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Salvation as Defeat of the Powers

The depiction of the armor of God in Ephesians (6:10-19) is often taken as a colorful illustration, which makes for great sermonizing, but is not usually considered as central to the gospel. Defeat of the powers and personal engagement in this defeat, to say nothing of the notion that Christ came to defeat evil, are often displaced by theories of the atonement focused on deliverance from the wrath of God, and limited to a legal remedy of imputed righteousness, none of which allows for primary focus on personal engagement with and defeat of evil. In this understanding, the gospel is thought to pertain to more effervescent and transcendent categories rather than depicting how it weaponizes those who bear it and wear it with a capacity to engage and defeat evil. Thus, what the early church and Paul considered the very heart of salvation is dismissed as a fun allegory, more suited to children’s choruses than serious theologizing. How this came to be is largely explained by the Constantinian shift.

Constantinianism is a form of Christianity which has abandoned Christ’s strategy for what it presumes is a more effective method. As Nathan Kerr describes it:

Constantinianism most fundamentally names a certain orientation toward the political meaning of history which is rooted in a heretical eschatology based upon a misconception of the relation of Christ to history. Most importantly, Constantinianism proceeds as if what happened in the cross, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus had not profoundly altered history, and it provides for the church a way of acting politically in history which is not entirely determined by the lordship of Jesus Christ.[1]

According to John Howard Yoder, Constantinianism (true to the vision of Constantine), moves the sign of the cross from Golgotha to the battlefield, and conquering under this sign no longer entails taking up the cross as an instrument of self-giving sacrifice but it reinforces sacrificing one’s enemies in violence and warfare.[2] As Jordan Wood describes, Yoder “is not merely claiming that ‘Constantinianism’ tempts Christians to disobey the commands of Jesus, but that it tempts them to renounce their destiny to be like God.”[3] In Yoder’s estimate this temptation becomes reality in the undoing of the church/world distinction, such that the church disappears and the Roman State takes its place:

Before Constantine, one knew as a fact of everyday experience that there was a believing Christian community but one had to “take it on faith” that God was governing history. After Constantine, one had to believe without seeing that there was a community of believers, within the larger nominally Christian mass, but one knew for a fact that God was in control of history.[4]

Prior to Constantine the persecuted and martyred Christians marked the church state distinction, but with the Constantinian embrace of Christianity, all Romans were (mostly) Christian and the church became an indistinct part of the masses, while Rome’s rule in the name of Christ was interpreted as the arrival of the kingdom. Thus, every Roman soldier was required to be a Christian, and soldiering for Christ was sublated by literal killing and service to the State. This ideology persists in Christendom, such that Paul’s illustration is often allegorized and spiritualized away.

Four key points need to be made regarding the gospel armor in Ephesians 6 to regain the meaning and centrality of this passage:

1. If Ephesians is, as I have argued (along with the early church fathers such as Origen, and contemporary scholars such as Douglas Campbell – here) the center and summary of Paul’s gospel, then Ephesians 6 as a summary of all that Paul has said in Ephesians, encapsulates Paul’s understanding of how the gospel works to defeat evil and bring about salvation (as I demonstrate below).[5] As Joshua Greever notes, Romans 13:12–14 is a parallel text, in which Paul urges Christians to “put on the armor of light” (13:12), but then follows this up in 13:14 with “put on the Lord Jesus Christ,” “suggesting that putting on the armor of light is nothing other than putting on the Lord Jesus.”[6] In other words, by encouraging them to put on this armor Paul is urging them once again to “put on Christ” and is summarizing his gospel with the added urgency to do this and thus defeat the powers.

2. Paul’s gospel is built upon resistance to evil. The genius of Walter Wink is in recognizing (and one could point to the failure of theologians such as David Hart and John Milbank, who both eloquently describe a peaceful ontology but fail to recognize) what Wink calls the third way of the gospel. This third way is not nonresistance or violent resistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil. As Wink writes, “Jesus is not telling us to submit to evil, but to refuse to oppose it on its own terms. We are not to let the opponent dictate the methods of our opposition. He is urging us to transcend both passivity and violence by finding a third way, one that is at once assertive and yet nonviolent.”[7] Christ does not promote passive resistance or violent resistance, but Christ offers the singular solution – the gospel.

3. In Ephesians 6:10-19, Paul is describing salvation. Salvation defeats evil in the form of the powers of this world and the only way these powers are defeated is through the means provided by God. Taking Ephesians as a whole and Ephesians six, in particular, as descriptive of salvation, means salvation is not deliverance from God but deliverance from the cosmic powers of evil, death, and the devil. The captivating power, the darkening power, the death dealing power, is not the power of God but the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers (the cosmocrats), the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (6:12). The cosmic struggle is not removed from the historical, political, and earthly, and so too, the Christian engages these spiritual forces through their earthly manifestations. Ideologies and institutions manifesting the various forms of individual and corporate violence and oppression (e.g., nationalism, fascism, racism, sexism, legalism) constitute the cosmos of darkness. There is no mystery as to the power of evil (this power of death and violence is the coin of the realm of the kingdoms of darkness) undone by the gospel of peace, truth, and righteousness.

That the mode of this salvation is provided by God is made clear in the armor passages Paul is echoing. The description of God’s armor in Isaiah (which Paul must be following) and God’s saving is Israel’s only hope: “And He saw that there was no man, And was astonished that there was no one to intercede;Then His own arm brought salvation to Him, And His righteousness upheld Him” (Is 59:16). God alone can accomplish this salvation and he alone has this armor.

Why can only God save? The obvious answer is in Paul’s depiction of the power of God (equated at 6:10 ff. with the armor) found (as he has explained) in Christ’s resurrection, ascension, and reign over the powers:

what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion (Eph 1:19–21).

Paul has explained the strength of the Lord and how believers appropriate this strength, thus his command to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of His might” (6:10) is a reiteration of the opening of the letter. It is through the gospel that God in Christ defeats death, and the powers that depend upon death. Christ is seated at the Father’s right hand in the heavenly place and this exaltation of Christ implies the disarming of all cosmic powers, and this disarming power is to be appropriated by each Christian.

4. Salvation involves a real-world defeat of the principalities and powers in the life of the believer. There is simultaneously the corporate empowerment (implying an army), but the focus in this passage is on the individual soldier. To state it most succinctly: to be saved is to be saved from the powers as outlined in the armor passage. This is inclusive of the thought (head), action (feet), and heart (breast) of the individual. The armor weaponizes the individual against the “fiery darts of the evil one” by creating a new plan of action (feet shod with the gospel of peace), a new world of thought (the head and mind transformed by the helmet of salvation), and a new ethic and worldview (the breast plate of righteousness and the belt of truth girding up the whole outfit). Defeating the powers, though it may not be a full explanation of salvation, is synonymous or at least synchronous with salvation in that the fulness of the gospel is required (with all of its positive benefits) to counteract, as Ephesians puts it, “the flaming arrows of the evil one” (Eph. 6:16).

Paul’s picture of salvation through the defeat of the powers focuses on the perspective of the individual soldier. This soldier has the resources of his Lord seated at the right hand of God, but he only sees the battle in the limited perspective of one directly engaged in warfare. It is only the commander on high who can survey the entire field of battle and he alone understands how this battle is to be won. One must trust that God is in control of history, as only the immediate warfare is in plain sight. The temptation is to judge this methodology ineffective and to replace the armor and weaponry of the gospel with the sword of state. The kenotic self-sacrificing power of the cross, the feet shod with the gospel of peace, the head protected by salvation, are unlikely strategies for victory by the standards of worldly power, so the soldier must have faith in his weapons and his commander or abandon the gospel. The final outcome is assured only in the eschaton.


[1]  Nathan R. Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene: Cascade, 2009) 7. Quoted in Jordan Wood, Assessing the “Constantinian Shift”: A Defense of the Theological Question, Presented at “For the Good of the Many”: Constantine and the Edict of Milan on Its 1700th Anniversary St. Louis, September 20, 2013.

[2] The description is from John Howard Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources of Western Social Ethics,” in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics Gospel (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984): 145. Quoted by Wood, 7.

[3] Wood, 7.

[4] Yoder, “The Constantinian Sources,” 137. Quoted in Wood, 4.

[5] Throughout his description of the armor, Paul is appealing to his former key points (a few examples must suffice): “the strength of his might” of 6:10 is defined by resurrection and ascension at 1:19; “put on the whole armor of God” has its parallel explanation at 4:24, “put on the new self”; “the schemes of the devil” (6:11) are explained at 4:14 as “deceitful schemes” and the Ephesians are warned “give no opportunity to the devil” at 4:27; the first three pieces of armor—peace, truth and righteousness (6:13-15) are defined earlier by Christ. Truth is directly equated with Jesus (4:21), and truth and righteousness are found in the one new man created and embodied in Christ (4:24; cf. 2:15), and the original preacher and resource of the gospel of peace is Jesus (2:17); the defeat of the rulers and authorities of 6:12 has been explained at 1:21, as Christ (resurrected and ascended) is far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, inclusive at 2:2 of the authoritative ruler of the air and at 3:10 the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. For an exhaustive list Joshua M. Greever, The Armor of God, the Gospel of Christ, and Standing Firm against the ‘Powers’ (Ephesians 6:10–20); [JBTS 5.1 (2020): 72–89].

[6] Ibid, 84.

[7] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (p. 101). Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

Imitation as Salvation

A central motif of Scripture, obscured by Martin Luther’s reaction to works righteousness, is the focus on imitating Christ. As Adam Koontz points out, “Luther’s confrontations with Anabaptists in the 1520s and 1530s caused him to react strongly against their urging a very literal imitation of Christ that excluded the just war tradition of Christian political thinking.”[1] The way I experienced this obscuring of imitation may be typical. It was not that the idea was ever directly dismissed, but in my seminary education the focus was on harmonizing the Gospels; rather than studying the life and teaching of Christ as a model to be imitated, the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain were relegated to the old covenant of works. In turn, “taking up the cross and following Jesus” was displaced by the notion of Jesus final payment for sin; that is, “Jesus died so that I do not have to.” Faith alone may not completely exclude the notion of imitating Christ but it is made secondary, as Luther demonstrated in his preference for the term conformitas Christi to imitatio Christi as a way of deemphasizing the Anabaptist focus.

Though imitation is central in Paul’s theology, Pauline theology (which in the Reformation is taken as the central theology of the New Testament) as interpreted through Luther and Calvin, makes very little (theologically) of the life and teaching of Christ. Focus on Christ as a sacrificial payment displaces the theological significance of the historical Jesus. It is not so much that Paul trumps Jesus, but Luther’s and Calvin’s Paul trumps the Paul focused upon the historical Jesus. “Faith alone,” penal substitution, anti-works, renders imitation of the historical Jesus secondary. For example, Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament is focused on Paul’s theology and within Paul’s theology imitation is all but dismissed.[2] In this understanding, the historical Jesus is more of a problem to be solved than a model to be followed. After all, Paul had no link with the historical Jesus and the Gospels are inconsistent and need to be harmonized in order to recover the historical Jesus.

 At a popular level, something like imitation of Jesus resurfaced in bracelets (WWJD which played off the 19th century novel by Charles Sheldon, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?). But it may have been that this reduced to a religious fad, as it was focused on an ethical decisionism (a questionable sort of ethical foundation), rather than taking the life of Christ as key to theological understanding. So too, the Anabaptist notion of a literal imitation of Christ did not set imitation within a larger theological understanding.[3] Anabaptists could read the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ other ethical teaching quite literally but Anabaptists would fall short, for example, of someone such as Thomas à Kempis whose theology is one in which imitation is the very fabric of salvation (see below).

There are the specific passages that command imitation but much of the vocabulary and theology of the New Testament presumes imitation. Walking as Christ walked, putting on the faith of Christ, taking up the cross, being in Christ, being a disciple of Christ or being part of the family of Christ is premised on imitation. The central significance of imitation is lost if Christ is primarily a payment for sin or a legal remedy obtaining imputed righteousness. But what if imitation of Christ is in fact the primary means of salvation, a salvation not merely of a future estate, but a present tense realization of “putting on Christ” and a putting off of evil? Could it be that imitating Christ is salvation, is atonement, is an ethic, is a theology?

The purpose behind the writing of the New Testament beginning with the Gospels, is that the life of Christ is a model around which his teaching and Christian teaching coheres. The incarnation, the life and death and resurrection of Christ is not primarily a doctrine, a set of propositions, or an institution, but it is a life which in its opening message calls out “follow me.” The reason for recording this life, the reason for prompting a particular ethic, or a particular understanding and doctrine, is to bring about reduplication of the life of Christ in his followers. It is his life that is being shared in the gospel message, so that imitation and participation are the very substance of salvation.

Paul’s Gospel coheres around the understanding that imitation is the mode of salvation. His suffering, his imprisonment, and his manner of life are part and parcel of the gospel he is modeling so as to be imitated: “Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life” (I Tim. 1:16). Bad models and rivalrous imitation looms in many of Paul’s letters. As I previously described it (here), to the rivalry prone lovers of hierarchy and false power in Corinth, Paul has a singular recommendation and resolution: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (I Cor. 11:1). The danger is that they would create a scandal of imitation gone bad: “Give no offense [do not become a scandal] to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Cor. 10:31-11:1). To be saved, is to imitate Christ.  

Where Paul has been present, he can simply appeal to himself as the model, but as in Ephesians the model is God revealed in Christ: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma” (Eph 5:1–2). This appeal to imitate God comes after specific descriptions of what imitation will entail: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you” (Eph 4:32). The appeal throughout Ephesians is that being members of one another in Christ entails adapting his form of life: “if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self” (Eph. 4:21-22). Even and especially the most intimate of relationships is to be carried out in imitation of Christ: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph 5:25).

In what is considered to be one of his earliest letters, Paul explains that the Thessalonians have come to have hope in Christ through imitation and that they are spreading the Gospel as others imitate them: “You also became imitators of us and of the Lord, having received the word in much tribulation with the joy of the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia” (I Thess. 1:6). The imitation of the Lord, and of Paul, and then of the Thessalonians is the way one enters into the “power” of the Holy Spirit and the “conviction” of the gospel (1:5). Imitation is the way the gospel spreads as becoming imitators of Christ and the apostles is the way one receives the gospel – it could hardly be otherwise. Imitation is a sign of election and is the way the Gospel works “not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit” (1:5). Imitation takes up the suffering of Christ but also the joy this entails (1:6). Paul describes his imparting of the gospel as a giving of his own life: “Having so fond an affection for you, we were well-pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives” (2:8). The life of Christ in the life of Paul is the very means of providing sustenance, just as a “nursing mother” imparts sustenance and her own life to her children (2:7).

The way the gospel is taken up and the way that discipleship continues is through imitation of a model: “For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example, because we did not act in an undisciplined manner among you . . . but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you, so that you would follow our example” (2 Thess. 3:7-9). This is what it means to “hold to the traditions” and this is the point of being taught, whether verbally or in writing. It coheres as a model to be imitated, resulting in “good work” (2 Th 2:15–3:1). Tradition and gospel and rule of faith contain a living model, a life that is to be shared through imitation. Apart from imitating the life thus conveyed, there is no gospel, no tradition and no faith.

Each of Paul’s letters is premised on imitation, but perhaps none more so than Philippians. The irony is that in interpreting Philippians, if it is not understood that both Paul and Christ are models to be imitated then the very substance of what Christ has done is obscured. That is the entire movement of Christ is not a one-off payment but is meant to be a manner of life: “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Php. 2:5–8).

If we imagine Paul is describing Christ’s movement from his preincarnate state to the incarnation, this is hardly something we can imitate. As James McClendon describes it, “Hence, the dominant feature of 2:5-11 has never been a heavenly-descent myth, for it is not a passage about the pre-incarnate acts of God, but one that juxtaposes Messiah Jesus’ earthly vicissitudes with the vast claim of his Lordship – on earth, but also in heaven and over the nether world.”[4] Jesus’ refusal to grasp equality with God must refer to the temptation in his incarnation, a temptation we experience and resist through imitating Christ. Paul’s premise throughout is to encourage imitation as a means of discipleship: “Brethren, join in following my example, and observe those who walk according to the pattern you have in us” (Php. 3:17). Jesus is the primary model, the pattern which Paul has also modeled.

Christ’s Lordship is established through his suffering and death on the cross and this is the pattern that is to be imitated. His manner of life, his humility, his suffering, and his death, is the archetypical pattern and not simply a one-off payment which cannot be replicated.  The “image of God” which he models and which the first pair and their progeny failed to live up to is not some “designated state but a task set, not an ontic level enjoyed but an ideal to be realized.”[5] The path of servitude and suffering is the model of the divine image Christ modeled and which his disciples imitate.

The conclusion: it is his life that is being shared in the gospel message, so that imitation and participation are the very substance of salvation. Apart from imitating the life thus conveyed, there is no gospel, no tradition and no faith. On this basis, Thomas à Kempis opens his book The Imitation of Christ, urging a focus on the study of the life of Christ as the means to imitate his life and attain to his understanding: “’HE WHO follows Me, walks not in darkness,’ says the Lord. By these words of Christ we are advised to imitate His life and habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart. Let our chief effort; therefore, be to study the life of Jesus Christ.”[6]



[1] Adam C. Koontz, The Imitation of Paul in the Greco-Roman World (Unpublished Dissertation, Temple University, 2020) 10.

[2] Ibid, 3.

[3] There was a move toward a Christus Victor reading of the atonement but this did not displace penal substitution among Anabaptists.

[4] James McClendon, Doctrine: Systematic Theology Vol. 2 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994) 267.

[5] McClendon, 268.

[6] Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (The Catholic Primer, 2004).

Love, Power and Violence in Hannah Arendt and Paul

Hannah Arendt arrives at a Christian insight that many Christians might find more believable or even recognizable from a political scientist and social theorist. A central teaching of the Bible, that the greatest power is the power of community, of communication, or of love, is easily passed over as a religious pablum which has to be acknowledged but without any real consequence. We all “know” that those who have the most weapons or the most material resources, are the real power brokers in society. Afterall, what is power except power over other people, the power of exploitation, the power of the master over his employees or slaves.

 “Power,” said Voltaire, “consists in making others act as I choose.” According to Max Weber, power is present wherever I have the chance “to assert my own will against the resistance” of others. He defines the power of war as “an act of violence to compel the opponent to do as we wish.” Robert Strausz-Hupe claims bluntly, power signifies “the power of man over man.”  C. Wright Mills equates violence, politics and power: “All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.” Mao Tse-tung maintained, “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Marx noted that power is “the organization of violence.” Bertrand de Jouvenel claims that the power of death or the power to make war is the very essence of the power of the state: “To him who contemplates the unfolding of the ages war presents itself as an activity of States which pertains to their essence.” As he describes it, “a man feels himself more of a man when he is imposing himself and making others the instruments of his will,” and this gives him “incomparable pleasure.” Elsewhere he says, “To command and to be obeyed: without that, there is no Power – with it no other attribute is needed for it to be …. The thing without which it cannot be: that essence is command.” Arendt concludes, that if the essence of power is the effectiveness of command, then there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun, and it would be difficult to say in “which way the order given by a policeman is different from that given by a gunman.”[1]

In short, power is the power of death and the one who controls and can mete out coercion and violent death, in this understanding, is the one with power. War and the capacity to make war is a primary ordering structure such that “war itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire,” such that “economic systems, political philosophies, and corpora juris serve and extend the war system, not vice versa.” In this understanding, it is not just diplomacy and politics that are war by other means, but peace itself is war by other means.[2]  The peace of the cold war reckons with the reality that deterrence, larger and more powerful weapons of war ensure the peace, such that mutually assured destruction, or the constant threat of total war and annihilation is the only realistic peace.

It is not just the violence of war which ensures peace, but at a personal level there is a similar sort of subjection to the inevitable nature of struggle, chaos, and coercion. Humans seem to be born with an instinct of domination and aggressiveness. According to John Stuart Mill, there are two competing forces in the individual, “the desire to exercise power over others” and the “disinclination to have power exercised over themselves.” As Arendt, points out though, the will to power and the will to submission seem to be interconnected.[3] The security of slavery in Egypt is a very real temptation, certainly present in my experience in Japan, but present to some degree in every society. But perhaps the lengths to which the tyrant will go to maintain rule is the clearest marker of the limits of violence.

The Stalinist regime demonstrated that total domination based on terror cannot afford support, as the supporters and friends of totalitarianism threaten through the most subtle form of power; namely support and friendship. In the end it was the friends and supporters of Stalin who he saw as posing the greatest threat. “The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim. And this is also the moment when power disappears entirely.”[4] Thus Arendt reaches her conclusion:

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance. This implies that it is not correct to think of the opposite of violence as nonviolence; to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.[5] 

Nonviolence or the capacity for peace as means and end, is the very definition of power. The power of community, the power of communion, the power of consensus, the power of love, the power of democracy, all stand over and against the notion that violence is power. Violence contains no possibility of communion, other than the communion of the scapegoat, or the contradictory notion that the common enemy is the means of cohesion. Rene Girard’s depiction of the lie surrounding the scapegoat, or Peter Berger’s depiction of the social construction of reality, illustrates Arendt’s and the biblical point, that the deception surrounding death is the universal lie.  The fear of death, or the imagined capacity to manipulate and control death is the singular lie exposed by Christ.

Paul names this lie directly, and counters it with the truth of community: “Therefore, shedding the lie, let each one of you speak the truth to his neighbor, because we are one another’s corporal members” (Eph. 4:25, DBH). Dispelling the lie with the truth gets at the prime reality that we are “corporal members” of one another. This is the missing fact in the notion of equating power and violence. True power builds on the reality of mutual interdependence. Violence may gain a certain control but at the cost of this prime reality. The lie here is singular and seemingly universal in its import so that all of the darkness and deception may be tied to this singular deception. Paul ties it to the hostility or enmity unleashed by the Jewish law as expressed, first in Jewish and Gentile hostility, but then in a “futility” of mind which he equates with a hardened heart and darkened understanding (Eph. 4:17-19).

 As a result of the Gospel, “we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ” (Eph 4:14–15). The cure points to the heart of the problem: “speaking the truth in love” displaces the lie (the deceitful scheming and the trickery of men) which serves dis-communion, hostility, and enmity. Paul continually links deception and alienation while also linking truth and love: “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (Eph. 4:25). Being members of another is a truth, that by definition should result in the putting away of violent falsehood.

Another way of getting at this same truth is in Girard’s and Paul’s deployment of mimesis. Girard inadvertently displaces the primacy of mutual membership in one another (mimetic desire), and pictures it first of all as built upon a necessary violence and rivalry. If one person imitates another person’s desire, then their desire for the same thing results in rivalry and violence. Girard comes to his theory of the scapegoat beginning with violence, rivalry and sacrifice, and it is only later that he realizes in Christ there is a positive mimesis, and even in the development of his theory he explains mimesis in the context of rivalry and violence. Much like political theorists or social scientists who begin with the presumption of an original chaos and violence, here too the presumption on an individual level is that rivalry and violence are originary. But what if we were to reverse engineer what Girard is doing and put mimesis front and center not simply as a negative force, but as the shaping force in our lives.

Paul has his own theory of imitation and community which locates reality, not in violent rivalry but in the necessity of relationship and love. “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma” (Eph. 5:1-2). To the rivalry prone lovers of hierarchy and false power in Corinth, Paul has a singular recommendation and resolution: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (I Cor. 11:1). The passage in full reads: “Give no offense [do not become a scandal] to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Cor. 10:31-11:1). Paul understands the scandal and violence of mimetic rivalry, but this mechanism is undone in his recommendation: “I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage.” Domination and coercion are set aside and with it the violence producing rivalry that is damnation itself. To be saved, is to imitate and commune in love.  

Paul warns against a “whoring acquisitiveness” (5:3) and likens the acquisitive man to an idolater (5:5), as one who has been deceived by “empty words” (5:5) and who lives in darkness (5:8). These things that are “hidden” are exposed by the light of Christ and now life reigns in place of death (5:14).

The conclusion of the chapter is a displacement of the mystery of sins alienating violence through a mutual submission to one another in one body: “’Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (5:31-32). This communion and participation in a singular body is the power of peace that counters the lie of violence as power.


[1] Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1969) 35-37.

[2] Arendt, 9.

[3] Arendt, 39-40.

[4] Arendt, 55.

[5] Arendt, 56.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World: The Defeat of Evil as the Revealing of the Mystery

Paul describes Christ as revealing the mystery which has remained closed to every previous generation of humankind (Eph. 3:5). Matthew pictures Christ as fulfilling the words of the prophet: ”I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35). René Girard explains that this mystery hidden since the foundation of the world is the mystery of scapegoating, that which organized primitive culture and religion and which controlled violence. The violence unleashed on the innocent victim served to channel violence to a singular sacrifice (rather than unleashing violence of all against all) and it made of the scapegoat the sacred deliverer, delivering the sacrificers from whatever plague or sickness they imagined threatened. And as Girard explains, the scapegoat really did deliver from uncontrolled violence, and allowed the crops to be planted and the society to survive, rather than succumbing to all-out violence.

The efficacy of the scapegoat, however, depended on its true function being a compounded mystery. In the first instance, the innocence of the scapegoat is not a possibility that poses itself in the original murder, but then the murder itself is obscured as the myth of the scapegoat as a sacred deliverer hides the murder. Those who kill the scapegoat do not know what they are doing, first in the blind rage in which they kill the scapegoat and then in the myth which hides the murder. The killers are blind (they are doing it but obscuring the fact) to the murder and then to the sacralization of the innocent victim. The end of the story, in Girard’s telling, is that the innocent victim Jesus, speaks for the oppressed scapegoat and reveals the scapegoating mechanism as that which stands behind all sacrificial religion, and he makes impossible the mystery, that up to his exposing it, stood at the center of religion and society.

Girard’s theory, for many, provides a complete theory of the atonement and an omnicompetent explanation of the work of Christ. Whether Girard saw it that way may be beside the point, but it is no critique of his theory to suggest that what he describes is a pattern that repeats itself in a variety forms, not limited to sacrificial violence but characteristic of the lie that stands behind all violence. That is, the mystery of which Paul speaks and which Jesus exposes, is a mystifying lie, an obscuring of origins, a false dialectic, which stands behind sacrificial religion but which also stands behind all human violence at an individual and corporate level. The equation of violence and power is the original form of the lie, that expresses itself in the scapegoating mechanism (among other forms of the lie). Violence not only reifies and deifies the scapegoat, but this is always the work of violence. The larger principle is not simply that the violence directed against an innocent scapegoat sacralizes and reifies the scapegoat, but all violence “mystically” reifies.

In fact, Girard begins his theory with a reexamination of Sigmund Freud’s Oedipus complex, which illustrates the point that the violence of the superego directed against the ego (death drive) reifies the split between the ego and superego, creating the registers of the Subject. The superego, in the voice of the father or the oppressive force of the law, is directed against the ego and the tripartite (ego, superego, id) dynamic is “born” (which is the wrong word, as this is a living death in Freud’s estimate). But what is to be noted is that the oppressive violence of the id, channeled through the superego, taking the ego as its victim, gives rise to the very notion of a self. Even if one rejects this Freudian picture of the dynamic of self, it illustrates the point, of how a lying violence gives birth to a fictional “reality.” Karl Marx’s picture of the functioning of capital, Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s picture of the dialectic of life and death or something and nothing, and Peter Berger’s explanation of religion, all illustrate the same point.

As Berger explains, the phenomenon of religion depends upon a mystifying lie:

Whatever may be the “ultimate” merits of religious explanations of the universe at large, their empirical tendency has been to falsify man’s consciousness of that part of the universe shaped by his own activity, namely, the socio-cultural world. This falsification can also be described as mystification. The socio-cultural world, which is an edifice of human meanings, is overlaid with mysteries posited as non-human in their origins.[1]

In Berger’s depiction, the dialectic process of society consists of three steps – externalization, objectivation, and internalization.

Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world, both in the physical and the mental activity of men. Objectivation is the attainment by the products of this activity (again both physical and mental) of a reality that confronts its original producers as a facticity external to and other than themselves. Internalization is the reappropriation by men of this same reality, transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness.[2]

Berger concludes, “It is through externalization that society is a human product. It is through objectivation that society becomes a reality sui generis. It is through internalization that man is a product of society.”[3] The notion that religion or society is a sui generis or self-constituting construct blocks all questions of genealogy and simply poses the social world as reality itself.

Berger explains he is appropriating Marx and Hegel, who illustrate this three-step process in regard to capital and the human psyche. As he notes, “The terms ‘externalization’ and ‘objectivation’ are derived from Hegel (Entaeusserung and Versachlichung), are (sic) understood here essentially as they were applied to collective phenomena by Marx.”[4] Capital is externalized in paper and coins, objectivized as intrinsically valuable, and internalized as a prime marker of value. Hegel, Marx, and Freud are each building upon a constricted Judeo-Christian understanding. So, for example, Isaiah’s picture of the idolater (Is. 44:15-18), carving the idol with one half of a piece of wood (externalization), turning and cooking his lunch with the other half (allowing for the obscuring objectivation), and then turning back and bowing to the carved piece (internalization) as a god captures the same movement.

Religion is accounted for in this process as the obscuring or mystification of the process – the disconnect between externalization and objectivation. “The sacred or numinous begin as perceptions ‘externalized,’ projected upon the skies (thus sky-gods are recognized) and upon persons and natural objects (hence shamans and sacred groves and springs). The externalized sacred objects thereby acquire status as factors in social life (so magic, incantation, and worship arise).”[5] The religionist, like the idolater, does not recognize he is the one shaping the idol and reifying or absolutizing what is essentially a projection (a product of the imagination).

The religionist does on a corporate level what Freud describes is happening on an individual level. The Oedipal-self obscures the fact that it is the engineer arranging the oppressive self-relation as the religionist obscures or falsifies the fact that religion is a projection (a necessary sacred canopy) of the socio-cultural world. The child externalizes its own image as seen in the mirror, then it objectivizes or reifies the image as perceived through the projection of the superego, then the internal life is made up of this dialectic between ego and superego.

As indicated, Berger, Marx, and Freud, are building upon the dialectic first worked out by Hegel. An easy entry into Hegel is provided by Slavoj Žižek’s understanding of Hegel as building upon the cogito of René Descartes. Descartes’ isolation of himself in the “heated room” and reduction of the real world to a category of doubt and his reconstruction of that world, up to and including God, is pictured by Hegel, according to Žižek as following the course of every Subject:

when Hegel determines madness as withdrawal from the actual world, the closing of the soul into itself, its ‘contraction’. … Was this withdrawal into itself not accomplished by Descartes in his universal doubt and reduction of the cogito … which … involves a passage through the moment of radical madness? … That is to say, the withdrawal into self, the cutting off of the links to the Umwelt, is followed by the construction of a symbolic universe that the subject projects onto reality as a kind of substitute – formation destined to recompense us for the loss of the immediate, presymbolic real.[6]

The passage into subjectivity involves the “ontological necessity of madness”… the mad gesture of radical withdrawal from reality that opens up the space for its symbolic (re)constitution.”[7] There is a sacrifice of one world and subjection to an oppressive symbolic order (the law has a totalizing effect). To maintain that the product of thought is objectively true, or to fuse thought and being, involves a form of madness that is at once so universal so as to be nearly inaccessible or a complete mystery.

As David Bentley Hart describes the Hegelian system:

the system in its entirety, depending on the angle from which it is viewed, is susceptible of every possible characterization or interpretation: disembodied abstraction or radical empiricism, mystification or disenchantment, absolute idealism or dialectical materialism, Mandarin detachment or bourgeois conformity, historical essentialism or essential historicism, a “totalizing metaphysics” or the ultimate “deconstruction of metaphysics,” and so on and so on.[8]

There is a seeming impossibility of getting beyond the all encompassing system described by Hegel, but this, I believe is precisely Paul’s depiction of what is accomplished in Christ. That is, the obscuring of origins through an originary violence or an originary hostility is precisely the dialectic Paul pictures as exposed by Christ.

Paul, in Ephesians, has in mind the peculiar dialectic of Jew and Gentile which creates a dividing wall of hostility (Eph. 2:14), but which organizes the Jewish world (2:15: “which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances”). The enmity of the law which creates the fabric of this fictional construct is not a reality (created by God) but a human system built upon human enmity and violence (2:15 – Christ abolishes the enmity in his flesh, which is not from God but is cured by God in Christ). For a Jew, Gentiles are nothing at all and Jewishness is over and against the nothingness (of the Gentile) as an absolute something. The organizing hostility for Jews and Gentiles alike, something on the order of the sacrificial violence described by Girard, is undone in Christ: “to be specific, that the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Eph. 3:6). This is the archetypical mystery revealed as Judaism depended upon this division, and Christ is reconstituting humanity, showing the divine purpose in creation: “by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity” (Eph. 2:15–16). Jewishness depended upon division and enmity and it was from this hostility, marked by the dividing wall in the temple that the religion, rightly or wrongly, was conceived. But Judaism is a case in point of the obscurity of every culture and religion founded upon a dialectic (inside/outside, near/far, citizen/alien, something/nothing).

In Paul’s depiction, there is a cosmic order of darkness dispelled in this revealing of the mystery. God’s will, God’s eternal purposes for the cosmos, have been revealed in Christ: “To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ, and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things” (Eph. 3:8). The purposes of creation, once obscured behind the mystery of enmity and division are now revealed in a unifying vision in which all things are being incorporated into God: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4–6).

The mystery revealed in Christ is the exposure of the lie, which pictures reality as a violent dualism (e.g., divine/human, creator/creature, nothing/something, life/death, Jew/Gentile, ego/superego, immanent Trinity/economic Trinity, heaven/earth, transcendent/immanent). The mystery revealed is an exposure of the mystification of evil, dependent upon alienation, dialectic, and dualism. The picture of God’s purposes worked out in Christ brings together absolute difference into a unified whole:

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.” In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things. Eph. 4:7-10


[1] Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Anchor; Reprint edition, 1990), 90.

[2] Berger, 3-4.

[3] Berger, 4.

[4] Berger, 21.

[5] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1966) 4-25. As summarized by James McClendon, Witness: Systematic Theology Volume 3 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000) 28.

[6]Slavoj Zizek, F.W.J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (University of Michigan Press, 1997), 8-9.

[7] Ibid.

[8] David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods (p. 70). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

The Ongoing Creation Ex-Nihilo of Humanity

Is it possible to glimpse the nothing from out of which creation came and is coming? I do not mean in the Buddhist or Heideggerian sense in which nothing is an ontological category – a necessity for the something. The Christian nothing is not a dialectical necessity that accompanies all that is something, though the primordial darkness can only break through in the cracks of what is. It is not the ontological empty space into which God inserted creation. Christian nothing, or the ex-nihilo, is not something that precedes, grounds, or serves as a point of expansion; rather, the Christian nothing from out of which God called creation bears no quality and does not show itself other than through dissolution, absence, and death.  The nothing may take on a dynamic, but it is the dynamic of destruction. Creation ex-nihilo that is, opens the possibility of evil as the return to the nothing from out of which creation arose.  On the other hand, to picture creation as anything less than having an infinite destiny (theosis or divinization) makes of creation a dynamic of nothingness. Existence as something less than union with the divine entails turning creation over to the ex-nihilo from out which it arose. Creation without final cause and purpose which sinks back into the oblivion from which it arose is a creation dominated, not by God, but by nothing. On the other hand, a creation (especially of the rational kind) which is continually called forth from its beginning into exultant praise and participation in the divine life, fully and forever sheds itself of the remnants or possibility of the nothingness from which it arose.

The play and possibility of the nothing – the possibility of evil – is perhaps best understood and approached in Paul’s depiction of the dissolution of the dynamic of death in the believer. The “I” that is crucified with Christ is subject to dissolution as there is a dynamic taken up with the human interplay between the ego (a transliteration of Paul’s word for “I”), the law and what Paul calls the “body of death,” all of which is undone in Paul’s depiction of baptism (Romans 6:1-6). On the other hand, in the psychoanalytic approach to Paul there is the demonstration of how this nothingness – the deception of sin – can play a central and competing role in human life.

In Slavoj Žižek’s picture, the Subject arises from out of nothing, with the implication that this nothing precedes the Subject and is the primary “substance” constituting the Subject. In Žižek’s atheistic creation ex-nihilo (a creation from nothing) God and truth, subject and object, are preceded by death and nothingness, which he does not hesitate to call evil, but it is out of this originary evil that the Subject arises. However, there is only one step from Paul to Žižek, if it is understood that Žižek is expanding upon Paul’s sinful, deceived Subject.

For Žižek, evil is subject to manipulation but, inasmuch as it is prime reality, it is not something that can be finally and completely overcome; nor would one want to overcome it, as this nothingness is the only possible ground for the absolute freedom of the Subject. Absolute freedom and autonomy, the point of departure for German idealism (Žižek’s key resource), cannot, by definition, be constrained by a prior Good. The absolutely free, autonomous Subject can be preceded by nothing, and this is the Nothing and negation Žižek links to death drive (the primary dynamic in the Subject).

Even for God, in the depiction of Friedrich Schelling, if nothingness precedes and comes after God or perhaps God’s creation, then nothingness is the predominant ontological condition. The passage from nothing (the eternal nothing without beginning or end) to something (the beginning of God) is an act that is eternally repeated in the passage from eternity to time. In other words, everything, including God, ultimately arises from and tends towards this absolute nothing. In any case, even if it is only the human Subject that arises from nothing and returns to that nothing, then Žižek’s description fits with a so-called “Christian vision” in regards to most of the human race (in Augustinianism and Calvinism).

The theological import of this is that evil is a necessary part of the good. The gap in reality – nothingness, sin, death drive, and evil – is not overcome but accounted for and accommodated. Evil is not finally and fully subject to the good but the good arises from and is ultimately subject to the evil which precedes it. The Fall is at the origin of the Subject, so that transgression, sin, and evil, precede the very possibility of the “good.”  In biblical terms, the very possibility of the “knowledge of good and evil” (of the symbolic) in Genesis is preceded by the serpent, temptation, and death.

The death of Christ, in this atheistic theology, does not overcome the gap but suspends the desire to overcome the reality of death and nothingness. The Hegelian notion of the “death of God” in Christ amounts to the death of the “transcendent Beyond” and this brings about the opening of reality from within (Metastases of Enjoyment, 39). The dynamic of nothingness (death drive), for Žižek, is necessarily at the foundation of subjectivity and its reconstitution, as it is in and through the death drive that “Nothingness is counted as Something” which gives rise to the Subject (Ticklish Subject , 157). Ultimately death or nothingness is the ontological (un)reality over which the Lacanian Subject is constructed (and which is the motive force behind the sacrifices in the name of the law (subjection to the punishing Superego).

What if this, though, is a true picture of the dynamic of the lie that is displaced in Christ? Then it is possible to speak of self-participation – even a freedom of choice – in the creation of the Subject. That is, we are responsible for our own creation or lack thereof, as we can name the nothingness which clings to us and out of which we are arising.

This nothingness or dynamic of death is the creative force in a Lacanian psychoanalytic frame, but the danger is that a Christianity that sees creation as subsumed by or returning to the nothing (in whole or part) is giving ontological priority to the ex-nihilo. Where reality is not finally and fully grounded in the divine it is not clear that any finite creature “exists” in the fulness of the term. Especially in the case of the rational or spiritual creature, how can this rationality or spirituality be fully so apart from having as its final end participation in the reality of God. The fully spiritual and rational creature then, can be said to continue the most direct role of co-creator (the responsibility assigned in the dominion mandate of Genesis) through direct participation, as David Hart puts it, “in their own origination from nothingness.”[1] To quote Hart at length:

And only by this primordial assent does humanity in its eternal “multi-hypostatic” reality— as the eternal Adam of the first creation— freely receive its being from its creator: and this even though that assent becomes, on the threshold between the heavenly Aeon and time, a recapitulation of the Fall, an individuating acceptance of entry into the world under the burden of sin, such that every soul is answerable for and somehow always remembers that original transgression. In that moment, the spiritual creature concurs in its own creation, and God hands the creature over to its own free self-determination. Here, naturally, the language of past and future can devolve all too easily into a mythology of individual guilt historically “prior” to any person’s actual life; but, of course, there was no fall “back then” in historical time, either for the race or for the individual. Rather, the Fall “happened” only as belonging to the temporal unfolding of that eternal assent. It “happened”— or, rather, is happening— only as the lingering resistance of nothingness to that final joyous confession, the diminishing residue of the creature’s emergence ex nihilo. For no creature can exist as spirit in God except under the condition of having arisen from nothingness in order to grow into his or her last end. That passage from nothingness into the infinite, which is always a free intentionality toward a final cause, is the very structure of created spiritual beings. They could not be spirit otherwise.[2]

This is not the self-positing “I” of the Cartesian cogito but is precisely the defeat and undoing of this psychoanalytic or Pauline “I” in that there is a relinquishing or willing deconstruction of this Subject.  The “I” that would posit itself through itself, freely and intentionally gives up on this project so as to be “in Christ” and thus through the Spirit to be joined to the Father. The Oedipal “I” or the Cartesian “I” would be its own father or originator. It is the free and willing abandonment of this project – the project of the Fall engaged by every human – that the Subject in its fullness emerges as one assenting to the eternal end, the continuation and completion of creation ex-nihilo.

A fundamental way of summarizing this understanding is the recognition that the play between life and death within the human creature is directly concerned with the life/Spirit given by God or a turning away from this Spirit so as to engage in death. Irenaeus (as I have shown here) describes the necessity of the Spirit of God, not as a force apart from man but as molding and blending the handiwork of God: “But when the Spirit here blended with the soul is united to God’s handiwork, the man is rendered spiritual and perfect because of the outpouring of the Spirit, and this is he who was made in the image and likeness of God.”[3]  That is, the Genesis account is only completed through the active participation of God in the man as Spirit.

While all three elements, body, soul and Spirit, constitute the image of God in which man was created, Irenaeus’ (who is following Paul) use of Spirit (sometimes seeming to refer to God and man simultaneously) portrays the perfection of full co-participation between the divine and human while also allowing for a diminishment of participation: “One of these does indeed preserve and fashion (the man)  – – this is the Spirit; while as to another it is united and formed–that is the flesh; then comes that which is between these two–that is the soul, which sometimes indeed, when it follows the Spirit, is raised by it, but sometimes it sympathizes with the flesh, and falls into carnal lusts.”[4] The Spirit “preserves and fashions” the man, so that there is no human apart from Spirit. The Spirit is not something added to man, and yet there is the possibility, in following lusts, that the role of the Spirit is diminished.

Hart, depicts how this beginning and end calls for willing surrender through free participation:

This is the ultimate reason that the first moment of the creature’s being is at once a vocation issued by God and yet also an act of free self-positing on the part of the creature. Just as the Holy Spirit is not some limited psychological individual consciousness possessed of an isolated self, who is first himself and who then only latterly assents to the Father’s self-utterance in the Logos, but is instead hypostatic as God’s own eternal assent to and delight in his own essence as manifested in the Son; so also the spirit in us is nothing but a finite participation in that eternal and infinite act of divine affirmation and love. The spiritual creature exists as always, in its origin and its end, wholly surrendered to God. And the chiasmus of the Spirit in us, in our creation and deification, is always the Spirit rejoicing in the love of Father and Son. The inmost reality of the spirit in each of us, that is, is nothing but that act of joyous accord with and ecstatic ascent into God.[5]

As he explains, “every creaturely spirit freely wills its own existence” but this is not a freedom exercised apart from God or who the creature is in God. “The eternal Yes of God to the creature is always already the creature’s eternal Yes to its creator, for the latter exists only within the eternal Yes of the Father to his own image in the Son, in the delight of the Spirit; and this is the Son’s Yes to the will of the Father; and this is also the Spirit’s eternal Yes to the Father’s full expression in the Son; and, in the end, these are all one and the same Yes.”[6]

There is a possible Yes and No to the unfolding creation and completion of the Subject in the life of the Spirit. The possibility of the ex-nihilo may threaten but for Paul the Subject precedes and exceeds the possibility of death and the constraints of the “I.”  There is not only the possibility but the necessity, (due to the goodness of God) of a Subject apart from sin (the fall back into nothingness). A Christianity which does not acknowledge the end of creation in participation in the divine (divinization, theosis, apocatastasis) may take on the look of an atheism in which Subjectivity requires death, sin and nothingness as its primary “substance.”


[1] David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods (Kindle Locations 2265-2268). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

[2] Hart, 2269-2281.

[3] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book 5, Chapter 6, paragraph 1.

[4] AH 5.6.1

[5] Hart, 2324-2328.

[6] Hart, 2330-2334.

The Peace of Jesus’ Body Versus the Violent Semantics of the Flesh

The semantic load that can be attached to the biological body is undergoing a continual extension, in that there is seemingly no end to the arrangement of gender identity. In a Lacanian psychoanalytic frame, the complete identity with the symbolic order though, is not really a multiplicity of types but is a singular type which he would dub “masculine.” “Masculine” does not refer to gender but to an orientation to the symbolic order. One might identify with these structures as they presently exist in the society or attempt to “bend the rules” but of course the rules are bent so as to conform to them. That is, the letter is prime reality and the biological body is divided or separate from this reality. The masculine (as opposed to the feminine, in a Lacanian frame) does not question the symbolic order as prime reality.

As Paul describes this type, “the law dominates the man for whatever time he lives” (Romans 7:1 DBH translation). Paul will identify this type, according to his own experience, as ignorant of their own actions and having an incapacity to discern evil. There is a fusion between sin and the law so that Paul, at the time he was doing it, could not discern the sort of evil in which he is engaged. As he describes, in a parallel passage in Galatians, his zeal for the law and his advancement in Judaism were marked by his persecution of the church and his desire to destroy it (Ga 1:13-14). For Paul, the law was not a marker of sin and evil but was fused with sin such that he could not perceive his own evil due to his zeal for the law. As he advanced in law-keeping and in Judaism he simultaneously advanced in his participation in evil. It did not occur to Paul the Pharisee that there was a reality which exceeded the measure of the law. Clearly, Paul is not imagining that in this understanding he has rightly perceived the law; quite the opposite, as he dubs this orientation as “having confidence in the flesh.” The problem is, the flesh marked by the law, has become a principle unto itself.

In the masculine the symbolic order reigns supreme and the biological body is written over and made to conform to this semantic load. This is not really the problem of any particular group of people, but in Paul’s terms this is the universal problem. There is (in Eph. 2) the divided body which may refer to the individual (divided into mind and flesh in Eph. 2) or the division of gender, race, or social status. The divided body might be classed, as it is in Ephesians, as either circumcised or uncircumcised or elsewhere he will talk of male and female identity, but the point is that this division makes of the flesh a sign system, or a blank slate for inscribing the symbolic order of the law. Circumcised or uncircumcised is clearly the imposition of a sign system (the law), on the biological body. We know that male and female can also bear this same sort of cultural inscription in which the biological is overwritten with a meaning that is not inherently part of gender. To be female in Japan, for example, may bear a very different meaning than it bears in Korea or the United States. Female can be assigned the meanings of passivity, nurturing, or servitude, all of which bear meaning in a particular culture in conjunction with what it means to be male. So too, the idea with circumcision and uncircumcision is that it is a binary that is not simply a description of physical marks, but is a religious and ethnic division inscribed in the flesh (Jew/Gentile). Paul refers to it as a mind and flesh issue (2:3 – the very opposition which gives rise to the peculiarities of human desire).

Paul then calls this the “enmity of the flesh,” but of course inasmuch as Christ is going to destroy this enmity in his own flesh, the problem is not the flesh per se but the semantic load invested in the flesh. Paul describes this semantics of the flesh in connection to conforming to the world; a conformity in which death reigns, and which is controlled by the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). He also speaks of a lust of the flesh, which he seems to connect to a spirit mind duality (Eph. 2:1-3). There is an antagonism, a sacrificial economy, that in both Walter Wink’s and Rene Girard’s description, predominates in human culture and religion. We can read Christianity as either fitting into and as a support of this sacrificial economy (divine satisfaction or penal substitution, or the oppression of women, or the “domination system”) or we can read it as disrupting this economy and order.

This principle or power (as Paul also refers to the same force) may be what Wink calls the domination system or the system of redemptive violence. As Slavoj Žižek describes it, redemptive violence is inscribed deep within the human psyche. The original sacrificial relation is established within the Subject (with passage through the mirror stage) between the imaginary (the ego or “I”) and the symbolic (the superego) which establishes the alienated distance from the real of the body. The passage is from being a body to establishing a symbolic distance from the body (and having a body): “The body exists in the order of having – I am not my body, I have it” (Organs without Bodies, 121). Self-consciousness arises simultaneously with the realization and refusal of the body and its mortal contingencies (sexuality/castration) so that the Subject arises over and against the real of the body. The symbolic or the soul “has to be paid for by the death, murder even, of its empirical bearer” (The Žižek Reader, vii). Žižek, following Paul, describes the process as giving rise to two bodies. That body which one might think can be reduced to the biological dimension is refused: the “subject turns away from her biological body in disgust, unable to accept that she ‘is’ her body” (Organs without Bodies, 93). Since “the body refuses to obey the soul and starts to speak on its own, in the symptoms in which the subject’s soul cannot recognize itself” she rejects the body (Organs without Bodies, 93). But this body that is rejected cannot be equated with the biological body as the body has already been overlaid with the symbolic “forcefully distorting its normal functioning” (Organs without Bodies, 93). So, there is the biological body and this second body: “The body that is the proper object of psychoanalysis, the body as the inconsistent composite of erogenous zones, the body as the surface of the inscription of the traces of traumas and excessive enjoyments, the body through which the unconscious speaks” (Organs without Bodies, 93). It is this second body, and not the physical or biological body per se, which the Subject struggles against and which makes up unconscious experience constituting desire. The biological body with its biological interests (wellbeing, survival, reproduction) is not at the center of the human Subject but the true “interior” is this second body.

When “we penetrate the subject’s innermost sanctum, the very core of its Unconscious, what we find there is the pure surface of a fantasmatic screen” (Organs without Bodies, 93). Žižek describes the rise of this screen of the fundamental fantasy as an attempt to “outpass myself into death” (Tarrying with the Negative, 76). One hastens to assume death in the form of the letter or symbolic (“potentially my epitaph”) in order to avoid it (Tarrying with the Negative, 76). The dead are immortal in that they are no longer subject to dying, so identity through the dead letter achieves an enduring (immortal) identity.

As we see further on (in chapter 2 of Ephesians) Christ is going to resolve the various antagonisms of the flesh in his flesh, or as chapter 1 concludes through his body. The unity of the body is achieved in the incarnation (it is precisely our tendency toward a disincarnate dualism that is overcome). Paul describes a present tense resolution through Christ’s resurrection and ascension and the Christian participation in the same (Eph 2:5–6). Death is marked by the division within the body, but Christ overcomes this division, as can those “in Christ” – in and through the body of Christ.

Though he does not use the word flesh in his description of “works,” Paul is clearly talking of the flesh. Circumcised or uncircumcised, or keeping the works of the law, is a matter of maintaining the signs in the flesh of Jewish ethnicity, the most important of which is circumcision. Where we are caught up in the law, in the symbol system, of being Jew or Gentile, or taking on the identities of the flesh that depend upon division, love is incapacitated (precisely the “work” for which we were made and toward which Paul is aiming).

Giorgio Agamben and Žižek both provide a picture from Romans 7, which explains how law can potentially create an obstacle to love. In Paul’s illustration (in 7:1-3), Paul describes a masculine orientation to the law with the husband of the woman representing the law. The woman that has a husband is bound by law to the husband. The woman’s relationship to her husband is the prototypical social obligation, marriage being the foundation of the family and of society, but it is also the prototypical love relationship. The problem occurs when these two are pitted against one another; when “social life appears to me as dominated by an externally imposed Law in which I am unable to recognize myself … precisely insofar as I continue to cling to the immediacy of love that feels threatened by the rule of Law” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 117). The law can only be said to “bind” when desire is in some way curtailed by the law. Love, understood as synonymous to this sort of desire, an element deep within the self which only refers to the self, can only experience the regulation of law as an imposition on the true nature of the self. The woman whose husband is alive, but who has fallen in love with another man, experiences the law as that which opposes her love. In fact, her love (her enjoyment or jouissance – evil desire) is here synonymous with sin (The Monstrosity of Christ, 273). Her notion that she is loved by her consort is, in turn, to imagine that deep within her is “some precious treasure that can only be loved, and cannot be submitted to the rule of Law” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 117).

In Žižek’s logic of the exception (masculine sexuation), her “love” is a symptom of the prohibition and the prohibition has its force only in the exception. The exception, in Žižek’s view, could be seen as creating the rule. As in Kafka’s short story The Trial, Josef K. discovers that the elaborate system of the law which bars him from entering a certain door is actually built by himself for himself (Reader, 45). The law is a construct erected by and for those who stand outside of it. If the woman in Paul’s illustration were to love her husband and not consort with other men, and if this were the universal case, the law would “disintegrate.” The law functions in this sense like a psychoanalytic symptom: “A symptom … is an element that … must remain an exception, that is, the point of suspension of the universal principle: if the universal principle were to apply also to this point, the universal system itself would disintegrate” (The Universal Exception, 171). The woman, as the one who is subject to the law, represents an orientation of inherent transgression: “The subject is actually ‘in’ (caught in the web of) power only and precisely in so far as he does not fully identify with it but maintains a kind of distance towards it” (The Fragile Absolute, 148). The dynamic of sin is an identity caught up in a web which tightens its grip the more it is resisted. In Žižek’s description of the couplet law/sin, the law is a transcendent “foreign” force that serves to oppress what is perceived as the love relationship (The Monstrosity of Christ, 271). The law becomes an obstacle to be overcome in order for love to be possible.

Žižek’s point is that this sort of love is not agape love but rather a form of love or enjoyment (jouissance) in which the obstacle constitutes the (lost) love. The woman’s living husband is a necessary part of this sort of consorting, as he is the obstacle that makes the sexual relationship with the “other.” This construct is synonymous with sin: “‘Sin’ is the very intimate resistant core on account of which the subject experiences its relationship to the Law as one of subjection, it is that on account of which the Law has to appear to the subject as a foreign power crushing the subject” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 271). The Subject is attached to a “pathological agalma deep within itself” and it is attachment to this supposed exception or remainder that gives the law the specter of an oppressive foreign force (The Monstrosity of Christ, 271). There is a resistant core, a holdout or remainder on the part of the Subject: “The notion that there is deep inside it some precious treasure which can only be loved and cannot be submitted to the rule of Law” (The Monstrosity of Christ, 271). The deception or illusion that sin works is to construe the law as a closure of identity which by its very nature – its absoluteness – excludes love. Sin mediates the law as a power over and against love.

It is from the seeming failure of interpellation or the failure of universality to account for the exception that the totalizing symbolic takes hold. From one perspective it can be said “that the subject never fully recognizes itself in the interpolative call … and this resistance to interpellation (to the symbolic identity provided by interpellation) is the subject” (The Indivisible Remainder, 165). The woman consorting with her lover only understands herself over and against the law, while she may imagine her relationship to her lover in some way pre-exists her relationship to the law. “Is not this hysterical distance towards interpellation … the very form of ideological misrecognition? Is not this apparent failure of interpellation … the ultimate proof of its success … that is to say, of the fact that the ‘effect-of-subject’ really took place” (The Indivisible Remainder, 166)? Ideological interpellation, from the Subject’s perspective, might appear to be relieved or in some way mitigated if the Subject simply maintains a cynical distance towards the interpolating power. The woman in Paul’s illustration might say to herself, “I know the law says not to consort, but the law does not account for my true self.” “Hegel’s Beautiful Soul maintains a cynical, passive distance towards power, but this is precisely the power of interpellation doing its work” (Reader, 229–30).

We are made for good works, and this is love, a love that is not available through a misorientation to law. Paul assures us these works are not of the ethnic kind and not works that are foundational: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (2:10) – this is the foundation.

The Gentiles and Jews have a flesh problem (Eph. 2:11-13): near and far, inside and outside, excluded and included, citizens or aliens. Christ has undone the gauge of distance, and of inclusion and exclusion. He has suspended (καταργέω) the effect of the misorientation to the law.  If body (sῶma) is the Subject with the qualifiers of death and sin (“the body of sin and death” according to Paul) describing the orientation to the law, to crucify the body of sin so that it is suspended or brought to nothing (καταργέω) describes the profound reorientation brought about by participation in the body of Christ.

Christ has suspended this problem of the flesh:

“For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing (καταργήσας) in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace” (Eph. 2:14-15).

We can specify what Christ has done and how he has done it. In Wink’s terms, Christ has abolished notions of redemptive violence and he has defeated the domination system. There is an undoing of the violence of the law which has been coopted by sin and domination. This law plays out in nearly every realm of psychological and social life.

Relief is brought from the domination system of the family:

I believe Jesus was so consistently disparaging because the family in dominator societies is so deeply embedded in patriarchy, and serves as the citadel of male supremacy, the chief inculcator of gender roles, and a major inhibitor of change. It is in families where most women and children are battered and abused, and where the majority of women are murdered. In a great many cultures, men are endowed with the inalienable right to beat, rape, and verbally abuse their wives. The patriarchal family is thus the foundation on which the larger units of patriarchal dominance are based.[1]

There is an undoing of Jewish purity laws and the markers of inside and outside:

Table fellowship with sinners was a central feature of Jesus’ ministry. These sinners, notes New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, had been placed, or had placed themselves, outside the holiness code of Israel as it was being interpreted by certain circles in first-century Palestine. To include such outcasts in the realm of God was to reject the views of those who valued separation from the uncleanness of the world. Jesus’ table fellowship with social outcasts was a living parable of the dawning age of forgiveness.[2]

The gender divide is defeated, as male and female are no longer a mode of securing identity:

Respectable Jewish men were not to speak to women in public; Jesus freely conversed with women. A woman was to touch no man but her spouse; Jesus was touched by women, and touched them. Once, a prostitute burst into an all-male banquet, knelt at Jesus’ outstretched feet, and began to kiss them, washing them with tears of remorse and relief, wiping them with her hair and anointing them with oil. Despite the shocked disapproval of the other men, Jesus accepted her gift and its meaning and took her side, even though she had technically rendered him unclean and had scandalized the guests (Luke 7: 36– 50).[3]

Jesus’ system, the ontology or ground of his work, is one of peace and nonviolence:

Jesus rejects violence. When his disciples request permission to call down fire from heaven on inhospitable Samaritans, Jesus rebukes them (Luke 9: 51– 56). Instead of praising the disciple who, in an attempt to save Jesus from arrest, cuts off the ear of the high priest’s slave, Jesus reacts: “No more of this!” (Luke 22: 51)— an injunction the church took literally for the next three centuries. According to Matthew, Jesus says, “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt. 26: 52).[4]

In place of a system of division, hierarchy, and domination, a system of equity prevails, beginning with a different economy:  

The gospel of Jesus is founded on economic equity, because economic inequities are the basis of domination. Ranking, status, and classism are largely built on power provided by accumulated wealth. Breaking with domination means ending the economic exploitation of the many by the few. Since the powerful are not likely to abdicate their wealth, the poor must find ways to overcome the Domination Epoch from within.[5]

In short there is an ending of the domination system:

The words and deeds of Jesus reveal that he is not a minor reformer but an egalitarian prophet who repudiated the very premises of the Domination System: the right of some to lord it over others by means of power, wealth, shaming, or titles. In his beatitudes, his healings, and his table fellowship with outcasts and sinners, Jesus declared God’s special concern for the oppressed.[6]

The real world defeat of the violence of the flesh inscribed with the law is accomplished in the suspension of this violent “ontology” and economy in the unifying peace of the body of Christ – this is the work for which the body was made.


[1] Walter Wink, The Powers That Be (p. 76). Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale. Kindle Edition.

[2] Wink, 73-74).

[3] Wink, 69-70.

[4] Wink, 68

[5] Wink, 66.

[6] Wink, 65.

Universalism: A Coherent Participatory Ontology

I think it should be assumed that all of the vocabulary of the New Testament describing participation in the Trinity coheres around a singular understanding of God’s relationship to the world.  That is, our overall understanding of the key vocabulary of the New Testament describing being “in Christ” is not dependent on the etymology and context of dozens of different words describing participation in Christ. Aren’t walking as he walked, being “in Christ” or taking on his “likeness” or being “adopted,” “united with,” or part of the body, or being “joined to the head,” or being “baptized into,” or partaking of his body etc., all referring to the same reality?

This presumption of a singular economy is captured in the terms “recapitulation” and “apokatastasis,” both of which bear a sense of the universal. Both words simultaneously refer to the universe and all that it contains (that is, in the first instance the reference is not to “who” but “what”) but it also refers to an economy and ontology. Recapitulation and restoration (apokatastasis) were terms the early church used to express this singular and coherent ontology and economy captured in the notion of participation. These nearly synonymous terms (depending on who is deploying them), were simply a means of summing up the economy of redemption and reality found in Christ and the New Testament. The different words of the New Testament describing participation in Christ must all refer to the same fundamental reality (which does not mean context, etymology etc. can be ignored, but that we are not starting fresh with each new word or description). However, through the processes of church history and theology this singular economy has either gone missing or has been qualified in much theology and Christian understanding.

So, for example, when we come to the crucial passage in Romans 6:3-5 in which Paul is describing being “baptized into Christ Jesus” he uses a series of terms that seem to all be referring to the same reality. Those that are baptized into Christ “walk in newness of life” they have “become united with Him in the manner of His death,” and therefore “in the likeness of His resurrection.” The baptism, the walk, the likeness, or being in Christ are all referring to a singular participatory economy. In turn, the meaning of the Christian’s “dying to sin” (6:2) will depend upon its “likeness” to Christ’s “dying to sin” (6:10). The understanding of the nature of this “likeness” (6:5) determines whether participation or proximity is indicated. That is, determination of the meaning of the word “likeness” is key to understanding what salvation is about and how it works, and one might presume this is not a one-off occurrence but describes what the New Testament consistently describes.

Unfortunately, when we turn to commentaries on Romans to determine the meaning of the word “likeness” (ὁμοιώματι) the meanings have a wide variation. It can be taken as either a “corresponding reality” (which would make baptism a likeness once removed from the original and the death an imitation) or a form of the original (which would mean baptism is not a reduplicated dying but a participation in the singular death of Christ). The similitude is sometimes pictured as an image of an inward event. James Dunn writes, “The thought is not of integration with Christ’s death as such, as though believers could actually participate in a historical event that took place twenty to twenty-five years earlier.”[1]

In Dunn’s description there is a gap between the imaging subject and its archetype or object. He illustrates this understanding with an appeal to Plato in Parmenides in which “finite things are ὁmoίwmata in which the heavenly ideas are expressed.”[2] As Dunn works this out in regard to baptism the question arises as to how one can ever overcome the gap between subject and object. Just as the likeness of the earthly and physical is a representation of the eternal form, so Christ’s death is the transcendent reality or eternal form, while the individual’s conversion is a concrete expression of this form.[3] Though he is using the word “form” he does not have in mind a participatory form but an imitation once removed from the original. As he further illustrates and explains, this “likeness” is that of the idol, “intended to give concrete representation to spiritual and transcendent realities.”[4] He likens the relationship of the believer to Christ’s death, to a “mirror image” and not a direct participation.[5] The likeness of Christ is on the order of the likeness of an idol or mirror image. (Which raises the question as to whether Christ’s “likeness to sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3) is also one step removed from the reality of being human?) Where Irenaeus and the early church understood the economy of Christ to be a defeat of sin, death, and the devil, in and through his real-world assumption of humanity and challenge to sin, one of the prime markers of the loss of this economy involves a loss of a real-world defeat of evil. The question is then, what is the status, not only of baptism, but any event, as all are removed by the passage of time? Is Christ only available on the same terms as other events? Perhaps he operates in some sort of legal fiction, an economy only found in the mind of God, and not pertaining to restoration of the cosmos and a real-world defeat of evil.

What Dunn, and those who follow this sort of nominalist ontology are specifically denying or missing is the early church notion of recapitulation. It is precisely in conjunction with this notion of “likeness” that Irenaeus sums up the early church doctrine:

He, too, was made in the likeness of sinful flesh, Romans 8:3 to condemn sin, and to cast it, as now a condemned thing, away beyond the flesh, but that He might call man forth into His own likeness, assigning him as [His own] imitator to God, and imposing on him His Father’s law, in order that he may see God, and granting him power to receive the Father; [being] the Word of God who dwelt in man, and became the Son of man, that He might accustom man to receive God, and God to dwell in man, according to the good pleasure of the Father. (Against Heresies, 3.20.2)

Irenaeus equates each stage of the work of Christ with recapitulation, referring with the term to the underlying and overarching economy. He refers to Eph. 1:10 where we read that God set forth his purpose in Christ “as a plan (oikonomia) for the fullness (pleroma) of time, to recapitulate all things in him” (Eph. 1:10).[6]  He “sums up” (ἀνακεφαλαιώ) all things, and this is the key to recognizing the breadth of Irenaeus use of the term (just as Paul is using “sums up” to encapsulate the economy described in Ephesians).

As Bradley Matthews describes it, “The verb carries the meaning ‘to sum up’, and the noun denotes a ‘summary’ or ‘statement of the main point’.” And “the prefix ἀνα- adds the sense of repetition or renewal. As such, the compound verb ἀνακεφαλαιόω follows the common meaning used in the ancient rhetorical contexts as summing up or recapitulating an argument.”[7] Paul employs the same term to indicate that love “sums up” the law (Rom 13.9 – ἀνακεφαλαιοῦται). “Thus, with respect to its meaning in 1.10, the ἀνακεφαλαίωσις of all things entails the summation of the cosmos in Christ.”[8]

Lest there be any doubt as to whether this recapitulation only applies to the human sphere, Paul specifies, this includes everything (τὰ πάντα), “things in heaven and things on earth.” Throughout the book of Ephesians, Paul explains the “all things” and indicates that all things have been placed under Christ’s feet (1:22); “all things” are derived from the creator (4:9); and there is “one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:6). The recapitulation is cosmic, referring to the universe and the powers behind and beyond the universe which sustain it and renew it and even those that challenge it.

Certainly, the summing up is inclusive, but not limited to, the human realm. According to the TDNT,

The summing up of the totality takes place in its subjection to the Head. The subjection of the totality to the Head takes place in the co-ordinating of the Head and the Church. As the Church receives its Head the totality receives its κεφάλαιον, its definitive, comprehensive and (in the Head) self-repeating summation. In the Head, in Christ, the totality is comprehended afresh as in its sum.[9]

Despite this strong cosmic application some scholars would limit recapitulation to the human realm. Marcus Barth traces this history and locates it with the Lutheran impetus of Rudolf Bultmann.[10] 

For Irenaeus however, there is no question that this economy of salvation is cosmic, while certainly inclusive of the human realm. In his explanation of Colossians 3:10 – “And in saying, “According to the image of him who created him,” he indicates the recapitulation of this man who at the beginning was made after the image of God (Gen. 1:26)” (Against Heresies, 5.12.4) . He describes recapitulation as encapsulating the meaning of Christ’s shedding of blood:

“The blood of every just man shed on the earth will be requited, from the blood of the just Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the temple and the altar; truly, I tell you, all that will come upon this generation” (Matt. 23:35–36). He was pointing to the future recapitulation in himself of the shedding of the blood of all the just and the prophets from the beginning and the requital of their blood through himself. He would not have demanded requital unless it was to be saved, and the Lord would not have recapitulated these things in himself if he too had not been made flesh and blood in accordance with the first-formed work, thus saving in himself at the end what had perished at the beginning in Adam. (Against Heresies, 5.14.1)

Irenaeus, like Paul, sees recapitulation as engaging the devil and spiritual forces for evil. Christ’s recapitulation defeats Satan:

So in recapitulating everything he recapitulated our war against the enemy. He called forth and defeated the one who at the beginning in Adam had led us captive, and he trod on his head, as in Genesis God said to the serpent: “And I will set enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed; she will watch your head and you will watch her heel” (Gen. 3:15). (Against Heresies, 5.21.1)

But each of the above is true because his death saves as it recapitulates or is the culmination of total or universal recapitulation:  

The Maker of the world is truly the Word of God: he is our Lord, who in the last times was made man, existing in this world (John 1:10), and invisibly contains everything that was made (Wisd. 1:7) and was imprinted in the shape of a Chi in everything, as Word of God governing and disposing everything. Therefore he came in visible form into his own region (John 1:11) and was made flesh (1:14) and was hanged from the wood, in order to recapitulate everything in himself. (Against Heresies, 5.18.3).

Irenaeus describes recapitulation in terms of a total “framework” bringing together heaven and earth:

The things in the heavens are spiritual, while those on earth are the dispensation related to man. Therefore he recapitulated these in himself by uniting man to the Spirit and placing the Spirit in man, himself the head of the Spirit and giving the Spirit to be the head of man: for it is by this Spirit that we see and hear and speak (Against Heresies, 5.20.2).

In other words, in this singular, word (recapitulation), which he applies universally, Irenaeus is indicating a singular economy by which to understand the work of Christ and Christian participation in that work. The word refers to all that God is doing in Christ for the cosmos.

Origen will employ the term “restoration” (apocatastasis) for similar purposes. Ilaria Ramelli defines the term as “related to the verb ἀποκαθίστημι, “I restore, reintegrate, reconstitute, return.” She says it, “bears the fundamental meaning of ‘restoration, reintegration, reconstitution” And “came to indicate the theory of universal restoration, that is, of the return of all beings, or at least all rational beings or all humans, to the Good, i.e. God, in the end.”[11]  

Origen apparently inherits the concept, as he indicates in his commentary on John, referring to “the so-called restoration.”[12] Ramelli says, he may be referring to both Clement, who often uses the phrase, and to its biblical employment.[13] The specific term appears in Acts 3:21: “that He may send Jesus, the Christ appointed for you, whom heaven must receive until the period of restoration of all things” (3:20-21). Peter repeats the phrase, announcing the eventual restoration, in Acts 3:24: “all the prophets . . . foretold these days,” that is, those of the universal restoration (apokatastasis). As Ramelli notes, “Origen chose precisely the phrase ἀποκατάστασις πάντων (restitutio omnium) found in Acts 3:21 to indicate his doctrine.”[14] He calls it the “perfect telos” and the “perfecting of all” or “the restitution of all things, when the universe will come to a perfect end” . . . “in which the consummation of all things will take place . . . that is to say, that period when all things are no longer in an age, but when God is all in all” (On First Principles, 2.3.5).

Ramelli tracks Origen’s multiple biblical references, and then traces the reception of restoration through church history. She concludes her study with this summary:

Indeed, the Christian doctrine of apokatastasis is based on the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ, and on God’s being the supreme Good. It is also founded upon God’s grace, which will “bestow mercy upon all,” and the divine will—which these Patristic authors saw as revealed by Scripture—“that all humans be saved and reach the knowledge of Truth.” They also considered it to be revealed in Scripture, and in particular in a prophecy by St. Paul, that in the telos, when all the powers of evil and death will be annihilated and all enemies will submit (for Origen and his followers, in a voluntary submission), “God will be all in all.”[15]

Both recapitulation and restoration express the all-encompassing economy giving meaning to the dozens of words used in the New Testament to describe some aspect of a participatory ontology. Both terms serve at once to picture the economy of salvation in its defeat of sin, death, and evil, and the bringing of all things to full participation in God. Perhaps the mark of a failed theology is lack of this integrating vision, due to a metaphysical understanding which falls short of a full participation in the divine nature.  


[1] James Dunn, Word Biblical Commentary: Romans 1-8. vol. 38 (Dallas: Word Books Publisher, 1988), 330.

[2] Plato, Parmenides 132 D and Phaedrus 250 B quoted in Dunn, Romans , 317.

[3] Dunn, Romans , 317, 331.

[4] Dunn, Romans , 317

[5] James Dunn, “Paul’s Understanding of the Death of Jesus as Sacrifice ’, in Sacrifice and Redemption: Durham Essays in Theology , ed. S. W. Sykes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 37,

[6] Irenaeus, Irenaeus of Lyons, trans. Robert Grant (London: Routledge, 1997) from Grant’s Introduction, 38.

[7] Bradley J. Matthews, (2009) Mature in Christ: the contribution of Ephesians and Colossians to constructing Christian maturity in modernity, Durham theses, Durham University, 76.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Schlier, H. (1964–). κεφαλή, ἀνακεφαλαιόομαι. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 3, p. 682). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

[10] M. Barth, ‘Christ and All Things’, in Paul and Paulinism: Essays in Honour of C. K. Barrett, eds. M.D. Hooker and S.G. Wilson (London: SPCK, 1982), 160-72. As Matthews explains, “Bultmann argued for a restricted sense through the theological argument that Christ’s death is existentially efficacious for people only. He also provided a historical-critical argument that τὰ πάντα draws from the Gnostic-redeemer myth, which necessitates that interpreters demythologise NT soteriology communicated through cosmic-naturalistic terms in order to focus on the actual victims of the fall.” Mathews, Ibid., 86.

[11] Ilaria L.E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Boston: Brill, 2013) 1.

[12] Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. by Ronald Heine (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989) 1.91.

[13] Ramelli, 4.

[14] Ramelli, 14.

[15] Ramelli, 817.

Douglas Campbell’s Framing of Paul Through Ephesians

The frame in which the book of Ephesians might be viewed, as Douglas Campbell sees it, is not as a late and pseudo-Pauline writing, but as an early work, central to Paul’s theology, an understanding which entails several revolutionary shifts. Overall, the understanding of the New Testament, and Paul specifically, must be understood, not through an atonement theory based on contract but one based on covenant (which entails an entirely different theological tenor), but this overall shift points to a series of major turns in theology and exegesis. This is the self-described description of Campbell, which accounts for his peculiar theological understanding and placement of Ephesians (as central) in the Pauline corpus. He notes that there were a series of major shifts occurring during his seminary years in the 1980’s which laid the framework for his theology.[1]

First, the publication of the work of Krister Stendahl in 1963 had thrown into question, what he calls the “Lutheran” understanding of Paul, in which Paul’s main problem was a guilty conscience arising from his inability to keep the law. Paul’s struggle was seen in light of the introspective struggles of Augustine and Luther, and salvation was seen primarily in terms of guilt and its relief. Stendahl notes that, “In the history of Western Christianity — and hence, to a large extent, in the history of Western culture — the Apostle Paul has been hailed as a hero of the introspective conscience. Here was the man who grappled with the problem ‘I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want to do is what I do . . . (Rom.7:19).”[2] As I have pointed out in my work on Romans, this misreading of Romans 7 marks the major forms of the faith (is this the conscious non-Christian Paul, or is this Paul’s reflection on his non-Christian life from a Christian stand-point, or is this simply Christian Paul?).[3] This background, according to Stendahl, gives rise to the Western notion of “justification by faith”: “hailed as the answer to the problem which faces the ruthlessly honest man in his practice of introspection.”[4]

This does not line up with Paul’s own description of his conscience in Philippians and elsewhere:

In Phil. 3 Paul speaks most fully about his life before his Christian calling, and there is no indication that he had had any difficulty in fulfilling the Law. On the contrary, he can say that he had been “flawless” as to the righteousness required by the Law (v.6). His encounter with Jesus Christ — at Damascus, according to Acts 9:1-9 — has not changed this fact. It was not to him a restoration of a plagued conscience; when he says that he now forgets what is behind him (Phil. 3:13), he does not think about the shortcomings in his obedience to the Law, but about his glorious achievements as a righteous Jew, achievements which he nevertheless now has learned to consider as “refuse” in the light of his faith in Jesus as the Messiah.”[5]

Justification by faith, Stendahl notes, is going to mean something very different if the notion of guilt, and relief from guilt, is not the primary lens for reading Paul or understanding Judaism. Stendahl notes the point which will be developed and built upon in what is called, “The New Perspective on Paul”: “for the Jew the Law did not require a static or pedantic perfectionism but supposed a covenant relationship in which there was room for forgiveness and repentance and where God applied the Measure of Grace.”[6]

Second, in Campbell’s telling of the story, it was E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism, published in 1977, which brought home the fact that Judaism, as it is characterized under the typical Protestant notion, as a “work’s righteousness” religion, gives a legalistic account of “justification by works” that is unrecognizable to Jews. The inherent antisemitism of this understanding, which in the post-Holocaust world was a key concern, added to the recognition of the false portrayal of Judaism in typical Western, mainly Protestant, understandings.  

As James Dunn notes, “What is usually taken to be the Jewish alternative to Paul’s gospel would have been hardly recognized as an expression of Judaism by Paul’s kinsmen according to the flesh. Sanders notes that Jewish scholars and experts in early Judaism have for long enough been registering a protest at this point, contrasting rabbinic Judaism as they understand it with the parody of Judaism which Paul seems to have rejected.”[7] Sanders quotes Solomon Schecter as an example: “Either the theology of the Rabbis must be wrong, its conception of God debasing, its leading motives materialistic and coarse, and its teachers lacking in enthusiasm and spirituality, or the Apostle to the Gentiles is quite unintelligible;” and then James Parks: “… if Paul was really attacking ‘Rabbinic Judaism’, then much of his argument is irrelevant, his abuse unmerited, and his conception of that which he was attacking inaccurate.”[8]

The fact that New Testament scholarship and the framing of Paul’s understanding (through such key scholars as Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Kasemann) is based on this Lutheran model, with its rejection the entire field became suspect.

 Sanders also demonstrated that Judaism is based, not on a contractual relationship of law keeping, but on a covenantal relationship:

In particular, he has shown with sufficient weight of evidence that for the first-century Jew, Israel’s covenant relation with God was basic, basic to the Jew’s sense of national identity and to his understanding of his religion. So far as we can tell now, for first-century Judaism everything was an elaboration of the fundamental axiom that the one God had chosen Israel to be his peculiar people, to enjoy a special relationship under his rule. The law had been given as an expression of this covenant, to regulate and maintain the relationship established by the covenant.[9]

The relationship of the covenant was primary, and the law was added only as a guide to maintain the relationship. “So, too, righteousness must be seen in terms of this relationship, as referring to conduct appropriate to this relationship, conduct in accord with the law. That is, obedience to the law in Judaism was never thought of as a means of entering the covenant, of attaining that special relationship with God; it was more a matter of maintaining the covenant relationship with God.”[10] Sanders refers to this understanding as “covenantal nomism” – which he defines in the following manner:

covenantal nomism is the view that one’s place in God’s plan is established on the basis of the covenant and that the covenant requires as the proper response of man his obedience to its commandments, while providing means of atonement for transgression … Obedience maintains one’s position in the covenant, but it does not earn God’s grace as such … Righteousness in Judaism is a term which implies the maintenance of status among the group of the elect.[11]

There are multiple implications to this understanding of Paul, which Sanders did not pursue. He simply assumed Paul’s Judaism was different than that of his fellow Jews.

The third thing that Campbell notes, which pertains to the above points, concerned the question of Paul’s “center” (which Campbell refers to as the question of the nature of Paul’s “gospel” or his “soteriology”). With the questioning of the Lutheran Paul, there was a turn to nineteenth century German theology, such as that of Albert Schweitzer focused on “being-in-Christ.” Schweitzer claims, “The doctrine of righteousness by faith is therefore a subsidiary crater, which has formed within the rim of the main crater – the mystical doctrine of redemption through being-in-Christ.”[12]  The question arose as to how to reconcile these two understandings of Paul. Was Paul inconsistent or was the scholarship on Paul flawed?

Fourth, Campbell mentions the impact of the work of Richard Hays, and his understanding that “various phrases in Paul were best understood as references to the ‘faithfulness of Jesus’ as against (Christian) ‘faith in Jesus.’” This coincides with a participatory notion of faith, in which Jesus is not so much the object of faith as the model of faith which his followers emulate.

The fifth contributing influence concerns Campbell’s studies under Richard N. Longenecker, who proposed an alternative frame for understanding the order of Paul’s letter writing. “If Galatians was Paul’s first extant letter (as Longenecker proposed) then the shape of his theological project was rather different from an account that positioned 1 or even 2 Thessalonians first . . . The language and concerns distinct to Galatians and Romans look rather less programmatic and rather more occasional if the latter biography holds good.”[13]

As Campbell concludes, “In short then we were taught in the 1980s at Toronto that some of the key details in Paul’s biography, which affected the interpretation of some of his key letters, were being vigorously contested.[14]

In Campbell’s description this all became coherent and constituted an alternative reading only with his encounter with the work of Thomas and James Torrance. Under the Torrance’s influence he came to a fuller understanding of exactly what might be entailed in a covenantal relationship:

Because the basis for the relationship is precisely this ground, of love, the covenantal actor reaches out to the other and establishes the relationship independently of any action by that party. It is therefore an unconditional and gracious act, and the relationship with the other is a gifted one. The covenantal actor has “elected” to enter the relationship and so taken the initiative. That actor has also thereby functioned “missiologically” and “incarnationally” — in the case of God literally — in stretching to the other actor’s location and, if necessary, meeting them right where s/he is. Once established, moreover, this relationship then extends through time, irrevocably. It lasts as long as the love of the loving covenantal actor lasts, hence, in the case of God, through eternity. And the relationship is consequently characterized by complete loyalty and unswerving fidelity.[15]

Though Campbell does not extend this particular essay to his own framing of Paul and the role he would assign to Ephesians, it seems evident these moves clear the ground for something like a return to the early church understanding of the centrality of Ephesians. As I indicated in my previous blog, Origen considered Ephesians the center of Paul’s thought[16] and according to Richard Layton he defined “this epistle as the spiritual ‘heart of Paul’s letters, a repository of mysteries at which the apostle only hinted in other correspondence.”[17] In the estimate of Origen and Jerome, “…Ephesians, that epistle of the apostle which stands in the middle in concepts as well as order. Now I say middle not because it comes after the first epistles and is longer than the final ones, but in the sense that the heart of an animal is in its mid‐section, so that you might understand from this the magnitude of the difficulties and the profundity of the questions it contains.”[18] As Ernest Best shows, Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement of Rome, Hermas, and other Apostolic Fathers knew and used this letter as a key to understanding Paul.[19] However, “with the reformation, and the modernist quest that followed it, the letter came increasingly to be read as a unified discourse with its own distinct message.”[20]

As Martin Wright demonstrates in his PhD dissertation, “Ephesians is deeply embedded in the CP (Pauline Corpus) . . .  it serves an integrating function within the Corpus, and above all . . . patterns of reception and reinterpretation across the Corpus are far more complex than the bifurcation between “authentic” and “spurious” letters can admit.”[21] Wright engages Campbell’s “framing” of Paul noting that in this understanding Colossians and Ephesians are  authentic, “the latter is really the “Laodiceans” of Col. 4:16, and together with Philemon these letters constitute a ‘single epistolary event’, dating from an imprisonment in Asia Minor in 50;59 they therefore precede 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians and Romans . . . .”[22] This leads to consequential conclusions as to the centrality of Ephesians:

The place of Ephesians (“Laodiceans”) in Campbell’s schema is intriguing. In his view it is not prompted by any particular crisis, but gives “an account of pagan Christian identity” to a Gentile congregation not founded by Paul. . . . But as a result, and because Campbell locates the letter before 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians and Romans, its role in the CP is transformed. Ephesians becomes a distinctively “unconditioned” statement of Paul’s gospel, more so even than Romans; its echoes throughout the Corpus reflect its closeness to the heart of his theology, with motifs first articulated here to be developed later on, perhaps transformed in the crucible of conflict and schism. This is of course the opposite of the usual modern position, that Ephesians is a late text drawing together strands from various earlier Pauline letters (though it sits well with Origen’s view quoted at the beginning of this study). As Campbell realizes, if his frame is accepted, one consequence will be “a more ‘Ephesiocentric’ account of Paul’s thought.[23]

As Wright goes on to note, this means that Ephesians is not occasioned by a particular false teaching (the rise of a rival Jewish-Christian Teacher spurring the discussion in of law, grace, faith and justification/righteousness in Galatians, Philippians, and Romans) as the writing of Ephesians precedes these events. What we have in Ephesians then, according to Campbell, is a summation of Paul’s gospel for a people otherwise not familiar with it.

Campbell sums up Paul’s gospel by highlighting four points:[24] 1. a realized eschatology: Resurrection, ascension, rule, life all come together as the predestined plan of God, and this rule is not simply to a future eschatological fulfillment (though this is not absent in Ephesians, e.g., 1:14; 2:7; 4:30; 5:5; 6:8, 13), the distinctive emphasis of Ephesians is of a present or realized eschatology (e.g., “we are now seated with him at the right hand of God, 2:6).

2. “Secondly, it is (as a direct consequence of the foregoing) a radical understanding, in that it cuts to the root (the radix) of sin in the sinful being of humanity and the present cosmic order, which is full · of oppressive evil powers that have a foothold in that corrupt being (notably sin and death; they plague the flesh- Gk sarx).” What we learn in this gospel is that resurrection and enthronement defeat the Powers (the prince of the power of the air, Eph. 2:2). It tells us that the power (the power of sin and evil) is defeated in the defeat of death, and that this power of death is that which is wielded by the principalities and powers and by the prince of the power of the air. The gospel of Paul is the mystery revealed in this reign over the Powers (3:9-10). Satan’s power over the nations is ended (3:1-13) and every Christian can participate in this defeat (6:10-20).

3. Campbell notes the Trinitarian aspect of Paul’s gospel which he elsewhere combines in an understanding of the participatory or perichoretic understanding. Paul “uses a sexual metaphor informed by Gen 2:24, understanding sexual union as oneness or unification, as that text suggests. This usage denotes the unity of close relational intimacy, along with close bodily contact without any erasure of differentiation or individuated personhood, and supports a perichoretic account of the divine unity.”[25]

Humankind was created for participation and relationship with God, and the intimacy of this participation is part of the mystery revealed (5:32). Christ’s salvific work (the mystery revealed to all the saints, 1:1; 1:9) brings about unity of all things, “things in the heavens and things on the earth” (1:10), inclusive and represented by the unity of Jews and Gentiles (3:1-6). This saving union with God marks the medium and goal of the Christian life. Christians are to “keep the unity of the Spirit” (4:3) through the oneness of the body, as “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you also were called into one hope . . .. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (4:4–6a). The point of the apostles and prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers, or the point of the church is building up the body of Christ “until all of us attain unity of the faith” (4:13) with “the whole body being joined together and united together by every binding ligament of support” (4:16). This gospel unity stands in contrast to the dividing powers controlling those alienated from the life of God” (4:18). Christians are members of one another (4:25) because of Christ’s victory over the alienating power of death and the resultant unifying and life giving of the Spirit (5:14-15) through the predetermined will of the Father.

4. “Fourthly and finally, the model is clearly utterly unconditional: no human act can initiate or effect the eschatological irruption of God-or the Father’s sending of the only Son. People are simply caught up in the irresistible purposes and creativity of God, as Paul himself was outside Damascus . . ..” Paul opens Ephesians with this understanding of God’s unconditional plan: “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will” (1:3-6). Paul informs us, “This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord” (3:11). All “because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved” (2:4-6). As Campbell puts it, “A new person, and new humanity, has been made. Note, this is not to subordinate the second creation to the first: in Paul the second clearly prefigured the first cosmically, and also vastly exceeds it . . .”[26]

Though I have drawn from Campbell’s early work to his most recent work to highlight the role of Ephesians, I think I have been true to the progression of his thought. In conclusion his summary of the gospel could just as well be a summary of the key role of Ephesians, which he notes:

The secret of the universe and the point of the great narrative that encompasses us all is God’s plan to draw us into a community imaged and formed by his resurrected Son. The risen Jesus will have primacy but also a rather extraordinary equality with those who surround him and look like him. Everyone in this community will therefore be a “brother,” bearing the image of the Resurrected One. . .. Our destiny, then, is to be a “band of brothers,” which is to say, “a family of siblings.” This is God’s great plan that lies at the heart of the cosmos. Its fulfillment is the story that enfolds us all, and it is the only story that really matters.

Just the same notion is expounded at length in the opening section of Ephesians. There Paul uses the form of a blessing— entirely appropriately, since it is a blessing— to convey the insight that fellowship with the triune God lies at the heart of the cosmos. Such is his enthusiasm that he articulates this notion in one sentence that runs on for twelve verses (vv. 3– 14). This purpose existed “before the foundation of the world: that we should be holy and blameless before him, having been chosen in love” (v. 4). At the heart of the cosmos, its inception, its existence, and its future, lies the divine plan to create us and to enjoy us in fellowship. And this plan entailed initiating this relationship by creating us and then calling us and drawing us into communion in the loving movement often known as election, the Greek literally meaning “calling out,” hence “summoning.”[27]

(Sign up for our next class beginning January 30th: Philemon and Ephesians: Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Paul https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)


[1] Douglas Campbell, “Covenant or Contract in the Interpretation of Paul.” Participation: The Journal of the T. F.  Torrance Theological Fellowship (2014) 183-184

[2] Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” First delivered as the invited Address at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, September 3, 1961 ; it is a revised and footnoted edition of the “article “Paulus och Samvetet,” published in Sweden in Svensk Exegetisk Ârsbok 25 (i960), 62-77. Accessed online at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/569543b4bfe87360795306d6/t/5a4d41fa085229a032376713/1515012617149/01Stendahl.pdf

[3] Seem my work, Paul V. Axton, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul (London: T & T Clark, 2015).

[4] Stendahl, “Introspective Conscience”

[5] Stendahl, Ibid.

[6] Stendahl, Ibid.

[7] James Dunn, “The New Perspective on Paul,” The Manson Memorial Lecture delivered in the University of Manchester on 4 November 1982. Subsequently delivered in inodified form as one of the Wilkinson Lectures in the Northen Baptist Theological Seminary, Illinois, under the title “Let Paul be Paul”. Accessed online at https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:1m1686&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS-DOCUMENT.PDF

[8] Dunn is quoting Sanders, Paul, p. 6. See the fuller survey “Paul and Judaism in New Testament scholarship” on pp. 1-12.

[9] Dunn, Ibid.

[10] Dunn, Ibid.

[11] Sanders, Paul, pp. 75, 420, 544. Quoted in Dunn.

[12] A. Schweitzer, Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1930, 2 1954). Quoted from Carsten Claussen, “Albert Schweitzer’s Understanding of Righteousness by Faith according to Paul’s Letter to the Romans” “Romans through History and Cultures Group”; SBL Annual Meeting 2007 in San Diego

[13] Campbell, “Covenant or Contract.”

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] F. Pieri and Ronald E. Heine, “Recovering Origen’s Commentary On Ephesians from Jerome,” The Journal of Theological Studies NEW SERIES, Vol. 51, No. 2 (October 2000), pp. 478-514 Published By: Oxford University Press

[17] Richard Layton, “Recovering Origen’s Pauline Exegesis: Exegesis and Eschatology in the Commentary on Ephesians” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8:3, 373–411 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[18] Origen and Jerome, The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, ed. and trans. Ronald E. Heine (Oxford: OUP, 2002), 77. This part of the commentary survives only in Jerome’s version, but Heine attributes much of it, including the quoted passage, to Origen.

[19] Ernest Best, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, ICC
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 115–17. Quoted in Oscar E. Jiménez, Metaphors in the Narrative of Ephesians 2:11-22, (Brill, 2022) 2.

[20] Max Turner, “Book of Ephesians,” in Dictionary for the Theological Interpretation of the Bible (London: SPCK, 2005), 187. Quoted in Jiménez, Ibid.

[21] Martin Wright, Breaking Down the Dividing Wall: Ephesians and the Integrity of the Corpus Paulinum, (Durham theses, Durham University, 2018) 10.

[22] Wright, 10.

[23] Wright, 80-81.

[24] Outlined in Campbells essay, “Covenant or Contract.” I am filling out his outline from Ephesians.

[25] Douglas Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics (Kindle Locations 1441-1445). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

[26] Campbell, “Covenant or Contract.”

[27] Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics, Kindle Locations 1699 – 1711.

Understanding the “Time” of Origen and Paul Through Ephesians 3:9-10

Origen considered Ephesians the center of Paul’s thought[1] and according to Richard Layton he defined “this epistle as the spiritual ‘heart of Paul’s letters, a repository of mysteries at which the apostle only hinted in other correspondence.”[2] As Layton explains, “The imagery of Ephesians moves in celestial realms and encompasses the vast reaches of eternity, inviting cosmological speculation. The language of Ephesians is particularly vivid at precisely the points where Origen’s teachings kindled controversy.”[3] One might read Origen as an explanation of this cosmological time and space bending book (Ephesians), which provides entre into Pauline theology. Though Origen and Paul are often read through Platonic conceptions, Origen is making a clear break with Platonism (most clearly on such issues as the intersection of time and eternity) and his is a demonstration of the unique logic of Paul and the New Testament. What Origen demonstrates is that Paul, in his conception of time (and eternity), is neither Greek nor Hebrew but is setting forth the peculiar implications arising from the incarnation of Christ and His consummation or summing up of all things (Eph. 1:10).

A key component of Origen’s thought is derived from Ephesians 3:9-10 in which Christ is said to be “the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things; so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.” Origen pictures Christ as the Wisdom of God, which as he notes from this verse is “manifold” or containing the different principles or arche upholding creation. The Wisdom of God “administered” through Christ captures the point of intersection between God, who is timeless, and his dealings with time and creation. While this Wisdom is also beginningless in its reference to the Son, it is also interwoven with the creative act of the Son:

The son of God is also called wisdom, made as a beginning of his ways to his works, according to the Proverbs, which means that wisdom existed only in relation to him of whom she was wisdom, having no relation to anyone else at all; but the son of God himself became God’s benevolent decision and willed to bring creatures into being. This wisdom then willed to establish a creative relation to future creatures and this is exactly the meaning of the saying that she has been made the beginning of God’s ways.[4]

Wisdom, through the Son, creates and is itself made part of creation, in that the reason or arche of all things is found in the Son. As Paul says, “in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17) and yet He is “the firstborn of all creation” (Col.1:15). As Origen explains, he “is the oldest of all created beings and … it was to him that God said of the creation of man: ‘Let us make man in our image and likeness.’[5] “Wisdom” is regarded as “created” in the “body” of Christ, such that the passage from uncreated to created is present in Christ.

Origen pictures the first creation account of male and female as referring to the arche or logoi from out of which the next chapter records the creation of the man from the dust and the woman from out of the side of Adam. As Panayiotis Tzamalikos describes it:

The “reasons” is what God created in the beginning. Taking into account that the term logōi means both “words” and “reasons”, Origen’s view is that these logōi are the words of God when he was speaking to his son in the creation of the world according to Genesis. These logōi of God are but the creative . . . fiat out of which the notion of “coming into being out of non-being” began to make sense. It is certainly God who brought them into being but the act of this “creation” is portrayed as an “utterance” of the father to the son. These “utterances”, in Greek called by Origen logōi (which means “utterances”, “words” and “reasons”), is what actually came into being out of non-being.”[6]

The “manifold wisdom” of which Paul speaks, is known through creation and Christ, the wisdom of God is manifest in creation. Wisdom as given through the son, Paul explains (and Origen notes), is the means of bestowing the divine mysteries. What was once hidden in God is manifest in Christ, which Paul notes in acknowledging that God created all things. So, there is a creaturely, created aspect (the logoi) which is from the uncreated, timeless divine wisdom, but which is made known in and through the work of creation.

 In his commentary on Ephesians, Origen refers to Paul’s specialized usage of the term “foundation” (Eph. 1:4) to suggest a similar idea.

καταβολῆς is properly used when something is thrown down and is placed in a lower place from a higher one or when something assumes a beginning. For this reason also those who lay the first foundations of future buildings are said καταβεβληκ ναι, that is, they are said to have thrown down the beginnings of the foundations. Paul, therefore, wishing to show that God devised all things from nothing, ascribes to it not making, not creating and formation, but καταβολῆ, that is the beginning of the foundation, so that something from which creatures were made did not precede creatures in accordance with the Manichaeans and other heresies (which posit a maker and material), but all things subsist from nothing.[7]

Origen makes a clear distinction between Creator and creation, which is worked out in his understanding of a two-fold notion of wisdom in Christ. There is the uncreated Wisdom, but then the manifold wisdom or the logoi. Origen maintains there is a separation between these two. The wisdom of God, which is Christ (I Cor. 1:24), contains the arche. The Logos is not the creator, but the means of creation. (Origen is explaining how it is that “He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being” (Jn 1:2–3).

As Origen writes,

And in the Epistle to the Hebrews the same Paul says: “At the end of days he has spoken to us in a Son whom he has appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the worlds,” teaching us that God has made the worlds through the son since the only begotten had the “through whom” when the worlds were made. So here too, therefore, if all things were made through the Word, they were not made by the Word, but by one better and greater than the Word. And who would this other one be except the Father?[8]

God the Father made the worlds through the Son, who is himself “begotten of the Father.” First, there is the reality of God in himself, then as Paul expresses it in Eph. 3, there is the manifold or multiple, or as Origen will put it, there is the “decorated” or “multi-embroidered,” wisdom through which creation came about out of non-being. In this first instance, we do not have yet to do with material or corporeal reality, as it is Christ who is the Wisdom of God, but through this Wisdom (singular and timeless) there arises the manifold (many, various) or “multi-embroidered” wisdom. As the TDNT puts it, “The wisdom of God (→ σοφία) has shown itself in Christ to be varied beyond measure and in a way which surpasses all previous knowledge thereof.”[9] This then explains the preparation of the beginning from which creation occurs:

And in relation to this, we will be able to understand what is meant by the beginning of creation, and what Wisdom says in Proverbs: “For God,” she says, “created me the beginning of his ways for his works.” It is possible, of course, for this also to be referred to our first meaning, i.e. that pertaining to a way, because it is said, “God created me the beginning of his ways.”[10]

There is a created aspect contained in the Word.[11] This initial phase does not reference the material creation or the corporeal body of Adam, but pertains to the one who is true Adam or the beginning from which creation comes. The archetype is Christ, the true image bearer of humans but containing the arche of all creation. As Tzamalikos explains, “When, therefore, Origen speaks of ‘first’ creation which was ‘incorporeal’ he does not refer to any ‘incorporeal world’ whatever. For in a strict sense there is no world at all. The reality is the “body” of Christ, which was ‘embroidered’ by those ‘made’.[12] This incorporeal nature is created but not of the material created order, yet it is in this incorporeal nature that embodied humans come to their fulness.

Paul illustrates this in regard to himself, in two passages Origen often cites: Paul says, “I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20) and he speaks of the husband and wife as being “one flesh” which pertains to Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:31-32). The embodied, corporeal person takes up the fulness of the image through Christ as Christ imparts the incorporeal logoi of his life.

In the Ephesians 3 passage, this accomplishment of wisdom shared and received is made known “to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph 3:10). He says the “rulers and authorities” we “ought to understand as saints and ministers of God” though he acknowledges that “some take them to be the prince of the air (Eph. 2: 2) and his angels).”[13] Origen makes the bold attempt to describe the place of the devil, who may stand behind the “principalities and powers.”

In other places, he describes a singular counter-power which could stand behind these powers. “Thus he speaks of “one, who fell from the bliss”, further he speaks of “one” applying the adjective “ruler” without stating any noun again; “while there were many rulers who were made, it was one who fell.’”[14] There is a failure or fall (the fall of the devil) which precedes the fall of man but which (even before the fall of man) pervades all of creation. The corporeal creation contains a divide, from its inception, which is the result of this fall. Origen quotes Paul as proof, “All creation groans and travails until now (Rom. 8:22)”[15] He surmises, “Creation was subjected to vanity, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope,” that bodies and doing bodily things, which is . . . necessary . . . for one in a body, might be vanity. He who is in a body does bodily things unwillingly. For this reason, creation was subjected to vanity unwillingly.”[16]

This travail and vanity explains some of the peculiar characteristics of time and its relief in Christ. There is an original unity in the “body” of Christ, but with multiplication of wisdom (the logoi) there arises the distinctions of space-time. The beginning constituted in Christ (which is timeless), is that from which time unfolds, and time pertains to change and ultimately to decay and death, which explains Christ’s incarnation: “because our Lord, on account of his love for man, took up death on behalf of us” and he “took our darknesses upon himself that by his power he might destroy our death, and completely destroy the darkness in our soul.”[17]

This freedom from death and darkness explains the sort of time travel, or passage out of time which characterizes Ephesians. Christ is the “summing up of all things” in heaven and earth (1:10) and Christians are, in the present tense, seated with him at the right hand of God (1:20). His body “fills all in all” (1:23; 4:10) and the church is made “one flesh” with Christ (5:32) defeating “the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (6:12). And this involves a fundamental apperception in which “the eyes of your heart may be enlightened” (Eph. 1:18). The peculiar intersection of time with eternity brings about a new form of knowing and a new unity and peace as God’s eternal purposes carried out in Christ have been made known (Eph. 3:11). This is not a discursive knowing but knowing by revelation: “By referring to this, when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit” (Eph. 3:4–5). Origen, who provides the earliest commentary on Ephesians, rightly sets it front and center in understanding the mystery revealed in the Gospel.

(Sign up for our next class beginning January 30th: Philemon and Ephesians: Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Paul https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)


[1] F. Pieri and Ronald E. Heine, “Recovering Origen’s Commentary On Ephesians from Jerome,” The Journal of Theological Studies NEW SERIES, Vol. 51, No. 2 (October 2000), pp. 478-514 Published By: Oxford University Press

[2] Richard Layton, “Recovering Origen’s Pauline Exegesis: Exegesis and Eschatology in the Commentary on Ephesians” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8:3, 373–411 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Origen, Fragmenta 1-140 in Joannim, fragment 1. Quoted in Panayiotis Tzamalikos, The concept of Time in Origen (Published by ProQuest LLC, 2018) 53.

[5] Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953) 5.37.

[6] Tzamalikos, 58.

[7] Jerome and Origen, The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, trans. by Ronald Heine (Print ISBN 0199245517, 2002), 84.

[8] Origen, Commentary on the Gospel According to John Books 1-10, trans. Ronald Heine (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989) 2.72.

[9] Seesemann, H. (1964–). ποικίλος, πολυποίκιλος. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 6, p. 485). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

[10] Commentary on John, 1.101.

[11] Origen does not believe the Son is created, as the “Son is the brightness of eternal light” and just as there is no brightness apart from light, neither then is the Father without the Son or the Son without the Father. “How, then, can it be said that there was a ‘when’ when the Son was not? For that is nothing other than to say that there was a ‘when’ when Truth was not, a ‘when’ when Wisdom was not, a ‘when’ when Life was not, although in all these respects the substance of God the Father is perfectly accounted.” Origen, On First Principles Vol. 2, trans. John Behr, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 4.4.1.1

[12] Tzamalikos, 72.

[13] Commentary on Ephesians, 149-150.

[14] Tzamalikos, 76.

[15] Commentary on John, 1.98. “Creation was subjected to vanity, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope,” 151 that bodies and doing bodily things, which is . . . necessary . . . for one in a body, might be vanity. 152 He who is in a body does bodily things unwillingly. For this reason creation was subjected to vanity unwillingly.

[16] Ibid. 1.99

[17] Commentary on John, 2.166.

Real Presence as Opposed to Deferred Meaning

Japanese is a language suited to a people concerned to gauge response (agreement or disagreement), and aiming to gain consensus, in that the meaning of a sentence is not clear from the beginning or middle but only becomes clear at the end. The statement can be turned to a negation, a question, or the subject changed all-together according to the ending of the final word of the sentence. What might seem a bold declaration can be turned round, softened, or negated, depending on how it is being received. Jacques Derrida saw this deferral of meaning as characteristic of writing and language in general, so that the entire signifying chain holds out a meaning that is deferred so that the subject/Subject is continually being uncoiled in speech.

Just as in Japanese, faced with a run on sentence, the meaning or substance of speech is always in process but never arriving. Derrida tried to capture this in his neologism “différance,” in which the changed vowel cannot be detected from the way it sounds. What the added letter indicates is that language is built on difference: the different letters and contrasting sounds or the different meanings of words compared to other words creates meaning, so that it is only through contrast and difference that meaning unfolds along an endless signifying chain. To attach some substantive element, some final meaning, or some essence or presence to the Subject speaking due to his speech, contains the deception inherent to language.

An object endures through time due to its static nature, but language does not endure but rather passes away as soon as it arises. It has no enduring being. One who is coming to his identity in and through language is subject to the fate of language. Thus, what Derrida means by his new word concerns the death dealing nature of language: “The a of différance, thus, is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oikesis.”[1] Tomb in Greek, oikesis, is akin to the Greek oikos (house) from which the word “economy” derives. Thus, to dwell in the house of language is to dwell in the house and economy of death. “And thereby let us anticipate the delineation of a site, the familial residence and tomb of the proper’ in which is produced, by différance, the economy of death.”[2] A Subject put into pursuit of an object, or identity as an object (the ego, or the notion of an enclosed self-subsistent center), through language is involved in an impossible contradiction.

Jacques Lacan would do for the human psyche what Derrida did for the text, finding there the pursuit of identity and presence through a three-sided play of language.  Following Freud, he finds in the compulsion to repeat a key to human self-destructiveness. Where Freud grounded the compulsion in a biological need to return to the stable material realm, Lacan explains the compulsion as arising from language and the struggle to establish the self in and through language. Lacan connects the compulsion to repeat to the ‘insistence of the signifier’ or the ‘insistence of the signifying chain’ or the insistence of the letter as a means to establish the self. To be present to the self or to have a self-presence gives rise to the compulsion to repeat so as to gain the self. He connects the compulsion to death in the “death drive” or “death instinct.”[3]

In the death drive one would be integrated into the signifying chain, converting the word into flesh (body and ego), simultaneously immortalizing the flesh through the word and its endless play. Thus, Lacan concludes the death instinct is “the mask of the symbolic order” of language (Seminar II, 326). The death instinct is the “insistence to be” through language.

Lacan, followed by Slavoj Žižek, considered his explanation of the human psyche as an extrapolation from the Apostle Paul. Paul is laying out this framework primarily in Romans, but is building upon the Hebrew Scriptures, dealing with the fall, with the law, and picturing both the human predicament and its resolution in Christ as arising from the economy described in Scripture. The knowledge of good and evil, the law, idolatry, or simply the “letter” in Paul’s depiction, kills. In the language of cabalists, Adam makes knowledge his own destiny and his own specific power.[4] So too with Paul, the law is not inherently deadly but the tendency is to reify it or make it substantive and by this means lend substance to the one who takes up the letter. The letter kills as no life or Spirit is to be found in the letter of the law.

Another approach to the same idea is to be found in the spectacle of the idol. The idol (the visual) is invested with substance through language. It is made a divine spectacle, not because the wood or metal from which it is crafted contains peculiar properties, but because it is invested with divine power through language.

A way of putting this that taps into the entire biblical economy is that God’s presence is displaced where the letter, where the knowledge of good and evil, or where the idol displaces that presence. That is, the economy of presence and absence which Derrida, Lacan, and Žižek, attached primarily to language is an economy that originally pertains to God’s presence. The letter kills as it cannot produce the presence which comes from God alone.   

In the economy of the Bible, the presence or absence of God is determinative of success or failure and is equated with life or death or truth and lies. From the opening verses of Genesis, God’s presence in the Garden represented by the Tree of Life, and by his walking in the Garden in the “cool of the day,” means all is well. With the entry of sin, access to God, to the Garden, and to the Tree of Life are cut off (Gen 3)

As the Psalmist indicates, “the nearness of God is my good” (Ps 73:28). God’s presence is equated with life and joy (Ps 16:11) and there is nothing better than to “dwell in the house of the Lord” and to behold his beauty and “meditate in His temple” (Ps 27:4). The presence of God is portrayed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as the equivalent of fulness of life and blessing. God assures Abraham, Moses, Jacob, and Israel in general that he will be with them, and so there is no cause for fear as they will endure and be successful. As God says to Moses, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest” (Ex 33:14).[5]

Likewise, salvation in the New Testament is equated with having access to the presence of God: “for through Him (Christ) we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph 2:18); “in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him” (Eph 3:12). Partaking of the body of Christ (Luke 22:19-22), receiving the indwelling Spirit (Rom 8:9-11), entering the Holy of Holies (the very presence of God) (Heb. 10:19), and inhabiting the City of God, the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21) are all equated with salvation. This presence gives eternal life, peace, love, joy, hope, forgiveness, freedom from sin, and access to God in prayer.

However, what is meant by Christ’s or God’s presence, is not an instance of presence in general but it carries a peculiar and specific meaning in Scripture. The presence of God pertains to God’s indwelling and active presence, comingled with the person in whom this presence is manifest. The presence of God is equated with the Gospel, with grace and with truth. It is “constantly bearing fruit and increasing, even as it has been doing in you also since the day you heard of it and understood the grace of God in truth” (Col 1:6). This presence has obtained a hold on believers: “Therefore, I will always be ready to remind you of these things, even though you already know them, and have been established in the truth which is present with you” (2 Pe 1:12). This presence is an ever-increasing reality culminating in the final presence or Parousia of Christ but present now in and through the believers: “For who is our hope or joy or crown of exultation? Is it not even you, in the presence of our Lord Jesus at His coming?” (1 Th 2:19). As the saints “increase and abound in love for one another” they are established “without blame in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints” (1 Th 3:12–13). In and through his presence a process of sanctifying preservation is enacted which will be secured with the final Presence/Parousia: “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Th 5:23). There must be an active pursuit of this abiding presence: “abide in Him, so that when He appears, we may have confidence and not shrink away from Him in shame at His coming” (1 Jn 2:28).

God’s presence is not simply an effect of language, the absorption of or in an idea, or the repetition of a divine formula. Nor is God’s presence simply that God is nearby. God’s presence accomplishes what the failed pursuit of the letter attempts. The human word made flesh, ossifies, entombs, and kills while God’s Word made flesh brings about the comingling of the divine and human. In the same way that Jesus Christ is both God and man, so too those who take on his identity experience this hypostasis.

Maximus the Confessor’s description of the person of Christ describes the manner in which there is a real presence in the life of every believer:

He does the things of man,according to a supreme union involving no change, showing that the human energy is conjoined with the divine power, since the human nature, united without confusion to the divine nature, is completely penetrated by it, with absolutely no part of it remaining separate from the divinity to which it was united, having been assumed according to hypostasis. (Amb. 5.14)

He assumed our being that we might assume His, joining together His Spirit as the substance of our life and His body as our continued incarnation of the Word. Through this Word Christians “become partakers of the divine nature” (I Pet. 1:4) and escape the corruption of His absence.

(Sign up for our next class beginning January 30th: Philemon and Ephesians: Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Paul https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)


[1] Jacques Derrida, Différance, translated by Alan Bass, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp 3-27.

[2] Ibid.

[3] The prime example of the drive to establish the self through language, inclusive of the deployment of language to establish being, and the impossibility of the enterprise is captured in Rene Descartes’s cogito.

[4] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, Translated by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 80.1.

[5] God’s presence is connected to the ark of the covenant, so that wherever the ark goes God is present, as in aiding in the defeat of an enemy (I Sam. 4:6-7). The particulars of how his presence manifests varies. “He can come in dreams (Gn. 20:3; 28:13), in more or less veiled theophanies (Gn. 18:1 ff.; 32:25 ff.; Ex. 3:2 ff.; 24:10 ff.; 34:6 ff.; Ps. 50:3), in the cloud . . . in visions at the calling of the prophets (Is. 6:1 ff.; Jer. 1:4 ff.; Ez. 1:4 ff.), in the storm, in the quiet breath (1 K. 19:12 f.), in His Spirit (Nu. 24:2: Ju. 3:10; 11:29; 1 S. 11:6; 19:20), with His hand (1 K. 18:46), in His Word (Nu. 22:9; 2 S. 7:4; 1 K. 17:2 etc.). The messiah is expected to come in history Oepke, A. (1964–). παρουσία, πάρειμι. G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 5, p. 861). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.