Forging Ploughshares

Do We Need the Insight of Islam to See Ourselves Rightly?

One of the most successful bridge builders to other religions was the Catholic Monk, Thomas Merton, who emphasized the need for a Christocentric understanding for engagement with other religions and traditions. His was not the watered-down approach which imagined it was enough to reason together, but like Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Nazi Germany, he saw the times as requiring drastic and emergency measures. With Bonhoeffer he concurs, people with good intentions who imagine that a little reason will suffice do not understand either the depths of evil or of the holy. “The news that God has become man strikes at the very heart of an age in which the good and the wicked regard either scorn for man or the idolization of man as the highest attainable wisdom.”[1]

Merton’s advocacy of peace, without compromise, at once appreciated that other religions recognize peace and goodness are to be equated with God, but he also recognized that reasoning together was inadequate to stand-up against political expediency. “Men do not agree in moral reasoning. They concur in the emotional use of slogans and political formulas.”[2] The persuasive power of fear and desire, such as that dealt out by the Nazis or our own Nazified political situation, is untouched by the call to ethical considerations. The evil done in the name of religion, in the name of the good, by those committed to lies and murder, will be unphased by moral or religious theory. The evil and destructiveness of the day, seemingly determined to ignite a world conflagration, is the necessary preparation for man to become a god, or for the president to be the Messiah.

We might have wished the Nazis saw themselves through the eyes of those they were destroying. Shouldn’t we wish the same thing for the United States at this moment. That it might see itself through the eyes of the hundreds of parents slain at a girls school, that it might see itself through the eyes of those suffering oppression and terror in Iran and Gaza. Bonhoeffer understood that the church of his day had failed, as it had been coopted by the Nazi regime. The sickness was too deep for a sermon, a philosophical correction, an ethical or religious discussion, but doesn’t that describe this present moment in the United States? Isn’t the best thing that could happen, in order to expose this present delusion, recognition that Iranians – those whom our military would destroy, may also be in the best position to expose the lie of the times? Isn’t that the point of loving the enemy, that we be enabled to see things through their eyes? If we simply demonize the enemy, and make no attempt to see the good in them, then we also will not appreciate where they are right in their judgment of us. According to Merton, “As long as we do not have this love, as long as this love is not active and effective in our lives (for words and good wishes will never suffice) we have no real access to the truth. At least not to moral truth.”[3]

We are living at a time when Christians would identify themselves over and against the culture of Islam, imagining the West is a Christian culture. In the rhetoric of various evangelical leaders (as Franklin Graham has put it), Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion” and war seems to be part of a “necessary” clash of religions and civilizations? This seemingly Medieval perception is precisely that – Medieval in its theological roots. Steve Bannon, perhaps the key thinker behind Donald Trump, believes the United States is a Christian nation, not just in the sense that a majority of Americans describe themselves as Christians, but also in the sense that the country’s culture is Christian. This means our war with evil is a literal war against Islam: “We” in the West must affirm our Christian identity or we will be overrun by dangerous outsiders (Islamists) who will impose a different identity upon us. In a speech at the Vatican, he said, “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism.” An article in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Vatican-vetted journal, singled out Bannon as a “supporter of apocalyptic geopolitics,” the logic of which is “no different from the one that inspires Islamic fundamentalism.” This notion of a clash of civilizations is a delusion.

Christians are not those who align with Western civilization over and against Islamic civilization. The fear of Islam is on the order of a previous generation’s fear of socialism. As a child in Texas, it seemed all of the evils of the world could be attributed to the communists and socialists, and what we were blind to was the “socialist” aspect of the gospel. Because of this inability, Christianity was reimagined as a capitalistic religion, in which concern for the poor was largely absent, and the injustices of Western oppression were excused or made invisible; which is not to excuse or deny the problems of communism, but the demonization of the enemy blinds to the value in their critical perspective on ourselves.

If this is true of “godless communism,” it is even more profoundly true of our coreligionists. Islam shares the early texts of the Bible and a high regard for Christ. The goodness, beauty, and love of God, as with Christians, is a first order reality. According to Islamist Seyyed Nasr, “All reality issues from the One, Who is the sole absolute Reality, which is also absolute Beauty. As the One manifests the many on various levels of cosmic existence, this absolute Beauty is also manifested along with existence, of which it is the splendor like the aura around the sun.”[4] In Sufism, aesthetics is part of ethics and spiritual discipline. One is trained to recognize Absolute Beauty as of God, and it is God for whom the soul yearns in its appreciation of the beautiful. Nasr appeals to Plotinus: “the soul strives after beauty and beauty is a manifestation of that spiritual power that animates all levels of reality. The Sufis agree completely with this view, which once dominated Western aesthetics but was marginalized in the West. . .”[5]

Aesthetics, in Islam, developed as a recognition that all beauty is a reflection of divine beauty, a profound spiritual insight, which may not be entirely lacking in the West, but in my branch of the faith at least, aesthetics has never been a focus. Yet who could disagree with Nasr’s assessment: “The supreme beauty is the beauty of the Supreme Reality; absolute beauty is the beauty of the Absolute. Even the most intense beauty experienced in this world in the beautiful face of a loved one or a supreme work of art or of virgin nature or even the perfume of the soul of a saint is a reflection of divine Beauty.”[6] As the Song of Solomon states it, “For love is as strong as death, Jealousy is as severe as Sheol; Its flashes are flashes of fire, The very flame of the Lord” (So 8:6).

Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, attaches great significance not only to the original garden scene of paradise, but to its reenactment in human love. Christians may have lost this significance of peace and love preserved at the heart of Islam: “According to the Quran and a saying of the Prophet, the greeting of the people of Paradise, of the Garden, is salam, or peace; hence the ordinary Muslim greeting, al-salām” ‘alaykim, or ‘peace be upon you.’”[7] Christians might learn from the Islamic mystical tradition, in its assigning spiritual significance to human sexuality: “a sacred reality, hence to be governed by the Sacred Law, [and] not as a sinful act simply resulting from the fall.”[8] Could it be that Western Christianity, plagued as it is with sexual transgression, might benefit from the understanding that “sexual union, which is the most powerful sensuous urge within most human beings, is in reality the search of the soul for union with God, especially when human union is combined with love”?[9]

Connecting human beauty to the divine also comes with a certain realism, seemingly lacking in Western youth driven culture. Outward beauty tends to fade, absent liposuction and face lifts etc., and is primarily the domain of the young. “As we grow older our actions based on our choices and free will become evermore reflected in our outward countenance, and inner beauty, in the case of those who possess such beauty, begins to dominate the outward while the original God-given outward beauty usually fades away.”[10] Still, there is an unabashed recognition of beauty: the “female face reveals a Divine Quality and unveils a Divine Mystery.”[11] Lovers of God in Sufism, are lovers of beauty, which is inseparable “from the Divine Reality and which, being related to the infinitude of the Divine, brings about total peace and liberates the soul from all fetters of restrictive existence.”[12] Shouldn’t Christians share this profound sense of beauty which “liberates” and brings “peace”?

A Christianity and a Western culture driven by egoism also might learn from the Islamic notion that love “is always combined with some degree of dying to one’s ego, to one’s desires, to one’s preferences for the sake of the other.” This is the case “because human love is itself a reflection of Divine Love, which we can experience only after the death of our ego, and can lead to the Divine those souls who are fortunate enough to have experienced this love.”[13] Are Western evangelicals blind and forgiving of the rape culture surrounding Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and the Catholic and Evangelical Church because they are missing the insight which Sufism might provide? Desire of the ultimate kind is fulfilled only by the Divine.

Maybe it is time to listen to our so-called “enemies” to gain the insight gone missing in Western Christianity, the insight to which Islam appeals: “When we ponder the terms pace, shalom, shanti, and salam in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam respectively and their ubiquitous usage by the followers of these religions, as well as terms with the same meaning used elsewhere, we become aware of the universality of this yearning.”[14] Absent focus on the peace longed for in the world religions, the gospel is perverted and its potential to address the hope of the nations relinquished.

When Christians take up the sword in civilizational war imagining this crusader mentality is Christian, they have missed the Christian faith. This civilizational security is not the security of Christ. In addition to denying enemy love, taking up the sword and slaying the enemy is to slaughter the very prophetic voice that is needed. As Christians faced with a Medieval form of Christianity, we must turn firmly from the means and method of empire or Christian civilization. We are not to seek power and security through the defeat of Islam in war. The danger is that in aligning with the powers and methods of empire, Christians have joined forces with the counter-Kingdom of the anti-Christ and have slain the very enemy who might have provided kingdom insight – that of the loved enemy.

[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 58. Merton is quoting but Bonhoeffer, but gives no footnote.

[2] Ibid, 59.

[3] Ibid, 63.

[4] Seyyed Hossein, Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition (New York: Harper One, 2007) 71.

[5] Ibid, 72.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid, 78.

[8] Ibid, 65.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid, 74.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, 66.

[14] Ibid, 78.

Abraham Heschel’s Sabbath Realized in the Person of Christ

Abraham Heschel has written one of the most profound reflections on Jewish conceptions of Sabbath, and I could not help but feel the beauty of his book pointed throughout to Christ. His expansive picture of the Sabbath is in no way diminished by this interpretation, as its universality is inclusive of both Judaism and Christianity. What this interpretation makes clear, is the personal reality and dynamism behind Heschel’s description. Perhaps the great offense of Christianity to Jews, is that all that Judaism claims about holiness is thought by Christians to be fulfilled in the person of Christ: the embodiment of the holy law, the holy place, the holy time, and ultimately of the holiness of God, but this holiness in the Bible never existed as an entity unto itself, but is preceded by and conjoined with the Sabbath (indicative of a fulfilled messianic time). Holiness (qadosh), the word which is representative of the divine, is not first connected with a holy object, a holy mountain, or a holy altar, but it is first introduced in Genesis at the end of creation as a holy time.[1] “Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy” (Gen 2:3). This is not the usual religious thinking, concerned at it is with holy places, but it is connected to a holy time and voice, speaking of himself to all creation. “It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”[2] The holiness of the Sabbath preceded and extended beyond Israel, with its land and feasts and temple and the Jews as a people, and is directly connected with God’s universal sanctifying presence. “According to some it is the name of the Holy One,”[3] a day into which all humans are invited.

The Bride of the Lamb/Sabbath

“The love of the Sabbath is the love of man for what he and God have in common.”[4] In this time humans are joined to God, joined to this time permeated by the eternal presence, and are thus literally made in his image through this union. This is universal man, Adam, and not a particular race or religion. The Jewish people preserved the Sabbath, but it was never theirs alone. The completion of man by woman means creation is an open-ended process, in which the whole inner basis of humankind (contained in the name Adam) is an ongoing realization of love, an ongoing realization of the divine image through marriage.[5] “This is what the ancient rabbis felt: the Sabbath demands all of man’s attention, the service and single-minded devotion of total love.”[6]

In the interpretation of the rabbis, all the other days are paired and the Lord says to the Sabbath: “The Community of Israel is your mate.”[7] Sabbath is God’s search and longing for man, a reversal of the usual picture. “The six days stand in need of space; the seventh day stands in need of man. It is not good that the spirit should be alone, so Israel was destined to be a helpmeet for the Sabbath.”[8] Welcoming the Sabbath is likened to meeting one’s bride and its celebration is like a wedding.[9] “We are the mate of the Sabbath, and each week through our sanctification of the Sabbath, we marry the day.”[10] A wedding feast for all.

The rabbinic focus, and that of the early Christians, on the Song of Songs indicates that the depth of love is lit by the flame of Yahweh’s presence (8:6). The one flesh relation between male and female is realized only in the presence of this binding, passionate, presence. According to Rabbi Akiba: “All of time is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all of the songs are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holiest of holies.”[11] Early Christians concurred, reading it as an allegory of the marriage between Christ and believers. It was cited by Cyprian, Ambrose, Jerome, Origen, and Augustine and in medieval Western Christianity it became the most popular biblical text.[12] In the Jewish conception the promise of the Sabbath is this depth of love, being conjoined to God in the spirit in the love of a day. In Christian thought the two becoming one in Genesis is the mystery fulfilled through Christ and the church (Eph 5:32). The Second Adam completes the human capacity for image bearing and the second Adam and his bride join the human and divine for eternity.

It is not so much an observance as an alternative existence in and through relationship. The marriage of and to this day contains the movement and purpose of personhood and history. This time, this event, this personhood, is what God and humans share and in which they are conjoined. The Church as the bride of Christ indicates Sabbath predestination was always the unfolding telos summing up all things. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:31-32). Sabbath pointed to and contained the reality of Immanuel, “God with us.” God has come to his Temple, he has been joined to his creation, inclusive of the cosmic order but most particularly his habitation in and with the human soul.

Sabbath Rest as Redemption and Arrival of the Spirit

Rest or menuha is not simply a ceasing from work, but from the futile toil of labor as described in Genesis, outside the presence of God. Heschel describes civilization as caught up in the struggle of toil, subduing the earth, forging instruments of war and technology, being “within” the world without being able to surpass the world. Sabbath is this surpassing possibility.[13] Even at the beginning, it is the creation of something new, in that tranquility, serenity, and repose, with God are made possible. There is a divine dignity in labor, which Sabbath does not diminish but ensures, by providing a time of freedom from the all-consuming demands. On this day the toil, the futility, the worship of money, are halted.[14] We can do without such things, such possessions, such values. “The seventh day is the armistice in man’s cruel struggle for existence, a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man; a day on which handling money is considered a desecration, on which man avows his independence of that which is the world’s chief idol.”[15] Heschel equates menuha with happiness, stillness, peace, and harmony. It is the root word Job used to describe the after-life he was longing for, or the state in which troubling wickedness and weariness, fighting, strife and fear are abolished. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters (the waters of menuhot).”[16] “All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God. This is Sabbath, and the true happiness of the universe.”[17]

The Sabbath is the foretaste of the miracle of redemption, sometimes considered as the arrival of the soul unto itself (a second soul). As Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said: “The Holy One, Blessed be He, gives a person an additional soul on Shabbat eve, and at the conclusion of Shabbat removes it from him, as it is stated: “He ceased from work and was refreshed” (Exodus 31:17).[18] It is not the creation of the soul but the reception of more soul, or spirit. It is also described as the “resurrection of the soul, of the soul of man and of the soul of all things. A medieval sage declares: The world which was created in six days was a world without a soul. It was on the seventh day that the world was given a soul.”[19] As Heschel describes referencing the rabbis, man is given a “supernal soul” or a soul which is “all perfection.” “It is ‘the holy spirit that rests upon man and adorns him with a crown like the crown of angels….”[20]

This granting of the soul or Spirit, completed through Christ, is the end point of God’s in-breathing of his image. No longer will death and death-dealing inclinations intervene, as life and peace are an enduring presence in the Spirit. “He gives the Spirit without measure” (John 3:34). In Judaism the spirit comes and goes with the passing of the Sabbath but as the writer of Hebrews describes, Christians enter into a continual Sabbath rest (Heb 4). This abiding presence is to be coveted and desired above all things. “It seeks to displace the coveting of things in space for coveting the things in time, teaching man to covet the seventh day all days of the week.”[21] “Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest” (Heb 4:11).

The love, joy, peace, and long-suffering, granted by the Spirit, were already to be present in the joy of the Sabbath. As Heschel writes, “Not only is it forbidden to light a fire on the Sabbath, but, . . . “Ye shall kindle no fire– not even the fire of righteous indignation.”[22] There is to be no sadness, anger, or mourning on the Sabbath. This is not simply a day, but the beginning of the realization of paradise, in which wrath, and strife are overcome. The Sabbath was always anticipation of the messianic age in which there is an enduring Sabbath: “Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath … one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.”[23]

Sabbath Time Giving Significance to Space

Sabbath is the entry of the eternal into time, an eternalization of the moments of time. Time can be “spent” in subduing nature, in gaining control through technical means, and thus one can build houses and barns but these things are not what is required for the soul (Luke 12:20). Barn building technique enlarges the physical habitation but does nothing for the expanse of the soul. The six days of toil are not to reign over the seventh, but are subordinate, as life spent in gaining power, wealth, and control is a form of slavery, if not conjoined to the eternal. “The manufacture of tools, the art of spinning and farming, the building of houses, the craft of sailing-all this goes on in man’s spatial surroundings.”[24] All of these describe a preoccupation with space, and this aim of spatial dominance tends to infect even religious understanding. In Japan, for example, sacred groves, sacred rocks, sacred mountains, constitute the “places” of the holy. People tend to “locate” the divine in space, and time and history are not assigned spiritual significance. The question of “where” and not “when” is primary.

This spatial attachment, to land, to place, to objects, or to things, tends to mold our image accordingly. Memorials to the dead and sacred shrines to the deities are literally made of the same stuff. Remembrance and preservation of the dead, service of dead objects, exercise a kind of spatial tyranny. “Thingness” or material space seems to constitute reality. “In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived, by most of us, as a thing.”[25] The gods fashioned in our image, reflect back the tyranny of the material world over our self-conception. In Sabbath there is an engagement of time, not simply as passing, but as an intersection with the eternal. Our tendency to cling to objects and space as if they are not perishing, is an obvious falsehood. “Things perish within time; time itself does not change.”[26] Time does not pass or die, but things in time do. “Monuments of stone are destined to disappear; days of spirit never pass away.”[27] The desire to possess creates rivalry, but time cannot be possessed or owned. “We cannot solve the problem of time through the conquest of space, through either pyramids or fame.”[28] The Bible assigns primacy to time, and so history, generations, events, are more important than countries, geography, or space. Time bears the meaning of space and is assigned a significance to which space is relegated.

Heschel notes that the Jews, like other people, celebrated life in nature, with its respective agricultural celebrations, these were transformed into time focused celebrations. Passover, originally a spring festival became a celebration of the Exodus, the wheat harvest festival became the celebration of the day Torah was given, the festival of vintage became the celebration of the sojourn in the wilderness. “To Israel the unique events of historic time were spiritually more significant than the repetitive processes in the cycle of nature, even though physical sustenance depended on the latter.”[29] The Jews began like other peoples, focused on nature and things, but then the redemption from slavery, the giving of the law, the guidance through the wilderness, drew the focus to events in history.

Heschel maintains, “It was only after the people had succumbed to the temptation of worshipping a thing, a golden calf, that the erection of a Tabernacle, of holiness in space, was commanded.”[30]The sanctity of time in the Sabbath, and then in the events of the exodus, were followed by a sanctity of space in the tabernacle, the temple, and then the land. “Time was hallowed by God; space, the Tabernacle, was consecrated by Moses.”[31] There is a holiness in time attached to sacred events. Each of these shifts however, come to be centered on the temple, which unlike the events proves subject to destruction. But then Jesus identifies himself as true temple and the significance behind each of these events.

Jesus as the Significance of Sabbath

Jesus disrupts the Passover sacrifice in the temple with a sign which, in his explanation, points to himself as true temple: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). The Jewish holy place is turned once again into a holy event in his person. During the Feast of Dedication, celebrating the reconsecrated temple (in 165 BCE), Jesus describes himself as the “consecrated one” (John 10:36). This temple is not subject to destruction, and this “building” is no longer a place but a person and a people. John the Baptist’s introduction and summation of the work of Christ, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29), pictures both Passover and the Day of Atonement as fulfilled in Christ. The event of the Exodus (the passing over of death), becomes an eternal event and entry into God’s presence (atonement) a personal and permanent realization. At the Feast of Tabernacles (or Booths), Jesus describes himself in terms of this festival as the source of thirst-quenching water (John 7:37) and the light of the world (John 8:12) recalling the miraculous events in the wilderness, but this deliverance from out of bondage, homelessness, hunger and thirst are eternal events in time. Christ is identified as the true giving of the law written on the heart through the Spirit (John 3; Rom 2:14-16). Here is the creation of a holy people promised in the law. The passage is from space centered to a centering on events, but then the focus on the temple returns these events to a place. Christ turns them into a focus on the dynamics of his personhood and incarnation.

Conclusion

The threat of time, seems to be a series of empty and identical moments delivering to death and the loss of the world, but Christ as Sabbath fills time with eternal presence. As Heschel writes, “All week long we are called upon to sanctify life through employing things of space. On the Sabbath it is given us to share in the holiness that is in the heart of time.” Here “Eternity utters a day.”[32] As the writer of Hebrews puts it, “So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His” (Heb 4:9–10). The Sabbath rest is to be found in resting in his presence. The sanctification of time, begun in Sabbath, invades all of time in he who is the reality of Sabbath.

[1] Abraham Josua Heschel, The Sabbath: its meaning for modern man (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005) 9.

[2] Ibid, 10.

[3] Ibid, 20.

[4] Ibid, 16.

[5] Ibid, xv

[6] Ibid, 17.

[7] Ibid, 51

[8] Ibid, 52.

[9] Ibid, 53-4

[10] Ibid, this is the summation of his daughter in the Introduction.

[11] Ibid, 98.

[12] See Karl Shuve, The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

[13] Heschel, 27.

[14] Ibid, 28.

[15] Ibid, 29.

[16] Ibid, 22-23.

[17] Ibid, 32.

[18] Beitzah 16a:12

[19] Heschel, 83

[20] Ibid, 88.

[21] Ibid, 91.

[22] Ibid, 29.

[23] Ibid, xv

[24] Ibid, 4.

[25] Ibid, 5.

[26] Ibid, 97.

[27] Ibid, 98.

[28] Ibid, 101.

[29] Ibid, 7.

[30] Ibid, 9-10.

[31] Ibid, 10.

[32] Ibid, 101.

The City of God Versus the Earthly City

Before Virginia Giuffre killed herself, she pronounced the entire society, which enabled Jeffrey Epstein to traffic her, as corrupt to the core. Not just those who had sex with her as a teenager, including those from academia, royalty, and the business world, but those from a much broader swath of society who never spoke up. The billionaires, media moguls, corporate leaders, political leaders, and those who carry influence and shape society, were represented by those who raped her, but they also made up the cadre of people who did not object. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were known as sex traffickers, it is the first line in Epstein’s Wikipedia profile, and had been for years, yet this was overlooked. Epstein was able to groom hundreds of young girls for sex trafficking, but at the same time the ruling class was willingly groomed by the same techniques. It is not just that he was friends with President Donald Trump and the Democratic President Bill Clinton, but he was able to worm his way deep into Harvard, MIT, Google, the Gates Foundation, and Goldman Sachs. Larry Summers the Secretary of the Treasury and president of Harvard University, turned to his friend Epstein to get instruction on how to seduce a young woman he was mentoring. Mort Zuckerman, CEO of Boston Properties, owner and publisher of U.S. News and World Report, needed help getting a child into an elite school, so he reaches out to Epstein. Heads of state, heads of major institutions, elites from nearly every sector of society, willingly associated with Epstein, and there is no record of any of these individuals protesting or seeking to expose his activities.

The journalist, Anand Giridharadas, confirms Giuffre’s judgment, comparing Epstein to a kind of food poison passing through every major organ of the social body, proving the system is inherently sick.[1] There was no nausea, no vomiting, no diarrhea, no reaction. Out of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of people at dinners and parties, no one who blew up at the circumstance or objected to the girls being abused or to the influence being traded. Epstein was a test, and though he is dead and gone, what he has proven is that the system lacks the capacity to react, to notice, to expunge this vileness, because the system is corrupt to the core. The institutions that shape society, the values and incentives held throughout the system, are sick and corrupt.

Add to the Epstein story his proven connections with Israel, and the genocide in Gaza and the war in Iran, and the depth of depravity, involving not just a culture of rape but one bent on murder is evident. Sex was the lure, but Zionism and genocide the goal, so that Israel could abolish the Palestinians and dominate in the Middle East. The problem for the Christian community, Catholic and Protestant, is not simply that the illness infecting culture has not been resisted by the church, but it could be argued, that the sickness proven by Epstein, is that of the church. There is no need to recount the levels of abuse to make the point: sexual abuse, avarice, greed, capitalism, and the grab for power, are not simply at the periphery of church institutions. Christian Zionism and with it, extreme nationalism, are forces that the church unleashed and made possible. Donald Trump is president due to the support of Christians, but this could also be said of the trends Trump and Epstein represent. The question is, why is the church now at the center of the problem?

Christianity began as a resistant community, resisting emperor worship and the ethics and religion of empire, so as to proclaim Christ as Lord and his ethical mandate as overriding the demands of empire. Even into the third century, Celsus (a late pagan traditionalist) is concerned that Christianity is causing the decay of the Roman Empire (not an accusation leveled against modern Christians). He considers Christianity completely subversive to the religious and social order of Rome, which he considers to be the true universal order. It is not monotheism to which he objects, “it makes no difference whether we call Zeus the Most High, or Zen, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amoun like the Egyptians, or Papaeus like the Scythians,”[2] but the problem is Christian exclusiveness. The Christians reject the worship of “daemons and quote the saying of Jesus, ‘No man can serve two masters,’” and for Celsus this is “a rebellious utterance of people who wall themselves off and break away from the rest of mankind.”[3] The Christian teaching on humility, and against wealth, and their refusal of the traditions, their refusal to engage in war, or even to take part in public life, means they cannot be good citizens.

This accusation of being different, a testament to the resistance of the early church, describes the faithfulness of the early Christians to being a peculiar people. As Thomas Merton sums up, “Christians not only believed that Celsus’ world was meaningless, but that it was under judgment and doomed to destruction. He interpreted the otherworldly Christian spirit as a concrete, immediate physical threat.”[4]

Origen responded, however, that Christians are not simply subverting society but make good citizens:

Christians have been taught not to defend themselves against their enemies; and because they have kept the laws which command gentleness and love to man, on this account they have received from God that which they would not have succeeded in doing if they had been given the right to make war, even though they may have been quite able to do so. He always fought for them and from time to time stopped the opponents of the Christians and the people who wanted to kill them.[5]

The evident linchpin in this argument is the role of violence and war. Celsus presumes war is necessary for human society, while Origen argues for a more profound understanding of peace: “No longer do we take the sword against any nations nor do we learn war any more since we have become the sons of peace through Jesus who is our author instead of following the traditional customs by which we were strangers to the covenant.”[6] Origen makes reference to the passage in Isaiah, Christians are “to beat the spiritual swords that fight and insult us into ploughshares, and to transform the spears that formerly fought against us into pruning hooks.”[7]

Origen argues that Christians play their part in the city through their spiritual influence and activity, especially in prayer: “The more pious a man is the more effective he is in helping the emperors – more so than the soldiers who go out into the lines and kill all the enemy troops that they can.”[8] Christians as a “priesthood of all believers,” are not unlike the pagan priests who devote themselves to offering sacrifices: “that it is also your opinion that the priests of certain images and wardens of the temples of the gods, as you think them to be, should keep their right hand undefiled for the sake of the sacrifices, that they may offer the customary sacrifices to those who you say are gods with hands unstained by blood and pure from murders. And in fact when war comes you do not enlist the priests.”[9]

Origen counters Celsus’ notion that all citizens “help the emperor with all our power . . . and fight for him,” arguing that Christians offer an even greater service: ”We may reply to this that at appropriate times we render to the emperors divine help, if I may so say, by taking up even the whole armour of God.” He quotes Paul, who exhorts Christians to take up spiritual armour: “I exhort you, therefore, first to make prayers, supplications, intercessions, and thanksgivings for all men, for emperors, and all that are in authority.”[10] If not even pagan priests kill in war, then neither should Christians offer violent resistance, but they do a higher service “keeping their right hands pure and by their prayers to God striving for those who fight in a righteous cause and for the emperor who reigns righteously, in order that everything which is opposed and hostile to those who act rightly may be destroyed.”[11] Origen concludes, “We who by our prayers destroy all demons which stir up wars, violate oaths and disturb the peace, are of more help to the Emperors than those who seem to be doing the fighting.”[12] As Merton notes, “If these evil forces are overcome by prayer, then both sides are benefited, war is avoided and all are united in peace. In other words, the Christian does not help the war effort of one particular nation, but he fights against war itself with spiritual weapons.”[13]

Unfortunately, this singular idea of the early Christians is gradually eroded with the Constantinian shift, and the rise of Augustinian theology, which now dominates among both Catholics and Protestants. In the two hundred years between Origen and Augustine, Constantine had his vision at the Milvian bridge in 312, and Christianity is officially recognized by Rome, and then in 411 Rome fell to the Goths. In 430, Augustine as bishop of Hippo, is confronted with the invasion of the Vandals and he develops his theory of just war. He understands Christians as split between two cities and two types of love. Confronted with the same objection Origen faced from Celsus, Augustine formulates a very different answer. Christians do not simply pray, but they may participate in the military, as long as the war is just, and as long as the Christian has the right motives. “Christians may participate in the war, or may abstain from participation. But their motives will be different from the motives of the pagan soldier. They are not really defending the earthly city, they are waging war to establish peace, since peace is willed by God.”[14] Origen would argue this false peace, through war, is unworthy of Christian peace, but Augustine succeeds in creating a lasting confusion.

Augustine agrees with Celsus, against Origen, maintaining that war is inevitable, and universal peace impossible. Maybe the early church was too intent on the Parousia, but Augustine is more of a realist amidst the collapsing empire, and he felt war was unavoidable. The question was not if, but how Christians might fight in war, and thus appealing to Cicero, Augustine drew up his notions of just war theory. But even in a just war, the Christian must be only motivated by love: “The external act may be one of violence. War is regrettable indeed. But if one’s interior motive is purely directed to a just cause and to love of the enemy, then the use of force is not unjust.”[15] Augustine poses the new possibility of a distinction between interior motive and exterior action, which will have tragic consequences. The divide between church and world is more or less demolished, as the Christian can serve the world with his exterior body, and reserve his mind for spiritual activity. This divide marks Christian entry into serving state values and purposes. One can even kill fellow Christians, given the right motive and circumstance. For example, better to kill heretics and save their souls, which will become the motive behind the crusades. “And so, alas, for centuries we have heard kings, princes, bishops, priests, ministers, and the Lord alone knows what variety of unctuous beadles and sacrists, earnestly urging all men to take up arms out of love and mercifully slay their enemies (including other Christians) without omitting to purify their interior intention.”[16]

The contradiction of Augustine’s logic should be felt, and yet is not, even in this nuclear age, in which the world may need to be destroyed so as to achieve peace. The Augustinian logic consigns the world to hell, not imagining that the church or the Christian might act as a constraint on the voracious appetites of the flesh. Along with the Conquistadors, who felt the need to destroy civilizations in Christianizing them, and the inquisitors willing to torture to death so as to save, we, in the United States, are subject to a leader ready to destroy a civilization, supposedly in the name of peace.

Jeffrey Epstein, like one emerging from the primeval depths, exposed the lie undergirding our culture. As with Nazi Germany, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s description, it is a “time of confirmed liars who tell the truth in the interest of what they themselves are – liars. A hive of murderers who love their children and are kind to their pets. A hive of cheats and gangsters who are loyal in pacts to do evil.”[17] If as Gandhi maintained, “The way of peace is the way of truth” then according to Merton, “lying is the mother of violence.”[18] A world of necessary violence and war is built upon a lie, and this lie serves in place of truth. As long as evil takes accepted forms and there are no objections, then it is “good.” The Augustinian (Constantinian) merger of church and empire through just war, the division between internal and external, creates a split mind and necessary duplicity. Killing in love makes nonsense of morality. The unfalsifiable claim of good intention opened the floodgate to the crusades, the inquisition, and ultimately to a series of holocausts. This church can no longer claim any likeness to the resistant New Testament Body of Christ or to the counter-ethics of Christ.

Merton quotes Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as the counter to the stink of this moral decay: “It is not astuteness, by knowing the tricks, but by simple steadfastness in the truth of God, by training the eye upon this truth until it is simple and wise, that there comes the experience and knowledge of ethical reality.[19] The truth, peace through Christ, is the singular resistant counter to the lie of the reign of death in the city of man. It is easy to convince ourselves that the lie is irresistible, that peace and purity are an impossibility, and that truth cannot endure, yet, Christ has spoken and those who hear his voice have a singular obligation to this Truth and Peace.

[1] See the interview on the Daily Beast, I Know How Epstein Groomed America’s Corrupt Elite, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57xynBbVUuw.

[2] Origen, Contra: Celsum, tran. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) xvii.

[3] Origen, xix.

[4] Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (New York: Orbis Books, 2004) 35.

[5]Origen, III: 8, 133, cited in Merton, 35.

[6] Origen, V: 33, 290, cited in Merton, 37.

[7] Origen, V: 33, 290.

[8] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37.

[9] Origen, VIII: 73, 509,

[10] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.

[11] Origen, Vlll: 73, 509.

[12] Origen,Vlll: 73, 509, Cited in Merton, 37-38.

[13] Merton, 38.

[14] Merton, 40.

[15] Merton, 42.

[16] Merton, 43.

[17] This is Merton’s summation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966) 60.

[18] Ibid, 79.

[19] Ibid, 60.

Julian of Norwich and the Reversal of Theology

If there is a single voice in the West which consistently develops a theology of originary peace, matching the leanings of Maximus and Origen, it must be Julian of Norwich. She develops a theology focused on the personal revelation of the love of Jesus Christ, dispelling any notion of unworthiness, with realization of the self with and in divine identity, very much on the order of theosis or apocatastasis. In the midst of the plague and death of her own family and some 50,000 citizens surrounding her, she feels the “woe” or heaviness of life, and then the realization of being secure in the love and goodness of God. Her feelings of personal brokenness and despair, and then entry into joy and love, in a deeply personal experience, describes the universal arc. She sees the typical theological focus on guilt, wrath, and law, as something of a necessary anthropomorphism, limiting redemption and God to negative terms characterizing human experience, and she presumes God is the unmoved, loving agent drawing humankind into divine identity.

Rowan Williams refers to her work as an “anti-theology” in that she turns the usual understanding upside-down. Rather than agonizing over God’s satisfaction, she turns from “squaring the circle” of how “God has to ‘do justice’ to his own justice.”[1] The point is not that God must pay himself a fair price. “Anger happens in us; it is that atmosphere of bitter conflict and fear which holds us away from peace, being at one with ourselves, living in atonement.”[2] We are the ones in need of satisfaction. As God says to her, “If thou art apaide, I am apaide.”[3] God would bring us fully alive, into the satisfaction of his love – believing that we are loved – by pouring his life into us. “To be ‘apaide’ in Julian’s theological world is to discover that we cannot pull apart human need and divine self-enactment and make them struggle for resolution.”[4]

Julian explains that there are two levels of judgement, the first in which “I must necessarily know myself a sinner. And by the same judgment I understood that sinners sometimes deserve blame and wrath,” but these judgments reside in myself, not God.[5] Movement beyond guilt and wrath, into the second level, is the deeper working of grace (potentially “filled with endless joy and bliss”).[6] This entails a necessary and eternal progression: “And therefore this belongs to our properties, both by nature and by grace to long and desire with all our powers to know ourselves, in which full knowledge we shall truly and clearly know our God in the fulness of endless joy.”[7] The common teaching, perhaps necessary, misses the deeper focus: “I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never will be. Because he is God, he is good, he is truth, he is love, he is peace; and his power, his wisdom, his charity and his unity do not allow him to be angry.”[8]

While we are in process, still our nature is complete and perfect in oneness with God, which she treats as an accomplished reality. “I saw that our nature is in God whole.”[9] In Christ, God has taken on our nature and shared his nature with us. “God is knit to our nature that is the lower part, in our flesh-taking: and thus in Christ our two natures are oned.”[10] Reality in Christ is without beginning but is integral to God’s plan and identity: “I understand in our Lord’s signifying, where the blessed Soul of Christ is, there is the Substance of all the souls that shall be saved by Christ.” So that “I saw no difference between God and our Substance: but as it were all God; and yet mine understanding took that our Substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our Substance is a creature in God.”[11] Christ, for Julian, is so tied to humanity that “When Adam fell, God’s Son fell,” as God’s Son cannot be separated from Adam. Christ’s incarnation insures no ultimate separation between fallen humanity and God: “for the Son to be the Son is for the Son to be the one who has always been the lover and companion of Adam’s race.”[12] God is who he always was and is, and to pull this apart is an unsolvable conundrum.

She recasts the usual theological dilemma, characterizing it as an overcoming of refusal of God’s love. Like a neurotic who enjoys his sickness, imagining this is the kernel of who he is, our tendency is to ward off divine love. We would have God change, so as to accept us, as if it is God who is out of sorts. Julian shows, the “‘problems’ can be resolved only by the erosion of my anger, my refusal of life.”[13] Sin is precisely this refusal of life, and is thus always an embrace of death. “And thus we are dead for the time from the very sight of our blissful life.”[14] But this deadness does not change the truth of God. “But in all this I saw soothfastly that we be not dead in the sight of God, nor He passeth never from us.”[15]

There is a reciprocity involving a sort of divine necessity: “But He shall never have His full bliss in us till we have our full bliss in Him, verily seeing His fair Blissful Cheer.”[16] We are working out in nature what is fulfilled in God’s grace, but God is the undergirding reality. We may be confused about who God is and who we are, but God is not. We are coming to know ourselves and God, in the assurance, as Paul says, that he knows us (Gal 4:9). God’s knowledge, and not our own, is the sustaining center of who and what we are. The unreality of sin does not alter God, and he is the reality we are being drawn into. “Thus I saw how sin is deadly for a short time in the blessed creatures of endless life.”[17] It is just a matter of coming to see rightly: “Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love.”[18]

God is unchangingly himself, acting in his love to bring us out of our disasters into his peace. Redemption is not balancing the legal books, but is “the sheer outworking of who or what God is.”[19] God in Christ is tied to humanity so that the journey of Adam (of humankind), is God’s journey in Christ. It is not as if God started at some point to love mankind, this love is an eternal fact about us and God. Likewise, there is no anger for God to forgive as “between God and our soul there is neither wrath nor forgiveness in his sight. For our soul is so wholly united to God, through his own goodness, that between God and our soul nothing can interpose.”[20]

Anger, in her description, in both its source and object is purely human, and falls short of God’s unmoving love. Self-destructive anger obscures God and self, and misses the deeper identification of the soul with God’s unchangeable goodness. She acknowledges that this is not the common teaching of the church, and humbly submits to this teaching, but she also offers a counter-explanation. Man in his weakness and fallibility loses sight of God, “for if he saw God continually, he would have no harmful feelings nor any kind of prompting, no sorrowing which is conducive to sin.”[21] There may be the necessity for sorrow, wrath, and forgiveness, as if these are movements in God, but this describes the changeableness of humans, fallibility and sin, and not the fulness of divine peace and love. “For we through sin and wretchedness have in us a wrath and a constant opposition to peace and to love.”[22]

Sebastian Moore, in the spirit of Julian, describes this “refusal” to enter completely into the fulness of life, as the result of a deep attachment to the false self. It is not simply refusal of “obedience to God” but an unwillingness to relinquish attachment to death. “Some unbearable personhood, identity, freedom, whose demands beat on our comfortable anonymity and choice of death. Further, something that at root we are, a self that is ours yet persistently ignored in favor of the readily satisfiable needs of the ego.”[23] Moore though, like Julian, hits upon the necessity of a deeper identity with Christ: “What if Jesus were the representative, the symbol, the embodiment, of this dreaded yet desired self of each of us, this destiny of being human, the unbearable identity and freedom (freedom and identity being really the same thing)?”[24] The crucifixion of Jesus is not, at its deepest level, concerned with conflict involving Caiaphas and Pilate but it concerns “man’s refusal of his true self.”[25] The crucifixion is at once the ultimate evil and its defeat: the evil of destruction not just of a general “true” humanity, but of the individual’s true self. But recognition of this self-destruction in Christ is also the resolution of this evil. This recognition is already “forgiveness.” Evil is transformed into a specific and personal sin and sin transforms into grace. “And through this conversion the believer finds as his own that identity which first he rejected and crucified.”[26]

Our life is with God in Christ, and where we fall short, we turn to death. As Julian describes it, where we fall we die, and “we must necessarily die inasmuch as we fail to see and feel God, who is our life.”[27] We may pass from doing the nailing to being nailed to the cross, from being the crucifier to being the crucified. The life and self, invested in crucifying, is in reality the destruction of life and self. The passage is at first the refusal of our own death, the projection of it on another, and then the relinquishing of this false sense of self. The passage beyond the ego, the death of self, is the only means of “return” to the Father.

God accepts our failings and works with them to transform us: “grace transforms our dreadful failing into plentiful and endless solace; and grace transforms our shameful falling into high and honourable rising; and grace transforms our sorrowful dying into holy, blessed life.”[28] Grace is transforming who and what we are, turning our earthly shame and sorrow into heavenly honour and bliss, and our present sufferings into endless rejoicing. She concludes: “And when I saw all this, I was forced to agree that the mercy of God and his forgiveness abate and dispel our wrath.”[29] Not God’s wrath but our wrath is dispelled and abated. Likewise, God cannot forgive because he cannot be angry. “For this was revealed, that our life is all founded and rooted in love, and without love we cannot live.”[30] God’s love is the ground and reality of life and it is into his life that we are being endlessly united.

Seeing ourselves as crucifiers, as filled with wrath, and recognizing this in the cross, gives rise to the recognition and possibility of God’s love. The recognition of evil in the crucified, awakens to love. We can see “evil’s visible effect. And this is the manifestation of God’s love: that extraordinary love that highlights our evil in order to leave us in no doubt that it is accepted.”[31] Moore describes this as “the deepest logic of the psyche, love is experienced in the vision of the Crucified.”[32] The killing of Christ and the exposure of the ultimate limits of human evil and possibility open directly onto new life.

Both Julian and Moore speak of the absolute ground, the penetrating force of God’s love. All human movement is in this love, leading to his peace. We may be victims of a temporary blindness but this unreality cannot compete with the reality of “God’s merciful protection.” God accepts us at our worst, and he exposes and accepts this worst in us, and this is the point of the cross. The defeat of this evil though, goes beyond our rational grasp, God making Christ sin exposes the depth of evil and reaches us in our sin. God comes to us in Christ, beyond our own capacities for self-acceptance, to make us his. “It is the mystery of God who comes upon us and loves us beyond the limits of our ego-organized potential.”[33]

We cease being self-organized or egocentric, and become Christocentric. In the words of Julian, “So I saw that God is our true peace; and he is our safe protector when we ourselves are in disquiet, and he constantly works to bring us into endless peace. And so when by the operation of mercy and grace we are made meek and mild, then we are wholly safe. Suddenly the soul is united to God, when she is truly pacified in herself, for in him is found no wrath.”[34] As Moore puts it, “I acquire sufficient selfhood to be identified with the crucified. This is the transition from man who ‘crucifies the Lord of Glory’ to man who is ‘nailed to the cross with Christ.’ It is the same man, changing only through self-discovery in Christ.”[35]

Williams sums up Julian as “saying that grace is God’s ‘no’ to our ‘no’: our persistent leaning towards nothingness, to the refusal of the act that is our very being, [this] is what is annihilated by openness.to God.”[36] Our “no” is annihilated, but this does not cancel creation, but is God’s crucifixion of evil. As Moore puts it, “In the ultimate order the ultimate sin, of crucifying the Just One, reverses itself, the victim giving life to the crucifiers.”[37] Evil takes on the only “being” possible in the ultimate effect, but in this form, it is defeated and annihilated. The effect of sin in the crucified is identical with its defeat and healing.[38] Our evil is made explicit in its annihilation. “When we say ‘no’, there is an abiding ‘no’ to this ‘no’ at the heart, of what we are.”[39] Death’s power and its denial of life and love are defeated in the cross. “Yet it is at the same time the reminder that God cannot be put to death and that the passion of Christ also declares the unchanging presence, of God in the centre of our being.”[40]

Julian is a counter-voice to the Augustinian tradition by which she was surrounded. She begins her theology where most theology leaves off, by focusing on the absolute unchanging love of God and works out all the movements of redemption through the logic of this love. Total identification with Christ opens a level of grace and love, which mark Julian’s unique perspective.

[1] Rowan Williams, Holy Living: The Christian Tradition for Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 171.

[2] Ibid, 174.

[3] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library,2002) The Thirty Third Chapter.

[4] Williams, 173.

[5] Julian, The Forty-Fifth Chapter.

[6] Ibid.

[7] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.

[8] Ibid.

[9] The Fifty Seventh Chapter.

[10] Ibid

[11] The Fifty Fourth Chapter.

[12] Williams, 176.

[13] Williams, 177.

[14] The Seventy Second Chapter.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Forty-Fourth Chapter

[19] Williams, 175.

[20] The Forty-Sixth Chapter.

[21] The Forty-Seventh Chapter.

[22] The Forty-Eighth Chapter.

[23] Sebastian Moore, The Crucified Jesus is No Stranger (New York: Paulist Press, 1977) X.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Ibid, XI.

[27] Julian, The Forty-Eighth Chapter.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid.

[30] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.

[31] Moore, 2-3.

[32] Ibid, 3

[33] Ibid, 6.

[34] The Forty-Ninth Chapter.

[35] Moore, 7.

[36] Williams, 179.

[37] Moore, 8.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Williams, 179-180.

[40] Williams, 183.

Sabbath Healing: The Sharing of Divine Presence

Salvation in the Bible hinges upon the presence of God, linked to his relationship to creation in his Sabbath rest (or Sabbath peace), the sacred time into which he invites those (being) created in his image. God’s rest contains and extends the divine reflection, “It is good, it is very good.” This reflective time is returned to creation as revelation: “God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it” (Gen 2:3). This permanent day, without morning or evening, is God’s significance, his sanctifying presence, given to and revealed in this day. The six days of creation, of activity, of motion, of control of chaos, etc., are for and lead to the seventh, containing the divine reflexive goodness. It might be said nothing happens on this day, but this day is the happening, the significance, the meaning arising out of and enfolding the other days. It is the final marker, contained within the sequence of events, each with its own sort of goodness, but culminating in the eternal goodness. According to Sigve Tonstad, “By the act of hallowing the seventh day God drives the stake of the divine presence into the soil of human time.”[1]

This day, in the description of Maximus, has no “created origin, since it is the manifestation of realities beyond limit and measure.”[2] It is subsequent to the created realities of the previous six days, with their measured beginning and end, morning and evening. It is unlimited and uncircumscribed, as he is in this eternal day. This “perpetual day, is the unalloyed, all-shining presence of God, which comes about after things in motion have come to rest.”[3] Maximus links the day with eternality in three modes or through three ways: being, well-being, and eternal-being. It is not that God’s Being is contained on a continuum with being, but it is out of the “essence” of God” that creation’s being occurs. This is a potential, actualized through human well-being and free choice. Given the reality of creation and nature, there is the potential to enact (or not), well-being. Eternal-being, contains and fills out the potential and activity of the others, and it is not a “natural potential within beings.”[4]

Maximus sidesteps an ontotheology which would put God on a continuum with being, through the division of the six days from the Sabbath. We do not get to God through creation directly, due to its own nature or its own essence, but we come to God in creation as on the order of a temple or a resting place for God, in which the meaning is in the added divine declaration. The motion and free choice of that which has a beginning and whose activity and motion has an end, cannot come to eternality through itself. There is an eternality to which creation gives access, through Sabbath, but the motion of the other days must cease. All activity, evolution, creation, even of an infinite or ongoing kind does not come to eternality, in fact it ensures, in its continual beginning and ending, that eternity will be obscured. All process (as in materialistic evolution or continual creation) does not allow for encounter with the agent behind the process, and this is the meaning given in the seventh day, otherwise lacking. It links creation with the Creator, not only by implication, but through presence, enunciation, and participation.

Nature and creation are not everything, though the world religions build upon this presumption in worshipping nature, and human philosophy often concludes the world is all that is the case (materialism, atheism, animism etc.). Sabbath puts a limit on creation from within, which opens onto or is eternity. Nature and free choice have a potential but there is a limit to their powers and activity, but that limit is the eternal. Their limit accords with the eternal principle for which they were created. We might say time is circumscribed by eternity, but this seventh day is an interpenetrating time. It is encountered among the other days and time as goal, as eternal possibility. God speaks on the other days (manifest in what is made), but God’s Word on this day is a direct manifestation and reflection of himself. The other days can be seen in what they produce, but this day is devoted to God’s word, to his delight and declaration, and to hearing. This difference marks the limits of what is made (manifest, seen, objective) from what is unmade (God himself).

There is activity, creating, working, tending, and eventually sweating and toil (which must end but is not its own end), then there is God’s sharing of himself. Nature and free choice have a potential which grace fulfills, and this is the significance (the symbol and the reality) of Sabbath. It is not that the eternal is outside of creation, but in Sabbath the eternal is conjoined and resting in creation. The eternal is not limited by the finite, but the finite is precisely for and intersected by the eternal. Eternality, God, Goodness, True Essence, are not limited, as if eternity were limited by time, or God excluded or limited by creation, but the opposite is the case; the created and finite are limited by the Eternal. This day without beginning or end, without created origin, is not succeeded by another, but is the terminus of all days and ages. This terminus though, is met among the others, as its own day and an alternative way.

The problem is that Sabbath presence is obscured for humans, and the story of the Bible might be read as Sabbath (re)gained. The faith founded on divine presence begins with a Judaism dealing primarily in absence. God speaks to Abraham, but shows up intermittently, though “Abraham obeyed Me and kept My charge, My commandments, My statutes and My laws” (Gen 26:5), which points to Sabbath remembrance. The first lesson of Israel in the wilderness concerns remembering Sabbath rest, which had already been given (Ex 16:1-31). They were to trust in God to provide double manna on the sixth day and to preserve it on the seventh, though they feared starvation. God shows himself in Sinai and the Tabernacle, but the Jews approached the sacred space only in trepidation and through representatives (Moses, Aaron, the high priest). He was hidden in the holy of holies, but then his glory absconded from the Temple entirely. The sacred space is lost in the exile, and sacred time is all that remains, but the prevailing sense is: “Truly, You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, Savior!” (Is 45:15). The Sabbath no longer claimed location, and its time was limited. The Sabbath was a remembrance of creation and God’s resting, holding out a promise of freedom, but in slavery, exile, and subjugation, the Jews seem unprepared for divine presence.

Jesus’ Sabbath controversies, his deliberate healing on the Sabbath, and his direct identity with God, fill out the revelation and meaning of Sabbath. Jesus explains, the Sabbath is not a day of doing nothing, but it is the day in which God is working in healing, redeeming, delivering, and saving: “My Father is working until now, and I Myself am working” (Jn 5:17). Throughout, Jesus challenges the received Jewish understanding of Sabbath (as inactivity), to emphasize divine activity. In turn, the paralytic must carry his mat (Jn 5), the blind man must mix mud (Jn 9), both involving activity the Jews prohibited on the Sabbath. It is this Sabbath work of redemption, performed by God but including a joyous response (mud mixing, bed carrying, running and leaping). A burden is involved, but it is a joyous burden inclusive of healing.

Believers take up the burden of cross, the work of redemption of Christ, learning the rest of God is a cessation of one kind of work, synonymous with the work of redemption. Jesus’ direct identity with God (“I am” the life raising the dead, the light giving sight to the blind, the true water curing thirst) arises in healing, the lifting of crushing burden, exchanged for an easy life-giving yoke. “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me . . . my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30). The healing is a proof of who Jesus is, but also of who God is. The absence and seeming indifference of God to human suffering is remedied in the curing of blindness, leprosy, paralysis, and death itself. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (11:28).

This violation and correction of Jewish Sabbath expectations involves reidentifying God in Christ, re-understanding the Sabbath, and accepting that God is present and revealed. There is a burden to bear, but it is not the weight and toil of the world, but the taking up of the cross, the burden of redemption. The Creator is the Redeemer, as Jesus is true light, true life, true glory, revealed in his seventh-day work. He is the Sabbath, the life-giving rest, giving God and rest in himself, to creation.

[1] Sigve K. Tonstad, The Lost Meaning of the Seventh Day (p. 37). Andrews University Press. Kindle Edition. Thank you Jonathan for the gift of this book, and putting me onto Tonstad.

[2] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, vol II, trans. Nicholas Constas, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 279.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 277

Resurrection as the Confrontation and Defeat of Antisemitism and the Antichrist

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamín Netanyahu recently said “Jesus Christ has no advantage over Genghis Khan” while explaining the rationale behind military actions involving the US and Israel against Iran. Netanyahu, referencing the historian Will Durant, was arguing that the military action of the US and Israel against Iran, and presumably the destruction of Gaza, were examples of when morality is not enough, and strength and power must be exercised. According to Netanyahu, “If you are strong enough, ruthless enough, powerful enough, evil will overcome good. Aggression will overcome moderation.” Ignoring the implications of out-eviling the evil through ruthlessness, the contrast between Genghis Khan and Jesus may have come to Netanyahu so easily, as one of the defining necessities of Israeli citizenship concerns Jesus and Christianity.

The Law of Return, defining who can be a citizen of Israel, refrains from defining the term “Jew,” but the Law simply states: “Every Jew is entitled to immigrate to Israel.”[1] However, in 1962 the High Court of Justice ruled that a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who had converted to Catholicism and had become a Catholic monk (Brother Daniel) could not immigrate to Israel, since he had converted to Catholicism. “The argument of the majority judges was that after his conversion to Christianity he is a member of a non-Jewish religion, and is not allowed to immigrate to Israel.”[2] The problem is that “Jew” was not specifically defined as pertaining to religion, but had been defined either as the child of a Jewish mother or a convert to Judaism. Those with Jewish mothers were not required to be practitioners of Judaism, but the only requirement is that he/she be one “who is not a member of another religion.” Secularism, atheism, nationalism, and Zionism, are not considered as competing with Judaism as a religion.

The primary issue was in regard to Jews who had converted to Christianity or Messianic Jews, all of whom were disqualified as having the right to immigration. That is, the primary consideration for the right to Aliyah (immigration to Israel, and originally referring to the honor of being called upon in the synagogue to read from the Torah) was rejection of any other religion, with Christianity and Christ being of specific and primary concern. The ruling was passed down, “a Messianic Jew (i.e., the child of a Jewish mother who believes that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel) is of ‘another religion’ rather than Judaism.” As Justice Barak makes clear, an atheist or secular Jew along with religious Jews all agree, for purposes of immigration, there is no such thing as “a Jew who believes in Jesus.” Justice Barak expressed his opinion that even according to a secular outlook there is general agreement that “a Jew who believes in Jesus” is no longer a Jew, according to the national meaning of the term.[3] The key determinant of who is a Jew cannot be said to be either religious or ethnic identity, as converts are welcomed as well as the children of converts who are secular or atheistic, but not being a follower of Christ is the clearest unifying factor.

Given the history of the conflict between Jews and Christians and the persecution of Jews by Christians, it may be understandable that Israel would want to preserve an identity which is specifically and definitively not Christian, but it is also true that this conflict goes to the heart of Christian identity. The rejection and crucifixion of Christ, and recognition of this fact is the beginning point of Christian preaching. Peter, in the first Christian sermon, says, the resurrected Messiah, is the one “you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men” (Acts 2:23). Everyone knows, “The things about Jesus the Nazarene . . . how the chief priests and our rulers delivered Him to the sentence of death, and crucified Him” (Lk 24:19–20). This killing is not a vague result of general wrongdoing but is the historical and concrete result of the beliefs, practices, and religion, grounding Jews (and Romans), causing them to condemn and crucify Jesus. These people have blood on their hands, and it is this recognition that “cuts them to the heart” causing their repentance which leads to their baptism (Acts 2:37–38). A neutral or innocent audience is simply not addressed by the Gospel, but it is aimed at those complicit in the killing. This message cuts to the heart, as “the things concerning Jesus” pertain to those who are guilty, but this guilt is not simply Jewish.

“For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel” (Acts 4:27). The “Gentiles rage,” and “peoples devise futile things,” and “all the kings of the earth” take their stand, “against the Lord and against his Christ” (Acts 4:25–26). The opposition to Christ is universal, including Israel, Gentiles, kings of the earth, priests, common people, or all that are represented in the gathering in Jerusalem, which seems to include the root of humanity. This city of man, Jerusalem, which is responsible for his killing, is also the site of the beginning of Gospel proclamation.

It is the crucified who is risen and who directly saves those involved in the crime of his murder. This is not generic or genetic guilt, but is specific, historical, and concrete.[4] It is in their role as “the Council of elders,” the “people assembled, both chief priests and scribes,” Annas as High Priest and Caiaphas, all who were of the “high priestly family,” as well as Pontius Pilate and Herod, or those who gather in Jerusalem (e.g., Lk 22:66; Acts 4:5-6). These are the judges who will be judged. The antisemitism is not in the details but the details contain the concrete reality that brought on the killing. Betrayal, scapegoating, victimization, judging, capital punishment, sacrificial religion, or the very modes of redemption in which Israel and Rome put their hope, killed Jesus. Where the first Adam encounters the second Adam, all that has gone into shaping and misshaping Adam, comes into play. The murder concerns the very ground constituting humanity, as it comes into conflict with the reality of his humanity.

They condemned him as a threat to their nation, to their temple, and to their religion and considered him a blasphemer (Mk 14:63–64). He is accused of colluding with Satan, of being insane (Mat 12:22, 24, 26, 27, 28; Mk 3:30; Jn 10:19–21), of having demons (Matt 12:25), and of wanting to destroy the temple (Mk 14:58). He is accused of being a malefactor (John 18:29–30), which may include being a sorcerer and may have been aimed at his miracles.[5] He was accused of claiming to be the rightful King of the Jews (Jn 18:33-38; 19:19). They crucify him because of the threat he poses, and the resurrection is a refutation of their legal-religious condemnation. It is a reversal and judgment on their “nailing him to the cross.”

It is not that Christianity is antisemitic, but Judaism is the specific site in which the Messiah reveals himself (universally), and he brings fulness and truth from out of the Jewish faith: “Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures” (Lk 24:27). He is in all of the Jewish Scriptures because none of it stands alone, it all requires relativization in the light of Christ. The law made absolute, the Jew made absolute, or even God, apart from Christ, made absolute, is captive to the orientation and power of death, which causes theme to condemn him. This God, this religion, this law, is built on crucifying. It absolutizes the tomb, and Jesus empties out this tomb religion, and this is the promised fulfillment of the law and the prophets (Is 28:14-28).

In light of the resurrection their accusations and understanding are proven false, the point of Christ’s vindication. Peter proclaims not only that Jesus’ resurrection vindicates him, but it indicts those who killed him, along with all their reasons for crucifying him. “But God raised Him up again, putting an end to the agony of death, since it was impossible for Him to be held in its power” (Acts 2:24). The “power of death” pertains to the deadly condemnation, but also to the nature of the worship, the religious nationalism, the essentializing identity, which drove in the nails. The condemnation, and the understanding and systems of religion and identity which brought it about, are judged by the resurrection. Peter distributes culpability to Jews (the “you”) and the Romans (the “godless men”) but all serve the power of death, which they presume is absolute and is theirs to manipulate. This essentializing, absolutizing, of death and their ability to wield it upon victims of their choice, is proof in the flesh (they imagine) of the truth of their power. The entire system, is overturned in the resurrection: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). Your beliefs, judgements, and religion (or at least the understanding of your religion), which brought about his crucifixion, stand condemned.

This confrontation of Peter with the Jews is the pattern of proclamation of the resurrection: Peter is himself confronted as a betrayer of Christ and all of the disciples share in the betrayal exemplified by Judas (the charge levelled by Jesus while washing their feet, in Jn 13:1-17). Peter is not shifting the blame but explaining how Jews and Romans are complicit in yielding to the bondage which killed Jesus. Some may not be persecutors on the order of Paul, deniers on the order of Peter, betrayers on the order of Judas, but may simply give themselves over to grief, like Mary at the tomb, but what all share prior to or outside the realization of resurrection is bondage to death. In a long explanation concerning the prophecy presumed to be about David, Peter explains that God has not abandoned Jesus to the grave, and this means life, and the Holy Spirit, not death, are the final reality (esp. Acts 2:33).

The message is a judgment on the judges, as the apostles condemn those who condemned Jesus. “On the next day, their rulers and elders and scribes were gathered together in Jerusalem; and Annas the high priest was there, and Caiaphas and John and Alexander, and all who were of high-priestly descent” (Acts 4:5–6). The same Jewish court that condemned Jesus condemns the apostles and demands their silence (Acts 4) but the apostles reverse the roles, and proclaim Jesus has judged the judges in his resurrection. This however is only the beginning of the message, as they have “acted in ignorance” (Acts 3:17) and through repentance and return, the wiping away of sin, and times of refreshing come through Christ (Acts 3:19–20). Absolution and forgiveness are possible through the power of resurrection.

The pattern is established: realization of complicity in the crime as the first step in a new sort of worship, a new sort of temple, a new understanding of Scripture and Israel. “He is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the chief corner stone. And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:11–12). God judges human judgment, as the victim has become the vindicator, offering true justice. As Rowan Williams notes, “grace is released only in confrontation with the victim.”[6] Grace comes to those who recognize their complicity in the crime, reifying the law, opting for the nation over Christ (the law of sin and death).

The refusal to recognize the resurrected Jesus is a refusal to recognize God is with the victim. This coin though, has two sides: the refusal of Jesus places one on the side of those who killed him, but victimizing through scapegoating, is also the crime that killed him. Jesus can be overtly or implicitly rejected, but on both sides of the equation are the guilty. The “not Christian” as the essence of Jewish identity performs the same work as antisemitism. Each is defined by the same reifying process. The scapegoating which killed Jesus is the same scapegoating which was turned on the Jews. That is, Zionism and the modern State of Israel may preserve the identity which, along with Roman complicity, brought about the death of Christ, however Christian antisemitism (e.g., the crusaders’ accusation that Jews are the “Christ killers”) repeats and preserves the same reifying identity which brought about the death of Christ. The reification of the law and the temple on the part of the Jews is repeated by those antisemites who also reify Jewish identity. Antichristian, antichrist, and antisemitism, are made of the same stuff in that each makes an absolute of the negative. While the tendency may be to quickly pass over “who killed Christ,” not only the sin of antisemitism but all sin is defeated by exposure and proclamation of what caused the death of Christ, as it is precisely the scapegoating reification which Christ confronts, judges, and defeats. Indeed, antisemitism is simply a case in point of what killed Jesus. Othering Jews or Romans, is of the same order as blaming Jesus, and in this victimization of the Other there are no innocent bystanders.

[1] Joshua Pex, “Immigration to Israel according to the Law of Return after conversion to another religion?” OFFICE@LAWOFFICE.ORG.IL, Updated on: 29/06/2025

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd LtD, 2002) 2.

[5] Deuteronomy warns, “If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, . . . that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death” (Dt 13:1–2, 5). Later sources also indicate it may have been the accusation of sorcery which got him killed: Evidence of Jewish opinion at the time of Lactantius is the following passage from the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Sanhedrin 43a: “On the eve of the Passover Yeshu [the Nazarine] was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Any one who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.’ But since nothing was brought forward in his favor he was hanged on the eve of the Passover.” See John W. Welch, “The Legal Cause of Action Against Jesus in John 18:29–30” Celebrating Easter: The 2006 BYU Easter Conference, ed. Thomas A. Wayment and Keith J. Wilson (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University), 157–75. Accessed here: https://rsc.byu.edu/celebrating-easter/legal-cause-action-against-jesus-john-1829-30.

[6] Williams, 4.

Leaning into Christ’s Death as the Hope of Resurrection

My wife, Faith, asked me in a point-blank way what I thought about my resurrection. Maybe it was the wording or the way she asked, but in the moment, I felt only disbelief. I mumbled that I was unsure, and kept to myself that annihilation sometimes seemed plausible. I assume I am a peculiarly poor example of Christian belief, and I know that for many the reality of resurrection and heaven are live options. We went on to talk of her mother, who had an immediate and lively hope of heaven. But as I thought about it, I realized I have no trouble believing in the resurrection of Christ, and I recognized in the New Testament his resurrection is the fulcrum opening the possibility.[1]

Resurrection faith, as it develops in the New Testament, is not focused so much on the future as it is on reconceptualizing immediate, concrete, experience. Baptism, for example, is a voluntary embrace of death so as to be reborn with a new sensibility and experience. Paul makes this argument in telling the Romans they must abandon sin and live virtuous lives (Ro 6:3). Resurrection faith is a training in dying, or in reconceptualizing life. Certainly, this entails future possibility, but it is primarily a more immediate engagement, which points to the significance of the bodily resurrection.

This is not a belief in the Platonic forms, or in some vague afterlife, but it intersects with or is on a continuum with embodied human experience. The death and birth imagery in baptism plays out the immediate embodied point, of resurrection faith. Yes, perhaps it is those of us who are weaker or more immature Christians who get drug down by earthly attachments, but it is also true that it is precisely in this earth-bound embodiment which Christ addresses us. I can take up (or at least grasp) the incremental orientation of living out virtue, dying to the self, and living for others. The immediate thing that impinges is also that which can be immediately resisted, to grasp hold of life as if to preserve it, but this immediate struggle seems obvious. The danger in leaping over these realities, to a future disembodied bliss, is to imagine we get there without passing through embodiment, mortality, and death. That is, we may leap over this reality and misconstrue the eternal significance of the present condition. Rather than severing these bonds, which would amount to giving death final say, Christ lifts us up together with all of creation beyond death, and we are to realize this now. The point is to inhabit the body – bodying forth a virtuous, resurrection faith. Christ has bound us fully and completely to embodiment, and on this basis we live resurrection faith.

We live within or between two experiences, or two overlapping ages, so that the possibility of resurrection, or the end of all things (“The end of the ages has come upon us” 1 Co 10:11) is negotiated now. Paul describes being simultaneously dead to transgression and alive in Christ. He goes on to describe, in the present tense, that he “made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:17). He does tie this to the ages to come, but he poses this future possibility on the basis of the present reality, fusing past, present, and future together in a singular movement.

The working of time, in putting off sin and dying with Christ (Ro 6), is an immediately enacted realization. Believers “have been baptized into His death” (Ro 6:3); “our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with” (Ro 6:6); we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection” (Ro 6:5). The resurrection is not first, but a faith arrived at given the reality of dying with him. We live into this understanding, not as a mere metaphor or mere likeness, but a present participation. As Ann Jervis notes, it is not that “believers travel to Christ’s past but because Christ’s past is present and can be known in human present tenses.”[2] So too we do not travel to Christ’s empty grave but live his resurrection and ascension in the present.

The movement described by Athanasius, “He became man that we could become God,” ties the purposes of creation and redemption in a singular time continuum. Stage one, making humans in His image and likeness, is not instantaneous but a project only completed in the one who is fully human (his inhumanization), and then stage two is a development out of stage one, human divinization. Christ unites himself absolutely and forever (hypostasis), with human nature so as to enact entry of humanity into divinity. God becoming man and man becoming God are distinct but intertwined and overlapping.

Dying to transgression, being brought to life, and being seated at the right hand of the Father, occur for Christ, but are repeated or realized in those found in Christ. There is a realized and being realized eschatology. It is an apocalyptic explosion in slow motion, in which we can see one order coming to an end and the other commencing. For Paul, the end of the ages have come upon us, as God in Christ has become human, but he is becoming human as we too incarnate who he is. In the process we are seated with him in a full divinization, both accomplished and unfolding. As Maximus writes, “To state the matter briefly, of these ages, the former belong to God’s descent to man, while the latter belong to man’s ascent to God.”[3] But Maximus goes on to explain, that inasmuch as this has happened to Christ already, and Christ is the beginning, middle and end, in this sense all of this “has already come upon us.”[4] All at once in Christ, in whom the ages are enfolded, we are caught up in this cosmic creation purpose.

Maximus describes this as consisting of an active and passive principle, with past ages or the ages of the flesh involving “human toil,” having “the characteristic property of activity, but the future ages of the Spirit, which will come about after this present life, are characterized by the transformation of man through passivity.”[5] The Psalm Maximus references, indicates man’s life is full of wearisome toil: “seventy years, or if due to strength, eighty years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away” (Ps 90:10). The imagery of Sabbath rest (described in my previous two blogs) intercedes into this wearisomeness, as we participate in God, in passive reception. As with Mary and Martha, the activity of Martha accompanies and provides for the reception of Mary at Jesus’ feet. With Mary and Martha (in varying proportions), so too we are caught up in two ages and modes, involving both action and receptivity. These two ages, of activity and passivity, are interfused as we must actively make our way to receiving. Having put on Christ is not an end of reason, of thinking, of putting on virtue, but involves a new nexus of reception and action.

Past, present, and future, run together, so that all things are occurring or unfolding in Christ, in and through whom we are active and passive. We accept Christ, we work, we think, we choose (e.g., to be baptized to partake of the Eucharist), we receive. This working of Christ within us is not finished, as the dying we do in taking up the cross and following him is still occurring, and the rising we do is not fully enacted, but the dying we begin, we believe will be made complete at the Parousia or at our death. “Existing here and now, we will reach the ends of the ages in a state of activity, at which point our power and ability to act will reach its limit.”[6] That is, our death is not our end, but is the full realization of the birth which we are undergoing, but it is also where God takes over. “In the ages that will follow, we shall passively experience by grace the transformation of divinization, no longer being active but passive, and for this reason we will not cease being divinized. For then passivity will transcend nature, having no principle limiting the infinite divinization of those who passively experience it.”[7] There is a limit to what we can do, what we can believe and understand, but this limit is where we entrust ourselves to God. The new creation has commenced, but there is still a groaning, a decay, a dying, which will be completed.

God will complete the good work, creation ex -nihilo begun in you: “And we are passive when, having completely traversed the inner principles of the beings created out of nothing, we will have come, in a manner beyond knowledge, to the Cause of beings, and, since all things will have reached their natural limits, our potentials for activity appropriate to them will come to rest.”[8] Our faith is not that we can take it all in, as we pass beyond knowledge and beyond our natural limits, but we can rest in God’s possibilities for us. Paul says, we shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye (I Cor 15:52). The transformation begun in you will no longer revolve around your ability to receive, but we must put this understanding to work now. “Blessed, then, is the one who, after making God human in himself through wisdom and fulfilling the genesis of such a mystery, passively becomes, by grace, God, for the fact of eternally becoming this shall have no end.”[9] Our active inhumanizing God within us, our training in righteousness, will become the age in which we are directly taken into the arms of God (our training in passive receptivity concluded).

The understanding that we are in the stages of a birth “converts” the meaning of death: no longer a condemnation of nature but clearly of sin.[10] Death reigns in one age, but those who are conformed to the death of Christ, are brought to life: “through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men (Ro 5:18–19). As Jervis notes, this one act of righteousness extends to people in every historical period. “In regard to Christ’s temporality . . . this suggests that Paul thought that an act in Christ’s human past affected all of humanity, even those who lived before the incarnation. In effect, Christ’s past spans all of human time.”[11] Though our time and place bound natural capacities limit our perspective, recognition of this time of Christ pertains directly to participation in him: “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Ro 6:9).

Paul, and Maximus after him, compare this state to being in the womb: “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who are the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (Ro 8:22–23). We may see as in a glass darkly, or as if we are peering through a womb, prior to which has been the activity of our conception (creation) and the other side of which is our entry into the fulness and purpose of creation (divinization). As Maximus writes: “For it is true—though it may be a jarring and unusual thing to say—that both we and the Word of God, the Creator and Master of the universe, exist in a kind of womb, owing to the present conditions of our life.”[12] The Word may appear obscurely in this material, sense-perceptible, enclosure, but the delimitations of the womb, set in the context of the birth it indicates, provides a continuity with resurrection which we can live and die into.

The work begun in us, the reality in which we are engaged, the effort of our life, Paul says, will be brought to completion (Phil. 1:6). This makes of death the final descent through birth. I may not immediately leap to faith in my resurrection, but I can fully embrace the faith of Christ, who is “the author and perfecter of faith,” and so I fix my eyes on Jesus, his death on the cross, his resurrection and his ascension (Heb 12:2). This Christocentric approach is not a faith in my faith, it does not depend on my power of belief but it is a participation in his faith, in his dying, and rising.

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th from 7 pm to 9 pm central time. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] I found the lecture by John Bare on Maximus, and I turned to Maximus’ approach to the subject, parting some from Bare’s and Maximus’ analysis.

[2] Ann L. Jervis, Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ (p. 81). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[3] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, Translated by Maximos Constas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 22.5.

[4] Ibid, 22.6.

[5] Ibid, 22.7.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 22.8.

[10] Ibid, 61.10,

[11] Jervis, 82-83.

[12] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 6.3.

Perspectives on Peace: An Inquiry and Invitation

This is a guest blog by PBI Professor Ethan Vanderleek

From April 8-May 27, I will be leading an 8-week module through Forging Ploughshares entitled “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled”: Perspectives on Peace. Here I offer a few initial reflections on peace, as well as some guiding questions for the module, in the hope that others will join me in reading some excellent texts and asking some tough, relevant, and meaningful questions.

The question of peace involves every level of human, even cosmic, existence. Spiritual teachers often say to start with inner peace, in your own heart and life. Such inner peace will spill over into relationships with others. The reverse is also true: inner peace, peace with and within yourself, is impossible if you live in deep enmity with your neighbor. And peace in neighbourly relationships extends to include our communities, cities, churches, nations, and the human race as a whole. When we talk about peace, then, there is ultimately no human reality that is left out of the discussion: when we truly desire peace we desire it at every level.

There is also a sense in which peace is primordial or foundational to human existence and experience. Many people, perhaps most, would say they desire peace. St. Augustine says that wars are fought not for their own sake but so that peace may be won. Violence is only engaged to bring about peace. No one could say they love violence for its own sake. The peace that is violently fought for may indeed be a false peace, but there is some connection to peace nonetheless. “What men want in war is that it should end in peace. Even while waging a war every man wants peace, whereas no one wants war while he is making peace” (Augustine, City of God, XIV.12).

What do we desire when we desire peace? First, it is a negative desire. It is the desire to be freed from certain forms of un-peace, of dis-ease, from violence and war. When a parent yearns for a moment of peace and quiet in a chaotic household, it is a desire that the noise, commotion, and inter-sibling conflict would cease. Peace from war and conflict, in our historical moment, often starts with a ceasefire, with something stopping, not so much something starting. This is negative peace: the cessation, even temporarily, of violence, conflict, and aggression.

But this negation of violence is only the barest condition for peace. Is there a positive sense of peace? First, peace is a positive, dynamic, energetic relationship between people or between things. There is peace when an infant slumbers on the breast; though there may be quiet, there is also excitement and anticipation at what this little life will hold, how the mother and father will encourage and behold the child’s growth and curiosity. Peace between friends involves conversation, exploration, pursuing common projects together: building a swing-set, perhaps, cooking a meal, or talking through some complex matter. Religiously, peace may involve the silence of prayer, listening for the voice of the creator; even here, in silence and stillness, there is an energy of relationship, of receiving life and love from beyond. So peace is not just an absence of violence: it is a positive set of relationships, sharing life and energy between differences.

To attempt a formula: peace is dynamic life-giving relationship between differences. Peace does not involve collapsing or eliminating all difference, where all that remains is an undifferentiated whole. Nor, though, does peace involve an absolute emphasis on difference, where individual people or communities isolate themselves from the unity that comes through relationships. Peace involves a delicate balance between unity and difference: an over-emphasis on either is the destruction of relationships, either collapsed into a whole or spread out so thinly and remotely that no relationship is possible.

Starting April 8, I will be leading an 8-week module through Forging Ploughshares on the question of peace. Four key questions will guide our inquiry. I sketch out some preliminary thoughts here, but these are open questions that admit to ever further thought and prayer. They are:

What is true peace?
What is false peace?
Is peace possible or even desirable? Is peace more fundamental than war and violence?
What is the peace that Jesus gives?

What is true peace? Peace is dynamic, energetic, ordered, exploratory, relational, and freeing. It operates at every level of existence: personal, relational, communal, political, and cultural. Peace at one level integrates with peace at other levels: I cannot have true personal peace if I am not at peace with my brother or sister. We cannot have true peace between nations without peace between cultures and civilizations.
What is false peace? Peace masquerades in many forms. There is the false peace of withdrawal into the self, the self making peace with itself totally apart from relations with others. There is the false peace of uniformity, where everyone must fit into one expected way of being. There is the false peace of the common enemy, where peace is made in a community by finding an enemy that everyone agrees to despise and hate. There is the false peace of victory, where one person or group achieves peace by defeating, perhaps subjugating, another person or group. There is the false peace of indifference, where the effort of relating is too great, and we agree to ignore difficult aspects of a relationship. There is the false peace of distraction, where work or entertainment keep us from deeper relationships, questions, or human endeavors.
Is peace possible or even desirable? Is peace more fundamental than war and violence? There is the further, troubling question of whether peace is a worthwhile question and whether it is a true or worthy object of desire at all. Is it possible that all peace is ultimately false? The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that “war [polemos] is father [pater] of all” (F23, The First Philosophers, trans. Robin Waterfield). Conflict seems constitutive of reality.And sometimes we crave the adventure of conflict, war, or aggression. Nietzsche writes in The Anti-Christ, “Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency” (New York: Penguin, 1990; 128; trans. R.J. Hollingdale). On the one hand, then, peace might simply be brief moments of rest within reality’s deeper constitutive violence. On the other hand, peace might cover over our fundamental humanity, which needs to express itself through conflict, power, and victory. Nietzsche warns us against desiring a lazy peace that squelches the endeavoring human spirit. Perhaps the pursuit of peace is one of Christianity’s lies, uncritically accepted, but needing a total revaluation when we return to the fundamental human drive to life, a drive which, far from fearing or shunning war and violence, seeks out and embraces them. This is a question that invites ever further inquiry, sometimes troubling inquiry, when we consider how deep seated the impulse to violence and war is in our world and in ourselves.
What is the peace that Jesus gives? Christian faith teaches that peace is the truth of creation and redemption. “My peace I leave you,” Jesus says, yet “not as the world gives.” The peace of Jesus is set firmly against all forms of false peace. But false peace is endemic, and so his presence is not first pacifying but aggravating. He exposes false peace. He is identified not as a wise, serene sage but as a man of sorrows. He suffers all the effects of our forms of false peace, our insistence on making peace through violent means. Jesus’s peace cannot be secured through military violence, which would be to totally compromise it. He makes real and accessible the peace of the Triune God, that infinite relationship of source, response, and openness, of Father, Son, and Spirit.

These questions and more will guide our inquiry in the “Perspectives on Peace Module.” We’ll examine historical sources with Augustine and Julian of Norwich. We’ll address critiques of peace from Heraclitus and Nietzsche. We’ll learn from Jewish and Muslim writers on peace. We’ll consider peace between nations, cultures, civilizations, and religions with Raimon Panikkar. Through it all we’ll strive to keep Jesus himself as the ultimate criteria and judge for what true peace is.

Where Does Thought Begin and End: Mary Versus Martha

The most basic question concerns that with which we are always occupied, the why and how of thought. What is it, how do we best do it, and how does it shape who we are? We might picture thought as either a verb or noun, a doing or a receiving, a striving and working from lack, or a resting in a given and received abundance. It is like the difference between six days of work and the day of Sabbath, or the difference between Mary and Martha upon Jesus’ visitation. “Mary was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. But Martha was distracted with all her preparations” (Luke 10:39). If we think of the two women figuratively, with Martha representing the verb, the working form of thought, and Mary representing the Sabbatical resting form of thought, it not only illustrates two forms of thought but the perspective of each in juxtaposition to the other.

From Martha’s perspective, Mary is being lazy, and she is “left to do all the serving alone.” Martha’s response to Mary is not meant to devalue Jesus’ teaching, but there are “more pressing and practical matters.” In terms of thought, Martha might represent a kind of pragmatism, asking what work is being accomplished? Martha’s busy-ness (food and serving preparation) will result in a tangible product. We often picture thinking and life as a task aimed at producing. Thought is not simply to be enjoyed and indulged, but must justify itself, and show its value in some other coin. Martha is cleaning, getting a meal ready, and the value of her work is evident, but it does not occur to her that all of her preparations are subordinate to the “one necessary and good thing.”

Mary, as a Sabbath form of thought, is thought for itself, and is not for something else. Our tendency is to put thinking to work, either in a neurotic compulsive repetition, or aimed at attaining (perhaps ourselves) in and through thought. Sabbath thought, is on the order of Mary’s sitting at Jesus’ feet and taking in his instruction. We may have the experience of insight or a realization occurring to us, in which we are the receptors of something beyond ourselves. This thinking is not like producing a meal but is more on the order of a form of art, to be enjoyed for itself. There is food for thought which has no object other than itself. In the case of Jesus teaching, so too with a certain form of thought, it is simply to be received with joy. According to William Desmond, it presumes an original ontological ground: “a vision of all things being what they are by virtue of an ultimate ontological peace —to be at all is to be in the gifted peace of creation as good.”1 Sabbath thought is a realization of this ground of thought outside of itself.

Given this ground, contemplation, study, meditation, and prayer, are for themselves, though they may infect and channel all that surrounds them, but thought which does not have this center, is all Martha and no Mary. Sabbath thought “rests” in the realization of the divine, presumes a dependence on God, a providential guidance, an opening to deeper insight. It is a waiting, expectation, and gratitude, while its opposite is pure distraction which never realizes its primary purpose. Sabbath thought bears peace, that is beneath and perhaps beyond articulation. Unadulterated appreciation of beauty, enjoyment, profound contentment, pervade this thought centered on receiving grace. It is the “very good” of God in his admiration of creation and it is our participation in that same realization.

However, before we too readily dismiss Martha’s accusation (or before Jesus’ dismisses it), we recognize that though sloth is not Mary’s problem, this is a real possibility. Isn’t it the case that Sabbath itself contains the possibility of a sort of bored laziness; that the day in which we are to sit at the Saviour’s feet becomes instead a groggy oppressiveness in which we fail to discern the Lord? Thomas Aquinas recognizes this juxtaposition and poses Sabbath as an exposure of slothfulness: “Sloth is opposed to the precept about hallowing the Sabbath day. . . [, which] implicitly commands the mind to peace in God to which sorrow of the mind about the divine good is contrary.”[2] Aquinas defines sloth, as an oppressive sorrow, which, “so weighs upon man’s mind, that he wants to do nothing. . . . hence sloth implies a certain weariness of work. . . a sluggishness of the mind which neglects to begin good.”[3] Sabbath sluggishness, describes a form of thought that is sorrowful, and having ceased activity (busyness), sorrow sets in as the mind turns in on itself. The lack of purpose, the despair, covered up by activity, may strike us in this moment. The wait for Godot, or for some larger explanation or purpose, is the opposite of Sabbath thought, in that it is all delay, anticipation, suffering, and there is no meaning. Sunday boredom may be much more pervasive than Sunday joy, but from this perspective Sabbath (the day of the Lord) is exposing something otherwise repressed. Sabbath may expose a sloth, a sorrow, a boredom which work hides.

Aquinas explains that sloth may pass from being a venial to a mortal sin, if it is deep ceded enough: “So too, the movement of sloth is sometimes in the sensuality alone, by reason of the opposition of the flesh to the spirit, and then it is a venial sin; whereas sometimes it reaches to the reason, which consents in the dislike, horror and detestation of the Divine good, on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit. On this case it is evident that sloth is a mortal sin.”[4] That is, the spirit may be willing but the flesh weak, or it may be that fleshly torpor also dominates thought and spirit. Sloth can become a way of thinking and Sabbath is meant to intercede in this downward spiral. According to Aquinas, sloth is opposed to joy, and as he explains “sloth can infect reason,” constituting its own joyless form of thought.

Thinking, of the Sabbath kind, the Mary kind, the received kind, is joyous. It is the thought God had on the Sabbath when he recognized, “It is very good.” There is an inherent pleasure in this recognition, which need not “do” something. This thought is an ontological ground out of which all thinking and goodness flows. There is no thinking, of any kind, apart from this origin. This goodness and peace are the basis of peace and goodness, making even defective forms possible. This thought need not wait till the end of history but is present throughout, the beginning and middle, as well as at history’s end. This goodness though, may be so pervasive that it is taken for granted, in that all possibility flows from this reality, making it difficult to recognize.[5] Martha-like busyness may not have time or inclination for this recognition.

We can hide from work, in the manner Martha projects upon Mary, but work can be a distraction, and this may be Martha’s problem: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things” (Luke 10:41). Jesus’ description of Martha captures life for many: worry and bother about many things but missing the point. According to Aquinas, “Now just as we do many things on account of pleasure, both in order to obtain it, and through being moved to do something under the impulse of pleasure, so again we do many things on account of sorrow, either that we may avoid it, or through being exasperated into doing something under pressure thereof.”[6] Martha is exasperated, and she seems to betray a sorrow, which according to Aquinas, she may be repressing. Sloth is a resistance, a dis-ease, the opposite of peace and joy, even where sloth is hidden by activity. Martha and her repressed kin may be missing the only thing necessary, “the good part.”

Martha wants Jesus to spur Mary into action, presuming she is avoiding work, but Jesus suggests Martha’s exasperation is causing her to miss what Mary has found (v. 41). He explains, “Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her” (Lk 10:42). Martha is misfocused, worried, anxious and bothered, and in the process may miss the good thing, the main thing, and to take it away from Mary would be tragic. Mary has found the peace that has escaped Martha. This peace and goodness give value to everything else. It is the original goodness that makes all the work and preparation an extension of goodness.

Jesus doesn’t tell Martha to drop everything and come and sit down, though we might expect she would finish what she is doing and not miss out. He doesn’t command her, or us, to stop working, and sit meditating, but the work is not going to produce goodness, but flows from and toward this goodness. Martha cannot whip up this thing in her kitchen. What is being imparted to Mary may be assisted by Martha, in that Mary is not taken away from what is necessary, but Martha’s worried, bothered, busy-bodyness, is not helping, but is a distraction from what is essential. “Mary has chosen the good part,” the part that gives value to what Martha is doing. Martha’s busyness is justified by what Mary is doing, but not her worry and bother.

To say her worry and bother are justified would be to justify her experience of exasperated futility. It would be on the order of saying war is necessary for peace, or evil is justified by goodness, or sin is essential to salvation. The two are not connected. Martha’s worry is for nothing, serves nothing, and accomplishes nothing, though it is connected to her service. The problem is, separating Martha and her worry, her service and her exasperation. Is worry or war a necessary means to an end? The one necessary and good thing Mary is experiencing is not aided but hindered by Martha’s worried interference. Mary does not need the worry of Martha. Jesus is immediately accessible, and the goodness and peace he brings are accessible. Nothing else is necessary, and certainly futility and sin in no way aid or serve the good. Paul can experience this peace in prison, John received visions of hope and peace while in exile and under torture, and Christ grants peace from the cross. This thought transcends context and potentially descends into every context.

Now if Mary had said to Jesus, “Excuse me, I must go into the kitchen and strangle my sister,” this would have been like the strategy of peace through war. There is a total disruption, a total break. The one is completely opposed to the other, though we understand the confusion. Life as war, or thought as a plague, killing as the means to life, all Martha and no Mary, kills off the goal in striving to achieve it. There is a basic negativity, nothing as ground, which is not simply a philosophical problem, but which philosophy exposes.

For example, Descartes would doubt his way to God, in a form of thinking which receives nothing which transcends it. Like Kant, he “wants to accept nothing he has not earned through his own work.”[7] Descartes gives more room to doubt and the demonic, (the possibility a demon is deceiving him), than he does to love of God. He considers the possibility that he is brain damaged, that he is dreaming, or that an evil genius is deluding him. Things are precarious, my head may be “made of earthenware,” or “glass,” or I may be insane, or a demon deceiving me. Every possibility must be equally entertained before the arbiter of doubt.[8] He aims for a sure thought, like mathematics, that cannot be doubted but which can be mastered. This suspicious doubt is aggressive to what is beyond its control, and has no room for wonder, astonishment, or love, none of which can be reduced to a mathematical formula. It is as if love of my wife needs a prior surety, perhaps a private detective to investigate, so as to relieve any doubt. In this thinking, love of God is not a possible starting point, but the detective of doubt must first be deployed. Doubt may seem the more rigorous form of thought, but it is by definition the refusal of received thinking (not just received tradition, received authority, received understanding, but the very possibility of reception), on the order of the Sabbath. I must be in all the thought as author and originator. Given Descartes’ starting point (radical doubt and the possibility of radical evil), Sabbath thinking is not possible. Things are too unsure. Tradition, Church authority, and faith, have their place, but not in the realm of serious thinking (the rational kind). It is no great leap from Descartes’ radical doubt to Nietzsche’s nihilism.

This Enlightenment thought promotes an empty autonomy, all Martha and unaware of the Mary form of thought. They will do for themselves: think the greatest thought after Anselm, think one’s being after Descartes, and accept nothing not earned with Kant. The fumes of a presumed autonomy render them unconscious to any alternative; all work and no resting-playful grace. This form of empty thinking brings on Nietzsche’s pronouncement, “God is dead,” and he is dead for this form of thought. It is as if Martha has gotten so caught up in her kitchen duties that she has forgotten the possibility of divine visitation (Jesus in the other room). Mary-like reception can be disrupted and broken, not due to lack of effort, but because of energy, effort, worry, and bother, all directed to attaining what can only be received.

In the same way, grasping the tree of the knowledge of good and evil excludes from the tree of life (they die unaware), but then they find they are naked and ashamed. This failed knowledge is a doing, a grasping, a divinizing through its own power, and at the same time it is a refusal of mortality. Adam is the original Descartes, imagining that in this knowing he has grasped immortal divine being. Busyness, business, war, philosophy, or neurotic thought, may distract and cover the reality (of nakedness, mortality, and frailty). The human impetus is to cover the nakedness without addressing the root problem. As Desmond describes the philosophical project, “preaches speculatively against nakedness and every beyond, and the system weaves its conceptual clothes to cover our naked frailties.”[9]

To cease one form of thought, to bring busyness to an end, to enter the Sabbath, is to give up on covering frailty. There is no activity, no thought, no system of knowing, that can cover this nakedness. All pretense of defense, all weapons, all notions of self-determination, all busyness, must be dropped, as there is nothing to be done, other than receive the gift of the Master. There is no working to get there, but the work of preparation, in the metaphorical kitchen, must cease so as to enter the metaphorical living room at the feet of Jesus. There is no warring our way to peace, struggling to gain rest, or working our way to salvation. You cannot get to Mary-thought through Martha-thinking, the one precludes the other.

The dialectical intelligibility of the world, its oppositional antagonism, may in fact be more familiar, and may even provide a momentary satisfaction, but hunger will return. As Jesus explains at the well in Samaria, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about,” (Jn 4:32) and he promises a living water which “will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13). Martha-thought may provide temporary sustenance but it cannot serve in place of what Mary receives. Mary takes the time given to receive what is not otherwise available, while Martha cannot make time.

Goodness and peace, like the thought they entail, require only sitting at the feet of Jesus. This is cessation of activity of the Martha kind so as to receive the Word in the way of Mary. This thought is from beyond us, just as every origin, including ourselves, transcends us. We cannot cook up this peace or create this goodness, but only receive it. The point is not to denigrate Martha and her work or any work, but to acknowledge that all work requires more than itself. Even God’s work days are followed by interludes recognizing the goodness and then an uninterrupted Sabbath day, recognizing and declaring this goodness. To enter into this divine recognition is the beginning of Sabbath thought. “There is nothing we can do, nothing we are to do; except to take joy in the gift of being, and to live divine praise.”[10]

So thought is that which pervades every waking and even sleeping moment of our lives, and it may not have occurred to us that there is a failed form, an inadequate form, and a redeemed form of thought. It is not that we can easily be continually absorbed into this reality, but the goal of this transformed, grateful form of thought, holds out the immediate realization of rest and peace, the fulfilled Sabbath rest of Christ.

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 320.

[2] Thomas Aquinas, Summa, ques. 35, art. 3, response, and ad. 1. Cited in Desmond, 319.

[3] Summa, Question 35, Article 1: Whether sloth is a sin?

[4] Summa, 35:3.

[5] Desmond, 320.

[6] Summa, 35:4.

[7] Desmond, 341. This Lutheran rejection of works somehow preserved a toilsome thought, perhaps in making God so transcendent that his goodness was unavailable.

[8] René Descarte, Meditations 1 & 2.

[9] Desmond, 347.

[10] Desmond, 347.

When Faith Bows Down Before Power

Guest blog by Allan S. Contreras Ríos

Pictures of religious leaders surrounding political figures, laying hands on them, and pronouncing public blessings have become part of the contemporary media landscape. Recently, a photo circulated on social media showing religious leaders laying hands on Trump and praying for him in these times of war. But this is not unique to the United States; it has also been done in Mexico. In fact, regardless of the country, the scene is repeated with different accents and partisan colors. And every time it appears, it awakens an ancient, almost visceral memory in those of us who have read the Bible with open eyes.

Because this situation is not just a symbolic gesture. It is the repetition of a pattern that Scripture knows all too well: the temptation to turn faith into a seal of legitimacy for projects of power. A temptation as old as the kings of Israel and as current as any modern political campaign. It is an echo of the false prophets, an echo that calls for a voice like that of the prophet Jeremiah.

In biblical accounts, court prophets, those who came too close to the throne, rarely spoke on behalf of God. Their role was rather different: to produce a false sense of tranquility, to promise false stability, to pronounce false blessings on political decisions, and all this in the name of God.

There are three features that characterized their message: 1. They promised peace when there was no peace. And in this way, they anesthetized the collective conscience.2. They confused the voice of the king with the voice of God. And in this way, they turned theology into nationalist propaganda. 3. They silenced those who did denounce injustices. Because the truth always makes those in power uncomfortable.

This pattern is repeated over and over again when religious sectors present a political leader as a “protector of the faith,” a “divine instrument,” or a “guarantor of the national destiny.” No matter the country, the mechanism is the same. Faith becomes a tool for violence, rather than a means of raising awareness.

When Andrés Manuel López Obrador was becoming president of Mexico, at a National Christian Fellowship, a congregation was proud to have had the opportunity to be with AMLO and pray for him that God would bless him as he led the country. This pride was based on a misunderstanding of 1 Timothy 2. A misunderstanding that fuels a dangerous religious nationalism.

1 Timothy 2:2 says that the Church should pray “for kings and all those in authority,” but the purpose is explicit in the same verse: “so that we may live peaceful and quiet lives with all godliness and dignity.” That purpose changes the entire narrative that was being told at this Christian event. Because Paul is not saying: “Pray that they win wars.” “Pray that God will bless their political projects.” “Pray that their nation will be superior to others.” “Pray that God will make America great again.” “Pray that Morena will be the hope of Mexico.”

Paul is saying something much more humble and pastoral: “Pray that the rulers will not bother the Church. Pray that there will be enough stability to live the faith without persecution. Pray that we may practice piety without interference.”

It is a defensive prayer, not a celebratory one. It is a pastoral prayer, not a nationalistic one. And it is especially not the latter. We must remember, and it is important that we do, that Paul writes this under a violent, militaristic, and pagan empire. Paul is not legitimizing Caesar. He is not blessing Rome’s military campaigns. He is asking that the Church be allowed to survive and witness in peace. And not a peace obtained through violence, as was the Pax Romana.

So when we pray publicly today for a ruler to “win wars,” “defeat enemies,” or “fulfill his divine destiny,” we are not obeying Paul; we are seriously misinterpreting him. We are repeating the pattern of the false prophets of the court, not that of the apostles.

On the other hand, in contrast to these false prophets, we have an authentic prophetic voice that was (and is) almost never popular. Jeremiah knew this well. While the official prophets assured everyone that all was well, he denounced injustice toward the vulnerable, religious corruption, the idolatry of nationalism, and false security based on sacred symbols. Jeremiah’s message was not “God is with our nation no matter what,” but something much more uncomfortable: “God is with justice, and if the nation abandons it, it also abandons his protection.” Jeremiah did not bless political projects. He blessed the truth, even if it hurt the rulers and the people. And that is why they beat him, imprisoned him, and accused him of being unpatriotic. Prophetic faithfulness has always come at a cost.

What is today called “religious nationalism” or “Christian nationalism” —whether in American, Mexican, or any other country’s discourse— shares elements that the Bible identifies as dangerous because it reduces faith to a patriotic symbol, divides between “true believers” and “enemies of the nation,” promises salvation through state violence, not the Kingdom of God, and uses spiritual language for electoral purposes: one nation under God! The hope of Mexico!

This is not only a theological error. It is a spiritual disease. Because it transforms the Gospel into an instrument of tribal identity and distances it from its mission: to liberate, heal, reconcile, denounce injustices, and proclaim a Kingdom that does not depend on borders or parties.

When faith kneels before power, it loses its voice. When it kneels before Christ, it regains it.

Those who raise their voices to denounce these distortions often feel like a minority. And they are. But the Bible never measured truth by majority. In fact, a sign that something is wrong is when a majority agrees with an idea.

The prophetic vocation today, then, involves naming injustice even if it is unpopular, remembering that the Kingdom of God is not a national project, unmasking religious manipulation without falling into cynicism, and caring for the community so that it does not confuse faith with propaganda.

It is not about attacking people, but about discerning spirits. Like when the disciples wanted to rain down fire on Samaria and Jesus rebuked them, saying that they did not know what spirit they were of. We must question which discourses produce life and which produce violence, death, and idolatry. We must remember that faith does not exist to bless empires and their wars, but to humanize those who live under them. And to care for those who are affected by imperial violence.

Biblical history warns us that when religion becomes an ally of power, it loses its ability to speak the truth. When faith becomes a political tool, it ceases to be good news—the gospel—for the poor, immigrants, widows, the oppressed, etc. And when prophets are silent, injustice becomes the norm.

That is why, in times when faith is used as a tool of national identity, Jeremiah’s voice becomes urgent once again. Not to destroy, but to heal. Not to divide, but to remind us that God cannot be tamed by any human project.

The Gospel does not need a king to be true, nor does it need the king to propagate it. But kings—and systems—do need prophets to remind them that they are not gods. And that the violent actions they take are not approved by God.

As a Christian, you are either a prophet of God who denounces the powers that be, or a false prophet who applauds your homeland.