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The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of: Carl Jung Versus an Apocalyptic Psychology

Christ has changed up language and signs and the very ground of meaning, exposing a symbolism and language focused on absence and the grave, emptying religion focused on worship of the dead (ancestor worship), manipulation of death through sacrifice (pagan, Jewish, and Christian religion, focused on propitiation), or a Heraclitean and Heideggerian presumption of violence (the Greek logos) as origin, exposing the emptiness of the grave and defeating death as the reigning category and joining himself to a new order of language and meaning, binding together the sign and signified in himself. The Logos of Christ exposes the emptiness of human language, human symbol making, and human religion, as its own ground, and sets forth an alternative foundation and alternative sign system. The place this shift is realized is in the mind, the psyche, the conscious and unconscious self. Psychic conversion, a transformation of the mind, putting on the mind of Christ, means that the human conscious and unconscious, like human language and human symbol making (idolatry), are reordered or even recreated. The mental equivalent of the exposure of religion and language grounded in death, or a life revolving around absence, the grave, the abyss, is the exposure of the unconscious as a ground of meaning or a controlling factor in consciousness. Where pagan religion, in necromancy, calling upon the dead, consulting mediums, presumes upon absence and death as primary, so too the presumption that the conscious arises from the unconscious, gives primacy to absence. It is on the order of presuming death and violence are the origin of life. Absence is put in control of presence, death is made to reign over life, and the unconscious, the repressed, the forgotten, is given primacy over the mental life.

The New Testament pictures a reordering of the mind, which still pictures key roles for the conscious and unconscious mind, but both are given a very different role as they are filled with the Trinitarian presence, focused not on a natural and given ordering of the mind, but the mind made new. Theological systems can be divided as to whether they build upon the given order, natural theology, common sense, philosophical insight, or upon an apocalyptic reordering, and this applies as well to the theological intersection with psychology. Typically, theologies which presume the given order is adequate also presume something on the order proposed by Carl Jung, that the symbols and signs of pagan religion or evolutionary development, contain an inherent truth and reality. It is on the order of presuming the logos of man is on a continuum with the Logos of God, and that the hidden roots and meanings of human symbols contain the key to healthy consciousness. To over simplify, the issue is whether the unconscious contains a depth of reality (a resource for depth psychology) or is a part of a deceived construct, which needs to be exposed and transformed.

Jungian Psychology Versus an Apocalyptic Transformation of the Mind

 The decisive divide in this theological moment is between apocalyptic theology and a vast assortment of others, including Robert Doran, Jonathan Pageau, John Milbank, and those Christians identifying along with Jordan Peterson with a Jungian understanding of the unconscious. For the Jungians the unconscious is a resource of archetypical symbols and reality that must be brought to consciousness to gain harmony with the conscious mind. While apocalyptic theology may not seem to align with any particular psychology, it fits, in part, the description of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, which would dismiss Jung’s psychology as pure idealism, and pictures the unconscious following the lead of Paul as consisting of a refusal of the truth (sin is the lie structuring the dynamics of personhood) and salvation is the reconstitution of the human Subject. As Paul puts it, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Paul exceeds Lacan and Žižek, providing for a fulsome role for the unconscious, in prayer, in relying on the Spirit, in communion with God, but also in suspending the permanent role they give to death (in the real and death drive), but prior to this possibility, the focus on death, alienation, the law or symbolic, points to the need for an apocalyptic remaking of the mind.  

Jung and Lacan and Žižek, are all building on Freud, who began to explore the unconscious and dreams, but they arrive at opposite conclusions. Jung is continuing with Freud’s notion that biology is primary, but Freud revised this assumption in his turn to death drive and a sociology of interior relations, which Lacan and Žižek will locate in language rather than biology. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, but this language is grounded in a fundamental fantasy or a grounding lie. The stuff of this lie is the same substance which Jung takes as a deep instinctual reality. For Žižek Jung’s archetypes are a perfect example of a fundamental fantasy, as in Lacanian terms, a fantasy is not a dream world we escape into; it is the framework that structures how we perceive reality so that we can ignore a traumatic, chaotic lack. For Žižek, Jungian archetypes are an “ideological mystification”—a narrative cushion designed to hide the fact that human experience is inherently broken, structured as it is on the divide in the linguistic and symbolic order.[1]

Jung and His Theological Disciples

For Jung, the unconscious is not merely made up of repressed personal memories, but is structured by archetypes—primordial blueprints, motifs, and instincts common across all human history. Jung presumes that dreams are to be mined for a truth not available to the conscious mind: “One cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a breath of nature—a spirit of the beautiful and generous as well as of the cruel goddess. If we want to characterize this spirit, we shall certainly get closer to it in the sphere of ancient mythologies, or the fables of the primeval forest, than in the consciousness of modern man.”[2] Dreams touch upon archetypical realities and trues which must be mined and understood to bring the conscious and unconscious into harmony. Jung pictures dreams as tapping into a world of spirit, which may not always be benevolent, but it must be heeded as they tap into the reality of the instincts: “For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or ‘dissociated,’ psychological disturbance follows. In this respect, dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.”[3]

Perhaps the most academically prominent theologian to utilize Jungian psychology is Robert Doran, who deploys Jung to complete his picture of the project of Bernard Lonergan: “what Lonergan would regard as the fourth level of intentional consciousness, becomes an exigence for psychic self-appropriation, calling for the release of what C. G. Jung calls the transcendent function, the mediation of psyche with intentionality in an intrasubjective collaboration heading toward individuation.”[4] Doran is using Jungian structures and language throughout, such as “self-appropriation” and “individuation,” so as to describe psychic health. He pictures his work as filling out Lonergan’s conversions with a fourth conversion, beyond the religious, moral, and intellectual conversions specified by Lonergan. “I call it psychic conversion. It aids the sublation of intellectually self-appropriating consciousness by moral and religious subjectivity, and thus is an intrinsic dimension of the foundational reality whose objectification constitutes the foundations of theology.”[5] As he succinctly states: “At a given stage in the self-appropriation of intentional consciousness, the intention of value or of the human good must come to participate in an ongoing conspiracy with the psychosymbolic dimensions of human subjectivity. The attempt to objectify this conspiracy will result in a position complementary and compensatory to that of Lonergan and compensatory to that of Jung.”[6]

There is a presumption of a naturally given knowledge and insight, flowing from Lonergan to Jung, such that “dream interpretation” reveals what Jung calls “active imagination” which plays its role along with “waking consciousness” in “the totality of subjectivity.”[7] Doran uses Jungian depth psychology to bridge the gap between human intentionality (the drive to understand, judge, and act) and the non-intentional layers of the psyche (emotions, images, and archetypes). Symbols and archetypes within human consciousness are inherently reliable structural conduits for the divine, though potentially distorted by individual or group bias, they are healed through psychological integration. The question is if human archetypes are neutral blueprints to be integrated or are they, as in a Girardian understanding, remnants of historical violence and scapegoating. Rather than being integrated, don’t they need to be exposed, apocalyptically destabilized, and reconstituted by the Word of the cross?

Jordan Peterson describes his self-discovery in conjunction with his first encounter with Jung and his concern to come to understand his dreams and nightmares. “I knew, vaguely, that Jung had developed specialized knowledge of myth and religion, so I started through his writings.”[8] It is here he hits upon Jung’s archetypes: “It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.”[9] This was precisely Peterson’s problem. This led him to explore religious phenomenology.

In Peterson’s understanding, the Bible offers viable moral guidance because it distils a large human sample over a long span of time represented in Jung’s archetypes. In Marc Champagne’s description, Peterson blends the ideas of Jean Piaget and Jung to elucidate interplay between personal psychology and collective archetypes aiming to unearth reliable interpretative patterns that range over all conceivable cases, thereby providing a meta-solution to whatever problem(s) humans might encounter. Thus, “The archetypes of Carl Jung help Peterson classify the various narrative patterns that govern our fundamental understanding of ourselves and the world.”[10] The content of faith, captured in religious narratives “selected by evolutionary pressures” must be a mode of becoming informed.[11]”Jung “believed that the mind was not a blank slate but prepared before birth to cognitively and emotionally guide the individual in dealing with certain life situations that are pan-human” and Peterson takes this and adapts it.[12] For Peterson the personal and personhood are subsequent to language, symbols, and culture and one orients themself according to these givens. He does not hesitate to include the Bible and Christianity as supports of his view that truth evolves through human interaction, hierarchy, and organization. Moses did not receive the ten commandments from above, but inductively arrived at them from below and Christ is not the Truth but he “embodies the ideal of ‘speaking the truth.’”[13]

As Champagne summarizes, “In his writings and lectures, Peterson presents an ambitious re-reading of the Bible that locates this text in humanity’s evolutionary history, as it were. On his telling, the Biblical stories are a collectively authored attempt to depict the ideal person.”[14] Peterson gives primacy to both the inductive method, and the laws at which the method arrives. Christ’s claim to be the son of God is itself aimed at displacing divine authority with inductive generalization. Every son can perform the inductive trick. Peterson has no room for revelation (whether in Christ or otherwise) rather, “different folks observed the conduct of many moral persons, abstracted out the common denominator in their actions, and then reified the resultant abstraction in a narrative format.”[15]

The question is if a faith that can celebrate our “Common Stories, the participation in our common rituals” and which looks to the hierarchy of culture, politics, or as Peterson puts it, the unified attention which has evolved through time through myths, stories, and the development of social order as the truth, can be equated with the Truth of Christ.[16]

An Apocalyptic Psychology

Is Jung’s or Žižek’s picture of the unconscious correct? There may be no way to empirically decide, but the biblical picture, while more complicated than either would allow, fits the initial picture provided by Lacan and Žižek (even in their estimate). They both point to Paul’s picture of the human psyche as the ground of their theory. The Bible with Lacan and Žižek, pictures the unconscious, not as filled with archetypical symbols, but with a deceived orientation, which by definition defines the function of the unconscious. The Subject is ultimately a repressed/unconscious Subject deceived primarily about the Self (the fundamental fantasy) as his own basic dispositional frame is one that obscures the “place” from which he sees.

This obstacle within the Subject, which Žižek finds in Paul’s description of sin in Romans 7:7ff but which his theory as a whole illustrates, is the necessary kernel of the “real” around which the Subject is constituted. It is in and through fantasy or deception (the stuff of the real) that the Subject arises, and this largely accounts for Žižek’s dialogue with theology.[17] This is not to affirm all of Lacanian psychology (with which Žižek identifies) or to suggest there are curative powers in this form of therapy, but his theory aids in showing that salvation (as pictured in Romans 6-8) reconstitutes the Subject in such a way that being “in Christ” overcomes the deception and alienation inherent in, and necessary to, the Lacanian registers.

Even in Žižek’s account of Christianity there is an overcoming of the perverse relation to the law, or an overcoming of metaphysics, as Christ’s death suspends the punishing effects of the symbolic order and institutes the religion of love. As Žižek puts it, “In Lacanian terms, we are dealing with the suspension of the big Other, which guarantees the subject’s access to reality: in the experience of the death of God, we stumble upon the fact that “the big Other doesn’t exist”’ (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42). For Žižek the Jungian categories are not a hidden reality undergirding conscious reality, they are a deception posited with the fiction of the perverse Superego (the big Other). For Jung and his followers, the order of reality is captured in symbols, signs, or the law, and the best one can do is read the symbols, follow the signposts of the law, while for Paul one is freed from the punishing constraints of the law. Christ suspends this circular logic in which the Subject is attempting to ground himself and exposes the fantasy of this supposed substantial ground – a ground that exacts the payment of a living death” (Did somebody Say Totalitarianism, 49-50).

Beyond Jung and Žižek to Paul

The Jungian notion is something on the order of investing more heavily in what Žižek, building upon Paul, considers a fantasy or a lie. Baptism into Christ displaces the primordial deception (connected with the lure of desire and the Law – death) with the ontological reality of the death and resurrection of Christ, but this complete putting away of the lie exceeds the possibilities of Žižek’s focus on the reality of death and death drive. Baptism is an ontological alternative to the “body of death” as there is a joining to his body as a new Subject. The “Subject” of death has joined herself to death while the Subject of Christ has been joined to the ontological reality of God in Christ. The psychological realization builds on this ontological ground it presumes: “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing” (Rom. 6.6). The voiding or suspension (“brought to nothing”) that takes place in v. 6 (katargέw) and which is repeated in 7:2 and 6 speaks of a transferal from one sort of Subject to another. In this, Paul exceeds Žižek, in that he pictures the suspension of death (the death drive) which is not a possibility in the Lacanian system. But this points to the apocalyptic realization of a new person, a new cosmic order, realized in Christ.

Paul’s redemption is passage from a mind out of control to one in which the Trinity is the ordering reality, up to and including a harmonious continuum between the conscious and unconscious. No longer is there the disjointed alienation, but a depth of communion within oneself characteristic of the Trinity. The unconscious structured like a language in Lacan contains only a deception or an empty word, but for Paul the Christian unconscious is not constituted through repression or deception but through a depth of communion. Where chapter 7 of Romans and Žižek picture the dialectic of human interiority as an antagonistic failure to communicate, in chapter 8 Paul depicts the unconscious workings of the Christian heart and mind as an open prayer in which “He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (8.27).

The tacit knowledge structuring the restoration of the mind, participates in a prayerful dialectic within the Trinity as “we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us” (8.26). Just as Jesus prayer in Gethsemane is the means by which he faces the suffering of the cross and remains true to his vocation, so too the believer obediently endures suffering by entry into this inter-Trinitarian communication between the Spirit and the Father. “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness” (8.26) as incapacity (ἀsqέneia) is the precise point at which the capacity of the Spirit intercedes. This is not a reliance upon naturally given signs and symbols but upon the presence of God.

[1] See the video https://www.reddit.com/r/zizek/comments/ha9ych/why_zizek_rejects_jung/

[2] Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols (London: Aldus Books, 1964), 52.

[3] Jung, 52.

[4] Robert Doran, Psychic Conversion (https://www.lonerganresource.com/media/pdf/books/14/119_D0207_Psychic_Conversion_(offprint).pdf) 201.

[5] Doran, 201.

[6] Doran, 202.

[7] Doran, 205.

[8] Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning : The Architecture of Belief (Routledge, 1999) 12.

[9] 13

[10] Champagne, Marc. Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson (Societas Book 69) . Societas. Kindle Edition.

[11] Peterson, 92.

[12] Champagne, Location 647.

[13] Champagne, 92.

[14] Champagne, 92.

[15] Champagne, 100.

[16] Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson, “Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven” (ARC Research, October 2023) 21. (Hereafter, “Identity”).

[17] Axton, 10.

The Unifying and Dividing Power of Language

The Word of God is the ground and shaping force of all things, the cosmic and the personal, the material and the spiritual, and even the perverse or misshapen opposed to the Word by an inadequate human word. The Christian faith revolves around language, from creation, with God speaking the universe into existence, to the identity of Christ as Logos, in which language is attached to God and Christ, and those created in his image, as person.  Then there is the subversion of original communion and communication in the “knowledge of good and evil,” and the confusion of languages at Babel, in which the individual is split and the community is divided (by language). This failure of the personal and the communal is reversed with the word of Christ (the gospel), the preaching of the gospel, the reversal of Babel at Pentecost, or simply the form in which faith comes, through Scripture and tradition. Language is primary, whether God’s word through creation and redemption, or human language as either a possible counter-force or a taking up of the Word. The medium of creation, fall, and redemption is linguistic, each gauged by the measure and practice of the Word.

The Language of God as Ground

The story of Scripture (both, “story” and “Scripture” being terms of language) can be told as ultimate reality opened through language. In Genesis (1:3, 6, 9) “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” He brings the physical universe into existence directly through His spoken command. “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth… For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm” (Psalm 33:6, 9). God compares His spoken word to rain and snow that do not return empty, stating that His word “shall accomplish that which I purpose” (Isaiah 55:10–11). It is his means of creation but an exercise of divine will, of accomplishment in creation. “The word of the Lord was rare in those days… Then the Lord called Samuel, and he answered, ‘Here I am'” (1 Samuel 3:1, 4). The encounter with “I am” brings the realization of “Here am I.” Personal encounter with the personal word is the realization of the personal. God speaking is the story of history and its culmination: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14). God’s ultimate self-revelation (Logos) takes on human language and physical form, so that the word become flesh has the one who created by his word becoming part of what is created. One word meets the other in Christ.

There are numerous subcategories which revolve around and refer to language, such as signs. These signs might be miraculous or not, but they are signals that are only apprehended in contrast or continuity within a system of meaning. The overall system of meaning, in which the symbols and signs of Israel are comprehended, for example, is the law, the judicial, and the sacrificial. The signs Christ is instituting partake of a different system of meaning, grounded in the relation of love, incarnation, and the interpersonal dynamics of the Trinity. Even categories such as silence, mystery, and the apophatic, are recognized in conjunction with language, but the order which they are surpassing (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christian mysticism) is determinative of meaning and significance. So, for example, in Paul’s picture of prayer in Romans 8, human language may fail, but the searching and groanings of the Spirit take up from there, but this is not an Eastern departure from the mind but on a continuum with the divine and human mind (Rom 8:27).

The Splitting of the Divine Ground

The negative role of language in Scripture pictures language as splitting, separating, or alienating. Where there was an original singular identity, language, and meaning (a corporate identity), the choosing of an alternative source in the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis, or the law in Romans, brings about the alienation of shame and focus on the I: “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself” (Gen 3:10). ‘I’ does not appear previously, and Adam repeats it in four consecutive bursts. Paul, in describing the universality of the event in Adam, describes a split within the ‘I’, with one half of the ἐγὼ pitted against the other in a struggle in which human agency is entirely relinquished to sin: “So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me” (Rom. 7.17).

The most famous place in Scripture where language splits and separates is the Tower of Babel (in Genesis 11:1–9). Originally, “the whole earth had one language and the same words” but humanity attempted to build a city and a tower reaching to the heavens to make a name for themselves and avoid being scattered, but God confused their language so they could not understand one another, forcing them to separate and scatter across the earth. As Kenneth Tanner notes, “Babel’s imposed diversity of language was a gift that limited for millennia the damage of fallen humanity’s collective narcissism and our self- destructive tendencies.”[1] The antagonism that Paul describes within himself and Adam, becomes a mode of creating human diversity. “Babel’s gift of language diversity was also an expansion of humanity’s cultural possibilities. All the difference in dance and dress and food and color and architecture and sport and art and so on— the beautiful variety of humanity we enjoy— flows from an ancient, gracious dispersal of humanity at Babel.”[2] Alongside this positive disruption, multiplied tongues, however, become a dividing point. Language and its pronunciation in the “shibboleth” by which the Gileadites set up blockades along the Jordan River to catch fleeing Ephraimites (Judges 12:4–6), leading to the execution of 42,000 Ephraimites.

Violence and difference due to language must be the oldest (dis)organizing principle in human culture. Nehemiah started a language reform, as “In those days I also saw that the Jews had married women from Ashdod, Ammon and Moab. As for their children, half spoke in the language of Ashdod, and none of them was able to speak the language of Judah, but the language of his own people” (Ne 13:23–24). Language was and is a primary marker of identity and division. Think of Peter caught in a lie in the High Priest’s courtyard due to his accent: “‘Surely you too are one of them; for even the way you talk gives you away.’ Then he began to curse and swear, ‘I do not know the man!’ And immediately a rooster crowed” (Mt 26:73–74). Language can unify in a singular identity, or it can betray and divide.

Thus, there are two roles for language or the word, and while not always opposite, there is a dynamic difference between the two. Recognizing language as primary, might lead to any number of false conclusions, pitting the material against the linguistic, or imagining language floats free of and is not dependent upon embodiment. Creation as spoken, or creation through the Logos, points to recent scientific verification that both DNA and the sub-atomic world, grounding the embodied and cosmic order respectively, are not primarily some sort of hard substance but information systems. Likewise, the human brain is not primarily a chemical cauldron, synapses and nerves, but shaped by language and its processes. The unifying and dividing qualities of language are to be seen throughout.

The Brain or Mind that Needs Transformation

Some researchers claim that the different psychologies, divided or unified, are reflected in the physical brain and its processing of language. This is illustrated in the work of brain researchers such as Ian McGilchrist, who describes the brain as organizing and organized into two hemispheres, or two modes of regulating information (see here). The “master” is supposed to be the brain’s right hemisphere, which is the side most connected with the holism of personhood, as it relates vitally, and humanly to the world, taking in what is “new” without concern for objective closure. The left hemisphere is focused on detail and analysis, and rather than connecting to living things, tends to focus on the static and lifeless, on machines, numbers, and abstractions, and while both sides of the brain are involved in language, the left brain tends to reify the word. Rather than recognizing the metaphorical, emotional, and integrating role of language (connected to the right hemisphere), in the left hemisphere there is rejection of the metaphorical for the literal, and a rejection of the personal for the impersonal. The left brain is the organizing bureaucrat which is all about procedure, organization, predictability, abstraction (decontextualization), and which has no room for uniqueness. Justice, in this realm, is not a sense of making things right so much as making everything equal. In this realm, “Increasingly the living would be modelled on the mechanical.”[3] Production, speed, scale, and quantity are the focus, and not quality. Those “with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology, and administration” which have become the shaping forces of our time.”[4] One might extend McGilchrist’s theory to suggest a left-brain theology and atonement as well, in which Christ is made to serve the law and his death makes up for any lack or failure in regard to the law, with the law defining and determining Christ, or one might propose a right-brain theology (in line with Paul) in which Christ does not complete human obligations in regard to the law, but suspends the punishing effects of a defective orientation to the law.

Before McGilchrist, Julian Jaynes pictured human evolution as the passage from bicameral brains, with divided brain hemispheres, to the melding of the two hemispheres (see here). In the bicameral period, it was as if the left side of the brain existed as an unquestioned authority through which the various cultural authorities spoke. The burial of the important dead, as if they still lived and spoke, is common to almost all ancient cultures. The Egyptian pharaohs, preserved in their pyramids, the kings of Ur entombed with their entire retinues buried (sometimes alive) for continued service, along with food and drink and even yoked draft animals, point to a static (unquestioning) entombed culture.[5] The undead, and the authority they represented, continued to speak through hallucinated voices or through the gods (often the dead are simply deified). In Assyria, Mesoamerica, and Japan, the dead are directly called gods and the various mystics or priests might be possessed by the dead so as to give them voice. Hesiod speaks of a golden race of men who became the “holy demons upon the earth, beneficent, averters of ills, guardians of mortal men.” Four centuries later, Plato refers to heroes who after death become the demons that tell people what to do and he has Socrates mention that in his own time “God-possessed men speak much truth, but know nothing of what they say.”[6] Socrates marks the point before which the human condition is to listen and obey but not to question or discern.

Jaynes is tracing a time when, in the bicameral period with its bicameral brain, everyone heard the voice of authority, but as the brain shifted only the possessed, idols, oracles, or mediums give voice to the gods. Cuneiform literature often refers to god-statues speaking, and the Old Testament refers to speaking idols (Terap) and depicts the king of Babylon consulting with several idols (Ezekiel, 21). Aztec history began, according to their reports to Spanish conquistadors (following their own perverse God), when a statue from a ruined temple belonging to a previous culture spoke to their leaders and commanded them to set out across the lake so as to come to a new land. They were sent zigzagging here and there, following their own Moses, into a new land. In Peru the conquering Spaniards presumed the voice ordering the culture was the Devil. The first report back to Europe said, “in the temple [of Pachacamac] was a Devil who used to speak to the Indians in a very dark room which was as dirty as he himself.”[7] It did not occur to the Spaniards to question their own genocidal authority. Jaynes’ theory suggests a metaphor more on the order of evolution or growth, in which the shaping force of left-brain law is only slowly overcome.

Even if we take McGilchrist and Jaynes as an exemplification of the psychological reality with which we are familiar, at a minimum they provide a picture of the possible why. We could use any number of illustrations or applications. We might illustrate this left brain, rule bound, reified language model as standing behind the Western theological tradition, from Augustine to Calvin. The Augustinian misreading of Romans 5 (“all sinned in Adam”) as it develops into Anselmian divine Satisfaction and Calvinist penal substitution, illustrate a singular point, and that is that law and language, are caught up in a turn from a relational understanding of reality to its opposite. This opposite might be described as reified language or law, but it is object-centered (deceptively material centered, in that language is a material medium apart from relationship), but it is also dealing in death as an absolute (perhaps a hidden absolute). Calvin’s transformation of hades into eternal torturous existence, illustrates the point that there is an eternalization of what is finite, created, and material. Rather than Christ delivering from mortality and death, Calvin has him delivering from eternal categories connected to the law. There is the absolutization of law, setting relationship on law, which is the same as the reification of language. The focus on sin, prior to death or as the cause of death, illustrates the same thing, language, law, determines the ground of being. In other words, we might live our entire lives, experience all of reality, and understand even all of our Christian faith, from the split, law bound, reification of language, in its dividing role, rather than its uniting role in the Logos.

The Uniting of All Things, Including the Mind, in the Word

The coming of the Logos is the reuniting on the basis of a shared person and Word. It is the reversal of Babel indicated in the sign at Pentecost with the gift of the Holy Spirit. “And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance” (Acts 2:3–4). As A.W. Tozer describes, “That which came upon the disciples in that upper room was nothing less than God him-self. . . . The God who had appeared to them as fire throughout all their long history was now dwelling in them as fire. He had moved from without to the interior of their lives. The Shekinah that had once blazed over the mercy seat now blazed on their foreheads as an external emblem of the fire that had invaded their natures.”[8] The Spirit brought them a new and vivid consciousness, the actual presence of God, in and through the new tongues, the shared language. There is a healing, unifying presence in the shared person of the Word, which is not language per se but is a new order, or ordering, of language.

I presume the transformation of the mind, taking up the Word, meditating upon these things day and night, is something on the order of a reshaping of our brain, a reordering of our thought world, so that the chatter of the divided, antagonistic, jealousy invoking, disease ridden, neurotic thought, is quieted as the unifying, binding, loving, relationship-oriented world of the Spirit, brings about a new order of thought. A brain-divided, alienated, hostile order, must slowly give way to a new order, no longer tossed about like a wave but made sure and steadfast in love. We can pray with Jesus, “that they (we) may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me” (Jn 17:21).

There may be a dividing word, but the true ground of reality is united: “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). There is ultimately One Word. This is the Word and reality drawing all things together. As Paul admonishes the Colossians, “Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Col 3:16). This is the perfect bond of unity in love (Col 3:14). Sing this Word, meditate on this Word, dwell in this Word, and let this Word saturate throughout, as this is the unifying ground of all that is. The brain, the mind, the person, is literally reshaped by the power of this Word grounding reality.

[1] Kenneth Tanner, Vulnerable God: How Jesus Upends Our Assumptions About God – and Shows Us How to Be Human (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2026), 202.

[2] Tanner, 202.

[3] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 430.

[4] McGilchrist, 408.

[5] Even the ordinary dead were often treated as if they still needed feeding.  In Mesopotamia it is recorded a dead person was buried with 7 jars of beer, 420 flat loaves of bread, 2 measures of grain, 1 garment, 1 head support, and 1 bed.  

[6] Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (p. 161-341). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

[7] Jaynes, 174-175.

[8] A. W. Tozer, God’s Pursuit of Man (Moody Publishers, 2015), 105. Cited in Tanner, 201.

Join Being and the Between

Guest Blog by Ethan Vanderleek

“Metaphysics” is, in some ways, an unfortunate word. It sounds variously grand, technical, abstract, or even boring. It might bring to mind dry, technical debates in philosophy. It includes the word “physics;” anyone who struggled with math or science in high school might think “physics was hard enough; how could I possibly find metaphysics inspiring or exciting”? And religious people might think that metaphysics has little or nothing to do with their lived experience and practice of faith. “I want to follow Jesus and be part of the Church,” a Christian might say, “not waste time on speculation and abstractions.”

But the word also carries within it some excitement: the meta inspires anticipation and urgency. The human mind is catapulted beyond itself, beyond the immediate immanence of things and experiences, and towards the purpose, meaning, structure, and end of everything. This is not an irrelevant line of questioning for the religious person, especially the Christian. If the entirety of my existence, as a Christian, is to be offered to God, then the entirety of my existence is worthy of inquiry. What are the things around me? How do things relate to each other? Who am I and how do I relate to the world? How does the world relate to me? What is the source and meaning of all things? Metaphysics allows us to ask the “big questions.” We are not just creatures who passively accept experiences and things around us. We reach out to the world, act in it, ask questions, and articulate what we understand, however provisionally.

This is why it is relevant and exciting to read one of the great philosophers of our time, William Desmond, and his powerful book in metaphysics, Being and the Between. This book is not trapped in academia. It is a deep, poetic, rigorous, and challenging exploration in metaphysics, in the meaning and structure of being itself. Metaphysics asks the question of being: what is being? What does it mean to be? This, for Desmond, is not to reduce existence to the human mind. For him, metaphysics is a philosophical articulation of being that is responsive and open. Metaphysics is not out to fit everything into convenient, practical categories, rendering everything useful and practical, passive to human manipulation. Metaphysics, for Desmond, is an effort to be responsive to what is there prior to the human mind and its knowing and articulating activity.

Far from being dry or strictly academic, metaphysics is rooted in wonder and astonishment. Before we start thinking about things and attempting to understand them, we receive them. We start thinking because we are not primary or self-sufficient. We are addressed by being—things, experiences, situations, others, even ourselves—and invited to respond. “There is a suffering, an undergoing,” writes Desmond; “there is a patience of being; there is a receiving that is not the production of the metaphysician or mind” (Being and the Between, 8). Thinking, articulating, speaking, acting—these are not initiated by themselves, by the philosopher, or the self-contained human being, but by being in its otherness, strangeness, and attractiveness.

Metaphysics, in this sense, is exciting and invigorating. It invites us on an adventure into the beautiful, challenging, and invigorating unknown. The world and the things we encounter are not simply there: they speak, they call, they invite, they expand the human person engaged in them. Metaphysics, with Desmond, encourages us to receive the world in its fullness, complexity, depth, and even infinity. For metaphysics is never done, closed, completed. There is always a new opportunity to speak of being because being itself is always speaking to us again, calling us again. The question of being “is old beyond age, newer than the most novel thought” (Being and the Between, 3). As we dwell in the world, wake up to it, we are called by the world to go beyond the world. Meta-physics has to do, Desmond says, with a double sense of meta: “The question of transcendence has nothing to do with a leap out of being into the void, but with the deepest mindfulness of what is emergent in the middle itself. The double meaning if meta is relevant. ‘Meta’ is being in the midst; ‘meta’ is also reference to what is beyond, what is transcendent” (Being and the Between, 44). Metaphysics invites a kind of double vision, seeing things in themselves for what they are and simultaneously seeing them in their transcendent source and foundation, what religions have often called “God.”

I am teaching a 7-week online course with Forging Ploughshares on Being and the Between on Saturday mornings, starting on Oct. 31, meeting for 1.5 hours on Saturday mornings (exact time TBD), through to Dec. 12. It is a challenging read, yet also poetic, beautiful, and even simple, in the most profound sense (not simplistic). We will consider the text carefully on its own terms and raise questions of its relevance for contemporary life and society and Christian faith, thought, and practice. Following our seven-week exploration, William Desmond himself will meet with us to discuss our thoughts and questions about the book. Please considering joining us: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/schedule. You can contact Ethan
(ethanvdl@gmail.com) or Paul (paulv.axton@gmail.com) if you have questions or if financial matters prohibit participation.

Anthony Bartlett’s Love’s Entanglement: God as Nonviolent Relation and How That Brings the World to Peace

We need Anthony Bartlett’s delineation between the clear, apocalyptic, anti-sacrificial, early Girard, and the compromised, muddled, and somewhat defeated later Girard, now more than ever.[1] Tony gently calls us to return to the true vision of Girard, in the midst of this cultural and political moment in which flaky Girardians, such as Peter Thiel and JD Vance rule. It is nearly impossible to initially distinguish between two groups: those Girardians who, like Thiel, would “turn to a new kind of Constantinian order where Christianity accepts the expedient role of force” and those who like the Girard of Things Hidden, who writes, “(The) sacrificial concept of divinity must ‘die’ and with it the whole apparatus of historical Christianity, for the Gospels to be able to rise again in our midst, not looking like a corpse that we have exhumed, but revealed as the newest, finest, liveliest and truest thing that we have set our eyes on.”[2] Girard initially saw no possibility of accommodating his theory to the institutional Church or the “apparatus of historical Christianity,” but then he compromised. Bartlett compares him to Galileo, making his initial discovery, and then under pressure from the Church, or friends such as Raymund Schwager, he backs down. Maybe the earth and its history of violence are true center (he seems to be saying in Battling to the End). Maybe his discovery in the Bible and Christ of a primary “transcendental relation of nonviolence” is inadequate in the face of “reality.”

Girard backs down in his opposition to the term “sacrifice” in conjunction with the death of Jesus. Schwager referred to Jesus’s death as “scapegoat” and “sacrifice” which had aroused his “unease” but he decides Schwager must be right, and he wants to be accepted by the Church.[3] He had wanted to “draw a definitive line between the death of Jesus and the deaths of the gods, since the former was viewed by ethnologists and cultural commentators as the ‘same-old’ mythical story.”[4] Schwager convinced him to drop his opposition to the language of sacrifice, and with this he compromised his original notion of a “symbolically manifest difference, something as visible and tangible as possible.”[5] Bartlett explains that accompanying this shift then was a compromise to what was key in his theory: “This is important as it seems to manifest the intention in Girard of expressing a critical semiotic shift from sacralized Christianity to the new meaning of the Gospels: he talks of a symbolically manifest difference.”[6] His theory had focused on the manifest difference of revelation breaking into human violence in Jesus Christ and making a clear distinction between a violent God and a nonviolent God. There was an absolute and apocalyptic difference, and no notion of some neutral ground with an admixture of violence and nonviolence. “Surely the deep tilt of Girard’s argument was a revelation coming from outside of humanity, and this does have a manifest difference for which it is correct to seek a proper symbolic or semiotic status. Girard’s instincts were by no means wrong.”[7]

“The gospel has its authentic character as a message, an angelion, which stands urgently for itself with its own highly distinctive semiotic status. Early Christianity expressed this dramatic difference by calling the crucified-and-risen Jesus ‘Lord and God.’”[8] Bartlett dubs this unique relation to God revealed in Christ “the transcendental relation of nonviolence.” This is the absolutely unique transformation, which cannot be laid out on some sort of historical or philosophical continuum. Bartlett recognizes that theology has continually compromised philosophically and historically, by imagining the divine revelation on a continuum with natural revelation, but this is always a compromise with violence. The semiotic shift of Christ is a different order of meaning. It “should be announced as an absolute difference reconstituting human meaning. Anything less is to forfeit the remarkable evangelical breakthrough Girard has himself brought about.”[9]

Girard abandons his clear understanding of Christianity’s uniqueness; there is “archaic sacrifice and Christian sacrifice. However it is all sacrifice.”[10] Mimetic desire and rivalry, he concludes are the case for all humans and there is no escape. “I repeat, absolute knowledge is not possible. We are forced to remain at the heart of history and to act at the heart of violence because we are always gaining a better understanding of its mechanisms. Will we be able to elude them? I doubt it.”[11] He had once understood “it is Christ who finalizes . . . the definitive revelation of a nonviolent god.”[12] Yet, in conversation Bartlett asked Girard if God is nonviolent, he answered, “I don’t know.” In his early work Girard sets forth the priority of Christ over subsequent violence.  “’Christ was the last messenger who came first.’ “It is a remarkable announcement of his full biblical thesis, presented with unquenchable brio and clarity, with the theme of revelation running like white-hot lava through its lines.”[13] By the writing of Battling to the End, however,Girard abandoned his belief in the priority of the nonviolence of Christ. “There Jesus is a last figure at the very end of history whose first meaning has been swallowed up in mimesis and violence.”[14] Girard begins to darkly presume apocalypse means a violent end to all things, and no longer refers to Christ’s apocalyptic breaking into history.

Girard once held that the biblical critique of violence was the basis for a sociological understanding, which arose from a place that was unassailable. He saw the gospel text as working unlike any other as it “breaks away from the rules of ordinary textuality.” As Bartlett notes, “These rules are obviously rooted in the relationality of generative violence.”[15] It is only in Christ, and reading in light of the gospel of Christ, that the violence of ordinary textuality is undone. Girard adds, “If this is the action of the text, the claims of Christianity to make Christ the universal revealer are much more well founded than its defenders themselves imagine, by which I mean those who always blend elements of ordinary sacralization into Christian apologetics. As a result they invariably regress to protocols of ordinary textuality . . .”[16] Bartlett adds, “Christ is the ‘universal revealer’ not ‘the universal scapegoat’ and it is this function that both breaks with past hermeneutics and appears weak before them if new relationality is not fully thematized.”[17]

Bartlett’s goal in the book is to demonstrate the necessity of thematizing, centering on, making primal, the role of relationship. He sees this as the original failure of Girard, and why his thinking was vulnerable to subsequent failures and shifts. Certainly, it is correct to desire “symbolically manifest difference,” as “it speaks to the sense of the new generative object-sign for human meaning.”[18] But if this new meaning is not grounded in relationship rather than abstraction it will collapse. Thus, Bartlett sees his work as providing a bulwark against this collapse, and he seeks to preserve the stark realization of early Girard, against his own collapse. “He held onto his manifest difference as long as he could, but in the end he let go of it, for lack of feedback and the intellectual shift of categories that would fully vindicate him. His thought was brought back within ‘ordinary sacralization’ because it had not found or expressed its crucial semiotic and relational framing.”[19]

Bartlett has extended and applied René Girard’s theory philosophically and theologically, providing a fresh reading of Scripture, founded, not on ontology or metaphysics but in relationship. Love as nonviolent relation, as in the subtitle of his book, is simultaneously an explanation of reality, and salvation as being brought into that reality. Undergirding Girardian theory is a linguistic and anthropological understanding, exposing relationship as primary. Bartlett does not repeat the Girardian picture of the initial scapegoating entry into language, but he provides Kierkegaard’s definition of self as “a relation that relates itself to itself . . . the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.”[20] This is not a relation to language, but it is a possibility within the self, posed by language. “God sets humanity in motion as relation, which then opts for all the wrong solutions within its synthesis until it comes to relation with God.”[21] Bartlett then turns to Martin Heidegger, (who plays the role of summing up the Western philosophical tradition and who fails in his attempt to escape metaphysics), Charles Peirce, Jacque Derrida, the Greek philosophical tradition, along with Girard and Scripture, and picks up where Girard left off. As he describes in the Introduction of his book, “This is a book about René Girard wrapped in a book about relation.”[22] Kierkegaard sets the tone of the book, in seeking to get to the bottom of relationship.

In particular he has in mind the relationship of love. “Once the gospel antithesis to violence is established then a project of semiotics rather than metaphysics becomes unavoidable.”[23] In Girard’s theory of hominization, humans enter into language over the cadaver of the scapegoat, which provides the focus so as to give birth to the sign. Difference, life and death, signaled by the cadaver of the scapegoat, acts as the primary focal point that transforms terrifying, chaotic violence into unified attention. The cadaver is the first sign because it is the first thing humans looked at collectively in peace, transforming a physical remainder of violence into the foundation of meaning, language, and the sacred. The manner in which we are all grounded in violence is the beginning point: “A theory of language that clearly recognizes violent origins is then able to open up, simultaneously and necessarily, to a radically alternative language, a message, a gospel, that overthrows those origins in explicit nonviolence.”[24] Part of the saving work of the gospel must be the exposure and overthrow of this inherent violence. To begin in metaphysics or philosophy or in some “natural understanding” involves a continuation in this violent inheritance, opposed to the gospel. In Kierkegaardian terms, this is to continue in the “sickness unto death,” which recognizes in the diagnosis of the disease the primacy of relation (ultimately resolved in Christ).

Of course, this insight is not lacking in Girard; the Logos of the Prologue to John, and the whole Bible must be re-read “in a genuinely Christological light, we must recognize the Word of truth to be the true knowledge of the victim, continually eluded and rejected by mankind.”[25] Genesis portrays God expelling the first couple from his presence, and then Cain slays Abel and establishes the first city, while “in the Prologue to John it is mankind who expels God.” The God who inflicts violence is replaced with “the God that only suffers violence, the Logos that is expelled.”[26] This Logos that has been cast out by his own and by the world, is the rejected truth (with the rejection signaling the nature of this truth). “Pascal writes somewhere that it is permissible to correct the Bible, but only in invoking the Bible’s help. That is exactly what we are doing when we re-read Genesis and the whole of the Old Testament, and the whole of culture, in the light of these few lines from the Prologue.”[27] The truth of the Bible is summed up in the new beginning proclaimed by John, in which all truth and meaning is “ready and waiting.” Bartlett observes, “with Girard there is a relation to a revelatory ‘other’ (God) hand-in-hand with the human other, but the dynamic is always disclosure. There is something coming from below, as it were, claiming the attention of human history.”[28]

Bartlett is building on his two previous books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard and Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence. In the former is Bartlett’s depiction of Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry and the discovery of the scapegoating mechanism, as a necessary step in evolutionary development of language. The sign that arises around the scapegoat initiates entry into language, constituting an originary violence in the human condition. In both Love’s Entanglement and Theology Beyond Metaphysics, Bartlett assigns great weight to Martin Heidegger’s turn from traditional metaphysics to the “firsthand experience of ‘being.’” He explains, that “Heidegger’s intervention is a serious relativizing of core concepts of metaphysics, demonstrating – from the alternative perspective of being – that they are not eternally ‘given’ apart from a history of their conceptual production.”[29] Heidegger undermined the presumed “foundation” of metaphysics, and Derrida would continue in his “deconstruction,” and Girard builds on both. The twentieth century shook the foundations of Western thought and civilization (with two world wars). As Bartlett puts it, “What greater proof could you have of original violence than Hiroshima and Nagasaki? In which case it is even more pressing to discover a source of life ‘in the ruins,’ rather than imagine some kind of return to pre-modern metaphysical order that smiled complacently as all this grew to monstrous term.”[30]

Heidegger is a symbol of the Twentieth Century shift, upon which Girard builds. He served to prepare the ground for Girard’s work, but it was Heidegger’s purposeful failure to distinguish the Greek logos from the Johannine Logos, and in conjunction with this a second failure, to recognize that relation precedes being. “You cannot have ‘being’ without difference – the relation – which provides the opening or realization of being.”[31] Heidegger assigns a singular, Heraclitean meaning to logos, presuming the Christian Logos is more of the same, but a degraded form of the Greek logos. It is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role to the Greek logos. What is to be noted in Heidegger, is that Greek “Logos brings together entities that are opposites, and it does not do so without violence.”[32] In Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition (the original development of the Greek logos).

The Christian understanding is relegated to a continuation of Greek thought. Girard considers the contrast between the Greek and Christian Logos as definitive. Christ “interrupts” the Greek logos, it interrupts the grounding in mythology (the scapegoated and deified victim), and it displaces the grounding in violence, but for this very reason the Logos of Christ is cast out of human culture and religion: “The Johannine Logos is foreign to any kind of violence; it is therefore forever expelled, an absent Logos that never has had any direct, determining influence over human cultures.”[33] The incapacity to discern and apply the peace of Christ, as shown in Heidegger and the Western tradition, is pervasive.

To not recognize the violent foundations of language and the possibility of an alternative, or the difference between a Greek and Christian starting point, is to presume an originary violence, and to the degree that theology has girded itself with a Greek philosophical understanding it has a necessary violence at its origins, a charge Bartlett levels at the Thomistic understanding of God (along with Anselm or any theology which would employ Greek philosophical thought). It is a failure to recognize the change in the role of signs, or the profound basis for a new meaning introduced by Christ. It is not simply that Christ gives new meaning, on the basis of the sign system of language in which in semiotics, it is recognized that meaning arises through differences (differences in terms, such as “black and white,” or differences in sounds, or the living and dead body, etc.). The role of difference, of the cadaver, becomes fully accessible in the body of Christ, a living sign exposing the role of the deadly letter written on the grave. The cadaver played the role of a false or mythological “transcendental signified” and the living transcendental signified expose this lie. Christ demythologizes the sign, emptying the grave of its grounding significance. Mythology is a homage to the victim, but in the same sense language, as a repeatable sign system, arises through the clash of difference and the arising of a third element (the reification of death). Christ’s entry into sign making starts with the recognition that death is the ordering principle of a universe of opposed pairs. “It is a matter of turning around with the universe itself and facing the terrible violence of our origins . . . to relate again as if for the first time to the victims at its core. We are called to relate in nonviolence and forgiveness where before we related in blame and murder – because it is in this way that root relationship is both acknowledged and made good.”[34] Ultimate meaning is not grounded in the dead victim but the living Christ who has emptied the grave of its deceptive meaning.

Much of Bartlett’s work is given over to demonstrating Christ’s change of the meaning of signs, or more accurately Jesus bringing about a foundational shift as to how signs are constituted. The sign of Jonah (the scapegoat thrown overboard), taken up by Jesus, undoes signs built upon sacrifice and death, as there “is a deliberate manipulation of familiar biblical DNA to produce a remarkably new mutation.”[35] The sailors, more than Jonah, are sensitive to spilling innocent blood, and rather than the usual release from guilt with the death of the sacrifice (Jonah tossed overboard) their fear is not assuaged: “Then the men feared the LORD greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows (Jonah 1:16) like true Israelites (Ex 14:31). The sailors and all of Nineveh are more quickly changed than Jonah, who shows no sign of repentance. Rather than satisfy the Pharisaical demand for a sign, he indicates the only sign he would give is the sign of Jonah, who was thrown into the abyss and was then delivered (which is what they will do to Jesus). The sea is representative of the abyss, the chaos, that the scapegoat was meant to tame. Jesus confronts and overcomes the abyss in his death and resurrection, defeating the very impetus behind scapegoating religion.

Though John does not mention the sign of Jonah, he closely echoes the story (in 6:16-21), the explanation of which closes Bartlett’s book. The sea, often equated with chaos (and as in Daniel, the gods of violence and chaos), is where Jesus reveals his divinity, tying the ἐγώ εἰμι to his power over nature in calming the storm and walking on the water (as if we now see YHWH trampling down the waves (Job 9:8 and Ps 89:10) and offering the comfort of his presence in the storm (Gen 26:24; 46:3; Jer 1:8; 1:17; 26:28). “So, it is the same battle, against the violence of the deep, gained victoriously by the peace-bringing word and presence of Jesus.”[36] In the portrayal of the synoptics, the disciples panic in the storm while Jesus sleeps, and they double down on their rowing before waking Jesus, to save them from “perishing.” Much like Jonah is vomited by the great fish, Jesus and the disciples arrive suddenly at the distant shore of the Gadarenes where he encounters a horde of demons and sends them (back?) into the sea (Mark 5:1–20) and the demoniac becomes an evangelist to the Decapolis. Jesus defies the expectations of the Jews and even his disciples by saving the wrong people, like Jonah.

Connected to the walking on the water is the feeding of the five thousand, a proleptic Eucharistic event: “The dramatic entirety of the scene has to be taken into account: the journey accompanying Jesus to ‘a deserted place,’ the weariness and hunger, the complete bafflement of the disciples, and, of course, the mirror hints of the Roman military legion. This is a scene of a new creation, where a new humanity is separated out from generative violence, and it is the significance itself of the whole complex that carries the scene.”[37] The echoes of the escape from Egypt, the Passover, the miraculous manna, the crossing the Red Sea, and the deliverance from slavery. “The bread is the meaning of a new human way of life, one to be consumed for its own sake once its revolutionary semiotics is grasped”[38] which is made explicit in the Passover meal celebrated by Jesus and the disciples.

Theology and not chronology are the main point. In each of the Gospels Jesus takes liberties which may make this meal something of a “quasi-Passover.”[39] The time may be incorrect or inconsistent between the Gospels, but more importantly the meaning is shifted. The point is no longer warding off death through the firstborn. Death is no longer the fulcrum, sacrifice is no longer the mechanism, but the defeat of both in a higher meaning (of relationship). The elements of the meal are made to bear a depth of meaning, fusing together both the Passover and the day of atonement, connecting both to the reality accomplished in Christ (a shared body, a shared life). The bread is part of the Passover meal, but is made representative of Jesus broken body (on the order of the servant of Isaiah), and the wine is representative of his poured-out blood. Jesus commands them to drink the wine, now representative of the blood, but consumption of blood is prohibited in the Temple rite and in Judaism in general. The instruction is clear: “He gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins’” (Matt 26:27–28). There is no mistaking that the symbol of poured-out blood is to be drunk, a sacrilege for Jews. “It was impossible that the blood be consumed, for the ‘life was in the blood’ and the life belonged to God alone.”[40] Which is the point; this is no longer a sacrifice. It is the pouring out and sharing of the life of God, not on the basis of death, but in its defeat in history. As Bartlett explains in the case of Mark, “The point for Mark surely is to not narrate a separate ‘spiritual’ body for Jesus on the other side of human life, but to place his triumph right in the middle of human reality and experience. This now is the ‘Kingdom of God come with power’ (9:1)!”[41]

Jesus is fusing the symbolism so as to make himself the center of what once was exclusive to Temple and Tabernacle (life will replace sacrifice and death). He is now the lamb sacrificed by our murder, and the disciples become the receptacles of his life, not simply life-blood spilled in death but taken up in new life. This is not a Jewish sacrifice, as in “the biblical tradition of sacrifice, it was imperative that the blood be separated from the body and spilt on the ground or at the altar” (Gen 9:4; Lev 17:10-14).[42] The Christians understand that there is a new meaning being worked out, which does not directly pertain to blood and sacrifice; even in the early Christian community the Jerusalem Council would continue to forbid consumption of blood (Acts 15:29). “By telling his disciples to drink a symbol of his blood Jesus was transgressing the central vector of sacrifice as it had been formulated in Jewish practice, and He was going against formal sacrificial practice generally. Indeed, he was turning sacrifice into something other than sacrifice!”[43] There is an “eruption of a completely new meaning in life, signified by the miraculous bread,” as the disciple is enabled by his Lord to also give his life, and not strike out in retaliation. The disciples were each to enter the jaws of death enabled by the body of Christ. “We know from Christian history that many individuals have done this, finding an abyss of strength within themselves to enter the jaws of violence without retaliation, and leaving behind an indelible witness in the same path and truth as Jesus himself.”[44]

Combined with his action in the Temple, in which he halted the sacrifices, Jesus has permanently overturned the Temple tables, so as to set another table with a completely different meaning and economy. God had always sought mercy rather than sacrifice: “For I desire steadfast love (or mercy) and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (Ho 6:6). Jesus sees himself as accomplishing this reality: “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt 9:13). This is not an economy of sacrifice or exchange but the fulfillment of mercy and love. Though only a minority of Christians may follow Jesus into a martyr’s death the meaning is there for the majority; “the meaning by which they shape their lives continues to eat away at the violent structures of actual historical humanity.”[45]

Blood per se is not violent but contains life, so spilling blood means a violent loss of life. “The blood contained absolutely no violence – on the contrary, it contained non-violence, which is positive forgiveness, peace, love. Only in that way would it be possible to drink and not feel the temple universe crashing down on you in outrage.”[46] To drink this blood is to take up the life of the one giving it, enfleshing the body, not through a continued destruction but through a recapitulated sort of body. To drink the blood, in this meaning, is to recover it from being spilled, as it is taken back into life. Jesus in recapitulating the Temple and its meaning focused on sacrifice, is removing the violence of sacrifice and replacing it with new life entailing the end of death (inclusive of violent sacrifice). “Thus, the ritual meaning of blood its elemental sign value – had been turned from the place where the violence of the group is poured away, removed as to become an inner agent that contains no violence and works proactively to transform into nonviolence and love. This is what it means to eat and drink the Eucharist. It is about as non-sacrificial as you can get.”[47] Though the Constantinian Church might return the meaning of the Eucharist to a sacrifice administered under its power and control, Bartlett ends his book with an appeal in regard to the meals significance: “the Eucharist will become not a badge and communication of official standing, but what it was always meant to be: an ongoing divine mimicry (imitation of signs) available to all human beings. What the Eucharist intends is to teach humans via a set of signs to be as totally nonviolent as God is.”[48]

The Temple recapitulated is clearly those who receive the life offered in Christ: “as living stones, being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (I Pet 2:5). The command to “do this in Remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) contains the same point, of living out this reality. The focus in Old Testament rites is on God remembering his people, but here Jesus changes the subject; it is his disciples remembering or recapitulating him. Remembering, in Bartlett’s explanation, pertains not to God’s remembering but to the transformation of humankind: “He took God’s act of fidelity – the full story of the Messiah – and held it out in remembrance, not in some heavenly space, but on a human table at the center of human concerns.”[49] Attached to this remembrance is a new sort of imagination, divinely inspired, taking up the body and mind of Christ. This double movement or “double revelation” simultaneously exposes the human violence (e.g., the shedding of blood, sacrifice) and from out of this exposure their erupts a new meaning in Christ (the giving of life in place of the taking of life).

For Bartlett, this is the Girardian synthesis, which Bartlett credits Benoît Chantre with helping to draw: “Chantre sums it up as Girard’s ‘fascinating and complex central thesis . . . it is the disruption of ancient mechanisms for containing violence, in their essential exhaustion, that the true face of man and the true face of God conjointly appear.”[50] The primacy of relation, coming face to face, is key. “The Girardian understanding can tell us that relation throughout the human cosmos is ultimately and thoroughly messianic.”[51] Human history is the story of a delivery, from out of violence and rivalry, into the realization of the fulness of relationship. “Relation is the hidden truth of existence that is more critical to existence than existential moods of anxiety, dread, or even the inevitability of death.”[52] The collapse of the sacred, a sacred constructed out of violence, reveals the individual and the possibility of relation, brought to its fulness in Christ. Sacrifice has lost its power and “it is Christ who finalizes that loss with the definitive revelation of a nonviolent god. . . . The gods of violence are demonetized by the announcement of a god of love; the machine has broken down, the expulsion no longer works.”[53] This is the power of the gospel as Girard originally recognized it and upon which Bartlett is building. God is the nonviolent relation that brings the world to peace.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Love’s Entanglement: God as Nonviolent Relation and How That Brings the World to Peace (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2026).

[2] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 236. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 151.

[3] Love’s Entanglement, 151.

[4] Love’s Entanglement, 151.

[5] Girard, One by Whom Scandal Comes, 43. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 151-152.

[6] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[7] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[8] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[9] Love’s Entanglement, 152.

[10] Love’s Entanglement, 153.

[11] Girard, Battling to the End, 47, 119, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 153.

[12] Things Hidden, 56. Cited in Love’s Entanglement, 154.

[13] Love’s Entanglement, 154.

[14] Love’s Entanglement, 154.

[15] Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[16] Things Hidden, 66, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[17] Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[18] Love’s Entanglement, 155.

[19] Love’s Entanglement, 156

[20] Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 13, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 21.

[21] Love’s Entanglement, 21.

[22] Love’s Entanglement, xxiii.

[23] Love’s Entanglement, xvii.

[24] Love’s Entanglement, xvii

[25] Things Hidden, 275.

[26] Things Hidden, 275.

[27] Things Hidden, 276.

[28] Love’s Entanglement, xxiv-xxv.

[29] Love’s Entanglement, 67.

[30] Love’s Entanglement, 67,

[31] Love’s Entanglement, xxiv.

[32]Things Hidden, 265.

[33] Things Hidden, 271.

[34] Love’s Entanglement, 135.

[35] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022) 126.

[36] Love’s Entanglement, 170.

[37] Love’s Entanglement, 170.

[38] Love’s Entanglement, 170..

[39] Signs of Change, 168.

[40]  Signs of Change, 171.

[41] Love’s Entanglement, 176.

[42] Signs of Change, 170-171.

[43] Signs of Change, 171.

[44] Love’s Entanglement, 177.

[45] Love’s Entanglement. 177.

[46] Signs of Change, 171.

[47] Signs of Change, 171.

[48] Love’s Entanglement, 203.

[49] Signs of Change, 172.

[50] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law, Tran. By Trevor Cribben Merrill, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2022), xi. Cited in Bartlett, Love’s Entanglement, xxvi.

[51] Love’s Entanglement, xxvii.

[52] Love’s Entanglement, xxvii.

[53] Things Hidden, 55-56, cited in Love’s Entanglement, 154.

The Rule of Faith is the Gospel of Peace  

The “rule of faith” is a short summary of the Gospel (the work of Christ in redemption, creation, and the work of the Trinity), often deployed over and against Judaizers or heretics, to reconfirm the unity of Scripture, or the unity of the faith community.[1] The rule is that handed down by the Apostles and agreed upon by all the churches, and is thus an assertion of authority, completeness, and is unifying. It is a unifying or peacemaking rule or the application of the Gospel of peace, where there is a threat to unity. The Scriptures do not contain this unity apart from the  Gospel, summed up in the rule of faith, but given the fact of the Gospel there is unity to be found within the Hebrew Scriptures, or between the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, or within creation, and in this sense, it is directly tied to peace. The rule of faith sums up the Gospel of peace, as a unifying whole (it is pictured in cosmic terms) doing the work of the Gospel, breaking down what would otherwise be a dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile, the Old and New Testament, or conceptions of God, or what Paul calls the “elemental principles” or the “principalities and powers.” Though nonviolence or peace may not be immediately associated with the rule of faith, in the context in which it is used in the New Testament, it is specifically this rule which is deployed to overcome the dividing or violent principles of this world order.

The rule functions in the first instance in regard to creation, and will be deployed by Irenaeus and the Church Fathers against the Gnostics, who would denigrate material creation, and picture salvation as a departure from the material world. This departure is not Gospel peace, as it is dependent upon an antagonistic dualism of the flesh, or what Paul will call the “elementary principles” and it equates salvation with shedding the physical body. The widespread notion in the ancient world, which Paul is clearly opposing (in Gal 3:28 and 6:15), is that the origins or the fundamental building blocks of the universe are based on opposed pairs (earth/air, water/fire) and God is read into this antagonism against the material world. The problem with the law, the problem with the flesh, and the problem with “this present evil age” reduce to the singular problem. The “elements of the cosmos” (στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου) have been made absolute and have not been understood in relationship to God but as opposed to God. The incarnation, the central part of the rule of faith directly contradicts this anti-materialism and is also the direct convergence with peace, as it is on the cross (the culmination of incarnation) that peace is established (Col. 1:20).

The rule of faith disrupts the dualism between heaven and earth and God and creation, by recognizing Jesus Christ as the creator incarnate. It is through the materiality of his blood, the physicality of his crucifixion, the embodied nature of his resurrection (all central to the Gospel or the rule of faith) that he makes peace. The material order, the embodied or incarnate, are affirmed in Christ, but the sting of sin and death are removed. In Paul’s summation of the rule, the incarnation, death, and resurrection are key: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve” (1 Cor 15:3–5). Death due to sin, burial, and then the defeat of sin and death in the resurrection of Christ, are the crux of faith. There is a defeat of the violence that would obliterate Christ, and this summation of the rule is the defeat of the rule of death: “For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death” (1 Cor 15:25–26). The violence that killed him is undone in the defeat of death in his resurrection. He is peace, the “abolishing of enmity,” the uniter of a divided humanity, split by the elementary principles contained in ordinances (Eph 2:14–16).   

Paul provides the example in Galatians, couching the rule of faith in a reconceived cosmic order, or a new creation. He is refuting Judaizers who are boasting in their law-keeping, while he would only boast “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” for through the cross “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God” (Gal 6:14-18). This rule of the cross is apocalyptic, as it deconstructs the cosmos ordered by law (circumcision or uncircumcision) and is the basis of a peaceful “new creation.” It is not simply that Christ’s crucifixion has caused Paul to think less of circumcision and law, than he had previously. According to Louis Martyn, “On the contrary, the cross separated Paul totally from the whole of the religious cosmos, of which a fundamental element was the pair of opposites called circumcision and uncircumcision, the Law/the Not Law.”[2] There is a new rule, a new ordering principle, at the foundation of the world. The former world was founded on violent division; the new creation is unified in Christ.

Paul makes a similar case in Colossians: “When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him. Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day— things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col 2:16–17). The “basic principles” which formerly enslaved and which now threaten again, are precisely those commanded in the law (I Ch. 23:31). The Colossians, like the Ephesians and Galatians, are being lured back into a Judaized Christianity, in which the law is pictured as a necessary first order arrangement (much as in contractual theology). Paul argues that, the specific way in which the reign of death is exercised is through human subjection to laws, principles and powers, which have no substance. They are lacking in truth and reality and yet these shadowy powers once reigned where Christ now reigns (“the substance belongs to Christ”).

The false teachers want to make the gospel a covenantal nomism, in which Christ has met the requirements of the law, so now righteousness has been obtained on the basis of keeping covenant through the law. Paul’s gospel opposes this partial gospel with the pronouncement that the malevolent grasp of the old-world order is finished. Christ has liberated from slavery through his cross. The lie is displaced by the truth as by the cross the cosmos has been crucified to me and I have been crucified to the cosmos (Gal 2:19; 5:24; 6:14). Circumcision is nothing, Jewishness is nothing, Gentileness is nothing, gender is nothing, ethnicity is nothing, philosophy is nothing, as what is taking place is on the order of creation from nothing, but the nothing is exposed in light of the new creation: “For neither is circumcision anything nor is uncircumcision anything.” What is something is the new creation. The old cosmos, with its violent ordering principle has not been repaired, but it has been displaced. The cross has rendered one world dead and buried (the world controlled by death and violence) as the new world of peace is now commenced.

The world, under the rule of the law or the elementary principles is violent and the god attached to it is violent, and this god and world are put to death at the cross. “The antinomies that lay at the foundation of the cosmos have now disappeared.”[3] The cosmos founded on opposed pairs (which for Paul was universal), no longer exists: “For when all of you were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ as though he were your clothing. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is no male and female; for all of you are One in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:27–28). Those in Christ, in rightly recognizing the rule have passed from the old ordering principle (the elementary principles, the binary divisions), in which the Galatians would bite and devour one another, and they need to “take care that [they] are not consumed by one another” (Gal 5:15). There is a violent incapacity and antagonism in the law of the flesh: “For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit . . . so that you may not do the things that you please” (Gal 5:17). The deeds of the flesh are inherently punishing: “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal 5:19-21). In this sense the rule of faith is no rule or law at all: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Ga 5:22–23).

The rule of faith directly coincides with the Gospel of peace, or the nonviolence of God as realized in the cross. Christ does not coercively throw off the elementary principles or the principalities and powers, but undermines them in accepting the death and violence they met out and defeats them at the cross. This message of a new peaceful cosmic order instituted at the cross, is the Gospel or rule of faith. To believe, preach, or practice, anything less than this rule is to fall short of the measure of the Gospel of peace.

[1] Here is Irenaeus summation of the rule of faith: “The church, dispersed throughout the world to the ends of the earth, received from the apostles and their disciples the faith in one God the Father Almighty, “who made heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them” (Exod. 20:11), and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, incarnate for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit, who through the prophets predicted the dispensations of God: the coming, the birth from the Virgin, the passion, the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension of the beloved Jesus Christ our Lord in the flesh into the heavens, and his coming from the heavens in the glory of the Father to “recapitulate all things” (Eph. 1:10) and raise up all flesh of the human race, so that to Christ Jesus our Lord and God and Savior and King, according to the good pleasure of the invisible Father, “every knee should bow, of beings in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess him” (Phil. 2:10–11), and that he should render a just judgement on all and send to eternal fire the spiritual powers of iniquity, the lying and apostate angels, and men who are impious, unjust, iniquitous, and blasphemous, while on the contrary he should give life imperishable as a reward to the just and equitable who keep his commandments and persevere in his love (some from the beginning, others since their conversion), and surround it with eternal glory.” Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 53-54.

[2] J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 565.

[3] Martyn, 570.

Putting on the Mind of Christ Through the Rule of Faith

To say, God is our problem, does not mean that our primary problem is that we deserve punishment and only God can take care of it, it means that our deepest gifts and problems, our neuroses, personality formation, attitudes toward ourselves and others, is caught up in belief or unbelief about ultimate reality or about God, and these beliefs and denials are often wrong. Belief may not capture it, because this may be prior to belief, it may be the impetus to unbelief, but it is our deepest conception about reality. What we project upon God, perhaps even the God we do not believe in, contains the human sickness, and coming to see God rightly is very much involved with the cure. We may have to begin with unbelief, or denial of God, or what we do not believe so as to say what is we believe. Our image of God pertains to our image of everything, and coming to conceive God rightly is the goal of our life and faith, precisely because this contains everything about our conception of the world. This interpretation of all things according to faith, rightly conceived, is captured in the biblical notion of the “rule of faith” (Rom 3:27, which the Church Fathers will also call the “rule of truth” or the “rule of love”). Paul is pitting his rule of faith against what is obvious about God, or seemingly so, as he is vengeful, law bound, and this is seen by everybody: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them” (Rom 1:18-19).[1] This legal, seen, naturally revealed, hermeneutic, working within everyone, stands juxtaposed to the “rule of faith” (regula fidei). This rule is the regula or the regulating mode of conception, a basic premise for reading scripture, and the premise in which scripture is constituted, which suspends a “works of the law” conception. We are naturally given, perhaps due to sin, to a perverse notion of God and the world, and this perception is to be relinquished through the gospel. How this works out in our lives may be a slow process.

Learning to See God Through the Rule of Faith: The Case of John Ashworth and Maximus the Confessor

This struck me in interviewing John Ashworth, a priest, missionary, and peacemaker working in Sudan in Africa. John was suffering from PTSD, having been put in front of a firing squad, after being kidnapped and held hostage. Having experienced many levels of horrific violence, the church gave him leave to undergo recovery. John described to us in an interview, and also describes in his autobiography, his work with a gifted therapist, an elderly nun, who offered “unconditional non-judgemental love” whose “favourite image of God was ‘Beloved’.” He writes, “She led me through a process of examining my own images of God, until one day I was able to say to her, ‘I don’t believe in God any more!’ She was delighted! ‘Excellent! Now that we have discovered the images of God that you don’t believe in, let’s begin to explore the God that you do believe in.’”[2]  

John began to rebuild his image of God, and along with it his understanding of himself and his world. “I had to move on from childhood images of God the stern father, the strict teacher, the controlling judge, an object of fear. We anthropomorphise God but often choose from a very limited range of human characteristics.”[3] The childhood image of God as the enforcer of law, or even more benevolent notions, may still be bound by a letter driven imagery of the human imagination. The visual, the legal, the symbolic (as in Rom 1:18), or any particular representation, will fall short of the all-encompassing reality of the God in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). There are a wide range of images, none of which can capture the deep mystery of an all-encompassing compassion, truth, and relational reality, inclusive of much of human reality, but as Paul describes we only come to this realization by the controlling factor of faith: “Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law” (Rom 3:27–28).

John describes a renewed recognition of God interacting within his life, and acknowledging this presence as an act of prayer. “Experiences of community and relationship, the joys of friendship, marriage and family, eating together, working together, playing together, making love together – these can all be prayer. In them God is present whether I recognise that presence or not, and an explicit awareness of that presence is prayer.”[4] John describes a growing recognition, of what in conversation he referred to as divinization, or the Eastern notion of the working of the Trinity in all of creation but also within the self. “This is a God whom I need to find within myself and to allow out in a ‘letting go’ rather than a ‘letting in’. We are not unconnected with the God who created us and the God who became incarnate, the God who is Alpha and Omega, the first-born of all creation (Colossians 1:15) and the endpoint towards whom we are all evolving. Thus relationship is also at the heart of Christianity.”[5] John discovers a means of interpreting all things according to  Maximus the Confessor’s version of the rule of faith, “the rule of love,” drawing all things to God.

In Maximus understanding, all of God’s activity has the single purpose of uniting the world to himself. As Torstein Tollefesen explains, “Maximus asserts that the creation and ordering of the world is an embodiment of the Logos: ‘Always and in all God’s Logos . . . God wills to effect the mystery of His own embodiment.’”[6] The Word of God at work in us produces the same impetus behind and in Scripture. In Maximus’ famous quote, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[7] Or as he describes elsewhere, “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[8] This is Maximus’ rule of faith, which precedes all things and is the purpose in all things, through which we rightly perceive all things. We are to put on the mind of Christ in our perception of ourselves and the world. There is a fusion of cosmology, soteriology, and psychology, in the activity of God’s unifying work. This rule of faith, for the early church, is not simply an interpretive method but it is the impetus behind the writing of the Gospels. The gospel truth precedes the truth of the Gospels, giving rise to their writing and this is what is to be encountered in the Scriptures.

The Rule of Faith as a Mode of Interpreting Scripture and All Things

As John Behr describes the rule of faith, this hypothesis of Scripture, enables “the demonstrations from Scripture to describe, accurately, the portrait of a king, Christ; it is a mode of interpretation delivered by the apostles in their proclamation of Christ.”[9] Scripture is an interpretation of the person of Christ (in both Testaments), and this is the substance of its unity and the point of departure, but Christ is the exegetical means of reading Scripture. Scripture is a confession of faith in the crucified and risen Christ, and this faith first arises in the Apostles and is being preached before it is written. The Church Father, Irenaeus, feels it is key that the apostles first preached the Gospel and subsequently wrote it down, as this indicates it is the continuous preaching in the Church of the tradition of the apostles. It is this word of the apostles that “has been handed down (‘traditioned’) in the Scriptures, as the ground and pillar of our faith.”[10] There is an encounter with a person in Scripture and this person, Christ, is not bound by the letters and writing, but is living. Scripture, tradition, and experience, arise from the authority of God in Christ and this becomes the means of an exegetical reason or explanation about God (Jn. 1:18).

Paul had spoken of the Church as the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Tim 3:15), but the living Word, which is Christ, is also rightly described as the foundation: “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). The Apostles possessed the fullness of the Word, and so Paul can also describe them as the foundation of the church: “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone“ (Ephesians 2:20). They first embody the Word constituting the continuing incarnation of Christ in the church, then they preach this word and subsequently write it down, but it is the living Christ that is to be encountered in this written word.

Irenaeus suggests that it is not writing per se that constitutes the gospel, as the illiterate “barbarians” who receive this gospel may have it written on their hearts though they cannot understand the words written with ink and paper. It is in fact meant to be an inscription on human character, in the human heart, and is only secondarily written in letters. Irenaeus is describing an encounter with the risen Christ, in the gospel, that is faith, the rule of interpretation. As he will describe, the rule of faith is inclusive of a specific understanding of God as creator, of Christ as unveiling and constituting the inspiration of scripture and delivering from death, and of the Holy Spirit who is being poured out making people righteous and forming a new unified people. One encounters God the Father, God the Son (as Word, Son of God, Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit in the gospel message, and this unity is the rule of faith. Rather than a dividing word of the law, this encounter brings about a transformed imagination, that is no longer shaped by what is obvious in this world (under heaven) but there is a “renewing of the mind” (Rom 12:2).

The rule of love or the rule of faith or the analogy of faith, or to say the same thing, the gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning provided in the Scriptures, but with this unveiling there is an unveiling, and unifying, of all things. As Paul explains to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). These events are not obvious in the Hebrew Scriptures, but given these events in the life of Christ, this make sense of Scripture (the Hebrew Scriptures). By the same token they provide an interpretive lens for all things. Given the reality of Christ, the Scriptures provide a vocabulary, a world, a history, which can be read in this light, but so too the experience of the world. The canon or measure of Christ certainly is a means of interpreting Scripture but it is the means of apprehending all things. There is a conversion of the imagination, a depth perception no longer delimited by “things under heaven.”

The Rule of Faith as a Mindset

There is the interworking of the apostolic preaching, the rule of faith, and the role of Scripture, but according to the New Testament and the early church fathers, this rule of faith is at once to be a personal mindset and an ethical orientation organizing, not just Scripture, but one’s life. That is, this rule is more than a proposition or rule in the ordinary sense, but is the means of seeing and measuring all things by the peace and love of Christ. The rule is linked with unity and peace, it is linked with apprehending rightly, and it is linked to making critical judgments, and all of these are linked with putting on the mind of Christ. Which is to say this rule of faith is taken up, cathected (to redeploy Freud’s word) into the self as part of one’s character and one’s apprehension of the world.

Paul explains that the “analogy of faith” works in conjunction with preaching and teaching and he wanted every prophecy and every teaching to be conformed to the analogy or likeness of faith (Rom. 12:6). The application or extrapolation of the kerygma may be the specialty of the prophet, but Paul calls every Christian to “appraise all things” according to the mind of Christ. Putting on the mind of Christ means that the individual is enabled to make authoritative judgments, informed critiques, “so that we may know things freely given to us by God,” so that we combine “spiritual thoughts with spiritual words” and thus come to understand those things that “are spiritually appraised” (I Cor. 2:12-16). This spiritual individual has the wisdom provided by God, where the natural man, or literally “a man of animal soul,” is incapable of discerning things according to the Spirit. Jesus promised that the Spirit would guide into all truth (Jn. 16:13) and Paul seems to be applying this to the individuals in the Corinthian church.

In dealing with those who are challenging his teaching and authority in Corinth, Paul explains that they are using the wrong measurement: “they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves,” thus “they are without understanding” (II Cor. 10:12). Where they measure by human, self-established measure (measuring themselves by themselves), Paul “measures by the measure which God has given me.” As he explains to the Ephesians this is “the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). This is the measure that, rather than stirring up human antagonism, is the means by which “we all attain to the unity of the faith.” Here is Maximus rule of love, drawing all things into the unity of Christ. Our usual measure, in which we measure ourselves against others, stirs up jealousy and violence. The force that killed Christ, namely the measure of man, is countered by Christ and the rule of faith. That is, the peace of Christ embodied in nonviolent love and nonviolent resistance, is the counter to the human rule and is the goal and means of the rule of faith, a deep transformative grammar preceding what is “clearly seen” (Rom 1:20).

From the Rule of Law to the Rule of Faith

There is a double meaning to this rule or canon, in that it is not simply a measure but is to “rule” or to be predominant in thought. It is an alternative to the rule of the law, both as measure and means, in that the law divides and diminishes but this rule speaks of a corporate identity in the Holy Spirit (no longer focused on “I” or law as in Romans 7), which has cosmic implications for those in Christ: “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (8:19), as they will reveal what is not now “clearly seen” or seemingly obvious. God understood in a relational identity, rather than a legal identity, is “Abba, Father.” The work of the “I” as measure and end, is displaced by the “rule” of the Spirit of life (8:2) which results in freedom from slavery to fear and a reconstituting the Subject as a child of God. The Pauline “body of sin” (6:6) or “body of death” (7:24) is displaced in the resurrection life of the Spirit (8:10-11) which is the beginning of cosmic redemption – “the redemption of our bodies” (8:23) and the redemption of the cosmos (8:21). This is not a condemning measure but redemptive. The measure and means that is predominant, is self-measure, how I measure up to others, or even within myself, or what is obvious to all, as if declared from what has been made (Rom 1:18ff). This natural measure belongs to the natural man, whose mind is captured by condemnation, but “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1).

The unification and participation Paul is describing is the realization of the rule of love. The law of life frees from the rule of law and letter: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom 8:2). There is a deep psychological shift in passing from measure of the law to the measure of faith, in and through which all things are reconceived. The law aroused an unquenchable desire, that is the desire for unity invoked or propelled by alienation. The fear and slavery under the law of sin and death, with its work through deceptive desire aroused by the law, became “another law” (Rom 7:23, ἕteronnόmon), but this law is now voided along with all of its various machinations. Law as measure and means seems to be part of the process of maturing, or being “tutored” (Galatians 3:24), but we pass from the tutor to a more fulsome reality that no longer requires this guide. The Spirit gives the righteousness of God or the promise of life indicated in the law, and the law’s “righteous decree” of life has been fulfilled. This then results in the capacity to “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (8:4). This walk is characterized in all of its phases by the power of life which enables the mindset and hope of the Subject in Christ.

The Rule of Faith and the Problem of Suffering

In our discussion with John Ashworth, he described a new way of viewing his own suffering and trauma. He had arrived at a moment of unbelief, or a denial of the God in whom he formerly believed, due to the violence he had witnessed and to which he had been subjected. It reminded me of the sort of protest atheism of Ted Turner, who had started as deeply religious, but with the prolonged illness and tragic death of his younger sister, Mary Jane, Turner turned to something of a protest atheism, as he was very angry at the God in which he did not believe. It is a story that could probably be repeated many times over, as in the case of Charles Darwin, whose oldest daughter, Annie, fell ill, or Samuel Clemens or Albert Einstein, all of whom came to unbelief due to suffering. The typical apologetic might attempt to explain, to make the suffering somehow beneficial, but there is really no answer of this sort, though suffering is thematic in Scripture.

John Ashworth describes an ability to see suffering in a different light: “Despite the hardships I regard it as a privilege to have shared the suffering, experienced the solidarity and camaraderie, and to have been part of something worthwhile. That’s what keeps me going and sustains me during difficult times, along with the knowledge that it’s not me who bears the responsibility of bringing peace and justice to Sudan and South Sudan.”[11] Or as he says elsewhere, “God is with us, not in an abstract and spiritual way, but in a very real and concrete way. God has experienced the sufferings of God’s people.”[12] He describes the work in analysis as realization that it may be in peak moments, “with a beautiful view, with joy or sorrow, with pain and suffering, with love and human relationships, with birth or death or other rites of passage” that we know God’s presence.[13] His book is a long meditation on suffering, and coming to recognize God in the suffering.

Where in Romans 7 Paul describes an unbearable suffering, in Romans 8, he provides the metaphor of childbirth, in which to couch and reframe human suffering. “For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom 8:22). Paul’s description of hope (the unseen, over and against that which is seen and obvious in Rom 1:18ff) allows for a full engagement with the vicissitudes of suffering as this suffering and even death is no longer definitive or determinative of life in light of the hope of certain glory. The “present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (8:18) as neither “death nor life” can separate from the love of God (8:38-39). Hope and faith embrace the dynamics of change, as it is focused on certain future fulfilment of a promise which cannot be obtained” within the framework (“under the heavens” (Rom 1:18, the possibilities inherent in the present). Faith and hope bear an unfinished (unseen, and beyond the heavens) embrace of the future, the possibility of growth and change. This hope directly counters the futility of sin (futility or matiotēs connotes what pseudos “lie” meant in Genesis and in Romans 1:25, “they exchanged the truth for a lie”). There is not an abolition of the present world so that heaven might take its place but a transformation on the order of birth, in which the pangs of suffering are fulfilling a purpose. With the “adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (8:23), the purpose of creation’s suffering will have appeared and the longing of hope and faith fulfilled.

Paul’s resolution to the alienation of the law is to become a child of God, the realization of faith. Where the sinful mind is by definition “hostile to God” the one adopted as a child by the Spirit has overcome this hostility enacted against the measure of the law (8:7). As in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the heart of stone will be replaced with a heart of flesh and God’s Spirit will indwell his people and enable them to keep the law (Ezek. 36:26-27). The move from law as alienating and oppressive to the law written on the heart (Jer. 31.33) is a description of the rule of faith, a character shaping way of apprehending. Paul’s cry at the end of Romans 7, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7.24), is followed by a cry of joy, “And by him we cry, “Abba, Father” (8:15). The measure and means have changed. The God who is law giver in ch. 7 is Abba in ch. 8 and this difference is wrought through “The Spirit himself who testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (8:15). This inward testimony is the measure of faith in the transformed mind.

(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

[1] Thanks to Brian Sartor for inspiring many of these thoughts. Listen to our podcast here, http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/brian-sartor-describes-pauls-deconstruction-of-the-teaching-of-the-false-teacher/

[2] John Ashworth, Journeying Toward Nonviolence: My Life in Sudan (London: Redhaven Books, 2026), 87.

[3] Ashworth, 88.

[4] Ashworth, 90.

[5] Ashworth, 91.

[6] Torstein Tollefesen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2.

[7] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1  Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7, paragraph 22. 

[8] St. Maximus the Confessor’s Questions to Thalassius, question 60, paragraph 3

[9] John Behr, The Way to Nicaea (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 37,

[10] Behr, 39.

[11] Ashworth, 15-16.

[12] Ashworth, 61.

[13] Ashworth, 89.

The Survival of the Devil in Theology and His Destruction in Paul

Many commentators presume that in Romans (7:7 ff), Paul is repeating the Edenic scene of the fall in Genesis 3, and is demystifying the story, explaining that which animates sin, or that which gives it a speaking role, is a deception in regard to the law (the role of the Decalogue is also presumed to be proleptically contained in the original prohibition). He displaces the serpent with sin, repeating throughout the events of the fall, so that “the serpent deceived me” (Gen. 3:13) becomes “sin deceived me” (Rom. 7:11) and the deception regards the 10th commandment on coveting, which serves to sum up the previous 9 commandments, while also centering in on the point of the original prohibition in Genesis. Covetousness or desire of the other, be it God in Genesis or the neighbor in Exodus (20:17), is the root problem behind sin’s deception.

Paul locates this Edenic event in “I” and describes the unfolding of death, not simply as physical demise, but as an internal split, in which he is pitted against himself, incapacitating his will in a psychological and spiritual bondage (7:14). He sums this up as “sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (7:11). The “promised life” is death, which in the lie is the special knowledge (the knowledge of good and evil) or the law enacted. The attempt of the “I” to possess the commandment, is turned back on the subject, and sin-possessed (λαβοῦσα) “I”. Where sin lies dead in Romans 7:8 apart from the law, under the law the “I” lies dead in v. 9 and sin becomes an animate force in the exchange.

Paul then goes on to explain how it is that Christ addresses this situation, defeats it, providing life in place of death dealing desire and deception, summed up as, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (8:2). What he has described in the shorthand of the early Church Fathers is dubbed “Christus Victor,” the defeat of sin, death, and the devil. It is also described, in a slightly different image, as “recapitulation” (as in Romans 5 Christ retraces and reverses the steps of human history, succeeding where Adam failed). 

Paul’s description by-passes a Devil centered atonement, but unfortunately subsequent explanations of Christus Victor will focus on the serpent and the Devil in a manner that will give them a key role, and then in legal theories of the atonement, though the key role of the Devil is displaced, the law will begin to play the same central function. The Augustinian, Anselmian, and Calvinist, readings will mystify the problem of sin in original sin, in legalistic notions requiring restored honor, or a punishing payment, missing where and how this dynamic unfolds. Paul’s demystification of the serpent and the law, locates the dynamic of sin in a process of reification and personification (either a demonizing personification or a reification of the law) that names the mystery of sin as enfolded in its blinding deception. Sin is not a mystery but a system, with its own logic and structure, and in the explanation of its structure lies the explanation of its propagation.

Early explanations of Christus Victor and then legal theories, fail to locate sin, as in the woman’s and Paul’s complaint – “the serpent/sin deceived me” (Gen. 3.13; Rom. 7.11), which are held together in the “I” as an existential self-identification within Adam or humankind. The failure is within humanity (corporately and individually), and is in a particular dynamic, which projects, reifies, and destroys. In the deception the law, language, the symbolic, is a means of establishing the self, but it is the self that has become the sight of a destructive desire. The deception produces an inverted economy of exchange in which life is gained through death, which is the pull of this desire.

The Focus on the Devil

The early Church Fathers, in their working out of Christus Victor, are still bearing the weight of what René Girard refers to as “mythological crystallizations” in notions of a personified Devil whom God tricked in Christ, such that there is not a complete exposure of the centrality of desire and its role in reifying, personifying, and projecting. As David Dawson describes, there are still notions of a contest, a “quasi-sportive or pugilistic event” in which Satan deceives humanity and absconds with God’s people, and Christ is able to trick the Devil and win them back. These explanations, in focusing on the Devil, miss the role of desire, as present even in their own explanations. “All the strategies of scandalized desire are on full display, from the Devil’s envy of Eden’s blessedness and inveiglement of human credulity, to the feigned inadvertence of Christs exposure to death and his rival’s homicidal covetousness, which he outfoxes.”[1]

The story is at once mythical and yet descriptive of human failure and conflict. The violence, the reification of death and its power, the fundamental deception as containing the self, reduces Christ to a special version of the scapegoat. Dealing in death as if death is the divine fulcrum, by which to leverage power, is still in place as the ground of society. The victims’ death is still required and divinely-willed, which “occludes the violent role of the human community in the exchange of a merely human victim to save its own skin. That human beings play a passive role in Christus Victor, first as dupes, then captives set free, means that little is revealed of their culpability, which pales in comparison with the malevolence of Satan, the undisputed agent of destruction.”[2] God and Christ are made out as deceivers, with the incarnation a divine hoax played on the Devil. This victim, Christ, is not so innocent, and then in a penitential economy all of the blame will be legally placed on Christ, with both systems missing the point.

The Focus on the Law

Anselm of Canterbury may be one of the most sophisticated theologians to attempt an explanation of the atonement, but rather than begin with a biblical explanation (which is not the point of his effort) Anselm provides what he considers an illustration (at the end of which, he says if it is helpful, use it, if not, dispose of it). The problem is Anselm’s explanation is ingenious enough that it will become the standard interpretation of the Western church, and it will be presumed he has concluded the issue, taking him more seriously than he may have imagined. Anselm moves the discussion from Satan, and presumes the primary issue is meeting the requirements of the law.

Like Paul, he deals with human interiority, focusing not on desire but on will (which he equates with a capacity for keeping the law). Will is the vital force that would take the basic equipment of the rational self, and if restored to its proper “rectitude,” could preserve a subject fully present to itself or able to completely remember itself and in rightly remembering itself encounter God. One is enabled to close the gap in the will by restoring God’s honor to him (an honor impugned by breaking the law), by fulfilling the demands of the law, and thus enabling right willing. But only God is able to satisfy the just requirement of the law, and this he did in Christ, closing the gap in the will. Throughout the book Cur Deus Homo, Anselm describes the atonement in terms of repaying to God the honor taken from him by sin, which makes Christ’s death necessary to pay back to God that debt. For Anselm, Christ’s death works according to the logic of law in that the satisfaction demanded by the law is rendered by Christ (but the economy itself is not disturbed or displaced). Though Anselm is not focused on punishment, it is by means of bearing the requirements of the law that Christ pays the debt. Anselm argued without direct appeal to Scripture (though Scripture is assumed throughout his argument), but the power of his argument was such that it affected future biblical understanding of the atonement. Anselm’s theory of divine satisfaction will dominate in the Western Church (Catholic and Protestant) until Calvin’s additions.

Calvin’s basic premise is that the debt owed to God is eternal punishment and only Christ can make this payment. The way in which he reaches this conclusion is an intricate argument about one of the most obscure passages in the New Testament, I Peter 3:18-22 (which I describe here). My summation of his explanation is that he fuses Gehenna (the place of future punishment) and Hades (the place of the dead), and argues that eternal punishment should also be fused with the chastisement of Isaiah 53. Then both of these passages should be moved to the context of the trial and punishment of Christ.

The debt owed no longer pertains to Anselm’s will, but to an eternal punishment, which Christ paid. There is a split in God, not in human will, and God must close this gap. Jesus is pictured as being not only forsaken by God but the object of God’s hatred (as I have explained here). As Dr. Abner Chou describes, “In that death the wrath of God was poured out on Christ, and the darkness exploded. In that instant God cursed Jesus, putting Him in a position of absolute, perfect hatred. God hated Him and desired to make Him nothing.”[3] Dan Allender and Tremper Longman propose that, “God chose to violate His Son in our place. The Son stared into the mocking eyes of God; He heard the laugher of the Father’s derision and felt Him depart in disgust. . . . In a mysterious instant, the Father who loved the Son from all eternity turned from Him in hatred. The Son became odious to the Father.”[4] As Tim Keller put it on Facebook (and quickly revised, due to subsequent criticism), “If you see Jesus losing the infinite love of the Father, out of his infinite love for you, it will melt your hardness.”[5]

As Dawson describes, in Anselm’s theory of satisfaction, and Calvin’s penal substitution, it is as if the role of the Devil is projected onto God, giving us a Janus-faced God, with violence and retribution now part of his character. “The victim is now completely innocent and the people stand fully condemned. But then the God of Christus Victor has also undergone a fearsome transmogrification. The Devil may no longer be a player of any consequence but the polarization of divinity into opposed faces has scarcely been reduced.”[6] Christ is now the victim of the Father, who requires death for his justice, and any notion of divine nonviolence (as in Christus Victor) is relinquished for divine retribution as the expression of God’s justice. Now it is God’s justice and violence from which all require deliverance. To fail to locate “divine violence” within humanity and to project it onto God, loses the exposure of human violence, reification and projection onto God: “This will is the divinized energy of the mob, violence writ large. A more unanimous act of murder could hardly be imagined. Christian soteriology now undergoes a last, unprecedented, and ultimately fatal transformation.”[7]

God needs the persecutors as his instruments so that he might have them kill Christ. The war is within God and “Death now expresses a relation of the divine itself.”[8] God is inherently violent, and death dealing and violence, in turn, are divinized. This is arguably worse than paganism, in that there is no room for human entry into this divine economy. “Rather than opening the flow of trade, this annuls it. The act of violence still discharges itself within the closure of the sacred as answering a divine necessity, and its deflection belongs undeniably to an economy of salvation. This economy is, however, petrified at inception, reduced to a theological symbol.”[9] Calvinism may be the final stage of this failure, in which God only provides symbols, and there is no room for a real-world human transformation, a forsaking of violence and entry into peace.

Paul’s Focus on Deliverance from Deception and Death

In Paul’s summary statement of the human problem, which he calls “the body of death” he locates the problem of sin and death as it has impacted the “I”: Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? (Rom 7:24). The law divides, and sin deploys the law in its deception, creating the exchange of life for a living death. “So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin” (7:25).

Paul’s understanding of the law introduces a series of categories in chs 6, 7, and 8, which demonstrate that the law mediates sin but, in contrast to Anselm’s and Calvin’s understanding, for Paul, the law does not mediate salvation. Salvation destroys the law of sin and death (resulting from the law), and ultimately obliterates any role for Satan in an economy of life and peace. In the conclusion of his letter to the Romans, Paul once again appeals to the image of Genesis (3:15), “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you” (Rom 16:20). The deceiver is destroyed with the sin which animates him.

(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)

[1] David Dawson, Flesh Becomes Word: A Lexicography of the Scapegoat or, the History of an Idea (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 78-79.

[2] Dawson, 79.

[3] https://www.adamsetser.com/blog/2015/7/25/the-big-picture-of-gods-mission-a-concise-over[1]view-of-the-entire-bible-by-dr-abner-chou. [June 19, 2018] Quoted from Joshua R. Farris & S. Mark Hamilton, “This is My Beloved Son, Whom I hate? A Critique of the Christus Odium Variant of Penal Substitution” (Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies, Volume 3, Issue 2).

[4] Dan B. Allender and Tremper Longman, In the Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions About God (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, [1999] 2015), pp. 184-85. Quoted from Farris and Hamilton.

[5] https://calvinistinternational.com/2017/07/27/tim-keller-the-cross-and-the-love-of-god/ From Farris and Hamilton.

[6] Dawson, 80.

[7] Dawson, 82.

[8] Dawson, 83.

[9] Dawson, 83.

Stanley Hauerwas and the MAGA New Right: Defining and Combating Evil

Stanley Hauerwas, along with the Yale post-liberals, pioneered a radical critique of liberalism, tied as it is to capitalism, individualism, and the nation state. Hauerwas defines liberalism as a set of beliefs built on the primacy of individual autonomy, privacy, rights, and self-interest rather than a shared substantive vision of the good. At one time Christians knew themselves to be “participants in a grand drama of God’s salvation of all creation” but “beliefs” cannot participate in drama. Liberalism robbed Christians of the primacy of a narrative reality.[1] The central point of Hauerwas’s critique is not liberalism or anti-liberalism, but it was a call to the church to be the church. The church, in Hauerwas’s estimate, is the singular community where one encounters truthfulness, or an embodied way of life (a narrative reality), in which the truth about reality emerges. It specifically involves the church community, because living the truth requires formation in principles, such as nonviolence and peace, which are not and cannot be fostered outside of the story of Christ and the church nurtured on this narrative.

The Anti-Liberalism of the MAGA New Right

Among those, such as political science professor Patrick Deneen, who have taken up Hauerwas’s anti-liberalism, there has been a profound misunderstanding.  Deneen has focused on the failure of liberalism (in his breakout work, Why Liberalism Failed) and the need to replace it as captured in Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. The second book shifts to a prescriptive and state-oriented blueprint arguing that anti-liberal forces must actively seek a “regime change” to wrestle control of existing political, legal, and economic institutions from the ruling class. In this shift toward state apparatuses, he has abandoned the central point of Hauerwas’s critique. Those like Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and J. D. Vance, who see Trump as the hammer with which to install an anti-liberal authoritarian government, have missed not only Hauerwas’s point but the point of the cross. They too are seeking to defeat evil, but rather than equate evil with what Christ defeated at the cross, these thinkers equate evil with modern ideas, the rejection of an absolute moral order and traditional values, as in a neo-Marxist wokeism. In the words of Trump, the evil they are aimed at is the left: “They are sick, radical left people.” In their estimate, there must be a return to America’s founding principles so as to once again become a Christian nation, even if this requires regime change and a redefining of rule of law. As Deneen advocates, this means employing evil means for good ends, or in his phrase “using Machiavellian means for Aristotelian ends,” by which he primarily means reorganizing America’s social order and “replacing the elites.”[2]

According to Laura Field, “When the thinkers of MAGA New Right suggest that only conservatives — or as some put it, heritage Americans — have access to America’s founding principles or that America is a Christian nation, they are providing a justification for authoritarian actions on the part of the government.”[3]  Christian salvation, Christian ethics, or the teaching of Christ, become secondary in this project in which the religion is weaponized as an anti-liberal, anti-Marxist, and anti-woke, instrument. For example, Yoram Hazony an Israeli political theorist and a leading advocate for national conservatism, “argues that the nation-state, as a homogeneous cultural entity, sets the true foundation of good politics. Despite being an Orthodox Jew, he has promoted Christian dominance in the United States, arguing that ‘the only thing that is strong enough to stop woke neo-Marxism, the religion of woke neo-Marxism, is the religion of biblical Christianity.’”[4] The point is to use whatever cudgel is necessary to defeat the left, and Christianity is another tool in the primary goal of defeating liberalism.

As James Chappel writes, “The ubiquity of funeral rites for liberalism can distract attention from those few who are genuinely committed to its murder. There are intellectuals and politicians out there who are seeking to uproot liberalism, root and branch.” [5]  He cites Deneen, and Rod Dreher, but is focused particularly on Vermeule, the Harvard legal scholar, who is advocating Catholic integralism, or the subordination of the state to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. “It would certainly ban abortion and pornography, and it would likely mandate Catholic education in schools. It is hard to see what place would be made for homosexuals or religious minorities in such a state. What he has said does not bode well for religious tolerance: he has argued that atheists should not be allowed to hold office, and that Catholic immigrants be given priority over Muslims, Protestants, and Jews.” [6] In his envisioned technocratic rule of elites, centralized rule will have to undermine the rule of courts and the judiciary. Vermeule’s first book, Judging Under Uncertainty (2006), calls for judges to step back and let expert authorities make complex decisions, and Law’s Abnegation (2016), is about the empirical success achieved so far. “Judges have no business, Vermeule thinks, meddling with technical or regulatory matters, and thus they seldom do. So whatever fantasy we might spin about living in a republic of laws, in reality we are living in a republic of administrators.” [7]  This defeat of the rule of law opens the door for the executive branch, the president, to take control.

More than Hauerwas’s anti-liberalism (they would claim both him and Wendell Berry), these theorists are fostered by the Claremont Institute, building upon the theory of Leo Strauss, and the legal theorist, Carl Schmitt (as I have described here). The legal theory enabling Adolf Hitler, according to Damon Linker, has “risen to greater prominence now than at any time since the 1930s.” [8] Schmitt viewed liberalism as containing a fatal weakness in refusing to recognize the nature of human evil (original sin) or its political expression in sorting out the world according to friends and enemies. Liberalism is too weak to draw the necessary line identifying enemies. There must be a decider in chief, as legislatures are fraught with indecision and internal factions, and the rule of law (determinations of friends and enemies) is through the singular leader who can enact the law. “That leaves the executive as the best option for decisive action. It was this line of reasoning that led Schmitt to throw his support behind Adolf Hitler’s efforts in 1933 to transform himself into Germany’s sovereign decider.”[9] The leader as the embodiment of the law, is the law, and as such serves as something of a Christ-like figure.

The Abandonment of the Cross

Taking charge, gaining control, saving the nation, the Christian definition of evil, is specific to what killed Christ and what Christ defeated in his death and resurrection. Evil is defeated through the work of Christ, and not a human politic or social organization attempting to extend that work. The politics of Jesus institutes its own social structure in the church where he is proclaimed as Lord, and this does not pertain to either liberalism or opposition to liberalism. But Deneen and company miss that Christian salvation is precisely concerned to defeat the state monopoly on the power of life, one which they would institute, through its control of death and destruction. In Hauerwas’s reading, Christ has abolished war and violence and political strife, and along with it the liturgy of the state, which imagines through government, through the president, through the legal order, through the death of the victims of state, freedom is gained.[10]  This is the lie Christ confronted in his life and in his trial and death. With the resurrection, the state power of death and coercion is defeated.

This new MAGA Right, not only miss Hauerwas’ point, but the point of Christianity, which is not to coerce through imposition of Christian doctrine (the point of this group, who would install ruling elites), but to participate in Christian freedom inaugurated in the cross. This freedom is not that of the Enlightenment but neither is it the imposed liberation, focused on a human agenda of gaining control over liberal democrats. In fact, these anti-liberals need to return to Hauerwas critique of liberalism, as it could serve as well as a critique of their aim to gain control, exercise their will, and implement their justice. It is still self-creation, and will to power, but under the auspices of religion. As Chappel notes, their plan “is to be achieved not through a coup but by the installation of a cadre of anti-liberal conservatives into positions of power in the administration. From those perches, they would leverage state power to create a new social order.” [11] Through social engineering they would impose what they perceive to be the Christian ethic, but in their method, they betray the faith they would promote. Peace, non-violence, taking up the cross, cannot be violently imposed. If liberalism seems to promote an ethically neutral state, the MAGA Right religionists have a definitive ethic, but it has little to do with the ethics of Jesus. As Fields concludes, “Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the kingpins of the MAGA New Right, embody a different form of politics. With particular ideas and a MAGA intellectual elite behind them, they are seeking to dominate a nation and impose their politics on those who don’t share his vision.”[12]

There is a definitive brand of religion and intellectualism behind the chaos of Trump, but those focused on Trump, should not miss that the project is to displace liberal democracy, as if this is the evil Christ defeated. Other than the critique of liberalism, and even this is misguided in presuming the problem is inherent to a form of government, this has nothing to do with Stanley Hauerwas. As Hauerwas has said, “the primary concern in my work has not been to critique liberal society; it has been to offer a vision for the church (in particular the integrity of the church) so that Christians might help negotiate the challenges of a liberal society. . . my position certainly does not entail a wholesale rejection of `secular civilization’, or even of liberalism.”[13] Hauerwas is a man of the church, and a church of a very different kind than those promoting regime change and the installment of an authoritarian government as part of their church work.

The Confusion Concerning Church

Hauerwas is not advocating an overthrow of liberalism or a taking control through regime change, but an acceptance of the already accomplished defeat of the world through Christ lived out in the church. Certainly, the Christian is not obliged to understand evil, peace, freedom and justice, under the dictates of an enlightenment rationality (which presumes such notions are available through a universal reason). The Christian need not presume autonomy, individualism, and universal reason, as defined by liberalism are the case, but neither is this the epitome of evil, as if to oppose liberalism is to side with Christ. The issue, for Hauerwas, is not liberalism or its opposite, but the centrality of Christ and living in a community of believers who learn to live this story. The embodiment and meaning of peace, justice, and freedom are specific to the person of Christ. “Though we continue to live in a time when the world does not dwell in peace, when the wolf cannot dwell with the lamb and a child cannot play over the hole of the asp, we believe nonetheless that peace has been made possible by the resurrection. Through this crucified but resurrected savior we see that God offers to all the possibility of living in peace by the power of forgiveness.”[14] We do not take charge and institute this peace, we receive it and inhabit it.

To take control and direct the Christian social strategy, the MAGA Right’s project, is already an abandonment of Christ’s kingdom. His truth cannot be relegated to human political organization, certainly it cannot be privatized or made to serve another story – i.e., the story of the nation state, the story of the rise of liberal democracy, the story of Rome or America, but neither does it promote Constantinianism or the story of a modern Catholic integralism.

The Church is a Politic and Method

As Hauerwas puts it, “The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.”[15] Hauerwas is picturing the role of the church as a practical defeat of evil in living out peace. Peace is its own fruit, and its own end as an overcoming of deception, a defeat of violence and death, and a coming to reality. The church is to be the instantiation of the peace of Christ, and every other means, including liberalism or illiberalism, falls into division and violence. As Hauerwas puts it, Jesus is the embodiment of the peaceable kingdom, he is the embodiment of Sabbath peace. “God’s kingdom, God’s peace, is a movement of those who have found the confidence through the life of Jesus to make their lives a constant worship of God. We can rest in God because we are no longer driven by the assumption that we must be in control of history, that it is up to us to make things come out right.” [16]

The justice or righteousness (or the making right) of Christ cannot be extracted from the church, as if American freedom or liberal justice or illiberal justice, mean the same thing as they mean in the story and rule of Christ. As Hauerwas writes, “We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.”[17] The idea of a Christian nation, according to Hauerwas is extraordinarily destructive. Instead, “The most creative social strategy we have to offer is the church. Here we show the world a manner of life the world can never achieve through social coercion or governmental action.”[18] The people of God are the empirical reality of the rule of God, the embodiment of the crucified reality.[19] The point is not to determine the outcome of history, “For Christians hope, is not ‘in the processes of history,’ but in God whom we believe has already determined the end of history in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.” [20]

Peace Not Coercion is the Method

For Hauerwas, peace is at the center of the gospel, as violence, whether in the name of justice or equality, is inevitably about power and control over others. Violence derives from the self-deceptive story that we are in control – that we are our own creators – and that only we can bestow meaning on our lives, since there is no one else to do so.” [21] Violence is the practice of a lie, a form of deceived meaning. It is not that violence may not gain short term goals, but Christians cannot rely on a justice that comes from the barrel of a gun, or that indicates less worthy motivations (being in charge), “for God does not rule creation through coercion, but through a cross. As Christians, therefore, we seek not so much to be effective as to be faithful – we, thus, cannot do that which promises ‘results’ when the means are unjust.”[22] The New Right, in abandoning the centrality of peace and nonviolence have missed that violence is the primary problem with liberalism and anti-liberalism, or any means other than the cross. In the name of their Anti as definitive, they stand against the means and method of Christ and the cross.

[1] A Community of Character: Towards a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, 4th edition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1981), 11. Robert Jenson, “Hauerwas Examined” in First Things (August 1, 1992). See also  Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 114 Stanley Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer on Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 114.

[2] Laura Field, “The 77-Year-Old Book That Helps Explain the MAGA New Right”, New York Times (Dec. 13, 2025). In Laura Field’s book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, Patrick Deneen serves as a leading figure and key architect of the postliberal intellectual faction.

[3] Laura Field.

[4] Laura Field.

[5] James Chappel, “Nudging Toward Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule’s War on Liberalism” in Dissent (Spring 2020). https://dissentmagazine.org/article/nudging-towards-theocracy/

[6] Nudging Toward Theocracy.

[7] Nudging Toward Theocracy.

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

[9] Damon Linker.

[10] Stanley Hauerwas, “Ten years and counting: Christianity and the end of war,” ABC Religion and Ethics – https://www.abc.net.au/religion/ten-years-and-counting-christianity-and-the-end-of-war/10101158

[11] Nudging Toward Theocracy.

[12] Laura Field.

[13]‘Will the Real Sectarian Stand Up! ‘, Theology Today, 44/1 (April 1987), 87-94. p. 93. Cited in J. B. Thomson, `The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas as a Distinctively Christian Theology of Liberation (1970-2000)’  (PhD University of Nottingham, 2001), 88.

[14] The Peaceable Kingdom, 135.

[15] Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader, John Berman ad Michael Cartwright eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 124.

[16] The Peaceable Kingdom, 134.

[17]Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 47-48.

[18] Resident Aliens, 83.

[19] The Peaceable Kingdom, 107.

[20] The Peaceable Kingdom, 145.

[21] The Peaceable Kingdom, 94.

[22] The Peaceable Kingdom, 104.

Combating America’s Default Atheism and Worship of a Tribal Deity with William Desmond

Sixty years ago, Time Magazine captured the ethos of the day in raising the question on its cover, “Is God Dead?” Among a certain segment of society, represented by such figures as Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, the cry of Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman (“God is dead”), expressed the felt need to carry on the work of theology and philosophy without God. It was a time in the United States when secularism captured the mass imagination, in a sensibility William Desmond dubs “default atheism.” In default atheism there are atheistic presumptions that may or may not be fully conscious. While the new atheists gained a popular hearing, there has also been a shift toward religion in politics and in the public imagination, which might be characterized as a “default religion” which unwittingly takes up atheistic assumptions. God’s existence is not the issue, but his moral character reflected in Christ, tied to the ground of being. If the Hebrew Scriptures depict the contention between belief in a tribal God (one who commits genocide, killing the inhabitants of the land to make way for “his chosen people”) and a God who is good, we might have thought the issue was resolved in the Christian picture of the Father of Christ. The God revealed in Christ is universal, the very ground of being as overflowing goodness. Where God is too small, there is a metaphysical disconnect between God, the world, and human interiority, and this disconnect can function as a practical atheism. The question is, if something more insidious than atheism is now at work, perhaps a “default” notion of God more nihilistic in its outcomes than atheism?

Statistically there has not been much of a shift, but in a time when Christians seem to be supporting harsh immigration policies, open racism, and genocide in Gaza (in supporting the present administration) one might expect that there would be a mass moral outcry against detaining migrants in torturous crowded conditions, depriving them of medical care and disappearing them to other countries or within the prison archipelago, arresting children and separating them from their parents, killing women, children, and civilians in Iran and Gaza, and killing U.S. citizens in the streets. One might expect that an administration populated by devout Christians, would have within it a moral counter voice to the draconian policies.

The present administration is made up largely of devout Christians with J. D. Vance (Vice President), Marco Rubio (Secretary of State) Sean Duffy (Transportation Secretary) John Ratcliffe (CIA Director), Linda McMahon (Education Secretary), and Elise Stefanik (UN Ambassador) all devout Catholics. Jonathan Heaps notes in this mornings Commonweal Magazine, that the administration has added one of the nation’s most prominent Catholic intellectuals, Chad Pecknold of Catholic University of America, to serve as Principal Director for Cultural Outreach at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Pecknold is to be the voice of administrations policies, working in Homeland Security’s Office of Public Engagement. He will provide explanation for the policies implemented under former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem (now head of The Shield of the Americas) and her replacement Markwayne Mullin (both devout Pentecostals). Rather than a moral counter voice, these prominent Christians are literally the voice promoting the worst cruelties of this administration. Heaps points out that Pecknold, as a professor of CUA is under the authority of the church (serving on “a pontifical faculty accredited by the Holy See.”). As such, he “has been hired to continue to publicly promote the administration’s hyper-hawkish immigration aims, to continue to say things like ‘mass deportations may be a legitimate response to mass migration’” as he has argued in a policy paper.[1] It seems Pecknold will be in charge of justifying the “disappearing” and torture of immigrants and the “de-legalizing more than a million Black and brown refugees.” 

Pecknold is joining a strong lineup of deeply pious Protestant Christians such as Mike Huckabee (Ambassador to Israel and a Baptist Preacher), who stated in an interview that it would be “fine” if Israel took the land stretching from the Nile River to the Euphrates River (the “Greater Israel” promised in the Bible), which would include the eastern parts of Egypt, western and central parts of Iraq, all of Syria, all of Jordan, all of Lebanon, the northern part of Saudi Arabia, and of course all of Palestine the West Bank and Gaza. Huckabee has recently come out condemning Israeli settlers’ treatment of Palestinians, but as U.S. Ambassador he has supported the right to occupy these lands. He has carried out U.S. policy in support of Israel, and the genocidal actions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

We could go on to describe the piety of Russell Vought (Director of the Office of Management and Budget), who has weaponized Trump’s policies against States resistant to his powers (as an outspoken evangelical), or the deep religiosity of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has implemented a policy of “maximum lethality” in bombing Iran, in extra-judicial killings of occupants of boats on the Caribbean, and in ignoring international law in warfare, recklessly killing civilians. We could point to Trump’s own religious concerns in his appointment of Paula White-Cain who serves as a senior advisor leading the White House Faith Office, acting as primary spiritual advisor to the President. Trump’s spirituality may be the most marked characteristic of the pervading religious sensibility. His religion is indistinguishable from nihilism, and though Jesus and God and prayer provide window dressing, any serious notion of God, of Christian ethics, of human compassion or empathy, or of any resistance to secularism or atheism are indiscernible. Trump embodies a religion that has succeeded in emptying the world of Christian social concern. He probably could not articulate the world which foregrounds and determines his actions, but it is clearly lacking in serious recognition of the Father of Christ or of a Christian ground of being. 

The point is obvious, that the Christian religion, as understood and practiced by this administration, and perhaps the religion which garnered the vote to put this administration in office, is more insidious than atheism, in that it worships a God who either allows for or justifies evil. The practical atheism and nihilism of this faith is covered by a veneer of Christianity, but the default atheism of one generation now pervades and foregrounds the religion of this generation. This God is less intellectually viable than the non-existent God of atheism, more of a primitive tribal God, disconnected from the ontological ground of goodness fused to the world in Christ. Whether default atheism and secularism are responsible, or simply a malformed Christianity or both, it is obvious that the God behind America’s religious nationalism and popular ethos lacks the basic qualifications for serious belief.

Godlessness may have so bewitched a generation, that serious consideration of God among philosophers and even theologians, to say nothing of the popular imagination, now seems to elude the Christian majority. It is a fairly simple exercise to pose the moral teaching of Christ against the morality of this religion. Nonviolence, welcoming the stranger, God as love, taking up the cross, forsaking selfish egoism, abandoning greed, giving to the poor, forgiveness, the universal value of all God’s creation and all people, is the entry point into Christianity 101. This moral teaching of Christ and the New Testament does not enter into the cruel ethos promoted by this administration and its supporters. Finite purposes, immediate selfish needs, greed, patriotism, white nationalism, Zionism, racism, all serve the immanent realm and the religion either does not interfere or is made to support this closed moral consideration enchained by worldly concerns (a failed metaphysics and morality). What seems to have been lost with moral seriousness, is a seriousness about God, such that default atheism and default religion occupy the same space. It may be that the popular religion has simply inherited the presumptions of atheism, presuming either that God is totally immanent (identical with the world), or so transcendent so as to be unknowable and unknown or at least not interfering with the world (deism). Transcendence removed from immanence, or an immanence without transcendence, function equally well to preserve presumptions of human autonomy. No God, a non-interfering God, or the world as God, serve the same practices, but perhaps more to the point, none of these systems presume to penetrate beneath the world foregrounding practice.

There is a closure within the self, in Charles Taylor’s description. Religious and non-religious inhabit the same “immanent frame,” existing as “buffered subjects” having closed off the boundary between inside (thought) and outside (nature, the physical), living in a disenchanted world. “Living in a disenchanted world, the buffered self is no longer open, vulnerable to a world of spirits and forces which cross the boundaries of the mind, indeed, negate the very idea of there being a secure boundary . . .”[2] The immanent frame is a practical atheism, excluding the interpenetration of the world and human interiority from realization of the divine.

William Desmond, imagines that we can break out of the immanent frame which binds by a reworked metaphysical recognition. He counters this lost porosity with the idea that there should be a concerted effort to realize the porosity of being, to recognize there is an intersection with the divine in the immanent. To unblock the boundaries clogging porosity, he calls upon a philosophical and theological acknowledgement of being saturated, a “too muchness.” “The very identity of philosophy might itself have to be called into question — an identity to be reformulated perhaps in terms of a porosity of thinking to what exceeds its determination purely through thought’s own immanent resources.”[3] The signs of transcendence intersecting with immanence are in an over determinate being (the idiocy or givenness of the world), in the aesthetics or beauty of the world, in the very nature of human desire or erotics and in, what Desmond calls, an agapeic outpouring. He describes breaching the walls of default atheism through recognition that human existence is between the transcendent and immanent: “Within the between there are hyperboles of being which communicate more than the terms of immanence can circumscribe: pointers to ultimate transcendence as Other to the immanent between.”[4] He describes these hyperboles as throwing us above, pointing both beyond ourselves and the immediate world. In Christian terms, there is an intersection, in Christ, between the immanent and transcendent, which points to the metaphysical reality we inhabit. Desmond’s resolution to default atheism addresses the failures of a default religion with very similar presumptions.

First, there is givenness (an “idiocy of being”), the wonder that there is something rather than nothing. With Pascal, we realize that we exist between an infinite something and an absolute nothing hidden from man:

A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes; the end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy. Equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. What else can he do, then, but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end? All things come out of nothingness and are carried onwards to infinity. Who can follow these astonishing processes? The author of these wonders understands them no one else can.[5]

The wonder of existence described by Pascal was once readily available, but default religion systematically reduces everything, so as to rid us of being either frightened or exhilarated (enchanted) by the darkness or the light. “Man is a double being, and yet in him the extremities can touch each other. It is as if the extremities flash across the interim between and find their point of intensive condensation in us. There is nothing middling or mediocre about our being between.”[6] The Pascalian realization however, points to the existential divide which will soon follow, in which human interiority is a world closed within itself. Friedrich Nietzsche considered Pascal the only logical Christian, and is one of his heirs. At least Nietzsche’s atheism retained some of the possible wonder, but modern scientism and secularism would reduce all to a grey sameness. Pascal has hit upon the wonder of being, a metaphysical astonishment beyond finite determinations, which for Pascal, as a Christian, pointed directly to God.

Second, is the hyperbole of aesthetics: “The incarnate glory of aesthetic happening rouses astonishment and appreciation before finite being yet seems to exceed finitization.”[7] The world speaks of the glory of God, in excess of its finite possibilities, on the order of a great work of art. “The beauty of creation: integral being lovely for self, splendid immanence as a whole, yet not a closed but rather an open whole. The sublimity of creation: the beyond of aesthetic finitude shattering finitude in finitude and elevating it above itself.”[8] There is an over determinacy in divine goodness showing forth in the shining glory of the world. As the Psalmist declares, “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge” (Ps 19:1-2). “This cannot be just another finite intelligibility, since this is in question, but rather we are pointed to an intelligibility hyperbolic to finite intelligibility. The intelligibility that allows us to render the finite intelligible is not itself intelligible in fully finitizable terms.”[9] It is not just a matter of intelligent design, but what is beyond and provides for intelligence and the rational. “We are awakened to something inexhaustible about the good of being at all. There is something too much about this for us. We are secretly sustained by it, but being so intimate with it, participating in it, we cannot get a fix on it.”[10] Aesthetics (as well as ethics) is a call to a deeper, transcendent being, in the goodness of creation.

Third, there is the hyperbole of “erotics” in which human passion draws us toward the world and toward others, which witnesses to a deep porosity or relatedness, natural and integral to being human. “Indeed, the passion of our being (passio essendi) points to something deeper than just self- surpassing, since it witnesses to a more primal porosity to what exceeds us.”[11] Human passion and erotics continually pull us beyond the self as part of the self: “the erotics of human selving makes us a living incarnation of an aporia of finitude: a living impasse in finite being that cannot pass beyond itself as impasse through its own power alone, even when it seems to surpass itself infinitely.”[12] There is pleasure, delight, or an aesthetic potency made manifest in passion, in recognition or realization of the good. We experience this bodily, but this bodily satisfaction is not simply physical, but points to an ontological depth, the pure goodness of being. This goodness does not by-pass the senses, but in the biblical understanding, this truth is received through the senses. As in the Song of Solomon, the flame of Yahweh is burning in the erotic, directly joined to enjoyment of the divine. 

Fourth, in our relational identity, is the hyperbole of agapeics of community. “There is an ecstasis from fullness giving itself as well as from lack seeking itself in fullness, our being is in receiving and in giving. We are at all, in a primal ontological sense, by receiving our’ ‘to be’, by being received into being at all.”[13] This fourth way intersects with Desmond’s grounding notion of the metaxological or the between, in that this is the grounding reality of the the gift, of receiving ourselves. “There is a sign of this in the ontological situation of our finitude itself: we are given to be before we can give ourselves to be; finitude as such is given, but not given from itself alone.”[14] It puts the stress, not on self-mediation, but the mediation through a community beyond the self, beyond univocal sameness and even beyond dialectics. As he says, “It puts the emphasis on an intermediation, not a self-mediation, however dialectically qualified.”[15] This inter opens the space for God, for community, for otherness, and plurality, simultaneously showing forth the truth in the univocal, the equivocal and the dialectical, but setting these ways in a larger context (the metaxological). As Desmond concludes, “These hyperboles, and most ultimately the hyperbole of agapeic being, offer us the richest senses of the ‘to be’ in finitude that also speak of the ‘too muchness’, the overdeterminacy of being in which we participate in the between. Properly understood, they communicate signs of the overdeterminacy of God.”[16]

This overdeterminancy, I take to be the sign and message of Christ, who brings together the divine and human. While Desmond is working primarily in a philosophical register, with the aim of bringing philosophy alongside theology, perhaps this one step back from theology, in philosophy, provides the necessary interval to recognizing the overflowing goodness of God. On the other hand, his project rests upon his Christian faith, which does not always serve to overtly ground his description. This is not necessarily a defect, but apart from this open recognition, it could be presumed (which is definitely not his presumption) that philosophy, observation, metaphysics, are adequate, apart from recognition that ultimate insight flows from a Christian center. Where this connection is not made (e.g., Nietzsche reading Pascal), one wonders if his descriptions might be reversed. One could restate his project in the negative, and describe how it is that being caught between something and nothing can drain beauty, desire, and love out of the world, in a crushing nihilism. This is the existential possibility that Pascal introduces, which Nietzsche develops, and which a default atheism presumes.

It seems it is this existential nihilism, the crack unfilled by a metaxological spirituality, that has a grip on American Christianity. With Slavoj Žižek, we might focus on the dis-ease of the discord and assume it points to a final lack, or with Desmond, we might see the gap as a “godsend” which points to the overflow of reality, but it is the same crack (letting in the darkness and the light) opened in the modern frame. In the “crack” there is a mystery which speaks of excess, which the theologian recognizes as Logos. The God/man certainly makes a moral demand, but this moral demand is grounded in the intersection of time and eternity, immanence and transcendence, heaven and earth, and divine and human in His person – he opens up the metaxological reality Desmond describes. Christ relieves us of the Big Other of the transgressive law, the crushing transcendence, whether in the form of Nietzschean atheism or a demonic theism. Desmond, in spite of his reticence, is a key aid in extrapolating from Christ, to break down the suffocating walls of default atheism, the immanent frame, which has captured the American religious ethos.

[1] Jonathan Heaps, “Chad Pecknold’s New Job” in Commonweal (September 15, 2026).

[2] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 300-301

[3] William Desmond, “On God and the Between, in Between philosophy and Theolog:Ccontemporary Interpretations of Christianity (Routledge, 2019),101.

[4] On God and the Between, 118.

[5] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, translated with an introduction by A.J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1966), 90. Cited in On God and the Between, 110.

[6] On God and the Between, 110.

[7] On God and the Between, 120.

[8] On God and the Between, 120.

[9] On God and the Between, 120.

[10] William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001) 66. Chapter 6 is entitled “Potencies of the Ethical: On the Sources of Being Good.”

[11] On God and the Between, 120.

[12] On God and the Between, 121.

[13] On God and the Between, 121.

[14] On God and the Between, 121.

[15] William Desmond, “The Fourfold Way” in The William Desmond Reader (State University of New York Press, Kindle Edition) location 295.

[16] On God and the Between, 121.

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth

The possibility of a madman having his finger on the nuclear button is our reality: one who would happily despoil the planet for economic gain, support genocide to build a resort, threaten the extinction of a civilization, beginning with the slaughter of children, and one who has threatened nuclear retaliation, asking repeatedly, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” – the mad possibility is now reality. What this madness exposes is the contradiction of destroying the world to possess it, and the singular solution. It is oxymoronic to say peace alone will save, but it should be obvious (and apparently is not) that nonviolence, nonviolence toward the Earth and its inhabitants (which cannot be separated in this nuclear age), is the only hope for human survival. As Martin Luther King said, “The choice before us is no longer violence or nonviolence. It’s nonviolence or non-existence.” The extinction of everything and personal extinction may be equally difficult to grasp but contained in facing this possibility is the singular solution. The meek will inherit the Earth because peace (meekness) is the means of obtaining land, gaining an inheritance, making a civilization, building a city, establishing life, creating the world, and this enfolds the human with the Earth, in a singular destiny – at least this is the story of the Bible summed up in Christ.

Violence and Meekness as Opposed Means of Inheriting the Earth

The Bible pictures the alternatives in a tight axis, spilled blood pollutes the land, while those who “humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways,” will find forgiveness and their land will be healed (2 Ch 7:14). People who do not recognize God pollute the land with violence, so true possession is making the land a fit habitation (for God) through nonviolence: “So you shall not pollute the land in which you are; for blood pollutes the land and no expiation can be made for the land for the blood that is shed on it . . . You shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell; for I the LORD am dwelling in the midst of the sons of Israel” (Nu 35:33–34). Cycles of war and revenge destroy human habitation, and God’s presence and inheritance of the land are synonymous with forsaking bloodshed. The Psalmist ties shedding of blood and pollution to idolatry: “they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan; and the land was polluted with the blood” (Ps 106:38). Ezekiel also describes a land polluted by false sacrifice (Ezekiel 36:18) and Isaiah promises the Earth “will disclose the blood shed on it and will no longer conceal its slain” (Isaiah 26:21). As God told Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Gen 4:10).

Innocent blood, crying from the ground is answered, not through the vengeance of Cain or the multiplied vengeance of Lamech, but through Christ: “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel” (Heb 12:22–24). The place names, “Mount Zion,” “the City of the Living God,” “the heavenly Jerusalem,” “the church,” are synonymous with the “righteous made perfect,” as they are cleansed by the one giving voice to all innocent slain victims.

Those who would inherit the Earth through violence are cursed as their land is cursed, due to their bloodshed, however the Bible poses the opposite possibility: “But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace” (Ps 37:11). In the beatitudes Jesus sums up the divine plan for Earth’s inheritance, for ultimate satisfaction, for seeing God, for attaining peace: “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Mt 5:5–9). Seeing God, being peaceful and merciful, being peacemakers, and inheriting the Earth as God’s children, are a singular realization. The Bible is bookended in Genesis and Revelation with God’s presence in a peaceful garden city, an Edenic sacred place, in which healing and the earthly inheritance are realized, not through violent conquest but through recognition of the victim. This means of inheritance is the story, summed up in Jesus.

True Israel Recognizes God in the Victim

It is to people that are not a people, without a distinctive genealogy, or a distinctive place, to whom God reveals his name and will become a name in which they can dwell. As Anthony Bartlett notes, it is one of the great ironies of the Bible story: “a people and a meaning based in escape from an oppressive king and his state apparatus turn to exactly those political features in order to maintain themselves.”[1] The Hebrews would possess and maintain the land through violence, and yet there is a competing means and understanding of God throughout.

If we read the conquest of Canaan as God’s participation in genocide, and leave aside the counternarrative, necessary to reading the story through Christ, we are left with a contradiction, but if we recognize the identity of God is under contention (in the two methods), we catch the story resolved in Christ. The true name of Jacob unfolds directly when Jacob sees the face of God in the victim he has pinned. He obtains his identity as Israel, in recognizing God in the face of his losing opponent: “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved” (Gen 32:30). Seeing God’s face in his victim is the preservation of his life, and thus he is dubbed Israel (“he who struggles with God,” Gen 32:28). The character of God is under contention, and it is rightly reflected in the face of Jacob’s pinned opponent. Immediately after, Jacob says to Esau, “I see your face as one sees the face of God, and you have received me favorably” (Gen 33:10). Jacob is metaphorically pinned, and Esau now bears the divine visage, precisely because Jacob recognizes in his brother the loving mercy he found in his visitor the previous night. The promise is given by Zechariah of a form of deliverance for which there was long preparation: “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,’ says the LORD of hosts” (Zech. 4:6). After being shaped as a people and then destroyed the original possibility presents itself: “Behold, your king is coming to you; He is just and endowed with salvation, humble, and mounted on a donkey, even on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zech. 9:9).

What is under contention in the Hebrew Scriptures is how to be a people, how to inherit the land, and this is tied up with the identity of God. The resolution is to turn once again to the outcaste, the one pinned to a cross: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col. 1:15). As Anthony Bartlett concludes, “the God whom Israel is in relationship with is a God who does not win by violent means, who in fact loses – and needs “a man” to signify as much![2] The pattern is thematic in Scripture, with Jacob, Esau, Joseph, Job, and Jesus (see here).

The Originary Peace of Creation Extended through the Garden

Genesis begins with a nonviolent creation (over and against typical creation myths), perhaps as part of an understanding worked out in both Genesis and Exodus. There is an originary peace, which explains the garden or the Earth as the shared dwelling of God and humans. John Walton describes the creation story in terms of a temple dedication ceremony, in which the cosmos itself is the resting place for God, reading the six days of creation through the lens of the seventh day. “The temple was made functional in a typically seven-day dedication ceremony” in which “the functions of the temple were initiated, the functionaries installed, and then, on the seventh day, the symbol that represented the deity was brought in and placed in the central room of the temple.” The seventh day is key, “Only then could the temple begin functioning as it was designed to do.”[3] Creation as temple construction is not aimed at describing how but why or for what purpose creation was brought into being. The seventh day as interpretive key for the previous six means that Genesis is not so much concerned to provide a history of material origins as it is to provide an understanding of the theological purpose of the cosmos, which is captured in the image of God’s dwelling come to Earth.

Adamah, or the one of the earth, is appointed caretaker over that from which he is taken (the earth into which God breathed). The earthly garden is the place God meets the humans, and this place is reduplicated in the temple, which is at once a representation of the garden and of Earth, made a fit dwelling for God. When Jesus comes to the temple in Jerusalem, the garden expansion comes to include the whole Earth, as he identifies himself as true temple, the earthly dwelling reconstituted with God’s earthly presence extended to all. Paul consistently pictures salvation under the rubric of new creation, bringing about a universal inheritance, fulfilling the promise to Abraham (Rom 4). This is for all people everywhere: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself” (2 Cor 5:19), as “creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay” to “obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). This is all inclusive, so as “to reconcile all things unto Himself — by Him, I say, whether they be things on earth or things in heaven” (Col 1:20).

In Revelation the heavenly Jerusalem descends from heaven to Earth, not to destroy the world, but to remake it or complete it (Rev 21-22). The Bible begins and ends with the world constituted as a temple. The biblical story is not one of souls departing Earth for heaven, but of heaven coming to Earth and being made a fit dwelling for God. Earth (adamah) come alive with God’s breath, is ultimately breathed into by God coming to Earth (in the divine adamah, the second Adam), through whom he pours out his Spirit on the world. The prediction of Isaiah, picturing the Earth as the Lord’s Temple is fulfilled: “The mountain of the Lord’s dwelling shall be established atop all mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills and all nations shall flow unto it” (Is 2:2). The Lord’s dwelling place with man brings about an all-inclusive extension of Eden: “Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Rev 22:1–2). Restoration of mankind, to and through Eden, is a life-giving identification between Earth and God. “Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter by the gates into the city” (Rev 22:14). Citizenship in this city, in this place, is salvation. The tie between inheriting the Earth through nonviolence and the presence and identity of God, are a saving integration.

The Nonviolent Will Inherit the Earth

Jesus is the true Jacob, the true Joshua, in whom the inheritance of Israel is not a piece of land in the Middle East, but the Earth and its people and all that it contains. This is not a diminishment or displacement of Israel, but an expanded understanding and obviously a reworked method of obtaining the land, combined with a revised understanding of God. Killing Palestinians is no more in God’s plan than Esau killing Jacob (rather than being the merciful face of God). The land is not gained, the Earth is not inherited, by military conquest, and the divine kingdom is not established by might, but by a cross (the ultimate meekness). It may be that Israel is behind the attack on Iran, and we know the genocide in Gaza is possible only under support of American presidents, dedicated to serving the expansion of Israel. The sad note is that it is often Christians who confuse this violent expansion with God’s method and with true Israel, supporting this policy which stands opposed to the peace of the Gospel, presuming that slaughtering the meek is the means to inherit the Earth.

[1] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Nonviolence (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022),  15.

[2] Bartlett, 35.

[3] John Walton, “Creation in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the Ancient Near East: Order out of Disorder after Chaoskampf” in Calvin Theological Journal (CT/43 (2008): 48-63).