bursting forth in this world and this life.” Bonhoeffer replaces the dictum “God became human in order that humans might become divine” with “the view that Christ’s humanity makes true humanity possible – now human beings as they were intended are exemplified by Jesus himself.”[11]

Bonhoeffer’s notion of a “worldly Christianity” is also captured in his notion of a “religionless Christianity.”  Religion, according to his definition, is preoccupied with otherworldly or heavenly obligations, personal salvation, and the tendency to see God as the solution only to problems we cannot solve. Religionless or worldly Christianity is focused on new life with God and the sharing in Christ’s suffering.  Where religion presumes to share in the power of this world, religionless Christianity embraces the reality of being pushed out of this world of power: “God consents to be pushed out of the world and onto the cross; God is weak and powerless in the world and in precisely this way, and only so, is at our side and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us not by virtue of his omnipotence but rather by virtue of his weakness and suffering!”[12] Where religion “directs people in need to the power of God in the world” (to God as deus ex machina), the Bible reveals “the powerlessness and the suffering of God” and only this suffering God can help.[13] This suffering in and with the world speaks of a total commitment, not to a divided reality, but to the reality of the incarnation.

At the same time, through Christ, there is a breaking open of the human “I” or ego which is otherwise deluded by isolation and alienation. Christ breaks open the path to others and our true humanity is recognized and comes to life in his humanity. There is “no way from us to others than the path through Christ, his word, and our following him.”[14] Religion, grounded as it is in pride, closes off suffering together with Christ and thus closes off access to relationship and communion with God and others. As Bonhoeffer recognized very early, the religious instinct is simply the formalization of the human instinct “to acquire power over the eternal.” Religion is “the most grandiose and most gentle of all human attempts to attain the eternal from out of the anxiety and restlessness of the heart.”[15] Religion, in its pride, is an isolating escape from suffering, while true humanity is something shared and never solitary as there is no such thing as an isolated, autonomous individual. Jesus Christ, the truly human one, is “the human being for others” and this human connectedness is the experience of the presence of God. This immanent experience is the experience of transcendence. This is neither a rejection of God’s good creation nor is it the typical ecclesial predisposition to dominate it. God’s presence is not in “some highest, most powerful and best being imaginable,” but rather “a new life in ‘being there for others,’ through participation in the being of Jesus” in the world.[16]

This being there for others is also the definition and parameter of the church. Bonhoeffer considers the German Protestant church, no church at all. Even the Confessing church is consumed with its own survival and thus “has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption . . . to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organising must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.” [17] This will not and cannot arise from “religion” or the God of the religious imagination. We have rather to “immerse ourselves again and again, for a long time and quite calmly, in Jesus’s life, his sayings, actions, suffering, and dying in order to recognise what God promises and fulfils.”[18]

This filling out of Luther’s Christocentrism pits the Christian against empire (whether the empires of the state, the empire of religion, or the empire of wealth) in the willingness to share in the suffering of Christ and refusing the double standard of an otherworldly ethics.  Christ suffered under the Roman state, and he suffered at the hands of the religious, and thus, instituted a new life of “being there for others” in the world. Rather than offering escape or reconciling himself to empire, Christ challenged and defeated it, and calls his followers likewise, to overcome the world by being in the world. Christ as a singular reality opens God and the world to us simultaneously, as it is in the world that God meets us and saves us.  

[1] Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 22. https://bookofconcord.org/other-resources/sources-and-context/heidelberg-disputation/

[2] Luther, Thesis 23.

[3] Luther, Thesis 24.

[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, (Fortress Press, 2004), 139. Cited in Peter Hooton, “Beyond, in the Midst of Life: An Exploration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in its Christological Context” (PhD dissertation, St Mark’s National Theological Centre, School of Theology, CSU, 2018), 90.

[5] Ethics, 140. Cited in Hooton, 94.

[6] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, (Fortress Press, 2004), 223. Cited in Brian Kendall Watson, “The Political Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Ethical Problem of Tyrannicide” (2015). LSU Master’s Theses. 612. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/612

[7] Letters and Papers, 447–48. Cited in Hooton, 90.

[8] Ethics, 99. Cited in Watson, 14.                                             

[9] Letters and Papers, 448. Hooton, 91.

[10] Letters and Papers, 213. Cited in Hooton, 89.

[11] Watson, 14.

[12] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John de Gruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010),  478–79. Cited in Hooton, 87

[13] Letters and Papers, 479. Cited in Hooton, 87.

[14] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, eds. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 95. Cited in Hooton, 12.

[15] “Sermon on Romans 11:6,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Vols. 1–17 ;10: 481–82. Cited in Hooton, 190.

[16] Letters and Papers, 501. Summed up by Hooton, 92.

[17] Letters and Papers, 389. Cited in Hooton, 94.

[18] Letters and Papers, 515. Cited in Hooton, 95.

Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies: Karl Barth as Resolution to Sexual and Body/Soul Dualism

I presume sin impacts humans not only in the experience of alienation but in conceiving all things in an alienated manner. That is, the failure of humanity becomes the singular truth, the only kind of humanity we know, and it is presumed there is no alternative to antagonism and dualism. Soul/body, male/female, or heaven and earth are taken to be, not only the historical understanding, but the singular reality. In psychoanalysis this shows itself in Lacanian psychoanalysis in that the antagonism structuring the Subject is presumed to be a necessity. Alienation and antagonism produce the Subject without possibility of qualification. One might manipulate this antagonism (death drive), but best of all, perhaps through therapy, one will be resolved to living with it. The insight of psychoanalysis, is that the various historical dualisms, centered on soul and body or male and female (but including every aspect of what it means to be human including life and death, language and meaning, heaven and earth) arise from a singular structure within the human psyche.  

Psychoanalysis locates the antagonism within the individual in interpenetrating categories such as ego and superego, but most dualisms have as their goal the presumed capacity to rid oneself of the negative, as is illustrated with male/female. Male is associated with the soulish, the rational, or the spiritual, while female is equated with the body, the natural, and the passions. As the church father Jerome describes it, “As long as woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But if she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called man.”[1] Every human must strive for the masculine and the Christ-like and aim to shed the fleshly-feminine, but clearly the female sex starts with a disadvantage. As Ambrose writes: “She who does not believe is a woman and should be designated by the name of her bodily sex, whereas she who believes progresses to complete manhood, to the measure of the adulthood of Christ. She then does without wordly name, gender of body, youthful seductiveness, and garrulousness of old age.”[2] What is at play, in even Christian texts, is the notion that the masculine is abstract, spiritual, soulish, and universal, and the feminine is bound by the body. As Daniel Boyarin lays out the opposed pairs, man is to woman as substance is to accident, form to matter, univocity to division and difference, soul to body, meaning to language, signified to signifier, natural to artificial, and essential to ornamental.[3]

The psychoanalytic insight is to assign what Boyarin and others have concluded is universal to the human sickness. The details and historical permutations of the sickness may vary (Neo-Platonism, Adam and Eve, Judaism, or Christianity, have been blamed) but what Lacanian psychoanalysis attempts is a diagnosis of the human disease which explains how humans are traumatized by death. Death resistance as castration, the Oedipus complex, the focus on human sexuality, the entry and orientation within law and language, may or may not be right in the details, but what it incorporates within its explanation is the shape of male/female or soul/body antagonism and how this constitutes the human Subject and her world. What it does not do is provide any path beyond the problem.

Karl Barth provides a different (simpler?) approach to assessing both the universal human disease and its resolution, in that Christ serves as definition of what it means to be human. Barth does not start with the phenomena of the human as it may present itself to the anthropologist or the psychologist, as this will only lead to one going astray, “especially as they always arouse at this point the burning interest which powerful inner contradictions always bring to light.”[4] What Barth might be referring to specifically is not clear, but he has hit upon the truth of the development of modern psychoanalysis in its focus on contradiction (life versus death, male versus female, body versus soul, or the imaginary against the symbolic) as the primary focus of study and interest. The turn to Jesus Christ as model is simultaneously a turn from the supposed normativity of this antagonism.

Barth is also departing from traditional Christian dogma, which begins with man’s existence in the abstract and then applies this understanding to Christ. As he points out, this has resulted in a “certain one-sidedness,” referring perhaps, to the sort of reflection found in Ambrose and Jerome. The downgrading and oppression of women and the privileging of the soul, represents a majority position in the history of the church. Barth, by making Christ definitive of what it means to be human, is setting theology on a different foundation than the “older dogmatics.” The body/soul, male/female, and mind/body dualism can now be approached and potentially resolved in Jesus Christ. At a minimum, Barth provides a largely untapped point of departure.

The ontological determination of humanity is grounded in the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus. So long as we select any other starting point for our study, we shall reach only the phenomena of the human. We are condemned to abstractions so long as our attention is riveted as it were on other men, or rather on man in general, as if we could learn about real man from a study of man in general, and in abstraction from the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus. In this case we miss the one Archimedean point given us beyond humanity, and therefore the one possibility of discovering the ontological determination of man. Theological anthropology has no choice in this matter. It is not yet or no longer theological anthropology if it tries to pose and answer the question of the true being of man from any other angle.[5]

Barth derives his concept of what it means to be human from the singular man, Jesus Christ. In his volume on the doctrine of creation, Christ is the “Archimedean point” for understanding not only humanity but all of creation. Barth, through a more circuitous route, lands close to the Maximian formula, “creation is incarnation.” Or, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[6] Barth’s doctrine of creation, like his doctrine of anthropology, presumes creation by itself is a mere abstraction. The incarnate Christ provides the concrete center and revelation concerning creation: “Because man, living under heaven and on earth, is the creature whose relation to God is revealed to us in the Word of God, he is the central object of the theological doctrine of creation.” Which leads to Barth’s anthropological focus: “As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God.”[7] Anthropology is not a subset of the study of creation but is its center, and true anthropology is approached only through the truly human one. “As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God.”[8] Barth concludes: “But this point of departure means nothing more nor less than the founding of anthropology on Christology.”[9]

Barth builds upon this foundation (in section 46) with his opening thesis in which he sets forth the primary terms of body, soul, and Spirit: “Through the Spirit of God, man is the subject, form and life of a substantial organism, the soul of his body – wholly and simultaneously both, in ineffaceable difference, inseparable unity, and indestructible order.”[10] Humans are both body and soul – simultaneously and inseparably. “Man’s being exists, and is therefore soul; and it exists in a certain form, and is therefore body.”[11] In Christ these are not constituent parts. “He is one whole man, embodied soul and besouled body: the one in the other and never merely beside it; the one never without the other but only with it, and in it present, active and significant; the one with all its attributes always to be taken as seriously as the other.”[12]

The death and resurrection of Christ do not alter this order: “The whole man, soul and body, He rises as he died, and sits at the right hand of God and will come again.”[13] This soul and body wholeness is an eternal fact about who he is. “He does not fulfil His office and His work from His miraculous annunciation to His fulfilment in such a way that we can separate His outer from His inner or His inner from His outer.”[14] Everything is simultaneously inner, invisible, and spiritual, and outer, visible, and bodily.

Barth illustrates the point through a series of biblical verses which refer alternatively to Christ “giving himself” (Gal. 1:4), giving his soul (Matt. 20:28), or giving his body (Luke 22:19). “Jesus, He Himself, is His soul, and His body, and it is the one whole man who died on the cross and thus made our sin inoperative and completed our reconciliation.”[15] In turn it is the whole man, body and soul, that is raised. Body and soul are not parallels or two parts or two lines. Their union in him permits no choice but to consider them together. “They cannot be considered independently. In and with one another they are the oneness and wholeness of this life.”[16] Which is not to deny that there is a higher and a lower or a dominating and dominated, but Jesus is both. Barth does not mention a male and female principle, but inasmuch as these might represent the body and soul, or the sensuous and the rational, it can only be said that Jesus is both. “His life of soul and body is really His life. He has full authority over it.”[17]

It is important that Christ accomplished this in his flesh. Flesh may be a neutral term referring to human existence, but it also has an evil connotation. “It indicates the condition of man in contradiction, in disorder and in consequent sickness, man after Adam’s fall, the man who lives a fleeting life in the neighbourhood of death and corruption.”[18] Christ has come in the flesh to condemn sin in sinful flesh (Rom. 8:3). He suffered in the flesh (I Pet. 4:1). He reconciled us “in the body of his flesh” (Col. 1:22). He “abolished in his flesh the enmity” (Eph. 2:15). In his flesh he parted the veil in the Temple and provided entry into God’s presence (Heb. 10:20). Even in his resurrection body he is still in the flesh, and is not pure spirit (Luke 24:39). He provides true food and true drink continually through his flesh (Jn. 6:51). Flesh, which in itself speaks of death, disorder and disobedience, through his flesh takes on life, order and obedience. “The flesh, which in itself profits nothing, becomes a purposeful instrument. The flesh, which in itself is lost, attains a determination and a hope. The flesh, which in itself is illogical and irrational, becomes logical and rational. As the Logos becomes flesh and Jesus is flesh, it is shown that this man has and is spirit and life, and the flesh itself becomes quickening and living and meaningful.”[19]

Barth equates the work of Christ in the flesh with creation itself – with the ordering of chaos into a cosmos. The reconciliation, ordering, rationalizing, of Christ in the flesh “is the triumph of the meaning of the human existence of Jesus.”[20] Chaos in itself offers no explanation no rationale, nor order, but through the ordering of the flesh in Christ the world and humankind are an ordered creation and cosmos. This establishes a new basis for understanding humanity, creation, and the human relationship to God.

The Christian response to dualism is to recognize that most every form of human subjectivity is built upon an antagonistic dualism (between body and soul, between male and female, between the ego and the law, or between life and death) but there is one human to whom this does not apply; namely Jesus Christ. Jesus is the alternative to alienation, antagonism, and dualism and this alternative applies to all and grounds a holistic Christian understanding.

[1][1] Jerome, Commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians, Patrologia cursus completus, series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1841–66), 26:533; translation from Vern Bullough, “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women,” Viator 4 (1973): 499. Cited in Daniel Boyarin, “On the History of the Early Phallus,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 8.

[2] Ambrose, “Exposition of the Gospel of Luke,” in PL 15:1844. Boyarin, Ibid.

[3] Boyarin, 12-13.

[4] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation III.2 (Hendrickson Publishers, 1956) 325. All quotes are from III.2 unless otherwise indicated.

[5] Barth, 132.

[6] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1; Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[7] Barth, 3.

[8] Barth, 41.

[9] Barth, 44.

[10] Barth, 325.

[11] Barth, 325. 

[13] Barth, 327.

[14] Barth, 327.

[15] Barth, 328.

[16] Barth, 331.

[17] Barth, 332.

[18] Barth, 335.

[19] Barth, 336.

[20] Barth, 336

Christ as Definitive of Torah and Judaism – Not Their Dissolution

There is a time and space bending aspect to the gospel which is no mere metaphor. The time, space, and place Jesus occupies, according to the writers of the New Testament, is the beginning of all things (John 1:1), the place of Israel, and the Temple and, as Jesus says, before Abraham he is (John 8:58). This present tense presence of Jesus in the ancient past is an interpretive key deployed throughout the New Testament. The 7th day of rest is, according to the writer of Hebrews, an ongoing reality encompassing all of human history (Heb. 4:6). Paul identifies Christ with the rock in the wilderness of Sin: “They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ” (I Cor. 10-2-4). Matthew identifies Christ with Israel, “And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Matt. 2:15). Jesus, in the middle of history, is the beginning, the door to the seventh day, the one present now before Abraham. The early church fathers will continue to identify Christ directly with Adam, Moses, and Joshua, so that Jesus is the subject of the Hebrew Scriptures. Our tendency may be to dismiss this as allegory or metaphor, and in doing so we may cling to a flat consecutive ordering of time and history, and thus miss how it is that the events surrounding Christ fold back to the alpha and forward to the omega of all of history (Rev. 1:8; 21:6; 22:13).

Maximus formula captures the time and space bending nature of the incarnation: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[1] As Maximus explains it: “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[2]

It is of doctrinal significance that the division which develops between Judaism and Christianity is gradual, in that Christianity was originally understood to occupy the same time and space, share the same scriptures, and even accord Torah the same primacy, such that Christians met in synagogues and were probably considered a sect of Jews. Magnus Zetterholm argues that the name, “Christian,” arises in Antioch because there may have been up to twenty to thirty synagogues in the city, and the designation may have come from the Christians or from their fellow Jews as a way of distinguishing their particular synagogue. As Zetterholm writes, “That Christianity eventually became a non-Jewish, separate religion does not mean that this separation must already have taken place by the first time we hear the term ‘Christian.’ The sources actually indicate the opposite.”[3]

But even to describe “Jews” in this fashion may already be anachronistic, if “Jew” is thought to specify a particular religion. Daniel Boyarin raises the question whether Jewish or Christian are categories which existed during the Second Temple period. The Greek term Ἰουδαῖος (Ioudaios) simply means Judean or Jew, and meant something like the ways of the Judeans/Jews as a people. To imagine Jewish designates a religion with a singular and agreed upon essence is anachronistic and mistaken at several levels.

The same sort of development is seen in more recent history with terms like Hinduism (a British designation), which simply refers to the practices of the people on the subcontinent of India and until the British designated the category, did not exist as a singular religion or even a particular set of practices. The same thing is true in Japan. The religion known as Shintoism is a late development (of the Meiji Restoration) imposing the notion that the animistic practices of the various clans fit under a singular umbrella unified by State Shinto. The Meiji government debated whether to designate Shinto a religion or a national identity, and created laws that reflect contradictory conclusions at different points. The central government eventually sent out State Shinto missionaries to enforce unified practices on the variety of animistic “religions” practiced on the Islands of Japan.

 So too “Judaism” is an open-ended term, according to Boyarin, “talking about the complex of rituals and other practices, beliefs and values, history and political loyalties that constituted allegiance to the People of Israel, not a religion called Judaism.”[4] In turn, “Most (if not all) of the ideas and practices of the Jesus movement of the first century and the beginning of the second century—and even later—can be safely understood as part of the ideas and practices that we understand to be ‘Judaism.’”[5] But Judaism, is not a closed set of ideas or a unified understanding, as Jews were broken into ever dividing factions, arguing over what constituted the essence of their religion.

Gregory Knight maintains, “The Pharisees were a kind of reform movement within the Jewish people that was centered on Jerusalem and Judaea. The Pharisees sought to convert other Jews to their way of thinking about God and Torah, a way of thinking that incorporated seeming changes in the written Torah’s practices that were mandated by what the Pharisees called ‘the tradition of the Elders.’” Knight refines the usual understanding of Pharisees and Sadducees: “Traditionally, scholars have portrayed the Sadducees as strict interpretationalists who accepted nothing as binding except the literal language of the Torah. At the other extreme, the Pharisees have been portrayed as the more progressive sect which accepted the whole corpus of traditional law-the ‘Oral Torah’-that had developed around the written Torah.”[6] Knight notes that this is a generalization that will not hold in that “the Sadducees were not completely averse to the traditional law nor were the Pharisees always the more lenient, tradition-bound group.”[7] Sorting out this difference though, will not begin to settle the issue of what is essential to being Jewish. As Boyarin writes, “It is quite plausible, therefore, that other Jews, such as the Galilean Jesus, would reject angrily such ideas as an affront to the Torah and as sacrilege.”[8] The Zealots would, in turn, reject all forms of Judaism but their own.

The Apostle Paul describes Judaism as lacking an essence in the understanding of the Jews. He describes it, in Hegelian fashion, in that the mystery of the Jews is a mystery to the Jews. The essence of Judaism escapes Jews (2 Cor. 3:15).  “But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away” (2 Cor. 3:14). Christ, in Matthew, describes a hollow emptiness (that of a tomb) in the Judaism of the scribes and Pharisees: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness” (Matt. 23:27). Where Christ is the “filling up” or fulness of the law (pleroma), the scribes and Pharisees are “full” (ἀνοµία) of emptiness. Their problem is not legalism but an active negation of the law. Jesus has no problem with law but with its emptying out, which is the mystery around which their Judaism revolves. Their focus on the letter takes the law as its own end but leaves out the doing: “The scribes and the Pharisees have seated themselves in the chair of Moses; therefore all that they tell you, do and observe, but do not do according to their deeds; for they say things and do not do them” (Matt. 23:2–3). Instead of “doing” the law the scribes and Pharisees are caught up in an outward adherence which misses the heart of the law. This absent center though, is the prototypical and universal human problem – culture, religion, or the individual subject revolves around a reified absence. This is the very definition of sin.

On the other hand, Christ is understood not as a disjunction or discontinuation of the law and the Hebrew scriptures, but as the point of mutual illumination. Matthew (chapter 1) depicts Jesus in two origin stories, which duplicate the book of Genesis (but here is the true origin or true Genesis). The word genesis (γένεσις) is used some ten times in the Septuagint version of Genesis and it is probable that by the time of Matthew’s writing “Genesis” had been adopted within Greek-speaking Jewish communities as the formal title of the book. The echo of Genesis is evident in the specific phrase “The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah” – which literally reads, “the book of the genesis of Jesus.” (This phrase occurs in Genesis 2:4 and 5:1.)

The birth narrative (Matt. 1:22-23) contains the formula Matthew uses throughout his Gospel to describe Jesus’ relationship to Judaism. “Now all this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord.” “Fulfilled” can be read as, “to bring to its designed end” or “to bring to its fulness” (pleroma). Jesus is not depicted as challenging Judaism, but as standing within it – fulfilling it and even defining it. That is Judaism is not brought to its designed end apart from Christ.

The point of Matthew’s formula is too simplistically described as prophecy and fulfillment, as many of the passages he sights are not prophecy, but Jesus fills out the Hebrew scriptures. Matthew would say “fulfilled,” as Jesus, the substance, fills up the scriptures of Israel in a substantially new and unexpected way. Jesus is not moving beyond Torah, but embodies Torah. “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (Matt 5:17). Jesus is upholding, bringing to life, or bringing Torah to its designed end.

As Richard Hays writes: “Matthew’s language and imagery are from start to finish soaked in Scripture; he constantly presupposes the social and symbolic world rendered by the stories, songs, prophecies, laws, and wisdom teachings of Israel’s sacred texts.”[9] The world of the Hebrew scriptures is precisely the world occupied by Christ. As Roy Fisher describes, “Matthew is envisioned as incorporating Torah into his work, such that we now envision Matthew’s composition to be taking form within a Torah-formed space.”[10] As Zetterholm writes, “A Jew who came to embrace belief in Jesus as the Messiah could not be said to change one symbolic universe for another. To become a Messiah-believing Jew would rather represent a new orientation within the same symbolic universe.”[11]

Jesus is pictured as filling up the righteousness of the law (e.g., as in his baptism). When John objects to baptizing Jesus, he answers, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness (πληρῶσαι πᾶσαν δικαιοσύνην)” (Matt. 3:15). Baptism marks the form, the relinquishing, the self-giving, which accomplishes the fulness of righteousness.  As Fisher notes, “baptism is the form righteousness takes. It is the proper doing necessary to inhabit the shape of δικαιοσύνην” (righteousness).[12] Of course, baptism is a work, or something Jesus does (and in Christian baptism, which all his followers do) but this doing is not over and against the law but is the laws completion. Jesus continually demonstrates his authority through his doing (e.g., baptism, teaching, healing, forgiving, and dying and rising). “This notion of πληρόω neither goes beyond Torah nor does it replace Torah. On the contrary, Matthew’s concept of fulfillment is the inhabiting of Torah through word and deed. This is how Jesus makes Torah complete.”[13]

 The Gospel of Matthew is a case in point of the time bending sense of Christ as the fulfillment (pleroma) and true subject of the Hebrew scriptures and the law, assigning them the definition (the authority and settled meaning) they always were to have. As with the other writers of the New Testament and the church fathers, it is not that Christ is beginning a new epoch in history (from old to new or from Jew to Christian) but Christ occupies and has always occupied the subject position of the Hebrew scriptures.  

[1] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1; Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[2] St. Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties In Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios; Translated by Fr. Maximos Constas, (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 60.3.

[3] Magnus Zetterholm, The Formation of Christianity in Antioch: A Social-Scientific Approach to the Separation of Judaism and Christianity (London: Routledge, 2003), 96. Cited in Roy Allan Fisher, “Locating Matthew in Israel” (Unpublished dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2018) 92.

[4] Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ (New York: The New Press, 2012) 2. Cited in Fisher, 18.

[5] Boyarin, viii.

[6] Gregory Knight, “The Pharisees and the Sadducees: Rethinking their Respective Outlooks on Jewish Law” 1993 BYU L. Rev. 925 (1993).

[7][7] Ibid, Knight.

[8] Boyarin, xiv.

[9] Richard B Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016), 109. Cited in Fisher, 56-57.

[10] Fisher, 57.

[11]Zetterholm, 6. Cited in Fisher, 91.

[12] Fisher, 84.

[13] Fisher, 87.

Is Homelessness Inherent to Christian Faith?

‘A tree which flourishes in one kind of soil may wither if the soil is changed. As for the tree of Christianity, in a foreign country its leaves may grow thick and the buds may be rich, while in Japan the leaves wither and no bud appears. Father, have you never thought of the difference in the soil, the difference in the water?’ [1]  

Shusaku Endo’s Silence

I lived for a year in Kagoshima, near the port where Francis Xavier first landed in Japan and inaugurated the period known as the Christian century in Japan (1549-1650). In an obscure area near Kinko Bay there is a long low stone wall and a golden statue of Xavier, which must be sought out to be found. This presumably marks the spot from which Xavier would begin to evangelize his way northward for one year, as the first of a series of missionaries. Japan was one of the most rapidly evangelized countries in all of Asia, with the Christian population numbering some 300,000 by the end of the century. Three hundred kilometers to the north, in Nagasaki, are the statues of the 26 martyrs, which marks the end of the Christian century and the beginning of one of the harshest and most “successful” persecutions in Christian history.

Shasaku Endo’s novel, Silence (quoted in the epigraph) builds upon several historical facts in addition to the above: the Japanese persecution is the most pervasive, brutal, and enduring on record; a Jesuit priest Cristovao Ferreira apostatized under torture; another Jesuit named Chiara (upon whom the character Rodrigues is based), hoping to make amends for Ferreira, entered Japan as part of a group of ten and all ten were captured and apostatized; Inoue was a Japanese magistrate set upon eradicating Christianity; the pit torture, hanging victims upside down in pits of excrement and opening a slight wound in the forehead, hanging sometimes for days and even weeks, was an effective and excruciating means of torture. The translator of Endo’s novel includes this description of the torture:

The victim was tightly bound around the body as high as the breast (one hand being left free to give the signal of recantation) and then hung downwards from a gallows into a pit which usually contained excreta and other filth, the top of the pit being level with his knees. In order to give the blood some vent, the forehead was lightly slashed with a knife. Some of the stronger martyrs lived for more than a week in this position, but the majority did not survive more than a day or two.[2]

Burning proved to be too quick and seemed to only encourage more martyrs. Richard Cocks describes seeing “fifty-five persons of all ages and both sexes burnt alive on the dry bed of the Kamo River in Kyoto (October 1619) and among them little children of five or six years old in their mothers’ arms, crying out, ‘Jesus receive their souls!,”[3] Killing and burning became something of a spectacle as tens of thousands would gather to watch, and many would subsequently convert. Thus the authorities devised various forms of excruciating torture. It was after six hours hanging in the pit that Ferreira apostatized, and this was significant as he was the first missionary to do so. Despite crucifixions, burnings, water-torture, and hanging in the pit, no missionary had apostatized until 1632. Being the acknowledged leader of the mission and the fact that he began collaborating with his persecutors, Ferreira’s apostasy proved a shock to the Christians.

Endo adds a twist to the story, in that he has Rodrigues apostatize, not due to his own tortures, but in order to save others. Inoue, in the story indicates that if he is willing to trample on an image of Christ (fumie) he can save his flock from torture – and in the story, Ferreira assists Inoue and had also apostatized under these conditions. After a long period of resistance, Rodrigues tramples on the fumie when Christ calls out to him: “‘Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.’ The priest placed his foot on the fumie. Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew.”[4]

The problem concerns literal interpretation from Japanese to English, which also entails several levels of cultural awareness. In the English the trampling is an imperative, but as Matthew Potts notes, “There is a sense of a quiet willingness to suffer indignity in the Japanese that softens the English’s annihilating command for erasure.”[5] The voice in Endo’s novel is on the order of a Japanese mother assuring her child that there is no end to indulgence (amae). Christ’s identity, like that of a good Japanese mother (Takeo Doi’s point), in Potts description, can “accommodate effacement.”  

The inquisitor, in suggesting that the act is only an outward formality and in no way impinges upon continued private belief, taps into a long history in Japan of an inward (ura, honne) and outward (omote, tatemae) self. Wearing a mask, in Doi’s estimate, is a requirement of Japanese society. The inquisitor and his translator require, not inward, but only outward conformity: “Give up this stubbornness! We’re not telling you to trample in all sincerity. Won’t you just go through with the formality of trampling? Just the formality! Then everything will be alright.’”[6] Martin Scorsese’s inquisitor goes to some lengths to explain that it is a simple lifting and movement of the foot.

Outward conformity and inward secrecy are not simply the lot of Japanese Christians, but are the burden of every Japanese according to Yukio Mishima (Confessions of a Mask), Natsume Sōseki (I Am a Cat), and in Doi’s analytic approach.  The problem is then, whether this is simply an intensification of Japanese cultural requirements which, under this definition, require secrecy, mask wearing, and what western Christians might dub hypocrisy.

On the other hand, is not the trampling an extreme example of the kenotic outpouring of the love of Christ (which is the argument of Ferreira in trying to convince Rodrigues)? Every Christian, like his Master is called to lose himself, but in this instance this losing is absolute: one must be willing to give their soul for love of the other. Ferreira argues, ‘Christ would certainly have apostatized to help men.’ ‘No, no!’ said the priest, covering his face with his hands and wrenching his voice through his fingers. ‘No, no!’ ‘For love Christ would have apostatized. Even if it meant giving up everything he had.’[7] One must ultimately be willing to relinquish everything in order to follow Christ, according to the priest.

As Patricia Snow remarks, the novel creates an unresolvable dilemma, “If it is always and everywhere difficult for human beings to hold in their minds seemingly contradictory tenets of Christianity, Silence makes the task feel impossible. Mercy is pitted against truth, love of neighbor against allegiance to God.”[8]

In Snow’s opinion this is not really the problem of 17th century Japanese Christians but reflects modern peculiarities: “What this means is that the deeply disturbing, polarizing drama at the heart of Silence is an anachronism. It is a projection of the modern mind, a hallucination of an anxious, confused, and codependent imagination.” She notes, what Endo himself seems well aware of, that death of God theology is in the air in the time Endo is composing Silence. Ferreira (Endo) “is speaking not the language of seventeenth-century Jesuits, but the language of Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, twentieth-century Death of God theologians who believed that not only Christ but Christianity must die, that it is not finally Christian to be Christian, and that in the name of Christian charity, Christians must reject Christian truths.”[9] Snow may be correct about the anachronism; in fact Endo would probably agree, as he describes his own struggle with nihilism.

Endo’s personal struggle may have been with a similar sort of “Christian” nihilism but he see his faith as a rescue from this darkness: “For a long time I was attracted to a meaningless nihilism and when I finally came to realize the fearfulness of such a void I was struck once again with the grandeur of the Catholic Faith.” Though Endo finds comfort in his Catholicism, it is not too far removed from the modern non-religious form of the faith. “This problem of the reconciliation of my Catholicism with my Japanese blood … has taught me one thing: that is, that the Japanese must absorb Christianity without the support of a Christian tradition or history or legacy or sensibility.”[10] This no tradition, no history, no legacy, sensibility is not simply Japanese but modern. In fact, the Japanese inherit this precise sense, not because they are Japanese, but because they are modern.

The Japan Endo projects into the Tokugawa period, with its mud-swamp qualities, its inherent mask wearing, and its native soil poisoning the Christian tree, is very much a modern sensibility. There is not a “Japanese” ethnic identity, Japanese uniqueness, or even a sense of Japaneseness, prior to the Meiji restoration. The ideology crafted in the Meiji Restoration unifies the disparate religions, dialects, and clan identities, under State Shinto. “Japanese identity” is not a “naturally” occurring or universal phenomena but is an ideology which required its own missionaries, forced adherence, and forms of punishment. The goal of this formation of a national or ethnic identity was to ward off the Christian west and to make of Japan a colonizing power like Great Britain and the United States. In other words, modern ideology is the stuff making up Endo’s mud swamp, and not the peculiarities of being Japanese.

This seems problematic for Matthew Pott’s argument: “I would like to suggest that what the critical analyses of this novel have neglected to recognize is that Rodrigues has not really been asked here to renounce his moral integrity or his religious faith. What he has been asked to reject in this climactic scene is his ethnicity. What he is being forced to abandon is his whiteness.”[11] This certainly does not fit the 17th century nor does it really work even as an anachronism, as non-Japanese can never become Japanese under the modern ideology, no matter what they relinquish, no matter what name they take, no matter the color of their skin. The ideology is militant in its advocacy of Japanese uniqueness: the Japanese language is unique, the Japanese brain is unique, the Japanese body is unique, the Japanese islands are unique, and Japanese nature is unique. This modern ideology of uniqueness was non-existent in the Tokugawa period, but is precisely the ideology that would make of Japan an anti-Christian mud swamp. It was this sense that was missing in the rapid turn of 300,000 Japanese to Christianity and in the underground church’s survival of 200 years of persecution.

Certainly, Christians in Japan understand the struggle Endo describes in his novel, of feeling homeless and divided between being Japanese and Christian. As Endo describes it, “Japan is a swamp because it sucks up all sorts of ideologies, transforming them into itself and distorting them in the process. It is the spider’s web that destroys the butterfly, leaving only the ugly skeleton.”[12] After more than twenty years in Japan, I understand the eroding effects Japanese culture, Japanese nationalism, and Japanese identity may have on the Christian faith, but I felt Endo-like homelessness most intensely upon my return to the United States. I no longer recognized the peculiar faith produced by the soil and water of this country: the political nationalism, the insipid preaching, the shallow music, the consumer mentality, and outright hostility toward the depth of the gospel.

As William Cavanaugh points out, “Endo is misunderstood if this struggle is limited to a Japanese context.”[13] God in Christ had nowhere to lay his head, and was ultimately reviled and crucified. Resolving this original homelessness may be the continual temptation of Constantinian Christianity, colonial Christianity, national Christianity, American Christianity, or simply institutional Christianity. The issue of effacement of Christ is always at stake in Christianity’s encounter with culture and the attempt to fill in his features (give him a home) through cultural rootedness.

[1] Shusaku Endo, Silence: A Novel (p. 138). Lulu.com. Kindle Edition.

[2] Silence, 9.

[3] Silence, 9.

[4] Silence, 208.

[5] Matthew Potts, “Christ, Identity, and Empire in Silence” The Journal of Religion

Volume 101, Number 2 April 2021, 193.

[6] Silence, 189.

[7] Silence, 206.

[8] Patricia Snow, “Empathy Is Not Charity,” First Things, October 2017

[9] Snow, Empathy is Not Charity.

[10] Silence, Translator’s Introduction, 14.

[11] Potts, 200.

[12] Silence, from the Introduction, 13.

[13] William T. Cavanaugh, “The God of Silence: Shusaku Endo’s reading of the Passion,” Commonweal, March 13, 1998, 10.

Experiencing God or Experiencing Nothing

For God created us in such a way that we are similar to Him (for through participation we are imbued with the exact characteristics of His goodness), and from before the ages He determined that we should exist in Him.[1]

Maximus the Confessor

Ours is a secular age in that direct experience of God is mostly unavailable. The Bible directly equates truth, wisdom, life, love, and light with Christ (and with experience of Christ), but the tendency is to soften this or to make it metaphorical. We seemingly no longer have direct access to God in the development of the virtues, in the experience of love, in the development of wisdom, or in peace of mind. To say what disrupts experience of God (the actualization of “existing in Him”), is part of an exercise in regaining this experience, but in brief, Christ is displaced as his own medium, his own reality, his own wisdom, and his own logic. Philosophy, human wisdom, human experience, and human logic (centered on nothing but themselves) become prime reality, and in Christian theology (popular and academic) Christ is made to fit an already existing frame and foundation.

Escaping the Obstacle of Ontotheology

The postmodern critique of ontotheology permanently dispels the notion that propositions, doctrine, or philosophy, can (in phallic/masculine form) “say it all” or lay its own foundation. The point is not to promote irrationality but reason cannot lay its foundations or encompass prime reality. What this has meant for theology, is that the person of Christ as foundation takes on a singular significance – Christ is a logic and reality that cannot be fit to an already existing frame or laid on another foundation. Examples of the significance for theology of the turn from ontotheology are the work of Stanley Hauerwas (in his turn to ethics), James McClendon (in his development of a practical theology), a return to the work of Karl Barth, and in Catholicism the new theology (nouvelle théologie) focused on escaping scholasticism. Historically the shift might be characterized as the difference between Origenism and Augustinianism, or in broad terms (too broad, but containing some truth) the difference between eastern and western theology. The general turn is one that joins faith and practice, and as with my work on the doctrine of sin and salvation, the impetus is to describe the work of Christ in real world terms.  

Realization of Christ as Prime Reality and as Salvation

I presume the defeat of sin and evil in salvation is describable phenomenologically and psychologically. First, in Christ’s confrontation with sin and death, we can describe his defeat of these categories in historical, psychological, systemic, and corporate terms. Second, we can describe incorporation into Christ and defeat of the categories of sin and evil. The implication of the incarnation is that there is a universally shared human predicament and resolution addressed in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Two things come together – the plane of human reality is a final reality in that God in Christ enters this plane of reality, and the universally shared failure addressed by the incarnation is corrected or being made right on this plane of reality. This is not to exclude mystery, but we can describe how the mystery of Christ takes hold in life, in love, in virtue, and in wisdom. We can, as with the historical person of Christ, experience and describe what it means for divinity and humanity to be joined in one person. This is the profound truth of Christ that exceeds every other truth. There is no logic or reason that can begin to approach this truth – it is a truth of a different order.

A practical way in which the singularity of Christ shows itself is that the Christian faith provides a diagnosis and solution to the human predicament that is unique, especially as it involves the incarnation. Even before consideration of the incarnation, a distinguishing mark of the Judeo/Christian faith is the seriousness of embodiment and death. This is one of the things that ties Judaism and Christianity together – the reality of history and embodiment. The death and resurrection of Christ addresses the human predicament, not by introducing another reality but by resolving the problem of death through resurrection. This contrasts with most every other religion, (many of which deny death by one means or another). Either there is innate immortality of the soul (downplaying embodiment), or material reality is unreal (as in Hinduism it is maya), or people do not stop living at death but survive as disembodied spirits or souls (as in animistic religion and ancestor worship). The problem of death is not to be solved on another plane of reality (or through death denial) but through incarnation, death, and resurrection.

The Subject of the Lie  

The resolution to the problem of death is aimed at formation of a new Subject. Theology and psychology merge in the description of a peculiar form of the human Subject which exists by virtue of a primordial disturbance – the Subject of the lie. Sin creates a wound or cut or obstacle in nature which constitutes one form of human subjectivity. Into the realm of immediate sense experience and “natural” animal copulating, a gap or obstacle has been introduced which constitutes the Subject. Sin, in this understanding, is not something which Adam or anyone “falls into,” as if they were fully functioning Subjects prior to the event; rather in the deception described in Scripture and psychoanalysis, sin is the passage into human subjectivity (the Subject that is self-constituting).

In brief, Jacques Lacan takes up the Freudian death drive and argues the human Subject arises around pure negation or absence, such that evil, death and absence are originary. Slavoj Žižek extends this, through Friedrich Schelling, to demonstrate how God and all things arise from an originary evil (Immanuel Kant’s “radical evil”). Surprisingly, Augustine, who also develops the notion of evil as privation, points to radical evil at the heart of the human Subject.

Augustine depicts an ineffable absence within himself. His depiction of stealing pears is clearly modeled after the Genesis story of the fall, as he indicates: “How like that servant of yours who fled from his Lord and hid in the shadows!”[2] As Pantanteleimon Manoussakis indicates, “Contrary to Greek ethics, evil for Augustine is not a mistaken choice, vice is not ignorance, and sin is not a category of epistemology that could be regulated and rectified by degrees of knowledge.” Augustine does not reference an outer temptation or anything on the order of the serpent. He is fully aware that his action was evil. “In fact he goes a step further – and this adds a whole new dimension on the problem of evil – for his theft lacked any reasonable motive; his transgression was “for no reason … there was no motive for my malice except malice.”[3]

Augustine’s description of evil goes against the Aristotelian notion that every human action is aimed at some good. “Not only there was [sic] no good that motivated Augustine’s action in the garden of Thagaste, but not even what Aristotle would call the apparent good: ‘No, I mean more: my theft lacked even the sham, shadowy beauty with which even vice allures us.’”[4] Evil is not accounted for, but is its own cause. It is the groundless ground. It has no explanation and is not intelligible and to imagine otherwise would, in Augustine’s estimate, amount to a defense of the necessity of evil.

Ontotheology, propositionalism, Platonism, foundationalism, or the fallen Subject, are made of the same stuff as Augustine’s thieving Subject. To imagine that Christ can be set on another foundation is to assign ontological priority to this nonentity.

Christ the Foundation and Wisdom of God: Experiencing God

This then sends us back to the Bible and patristic sources, in order to describe the peculiar logic and experience found in Christ. According to Maximus the Confessor, Christ is not a truth among other trues but is the foundation of truth:

For the Word, who created all things, and who is in all things according to the relation of present to the future, is comprehended both in type and in truth, in which He is present both in being and manifestation, and yet He is manifested in absolutely nothing, for inasmuch as He transcends the present and the future, He transcends both type and truth, for He contains nothing that might be considered contrary to Him. But truth has a contrary: falsehood. Therefore, the Word in whom the universe is gathered transcends the truth, and also, insofar as He is man and God, He truly transcends all humanity and divinity.[5]

The Word has his own “being” and “manifestation.” There is no natural logic or philosophical logic or natural reason which can comprehend the fact of the God/Man. This is not a truth established over and against falsehood, as there is no “contrary” dialectic which establishes this truth. This is a logic all its own and an experience of a different order. He is his own manifestation in the life of the believer. He “transcends” the truth and all humanity and divinity and all conceptions of the same. The person and work of Christ is its own point of departure. No other logic or reality mediates Christ, as he constitutes a logic and reality, and he alone mediates himself. But inasmuch as we become Christ, we too enter in to this reality which has no genealogy, no precedent, no explanation, other than Him.

Maximus illustrates the point with the example of Melchizedek:

He alone in this respect is mentioned by Scripture, probably because he was the first who through virtue passed beyond both matter and form (which may be understood as his being without father or mother or genealogy), and by knowledge he surpassed all things subject to time and the age, things whose temporal existence began with their creation (for creation did not deny them their being in time), without stumbling over them in his mind as he followed his divine course, which is perhaps what having neither beginning of days nor end of life means. And so transcendentally, secretly, silently and, to put it briefly, in a manner beyond knowledge, following the total negation of all beings from thought, he entered into God Himself, and was wholly transformed, receiving all the qualities of God, which we may take as the meaning of being likened to the Son of God he remains a priest forever. For every saint who has made exemplary progress in beauty is thereby said to be a type of God the giver. Consistent with this principle, the great Melchizedek, having been imbued with divine virtue, was deemed worthy to become an image of Christ God and His unutterable mysteries, for in Him all the saints converge as to an archetype, to the very cause of the manifestation of the Beautiful that is realized in each of them, and this is especially true of this saint, since he bears within himself more prefigurations of Christ than all the rest.”[6]  

Melchizedek, like Christ, cannot be reduced to matter or form or genealogy. He cannot be reduced to a particular age and time, as he is beyond this form of material creation and has been taken up into God himself. He has been “transformed” – receiving “all the qualities of God” and being made in the likeness of Christ. But what is true of Christ and Melchizedek is true of every saint as the Beauty of Christ is “realized in each of them.” The experience of Melchizedek is open and available to all imitators of Christ.

Maximus completes the thought with a final appeal to Hebrews and the depiction of the singular reality establishing a different order of Subject:

If, in addition to these things, he should also deny himself, having lost his life, according to the divine voice, which says: He who loses his own life for my sake, will find it— that is, whoever casts aside this present life and its desires for the sake of the better life—will acquire the living and active, and absolutely unique Word of God, who through virtue and knowledge penetrates to the division between soul and spirit, so that absolutely no part of his existence will remain without a share in His presence, and thus he becomes without beginning or end, no longer bearing within himself the movement of life subject to time, which has a beginning and an end, and which is agitated by many passions, but possesses only the divine and eternal life of the Word dwelling within him, which is in no way bounded by death.”[7]

The life and Subject that would find itself, ground itself, father itself, or constitute its own presence, is cast aside for a different order of reality and experience. The Word of God vivifies and creates a new Subject, who through putting on virtue and knowledge enters a different order of existence in and through “His presence.” So the follower of Christ, like Christ, is no longer a creature of a particular family and genealogy, and is no longer a Subject of time but puts on the full likeness of Christ as he possesses “divine and eternal life” and “is in no way bounded by death.”  

Jesus Christ is an economy and a reality, and the only access to this economy and reality is through Him. Putting on Christ is to put on the wisdom and virtue of God. The wisdom of Christ is Christ. The virtue of Christ is Christ. The love of Christ is Christ. The hypostatic joining of deity and humanity in Christ is repeated in the saint who experiences immediate union with God in Christ, not through an ecstatic departure but through a union of the human with the divine. The created nature is brought to its full limit and potential and is thus preserved through the Word.  

In summary: the divine and human brought together in the person of Jesus Christ is the mystery that is repeated in the salvation Christ brings. Christians comprehend this salvation – that is, it exists on a historical and earthly plane of reality – we see the God-Man Jesus Christ acting in history, defeating sin death and evil (the experience of nothing) and so too the experience of salvation can be described in terms of human transformation and experience.

[1] Maximus the Confessor, The Ambigua, Volume 1, trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.38.

[2] James J. O’Donnell, Augustine Confessions, vol. II (Oxford, 2012), 126-7. Cited in Pantanteleimon Manoussakis, “St. Augustine and St. Maximus the Confessor between the Beginning and the End” (Peeters Publishers, Studia Patristica, 2016) 2. Published in Academia edu – https://www.academia.edu/28215430/St_Augustine_and_St_Maximus_the_Confessor_between_the_Beginning_and_the_End

[3] Ibid, Manoussakis. The Augustine quote is from Confessions, II 4.9.

[4] Manoussakis, 3, Citing Augustine’s Confessions, II 6.12.

[5] Maximus the Confessor, The Ambigua, Volume 2, trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 37.8.

[6] Ambigua, 10.45

[7] Ambigua, 10.48.

Incarnation as an Eternal Fact About God and the World or a Momentary Provision?

With the celebration of the resurrection and ascension of Christ, we may conclude that this marks the end of Jesus’ incarnation. He accomplished what he came to do, and has now returned to his disembodied estate (at least this is the way I pictured it as a young Christian). But is the incarnation a momentary affair in the life of God, in which the Son momentarily alights on earth (a mere 33 years) only to ascend and shed his body to take his place once again in the spiritual realm? I am not sure that I had thought it out or could articulate it, but I was not alone in picturing the incarnation as temporary and provisional. Unfortunately, this is a common presumption which gives rise to notions of salvation and the Christian life that are disincarnate (disembodied, otherworldly, “spiritual,” inward, individualistic, and focused on going to heaven). The provisional incarnation relinquishes the incarnate work of Christ in his real-world defeat of evil, and allows for a provisional evil to reign in his absence.

Incarnation as an Eternal Fact About God

The incarnation of Christ, in which the creator and the created, the divine and human, and heaven (the dwelling place of God) and earth are brought together, should have forever dispelled the division between the earthly and spiritual, typical of evangelicalism and of many forms of Christianity. The incarnation, according to Maximus the Confessor, is the explanation of creation:

The mystery of the Word’s incarnation contains the force of all the hidden meanings and types in scripture, and the understanding of the visible and intelligible creatures. The one who knows the mystery of the cross and tomb knows the true nature of these aforementioned things.  And the one who has been initiated into the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the purpose for which God made all things.[1]

Nature did not originally have unity with God, but according to Maximus, the incarnation has brought about this unity, in which both creation and God maintain an integrity “unaltered on the level of its essence.” By virtue of the incarnation and the union of creator and creation, nature will “continue to abide with its essence strictly intact and in every way undiminished” by sin. “In this way, the Word entered into ‘communion’ with human nature in a way that was ‘far more marvelous than the first,’ essentially uniting nature to Himself in a union according to hypostasis.”[2]

God reveals himself in the incarnation, making of the created order a fit dwelling for his presence. God in Christ provides renewed life to Adam and the created order becomes lit up with his glory. As Lewis Ayres pictures it, Christians are to “see themselves embedded within a cosmos that is also a semiotic system that reveals the omnipresent creating consubstantial Word.”[3]  As Paul writes, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him” (Col 1:15–16). What is accomplished through him and for him is not a failed or temporary arrangement. Incarnation completes, heals, and fulfills creation.

According to Irenaeus, “He was incarnate and made Man; and then he summed up in himself the long line of the human race, procuring for us a comprehensive salvation, that we might recover in Christ what in Adam we lost, namely being in the image and likeness of God.”[4] As Paul states it, “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph 1:9–10). This summing up of the incarnation is an eternal and ongoing fact about God. In Maximus’ formula, (as I have described it here) “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things” (Ambigua, 7.22). As Maximus explains it elsewhere:

This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings. (QThal., 60.3).

Provisional Incarnation Allows for the Continued Reign of Evil in a Heaven and Earth Divide

The issue begins with how seriously we take the incarnation and it ends with how we perceive the beauty of God and the ugliness of evil. If the incarnation is seen as provisional, then true Christian peace and beauty must be discontinuous with this world as we have it. Yes, the kingdom of God will usher in a new world, but if this kingdom is of another order, then so too the salvation, ethics, and politics of Jesus. The incarnation, in this understanding, points away from the earthly work of Christ to a spiritual transaction between the Father and Son. Salvation is primarily soulish and disembodied, so that ethics is secondary and various forms of evil may be seen as necessary (part of God’s plan). Christians can thus tolerate great ugliness and the injustices of the world, while simultaneously refusing the beauty of God’s glory with which the world is permanently imbued in the incarnation.

If the incarnation is temporary and provisional, then the division between heaven and earth, the transcendent and immanent, the spiritual and material, must be a permanent division in which the affairs of this world can neither bear the weight of God’s glory nor the ugliness of radical evil. The world is rendered a neutral grey with only slight gradations of brightness and darkness, while all that is truly good is bound in heaven and all that is truly evil concerns the soul. Embodied reality is rendered secondary, such that what one does in the flesh, or one’s ethical practices (whether good or evil), only pertain in a secondary manner. There is a division within reality in which the earthly, the embodied, and the created, are secondary realities. In this form of Christianity, the primary concern is with individual souls going to heaven and missing hell, and both the goodness and evil of the world are temporary and provisional – just like the incarnation.

With belief in this discontinuous incarnation, we miss not only the great beauty of God’s creation but the incarnate goodness of God and, as demonstrated in the history of the church, Christians will tolerate evil and the most profound forms of ugliness as these are considered temporarily necessary and expedient. Violence, war, racism, and ultimately the worst forms of cruelty and genocide have been associated with forms of Christianity which have not only tolerated but promoted colonialism, slavery, and violence in the name of a greater (disincarnate) good.

A provisional incarnation means the gospel pertains primarily to the “spiritual” realm and the injustices and cruelties of this world must be seen in light of this greater concern. As theologian Wayne Grudem states it:

In areas where there is systematic injustice manifested in the treatment of the poor and/or ethnic or religious minorities, the church should also pray and—as it has opportunity—speak against such injustice. All of these are ways in which the church can supplement its evangelistic ministry to the world and indeed adorn the gospel that it professes. But such ministries of mercy to the world should never become a substitute for genuine evangelism or for the other areas of ministry to God and to believers mentioned above.[5]

Rather than the gospel addressing and correcting wrong, in this typical evangelical theology, the gospel, evangelism, and conversion are realms apart from injustice. The best one can do is “pray” and “speak out against injustice” but to do more would potentially distract from the real work, as these are only “supplements” to the “genuine” work. The gospel is limited to the disembodied soulish realm, and salvation is mainly from the world and not for the world while the presumed anthropology is absolute individualism.

This split between heaven and earth and the divine and human, renders ethics and practice realms apart from belief and doctrine. Again, according to Grudem, theology and ethics must be purposefully separated:

The emphasis of systematic theology is on what God wants us to believe and to know, while the emphasis in Christian ethics is on what God wants us to do and what attitude he wants us to have. Such a distinction is reflected in the following definition: Christian ethics is any study that answers the question, “What does God require us to do and what attitude does he require us to have today?” with regard to any given situation. Thus theology focuses on ideas while ethics focuses on situations in life. Theology tells us how we should think while ethics tells us how we should live.[6]

According to Grudem, belief and practice are separate and thus ethics does not enter directly into theology, as if belief and doctrine do not already entail a set of practices. The presumption is that of René Descartes, that the soul and body are separate and thus belief is interior while practice is exterior.

Another problem with a discontinuous incarnation is that sin is relegated to legal transgressions and individual acts, and the corporate and incarnate nature of the problem is overlooked. Again, Grudem serves as an example of this legal and individualistic understanding of sin:

We may define sin as follows: Sin is any failure to conform to the moral law of God in act, attitude, or nature. Sin is here defined in relation to God and his moral law. Sin includes not only individual acts such as stealing or lying or committing murder, but also attitudes that are contrary to the attitudes God requires of us. . . .

The definition of sin given above specifies that sin is a failure to conform to God’s moral law not only in action and in attitude, but also in our moral nature. . . . It is far better to define sin in the way Scripture does, in relationship to God’s law and his moral character.[7]

With temporary incarnation, sin is not connected to the orientation to death or the corporate evil that killed Christ, just as deliverance from sin is not connected to the defeat of this orientation. Sin is not related to the death dealing systemic evil, which Christ describes in all four Gospels, as that which would “save the self.” Sin is not connected to the deception Isaiah describes and which Paul focuses upon; the “covenant with death.” In Grudem’s theology sin is not related to the devil, evil spirits, systemic evil, or the world of darkness, which is the focus of much of the New Testament. Sin is simply understood in relation to God’s law and salvation is satisfaction of God’s “moral character” as expressed in the law. In this understanding the cross of Christ does not directly address the problem of evil. In other words, the life of Jesus, his teaching, death, and resurrection do not really figure into the central problem and its resolution, which is solely connected to the law.

Meanwhile, the problem of evil, which is thought to go unaddressed by the cross, is explained as part of God’s plan. After all, what greater evil could there be than the murder of the Son, and yet this too is part of God’s plan to find self-satisfaction. Evil then, has its purposes as part of teaching people to endure suffering and creating better souls, so that God deploys evil as part of a “soul-making theodicy.” Rather than seeing the cross as the challenge and defeat of evil, evil is given a role in God’s plan.

In fact, evil may be a difficult category to discern, as God must have designated certain persons to rule in patriarchy, slavery, racism, nationalism, and colonialism, so that the gospel can be spread and souls saved. Better to oppress, dominate, and even kill the body so that the soul might be saved. Colonialism spreads the gospel and slavery trains and disciples those who otherwise might remain ignorant of salvation.

In other words, where the solutions of the incarnation, in addressing evil on the cross, are set aside, evil becomes an instrument which may be directly deployed by the church or perhaps is not recognized as evil at all. As Duane Loynes describes in a survey of the literature, John Feinberg, in his comprehensive survey of evil and theological and philosophic approaches to the problem “fails to mention slavery, racism, genocide, African Americans, Native Americans, liberation theology, Cone, King, the Civil Rights Movement, or the American Church’s tragic history of injustice.” He notes N. T. Wright’s Evil and the Justice of God provides passing references to the horror of Hurricane Katrina as an inspiration for his text, but doesn’t acknowledge the fact that Black bodies were the ones who suffered the most.”[8] Norman Geisler’s systematic theology, likewise “is dedicated exclusively to the topics of sin and salvation,” and yet makes no reference to corporate or systemic evil such as slavery or racism.[9] He also provides examples from Catholic theology and concludes, “Because of this silencing and invisibility, there are not only voices that have not been heard, there are moral questions that have not been asked. . .” Questions of racism, colonialism, and white supremacy, have gone unasked and unanswered by multiple generations.[10]

The New Testament Pictures the Body of Christ as a Continuing Community of Practice Bringing About Holistic Salvation

The teaching of the New Testament (and an observable truth) is that belief and practice cannot be separated and that practice reveals true convictions. This is why it is necessary to think out our convictions in a community of practice, as the fulness of doctrine and the fulness of salvation are lived-out beliefs expressed and learned through the practices and discipleship engendered in the church. One is not “saved” apart from the body of Christ any more than one can have a disembodied belief. Language and thought are not realms apart from the body but come to us through linguistic communities which embody certain beliefs in their practice. In the church, primary conviction is expressed in the ethic, the prayers, the hymns, the sermons, expressed in the life of the church – a life and set of practices that are salvific. The incarnation continues, and the church is a form of this continuation. Being joined to the incarnate One is not provisional or partial, but is holistic and eternal.

As Loynes writes in response to Grudem:

In examining the accounts of healings performed by Jesus in the Gospels, it should be obvious that they embody the union of spirituality and liberation. They are never juxtaposed as if one is opposed to the other. In fact, we sometimes find Jesus engaging solely in the work of ‘liberation’—healing people, freeing them from physical, earthly burdens—without preaching a ‘spiritual’ Gospel.[11]

 The problem is, where Jesus’ work is “spiritualized” (as deliverance from a legal category or deliverance from the wrath of God) the healing ministry of Jesus, and the historical life and death of Christ (or in short, the incarnation), are rendered secondary to the real story which is a-historical and “spiritual.” Jesus has born a spiritual and legal punishment which only indirectly pertains to historical events. The incarnation as provisional misses the eternal defeat of sin, death and evil – which in light of the eternal incarnation are defeated forever.

To know God is to know Christ in the world and to know the world through Christ. God has made nature new, including human nature, “returning it to its primordial beauty of incorruptibility through His holy flesh.”[12] Certainly this is a work in process, but apart from this joining of humanity and God in the incarnation there is no salvation, no renewal, no defeat of evil.

(Register for the Class Marginalization and Restorative Justice, starting April 17th and running through June 9th, here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1]Maximus, Chapters on Theology and Economy 2.57‐58. Cited by Derrick Peterson, in “Maximus and Augustine: The Will, Incarnation, and Aesthetics of Creation” uploaded to academia-mail.com.

[2] Maximus the Confessor, The Ambigua, Volume 2, trans. Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 36.2.

[3] Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to 4th Century Trinitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 325. Cited in Peterson.

[4] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III.18.1. Cited in Peterson.

[5] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), 868. Cited in Duane Terrence Loynes Sr., “A God Worth Worshiping: Toward a Critical Race Theology” (2017). Marquette University Dissertations (1934 -), 94.

[6] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 26. Cited in Loynes, 97.

[7] Grudem, Systematic Theology, 490–491. Cited in Loynes, 100.

[8] Loynes, 110.

[9] Loynes, 100.

[10] Loynes, 111.

[11] Loynes, 94-95.

[12] Ambigua, 42.5.

Marginalization and Restorative Justice

A guest blog by Jonathan Totty

In the parlor of a grandly decrepit Episcopal Church, we began to create a community of people becoming whole, integrated, healed. Like moribund flesh, as individual worshippers bound together by the felt need to allow the Protestant Episcopal Church to submit her doctrines and liturgy, along with the Holy Scriptures, as opinions to be considered by rational minds, we endured the malaise of mainline protestant decline. As a community of Christians, though, we grasped for the potency of ancient ideas reborn toward a politics of friendship, which constitutes the politics of God’s eternal community. Nothing loves death as much as itself. Busy and isolated people merely experience the decline and fall of humanity, whereas life manifests in relationships wherein minds meet, and hearts synchronize in desiring the good. So, we made our prayer, “Come Holy Spirit, come and renew the face of the Earth.” Against the odds of modern life, an eclectic group of folks met in a parlor, oddly resembling an undertaker’s lounge, to study and discuss articles, books, films, and lectures collected around the idea that Jesus’ incarnation, life, death, and resurrection establish a just and peaceful way of being human in the world.

We, a priest, a literature professor, an engineer, an attorney, a scientist, a social worker, and several folks who work in healthcare—about twelve of us in total—meet Sunday mornings, regularly, to discuss the Bible, the history of the Church, doctrines, but this time we met more purposefully and more committed to developing a robust self-understanding about Christian identity. As the priest, my parishioners delightfully surprised me by their willingness to commit to a rigorous course of study. We replaced what had amounted to a Sunday School hour with a course complete with syllabus, lectures, and course readings. Our materials included varied sources such as Pope Francis’ Laudato Si, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s Silence, writings about the Bible by the feminist theologian Susanne Scholz, and a lecture by Rowan Williams the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Our goal was to develop a self-understanding about Christian identity, derived from the witness of Jesus’ self-sacrificing life and death, that fosters peace and justice while opposing violence and oppression. My parishioners met my ambitious proposal with eager minds and supple spirits open to encountering God.

Throughout eight weeks of Sunday morning discussions, we became God’s beloved community, followers of Christ, people awakened to the forces, the principalities, and powers of demonic and human origins, and people committed to inculcating Christ’s spirituality of peace and justice within our own lives. We became a community by listening to diverging views and understanding the biases and social locations informing each other’s thoughts, opinions, and theories. By listening to one another, we developed a theological stance of openness, open even to meeting Christ in the other. We embodied the theology we hoped to understand. A theology of Christian identity resides within us; the Holy Spirit makes Christ’s life come alive in us by God’s grace infused within our person. Thus, a Christian identity does not exist as an impersonal standard of measure, rather Christian identity resides in Jesus as the one who reveals the Father by his kenotic incarnation and sacrificial death. In Jesus’ resurrection, God promises that our own creaturely personhood abides in the life of God. Consequently, we discovered Christ in ourselves as we recognized Christ in each other.

After weeks of attending to our surroundings and developing a vantage point for reflection by way of critical theory, we wondered how we might meet the demands of our consciences and the world as authentic followers of Jesus. For it is not only some historians, as Toynbee thought, who “hold that history is just one damned thing after another,” because we sometimes endure life as one damned thing after another. In contrast, the way of Jesus forms a straight and narrow path through suffering, through death, into the bright light of God’s eternal life in which all things cohere. We walk the way of Jesus in prayer, study, and service. When we walk the way of Jesus, we enter the flow of God’s love, which establishes the source and goal of all creaturely life. So, even as we became attentive to the powers, principalities, and forces of darkness, we turned to the traditional practices of the Christian spiritual life as a strategy of resistance. Sin and death hold sway by encouraging despair, whereas the Holy Spirit promises joy subsists in the fullness of God’s presence.

While leading our Sunday morning discussions, I decided the communal life we discovered at Grace Episcopal Church should be shared. So, I shared the materials I developed for my parish with Paul Axton. He, then, extended an invitation for me to adapt the course for Forging Ploughshares under the class title: Marginalization and Restorative Justice. Thus, under the auspices of Forging Ploughshares, I invite you to join a discussion about the Christian identity, and how Jesus’ life in us fosters the just, peaceable, and beloved community of God. The class, Marginalization and Restorative Justice, will create a space of discernment about the mission and life of God in us and in the world as we explore Christian social teaching from both Catholic and Protestant perspectives. By study and conversation will foment a realized and active spirituality, which constitutes an alternative peaceable way of life instead of the violent and oppressive norm. Together we will practice spiritual conversations that teach us a way of encountering God, a way of being formed as disciples of Jesus, a way of inhabiting the Peaceable Kingdom.

Therefore, even as I have described one theological conversation and offered an invitation to another, my ultimate purpose resides in the description of theological conversation. In theological conversation, we live and move and have our being in God as a community. We encounter God in dialogue with others. To be present to another, we must also be present to ourselves. Every conversation marks an opportunity for self-knowledge. Attentiveness to others and to ourselves along with the reasonable and responsible pursuit of truth fosters good conversation. The unqualified and unrestricted Good, which is God, fulfills the implicit question of every conversation, which is the human unrestricted desire to know. Consequently, if we seek the meaning of Christian identity honestly and responsibly, then we will together become Christians. The unrestricted nature of our conversation means our conversation ever and always occurs as dialogue approaching the Word of God. God invites our conversation into the divine life. So, let us dare together to talk about what it means to be Christian, and thereby invite the Holy Spirit to come, come and renew our lives in this world and eternity.

(Register for the Class Marginalization and Restorative Justice here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)