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The Broken Middle and the Metaxological: William Desmond’s and Rowan Williams’ Opposed Readings of Hegel

Both William Desmond and Rowan Williams are advocates of a metaphysics from the middle or between, with the difference that Williams arrives at this understanding through Gillian Rose and G.W.F. Hegel while Desmond claims to be going beyond Hegel. “The metaxological can be thought of as a different way to relate the same and the different, in contrast to the Hegelian way of ‘dialectical’ mediation, which unites them in a higher unity.”[1] Williams along with Rose, argues that Hegel is not seeking some final synthesis or resolution, as though difference were an obstacle to overcome, but there is the “agon” of existing between or in the middle. In the agon of difference we do not seek synthesis but we endure the anxiety.[2] In their description of the middle or between Williams and Desmond are sometimes indistinguishable: “The same does not return to itself through the different; rather the space of play between the same and the different is sustained, allowing for relations of otherness, difference, and plurality to obtain along several orders—between mind and being, immanence and transcendence, finite and infinite, and singular and universal.”[3] What both are centered upon is the tense relation of betweenness.

As John Caputo notes in the Desmond Reader, “Desmond calls attention to a “between,” a community, a relation to the other.”[4] There can be relation only after the moment of difference. There cannot be a collapse into oneness nor a relation that does not build upon difference. In Williams’ Hegelian terms, there is a “tarrying with the negative” (difference), as one recognizes vulnerability and the possibility of failure while there is an openness to the other. There can be neither total identity nor absolute difference, but one negotiates between these without closure (not aiming at a final absorbing synthesis). There is growth and change, the devastation of the egocentric self (the seeming loss of self) necessary to acknowledging the other. In Benjamin Myers description, “Williams took up Rose’s Hegelianism and transmuted it into a Christian theology of identity, difference, and sociality.”[5]

The problem with the Christian tradition, which Desmond and Williams recognize, is God as absolute Other undermines knowing (see my full depiction of Williams’ reading of Hegel here). The difference lies in Desmond’s continued focus on Otherness (beyond knowledge) and Williams appreciation (through his encounter with Rose) of Hegel’s focus on knowing God. In Rose’s description: “Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought. How can the absolute be thought, and how does the thinking of it have social import? The idea which a man has of God corresponds with that which he has of himself, of his freedom. If ‘God’ is unknowable, we are unknowable, and hence powerless.”[6] An unknowable absolute means everything is absolutely unknowable. A misrepresented absolute means a misunderstood and misrepresented society and people. The Self, mediating all knowledge is not simply human but the Divine Trinitarian Self (inclusive of the human) who makes thought possible. For Hegel, “no otherness is unthinkable,” as “an unthinkable otherness would leave us incapable of thinking ourselves, and so of thinking about thinking – and so of thinking itself.”[7] Consciousness and thought begin with the recognition of the self in and through the Other. God is not an isolated Subject but gives himself to the world in his Son. He gives himself for thought, and makes thought and self-consciousness possible.

Though Desmond is also critiquing the traditional metaphysical understanding, he thinks Hegel posits a false God in place of the transcendent God: “Hegel enacts a project in reconstructing God, in constructing his ‘God’, a project deriving from religious sources, but also diverging from them in a decisive reconfiguration of divine transcendence.” He asks rhetorically, “Does the reconfiguration amount to the production of a philosophical surrogate for the God of religious transcendence? Is this ‘God’ a counterfeit double of God?”[8] According to Desmond, Hegel’s God is not “Other” enough: “transcendence must stress the importance of some otherness; the trans is a going beyond or across towards what is not now oneself. If God is third transcendence (beyond ordinary human transcendence and the transcendent otherness of objects), there is an otherness not reducible to our self-determining.”[9] Transcendence must not fall into a “determinant” understanding: “It would have to be ‘real’ possibilizing power, more original and other than finite possibility and realization. It would have to be possibilizing beyond determinate possibility, and ‘real’ beyond all determinate realization.”[10] God cannot be dependent on the determinate reality of the human, even in Jesus.

According to Desmond, Hegel is too taken with the Self and this takes away from divine transcendence: “The issue of transcendence as other (T3) is reformulated in terms of a self-completing of self-transcendence: transcendence from self to other to self again, and hence there is no ultimate transcendence as other, only self-completing immanence.”[11] In short, Hegel’s is a projection of human transcendence onto the divine. According to Desmond, “We seem to have no need for an other transcendence. Hegel, I propose, seeks a dialectical-speculative solution to the antinomy of autonomy and transcendence. There is no absolute transcendence as other. . . God, as much as humanity, it will be said, is given over to immanence. Indeed, this immanence is itself the very process of both God’s and humanity’s self-becoming.”[12]

 Desmond concludes Hegel’s picture of the resolution of self-antagonism (the I pitted against itself) undone in Divine self-identity, does away with “otherness.” He recounts Hegel’s picture of self-antagonism overcome through divine forgiveness: “Here is how it goes in Hegel: ‘The reconciling Yes, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the “I” which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God appearing in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowing’ (PhG, 472: PS, § 671).”[13] (Hegel, in Slavoj Žižek’s reading, may be taken as an extended reflection on Paul’s picture in Romans 7, in which the “I” is pitted in a deadly struggle, and Romans 8 in which one is rescued from this “body of death” through Christ). Desmond finds this too subjective, as for Hegel it just comes down to “self-absolution.” “The importance of pluralized otherness, the other to me as irreducibly other, even in forgiveness, is not strongly enough marked.”[14] He acknowledges that Hegel is picturing this movement as dependent upon knowing God, but the combination of God rightly knowing himself, Desmond assumes, dissolves into self-mediated knowing: “if this is ‘God’ appearing, it is also clear that the meaning of this is ‘pure self-knowing’. As he later puts it: The self-knowing spirit is, in religion, immediately its own pure self-consciousness’ (PhG, 474-475; PS, § 677).”[15]

In Williams reading, Hegel pictures human self-consciousness as dependent upon God’s self-consciousness shared/realized in the historical person of Christ, and given or realized in the Spirit. [16] In Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers and Maximus, down to Sergius Bulgakov, there is a dynamic personalism in the Trinity realized in the incarnation (such that the life, death and resurrection are eternal facts about God), and this is the sensibility with which Williams seems to be reading Hegel.[17] But Desmond concludes that Hegel is foreclosing God’s transcendence: “In truth, the divine life is the always already at work energy of the whole mediating with itself in its own diverse forms of finite otherness. There is nothing beyond the whole, and no God beyond the whole.”[18]

For Williams as for Hegel, the condition for thinking is nothing less than the doctrine of Trinity, creation, reconciliation, and incarnation. “Thus to think is, ultimately, to step beyond all local determinations of reality, to enter into an infinite relatedness – not to reflect or register or acknowledge an infinite relatedness, but to act as we cannot but act, if our reality truly is what we think it is, if thinking is what we (just) do.”[19] In the words of Hegel, “The abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son—this then is death. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[20] For Desmond, Hegel’s Trinitarian dynamism dissolves to immanent sameness: “’God’ is coming to know itself in the human being coming to know itself as being ‘God’. That there is no difference is more ultimate than the representational insistence that there is a difference.”[21]

The question is if the difference between Williams’ and Desmond’s reading of Hegel stems from two very different interpretive traditions, sometimes (too generally) characterized as a Western and Eastern reading of Chalcedon?

[1] William Desmond, The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press. Kindle Edition) Location 66.

[2] Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 293.

[3] Reader, 73.

[4] Reader, 199.

[5] Benjamin Myers, Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams (London: T & T Clark, 2012) 53-54.

[6] Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009) 98.

[7] Rowan Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007) 36.

[8] William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003) 2.

[9] Hegel’s God, 4.

[10] Hegel’s God, 3.

[11] Hegel’s God, 4.

[12] Hegel’s God, 5.

[13] Hegel’s God, 64.

[14] Hegel’s God, 64.

[15] Hegel’s God, 64.

[16] Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 41.

[17] Williams, “Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 41.

[18] Hegel’s God, 66.

[19] Williams, Logic and Spirit in Hegel,” 36,

[20] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, vol. 3, Translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart with the assistance of H. S. Harris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[21] Hegel’s God, 67.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Christ as a Lying Half-Truth or Absolute Truth

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Biography - Facts, Childhood, Family Life ...

Even or especially for Christians, telling the truth and discerning lies in this political moment is complicated. Does the truth of Christ apply to every realm, including the political, or is He the truth in a personal, heavenly, and non-political sense? In a somewhat similar situation to our own, Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted it was the inability of Christians to speak truth to the German State which allowed for the rise of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler. The willingness to accommodate, tolerate, or to imagine Christian truth does not constrain the State meant the German Church became an instrument for evil. As in this country, as brothers and sisters in Christ advocate genocide, arrest and murder of children, and destruction of families, the name of Christ is deployed for evil. Bonhoeffer came to an expanded and absolute view of the truth of Christ, recognizing that His truth must pertain to every realm of life, otherwise truth becomes indiscernible. German Christians could no longer recognize truth, due to the lie that Christ was a partial truth.[1]

As a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer once held to Martin Luther’s notion of two kingdoms: Christian truth and salvation pertain to God’s (heavenly) kingdom 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, she must sort out 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. Practically this meant the church’s witness was silenced as it allowed State ethics to dictate church action or inaction.  In Bonhoeffer’s estimate, this gave rise to the notion that the church exists for itself, rather than for the world.

Recognizing this two-kingdom understanding (and the consequent notion that the Church exists for itself) caused the failure of the German Church, Bonhoeffer takes Luther’s Christocentrism beyond Luther by grounding all reality in the incarnation. The incarnation is definitive of the center of God’s activity, constituting a singular truth: “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.”[2] Christian life and Christian ethics are not to be centered on some other world or kingdom. Bonhoeffer sees this two-kingdom 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.” However, “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.”[3]

Christ gives himself completely for the world and the Christian is called, not to serve another world or another kingdom: “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.’”[4] 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 Bonhoeffer explains, “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.”[5] Christ’s death and resurrection are not for life in some other place, but speak of redemption and new life in the place he died and was raised. We are not to flee this world and its suffering, but face it and so share in His suffering and thus share in redemption.

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 in a new way. We are no longer bound by alienation and isolation but 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.”[6] Jesus Christ, the truly human one, is “the human being for others” and this human connectedness is the experience of His truth. 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.” Christ makes possible a new life in being for others, through participation in His life of self-giving love (pouring out his life in love for the world).[7]

Bonhoeffer did not come easily to the conclusion that “Nazi Christian” is an oxymoron. The Lutheran division of powers resulted in the church continually appeasing state encroachment upon the church, such that it became clear that a decision had to made between National Socialism and Christianity. In Bonhoeffer’s estimate, there had to be a clear delineation between what it means to be a Christian and what it means to be a National Socialist. The unwillingness to make this distinction led to a near complete loss of truth. By the same token, “Christian Zionism” or “Christian Nationalism” are inherently contradictory. Support of genocide in Palestine (in the name of “Christian Zionism”), support of destruction of immigrant families (in notions of “Christian Nationalism”), support of arrest and deportation to torturous prison conditions (in the name of “Christian politics”) is as contradictory as “Nazi-Christian.” Bonhoeffer accused the German Church of being a silent witness to “oppression, hatred, and murder,” and of failing to aid “the weakest and most defenseless brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.”[8] 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.”[9]

In the end, Bonhoeffer considered the German Protestant church, no church at all. Even the Confessing church, consumed with its own survival “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 organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.”[10]

This filling out of Luther’s Christocentrism pits the Christian against worldly empire as an end in itself (whether the empires of 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, the Church speaks in the world for the world. Christ suffered under the Roman State, and at the hands of the religious, so as to institute a new life of “being there for others” in the world. Rather than offering escape or reconciling himself to empire, Christ challenged and defeated the powers, and He calls his followers likewise, to overcome the world, not by fleeing the world but by being in the world. Christ as a singular truth opens God and the world simultaneously or not at all, as it is in the world that God meets and saves us.  

[1] “Only complete truth and truthfulness will help us now.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, No Rusty Swords, translated by Edwin Robertson and John Bowden (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 287.

[2] 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.

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John de Gruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010) 447–48. 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.

[4] Ethics,  99.

[5] Letters and Papers, 213.

[6]  Watson, 14.

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

[8] Ethics, 139.

[9] Ethics, 140.

[10] Letters and Papers, 389. 

The Sublime Experience of God

If there were a singular term which could include the moral, rational, cosmic, and divine as part of a realization or part of an experience, the term “sublime” may come closest. At any rate, I want to build on the term, to name the ultimate Christian experience or to locate the point of Christianity. To call this an “experience” may already be problematic due to the way we presently divide up our world, but this is also part of the point. There is the need to reunite fundamental human experience with an explicit moral and cognitional content which accounts for the individual before God in the world.

In common usage, the sublime is a combination of experiencing fearsome, overwhelming phenomena such as a raging storm at sea, threatening cliffs or mountains, towering thunder clouds, before which we are normally reduced to insignificance in comparison to their power, but in the sublime experience, instead of feeling diminished, we are able to take it in and feel our own soul or imagination enlarged. As a boy in Texas, there were several occasions in which on a long ride, alone on the prairie, I was surrounded by distant thunder storms, an endless expanse of wilderness, and rather than being frightened I felt a great thrill, which I equated with an experience of God. I could not name this sublime experience, but I presumed correctly (I am now convinced, fifty years later), it was the center of my newfound faith.

There is a terrible beauty that makes of the fearful something attractive the more fearful and powerful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety. As Immanuel Kant describes the situation,  “the irresistibility of [nature’s] power certainly makes us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature…whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion.”[1] The sense of safety and wellbeing is at once physical (involving all of the physical senses) and yet it is centered in our soulish or cognitive capacity.

The problem with Kant is that he identifies the safety of the sublime with objective reason. He equates it with suprasensible reason or the recognition that it is through cognitive capacities or powers of reason that humans can count themselves above nature. It is not just that he may be confusing reason with God, but I believe he fails to understand the experience of God inherent to the sublime.

I think we can go beyond Kant, but Kant himself points beyond what he calls reason, by describing the pleasure of the sublime experience as mixed with something like displeasure or what he calls negative pleasure. Where he characterizes experience of the beautiful as a positive pleasure, the sublime calls forth an admiration or respect which he characterizes as a negative pleasure. What he did not have the psychological vocabulary to describe, but which he seems to be aiming at, is the notion of a limit experience.

A limit-experience is what it feels like to be undone, or to have the notion of the self as a unified subject thrown into question. A limit-experience according to Michel Foucault, is that which wrenches the subject from herself and which throws into question the notion of a unified subject. If we think of Freud’s reading of Kant, in which the reason behind his categorical imperative is identified with the superego, this negative pleasure might be mistaken for a simple masochism or what Freud called a moral masochism. That is, by not acknowledging the supreme limit which the sublime might be challenging, Kant neither faced the limit experience of death, nor the manner in which ultimate unity is linked to the divine. In other words, he fails to connect the sublime experience to the limit experience definitive of Christianity and in this failure, he fails at both ends of his description of the sublime.

He does not recognize that the ultimate experience of nature is to take it in all at once, either in the simple wonder at the fact that a world exists or in recognition of creation ex nihilo. His picture of the world and of human imagination limited it to a priori, necessary, and stable structures which he considered inherent to the world and necessary to the mind. His thought about the world (there are absolute and necessary laws) structured his depiction of the powers of human imagination.  He allowed a role for intuition, but it was an intuition dependent upon an already existing framework of the mind. As Cornelius Castoriadis notes, “the imagination remained bound to functioning in a pre-established field in Kant’s theoretical work.”[2]

Castoriadis turns specifically to creation ex nihilo to suggest an alternative understanding of the human capacity for creation. He acknowledges that there may be a set of historical or natural conditions linked to creativity in general, but these conditions are not sufficient to account for that which is truly creative. Kant’s notion of the sublime only points to a derived realization. Much like the problem of cosmological arguments for God, the God that might be conceived within these arguments tends to be fit to the pattern of reason which implies his existence from the world.

Kant not only limited the extent of the human imagination in its positive mode, he also did not account for the height of the obstacles it might overcome. It is not simply creation from nothing, but the human experience of this creation power in resurrection faith, which he misses. He maintains that the sublime gives one a sense of immortality, but what should be posed against this intimation is the simultaneous recognition of one’s mortality. As in Paul’s definition of Abraham’s resurrection faith, he had faith in “the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not” (Rom. 4:17). The existential realization of the reality of death and God’s ability to give life to the dead is the personal realization of his power to create from nothing. In other words, Paul is depicting the limit experience of death (as in the living death of being old and unable to have children) with the capacity to conceive of creation from nothing.

Kant is instructive as, in his failure of thought, he helps locate the distinctive difference contained in the Christian experience of the sublime. The overwhelming power and danger of the world are not subdued by an innately immortal soul, or immortal reason, but by the specific death dealing work of Christ. Just as the most powerful force in the world is the big bang behind creation from nothing, so too the personal realization of this power is to be had in Christian resurrection faith.

This is the Christian sublime: the simultaneous recognition of the overwhelming power and danger of the universe exploding into existence and the existential recognition that this power is unleashed in our own life in resurrection power. The ground of sublimity lies within each of us as we reflect upon what might be taken as fearsome, formless colliding galaxies and planets coming into being. Or as it says in Genesis, the world was a chaos in the beginning but in verse 2 the Spirit hovered over the waters and brings order out of the chaos. The same hovering, indwelling Spirit brings order out of the chaos of the human mind. This chaotic power brought to order within ourselves and in the world describes the ultimate sublime experience.

 Being quite young, and having no name or developed understanding of Christian doctrine, I had no way of putting flesh on my first experience of the sublime.  I thought it enough to reproduce the situation, returning continually to the prairie, so as to re-experience the wonder.  As the years went by and I was taught to be more rational, and not to confuse faith and experience, my moments of bliss were whittled down. If I had been properly discipled, properly indoctrinated, I would not have been turned from these early experiences but I could have been turned to exploring and understanding them. Of course, we cannot live in continuous wonder and joy, but by putting a name and understanding to this experience, we can at any time or place experience the epiphany of the sublime.

First published November 5, 2020

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Critique of the Power of Judgment (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant), ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 261–262. I am referencing the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Kant’s notion of the sublime.

[2] (Castoriadis Reader 319-337).  See https://iep.utm.edu/castoria/#SSH3aiv

Can We Ever Escape from Our Surroundings?

Guest Blog by C J Dull

An enduring issue in the history of Christianity is the relationship to surrounding culture or history.  For some, “adaptation to culture” is a positive and realistic course; others condemn it as simply a surrender to a new–or not so new–paganism.  Some years ago, I reviewed a book containing articles on Patristic themes.  What especially caught my attention as one trained as a classical Greek and Roman historian was a piece on Jerome and paganism. It was interesting to note that this was still an issue.  Will Durant reflects well the attitude last century (Caesar and Christ, p. 595). His peroration begins with the sentence:  Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it; and ends with the following: Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.

 The church, however defined, has gone both ways on this issue.  The “Orthodox”, somewhat surprisingly, use a Neo-Platonic concept to justify their use of icons.   Neo-Platonism from its early years was pitched as a pagan alternative to Christianity.  The bugaboo especially in the East was a fear of becoming “too Jewish” (later Islamic) rather than too pagan.   

This issue was a particularly strong one in the 19th century as demonstrated by the classic statement of Durant above, which innumerable preachers have been able to forgive or ignore because of his ability to continually turn a memorable phrase. In fact, the scholarship behind such a statement probably knew more about dying and rising gods than about Rabbinic and other forms of Judaism. In that era, it was not uncommon for many to have undergraduate degrees (or at least work) in Classics as a preparation for careers in law, medicine, government, theology (aka divinity) and such.  During my graduate study years, the largest course in the Classics department was “Greek and Latin origins of medical terms.” Aside from the usual emphasis on Cicero (cf. both Jerome and Augustine), which is natural for public speakers, there are real issues in significant areas.  Romans often dedicated temples to a triad of gods.  The most famous one was that on the Capitoline to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. Is it just coincidence that Rome—where it was more important to affirm a position than to understand it — was an early and strong supporter of a trinitarian formula?  Similarly, another area, Egypt, that became a strong supporter of the formula was familiar with triads as well, most notably Osiris, Isis and Horus.  Ancient Roman religion also placed a premium on the exact repetition of certain formulae.

In the East, especially the Greek East, understanding was often more stressed than affirmation.  They also preferred to think in pairs more than triads.  The pairs could be almost any combination such as Zeus-Hera (male-female), Apollo-Artemis (brother-sister), the Gemini (both male although both not immortal).  An early work, Hesiod’s Theogony, conceived of virtually all creation as coming from a sexual pair. Before Nicaea, it was common in the East to talk a great deal about the Father and the divine Son, but little about the Holy Spirit.

The major difficulty in discussing the relations and intersections of ancient paganism and Christianity is our lack of conscious familiarity with paganism. To us, the term conjures up images of primitive tribesmen performing ghoulish animal or even human sacrifices. The more educated paganism of the later Roman Empire was often philosophical, intricate and sophisticated, morally uplifting, and presented with considerable skill even in astrological terms.  Most of all, it had adherents in high places (e.g., the emperor Marcus Aurelius). Thus, it is not surprising that such adherents found Judaism (especially circumcision) repugnant and barbaric.  Christianity was to them a religion of slaves and the ancient version of white trash. It seemed the epitome of Troeltsch’s dictum about religion and the lower classes.  By contrast, ancient paganism had status.

My first encounter with this sort of approach came from a presentation that compared (and to some extent equated) Independent Christian Church structures with the governmental structures of states in the U.S. Both have an elected executive; an upper house, a council of elders (the “senate”, the common governmental term, comes from a Latin word, senex, an elder or old man); and a lower house usually referred to as “the general board” or “church board”, which mainly deals with financial matters and other practical concerns. The author had lived in Nebraska for some years, and it may have sensitized him to the issue since that state has a unicameral legislature.

In one sense that comparison may be appropriate since modes of governing most often seem to impress themselves on religious groups. The centralized control of the Roman and Byzantine empires is seen in the religious groups most prominent in that era. In fact, it was not unusual for certain powers and definitions of jurisdictions to be decided by the emperor.  In Geneva, a banking center then and now, it should not be surprising that the Calvinist presbyters emanating from there should act like the board of directors of a business, sometimes even meeting quarterly as scheduled business reports now appear. The ecumenical movement advocated by Eugene Carson Blake, a prominent Presbyterian, overlaps nicely with the “conglomerate period” accounting textbooks talk about. Perhaps the most positive development of the Disciple-Independent split was an increasing appreciation of Judaism and congregational autonomy.  One might compare the nearly autocratic control of Baptist ministers over their congregations, which seems a reflection of the monarchies in the countries from which they emerged, England and Holland. The term “high priest” may or may not convey a sense of rule; translated into the Latin “pontifex maximus”, a regular title of the Roman emperors, it certainly does.  To apply it to a pope invariably brings in this nuance.

The relations between governments and religions are deep, frequently inseparable, and often by design. The idea that Israel’s theocracy was a unique experiment is far from reality.  Most ancient governments claimed a connection with some deity, even if only a tutelary presence. A connection with religion is hardly unusual. In most countries, especially before the American Revolution, it is more the rule than the exception. Thus, the conflict in dealing with various forms of pagan influences actually resolves itself into a question of old governmental influences versus more recent ones. This difference may well ensure that there can be no merger into a single, unified church. Reconciling very strict central organization with much freer ones can be extremely difficult.  A number of groups have “free” in their names. Putting liturgical groups, Pentecostals and Quakers under the same roof virtually ensures a lack of final unity.

 One of the most intriguing studies in my efforts was research on the abortive merger efforts between the Disciples of Christ and the Northern (now American) Baptists. These efforts began in the 1920’s with no success. Slowly it began again in the following decades. A joint hymnal, Christian Hymns, mostly funded by Disciples, was produced in the early forties. There were even some mergers of congregations (e.g., in suburban Milwaukee, Duluth and near Purdue University, to cite a few). The effort ended in 1952 following simultaneous conventions. What was most interesting was the different approach to American history. Disciples felt that the term “union” indicated that the church could be united even as the country could be despite disparate states. The Baptists particularly honed in on individuals such as Roger Williams and America as a refuge for religious freedom with the concomitant emphasis on the value of congregational autonomy, quite the contrast with the Disciples’ increasing valuing of cooperation.   

The rapprochement with paganism begins within the ancient church probably noting the discoveries of similarities with pagan writers.  One of the most popular of these was Virgil’s Eklogue (Bucolic) IV.  The author, who wrote not long after the end of the civil war (about 38 BC) following the death of Julius Caesar, Virgil, became virtually a propagandist for the new regime of Augustus (cf. the end of his epic, the Aeneid), looked forward to a period of peace and prosperity after the prolonged conflict. He mentioned the coming birth of a child that would herald the new era. There are also allusions to a virgo and even to Syria, the Roman province Israel was a part of. Not surprisingly, the ancient church considered him a “pagan prophet”.

The use of Virgil as quasi-scripture also connects to another issue.  He starts Romans inadvertently on the same course as Joseph Smith among the Mormons: the beginning of a theological tradition in the native milieu. Greek was not only the language of the N.T. but of the Roman church until the mid-third century. Then Pope Stephan I, Cyprian’s nemesis, both elevated Latin to the language of the Church of Rome and his own claim to the importance of his office. 

The Book of Mormon does much the same as the ancient church did with Virgil; it connects an existing religious tradition or belief system to a new/different area, the Americas.  Thus, Virgil helps to begin a tradition in Latin separate from the original biblical languages and geography. Similarly, and much more controversially, the Nazis tried to build a new religion for Germans and accommodate historic Christianity to their own people. A number of Saints Lives likewise try to connect local issues to historic Christianity. Perhaps even later portrayals of Washington praying in the snow at Valley Forge are part of the same process. Allister Cooke’s America (p. 135) prints a painting shortly after his death showing Washington ascending to heaven (note:  Cooke assigns it to a “Chinese artist”; most others to John James Barralet, an Irish artist; perhaps the former is a commercial copy of the latter). That period saw a number of paintings of Washington’s apotheosis.

It is easy to write off such studies as the irrelevant esotericism of scholars, yet perhaps no greater testimony exists to the power of culture currently than Amish walking around with cell phones. It is especially so because it is difficult to recognize many manifestations of such influences. Yet there are some clear examples. Augustine of Hippo stated that he could not have become a Christian were it not for “that philosophy”, and he did not quote Scripture on his deathbed but the founder of Neo-Platonism. Some think his mother’s name, Monica, is based on the name of a local pagan god. Ambrose, whose liturgy is still used, was a strong user of Neo-Platonic themes. In the ecumenical creeds, the emphasis on Christ always seems to be a definition of what he is. Parentage of course matters—as in Hesiod—but above all, beginning with Parmenides and the Eleatic School, a group that believed nothing ever changed (Plato was affected by him; his dialogue the Parmenides is one of the few in which Socrates does not prevail). Since there is no change–defining one’s essence is to define one’s achievements. The detail is secondary, if not irrelevant, in such pagan religious thought. Pagan thought is almost unavoidable in the ancient church; either the church accepted it or fought actively against it. It is almost ubiquitous in the background. The need for restoration becomes ever more crucial unless we are to be satisfied with the accretions of pagan philosophies (Stoic “natural law”, Platonism, Aristotelianism to cite a few) and events. Religious groups often preserve for very long periods items that once were contemporary. Plutarch—himself a pagan priest—relates how caps were initiated for the major Roman priesthoods (three in number of course; Plutarch Life of Numa Pompilius 7).  We saw a multitude of them in the recent cardinal priestly processions.

Christianity is above all a historical religion; what happened does matter. More and more we need to hone in on that!

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

William T. Cavanaugh: Recovering The Body of Christ from the Modern Nation State

Ivan Illich and William Cavanaugh both describe the development of the modern nation state as a displacement of the church by the state. Illich traces the first step in this transformation as occurring within the Catholic Church, as it transformed itself into “an independent, legally constituted, bureaucratically organized state exercising a dominion of an entirely new kind over the lives of the faithful.”[1] The institutionalization of Christian charity, fellowship, and love, had the effect of assigning a divine-like status to bureaucracy, church-law, priest and pope, such that the Christian suspension of the weight of the law becomes instead, a divinizing of the law, which through history is shifted to the powers of state.

Cavanaugh provides a case study of this development with the Church in Chile, where the responsibility and reality once assigned to the church become the domain of State in shaping peoples’ lives. The divisions between soul and body, State and society, politics and religion, effectively assigned predominance to the State. Inasmuch as the Eucharist joins Christians to the body of Christ shaping the life and mind of communicants, the State, through coercive measures such as torture, took over this Eucharistic power.

Cavanaugh shows “how torture works to discipline an entire society into an aggregate of fearful and mutually distrustful individuals” functioning as the State liturgy in Chile, in disciplining the population. [2]  “Torture is liturgy – or, perhaps better said, ‘anti-liturgy’ – because it involves bodies and bodily movements in an enacted drama which both makes real the power of the state and constitutes an act of worship of that mysterious power.”[3] Just as the body of Christ transforms human imagination, so too the state (in co-opting the church), can shape and discipline human imagination in a drama of its own making. Rather than divinization and salvation, the state both produces and controls the “enemy” through torture. The drama is a demonstration of the omnipotence of the state to discipline, control, and destroy the revolutionary, the subversive, or the “filth” that would oppose it.[4]

Torture atomizes the individual, destroying the connections of family, society, and church, producing the isolated individual with a singular focus (the pain of torture). In turn, the torturer functions on behalf of the state, sacrificing moral integrity in the service of the larger cause. “By focusing on their own pain and sacrifice, no matter how disproportionate to the pain of torture, torturers deny the reality of the other and confer reality on the concerns of the regime alone.”[5] The only reality that concerns torturers and their victims is that of the state, and in the process of torture this reality takes on flesh. While there is no concrete reality to the idea of state, the process of torture inscribes these ideas in the flesh. “With the demolition of the victim’s affective ties and loyalties, past and future, the purpose of torture is to destroy the person as a political actor, and to leave her isolated and compliant with the regime’s goals.”[6] In Cavanaugh’s telling, the Church in Chile is complicit in these goals, inasmuch as she relinquished the realm of the political and the body to the State.

Chile is simply a type however, of what has happened throughout the West with the rise of the modern state and what might be called modern religion, inclusive of nationalism and capitalism. He argues in Modern Theology and Political Theology, “the kinds of public devotion formerly associated with Christianity in the West never did go away, but largely migrated to a new realm defined by the nation state.”[7]  It is not that in the modern secular age we do without religion, rather the enchantments of religion have been invested in the nation state. The transcendent has been traded for an idolatrous immanence. As Eugene McCarraher in, The Enchantments of Mammon similarly describes (as in the subtitle of his work) “How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity.”[8] “Far from being an agent of ‘disenchantment,’ capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity.”[9] McCarraher and Cavanaugh suggest that, rather than disenchantment, modernity is simply “misenchantment,” with state and capital becoming the immanent frame of worship. The state and its economy become the unifying center, with the accompanying demand that its citizens be willing to sacrifice their lives for the nation as they might have once sacrificed for Christ.

In Cavanaugh’s narration of how sacrifice for the nation displaced Christian sacrifice, the “revulsion to killing in the name of religion is used to legitimize the transfer of ultimate loyalty to the modern state.”[10] The so-called “Wars of Religion” of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe evoked the founding moment of modern liberalism by theorists such as John Rawls, Judith Shklar, and Jeffrey Stout. According to the liberal telling of the story,

liberalism … was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the powerful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen … [11]

In this telling, the modern state arose to keep peace among warring religious factions. The state must step in to mediate between competing religious beliefs, and the secularization of public discourse and the privatization of religion were necessary to keep religionists from slaughtering one another.

Cavanaugh maintains this telling of the story is backwards: “The ‘Wars of Religion’ were not the events which necessitated the birth of the modern State; they were in fact themselves the birth pangs of the State. These wars were not simply a matter of conflict between ‘Protestantism” and “Catholicism,’ but were fought largely for the aggrandizement of the emerging State over the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order.”[12] Cavanaugh argues that “Wars of Religion” is an anachronistic misreading, as “religion” as it will come to be known – an apolitical and private sphere, and State as the proper realm of the political (and with it the embodied and public) did not exist apart from the creation of these categories through justification provided by the Wars of Religion. “The creation of religion was necessitated by the new State’s need to secure absolute sovereignty over its subjects.”[13] Gaining this sovereign control explains why the religious wars pitted co-religionists against one another (sometimes Catholics versus Catholics or Protestants versus Protestants), as it was not religion but state power that was being contested, and religion was simply a justifying backdrop in this effort.

As religion was privatized and separated from the political, the State shifted from reference to the condition of the ruler or condition of the realm (in the medieval period) to an abstract and independent political entity: “a form of public power separate from both ruler and the ruled, and constituting the supreme political authority within a certain defined territory.”[14] The result of the conflicts was an inversion of the previous ecclesial dominance over civil authorities, with the modern State dictating to the Church.

Martin Luther, Henry VIII, and Philip II, backed and insured this new arrangement. According to Luther, every Christian is subject to two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal. “Coercive power is ordained by God but is given only to the secular powers in order that civil peace be maintained among sinners. Since coercive power is defined as secular, the Church is left with a purely suasive authority, that of preaching the Word of God.”[15] Luther assigned coercive power (the power of the sword) to the state (picturing the state as the peacemaker), attempting to disinvest the Church from such powers. In so doing , he left no clear jurisdiction to the Church. As he writes To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation: “I say therefore that since the temporal power is ordained of God to punish the wicked and protect the good, it should be left free to perform its office in the whole body of Christendom without restriction and without respect to persons, whether it affects pope, bishops, priests, monks, nuns or anyone else.”[16]

This sensibility among both Protestants and Catholics, explains not only the case of Pinochet in Chile, but the general relegating of the religious to the private and non-political. “Because the Christian is saved by faith alone, the Church will in time become, strictly speaking, unnecessary for salvation, taking on the status of a congreganofidelium, a collection of the faithful for the purpose of nourishing the faith. What is left to the Church is increasingly the purely interior government of the souls of its members; their bodies are handed over to the secular authorities.”[17] Cavanaugh goes to great lengths in showing the Wars of Religion were actually the wars of this emerging State dominance. “The new State required unchallenged authority within its borders, and so the domestication of the Church. Church leaders became acolytes of the State as the religion of the State replaced that of the Church, or more accurately, the very concept of religion as separable from the Church was invented.”[18]

This aggravated form of Constantinianism goes beyond the early Roman Church, in that the State as guarantor of freedom and peace with final authority over the body, becomes an end in itself. Freedom in Christ and that freedom and safety secured by the State are fused, and the State is the ultimate public good, while religion is relegated to soulish goods. “Wars are now fought on behalf of this particular way of life by the State, for the defense or expansion of its borders, its economic or political interests.”[19] In the words of Immanuel Kant, thus the State can “maintain itself perpetually.”[20] For Kant, the peace and stability provided by the State is integral to his theory of right, and it would be as wrong to attempt to overthrow the State as it would be to overthrow reason.[21] So the Church in Chile serves as a type of the Church in general, in imagining it could liberate itself from political alignments with the State, it became one of many privatized groups, subject to State domination and torture.[22]

Cavanaugh’s more positive conclusion is that part of the Church in Chile gradually found a way to escape the confinement to the private and the “soul” put upon it by the State, and it was able to “body forth the life of Christ” in resistance to the liturgies of State. He describes a small segment of the Church “performing the body of Christ” as it began to reconceive itself and its relation to the State, especially in conjunction with being the body of Christ in an imagination shaped by the Eucharist.[23] “If torture is the imagination of the state, the Eucharist is the imagination of the church.”[24] It is the means of resisting the state and being conformed to Christ so as to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1-2). The body of Christ cannot be de-politicized, privatized or hidden (in the realm of the soul), but one must perform or do the Eucharist. The point is not simply a silent remembering, hearing, or attending, but to “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk. 22:19) is a “literal re-membering of Christ’s body, a knitting together of the body of Christ by the participation of many in His sacrifice.”[25] “The word anamnesis had the effect not so much of a memorial, as one would say kind words about the dead, but rather of a performance.”[26] The church resists state oppression by being the body of Christ and resisting the isolating, fragmenting, discipline imposed by the state.

 In the words of Justin Martyr, the Eucharist is not a common bread or drink, but just as the Word becomes incarnate so Christians are to incarnate Christ. The “food over which thanks has been given by the prayer of his word, and which nourishes our flesh and blood by assimilation, is both the flesh and blood of the incarnate Jesus.”[27] Those who participate in communion without love, with no thought for the widow and orphan, according to Ignatius, “will not admit that the Eucharist is the self-same body of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in His goodness afterwards raised up again.”[28] Ignatius is reflecting on Matthew 25:35-36, “For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.” Christians are to body forth and live out His life. Those who assimilate and discern the body of Christ partake of His suffering with the weak. As Augustine reports, he heard a voice say, “I am the food of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on me. And you will not change me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into me.”[29] By the power of His life, and the power of His body (tortured and killed and raised), His followers have a body which the powers of state, the principalities and powers, the powers of death, cannot erase or disappear.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Though Illich wrote extensively, the ideas expressed here come toward the end of his life and were only captured in an interview recorded by David Cayley, and presented as a series of podcasts https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/category/Ivan+Illich, for which Cayley has provided transcripts https://www.davidcayley.com/transcripts. Paul Kennedy moderates the overall podcast, with David Cayley, commenting in both the direct conversation and explanatory asides. 

[2] William Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) 15.

[3] Torture, 30.

[4] Torture, 31.

[5] Torture, 36.

[6] Torture, 38.

[7] William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011) 1.

[8] Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. (Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition).

[9] McCarraher, 4.

[10] William T. Cavanaugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” (Modem Theology 11:4 October 1995 ISSN 0266-7177) 397.

[11] Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1984), ρ 5. Cited in Cavanaugh, Wars of Religion, 397.

[12] Wars of Religion, 398.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol II, ρ 353. Cited in Wars of Religion, 398.

[15] Wars of Religion, 399.

[16] Martin Luther, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” trans Charles M Jacobs in Three Treatises (Philadelphia Fortress Press, 1966), ρ 15. Cited in Wars of Religion, 399.

[17] Wars of Religion, 399.

[18] Wars of Religion, 408.

[19] Wars of Religion, 409.

[20] Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 136 [326]. Cited in Wars of Religion, 409.

[21] Ralph Walker notes that Kant “clearly regards the stability of the state as an end which the Theory of Right requires us to pursue (though he does not put this in so many words, so that the contradiction with his other remarks about ends does not become obvious)” Ralph C. S. Walker, Kant (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 161. Wars of Religion, 409.

[22] Torture, 202.

[23] Torture, 253.

[24] Torture, 229.

[25] Torture, 229.

[26] Torture, 230.

[27] Justin Martyr, First Apology, 66, in The Eucharist, Message of the Fathers of the Church, no. 7, ed. Daniel J. Sheerin (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1986) 34. Cited in Torture, 231.

[28] Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 6-7, Early Christian Writings, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 121. Cited in Torture, 231.

[29] St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 124 [VII. X (16)]. Cited in Torture, 232.

Deliverance From the Cloud Economy

In Paul’s depiction of the law, we are bound to serve some form of the Law (e.g., the Master, the superego, the conscience, the father) but this authority, even in Paul’s description is amorphous. We mistake the law for God, or we imagine that the symbolic order holds out life, while it offers only death and a futile servitude. The ultimate master, the force behind all fear and striving, is fear of death, but as in the Garden, the symbolic order, the knowledge of good and evil, the manipulation of the law, seems to hold out the possibility of life through the law. We would inscribe ourselves into the law, so as to attain life, but as Paul notes, “the law deceived and killed me” (Rom. 7:8). As Slavoj Žižek describes, “we are condemned to domination—the Master is the constitutive ingredient of the very symbolic order, so the attempts to overcome domination only generate new figures of the Master.”[1] With the internet and information technology dominating the economy, the symbolic order (the desire of the law) threatens to shape desire in a more controlling and explosive manner. The techno-oligarchs presume to have access to the mind and soul of the masses, such that they can manipulate desire through controlling the algorithms of consumption and want. No longer is it a straightforward master/slave sort of exploitation, or exploitation of workers by owners, but the enslavement is more insidious. It is a psychological enslavement and exploitation based on personal choices and production of data. It is no longer the body of the slave as commodity, but the mind and identity of the individual that is exploited.

Among the key theorists who have recognized this process is Yanis Varoufakis, who argues that capitalism is morphing into techno-feudalism.[2] We are toiling away in the fields staked out by Google, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon, but what is ultimately being mined from our toil, along with our identity, is our wants and desires. We are data-producing subjects confined to an infinitely reflexive world of personal choices. Our desire is the commodity that is being mined and shaped. “Not capital as we have known it since the dawn of the industrial era, but a new form of capital, a mutation of it that has arisen in the last two decades, so much more powerful than its predecessor that like a stupid, overzealous virus it has killed off its host.”[3]

Capitalism depended upon profit and markets, which the techno-fiefdoms have replaced with digital platforms; all who enter pay a form of rent, what Varoufakis calls “cloud rent.” The owners in traditional capitalism, owned the land, the machinery, the buildings, and the means of transport, but the owners of cloud capital own and control digital information. Just as modern physics, after Einstein, recognized that the physical universe is mostly a dynamic of information, so too in the modern economy, information is capital. Whoever owns or controls the code is the final arbiter of power.

Capitalism is already a departure from traditional economies tied to materiality, in that capital is not just another commodity, but its exchange value is intrinsic to human desire and activity. Capitalism decoupled power from land or various material goods. As is evident with Bitcoin and its offspring in the digital age, capital “is, above all else, a reflection of our relation to one another and to our technologies; i.e. the means and the ways in which we transform matter.”[4] The step from capitalism to techno-feudalism is that as in the feudal age, the techno-barons own information just as the landed gentry once owned and controlled the land but the difference is that there is no end to the capital to be generated. There is no end to the depth of exploitation and control.

Varoufakis illustrates the difference with the common household tool Alexa:  

It means that what begins with us training Alexa to do things on our behalf soon spins out of our control into something that we can neither fathom nor regulate. For once we have trained its algorithm, and fed it data on our habits and desires, Alexa starts training us. How does it do this? It begins with soft nudges to provide it with more information about our whims, which it then tailors into access to videos, texts and music that we appreciate. Once it has won us over in this manner, we become more suggestible to its guidance. In other words, Alexa trains us to train it better. The next step is spookier: having impressed us with its Capacity to appeal to our tastes, it proceeds to curate them. This it does by exposing us to images, texts and video experiences that it selects in order subtly to condition our whims. Before long, it is training us to train it to train us to train it to train us … ad infinitum.[5]

This infinite loop in the algorithmic network, an unseen force in the cloud, guides our behavior and choices, such that owners, manufacturing and curating our desires, directly profit through this manipulation.[6] Our identity is literally relinquished, through ID codes, purchasing records, familiarity (on Facebook and X) with whom and what we like. Every thought, every thing you have paid attention to, every opinion, is tracked, such that Apple, Google, Facebook, and X, know you and remember you better than you do.

The constant surveillance, the presumption of ownership over one’s life, the daily indignity of giving up something of oneself, and ultimately the fact of being rendered servile and brainwashed, describes a form of impoverished enslavement. It is as if the techno-oligarchs have claimed ownership of the law, and benefit according to how many cycle through the sequence of desire, sin, and death, Paul describes in Romans 7. The biblical picture of the loss of identity is not dissimilar though more exhaustive, in that pursuit of life through the law not only renders one a subject of the law but it identifies the deadly emptiness. The more one attempts to gain control the tighter the bind to the symbolic order, which contains only death in spite of or due to the effort expended. This also means that the salvation which Paul describes, perhaps more than at any other time, is a literal suspension of the economy which binds us in this modern age.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 29th https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (p. 20). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] Yanis Varoufakis, Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism? (New York: Vintage, 2023). Thanks to Matt Welch for pointing me to Varoufakis.

[3] Varoufakis, x.

[4] Ibid, 17.

[5] Ibid, 54-55.

[6] Ibid, 55.

Trump as Sovereign: The Theological Impetus Behind Donald Trump

Both the New York Times and the Washington Monthly have recently drawn a direct link behind Donald Trump’s pursuit of expanded presidential power and the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank built upon the thought of Leo Strauss and his mentor, the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.[1] The legal theory enabling Adolf Hitler, according to Damon Linker, has “risen to greater prominence now than at any time since the 1930s.”[2] Schmitt viewed liberalism as containing a fatal weakness in refusing to recognize the nature of human evil (original sin) or its political expression in sorting out the world according to friends and enemies. Liberalism is too weak to draw the necessary line identifying enemies. There must be a decider in chief, as legislatures are fraught with indecision and internal factions, and the rule of law (determinations of friends and enemies) is through the singular leader who can enact the law. “That leaves the executive as the best option for decisive action. It was this line of reasoning that led Schmitt to throw his support behind Adolf Hitler’s efforts in 1933 to transform himself into Germany’s sovereign decider.”[3]

Trump in his deployment of the military to the southern border, imposing tariffs, invoking the Alien Enemies Act to round up migrants, trying to end birthright citizenship, investigating his critics, suspending funds appropriated by Congress, firing the Inspector Generals, turning over personal data of Americans to Elon Musk, and making more emergency declarations in the first weeks of his presidency than any previous president, is setting himself up in the mold of Schmitt’s sovereign leader. It is not that Trump is reading Schmitt, but advisors such as Russel Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, are working a definitive plan, in which power flows through the presidency. According to both Linker and Shapiro, Trump is surrounded by ideologues who are implementing the philosophy of Schmitt, Strauss, and the Claremont Institute. The President’s approach to politics, “to cast supporters as friends and critics as enemies,” is precisely the formula of Schmitt.[4] As Shapiro concludes, “This is not muddled thinking or engineered chaos. It’s a coherent view of politics that supersedes the debates between a strong versus weak presidency. A new battle over Trump’s Schmittian approach to America has begun, and the outcome is unsettled.”[5]

The Sovereign Power of the Leader as Rule of Law

While it may not be as obvious as Christian nationalism, Christian Zionism, and the alignment of evangelicals behind Trump, this understanding is consciously theological (Schmitt began his career as a devout Catholic) both in its understanding of the leader as sovereign, and the necessity of this strong leader due to evil (original sin or Hobbes state of nature). People are driven by fear of violent death (the ultimate evil), and this fear is a healthy realism which drives them to the protections offered by a strong leader.

Schmitt justified the rise of Hitler to the position of sovereign leader on the basis of what he calls metaphysics. He contends that religious and metaphysical assumptions translate directly into political organization, and (he presumes) nominalist voluntarism is the proper underpinning of the role of the secular state. Nominalism pictures God, in his essence, as beyond human cognition and therefore we only have access to God’s law. This law is not based on human reason or notions of morality, but coming as it does from God, it is to be accepted in and for itself (sometimes called “divine command theory”). God does not obey laws of morality because they are moral, but the law is moral because he so commands (thus voluntarism). He is the originator of morality; it does not rest upon anything other than his decision (“God said it, and that settles it”).[6]

The voluntarist God translated into politics means that just as God is sovereign (and this is the ground of morality and law), so too the president or leader is sovereign and his word is law. The leader is the instrument of God and he enacts divine sovereignty through his decisions. Legislators, judges, and courts serve the president, who is the arbiter of the law. Legislatures and bureaucrats cannot make unified and uncontested decisions; this is the sole domain of the absolute leader. Thus, Trump has declared his “authority is total,” he stated his intention to be a “dictator from day one,” he does not intend to uphold the constitution (as he recently revealed), and the Supreme Court has agreed the president cannot break the law while acting as president (he is the embodiment and enactor of the law).

Original Evil in Fear of Violent Death

The peculiar role of evil for both Strauss and Schmitt is built upon the work of Thomas Hobbes, who grounds the work of the state in warding off violent death. Strauss referencing Hobbs maintains, “the fear of death, i.e. the emotional and inevitable, and therefore necessary and certain, aversion from death is the origin of law and the State.”[7] Fear of the other, my potential murderer, is prerational but it gives rise to the drive for self-preservation which undergirds all morality. “For death is not only the negation of the primary good, but is there with the negation of all goods, including the greatest good; and at the same time, death-being the summum malum, while there is no summum bonum – is the only absolute standard by reference to which man may coherently order his life.”[8]

The fear of death, or the negative and prerational (and perhaps preconscious) is the root of the more positive “preservation of life,” but the negative fear is the ground of the positive drive. “Only through death has man an aim . . . [the] aim which is forced upon him by the sight of death the aim of avoiding death. For this reason Hobbes prefers the negative expression ‘avoiding death’ to the positive expression ‘preserving life’.”[9] Hobbes concludes that fear of death is the root of virtue and the reason for the State: “consolidating peace, [and] protecting man against the danger of violent death.”[10]

Schmitt, taking up Hobbes’ root cause (fear of violent death), concludes that the essence of politics is discerning friend from enemy (the one to fear): “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”[11] Just as good and evil in the moral sphere and beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, are basic to these realms, so friend and enemy functions as the foundation of the political: “it is independent, not in the sense of a distinct new domain, but in that it can neither be based on any one antithesis or any combination of other antitheses, nor can it be traced to these.”[12] No other binary gets to the root cause of human striving: “The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation.”[13] The fear of death at the hands of the enemy, the other, the stranger, or the foreigner, is not based upon anything else; it may or may not pertain to economics, business or competition. “But he (the enemy) is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm nor by the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party.”[14]

This fear of death is the fundamental fact, having nothing to do with any outward cause: “the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word.”[15] The fear of the other is the basic state of nature, and “the political becomes evident by virtue of its being able to treat, distinguish, and comprehend the friend-enemy antithesis independently of other antitheses.”[16]

For Schmitt it is not simply that the friend/enemy distinction is the given reality, but it is the necessary reality for being human. A world of peace, without this distinction or without politics, would be a world without meaning: “It is conceivable that such a world might contain many very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful antithesis whereby men could be required to sacrifice life, authorized to shed blood, and kill other human beings.”[17] Meaning is created through death – the fear of death, the warding off of death, the shedding of blood, killing other humans, and sacrificing one’s life in this killing. Where would be the meaning in a world of peace?

Schmitt does not believe peace could prevail, anymore than he thinks it possible for humanity to exist without politics. “If a part of the population declares that it no longer recognizes enemies, then, depending on the circumstance, it joins their side and aids them. Such a declaration does not abolish the reality of the friend-and-enemy distinction.”[18] It just means that those who do not recognize our enemies have become the enemy. Having the same enemies is key in determining our friends. Someone who says they have no enemies is simply trying to stand outside the reality of a political community. For a nation to attempt such friendliness is dangerous: “If a people is afraid of the trials and risks implied by existing in the sphere of politics, then another people will appear which will assume these trials by protecting it against foreign enemies and thereby taking over political rule.”[19]

“What always matters is the possibility of the extreme case taking place, the real war, and the decision whether this situation has or has not arrived.”[20] War is the situation in which the fulness of meaning is made clear: “For only in real combat is revealed the most extreme consequence of the political grouping of friend and enemy. From this most extreme possibility human life derives its specifically political tension.”[21] This tension is the very substance of meaning and war makes this clear. Hobbes, through his experience of war, discovered war wipes away any illusions: “then all legitimate and normative illusions with which men like to deceive themselves regarding political realities in periods of untroubled security vanish.”[22] War washes away delusions of untroubled security and reveals the state of nature which prevails beneath political realities: “In it, states exist among themselves in a condition of continual danger, and their acting subjects are evil for precisely the same reasons as animals who are stirred by their drives (hunger, greediness, fear, jealousy).”[23]

Man is evil, and this reality once exposed stands behind true politics: “What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being.”[24] While the educator may be optimistic that all can be educated, and a judge must presume innocence, and the moralist must presume a freedom of choice, the political philosopher must recognize the reality of evil and the necessity of controlling this evil. The theologian and political philosopher begin with the reality of human evil. “A theologian ceases to be a theologian when he no longer considers man to be sinful or in need of redemption and no longer distinguishes between the chosen and the nonchosen.”[25] By the same token – “Because the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with an anthropological optimism.”[26]

Recognizing the reality of human evil or being duly frightened by evil is necessary to both theology and political philosophy: “The fundamental theological dogma of the evilness of the world and man leads, just as does the distinction of friend and enemy, to a categorization of men and makes impossible the undifferentiated optimism of a universal conception of man.”[27] There are friends and enemies and enemies are deadly. It may be necessary to frighten people into recognizing this basic human condition, along with the need to find protection. Afterall, “No form of order, no reasonable legitimacy or legality can exist without protection and obedience.”[28] The role of inducing fear is played by key political thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Fichte who “presuppose with their pessimism only the reality or possibility of the distinction of friend and enemy . . . Their realism can frighten men in need of security.” By frightening men one can instill in them the fundamental recognition of the need for protection rendered by the state. Schmitt compares recognition of the need for the state protection to the Cartesian cogito: “The protego ergo obligo is the cogito ergo sum of the state. A political theory which does not systematically become aware of this sentence remains an inadequate fragment.” [29]

As John McCormick sums up Schmitt, “fear is the source of political order. Human beings once confronted with the prospect of their own dangerousness will be terrified into the arms of authority.”[30] Schmitt sees his task as building on Hobbes view of humanity and to keep fear alive through posing the realism of the basic human condition, demonstrating the continual threat of war, convincingly showing that only a state under the control of a sovereign leader can provide security.[31]

Conclusion: An Alternative Theology and Politic

Donald Trump’s politics of fear, of multiplying enemies, of sovereign power vested in himself, of determining law above and beyond its written and judicial forms, and of holding out the possibility that only he can provide safety, has a clear lineage through Carl Schmitt and in failed theology. Nominalism and voluntarism constitute the abandonment of the identity of God in Jesus Christ, the true Sovereign, leaving a political blank slate on the order of the theological blank slate (filled in by law). Schmitt extended this theological error to include the political rule of law through the sovereign; a necessity in order to control this world which has been handed over to evil (in the absence of a robust understanding of the cosmic and universal work of Christ). The two-tiered concept of reality (God made inaccessible in heaven) displaces the revelation of God in Christ with law (which does not resolve but regulates evil). However, by identifying Christ as the final and full revelation of God (God in the flesh), the one who defeated evil and overcame death (even violent death on a cross) along with its enslaving fear, including fear of the enemy (displaced with love of enemy), in this faith there is a suspension of the punishing law, in the politics of the Kingdom (Rom. 6-8). This Christian vision is precisely what is missing in the political theology of Trump.  

[1] Damon Linker, “These Thinkers Set the Stage for Trump the All-Powerful”, New York Times (May 4, 2025). Robert J. Shapiro, “The German Political Theorist Who Explains What’s Happening in Washington” The Washington Monthly (February 10, 2025).

[2] Ibid, Linker.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, Shapiro.

[5] Ibid.

[6] See Jack Huchison, “The Political as a Theological Problem in the Thought of Carl Schmitt” A dissertation submitted to the Department of Government, the London School of Economics and Political Science, 2018.

[7] Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, Transl. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) 17.

[8] Strauss, 16.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid,18.

[11] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007) 26.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 27.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid, 35.

[18] Ibid, 51.

[19] Ibid, 52.

[20] Ibid, 35.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid, 52.

[23] Ibid, 59.

[24] Ibid, 61

[25] Ibid, 64.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid, 65.

[28] Ibid, 52.

[29] Ibid, 65.

[30] John McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany,” Political Theory, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Nov., 1994) 622.

[31] Ibid, 623.

Recovering the Neo-Chalcedonian Resolution

The divide between the Eastern and Western church rests upon two very different conceptions of Christology, cosmology, God, predestination, and salvation. Where the West would divide the Logos from the person of Jesus, the East has a long tradition of identifying Jesus directly with the Logos. Where the East has (mostly) consistently identified Christ’s suffering and death as divine suffering and death, the West has tended to mitigate through two natures the suffering and death so that it is only the human Jesus and not the divine Logos or divine Son of God who suffers. This has resulted in two very different pictures of God’s relation to creation and the nature of salvation (with the West focused on legal theory and the East focused on deliverance and healing). While in the name of ecumenism, it might do well to downplay this difference, the history of the difference is one of being glossed over until discussion has broken down and two very different Christianities have resulted.

The Lutheran theologian who devoted most of his life to recovering the unique sensibility of the East may be best qualified to tell this story. In Robert Jenson’s telling, the early creeds and councils did not so much resolve controversy as temporarily contain it through compromises which would ultimately end in schism. Even the power of the emperor, backing the impetus of the councils to reach a unified understanding (and the force of excommunication), did not contain the controversy and contradiction. It was not just Arianism, but even within the parameters of the creeds two irreconcilable positions, surrounding the issue giving rise to Arianism, survived. In the broadest terms, in one understanding the gospel tells of work done by a God antecedently and otherwise determined and in the other the gospel itself determines who and what God is.[1] The starkness of these two alternatives was mediated through a series of secondary issues such as the role of Mary (Theotokos?), the nature of the Logos, the nature of Christ as Son, distinctions within the Trinity, but what was at stake was the degree to which the story of Jesus of Nazareth could be identified with the story of God.

The identification of Jesus of Nazareth with God, certainly did not fit the philosophical understanding of God’s impassibility. Subordinationism was the initial response for those committed to a Greek understanding but Nicaea accentuates the dissonance in identifying “one who underwent gestation, birth, growth, a human career, rejection, torture and execution as ‘true God.’”[2] Subordinationism had said Jesus was less than God and had thus relieved the strain, as these things were assigned to one less than God. Nicaea forced a new expression of the same problem.

The Alexandrian school of Christology acknowledged the dissonance in a position Jenson summarizes as: “We have no idea how the Son, who is true— and therefore of course impassible—God, can have suffered, but somehow it happened.”[3] The Antiochene school refused the dissonance and attempted something like the Arian compromise by distinguishing between Jesus the Son who suffered and God the Son, who alone is “true God.” God the Son is divine, and therefore does not suffer but within this same person is another “nature” which suffers with humanity. The Antiochene escape is the Arian escape “moved a notch.” [4] Now instead of subordinating the one who suffers to less than God, no longer allowed by Nicaea, the Antiochenes make a distinction within Christ, assigning part of him to deity (the impassible) and part of him to humanity (the suffering). The philosophical ontology could be spared by prying open a different place within Jesus. The split within Christ would be negotiated in a variety of terms but the Antiochenes prevailed inasmuch as the unified image of Christ was displaced by distinctions identified with deity (e.g., Logos, Word, Son of God) which were something other than the human Jesus. “Thus theology was set a new problem: of construing a unity between two distinct and metaphysically polar entities.”[5]

The unified understanding of Jesus as “Christ,” “Logos,” “Son of Mary,” “Son of God,” the second member of the Trinity was once assumed, but a gap was opened, in which Jesus is “one with the Son” or “one with the Word” as a relation rather than as direct identity. As Theodore of Mopsuestia describes, in his development of physeis (natures): “He |Jesus| is God because of his close conjunction with that divine nature who really is God.”[6] In his commentary on John he sorts out each clause of the narrative so as to assign it to either the Logos (with its deified conjunction) or the man.[7] Jesus of Nazareth is not himself directly the Logos or one of the Trinity, but inasmuch as he is Son, Logos, or Word, he exists in relation to the second identity of the Trinity. There is a clear distinction between his two “natures,” conjoined as they might be. Even the saving assigned to Jesus is more a result of this conjunction of two natures. “Jesus saves,” or his flesh is “life-giving” only in being conjoined to God. While Jesus shares in the Logos, and is thus deserving of worship, this conjunction is not direct identity. The Logos precedes the man, and by the same token the Logos does not suffer nor is he son of Mary. Theodore’s distinction of Logos from the man Jesus, would become standard in Antiochene thought and among those subject to its influence.

According to Nestorius, even the popular liturgical expression acclaiming Mary “Mother of God” (Theotokos) is mistaken. Mary did not bear deity but a man and “the incarnate God did not die, but raised him in whom he was incarnate. . . .”!”[8] This was a step too far for the Alexandrians, and they find a champion in Cyril of Alexandria, who takes up the Alexandrian cause in opposing Nestorius. According to Jenson, “His great concern was for continuity of divine agency throughout the gospel narrative, for theological warrant to read the Gospels whole as God’s own story. It is throughout the story God the Son who becomes human and who by what he does as human unites us to himself and his Father.”[9] According to Cyril: “We confess that the very one. . . who is only-begotten God—and who is indeed according to his own nature impassible—suffered in the flesh for us. . . .” Confession must include “the death according to the flesh of the only-begotten Son of God.”[10] Cyril insists, everything one might denote by Christ, God the Son, Jesus, or any of the other biblical names or titles ascribed to him, all are predicated of the one subject, the incarnate God. As Cyril puts it, “The sacred writings proclaim him sometimes as a whole and single human who is, in the Incarnation, the understood subject of his deity, and sometimes, vice versa, as God who is the understood subject of his humanity.”[11] His point is a direct refutation of the Antiochene doctrine, aimed at dividing Christ.

In Theodore’s examples, “God the Son has a mother” and “Jesus is lifegiving,” demand two different natures (as God has no mother and God alone, and not Jesus, gives life), but Cyril identifies what is two, in Theodore, with one subject. “Therefore we say the body of Christ is divine since it is the body of God. It shines with unutterable glory and is incorruptible and holy and life-giving.” Likewise in the other direction: “When we read he “grew in wisdom and knowledge and grace’ this must be predicated of (the incarnate Son)… and so also hunger and thirst. And indeed, even when we read that he petitions the Father to escape suffering, we attribute also this to the same one.”[12] According to Cyril, we confess “one nature, of God the Logos, that has been enfleshed.”[13] Cyril is directly deploying Theodore’s term, not to refer to two natures but to show that there is a singular Subject (the Logos is human). Cyril acknowledges that it may be legitimate to speak of two natures, if by this we mean Jesus is everything required to be God the Son and this particular human being. He instantiates each in who he is. There is an abstract understanding allowing for two natures, but not a concrete distinction.

Unfortunately, the Council of Ephesus (449) and then the council of Chalcedon (451), though setting forth a statement in light of Cyril’s strong claims, once again aimed at appeasing the Antiochenes. Pope Leo sent representatives to the councils, along with his Tome or letter, which would be appended to the councils’ statements, including the following crude formulation: “For each nature is agent of what is proper to it, working in fellowship with the other: the Word doing what belongs to the Word and the flesh what belongs to the flesh. The one shines forth in the miracles, the other submits to the injuries.”[14] In other words, each nature does its own thing and goes its own way depending on the circumstance. Leo’s representatives insured that his views were reflected in the final statement by picturing the natures as existing “in” Christ rather than allowing that Christ is abstractly “from” these two natures hypostatically united in him. For the Western church, Chalcedon was identified with Leo’s position, while the Egyptian and Syrian churches remained suspicious of Chalcedon, eventually becoming separate churches.

Those of Cyril’s followers who remained in the imperial church would interpret Chalcedon and hypostasis with a Cyrillian slant. They made hypostasis mean what they thought it should, making it the “’synthetic’ agent of the whole gospel narrative, both of what is divine in it and of what is human in it and they identified the eternal Logos as himself this hypostasis.”[15] According to John of Damascus, “Since Christ is one and his hypostasis is one, it is one and the same who wills and works divinely and humanly. . .. And since Christ is one and the same who wills according to each nature, the concrete will is one and the same… .” Thus, “He did not do human things in the human way, for he is not only man but also God. Whence it is that his sufferings are life-giving and salvific. Nor does he do divine things in the divine way. . .. Whence it is that he performed divine signs by touch and speech. .. .”[16] Also John is clear, Jesus is the Logos: “God the Logos was not united to flesh antecedently hypostasized in itself, but… came in his own hypostasis to dwell in the womb of the holy virgin, and hypostasized .. . , from the holy blood of the virgin, flesh animated by a rational soul. . . .”[17] This understanding, which identified hypostasis with Logos as the one agent of salvation, marks Neo-Chalcedonianism. The Cyrillians insure that at the Second Council of Constantinople (made up mostly of Eastern bishops in 553) this Neo-Chalcedonian understanding was made dogma, though it had little effect outside the communion surrounding Constantinople (the Western church mostly ignored Constantinople of 553).[18]

Maximus the Confessor (579-662) inherits and builds upon the Neo-Chalcedonian identity. Neo-Chalcedonians included both Cyril’s “from which he is” and the Chalcedonian “in which he is” and Maximus adds “he (simply) is”: “Christ, being according to nature from both deity and humanity, and in deity and humanity, is by nature God and man. And another factor there is not at all.”[19] The hypostasis is not a synthesis in addition to the natures, but the hypostasis is both of the natures. He is not alternatively one and then alternatively another but he is directly “from” both. Not “from” as a sequential relation (e.g., in time or before time) but simply as an abstract description made concrete in Jesus Christ. According to Jenson, “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him.”[20]

What God is doing in Christ is not secondary to who he is, but Jesus in his healing, peaceable, kenotic love, is God. Thus, Maximus claims that one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh. This is not a suffering exterior to God but God suffering in the Son – “suffering God” in Maximus phrase.[21] The early church, from Melito of Sardis (100-180) affirmed straightforwardly and paradoxically, “The Impassible suffered… .” “God was killed. . . .”![22] The Neo-Chalcedonian developments of Maximus do not ease the paradox so much as accentuate it in that “the suffering Son is the Logos of the presumed impassible Father.”[23]

The near loss of this Neo-Chalcedonian insight in the West has stunted Western theology in nearly all of its phases, but most particularly it has helped foster a violent image of God and a violent atonement. While both East and West have embraced various levels of violence, it is ultimately the Neo-Chalcedonian understanding, in its identity of God with Christ, that most fully opens up the possibility of the peaceable nature of God and his Kingdom as the saving purpose of Christianity.

(Register now for the course Colossians and Christology which will run from June 3rd to July 22nd https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology: volume 1, The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 165.

[2] Jenson, 125.

[3] Jenson, 125.

[4] Jenson, 126.

[5] Jenson, 126.

[6] Catechetical Homilies, 57, cited in Jenson, 127.

[7] Commentary on the Gospel of John, ed. & tr. into Latin, J.-M. Vospe, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (Paris: Louvain, 1940), vols. 62-63. Cited in Jenson, 128.

[8] “First Sermon against “Theotokos,”” Friedrich Loofs, ed., Nestoriana: Die Fragmente des Nestorius (Halle: 1905), 251-252. Cited in Jenson, 128.

[9] Jenson, 128-129.

[10] Second Letter to Nestorius, ed. Schwartz, i.i.1.25-28.6. Cited in Jenson, 129.

[11] To Theodosius, on True Faith, ed. Schwarz, i.i.1.25-28.29. Cited in Jenson, 129.

[12] First Letter to Successus, ed. Schwartz, i.i.vi.151—157.10. Cited in Jenson, 129.

[13] To the Noble Ladies, on True Faith, ed. Schwartz, i,v,62—118.10. Jenson, 129.

[14] Epistola Papae Leonis ad Flavianum ep. Constantinopolitanum de Eutyche, cited here from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1:79.3-7. Cited in Jenson, 131.

[15] Jenson, 133.

[16] John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith, 59.193-196. Cited in Jenson, 133.

[17] John of Damascus, 46.24-30. Cited in Jenson, 133.

[18] Jenson, 133.

[19] Ambigua 91:121B. Cited in Jenson, 136.

[20] Jenson, 137.

[21] Ambigua, 91:1037B: “theos pathetos.” Cited in Jenson, 137.

[22] Antonius Caesar, 13.16. Cited in Jenson, 125.

[23] Jenson, 137.

Solving the Puzzle of Christology

The primary issue in the development of doctrine, as it passed through a variety of heresies and their repudiation, is the identity of Christ. How are the humanity and deity of Jesus to be understood? Is it that Christ is divine only inasmuch as he is not human, or human apart from his divinity? Is His suffering limited to His humanity, preserving his deity from the passion and cross?  Or is it that Jesus in his suffering in Gethsemane and Golgotha is revealing the true heart of God? What is clear, is that Jesus Christ poses a new model, a new relationship between humanity and deity, and understanding how God is at work in the humanity of Christ is the key to understanding how he is at work in our humanity. The key question is, according to Rowan Williams, “how does Christology itself generate a new and fuller grasp of the ‘grammar’ of createdness?”[1]

Recognizing and knowing Christ, gives us a fuller grasp of who He is, simultaneous with recognizing the world in which we live and who we are. What Christology “seeks to articulate presses us to work at the logic, or grammar . . . of speaking about God” characterized by “intelligence and love” and the logic of creation.[2] Talking about God and Christ provides “a credible environment for action and imagination, a credible means of connecting narratives, practices, codes of behaviour;” ultimately it offers “a world to live in.”[3] The refining of Christology is not simply the practice of the individual Christian, but is definitive of one of the primary activities of the Church, with the errors and their correction providing a way forward in knowing Christ.

The manner in which Christology is misconstrued, demonstrates that the primary error is trying to fit Christ into an already realized understanding. God incarnate is made to fit an already existing world pattern, which inevitably denies the reality of God and human brought together in one person. Docetism would deny the bodily incarnation; adoptionism holds that Jesus Christ was not the Son of God from eternity but was adopted by God at some point; Sabellianism and Modalism hold that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are simply different manifestations of God; Arianism teaches that Jesus is not fully divine; etc. etc. In the first five centuries of the church there were some 30 distinct heresies concerning the person and work of Christ. All these heresies share the form of trying to conceive Christ along an already accepted understanding, and if nothing else this is what the early church councils refute.

The focus of the church councils was aimed at countering heresies which would reduce the reality of Christ’s identity. The first council of Nicaea (325) condemned Arianism and defined Father and Son as consubstantial; Constantinople I (381) also condemned Arianism, but also Macedonianism which denied the divinity of the Spirit; Ephesus (431) condemned Nestorianism, which denied the unity of the divine and human in Christ; Chalcedon (451) condemned Monophysitism (or Eutychianism) which denied Christ’s human nature; Constantinople II (553) recondemned Nestorianism; Constantiniple III (680) condemned Monothelitism, which held Christ only had a divine and not human will which arose as a reaction to Monophysitism which taught Jesus had only a divine and not a human nature; Nicaea II (787) condemned adoptionism which held Christ was not the Son of God by nature. The consistent problem was a reduction in the reality of the New Testament portrayal of the identity of Jesus.

There is an expansive understanding of Christ in the New Testament, in which Jesus could in no way be conceived within the received parameters of personhood. He is active in the life of believers, preserving their faithfulness: “awaiting eagerly the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end, blameless (1 Cor. 1.7–8); He is “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). Christ is “alive” in believers (Gal. 2.20); as God’s Son he is restoring relations with God throughout the Cosmos (Rom. 8:21). He has died, and has been raised and is seated at the right hand of God (Rom. 8.34). In one of the most common phrases of the New Testament, believers are “in Christ.” He is the ultimate agent of divine judgment; He puts divine rule into effect, both in his ministry (exorcising demons, healing etc.) and the work completed upon his return; He is the means of the gifting of the Holy Spirit creating a new community through his body and acting as head of the Church. Christ is the identity and ground of this new community.[4]

“Who do you say that I am,” is the perennial question and human language and understanding through the centuries have approached an answer and explanation in a series of false starts, qualifications, and general pointers, such that there is a continual groping toward a fuller understanding of Christ (and through Christ an understanding of the world.) The understanding of Christ individually and corporately, however, can in no way be identified as one of steady progress. Entire epochs, modes of thinking, and developments within theology, have misidentified Christ. For example, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham (if not the Franciscans) found a mode of thinking (nominalism), which denies there is access to God’s eternality. According to Scotus, “the human soul and will of Jesus perform finite acts and those acts must be of finite worth.”[5] Likewise, “Ockham wants to argue that God’s power to bestow grace is always conditioned (as a result of his own divine choice, of course, in the ordering of the contingent universe) by the character of the subject receiving it, so that infinite grace cannot be given to a finite agent.”[6] Everything must be traced back to God’s unconstrained voluntaristic will: “God’s will and purpose were completely free and unconstrained by any created reality – and that must mean that God’s decision to be incarnate could have nothing to do with any quality inherent in humanity.”[7] This pure will on the part of God could make a stone or a donkey, as well as Jesus, the site of incarnation.

What becomes clear by the fifth century, according to Williams, is that speaking about Jesus must involve a new form of thought “in which the complete and unequivocal presence of divine action and human action inseparably united with one another was affirmed in a way that did not diminish the true and active presence of either and did not see them as related ‘side by side’, one of them influencing the other from outside.”[8] The puzzle solving involves recognizing the divine presence in Jesus of Nazareth, and continuing to comprehend the fullness of that presence. The Christological statement from the Council of Chalcedon is typical: a formula aimed at satisfying various perspectives in regard to that fullness, but more of a guideline, than a definitive statement:

We all teach harmoniously [that he is] the same perfect in godhead, the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of a reasonable soul and body; homoousios with the Father in godhead, and the same homoousios with us in manhood … acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.

He is perfect in his humanity and deity, having homoousious with the Father (that is the same in being and same in essence), and also having the same essence and being as other humans; he has these two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. This statement is a long time in coming, but how do we grasp its meaning? As Williams notes, “Like most or many formulae of settlement, Chalcedon defines an agenda rather than a solution to the problems that have generated it.”[9] The agenda for Christology though, is now more clearly defined: Christ has two natures and two wills in one person.

Chalcedon, like all of the early Church councils, reflects the radical questions posed by the New Testament. The identity of Jesus with God, and the explicit claims of deity in his “I am” statements in John (e.g., “before Abraham was born, I am.” Jn 8:58) can in no way be approached according to some normative model as to how God reveals himself. Paul also provides descriptions that are pointed, clear, yet beyond immediate comprehension. In Colossians alone, Christ is the “image of the invisible God”, the “firstborn” over creation (1:15), with “all things created through Him and for Him” (1:16), “in Him all things hold together” (1:17), in Him “all the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily” (2:9), through Him God “reconciles all things to Himself” (1:20), He is the “head of the body the Church” (1:18), sharing the glory of God with believers (1:27), He has preeminence over all things that “in everything, He might have the supremacy” (1:18), all of this results “in a true knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ Himself (2:2). Jesus Christ in these passages is identified as Creator, sustainer, reconciler, the visible image of God, and in each of these roles the work of the Father and Spirit are evident. It is through Him that the Father is revealed, that the Father reconciles, and that the mystery of God, the Trinity, is revealed. Knowing Christ is the goal, but this knowing involves stretching human understanding and experience.

Perhaps the most radical contemporary statement which comes closest to the radical biblical identity of God with Jesus, comes from the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson:

What Christology is—or ought to be—about is the Jesus who appears in the Gospels, as he is in fact the Son of God he was accused of claiming to be. Thus, if we speak of a “divine nature,” what the phrase in its way denotes must be this one. If we speak of a “human nature,” what the phrase denotes in its different way must be this one. If we speak of “a single hypostasis,” what the phrase denotes in its yet different way must be this one. And all of this language—as any new language we might devise—speaks truly about this one only as it displays him as the Son, that is, as it displays this one’s relation to the Father in the Spirit.”[10]

Jenson pointedly identifies the story of Jesus with the story of God. Where Williams is eager to distinguish the Word of God from Jesus of Nazareth, Jenson says explicitly these are not two but one and the same: “the second identity of God is directly the human person of the Gospels, in that he is the one who stands to the Father in the relation of being eternally begotten by him. May we now finally say that God the Son suffered, without evasive qualification? It was dogmatically settled before Maximus that ‘one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh.’”[11] This understanding may not be immediately comprehensible or reducible to our present understanding, but here the identity between God and Jesus set forth in the New Testament and the Church seem to take on its most complete form.

Who is Jesus in His divinity and humanity, in His relation to creation and the Church, and how do I come to know him more completely – is the driving question and impetus behind much of the New Testament, behind the various heresies and their repudiation, and behind the formulas arising from the councils, which require continued refinement and explanation. The task of every Christian, the theological task, which is never finished, is to identify the person of Jesus. This is not a task that can be closed out, as if one has fully achieved the fulness of the reality of Christ. Jesus’ identity, his question for each of us (“Who do you say that I am”), is not a mere summing up of his past history but is an ever-present demand.

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition) 6.

[2] Williams, 7.

[3] Williams, Intro, location 70.

[4] Williams, 48-49.

[5] Williams, 133.

[6] Williams, 134.

[7] Williams, 136.

[8] Williams, Intro location 81.

[9] Williams, p. 88. Unfortunately, as Jordan Wood spells out in some detail, Williams is guilty of the very thing he warns of – trying to fit Christ into preconceived frame. “What troubles me most about Williams’s christology is how keen it is to deny “exhaustive identity” between the Word of God and Jesus of Nazareth (159-60).” Also, “To the extent that Williams’s operative and determinative thought-picture is one of ‘two agencies’ and not, as in Christ, two agencies that are positively one and mutually interpenetrating in one agent, his picture furtively imports the very premise he wishes to deny throughout: that infinite and finite agencies are not to be conceived as two finite agencies that must impinge upon one another to be united.” Jordan Wood, “Against Asymmetrical Christology: A Critical Review of Rowan Williams’s ‘Christ the Heart of Creation’” Posted on Al Kimel’s Blog, Eclectic Orthodoxy (4 August 2019).

[10] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Triune God (second edition), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 134.

[11] Jenson, 137.

A Historical-Theological Understanding of the Resurrection: From Wittgenstein and Hegel to Moltmann and Paul

Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. W. F. Hegel, two figures not normally cited together, concur that the resurrection of Christ is the triumph of love, and has little to do with the miraculous. Focus on the miraculous aspect of the resurrection misses how resurrection is to be integrated into the life and identity of the crucified. Wittgenstein confides to his diary his struggle with the resurrection. He understands it is not simply a matter of believing another miracle, but a comprehensive shift in how the world is perceived – an alternative grammar in apprehending the world. “Just as ‘God’ does not pick out an agent or an individual among others, in the way a proper name does, so ‘resurrection’ does not pick out a specific event in chronicled history to set beside other events.”[1] Proof or evidence or even the factuality of the resurrection is not primary for Wittgenstein, but the shift in the global “reading” of facts entailing the founding of the church and living in faith. Belief in the resurrection is entry into an alternative world of understanding.

The Death and Resurrection as God’s Story

For Hegel also, the resurrection is not about the miraculous but is to be read as key to the story of God: “the full presence of both humanity and divinity, the despair that God himself is dead, and the reversal, the putting to death of death and the resurrection into life” is “a reenactment of the divine history.”[2] This history is Trinitarian in that the “abstractness of the Father is given up in the Son. But the negation of this negation is the unity of Father and Son—love, or the Spirit.”[3] In Christ a difference in God is realized, in that the distant abstract God is made concrete (in the world), such that he is immediately accessible (in Spirit and love). Through incarnation and death, human finitude is “transfigured into the highest love” as God is poured out and made available in human interiority. The resurrection and ascension are an extension of the incarnation, as in this “exaltation Christ has appeared for immediate consciousness in the mode of actuality.”[4] Hegel refers to the resurrection as making God available for “envisagement,” which he equates with the defeat of death (the negative) and the “preservation in death itself” of the “highest love.”[5]

In Hegel’s estimate this story of God in the history of the “teaching, life, death, and resurrection” makes the community of love, the church, a possibility. This goes beyond an intellectual foundation: “This is the crucial point on which everything depends, this is the verification, the absolute proof. This is what is to be understood as the witness of the Spirit.”[6] This is the history of the kenotic outpouring of the Holy Spirit in which the sensible presence is transfigured into his real presence through the Spirit.[7] In the “eternal repetition of the life passion and resurrection of Christ in the members of the church,” lies the creation and preservation of the world.[8] The world is incorporated into the story of God.

Jürgen Moltmann, like Hegel, reads the resurrection as the unfolding story of God: “The union of Jesus with God and of God with Jesus was constituted . . . by ‘the resurrection of Jesus’.”[9] The risen Christ is the truth of the historical Jesus and the truth of God, and this is captured in the earliest formulas of the New Testament: “Jesus Christ crucified and risen” (1 Co 15:3–5). His resurrection, joined to his life course, teachings, and death, serves as the foundation of Jesus’ identity as Son of God, Lord, or simply God, and is the cornerstone of his eschatological kingdom. Resurrection means his entire life is the founding of the eschatological kingdom, and there is no divide between the life of Christ and the founding of the Church. Luke-Acts, the Gospels and the history of the Church are to be read as a singular movement of God pouring out his life for the world.

Resurrection: The Interpretive Key to All Things

Along with Hegel and Wittgenstein, Moltmann recognized resurrection is not just a fortuitous miracle or another historical event. The resurrection is the end of history as previously understood: “it is not a question of establishing the life and death of Jesus as a historical fact, and regarding the resurrection, the appearances of Jesus and the Easter faith as inter-changeable interpretations of that fact. That would not do justice to the rise of the Christian faith at all.”[10] The resurrection is the interpretive key to understand the life of Christ through faith. The resurrection “does not speak the ‘language of facts’, but only the language of faith and hope, that is, the ‘language of promise.”[11] In this world the cross is foolishness and a scandal, and by the same token the resurrection cannot be “proven.” The cross and resurrection can only be grasped through faith as an alternative world-view.

In the Wittgensteinian sense, for Moltmann the resurrection is the deep grammar by which the meaning of Christ is to be read into all things. Referencing I Cor. 15:14 (“If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain and your faith is vain”) Moltmann notes, “If one calls the cross of Jesus the ‘nuclear fact’ of Christian faith, one must call his resurrection the primal datum of that faith.”[12] In the early Christian community, there was little dispute about the fact of the resurrection. The issue was how to interpret Christ’s death in light of the resurrection in which light record of his life was preserved. “As a merely historical person he would long have been forgotten, because his message had already been contradicted by his death on the cross. As a person at the heart of an eschatological faith and proclamation, on the other hand, he becomes a mystery and a question for every new age.”[13]

A Reinterpretation of God’s Righteousness

The Easter faith arose among those who fled the crucifixion, as God seemed to have abandoned Christ. However, where faith in Jesus was shattered at the cross, the resurrection expands faith to include a reconstitution of (Jewish) hope. No longer is righteousness on the basis of the law or Jewish eschatology. Jesus was a “lawless man,” a “rebel,” “abandoned by God” according to the law, but declared righteous by the resurrection. The Jewish apocalyptic says all should wait for the resurrection of the dead, but Easter faith is trust in Jesus resurrection from the dead.[14] “Between the eschatological Easter faith and the various forms of late-Jewish apocalyptic stood Jesus himself and his cross.”[15] The future and past of Judaism are made new in light of God’s identification with Christ. In the resurrection “God has identified himself, his judgment and his kingdom with the crucified Jesus, [with] his cross and his helplessness.”[16] God and life are found in the midst of death as the future kingdom of life is made possible: “namely reconciliation in the midst of strife, the law of grace in the midst of judgment, and creative love in the midst of legalism.”[17]

This is not faith that God will damn the unrighteous and save the righteous – a resurrection unto judgement. This is a different conception of God and righteousness – a trust in God’s righteousness. In the midst of suffering, evil, and death, God has made things right. “The Christian belief in the resurrection does not proclaim world-historical tendencies or anthropological hopes, but the nucleus of a new righteousness in a world where dead and living cry out for righteousness.”[18]

Reading the cross in light of the law makes of Christ’s death one more propitiating sacrifice, with the expiation or propitiation meeting the requirements of the law but the resurrection is the end of the law of just deserts, as executioner, betrayer, oppressor and oppressed alike are received into righteousness by grace. “God had answered the evil deed of men in crucifying Jesus in a glorious way by raising him from the dead (Acts 2.24).”[19] The resurrection read into the cross means all that have been delivered over to death due to unrighteousness will find life. “Through his suffering and death, the risen Christ brings righteousness and life to the unrighteous and the dying.”[20] His death on the cross makes the meaning of the resurrection evident for the unrighteous: as their representative in death provides new life in resurrection. There is passage from death to life for all who are subject to death.

Defeat of Death, Evil and Sin

His is “resurrection from the dead” and not a revivification, reanimation or temporary raising, as it directly counters death (with all of its connotations of sin and punishment). It is not life after death, as conceived in many religions, presuming the immortality of the soul or the transmigration of souls. There is an annihilation of death; not mere life after death. The harshness of the crucifixion is an exclamation that death is a reality, and there can be no peace between this reality (a life lived in light of death) and the reality of crucifixion and resurrection (death defeated by life). This is not on the order of the raising up of Lazarus who would die again, but Jesus is no longer controlled by death: “Christ being raised from the dead will never die again” (Rom. 6.9). “Resurrection means ‘life from the dead’ (Rom. 9.15), and is itself connected with the annihilation of the power of death.”[21] One sort of history ends – “evil, death, abandonment by God” with resurrection marking the beginning of the new world of the righteousness of God.”[22]

He is “the first fruits of them that are asleep,” “the “pioneer of life,” the “firstborn from the dead.” He is “Jesus Christ”: “Jesus” binds him to his past, and “Christ” binds him to his future.[23]

‘Easter’ was a prelude to, and a real anticipation of, God’s qualitatively new future and the new creation in the midst of the history of the world’s suffering. . . For the Easter hope shines not only forwards into the unknown newness of the history which it opens up, but also backwards over the graveyards of history, and in their midst first on the grave of a crucified man who appeared in that prelude.[24]

Through the resurrection the death of Christ becomes the defeat of death for the living and the dead: “For to this end has Christ died and come alive again, that he might be Lord of both dead and living” (Rom. 14.9). The resurrection does not relativize the cross (as a past event), but makes it the point of salvation, qualifying the crucified as Lord and Christ, filling the cross with the eschatological and saving significance of God defeating death in dying and being raised.

The Resurrection as Providing Theological Coherence

The resurrection is often tacked on to legal theories of atonement (e.g., a sign of sacrifice accepted), rather than integrating the resurrection into the life and death of Christ to form a theological coherence. The historical and the eschatological are separated, with Jesus life and death as one half of Jesus and the risen Christ as the other half.[25] His death, separated from his resurrection is a repudiation of what he said and did, but joined together the reality of the incarnation (God become man) is made complete and coherent: “his cross is understood in the light of his resurrection, his way to the cross in the light of the saving meaning of his cross, his words and miracles in the light of his Easter exaltation to be Lord.”[26]

Jesus is raised, which means not only that this single individual has overcome death but his life is extended to church and cosmos. As Rowan Williams puts it, “The life that lives in Jesus is the active source of all relations in the finite world; so it is natural that, in its human embodiment, it is creative of unrestricted relation in the human world – and indeed beyond, if we take seriously Paul’s meditations in Romans 8 on the dependence of the entire creation on the reconciling process that occurs in the death and resurrection of Jesus.”[27] The resurrection is not tacked on to history but is the transformative moment for history and the cosmos, as the indestructible life of God is activated from within history and the cosmos so as to become “all in all” (Col 3:11).

[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. Von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980 (henceforth CV), 64. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition) 218.

[2] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Consummate Religion, trans. By R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodson and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007) 53.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Hegel, 131.

[5] Hegel, 131-2.

[6] Hegel, 145.

[7] Hegel, 149.  As the editor notes, “For Hegel the resurrection of Jesus from the dead indeed entails an Aufhebung—an annulling of his sensible presence, yet a preservation of his real presence and its transfiguration into the modality of spirit.”

[8] Hegel, 152.

[9] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993) 161.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Moltmann, 173.

[12] Moltmann, 161.

[13] Moltmann, 162.

[14] Moltmann, 172.

[15] Moltmann, 166.

[16] Moltmann,169.

[17] Moltmann, 171.

[18] Moltmann, 177.

[19] Moltmann, 179.

[20] Moltmann, 185.

[21] Moltmann, 170.

[22]Moltmann, 169.

[23] Moltmann, 164.

[24] Moltmann, 163.

[25] Moltmann, 160.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Williams, 38.