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The Greek Logos Versus Jesus as Logos: Anthony Bartlett’s Completion of the Girardian Philosophical Project

It is not simply that Christ offers a new meaning, built on the same foundation as human religion, philosophy, or culture. There is the exposure of the violent origins of human language (e.g., as in the history of the Greek logos) and the setting forth of a peaceable alternative (Christ as Logos). The thinker who brings this out most concretely is René Girard, but the contemporary thinker who has completed the work of Girard, in his philosophical implications and expression, is Anthony Bartlett. Bartlett (who is now teaching a class with Ploughshares Bible Institute) tells the story of presenting his findings in a seminar, in which Girard was in attendance. Girard responded after the presentation, “Very impressive,” but immediately left. His singular genius in textual hermeneutics, seemingly left him uncomfortable to engage in discussion of its philosophical implications.[1] Bartlett however, through a close reading of Martin Heidegger (who plays the role of summing up the Western philosophical tradition and who fails in his attempt to escape metaphysics and violence) picks up where Girard left off.  

Why Heidegger Fails to Discern the Johannine Logos

Girard notes both Heidegger’s tracing of the Greek logos into an originary violence and its contrast with the Johannine Logos, but Heidegger does not draw out this difference as violence opposed to nonviolence but as a difference of violence. According to Girard, “Heidegger obviously means there to be a difference between the violence of the Greek Logos and the violence he attributes to the Johannine Logos. He sees the former as a violence committed by free men, while the second is a violence visited upon slaves.”[2] It is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role (“the violence visited upon slaves”) 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.”[3] In the end, according to Girard’s reading of Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition (the original development of the Greek logos).

There is an incapacity to distinguish, and thus the Christian understanding is relegated to a continuation of Greek thought, but 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.”[4] The incapacity to discern and apply the peace of Christ, as shown in Heidegger and the Western tradition, is pervasive.

Part of this incapacity is explained by Heidegger’s starting point in Being and Time, which is a philosophical articulation of the sense that things are the way they are, and this reality is the necessity within which we work. The primary thing is that man speaks or dwells in language, which does not mean Heidegger’s goal is an intellectual or propositional explanation. “Being there” (Dasein) is the given presupposition and determination, such that one can “take a look” at the meaning of Being, but the point is not to arrive at some “axiom from which a sequence of propositions is deductively derived. It is quite impossible for there to be any ‘circular argument’ in formulating the question about the meaning of Being; for in answering this question, the issue is not one of grounding something by such a derivation; it is rather one of laying bare the grounds for it and exhibiting them.”[5]

As Heidegger puts it elsewhere, “Language speaks”[6] and so too the ground of Being reveals, but there is no penetrating this fact. Rather, what is shown in language is a “relatedness backward or forward”[7] and the question is to spell out the nature of this relatedness. “The speech of mortals rests in its relation to the speaking of language.”[8] The capacity for difference is drawn together in language. “Man speaks in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing.”[9] He finds himself in language, and this is the primary fact about him, which cannot be penetrated but must be allowed to make itself manifest. (Thus poetry is the truest and highest art form, in that it allows language to speak.) Human speech locates Dasein not so much in what is said but in the speaking, in the relatedness to language. Heidegger reifies language as the essential relation shaping human reality and he does not presume to go beneath or above this speaking.

Thus, Heidegger presumes Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek thinker who first develops the history of logos, in his view that “war is the father of all,” has hit upon the origin of logos. Referencing Heraclitus he concludes, violence (German, Gewalt) or war (Polemos) is synonymous with the logos; it is the transformative and creative center. “Confrontation” is the “sire” of all that comes to presence. The gods, humans, slaves and free, arise through “strife” (polemos), as this opposition is what first allows hierarchy, status, discreteness, intervals, and distances. “Confrontation does not divide unity, much less destroy it. It builds unity; it is the gathering (logos). Polemos and logos are the same.”[10] As he says later, “Who the human being is, according to the word of Heraclitus, first comes forth (edeixe, shows itself) in the polemos, in the disjunction of gods and human beings, in the happening of the irruption of Being itself.”[11] Heidegger locates entry into Dasein with “deinon,” designating one who is “violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein.”[12] Heidegger, who fully embraced and never repudiated the Nazi project, sees violence as the creative center from which meaning arises.

In short, humans come into being (Dasein) through the violence of logos. Heidegger locates essential being (phusis) in logos, and raises the question as to how this unfolds into being. “Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming.”[13] The human comes into being as what is distinguishable (out of the indistinguishable) through the emergence of opposition in logos, which brings one thing into presence against the other.[14] Logos is this gathering together, the original differentiating, which marks Dasein.

The Differentiation Proposed by Girard

Heidegger recognized and commended the inherent violence of the logos and of Western thought,while for Girard human meaning has violent, irrational, origins in the scapegoat mechanism but Christ poses an alternative meaning system escaping violent origins. Girard agrees with Heidegger in his focus on myth, his picture of an originary human violence, and the presumption that language, writing, or the oracular contains a hidden truth. Heidegger is right about something concealed in language but the “un-concealing” is only possible through the revelation of Christ: “I propose that if today we are capable of breaking down and analyzing cultural mechanisms, it is because of the indirect and unperceived but formidably constraining influence of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.”[15]

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.”[16] 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.”[17] 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.”[18] 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’s Completion of Girard

As Bartlett notes, the gospel consists of transformative news delivered in simile and figures of speech: “Christian faith depends on the popular use of words, with their built-in potential for metonym, allusion and suggestion, rather than strict conceptual-propositional agreement.”[19] According to John “these [signs] are written in order that you may believe” (John 20:30–31), suggesting “it is the overall writing of Jesus’ deeds and teaching that makes the effective gospel.”[20] There is an immediate identity of signs and mental activity (appreciated in Western or Latin study of signs), but what is missed is the identity of Christ as Logos, completely differentiated from the Greek logos.

Jesus Christ, not the slain scapegoat, is the “true transcendental signifier,” the generator of a peaceable order of meaning. In the Logos of Christ there is a defeat of the violence structuring the world, and this involves a “semiotic struggle, comprising stories, law, prophecy, poetry and, last of all, the singular fact and figure of the cross.”[21] This one rejected by men “must always have itself expelled from a world that cannot be its own.”[22] This is the error on which Jewish thought and the whole of Western thought is founded: Jews who believed “they could keep Yahweh in the Temple” or capture Him in the Law, or Christians who imagine there must be sacrifice and at least one scapegoat (necessary violence).

In Bartlett’s summary, “Another way of saying this is that the logos of Christianity is non-violent, is non-violence itself, and will never retaliate. It is precisely by being ‘driven out’ that it reveals itself: a paradoxical, subversive, world-overturning revelation amounting not to the continually misrecognized double valence of the human good, but to a generative new human meaning.”[23]  The Christian Logos not only overturns myth but subverts the ground of Western metaphysics and thought. Christian truth is not to be set along side other truth systems but is singular and overturns the tables of human religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. (In this the project of the poststructuralists, such as Heidegger and Derrida, is brought to completion in the exposure and overturning of the violent metaphysic at the root of human meaning.)

The deep existential choice, posed by Heidegger (summing up the Greek religious and philosophical tradition) and Girard (summing up the Christian exposure of this tradition and offering an alternative) is between a violent and a non-violent (peaceable) organizing center for human existence. As Bartlett emphasized in his lecture, this shift requires total commitment: “You have to go to the heart of it – this is the idea of going to the desert, of changing your life the way Paul changed his, of really taking this thing to heart, because everything is at stake.” Violence is the organizing principle of human civilization, and the empty tomb is a “cataclysmic shock” that provides “no real resolution yet” – “just the radical deconstruction of all familiar structures.” Heidegger retreated into Naziism and Girard did not arrive at total nonviolence, toward which his work pointed. The legacy of the Christian logos is hard to take, hard to assimilate as a way of being human. The vast majority of people, including great thinkers, shrink back from the radical implications of choosing the non-violent path, because it requires nothing less than a complete transformation of how we understand human existence and meaning-making.24

[1] This is too brief and inadequate of a summing up but this is my feeble attempt to capture some of the profound significance Anthony Bartlett is setting forth. His work deserves a wide exposure and I hope this class is the beginning of a wider and much deserved recognition.

[2]René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 266.

[3] Things Hidden, 265.

[4] Things Hidden, 271.

[5] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 28

[6] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans., Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 207

[7] Being and Time, 28.

[8] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 206.

[9] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 207.

[10] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 65.

[11] Metaphysics, 149.

[12] Metaphysics, 160

[13] Metaphysics, 160.

[14] Metaphysics, 132.

[15] Things Hidden, 138.

[16] Things Hidden, 275.

[17] Things Hidden, 275.

[18] Things Hidden, 276.

[19] Anthony Bartlett, “Theology and Catastrophe A (Girardian) Semiotics of Re-Humanization,” (Forum Philosophicum 23 (2018) no. 2, 171–188 ISSN 1426-1898) 178.

[20] Theology and Catastrophe, 178

[21] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.

[22] Things Hidden, 272.

[23] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.

[24] Thank you Jim for the notes.

Girardian Evolution of Language and the Semiotic Shift with Christ

Religions focused on death, by sheer quantity, point to René Girard’s claim that significance or making signs begins with death and killing (the scapegoated victim). Ancestor worship from ancient Egypt, in African traditional religions and in modern Japan, and the veneration of the dead in Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism, or the Mexican Day of the Dead, all point to the primacy of death. A new world unfolds from the body of the victim, as is graphically displayed in religious myth. The violence between Marduk and Tiamat in the Babylonian Creation Epic (Enuma Elish) results in the body (the canopy of the heavens) and blood of the god Tiamat (slain by Marduk) providing the raw material for the created order. In Norse creation, the giant Ymir is slain by Odin and his brothers and his body becomes the earth, his blood the seas, and his bones the mountains. In Aztec myth, Quetzalcoatl, and his trickster brother, Tezcatlipoca, tore a goddess (or god in some accounts) Tlaltecuhtli in half to make a new heaven and Earth and from the divine body sprouted everything that was necessary for the life of human beings. In Hindu mythology, the Rigveda describes the cosmic being Purusha, whose sacrifice leads to the creation of the universe and all living beings from his body parts. In African mythology, the Dogon people believe that the god Amma created the world from his own body, emphasizing the interconnectedness of life and the cosmos. In other myths there may not be as direct a connection, but as in the Japanese myth the death of Izanami precedes and indirectly is connected with the creation of the Japanese Islands. A world of meaning arises in these myths through the dead body of the god.

Girard explains the rise of the sign as directly connected to the cadaver of the victim: “The origin of symbolic thought lies in the mechanism of the surrogate victim . . . It is a fundamental instance of ‘arbitration’ that gives rise to the dual presence of the arbitrary and true in all symbolic systems . . . To refer to the origin of symbolic thought is to speak as well of the origin of language.”[1] The symbol of the sacrificial victim, carrying the guilt and violence of the community, gives rise to the first sign and entry into language: “there is the cadaver of the collective victim and this cadaver constitutes the first object for this new type of consciousness.”[2] The crisis of all out violence and then the resolution in the victim, Girard speculates, brings on the evolutionary leap into language: “As weak as it might be, the ‘consciousness’ the participants have of the victim is linked structurally to the prodigious effects produced by its passage from life to death, by the spectacular and liberating reversal that has occurred at that instant . . .”[3] Around the cadaver, perhaps connected with a cry or meaningful utterance in death, there arises the linguistic ordering of the world: male and female, inside and outside, and good and evil. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly the myth points to the reality of a murder in which the victim is the “transcendental signifier” constituting meaning and from which all potential meaning will arise.

Girard provides a key to the bizarre and otherwise mystical religious myths. They are not reasonable but they give rise to a peculiar order of reason. Reconciliation, community, and communication arise through the original and ritually repeated act. Out of chaos and murder there arises a system of order, held together by signs, grounded, not in some arbitrary arrangement but in warding off violence through the very possibility of signification given in the scapegoated victim. Language has its roots, according to this view, in the possibility of peace through violence, the possibility of inside through casting out, the possibility of friend and family through enemy and stranger. There is an explanation of the binaries in the act from which they are generated. 

But doesn’t this originary violence paint a dark picture of the evolution of the species, as it requires violent death and the worst forms of evil (e.g., scapegoating, discrimination, murder, victimization)? Though Girard is a Christian with a deep belief in the primacy of revelation, he reinterprets the biblical story of the fall through originary violence on a human scale. Does it really matter though, that what comes first is not binaries and opposition (as in structuralism), but a transcendental signified, if this signified is a murdered cadaver? There may be no immediate answer to this question, but the reality of human violence structuring meaning is not speculation, faced as we are with the pervasive reality of violence and evil, but in the Girardian system the darkness is not only offset by Christ but transformed. Meaning is at first grounded in the reality of violence, pointing to the violence which Christ endured, but the teaching of Christ and the work of Christ, displace and transform human systems of meaning, grounding them in a divine order.

This is a move beyond both the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, in that Girard “grounds” signs in the scapegoating mechanism. Structuralism does away with metaphysics as ground and in its anthropological version (developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss) culture is unmoored from metaphysics. According to Anthony Bartlett, culture is set “adrift on a sea of purely semiotic relationships, that is, a kind of language; and, yes, this language was as mobile and uncertain as the sea itself.”[4] The incest taboo for Lévi-Strauss is simply an ordering and arbitrary construct, but Girard points to its prevention of revenge and violence among fathers, brothers and uncles, fighting over daughters, sisters, mothers, and nieces.

Girard grounds symbolic meaning or language in empirical realities of foundational violence. Meaning is embodied, literally and historically. Signs are not simply an endless interplay with other signs, with meaning fabricated in différance (deferral, opposites, sameness and difference), but the original sign or the transcendental signified is the scapegoat victim. If there is no transcendent or stable meaning (no grounded meaning), then there is no representation of reality or “truth” but only the sign system (the point of deconstruction and poststructuralism). The Girardian system escapes the arbitrariness of an endlessly circulating system of signs, existing only in human consciousness, but it is not that Girard directly rescues truth.

As Bartlett points out, “none of this demonstrates anything real.”[5] The sacred cadaver, or the deified victim – the god, is a necessary fiction falsifying murder and hiding the destructive and cathartic role of violence. “It is a falsification of a real event which, in today’s terms, boils down simply to group murder and a kind of misrecognized foundational PTSD implanted in the collective hominid brain.”[6] The victim, after all, is arbitrary and his significance is false (e.g., he is not the singular cause of trouble) but Girard points to how significance may have evolved through blood and murder. “Girard offers a scientific demonstration of how meaning comes about, how something acts as a transcendental signifier, but not that it really is so, that there is metaphysical truth”[7] but there is the possibility for truth and uncovering truth.

There is the creation of a sign system, a reserve of meaning with a false significance. The tomb and death, grounding the system, refer to a pure absence and nothingness. Death is not restorative and the magic of the scapegoat depends upon a lie. Scapegoating is historically real, following the contours of mimetic desire, rivalry, and violence – so it comes through a certain reality, but it obscures this reality in human consciousness. If it is binaries and linguistic structures all the way down, then there is no intersection with reality and no ground, nor truth (though the transcendental signified of the scapegoat is hardly the “truth”). There is the recognition in Girard of a historical reality and a metaphysic, false though it is. He recognizes the binary function of meaning, but does not presume this alone contains meaning but offers an order of meaning grounded in the realities of human relationships and community. He explains the rise of religious meaning in the scapegoating mechanism as the source of meaning per se, but this false meaning is best understood, according to Girard, against the background of biblical revelation. That is false religion or failed religion provides the context for what is happening in the revelation of Christ.

The body of Christ symbolically presented in the Lord’s Supper is the first instance of a meaning system arising from the living body. He breaks bread symbolizing his body, and offers the cup symbolizing his blood (both before and after his death), with the promise of a new order of significance, not in the reification of the cadaver but in the living body of the crucified and living Lord. Christ reveals the workings of the scapegoating he undergoes, but also establishes a reordering of all meaning and Truth around himself.

Christ takes over the meaning fostered by religion in the same way he gives meaning to the law, the temple and indicated in the original Passover. Christ casts truth backward as well as forward, showing how it is that in him death would Passover, and the covenant with death would be broken. As John Behr writes, “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it.”[8] Throughout, Christ is duplicating and fulfilling or giving final meaning to the history of Israel, which would otherwise have no clear reference. The Exodus of Israel and the original Pascha (or Passover) is the type of the true Passion of Christ (Christ is the true Passover Lamb). The tabernacle and temple are grounded in the reality of Christ as true temple. Moses warded off the deadly snakes in the wilderness but this event finds its true meaning in Christ: “Just as Moses raised the snake in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, so that those who believe in Him may have eternal life” (John 3:14). The true bread from heaven (John 6:41–42), the heavenly King and Truth (John 18:36–38), and the true prophet (John 7:47–52), resonate with and complete the prior understanding of the Scriptures.

According to  Behr, “the antinomies of the old creation (male/female, slave/free, Jew/Gentile—circumcised/uncircumcised) are now done away with, as belonging to a different era; with the revelation of Christ, the world is structured anew, indeed is a ‘new creation’, with its own antinomies—the Spirit and the flesh—resolved and brought together in Christ, the Church, and the Israel of God.”[9] In the words of Bartlett, “there is implied a Christian signifier at work in the world: its truth arrives like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky.”[10] As Girard writes, “What [Christ] brings us cannot come from human beings, and therefore can only come from God . . . the thought that underpins the Gospels must stem from a reason more powerful than our own.”[11] The meaning and reason of Christ transforms human meaning, grounding it not in violence, but in the divine peace that defeats and displaces violence.

Girard provides a deep technical explanation of Christ’s “regenerative semiotics.” “It is from within the biblical system of signs that truth is found, by reason of the quality of the semiotic reversal itself.”[12] “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him” (Jn 1:18). Christ, the innocent scapegoat, reveals the truth of victimhood and God, generating a new significance, not grounded in violence but in an originary peace and self-giving love.

[1] René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Translated by Patrick Gregory ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 235. Cited in Anthony Bartlett, Theology Beyond Metaphysics: Transformative Semiotics of René Girard (p. 36). Cascade Books. Kindle Edition.

[2] René Girard, et al., Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Translated by Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987) 99-100. Cited in Bartlet, 39.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bartlett, 35.

[5] Bartlett, 46.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Bartlett, 41-42.

[8] John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology: The Way to Nicaea, Vol. 1, (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 27-28.

[9] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 116. Behr is referencing Louis Martyn, ‘Apocalyptic Antinomies’.

[10] Bartlett, 47.

[11] René Girard, When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer. Translated by Trevor Cribben Merrill. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014) 92-93. Cited in Bartlett, 48.

[12] Bartlett, 48.

Forgiveness 

This is a guest blog by Brad Klingele

A dear friend, suffering in a protracted conflict says to me  “I have my story of what is happening, they have their story, and neither story is the real story.” Jesus’ observation that my friend is not far from the Kingdom whispered to my soul.

The end is like the beginning, as Nyssa says. In Christ all of creation will be reconciled to God, such that God will be All in All. We will be reconciled to each other and divinized, participating in the self-gift of the Trinity. Jesus’s life shows us that we are the ones who are violent, and we project our violence onto God and onto others. We live by “the law” when we defend our false self image and an image of a false, retributive and therefore violent God by inflicting death on others. 

Jesus shows us that God is not like this; He comes and predicts that we will murder Him, that we are all murderers from the beginning, and that we try to preserve life by inflicting death on others (John 8). We live by a “law” of violence. We set up rules to live by, and we live by seeking to preserve our sense of self and our very lives in and through protecting our lives and self-image by using violence and preventing a true self-understanding of ourselves as hopelessly caught up in a world-view in which we must use violence to prevent death and prevent seeing ourselves as caught up in this culture, this way of being. Jesus’ life  reveals that from the beginning it is not the case that God is violent, rather, He is forgiveness. 

Jesus refuses to use violence to protect Himself, revealing that God is nonviolent, for when we see Jesus, we see the Father. If we are to become God, we are to live by recognizing that God forgives us and invites us into accepting death and suffering. Death and suffering are not the problem; living by violence and living by an image of God as violent is the problem. God is forgiveness and peace. We needn’t fear death or suffering because God will raise us up when we accept His life and enter into accepting death. In this acceptance, we trust that God forgives us all, and will forgive us all. 

If we want to live a life that is a participation in the forgiving, non-violent God, we too must live by forgiving each other and returning peace instead of violence. We may not withhold forgiveness, we may not return violence, for we are to be the ongoing reconciliation of God and the world by accepting our brokenness, our violence, and enact a different culture, a way of being, that is Divine.

Labelling people who harm us as bad, or as evil, is normally seen as the prerequisite for forgiving; why would we forgive if we had not been harmed? 

It is hard to forgive other people. It is in fact very dangerous; Jesus forgave sins, and people knew that this was a claim to be God. Only God can forgive sins. There are hidden impediments to forgiving that are not normally understood in the literature on forgiveness.

Forgiving others does preserve ourselves from the ravages of anger that injures us. Stanley Hauerwas,  in his Princeton lectures emphasizes that it is much, much harder to be forgiven than to forgive. Rene Girard reveals why this is the case. 

Girard helps us to read, through the Scriptures, that since the dawn of the evolution of becoming human (hominization), we are participants in a reality in which we hide our violence from ourselves and project it onto others and, ultimately, God. 

Before the Gospel, I couldn’t look at my faults because it was too scary and also because at some level surely God hated me. Accepting forgiveness requires feeling accepted and loved in and with many faults. Real love is capable of seeing faults and assuming the best and fully accepting the person as they are; in this unconditional acceptance of myself as broken, we can allow Christ to transform us because we can look at our faults while knowing that our value lies in being loved; we are not loved by God because we are good, we are good because God loves us. 

Forgiveness requires acknowledging that I am blind to the ways I hurt other people. If I can see that I am blind, maybe I can forgive others for their blindness when they hurt me. I am grateful for friends who explain, right away, the ways I hurt them. It is only because they love and like me that I can hear how I hurt them without just despairing. It’s only in love that I can accept my faults. But it still is so painful, to see the seemingly intractable patterns I have of hurting people. 

For most of us, however sophisticated our articulation, we have a kind of first pass Christianity, or Sauline Christianity, meaning Saul before he became Paul.  I have broken a moral norm and I must be forgiven. I am saved insofar as I trust Jesus to forgive the transgression and confess breaking this norm and then follow the norm. Once I or anyone recognizes that they ought to follow the norms and believe the right thing, one is safe. This safety usually extends to “I won’t be harmed” by the results of my breaking of a moral norm; I will have a life that is less troubled. We tend to imagine that the troubles we face are usually due to breaking of a moral norm. And so once I find myself following the moral norms, and someone breaks a moral norm and injures me, I see myself as injured, as righteous, and the other as a worse person than I am. Their injury to me ends up reinforcing my sense of being righteous, and I come to rely on the unrighteousness of others in order to reinforce my righteousness. At a subconscious level, we are seeking safety, a self-image as good, so that we are safe from God and feel good about ourselves, and safe from hell and the consequences of an immoral life. Jesus pokes fun at this with the prayer of the Pharisee vs the Plebian, the woman caught in adultery, and emphasizing the righteousness of prostitutes as distinct from religious leaders.  

This makes nonsense of course, of the cross and incarnation as a mere second-chance, or even infinite chance schema and does little to acknowledge the radicality of Jesus; it makes the following of  norms the primary reality and God’s forgiveness the secondary reality, as James Alison articulates in The Joy of Being Wrong. St. Paul makes fun of this notion in the first section of Romans, but alas, as Douglas Campbell points out, we have lost the context and read it not as a first century Colbert Report sendup, but as an earnest condemnation of those who break moral norms.

We fear death, alienation, poverty, suffering, and violence. We seek security through power, position, prestige, money, and a deontic “objective” truth bereft of the category of relationship. When we ground our identity in these idols we live by “the law.” 

When we live by a concept in which belief in Jesus is essentially following the rules, we derive our security and sense of self from whether or not we are successful in following these rules. We necessarily blind ourselves to self-knowledge because any discovery of rule-breaking is a threat to who we think we are. We become our own saviors because we must succeed in following the rules and we must believe the right thing.

When others cause injury, we see them as outsiders and ourselves as insiders. And so we must compound our self-identity by setting boundaries in which those who have broken the rules are bad, while I, who live righteously, am good. Jesus punctures this when He says “no one is good but God alone.”

In this schema, we necessarily place others on the outside and ourselves on the inside in order to feel secure. As Paul says, who will free us from this prison?!

How do we learn the real story we are living in? Jordan Daniel Wood, explaining Maximus the Confessor’s theory of sin, explains that sin means that we pour our lives into something that is not real, because we don’t understand ourselves or God, and so we create a false incarnation. Freeing ourselves of the false self, as Thomas Keating calls it, is, according to Nyssa, like cauterizing a wart; the condition of the skin is not its true condition, and gaining true skin is painful. We think we are losing our very self, but it isn’t who we are. This is why sin is so painful; God is simply giving us our true self, but it feels like we are losing ourselves, it feels like punishment. It is not punishment but healing. Elsewhere, Wood explains that Origen tells us that God does in fact fulfill His promise in Jonah to destroy Nineveh, but in doing so He saves. God destroys what is false in order to restore Nineveh by restoring it to its true self. Jonah is rather put out by this; he wants Nineveh destroyed, not saved. 

Anthony Bartlett places Jesus’ entire self-understanding of His ministry in the sign of Jonah; Jesus invites us to see ourselves as Jonah; we are violent and want our enemies vanquished. We, like the followers of Jesus before the Resurrection, imagine God as violent, but it is we who are violent, and Jesus refuses to return our violence, instead, Jesus returns after we murder Him and forgives us. 

James Alison explains that the culture we live by, one of self-deception and violence, is not the center of reality; Jesus’ forgiveness is. Jesus lovingly accepts our violence, a willing victim to us, in order to reveal His love for us and our violence. We need not hide our violence from ourselves because we see that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Now, we needn’t hide from ourselves our violent ways, we can see them and know that Jesus’ love is greater than, and precedes, our violence. 

The Fall, explains Alison, is not the defining reality; forgiving self-gift is. God is self-gift, God is love, and in Jesus we see that we no longer need scapegoat others in order to hide our brokenness from ourselves; we can trust Jesus who reveals through His kindness and His complete self-gift that will win over all of us, for “God desires that all will be saved,” and Jesus reveals the truth that He will win over all of us to His manner of Being; self-gift. 

The Gospel reveals what we cannot see; we are murderers who are forgiven. We cannot see ourselves if we don’t know first that we are loved and then can see the ways we hurt others. Universalism is necessary for seeing this; we need God’s help, not protection from God. Only a God who saves all can do this.

We don’t know what it means to be a human or who we are, until Jesus reveals who He is, as the true Human, and then who we are called to become; participants in His Divine-Humanity as members of a communion of mutual self-gift, which is the Church. 

In most approaches to forgiveness, we end up as the Pharisee “thank you Lord that I am not like this tax collector.” We are, in fact, constantly messing up, and only by trusting that God will keep transforming us can we allow ourselves to perceive our constant messiness. Shusako Endo’s Silence has a hero that we tend to miss; Ichiro. Ichiro is the one who is most like us; he doggedly seeks forgiveness. The Jesuits constantly seek to be heroic. Ichiro constantly seeks forgiveness.

Dostoevsky’s Zosima explains that we are all responsible for each other’s sin. This is not pious hyperbole; we are inescapably caught up in relationships with each other in which we are continually blind to the ways we hurt and scapegoat and seek protection from self-knowledge, from suffering at each other’s hands. This is why nonviolence, whose active form is peacemaking, is essential to participation in becoming one with Christ, who is ontologically incapable of retribution or violence. Our experience of suffering is never from God, but only from our brokenness. In the eighth chapter of John Jesus tells His interlocutors that are seeking to kill him. They hide their violence from themselves and accuse him of being crazy. 

We too are all caught up in killing Jesus whenever we injure others; “Saul Saul why are you persecuting Me?” When we are angry with anyone, we miss that we are all made in God’s image and likeness; “amen, amen, I say to you, whenever you are angry with your brother you have committed murder in your heart.” When we live so as to use violence in any form to protect ourselves from suffering we live according to the history of the fall “you are children of Satan, who was a murderer from the beginning.” Girard explicates this reality handily in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Today more than ever we hide vengeance from ourselves more easily because we outsource vengeance in the judicial system, as Girard explains in Violence and the Sacred. Within this context we misunderstand justice as retribution. True justice is restoration to Christ. 

When we know that we are loved in our bones no matter what, we can begin to see ourselves as we are; loved and brought into Jesus’ healing restoration. We are loved by Jesus precisely as people caught up in violence. Jesus was able to enter into the human culture of violence and offer love and forgiveness because Jesus knew He is loved by the Father in the Holy Spirit. Jesus is willing to suffer our violence without resentment

Forgiveness requires accepting, without resentment, our own participation in violence. In Jesus we can experience ourselves as loved by the Father in the Spirit. This often happens when we experience, usually, in at least one concrete, specific person in our life, the unconditional love, which is in fact the love of Jesus. As we experience this unconditional love, we too can then turn and offer the same to concrete, specific people in our lives. 

Salvation then, is, the concrete specific participation in a particular community of people who, knowingly (as Christian) or unknowingly (in Christ) enact mutual self-gift, nonviolence, forgiveness, and unconditional love. This does not mean that we must not try to avoid injury, or that we don’t engage in trying to change the violence we experience at the hands of others. Jesus shows us His radical form of engagement, without violence, harsh words, or retribution “Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.” Salvation is a communal participation in self-gift within a community of specific people with whom we practice mutual self-gift. We begin to offer  this self-gift even to those who have not yet accepted or returned this self-gift. God is love, meaning self-gift. Salvation given to humans because it is divine-humanity. 

Universal Salvation After Death?

My neighbor, who is a good Christian man, who has raised four of his own children and then raised three more grandchildren, is dying. He has been suffering and his family is sad but seem to feel some relief, but I had another feeling. I have not always felt this (e.g., at especially painful or terrible deaths) but did at both my father’s and mother’s death. A certain sense of completion, and dare I say, satisfaction. I have never spoken of such things or tried to articulate it, but I have come to understand what may be behind this feeling.

If salvation is being made like Christ, becoming full participants in the divine likeness, ridding ourselves completely of sin and taking on the perfection of Christ, then this process inaugurated now must continue after death. Death is not expectation of fear and judgment but of being perfected, of being brought to fulness, “age after age.” There is a stretching out, a striving toward completeness, that in Paul’s picture is never ceasing (Philippians 3:13–14). There is a progression from glory to glory, a continual moving beyond to the ever-greater, the ever-fuller, and the ever-higher (2 Corinthians 3:18).

This Christian hope of being brought to completeness after death, makes sense of the striving toward maturity in life. It is not cut short, but death will be an extension and acceleration of the good work begun in Christ. The ideal is before me, but my love of neighbor or love of enemy is in no way perfected, though I believe this is the goal toward which life now and in the future is converging. This love is at work in me, though I am a hard nut, but nonetheless I believe this work is the completion toward which death is a next step. The failures are shameful, the slip ups so numerous, the creatureliness sometimes disturbing, but I feel I am improving and will do so into eternity. But could it be that, as severe as the improvements I require, that there is nothing or no one beyond God’s redemption?

There are many passages of Scripture that indicate as much: “The LORD’S loving kindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail” (La 3:22). “For no one is cast off by the Lord forever. Although he causes grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone” (La 3:31-33). This verse appears in the midst of a time when the Jewish world was falling apart, Jerusalem and the temple destroyed, and Jews sent into exile in Babylon (around 587 BC.). The temple was the microcosmos ordering the Jewish world, so for Jews this was a disaster of cosmic proportions, but in the midst of this universal disaster is assurance of an unfailing love. God does not, and because of his character cannot, reject forever. Judgment and heartache and destruction are never the end of the story but always followed by mercy. God’s judgment, we learn from Lamentations, is not retributive but restorative.

Ezekiel tells us that in the worst case, that even the people of Sodom will be restored: “I will restore their fortunes, both the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters, and the fortunes of Samaria and her daughters, and I will restore your own fortunes in their midst” (Ezekiel 16:53). There is no people worse than Sodom in Jewish estimate. Jude says they will suffer “eternal fire” (Jude 1:7). This fire must not be retributive but purifying and cleansing as God says, “I will restore the fortunes of Sodom.” The only thing that burns forever is God himself, who is a “consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:30). As David Artman puts it, “The eternal fire of God is the fire of God’s holy presence which finally burns away everything that is not holy.”[1] God’s presence cleanses of sin.

According to George McDonald, “God will never let a man off with any fault. He must have him clean.” Likewise: He “will have you clean,” and “will neither spare you any needful shame, nor leave you exposed to any that is not needful.”[2] Everything about you must be saved. There is an all-inclusive depth to salvation that is universal in that it includes everything about each of us and everything about all of us and the world. The perfection required may be terrifying in its thoroughness, yet outside this universal completeness there is no salvation. Thus, the cleansing “worm does not die” and the purifying “fire is not quenched” (Mk 9:44). There is no end to the restorative action of God. “For love loves unto purity,” though this is often experienced as wrath, “as the consuming fire that will not be content until our sinful nature, everything that separates us from God, is burned away.” According to McDonald, “God’s anger is at one with his love.” Mercy and punishment, love and justice, are not opposed, “for punishment—the consuming fire—is a means to an end, that we might be the creatures he intended us to be. God’s punishment, his justice, can be his most merciful act.”[3] The singular work of God in his fiery love is that we should be as he is, and for this he ascended the cross and he descended into the depths of hell so as to retrieve everyone. God is not satisfied with anything less than total salvation, as heaven would be hellish if it is, as Aquinas pictured, an eternity of watching our loved ones burning in hell.

Peter describes the common belief of early Christians that Christ descended to hell or hades to preach to the dead, proclaiming the liberation of the Gospel to those imprisoned by death: “He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah, during the construction of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water” (I Pe 3:19-20). As Peter goes on to say, “For the gospel has for this purpose been preached even to those who are dead, that though they are judged in the flesh as men, they may live in the spirit according to the will of God” (1 Pe 4:6). Paul indicates that not even death can separate us from the love of God (Rom 8:35-39). Neither death nor judgment limit God’s grace but are in fact a means of grace. As William Barclay argues, “Jesus Christ not only tasted death but drained the cup of death, that the triumph of Christ is universal and that there is no corner of the universe into which the grace of God has not reached.”[4] God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4) and nothing can thwart God’s desire. He is “not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Pe 3:9) and thus “at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Php 2:10-11).

Death holds out the possibility of completion, of total reconciliation, of reunion with God and family, and final universal reconciliation. McDonald, has the murderer, Leopold, in one of his novels describe the possible salvific properties of death: ‘Oh!’ he sighed, ‘isn’t it good of God to let me die! Who knows what he may do for me on the other side! Who can tell what the bounty of a God like Jesus may be!’[5] McDonald describes death as “that blessed invention which of itself must set many things right.”[6] For some death may mean relief, for others reunion, and for some death may be the last resort. Of the miserable reprobate, the suicidal, the insane, the hopeless it might be said, “He has gone to see what God could do for him there, for nothing more could be done here.”[7] For everyone death must mean the next step in ongoing perfection toward which he is drawing all things.

[1]  David Artman, Grace Saves All: The Necessity of Christian Universalism (p. 25). Wipf and Stock, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

[2] George MacDonald, “Justice,” Unspoken Sermons, III (London: Longmans, 1889), p. 147; “The Child in the Midst,” U.S., I, p. 25. Cited in David M. Kelly, The Treatment of Universalism in Anglican Thought From George McDonald (1824 – 1905 ) to C.S. Lewis (1898- 1963 ), (Unpublished Dissertation, University of Ottawa, 1988) 135.

[3] McDonald, “The Consuming Fire,” from Unspoken Sermons – http://www.online-literature.com/george-macdonald/unspoken-sermons/2/

[4] Barclay, Letters of James and Peter in New Daily Study Bible (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003) 280. Cited in Artman, 29.

[5] MacDonald, Thomas Wingfold, III, p. 157. Also, Robert Falconer, pp. 291, 325, 337-8; Wilfred Cumbermede, pp. 208, 329. Cited in  Kelly, 148.

[6] MacDonald, Wilfred Cumbermede, p. 208. Cited in Kelly, 148.

[7] MacDonald, Sir Gibbie, p. 35. Also, “The Hardness of the Way,” U.S., I I , p. 29. Cited in Kelly, 148

Understanding McGilchrist Through Paul, Hegel, and Lacan

Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary, in his approach to left brain/right brain theory, presumes “each hemisphere is involved in everything” but nonetheless he argues there is a predominant form of thought attached to the different spheres of the brain.[1] It is not that there are absolute differences or that the two spheres of the brain are not continually interdependent, but this does not mean that there are not necessary differences. Afterall, as he points out, “every known creature with a neuronal system, however far down the evolutionary tree one goes, and however far back in time, has a system that is asymmetrical.” This raises the question of his research, “Why on earth would that be, given that the world they are interacting with is not asymmetrical?”[2] This asymmetrical world shows up continually in “subject versus object, alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole,” with either the objective and impersonal or the subjective and personal, tending to win out.[3] What I demonstrate throughout is that the categories in which McGilchrist sets his dichotomies (between the two hemispheres) easily convert to the Pauline differentiation between law and Christ with the “incarnation” overcoming “alienation” in the “particular life” of a “singular” man in which the antinomies posed by the two hemispheres, or simply by life, are overcome. I also make the case that the completion of McGilchrist’s theory, the ultimate right-brain synthesis, lies in a particular theological understanding toward which his theory points. Throughout the second half of the book he describes two forms of thought or two ways of “being” reflected in the brain and the mind, one of which I argue, culminates in Hegel’s notion of “absolute knowledge” in and through Christ.

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.”[4] 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.[5]

Ideally the master or the right side of the brain is served by the left side of the brain, but there is a tendency in history and in the individual to cut short this integrating holism and to become focused on dissecting the details as an end in itself. Modernity, with its focus on scientism, industrialization, mechanics, materialism, information processing, or perhaps a neuro link in which the machinery is inserted directly in the brain, demonstrates how the servant can usurp the role assigned by the master.

As with illness or brain damage, there is a general trend for the left brain to close in on itself and to shut out the world beyond its own projections:

But what if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings—so that the realm of the actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering, not ‘the Other’, but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere. It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that truly was ‘Other’ than, beyond, the human mind. In essence this was the achievement of the Industrial Revolution.[6]

The mirror stage in Lacanian psychoanalysis can become terminal, in its focus on the self, to the exclusion of all else. Rene Descartes is a key example of one who turns to focus on his own thought, attempting to get at the “thinking thing” behind the thought, dissecting, isolating, refusing the body, and focused completely on interior thought. His philosophical focus follows the pattern of modernity, and betrays the same characteristics of (new) forms of mental illness which would arise in this period. In Pauline terms one is enclosed and isolated in the sinful orientation to the law.

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. The sickness of the left brain, the bureaucratic disease that would achieve perfection and power seem perfectly illustrated by Pharisaical Paul: one can be a perfect Jew and keep the law blamelessly (Philippians 3:6), which Christian Paul explains, was what made him the chief of sinners (I Tim. 1:15). Power through language or law presents the possibility of a limited whole which can be manipulated, but to maintain this realm it is necessary that it be complete in itself. The tendency is to see all of reality, even God and Christ, as constituted in a closed space, so that there must be an obstacle, warding off the right brain or warding off the limited nature of language and law. In McGilchrist’s description this gives rise to violence and in the case of Paul it accounts for his arresting and killing Christians. The letter, or primary attachment to Scripture and law, functions as an obstacle, killing off the unlimited vagaries of the spirit, in the Pauline sense (2 Cor. 3:6).

Rather than an embodied and social language (as in Wittgenstein) the tendency is toward a disembodied Platonism, Cartesianism, or legalism. In a Lacanian sense the symbolic order becomes a realm unto itself, with language taking the predominant role over the imagination, reducing the ego to an object. The symbolic register is the organizing center – the possibility of a subject. The “obstacle cause of desire” is the impossible desire of a desiring self. That is, one is blocked from achieving the desired object and this creates the frustrated agon, that for Lacan is the very definition of the human subject. In Paul’s picture, one serves the law, and imagines law is an end in itself, and there is a basic confusion between God and the law, which is inherently alienating. Paul describes an irresolvable split within himself (Rom. 7:15). This Pauline bilateralism within the ego is reflected in McGilchrist’s picture of how it is that we become an obstacle to ourselves. The left brain cuts off the integrating powers of the right brain in the same way the law cuts off from the person of God or the absolute personal reality of Christ.

The work of Christ, is to suspend the law, sublating or suspending while also preserving and fulfilling. Through Christ Paul escaped the delimited world of the law as in Christ the law is delimited (pointing beyond itself), and human brokenness is not a failure in regard to the law, but the failure, and incompleteness of the law as a guide. Christ does not complete human obligations in regard to the law, but suspends the punishing effects of a defective orientation to the law.

The fact that McGilchrist uses the Pauline word describing the suspension of the law in Christ (aufgehoben) indicates that imposing a Christian or Pauline understanding is not foreign to his project. He uses the word in the context of the Hegelian synthesis, in which Hegel deploys Luther’s translation of Paul’s καταργηθῇ, which is a suspension of the punishing effects of the law and its simultaneous preservation. The right brain cannot function apart from the left brain but at the same time it tends to pose an obstacle to its integrating powers. Christ is recognized through the law, through Judaism, through the Scriptures, but taken as their own end these are an obstacle to Christ. The ill effects of sin are when the emissary is thought to be the master. The sin condition, which is a misorientation to the law or a reification of the law, amounts to something like the obstacle the left brain often poses to the right brain. One cannot get rid of the law, any more than function with half a brain, but the ill effects of the law can be suspended in Christ (while the law and Judaism are preserved).

By the same token, it is not that a more holistic (right brain) Romanticism abolishes the Enlightenment or that any particular age is a complete departure from the one that preceded. McGilchrist specifically sights the Hegelian synthesis to express the full integrating power of the right brain. “The movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism therefore is not from A to not-A, but from a world where ‘A and not-A cannot both be true’ is necessarily true to one where ‘A and not-A can both hold’ hold (in philosophical terms this becomes Hegel’s thesis, antithesis – synthesis).”[7] Elements of the Enlightenment are found in Romanticism, just as elements of the Hebrew Scriptures frame understanding of Christ. This synthesis found in Christ is precisely not supersessionist or anti-nominalist, though in the thought world of the left brain and the law this must necessarily be the case.

As Jordan Wood notes, Hegel distinguishes two kinds of thinking: there is finite thinking in which antinomies such as subject/object (along with all of the Kantian antinomies) hold as the one always implies and depends upon its opposite and this “permanent opposition” is definitive of the terms.[8] In Lacan and Žižek’s Hegel, this antagonism and ultimate negativity (death drive) is what gives the appearance of truth and a human Subject. Truth inheres in a lie and the subject arises as a result of this power of negation. In McGilchrist’s definition, this would be the ultimate left-brain materialism and sickness (which Žižek would acknowledge in his notion that the best we can do is “enjoy our symptom”).

Jordan provides a more orthodox reading of Hegel: “Infinite or “rational” thinking is thinking in itself—or better, thinking thinking itself—since here the thinking subject and the object thought are one, and are directed to an inward identity that brooks no definite term.”[9] Hegel has in mind the divine Subject and his thought, shared in Christ, in which there is a move from finite to infinite thinking. As Jordan describes, the theological picture of Hegel’s “knowing” is not the finite but an infinite ground, both subjective and objective. In the subjective, “human reason ‘from below’ is in truth God’s self-knowing “from above” as the Spirit in us.” The objective ground is “God’s Incarnation as a single human individual establishes the conditions for intuitive certainty that the divine nature is such that it can communicate its entire identity as the concrete oneness of abstract opposites, of the infinite and the finite, subject and object, etc.—and this communication is also the form of speculative logic.”[10] This integrating unity of the knower and the known is Hegel’s “absolute knowing,” the goal and means of his “speculative thinking.” That is, this absolute is not closed but open to continual speculation, incorporation, and synthesis.

McGilchrist describes a left-brain failure in theology – reification of the word, focus on the book or the letter as opposed to the integrating factors of the right brain. He argues, the Reformation is a refusal of the metaphorical, and in this the Reformation preserves the Enlightenment rejection of the mysterious and a turning of the imagination to the word. “In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty.”[11] There is a loss of a sense of the “real presence” of Christ in “an endlessly repeated and deferred” symbolism, devoid of its signified. Though he does not explicitly connect the fulness of the right brain with the person of Christ, he does note the “real presence is displaced by a sign, “re-presentations not presentations.”[12]

Where the Greek and Hebrew logos or the law is an entity apart from God, the incarnation enfleshes the Word – which seems unthinkable in the left-brain world. The incarnation of the Word is the ultimate synthesis which personalizes all things and which demands an infinite openness to the new, the unique, and the different. The Word is not that which reduces to sameness but it preserves difference. As long as the left brain, the law, or the symbolic order is predominant, subject-object opposition, bilateralism, dichotomy, dualism, or what Hegel refers to as finite knowing, are clearly in place. Synthesis, integration, or participation in the Word does not obliterate difference but it passes beyond, not through sameness or obliteration of difference, but through recognition that God has made himself available to thought. This Hegelian picture of the role of Christ seems to be the natural implication toward which McGilchrist’s theory points.

For McGilchrist, perhaps in the spirit of Maximus or Origen, we are cocreators, in many senses, of the world we inhabit, as our understanding or perception is shaped by our perspective, our theory, our hypothesis, or even the apparatus of the brain through which we apprehend but this this means of apprehending is not neutral but is itself shaped by our thought. That is there is continual feedback between the mind and brain, and it may be impossible to separate the interplay between the two. McGilchrist recognizes that his theory may serve only as a metaphor, which floats free of cerebral hemispheres, and point to two ways of being in the world. As he puts it,

If it could eventually be shown…that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but of being in the world, are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres, I would be surprised, but not unhappy. Ultimately what I have tried to point to is that the apparently separate ‘functions’ in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent entity; that there are, not just currents here and there in the history of ideas, but consistent ways of being that persist across the history of the Western world, that are fundamentally opposed, though complementary, in what they reveal to us; and that the hemispheres of the brain can be seen as, at the very least, a metaphor for these.[13]

His work is pointing to the primacy of metaphor, connectedness, and synthesis, so he is content if his work serves this purpose. The Christological conclusion, which he does not name but which seems a natural extension of his work, is the Personalism of Hegelian Christology.

Afterall, it is the refusal of the primacy of the personal, of narrative, of metaphor, of openness, that describes the human disease. Only in brain damaged patients, or those who suffer mental illness, can it be said the physical brain is controlling thought but what can be seen in these instances (such as autism or schizophrenia) is the trend which McGilchrist sees as characteristic trends of modernity; narrow focus, reification of language, and depersonalization, but these are precisely the symptoms Paul describes as entrapment to the law. In Christian terms, the disease is addressed and cured in the Person of Christ, as the personal depth of creation, and participation in personhood open up the left-brain to infinite knowledge and synthesis of the right-brain.

[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) Thank you to Jim for acquiring this book for me.

[2] Ibid, 2.

[3] Ibid, 462.

[4] Ibid, 430.

[5] Ibid, 408.

[6] Ibid, 386.

[7] Ibid, 353.

[8] Jordan Wood, “Hegel as Alexandrian Christian: Or, Against False Piety,” from his Substack: Words in Flesh, Sep. 3rd,2025. This wonderful piece just appeared as I was writing.

[9] Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline [Enc hereafter], Part I: Science of Logic. Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Dnaiel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]), 28. Cited in Wood.

[10] Ibid, Wood.

[11] McGilchrist, 315.

[12] Ibid, 317.

[13] Ibid, 461.

A Conversation on Why I Am a Christian

Jessica: What’s ur biggest reason for believing Jesus is the way. The most compelling reason for believing jesus is the best.[1]  

Paul: Meaning!

Jessica: Can you Elaborate!

Paul: You ask for the “biggest reason” and so I use the word “meaning” in the broadest sense. Personal meaning is either partial, absent, or wrongheaded apart from the depth of meaning in Christ. We can find all kinds of meaning apart from Christ, and that may be good or bad or indifferent. Meaning in work, family, or even a variety of religions may give us personal satisfaction. Perhaps our skill at sports, or art, or some other area provides levels of meaning. But these will remain partial apart from a broader ground of meaning. For many, there is no meaning, and Christ is the entry point into meaning. For others, they may find meaning in the military or the mafia or a false religion, but this is the wrongheaded sort of meaning.

Beyond personal meaning but tied to this is just the possibility of meaning in the areas of philosophy, linguistics, and semiotics. Meaning systems derive from a meaningful ground and these various explorations of meaning systems ultimately find their possibility in Christ. Philosophical nihilism, pragmatism, phenomenology, etc. have the same issue as personal meaning. They may be good but incomplete, or wrong and dangerous, or they may simply conclude there is no meaning. So, the term can be applied in every area. No area of human endeavor is complete in itself, though every area may be good or bad, but will always remain partial. Of course, this is not a coercive meaning to be foisted onto us personally, scientifically, or philosophically, but it is like the word itself. It is there to be grasped and to lead us on a journey, but it is not insistent or fear inducing. Like meaning, Christ is healing, completing, and fulfilling. This is my humble attempt at the “biggest” reason.

Jessica: So, the fact that there is meaning at all convinces you of Gods existence?

Paul: I prefer meaning. This is not to say that meaninglessness is not also convincing. Most days I ward off the nihilism, the evil, the cruelty, or the seeming meaninglessness of everything. On these days or these small snippets of time, you might say I am “convinced” of God’s existence. But that does not sound exactly right. I am committed to meaning, to living a meaningful life, to being loving, and to the beauty and goodness of the universe which entails God, but my personal capacity for belief or being convinced is not very great. I feel I can make the moral commitment to the Truth (just the possibility of truth in the Truth) without being personally inclined toward a strong sense of conviction. I am well acquainted with a lack of personal spiritual devotion, with doubts and disbelief, but my own proclivities are not the point. I have never considered either my capacity for belief nor my tendency toward doubt as primary. Belief is no great accomplishment, and to think it is, is the problem in imagining doubt is determinative of salvation or moral engagement. The focus on individual belief misses the New Testament meaning of faith, which does not refer to my faith but to Christ’s faithfulness, of which I can partake. I have no faith in my faith or in faith in general, but the faithfulness of Christ is salvific. Saving, not in the sense of going to heaven and missing hell, but in the sense of delivering from bondage: bondage to my capacity, my thought, myself and the values of my culture.

This is a form of belief and of being convinced, but it is not the form in which we usually discuss these things. Most are thinking of historical and scientific proofs, but this will only lead to the endless need for more and stronger proof. Belief and faith are largely moral commitments that engage us more holistically than typical proofs. I am full of doubt, but this doubt is not the kind that many may find so disturbing, as my faith embraces doubt as part of the reality in which I believe.

The doubt that many have, is grounded in an ultimate trust in reason, in which there is no room for doubt. Thus, apologetics must be airtight. The Bible must be inerrant. Tradition cannot contain fallacy. Doubt is not part of the possibility of this form of faith. Undeniable philosophical arguments and the absolute historical trustworthiness of the texts is required. This foundationalism and Biblicism is focused on rationalism or Scripture rather than Christ. It trusts the authority of history and reason more than Christ. This sort of foundationalism has displaced Christ with reason, Scripture, history, or some other authority as foundation.

Jessica: I think I understand, but you are saying too much too quickly. I have been reading Sam Harris and he has many convincing proofs that Jesus never existed and that God does not exist.

Paul: Sorry, my wife tells me I overcomplicate things.

The issue is not between different sorts of meaning or levels of meaning, but whether there is meaning or no meaning. The new atheists, such as Sam Harris, like fundamentalists, liberals, and modernists of every stripe presume a foundation of meaning and this is their starting point. One can use this foundation to argue for the inerrancy of the Bible, the truth of secular humanism, the self-contained truth of science, or basic principles (“I Think”, there is cause and effect”) or whatever, but all share the modernist foundation. The way in which they build upon this presumed philosophical rationalism varies, but they all share the modern rationalist presumption of a given meaning. This presumed foundation is a parasite on the meaning set forth in Christianity, but it is incorrect (in its atheistic, fundamentalist, and liberal manifestation) in that its imagined meaning floats free of the person of Christ.

Jessica: I have started reading David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions.

Paul: Excellent! Hart quickly and accurately debunks the New Atheists.

I prefer a more hard-core atheism, such as that of Slavoj Žižek, who recognizes the construct of meaning (and self) are easily deconstructed. As a true atheist, he does not argue on the basis of meaning, but he makes the case that beneath the structure of “self” is the reification of language which fabricates the self (and meaning) through the interplay of language – on the order of the Cartesian cogito (“I think therefore I am”). Žižek is Cartesian, not because he believes Descartes is correct in his foundationalism, but because he considers the Cartesian error or lie, the basis for “truth.” That is, there is no Truth, but only the lie which gives rise to truth. This is a better understanding of the choice with which we are faced. True nihilism and atheism do not hold to meaning of any sort, other than that which can be fabricated.

So, I prefer meaning as opposed to no meaning. I prefer love, beauty, and goodness as opposed to hatred and evil, and this entails the world revealed by Christ.

Jessica: But what about the contradictions in the Bible?

Paul: The focus of the Bible is not on itself or its own authority, but it is a witness to the authority of Christ.The founding premise of Scripture is set forth by John: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegeted Him” (John 1:18). The revelation of Christ precedes and makes possible the writing of the New Testament and the formation of the canon of Scripture. There would be no Scripture apart from its formation around the work of Christ. It is not just that Christ precedes Scripture, but faith in Christ (the “rule of faith”) precedes and is the means of exegeting Scripture (and in particular was the early church’s means of incorporating the Hebrew Scriptures into the Christian canon of Scripture). This means that the reality of Christ not only precedes Scripture, but precedes the unfolding political and cultural realities of our day.

The primacy of Christ implies an exegetical method which is not primarily historical, literal, or attached to a book. That is, if we take this passage (John 1:18) literally, this means the rest of Scripture must fit this fact. The primacy of Christ is the means of Scripture and its interpretation, and apart from this primacy the letter is bent in every direction (e.g., Jesus the warrior, the upholder of national and cultural interests). The Old Testament is filled with conflicting images, which if given equal weight (and literality), displace the literal fact of Christ as exegete. Christ brings together the sign and signified, enfleshing meaning, such that to make Scripture the foundation of meaning is to set the sign afloat, separating it from it from its signified. A biblicism or sola scriptura which does not recognize Scripture as derived from Christ has taken images of violence and warfare, images of sacrifice and law, or simply interpretations of history, and imagined that Christ must be made to accommodate this order. The images of God in the Bible (Old and New Testaments), require the Gospel, require that all of the Bible be read in the light of faith in Christ.

As Origen put it, “If you want to understand, you can only do so through the Gospel.” The Gospel (Jesus Christ) makes the Bible the Word of God for each of its contemporary readers. The analogy of faith, or the rule of faith or, to say the same thing, the Gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures (among many other 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). Paul is referencing the only Scriptures he knew, the Hebrew Bible. Apart from these events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of the life of Christ, the Scriptures become a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. Christ is a revelation which inspires Scripture, and this revelation constitutes the center of Christian thought. Apart from this center, it is not clear Christian thought survives. Apart from Christ there is no Bible, there is no authority, there is no meaning, but only a bundle of contradictions. In light of Christ, the contradictions do not completely disappear but they are relatively unimportant in light of the fulness of meaning revealed in Christ.

Jessica: I think I am beginning to grasp some of what you are saying, but have you written anything that might help?

Paul: I will recommend a few of my blogs, which I have referenced above and which expand on the topic.[2]

(Sign up for the class Human Language, Signs of God: using Anthony Bartlett’s two books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics and Signs of Change, as one continuous argument.  The course will run from 2025/9/16 to 2025/11/4. Register here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/)

[1] This question arose through messenger and continued on the phone, and I have taken liberties with how it unfolded and have changed the name of the inquirer, but it is based in reality.

[2] Here is a piece on reading Scripture through Christ and the Gospel https://forgingploughshares.org/2025/02/06/the-scriptures-gospel-and-the-exegesis-of-jesus/ I have done several on Hermeneutics. This one is on Origen’s approach: https://forgingploughshares.org/2022/09/22/the-peaceful-hermeneutic-of-origin-the-end-of-deicide/ As is this one: https://forgingploughshares.org/2024/11/07/finding-the-center-in-the-midst-of-despair/

Practical Universal Salvation Through the Church

The disconnect from and justification of the blatant evil in Gaza by many American Christians reveals the dark side of a faith, apparently open to genocide.[1] Rather than heightening empathy and taking up the cause of defenseless women and children and a starving population, could it be the faith enables support of mass slaughter, as it did in previous colonizing tendencies? The forced resettlement and genocide carried out on the American native population (in the name of America as the new Zion) is being repeated and consciously embraced in modern Christian Zionism, or simply evangelical or Christian nationalist sensibilities. The incapacity to recognize annihilation cannot be “deserved,” no matter the evil that may have been perpetrated or the “practical necessities,” demonstrates not only a mental but a moral failing. The question is, how is it that the Christian faith, as it is commonly practiced in this country, has become a force for evil?

Jesus Confrontation with Evil is Displaced by Legal Theories of Atonement

While there is probably no singular reason, what is clear is that Christianity as the defeat of evil has been displaced with a religion focused on individual salvation and legal justification, allowing evil to run its course. Rather than seeing the cross as a defeat of Satan and the inauguration of the reign of Christ over evil, the satanic is left undisturbed. This church is not a counter kingdom deploying the nonviolent ethics of Jesus in his reign over evil, but is a waiting room for saved souls. There is a complete disconnect between the cross and the kingdom, as the work of the cross provides legal benefits rather than constituting a real-world defeat of evil. The captivity to sin, death, and the devil, is not addressed in legal theories of the atonement, and the the cross is emptied of its kingdom purposes.

This is evident in such theories as Christian Zionism, premillennialism, and dispensationalism (see here), but all of these theories arose in the vacuum created by legal theories of atonement such as penal substitution and divine satisfaction, which displaced the New Testament understanding that Christ releases from captivity to sin, death, and evil. Legal theories deal in the theoretical realm of imputed righteousness, and what is lost is the need for a kingdom of atonement, a counter kingdom to the kingdoms of this world, in which a people can be shaped and redeemed in a practical sense (rather than in a legal or theoretical sense). The embodied, social, and practical nature of redemption means salvation is corporate and by definition a community of practice, but legal theories fragment salvation into the particular, the individual, and the disembodied, leaving aside political and social practice. Where salvation is not real-world redemption, evil is a practical necessity to participate in the politics of the kingdoms of this world. Christians are taught they must be violent, they must participate in the killing machine of nation states, as the practical necessities of this world demand wielding the sword. Enemies must be excluded and slaughtered, not loved and ushered into the kingdom. The evil of the world is too great to lay down the sword.

Sin is Participation in a Counter-Kingdom

What is missed in this worldly Christianity is that sin is participation in a kingdom. The kingdoms of this world are in rebellion against God and in league with evil, not in some abstract legal sense, but in the deadly sense of being willing to destroy the other. Salvation and safety require that the stranger, the foreigner, the enemy, be excluded, and when they encroach on “our land” or presume they can gain citizenship in our country they must be taught a lesson. Crosses outside the city, walls of exclusion, Alligator Alcatraz’s, ice agents in masks, will save us from being the door mat of the world. Where the church is a universally open kingdom, and for this reason is not a kingdom of evil, the kingdoms of this world are exclusive and this exclusion is definitive of the kingdom of sin.

While we might refer to the church as a “spiritual kingdom,” what is meant by spiritual has come to mean not embodied or practiced, and thus is a means to not love the enemy, to not turn the other cheek, or to refuse taking up the cross. These are “spiritual” and other worldly and not meant for kingdoms of practice. In other words, sin is rebellion against God (not just weakness or sensuality), a defiant will to power, in which we would live from our resources, from our strength, from our kingdom, and not God’s. Spiritualizing the commands of Jesus and his kingdom is one way to remain good citizens of the kingdom of sin.

To continue to bow to the “god of this world” and submit to the idolatry of Mot (the god of death) the realm of this aeon must maintain its integrity as a kingdom unto itself. It cannot be perceived as a counter-kingdom, dependent upon separation, rebellion, and alienation from God. The demonic servitude, evident in pro-genocide policies, can endure only where the power of the cross is evacuated by refusal to recognize the monstrous evil all serve in the kingdoms of this world. Sin is dismissed as “error” or “weakness” or “legal guilt” and the demonic delusion Christ exposed and defeated is allowed to continue.

To transfer our allegiance out of the kingdoms of darkness into the kingdom of Christ, we have to recognize Christ, the Lord of history, has defeated the principalities and powers. The old aeon of sin continues, but the reign of Christ has begun, which is not to say it is the consummate kingdom but it is the inaugurated kingdom of the new age (now and not yet). The reign of God in Christ is a present reality in which new birth, heavenly citizenship, new creation, resurrection life, is entry into this kingdom. Where legal atonement theory can hardly be connected to the kingdom, Christ’s defeat of evil can only be understood in a kingdom context. Exodus is not only for ancient Israel, but the cross means all are released from bondage to the Pharaohs of this world through serving a new King and kingdom.

Jesus is the Presence of His Kingdom

The passage from John the Baptist to Jesus, is from one of preparing for the kingdom to announcing the kingdom has come. “The time has come, . . . the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!” (1:15). Jesus “went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people” (Matt 4:23). In Paul’s view Christ has undertaken “an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things” (Eph 1:10). This administrative summing up is not a delayed or future reign. As Jesus says, “The kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt 12:28; Luke 11:20).

According to Leslie Newbigin, “If the New Testament spoke only of the proclamation of the kingdom there could be nothing to justify the adjective “new.” The prophets and John the Baptist also proclaimed the kingdom. What is new is that in Jesus the kingdom is present.”[2] “Jesus came into Galilee announcing the good news of God and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, the reign of God is at hand: repent and believe the good news'” (Mark 1:14-15). Jesus proclaims the message of the kingdom and he does the work of the kingdom as in him the kingdom is dynamically active and present.[3] He said, “If I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt. 12:28). He casts out demons, and this is the sign that Satan is bound: “Or how can anyone enter the strong man’s house and carry off his property, unless he first binds the strong man? And then he will plunder his house” (Matt 12:29). As Paul describes, “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way” (2 Thess 2:7). This is enacted at the cross, “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (John 12:31-32). 

In addition to casting out demons and binding Satan, the third mark of the presence of the kingdom are the miracles of Jesus. Jesus replied to John the Baptist’s question about the coming Messiah, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor” (Matt 11:4-5).  These are signs the kingdom of salvation has come: the healing of the blind points to Jesus power to heal spiritual blindness; the healing of the lame means Jesus can heal spiritual disability; the healing of leprosy testifies Jesus can purify; the healing of the deaf shows Jesus can penetrate obtuseness and deception; and the raising of the dead demonstrates Jesus’ power over death and the capacity to give life. This sign points to Jesus’ resurrection and the resurrection already available in Christian baptism (Rom 6:1). According to John (in Revelation 20), the resurrection from the dead has already occurred, and we need not wait on the millennium. According to Paul, we have already been raised up and made alive together with Christ (Eph 2:6; Col 2:12-13; 3:1).

Matthew provides a fourth indicator of the presence of the kingdom in his record of Jesus answer to John: “the good news is preached to the poor” (Matt. 11:5). The good news of the promised kingdom is specifically for the poor, the broken, and the enslaved (Is 61:1). A fifth sign of the kingdom, also predicted in Isaiah (as well as Jer 31:34; Mic 7:18-20; Zech 13:1) is the forgiveness of sins: “The people who dwell there will be forgiven their iniquity” (Is 33:24–Is 34). Jesus heals the paralytic to demonstrate he can forgive sins: “‘But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—He said to the paralytic, ‘I say to you, get up, pick up your pallet and go home’” (Mk 2:10–11).

The sixth mark of the kingdom’s presence was Jesus new teaching about its internal realization: “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20-21). To say it is internal does not, of course, exclude its corporate and embodied nature. His is a spiritual kingdom in that it is not the nationalistic kingdom Israel expected – a caution to those who would equate Christ’s kingdom with territorial or material kingdoms. As Paul says, “The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).[4]

Universal Salvation Through the Church

As Newbigin sums up, in Christ “we are talking about the reign and the sovereignty of God over all that is, and therefore we are talking about the origin, meaning, and end of the universe and of all human history within the history of the universe.”[5] The Bible describes the blessing of all nations, not just one, and the completion of God’s purposes in all of creation and not just some part, as the history it records is bringing all of creation and history to its divine end. The body of Christ is the means of an all-inclusive salvation: “there is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope when you were called—one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:6).

According to Sergius Bulgakov, “One should not diminish the ontological significance of this unity by transforming it into merely a figure, a simile: like a body or similar to a body. On the contrary, the apostle speaks precisely about one body (Eph. 4:4–6), in direct relation with the unity of God. The Church is not a conglomerate, but a body; and, as such, it is not quasi-one, but genuinely one, although this unity is not empirical, but substantial, ontological.”[6] The unity increases in and through God as it “grows with a growth which is from God” (Col 2:19). It is the realization of the ontological unity of the Trinity, the experience of the foundation of creation experienced in the perfection of creation. This unifying work has no limit: “Christ is the head of humankind and therefore lives in all humankind.”[7] Bulgakov ties this universality directly to the church: “The Church is the general foundation of creaturely being, its beginning and goal. The problem of the Church is posed here outside of historical concreteness, outside of the limits of space and time, outside of specific church organizations.”[8] There are no limits to the church mystically or ontologically, anymore than there are limits to the incarnation: “the incarnation of the Lord as the divine-human person of Christ consisted in the assumption of the whole Adam, “perfect” humanity. There are no limits to this assumption, either external or internal.”[9]

Christ is the goal of all humanity, and thus all humanity “belongs to the Church.” The good tidings are for “all people” (Luke 2:10–11) and the salvation is “before the face of all people: a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel” (vv. 30–32). “The grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men” (Titus 2:11). God “will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4). Those who would limit the number or who would divide the means, contradict the identity of Christ. There are no limits to the Logos’ assumption of humanity (“becoming flesh,” in John 1:1) or limits to the Holy Spirit. As Peter says on the day of Pentecost, quoting the prophet Joel, ‘it shall come to pass in the last days, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh’” (Acts 2:17). The “whole universe belongs to the Church. The universe is the periphery, the cosmic face of the Church.”[10] To put a limit on the work of Christ, by means of Israel or an institutional church, or to imagine the purposes of God can be delayed or thwarted by human means, or that God is only concerned with some of creation or some people is to refuse the “all in all” work of Christ.

Conclusion

How does the kingdom of God come if not in the incarnation? If it is dependent upon physical and political Israel, or on the kingdoms of this world, it will come through killing, (killing Palestinians, starving their children, killing their doctors, destroying their water, blowing up Iranians, assassinating nuclear scientists, committing murder mayhem and bloodshed). Christians who reject the cross as the reign of God demonstrate their worldly citizenship in their commitment to violence. Christians who follow Christ practice the way of the cross, not by putting people on crosses but by taking up the cross, knowing this is the cosmic reality unfolding in His millennial kingdom.

[1] There is no possible debate about the facts, or about the use of the term genocide, as this is the term chosen by two Israeli human rights organizations and by multiple Israelis. The New Yorker this week cites Moshe Ya’alon, former defense minister under Netanyahu calling it “ethnic cleansing.” Omer Bartov, a leading historian of the holocaust and a veteran of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, says what is happening in Gaza is not a war but “genocide” – “it is the attempt to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza.” Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister of Israel, says “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of devastation: indiscriminate killing of civilians. He calls it war crimes.” He says, “It is not a few bad soldiers, but government policy knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated.” Two hundred and fifty former officers in the intelligence establishment, including three ex-chiefs of Mossad, signed an open letter of Protest. A thousand Israeli Air Force veterans signed a letter describing it as a useless political and personal ploy. 

[2] Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,1978) 44.

[3] See Kim Riddlebarger, A Case for Amillennialism: Understanding the End Times (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2013) 122.

[4] I am following Riddlebarger, 122-124.

[5] Nebigin, 32

[6] Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (p. 258). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Kindle Edition.

[7] Bulgakov, 261.

[8] Bulgakov, 265-266.

[9] Bulgakov, 266.

[10] Bulgakov, 267.

Is Christian Zionism Worthy of the Name of Christ?

Christian Zionists do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who have starved to death as a curse but as fulfillment of prophecy. They do not see the slain families gunned down at food hubs as a war crime but as the work of God. They do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary but as a step closer to Christ’s return. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric but necessary. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage but as a step closer to the kingdom. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror. Christian Zionists, like the Jewish Zionists they support, have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media, a bankrupt theology and a political class that tells them only what they want to hear and shows them only what they want to see.[1]

There was a time when dispensationalism in the lineage of Cyrus Scofield (and the Scofield Reference Bible), and popularized by Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye seemed dismissively silly. Lindsey’s inventiveness, finding in Revelation “supersonic jet aircraft with missiles … advanced attack helicopters … intercontinental ballistic missiles with Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles tipped with thermonuclear warheads … biological and chemical weapons, aircraft carriers, missile cruisers, nuclear submarines, laser weapons, space stations and satellites” is as creative as any fiction, accounting for book sales in the tens of millions.[2] But Christian Zionism has become the majority voice in American politics and is the enabling force behind Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians, so what one believes about the millennium is deadly serious.[3] Ironically, Christian Zionism preceded and nurtured development of Jewish Zionism,[4] and from its inception has been more Israel centered than Christ centered as Israel takes precedent and is the means of understanding Christ.[5] The innovators of this method have, from the beginning, taken liberties in interpreting Scripture with no precedent in the New Testament or the early history of the church.

For example, where the New Testament and the early church saw Christ alone as the unifying hermeneutic, Scofield argued his dispensational hermeneutic recovers a harmony, otherwise lacking in Scripture. He “recovers the harmony,” by “distinguishing the ages” creating divisions never before detected in Scripture. Thus, the Jews in the fourth dispensation only needed to “abide in their own land to inherit every blessing” and turn down the law. According to Scofield, “The Dispensation of Promise ended when Israel rashly accepted the law (Ex. 19:8). Grace had prepared a deliverer (Moses), provided a sacrifice for the guilty and by divine power brought them out of bondage (Ex.19:4); but at Sinai they exchanged grace for law.”[6] “The Dispensation of Promise” ended when Israel rashly accepted the law (Ex. 19:8). To make a divide before and after the cross he concludes, “The mission of Jesus was, primarily, to the Jews … The Sermon on the Mount is law, not grace … the doctrines of grace are to be sought in the Epistles not in the Gospels.”[7] Christ and the beginning of the Gospels, clearly set forth Christ as a new beginning (Mark 1:1; John 1:1), yet Scofield ignores this division, placing Jesus’ life and ministry within the dispensation of the Law. In his opinion, the Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount are not for Christians and are not applicable to the church.[8] Dispensationalists insist that those who do not divide Scripture according to their divisions are not “rightly dividing the word.” According to Dwight Pentecost, “scripture is unintelligible until one can distinguish clearly between God’s program for his earthly people Israel and that for the Church”[9] and the only way to follow God’s program is to follow dispensationalist divisions. The ethics of Christ, the teaching of Christ, the life of Christ, must be set aside as part of the law. In other words, Scofield’s divisions (as arbitrary as they are), not Christ, make sense of Scripture.

The premillennial dispensationalist hermeneutic presumes Christ failed to establish his kingdom, failed to bind Satan and defeat evil at his first coming, so he must return to complete this unfinished work, but before he can come back, according to variations in the theory, Israel must return to its homeland, may or may not convert to Christianity, and may or may not be aligned with either God or the devil. Either way, the New Testament hope of the immanent return of Christ must await the unfolding of current events surrounding Israel. Ethics, theology, salvation, and world history, are centered on historical events surrounding Israel, while Christ plays a secondary role (permanently or for now, depending on the theory), so that “blessing Israel” is determinant of salvation (in a mangled reading of Genesis 12:3). “A Christian Zionist,” according to Louis Hamada, “is a person who is more interested in helping God fulfill His prophetic plan through the physical and political Israel, rather than helping Him fulfill His evangelistic plan through the Body of Christ.”[10] The work of Christ is made subordinate to the manipulation of political Israel, supposedly fulfilling prophecy enabling the return of Christ. The details of how this may work, have endless variations, and may change week by week, indicating the primary focus is on what God is doing now through Israel, and not on what he has done through Christ.

At an ethical and humanitarian level killing Palestinians for Christ is blasphemous but Christian Zionist theology puts Israel over Christ, not only in its subversion of Christian ethics, but in its twisting of Christian salvation. In the explanation of Dale Crowley, “They have one goal: to facilitate God’s hand to waft them up to heaven free from all the trouble, from where they will watch Armageddon and the destruction of planet earth.”[11] The literal and futurist interpretation, despite Paul’s identification of Christians with the true children of Abraham (e.g., Gal. 3:7), requires a separation between the Church and the Jews (the “chosen people”) and two means of salvation.

The saving focus is not in Christ’s first coming but in his second coming, in which he will rapture believers into heaven, but this cannot happen until Israel is gathered into its homeland and the Temple is rebuilt. In Covenant Premillennialism, there is at least a relation between the church and Israel but in the various versions of Dispensationalism God has an eternal plan for Israel and an eternal plan for the church, and the twain need not meet.[12] This blatant misteaching revolves around a single chapter in Revelation (chapter 20) and devolves to the meaning of a single word: millennium.

Millennium or a thousand years appears only three times outside of Revelation 20,[13] but it is only in Revelation 20 that there is mention of a thousand-year reign: “they will be priests of God and of Christ and will reign with Him for a thousand years” (20:6). The premillennial and dispensationalist reading is a “literal” future reading, taken from this most figurative and allegorical of books. However, this “literal” reading is highly selective, with few believing horses will be the main transportation in heaven, and Jesus will return on a horse with a sword clenched between his teeth, and he will be accompanied by a posse of horse mounted angels, and they will carry a massive chain so as to lock up Satan in a deep hole. That is “literal” is a misnomer, except in regard to the length of the thousand years. But what all premillennialists agree upon is that this thousand year period, in which Satan is bound and Christ’s kingdom is inaugurated, has not yet happened. They argue Satan is not bound and the death of Christ has not impacted his reign, in spite of the fact that the New Testament directly connects the death and resurrection of Christ with the defeat of Satan and the kingship and kingdom of Christ. That is the millennium is a reference to the age ushered in by Christ and the church in which the work of evil is delimited, and it is a “thousand years” as this is symbolic of completeness.[14]

Paul describes sin as a fearful slavery from which Christ defeats and frees us (Ro. 8:15). As Hebrews puts it, he freed “those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Heb 2:15). The manner that this was accomplished was through Christ’s death: “that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil” (Heb. 2:14). It was on the cross that “he gave himself” (Gal. 1:4, 1 Tim. 2:6; Tt. 2:14), that he might rescue, ransom, and redeem from the power to which men have been given up. The power that killed Christ is exposed, and the death-dealing of the world and the ruler of this world are defeated in Christ: “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out. “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (John 12:31-32). John puts it succinctly, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (I John 3:8). At the opening of Revelation Jesus holds “the keys of death and Hades” (Rev. 1:18). Presumably the one who holds the keys to death has taken control of what was formerly under Satan’s power. As Paul says in Ephesians, “He put all things in subjection under His feet” (Eph. 1:22). Christian Zionists would nullify this reality.

Jesus, in his healing ministry, says he has bound Satan. He casts out demons, and this is the sign that Satan is bound: “Or how can anyone enter the strong man’s house and carry off his property, unless he first binds the strong man? And then he will plunder his house” (Matt. 12:29). It is in this context, failing to recognize Christ’s defeat of Satan, that Jesus introduces blasphemy of the Holy Spirit: “Therefore I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven” (Matt. 12:31). They suppose he does these things by the power of the Beelzebub, but Jesus asks, “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he is finished!” (Mark 3:23-26). Here in Mark, he also equates missing this with blasphemy against the Holy Spirit: “Truly I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mark 3:28–29). Jesus declares he has bound Satan. He has “put the finger of God upon him,” and this means the kingdom of God has come upon you (Luke 11:20). With the sending out of the seventy Jesus declares, “I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning” (Luke 10:18). Jesus came to “proclaim release to the captives” as he reads from the scroll of Isaiah, and says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). Jesus clearly teaches Satan has been bound by his ministry. Revelation speaks of a loosing of Satan (or a lengthening of the chain that binds him); could it be that this occurs where Christians blasphemy the Holy Spirit and void the work of Christ, by dividing the kingdom (between the church and Israel) focusing on events surrounding Israel?

Revelation portrays the slain Lamb (Jesus Christ raised from the dead), as having defeated evil and reigning over the world: “And I saw between the throne (with the four living creatures) and the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth” (Rev. 5:6). Through Jesus’ death and resurrection the reign of God on the earth is established (in Rev. 4:1–8:1). The point of Revelation is how to endure devastation without being defeated by Satan: “And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death” (Rev. 12:11). By means of His death and resurrection and then in their witness, Christians are made a kingdom of priests who reign upon the earth (Rev. 5:10). “Now the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, he who accuses them before our God day and night” (Rev. 12:10). The dragon, that serpent of old has already been cast down in defeat, due to the testimony and blood of the martyrs and the “blood of the Lamb” but where the power of the cross is obscured the chain binding Satan is loosed. The implication is that where the message of Christ is perverted Satan continues to reign.

The genocide in Gaza is the clearest of signals that Christian Zionism is not only a bankrupt form of the faith, but spawned by the worst form of evil. This is not the Christianity of Christ or the New Testament, but is anti-Christ in its opposition to the ethics of Christ and the salvation Christ offers in His defeat and reign over evil. To answer the question of the title: Christian Zionism is not worthy of the name of Christ, but identifies the enemy Christ came to defeat.

[1] Referencing Chris Hedges report on Israel and Gaza, but substituting “Israelis” with “Christian Zionists,” brings home the evil being perpetrated in the name of Christ by premillennial, dispensationalist, and Zionist Christians. Chris Hedges, “The Gaza Riviera,” The Chris Hedges Report, July 26th, 2025. Thank you Jonathan for opening this to me.

[2] Hal Lindsey, The Apocalypse Code, (Palos Verdes, California, Western Front, 1997) 36. Cited in Stephen R. Sizer, The Promised Land: A Critical Investigation of Evangelical Christian Zionism in Britain and the United States of America since 1800 (PhD Dissertation at Middlesex University, 2002) 128.

[3] The list of prominent Christian Zionists is now beyond enumerating, but include most every prominent Republican politician and such prominent Christians as Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, John Hagee (the founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI)), and Mike Huckabee.

[4] See Donald M. Lewis, A Short History of Christian Nationalism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2021). Robert O. Smith, More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

[5] As made clear by Robert Smith (even in the title of his book).

[6] The New Scofield Study Bible, (New York, Oxford University Press, 1984), fn. 1, p. 20. Cited in Sizer, 120.

[7] Scofield Bible, 989. Cited in Sizer, 120.

[8] Sizer, 120-121.

[9]Dwight Pentecost, Things to Come, (Findlay, Ohio, Dunham, 1958), 529. Cited in Sizer, 126.

[10] Louis Bahjat Hamada, Understanding the Arab World, (Nashville, Nelson, 1990), 189. Cited in Sizer, 15.

[11] Dale Crowley, ‘Errors and Deceptions of Dispensational Teachings.’ Capital Hill Voice, (1996-1997), Cited in Sizer, 18.

[12] Apocalyptic Dispensationalism, Messianic Dispensationalism, and Political Dispensationalism offer variant interpretations but are agreed on the key facts surrounding Israel.

[13] In Psalm 90:4 and twice in II Peter 3:8. See Russell Boatman, What the Bible Says About the End Times (Joplin: College Press, 1980) 74-84. I am utilizing Boatman throughout this section.

[14] “As seven mystically implies universality, so a thousand implies perfection, whether in good or evil [AQUINAS on ch. 11]. Thousand symbolizes that the world is perfectly leavened and pervaded by the divine; since thousand is ten, the number of the world, raised to the third power, three being the number of God [AUBERLEN].” Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., & Brown, D. (1997). Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (Vol. 2, p. 598). Logos Research Systems, Inc.

The Unity of Creator and Creation in Christ-Consciousness: A Meditation on Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose

The incarnation means there is no gap between the finite and infinite, such that the ordinary is on a continuum with the eternal. Feeding the hungry, providing a drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, involves eternity: “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me” (Matt. 25:40).  This is not hyperbole. God is not a discreet object, an intrusion, or something beyond. God is in history, in the finite, in the “mundane.” Due to our distinctions between “the natural and the supernatural” we may think ordinary life, outside those special religious moments in prayer or church, are not adequate for the spiritual. Salvation, after all, is often conceived as departure rather than an embrace of the immediate reality, such as sharing a cup of water. We are prone to miss the spiritual in the ordinary and pass over reality in imagining it lies beyond, but there is no creature closed off from its Creator or one moment closed off from the eternal as the one depends upon the other, just as the Son relates to the Father. Reality is not discreet stuff contained in consecutive space and time but is a relational interdependence, in which the part is dependent upon the whole and the whole is in and through the parts, and in which Christ is holding all things together. Like Christ his disciples are to hold things together as mediators of order, bringing unity out of chaos, peace out of violence, care out of indifference, quenching thirst, hunger, and loneliness.

The problem which bad reflection and bad theology pose is to introduce conceptual distinctions into reality, such that the ultimate or absolute is beyond and the finite is only itself in distinction from the infinite. As Rowan Williams argues: “there is no ‘alterity’ – no sense of ‘one and then another alongside’ – between Creator and creation, between Word and humanity in Jesus; just as there is no ‘one and then another’ in the relation between Father and Son. In neither context can we talk about items that could be added together.”[1] Life is often a striving beyond itself (definitive of death) while eternal life is immediate. There is a harmonious whole in the relation between Father and Son poured out upon all things through the Spirit. The priority of deity over humanity does not mean they are discreet, anymore than the Father and Spirit are discreet. 

Creation is most fully itself, just as the Son is most fully himself, in relation and dependence: “the fully responsive and radically liberating dependence that is the filial relation in the divine life is the ground of all created dependence on the Creator, and so the logic of creation includes a natural trajectory towards this kind of life-giving responsiveness.”[2] The goal and ground of creation, as realized in the Son, is participation in Trinitarian life, but this participation is not beyond the finite, as if finitude were an incapacity. God is knowable in the Son, within finite capacities, as God has poured himself out in the Son by the Spirit, so he is present in human ways by human means, offering a drink, offering food, offering himself, to be known and loved in human ways.

Christ, the heart of creation, is not beyond creation but its center, so uncreated love, uncreated understanding, uncreated knowledge, as exercised in the Word, are opened to creatures made for eternity. However, unity with God is attained in a particular finite context. Just as Jesus comes in a particular context, so he finds us in history and time. It is not by escaping or transcending the context of createdness, but by coming to the fullness of the historical, the physical, the humanness that eternity is mediated.

The obstruction of sin, cuts off eternity in time and Christ reconciles us to this confluence. There is an opening to creation, as Christ restores or heals the broken relation, not only with God, but with reality. Createdness is an opening to the infinite as the discreetness, the alienation, the separation, the loneliness, are overcome in relatedness. The unity of the subatomic with the organic and the organic with the social and the social with the spiritual are part of a field, a form of consciousness. There is no gap to be bridged but the removal of the false obstacle is the coherence of Christ.

The convergence of visible and invisible is in and through the unifying head: “For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible . . . He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything” (Col. 1:16–18). This headship is inclusive of consciousness, of shared experience, of life in the Spirit, which participation in the body under the head entails, but it is realization of the infinite (consciousness) through immanence. The infinite does not transcend the finite in the sense that the finite annuls the infinite, or the infinite annuls the finite; they are interpenetrating.

God, taken as a discreet object, reduces to a mysterious transcendence in which ignorance passes for knowing the infinite as absence. As Gillian Rose notes in her meditation on Hegel, “If the infinite is unknowable, we are powerless. For our concept of the infinite is our concept of ourselves and our possibilities.”[3] God brings coherence out of chaos and this coherence is itself knowing God. Ironically, the insistence on absolute distinction between the finite and infinite, between God and the world, between the knowable and unknowable, is posited by consciousness. A consciousness which would only relate to an unknowable infinite, or which depends upon the unknown, grounds knowing in the negative.[4] In this manner Kant saved his rational foundation. The Kantian or modern notion of the infinite would separate it from the finite and sensuous, making the infinite utterly different and exterior. As Rose points out, “it is deprived of all characterization, and hence turned into an empty abstraction, an idol, made of mere timber.”[5]

In this hollowing out of the infinite is a “hallowing of a finitude that remains as it is” and the relations of domination, violence, exploitation, are legitimized.[6] To bring together the finite and the infinite, the domination of human reason must give way. God, the infinite, participates and enjoys creation as a fit dwelling, and the ethical infinite expressed in Christ is made an actually existing ethical finite. In other words, the Sermon on the Mount takes precedent over the particular laws of any place. There is an infinite ethical imperative that disrupts commitment to the infinitizing of human ethics and will.

We can only fall silent about God apart from Christ, but this knowing in Christ is not apart from creation, or apart from ethics, or apart from the normal. We can see the Father in Christ (John 14:9) and more. By partaking of the divine nature in discipleship, enacting Trinitarian life, taking up the cross, it is not as if God appears alongside the self or the world. God does not disrupt creation or personhood, but orders and opens it as the place of his indwelling. There is a unity of consciousness in which opposition between thought and its objects, the finite and infinite are dissolved, as consciousness takes on the unifying wholeness of the Head.  

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (p. 218). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.  

[2] Ibid.

[3] Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, (New York: Verso, 2009) 48.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 104.

[6] Ibid, 105.

Seventy-seven-fold: The Negative Infinite of Death Countered by Eternal Life

It is easy to understand the incident: a boy slaps and insults his elder and the man, forced by honor and perhaps self-protection, kills the young man (Gen. 4:23-24). Lamech kills the boy for striking him, and promises he will take seventy-seven-fold vengeance should anyone else dare to insult him. If the number is literal, he would kill 490 more rather than suffer the humiliation of unrequited insult. But this is not a limited number or a finite amount, as in Hebrew idiom seventy-times-seven is infinite. We have passed from the realm of quantification into the realm of pure drive. While radical evil, or the presumption the evil is in ontological competition with the good, is clearly a lie, Lamech demonstrates that this lie can be enacted.

Cain needs God to protect him, but Lamech takes up the work of God, even imitating and going beyond God in his own protection: seventy times more than the divine vengeance God promises for Cain. It is divine-like righteous indignation he serves, not God’s, but the obscene superego. As Paul and Freud describe, there is a split in the ego in which the superego is representative of the law, authority, God, but which is taken up into the self. This is not exactly self-worship, as what is served is death-dealing, fearful, shameful, and punishing in the experience. It is the sense in which one never feels adequate, never enough, never complete, and there is continual striving to achieve adequacy, life, fullness of being. This is a result of the self-diminishing superego or unconscious sense of having to gain life through serving the father, the law, or the masochistic orientation to death. It is a drive toward death, not only in murder but in the pursuit of life through death. Honor is gained through revenge, life is established through the power of death. In presuming a divine-like vengeance Lamech would establish justice, he will be justice, and he will spend himself in absolute servitude to the violence that has gripped him. Where Cain feared he would be avenged for Abel’s murder, Lamech is willing to spend his life in service of vengeance, the punishing law he would enact. He would be the law, the punisher, the judge, and the exactor of righteousness. Clearly the realm in which he is keeping account is symbolic, and the law he serves is larger than himself. What will come to be called “the law of sin and death” does not serve life but death. Soon the entire earth will take up and serve the law of Lamech: “Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11).

Lamech has assurance and even pride (perhaps religious pride), that he has done what was necessary, so he pens a little poem for his wives explaining his heroism (he has taken two wives, clearly an innovator in the realm of passion). In his poetic flourish he waxes hyperbolic about the impact of the slap, describing it as a “wound.” In the flesh a slap may not amount to much, but in the symbolic world of wounded pride and shame, a slap is a wound to the ego. The boy may as well have severed a limb, as Lamech is wounded spiritually and personally. No matter the age of the boy, as the greater his youth the greater the wound to Lamech’s dignity, and the greater the humiliation if the price of this offence is not exacted. This sort of evil deserves death or annihilation in payment.

Lamech may be describing a double homicide, as he has killed both a man and a boy, but more than likely it is the boys slap, that in his rhetorical flourish has become a wound, and the boy takes on an ominous manliness. This boy-man cannot simply be slapped in return, as the wound to Lamech is greater than the blow to the flesh. It has taken on symbolic weight; thus Lamech’s call for infinite revenge and the immediate death of the boy, signals passage into the symbolic.  The symbolic is the realm of death drive, no longer subject to or explainable by the finite. Something as delimiting as “an eye for an eye” or “a tooth for a tooth” is only for the finite and fleshly, but with Lamech the wound is clearly spiritual. The boy has offended one of divine-like status and for an infinite offense an infinite payment is necessary. The superego is an all-consuming deity, and no hint of wounded pride can go unpunished, and no punishment will ultimately satisfy.

Clearly there is delusion at work in Lamech’s presumption of divine dignity and revenge (the lie of the serpent continues). Gaining God-like status by being interpolated into the law, being the law, enacting justice, is “life” through the law. “Life” is the wrong word, as with the letter of the law, there is an incapacity for dying (a deadness not subject to mortality) taken up in identity through the symbolic order. The imagined self (the ego) is striving for life (dignity, pride, or substance). The struggle of Lamech to eternally revenge his wounded dignity, is on the order of the struggle Paul describes as the self-antagonistic body of death.

 The split objectifies the self, which is the psychological reality of Adam and Eve, in shame seeing themselves through the eyes of another. In the experience of shame, the objectified self is at once alienated (from God and self) and the struggle is pursuit of life (self) in the midst of shame and death. The symbolic, the law, the knowledge of good and evil, or simply language, is the medium of pursuit. Honor and pride, in the case of Lamech, constitute the symbolic (law), or superego (a function and creation of this law) he serves. Though it seems we are dealing in the realm of morality, the entire engagement is one of immorality, antagonism, and aggression. While it is obviously aggression against the other, the boy, it is also an inward violence turned outward (masochism turned outward in sadism). The price of serving this law is a life oriented to death.

As bizarre as the story of Lamech might be, it rings true with human experience of shame, anger, and revenge. While we may not want to own up to it, the story is not unfamiliar. On the other hand, what seems impossible, is Jesus’ counter to the story of Lamech: “Then Peter came and said to Him, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven’” (Matt. 18:21-22). Jesus poses the opposite, and seemingly incomprehensible ideal of infinite forgiveness, of forgiving seventy-seven-fold. Combined with his recommendations in the Sermon on the Mount, to love the enemy (Matt. 5:44), to turn the other cheek (Matt. 5:39), to joyfully suffer persecution (Matt. 5:11-12), this all seems highly implausible. The act of turning the other cheek alone, given the history following in the wake of Lamech’s revenge, poses a profound countermeasure to the cycles of revenge.

The two alternative actions arise from two different worlds and experiential resources. The pure evil of Lamech is posed against the pure goodness, grace and mercy of God in Jesus’ account. Lamech’s infinite revenge is a lying form of radical evil (an absolute evil) which experientially is the resource of murder or murderous anger. Jesus counters the infinite negative with the (actually existing) infinite God he incarnates. The lying infinite may seem more within our reach and realm of experience. Lamech’s revenge is more or less normalized in continuous war and violence of the world and inward struggle with pride and shame, while Jesus’ command of infinite forgiveness seems beyond human capacity. Jesus’ infinite forgiveness calls, not on the lying transcendence of the law (which transcends life only in its deadness) but His is a living transcendence and resource. Lamech’s infinite revenge or radical evil, is a lying impossibility but it is a lie that poses itself in our existential experience of unquenchable anger and shame.  What we learn in Christ is that the power of evil can be broken, not by exhausting human effort, but through participation in the divine life.

 As in the Lord’s prayer forgiveness is divine, and to be perfect like the heavenly Father is to forgive as He forgives (Matt. 5:48). Forgiveness is limitless in that it never capitulates to revenge, but also because it is a participation in God’s perfection (Matt. 5:48). God’s love and mercy are boundless and directly counter the negative infinity of evil. God is an infinite resource for goodness made available in Christ, as alien as this goodness may seem: “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust” (2 Pet. 1:3–4). Christ provides the existential and experiential reality of participating in God, restoring the divine image through becoming partakers of the divine nature. In this manner we escape the seemingly infinite lust that consumed Lamech.

Lamech stands at the head of long traditions of manly honor, machismo masculinity, knightly sensibilities, samurai spirit, laying down one’s life in violence, in which blood must be spilt that honor be restored. Jesus poses the opposite, and seemingly incomprehensible ideal, of forgiving seventy-seven-fold and then makes this seeming impossibility a reality through pouring out his life in his disciples.