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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.

Missing the Mark Exposed by Christ

Sin is one of the most complicated concepts in the Bible, yet in modern teaching and preaching it is often reduced to breaking a law and legal guilt and then in turn the work of Christ is reduced to getting rid of guilt. The richness of the original context reduced to the judicial or legal, misses the variety of words and concepts in the Hebrew, translated in the Septuagint as “hamartia.” The TDNT notes that the Hebrew poses a special difficulty because the terminology is not exclusively religious or theological, and in fact none of the Hebrew words can be captured in the English word “sin.”[1] It can involve something as slight as a “misdemeanor” or “negligence” or it may mean “to bend,” to “go astray,” to “miss the right point,” to “fail to find what you are seeking,” or it may refer to “those who have lost their way.” There is sometimes only slight or even no moral culpability, so sin cannot automatically be associated with guilt. At other times it may indicate a criminal offense such as murder and is inclusive of guilt.[2] But sin does something other than just cause guilt, as in a strictly legal understanding.

The first usage of hamartia in the Septuagint, is in God’s warning to Cain prior to his slaying of Abel: “sin is crouching at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Gen. 4:7). God equates sin with an animate desiring force that can and will gain mastery. Sin, like diabolos (διάβολος), is not a person but a power of “separating.”[3] Sin takes on an animate quality (“crouching,” seeming to speak, lying), in the serpent or the devil and “tries to disrupt the relation between God and man.”[4] Sin or “the satan” (this sub-personal force) causes enmity, and the fact that an angel sent by God is called the adversary or the satan, the one confronting Balaam and the one confronting Joshua the High Priest, indicates it is a force and not a particular personage (Num. 22:32; Zech. 3:1ff).[5] More often sin or the devil is “the one who separates,” “the enemy,” “the calumniator,” “the seducer.”[6] This force is a malicious liar aiming to create enmity and separation from God.

In the fall the serpent points to obtaining knowledge (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) rather than life with God (the tree of life representing God’s presence) and in acting on this lie the first couple are cast out of the garden. The text focuses on the shift in desire, from desiring life with God (the tree of life) to desiring the fruit of the other tree: “When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate” (Gen. 3:6). Adam and Eve in rejecting the model of God become the model: “In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God” (Gen 5:1). “When Adam had lived one hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, according to his image” (Gen. 5:3). There are varying degrees of individual moral turpitude in refusal of God (self targeting) but there is a downward inclination from Cain, to Lamech, to the generation of Noah, until humanity is corrupted by violence and separated from God.

The corruption involves a displacement of the divine model, as Cain turns his jealous attention off of God onto Abel, Lamech is filled with revenge and focused on his enemies, and the generation of Noah turn on one another and away from God: “every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Gen. 6:5). The focus off God onto parent, brother or enemy creates an exponential desire in pursuit of an unobtainable goal. “Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11). The target (indicated in hamartia) that poses itself in sin is a false goal based on a deadly deception, and this understanding, as pictured in Genesis 3, is thematic. The mark or goal is not external to God, but in sin the target is obscured.[7] As Isaiah indicates, “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Is. 59:2).

Sin is missing the desired mark, but the mark is not only obscured but displaced by what is unachievable, creating exponential desire. In Genesis 3 knowledge which would achieve divinity displaces knowing God (as with Adam and Eve); in Genesis 4 a sacrifice of the brother so as to attain his place of favor is focused on the obstacle (Cain focused on Abel); endless revenge enacted to obtain justice is focused on the enemy (as with Lamech and the generation of Noah). In each instance an obstacle, sin, satan, a lie obscures God. Knowing God, finding favor with God, and enacting justice are worthy goals, obscured and displaced. (As will become clear in the New Testament, the law becomes an obstacle as it becomes the goal and this is the archetypical problem.)

The New Testament clarifies the nature of the deception and the hostility it creates. According to the TDNT, “A complete transformation takes place when the NT uses ἁμαρτία to denote the determination of human nature in hostility to God.”[8] With the coming of Christ culpability comes to bear as the deception and blindness are exposed: “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:21). Jesus exposes the murderous intent of the scribes and Pharisees, not because they are peculiarly bad, but because they are perhaps the best, and what the best would do when confronted with God in Christ is kill him (in a fatal case of mistaken identity?). As Dietrich Bonhoeffer states: “When a human being confronts Jesus[,] the human being must either die or kill Jesus.”[9] The ego or “I” becomes the false goal and Jesus is unambiguous; either the false self, given over to sin dies, or one joins in those who kill the Messiah. As Rowan Williams puts it, in Christ the falsehood is exposed, “so that if we do not accept the mortality and death of our human logos we are going to be complicit in the death of the Word of God.”[10]

In the midst of their plotting to kill Jesus, the leading Jews are deceived about their violence and opposition to God: “If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets” (Matt. 23:30). They know their forefathers were deceived but cannot recognize their own delusion, made obvious in their opposition to Jesus: “So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers” (Matt. 23:31–32). They are deceived killers and Jesus exposes this reality: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt. 23:27). According to Luke they are like unmarked graves that men unwittingly walk over, and the danger is falling into the deadly trap (Luke 11:44). The corruption is hidden in the façade but the intent is clear in their action.

The history of murder is now revealed, and Jesus’ persecutors are culpable: “upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar” (Matt. 23:35). The image of God obscured by sin is fully revealed in Christ, but due to sin they destroy the true image so as to preserve the false image. As in the parable of the evil winegrowers (Mark 12), they destroy the Son so as to obtain ownership. Israel as a nation is committed to murder and has always been dominated by the same deadly spirit: “the blood of all the prophets, shed since the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation” (Luke 11:50). Jews are the prime example of the universal problem, as in them is exposed the spirit of murder and violence which would take by force the life that is freely given.

Their intent is exposed with the destruction of the Messiah, which will be followed by the destruction of Israel (Mark 13:2; Luke 19:43-44). The absolute destruction brought on by all-out violence is fulfilled in 70 A.D., but this cataclysmic violence pertains to all nations: “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be frightened; those things must take place; but that is not yet the end. For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will also be famines. These things are merely the beginning of birth pangs” (Mark 13:7-8). Jesus describes war and violence, not as the instrument of God, but as the culmination of evil. The violence on display against the Messiah and surrounding Jerusalem’s destruction will ultimately infect every level of humanity: “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and have them put to death” (Mk. 13:12). The end is upon the world as Jesus exposes the nature of violence, marking the beginning of the end. So, when Jesus accuses the scribes and Pharisees of murderous opposition, theirs is a type of the violence which will ultimately infect the world, in its pursuit of life through death.

Judaism and the law do not save from sin but the law (as both means and end) becomes the characteristic obstruction to God. The law becomes the Thing, holding out life, and there is no life in the law. The question that Paul raises in Romans 7:7 has to do with confusing or equating law and sin: “Is the law sin (Rom. 7:7b)?” Sins confusion, trying to obtain life through the law, makes it seem that the problem is with the law but the problem is in confusing the law with the goal. The law is not God, nor the power of God, nor the presence of God. The law does not contain life, but to imagine it does, creates the impossible situation of making the law the goal, which in Paul’s explanation points to the purpose of the law: “The Law came in so that the transgression would increase” (Rom. 5:20).

Paul does not mention the serpent in his commentary on Genesis 3, but identifies its role directly with sin and the law: “sin taking the opportunity through the law . . . produced in me coveting of every kind” (Rom. 7:8); “sin became alive” (7:9); “sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me” (Rom. 7:11). Sin’s deception creates the unobtainable goal, the big Other, the false god, the desirable, and the inherently unobtainable.

In the light of Christ, “the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature” (Heb 1:3) the true image and target (becoming like Him) are a reality. The deception is exposed and there is the possibility of defeating sin: “But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness” (Heb. 3:13). Now there is the possibility of recognizing, along with the prodigal son, the broken relationship caused by sin: “I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you” (Luke 15:18). The son’s prodigal action of abandoning his father becomes clear. The parable illustrates Jesus’ understanding that sin is to betray the Father for a false reality. “It is going out from the father’s house, i.e., godlessness and remoteness from God working itself out in a life in the world with all its desires and its filth. The event achieved through the coming of Jesus is recognition of this sin and conversion to God.”[11] In Christ we recognize the true image of God and we can thus be victorious over the deluding effect of sin, causing us to miss the mark.

Sin as missing the mark or failing to achieve a desired end, reduced to a judicial sense, misses the relational, emotional, and the desiring connotation of the biblical word and context. The judicial understanding imagines that the desired end is in view, and misses the biblical notion that sin deceives through a desire that obscures the goal. There is a broken relationship as the lie of sin directs desire onto an unobtainable object. Eve is focused on the fruit, Cain on his brother, the prodigal son on his inheritance, the older son has his eye on his brother, and the Pharisee is focused on the law. God as goal is obscured, but in Christ the root of sin, the obscuring animate lie, is exposed.

[1] Quell, G., Bertram, G., Stählin, G., & Grundmann, W. (1964–). ἁμαρτάνω, ἁμάρτημα, ἁμαρτία. In G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 1, p. 269). Eerdmans.

[2] Ibid, 267ff. .

[3] Foerster, W. (1964–). διαβάλλω, διάβολος. In G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley, & G. Friedrich (Eds.), Theological dictionary of the New Testament (electronic ed., Vol. 2, p. 71). Eerdmans.

[4] Ibid, 76. As in the case of the fall, in the case of Noah, Abraham, in the Exodus, in the episode of the golden calf, in the case of David, and throughout the history of Israel.

[5] “The angel of the LORD said to him, ‘Why have you struck your donkey these three times? Behold, I have come out as an adversary, because your way was contrary to me.’”

[6] Ibid, p. 72.

[7] Thanks to Jonathan Totty for this thought.

[8] Ibid, ἁμαρτία, 295. Especially in Jn. in the synon. formulae ἔχειν ἁμαρτίαν (9:41; 15:22, 24; 19:11; 1 Jn. 1:8).

[9] The Bonhoeffer Reader, ed. Clifford J. Green and Michael P. DeJonge, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013) 286. Cited in Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (p. 186). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

[10] Williams, 186.

[11] Ibid, ἁμαρτία, 303.

Universal Nonviolence Through Apocalyptic Beatitudes  

In recent posts I trace the interlocking logic of universal salvation with nonviolence, claiming that salvation is through cosmic peace taken up in the nonviolence of the individual. In this post I pursue this theme in apocalyptic imagery (the universal defeat of the powers and establishment of peace) which must be presumed in practicing the ethic of Christ (constituting salvation). The breaking in of the kingdom of peace in Christ is the enabling telos and vision behind the resistant nonviolence of Jesus’ central ethical teaching. The ethic alone does not contain the compelling vision, while the apocalyptic imagery alone does not account for the peaceful nonviolent participation of the individual. Taken together, there is an interlocking logic of universal peace through nonviolent practice. The imagination captured in the cosmic victory, portrayed in Revelation, is enabled to participate in the victory of peace through following Jesus’ ethic in the Sermon on the Mount.

The Victory of the Slain Lamb in the Life of His Followers

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). The perfection of power in seven horns and the fulfillment of omniscience in seven eyes, indicates that this perfect one is able to open the seven seals and reveal what has been formerly hidden.

It is made clear (in 4:1–8:1) that through Jesus’ death and resurrection the reign of God on the earth is established. This message is delivered to a people being harshly persecuted, and the point is to enable them to endure, by recognizing God’s kingdom established through the victory of Christ, which is also established through their martyrdom (the message of the fifth seal 6:9). In the midst of seeming defeat is a vision of victory. The point of Revelation is how to understand and 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). Thus, 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).

The perspective need not depend only on future fulfillment, as it is enacted now: “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 caste down in defeat, due to the testimony and blood of the martyrs and the “blood of the Lamb.” The blood of each represents the defeat of violence through total nonviolence. As Denny Weaver sums up Revelation: “The two sections of the book present different versions of the confrontation, but in both the victory comes through resurrection — the overcoming of violence by restoring life — rather than through greater violence by God to eliminate the world’s violence.”[1] In both the case of Christ and the church there is a confrontation between the reign of God and the reign of Satan, manifest in Rome. In chapter 12, the dragon recognizing his defeat, attempts a final ploy by making war with the woman (the church) and her offspring: “So the dragon was enraged with the woman, and went off to make war with the rest of her children, who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus” (Rev. 12:17). They are able to hold to the commandments and their testimony because they recognize Satan is already defeated.

The Ethics of the Lamb and His Followers

In Revelation, it is in light of the victory of Christ secured and announced in the resurrection, that a martyr’s ethic is enacted. The Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, encapsulate the new attitudes Christians are to be, in light of Jesus’ defeat of death. The reworked reality enables a new sort of kingdom ethic, which in the Sermon entails an immediate counter to empire (Rome). Turning the other cheek, going the second mile, giving the inner cloak, giving up on oaths, and loving enemies, are strategies for resisting evil without participating in the violence of evil (Matt. 5:38-48). The better translation of verse 39, rather than “do not resist an evildoer” is “do not oppose the wicked man by force” (David Bentley Hart’s translation). The command is not one of nonresistance, but a forbidding of evil resistance. The entire recommendation is one of nonviolent resistance: enduring the slap and turning the cheek means standing one’s ground, going the second mile means putting the Roman soldier in your debt (going beyond what is required and even legal), and offering up the inner garment in court means standing naked (which again involves the shame of the perpetrator). The specifics of Roman law and the Roman situation make each of these a very specific leveraging of nonviolent resistance.

In the beatitudes (Matthew 5:2-12), poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness, hunger and thirst for justice displace, the worlds attitudes of pride, revenge, and injustice. Peacemaking, is the mark of God’s children and this is immediately compounded with “those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness,” the mark of kingdom citizens (Matt. 5:10). This is Jesus’ handbook for Christian enactment of universal peace at an individual level. Do and be these things and one is a true follower of Jesus: “a child of God,” enacting heaven on earth, “inheriting both heaven and earth,” finding “satisfaction” in life, and enabled to “see God,” such that the presence of God comes to bear on earth. This is the action and belief behind the prayer, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). As J. Denny Weaver explains, “The reign of God becomes visible in the world when Christians — people identified with and by Jesus Christ — continue to live in Jesus so that the reign of God becomes visible.”[2]

God is with us in Christ (Immanuel) and this reality of God poured out in the particulars of his life, is taken up in the lives of participants in his kingdom. God is Christ-like and the Christian can be like Christ, in imitation and through mutual indwelling. The Christian can enter into Trinitarian relationship, inclusive of the nonviolent practice of Christ’s peace. The character of God is given in Christ, involving concrete attitudes and actions. The nonviolent God revealed in Christ, as with Christ, necessarily involves resistance to the world’s violence, persecution, and the possibility of a violent death, but this is the point. The peace of God is not founded on violence but defeats death and violence, and this is salvation.

Universal Nonviolence

The apocalyptic breaking in of peace into the violence of the world, enacted in Christ and carried forward by his followers, is simultaneously cosmic (universal) and individual (particular), as portrayed in the Sermon on the Mount and the book of Revelation. The world change enacted in Christ defeats death and violence, casting out the ruler of this world, but this cosmic casting out inaugurated by Christ is continued through his followers’ taking up the cross and being the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world” (Matt. 5:13). The Truth exposing and casting out the father of lies, transforms human imagination about the world and God (the universal) and this shows forth in a kingdom ethic and attitude. In this apocalyptic understanding the followers of Christ begin to live according to the new ethical understanding set forth by Christ’s example and teaching on resistant nonviolence. The weapons of peace do not deal in destruction and death, but are an enactment of heaven on earth, both assuming and bringing about the reality of Christ’s kingdom on earth.

[1] J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent God (pp. 45-46). Eerdmans. Kindle Edition.

[2] Weaver, p. 25.

God is not Violent

It is not God’s violence that killed Christ but human violence. This violence is projected onto God (as His will), obscuring who He is, and Christ reveals God through enduring, exposing, and defeating the power that killed Him. The final and full revelation of God in Christ displaces violent notions of God, as not only is Christ nonviolent, but his entire life journey through death and resurrection defeats the weaponization of death, exposing notions of originary violence as the lie of the devil. In Christ God is defeating both this violent image of God and deployment of death as the means to salvation. 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). Jesus ends the violent hostility by defeating death and making the God of peace known and knowable and thus ending the confusion between God and the devil.

We Know God Through Christ

The revelation given through Christ is not simply propositions about God (though this is not excluded) but a personal knowing, and this knowing stands in contrast to previous forms of knowing. Formerly God was not known in the fullness of his personhood (which also includes an inadequate propositionalism). The former incompleteness is variously described as dealing in “dead works,” “the law of sin and death,” “the body of death,” or “the letter that kills.” Life in Christ is the primary contrast with this former way characterized by death, and this life is characterized by peace, love, hospitality, and nonviolence. In the former system God is not known directly but is partially revealed through the mediation of law, angels, and human messengers, which are variously likened to shadows or subject to an entrapment to “elementary principles” or may give rise to a violent deception. Knowing God in Christ is to pass from death to life (inclusive of all those characteristics and orientations involved in each).

Hebrews: God in Christ Defeats Enslavement to the Fear of Death

The writer of Hebrews contrasts knowing God in Christ with every manner in which God was revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures and religion: “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:1–3). Chapter by chapter the writer describes the variety of means used previously  and their inferiority compared to Christ: chapters 3-4: Christ is greater than Moses and the law delivered by angels and not God; chapters 5-7: Jesus is the true High Priest in that he is true mediator and thus perfect representative of God; chapters 8-10: Christ establishes a new relationship or covenant which brings about the life and peace lacking in the temple and its system; chapter 11 describes faithfulness of the Hebrew martyrs in the face of violent death even though they had not received the fullness of Christ; chapter 12 points out that though they may be suffering violent persecution the recipients of this letter have not yet shed any blood (12:4) thus they are experiencing the discipline of the life of faith; chapter 13, Jesus is the author and perfector of faith and thus they are to endure in love and not fear the violent things that might be done to the body.

The author consistently ties in the personhood of Christ, not only with a complete understanding of God but a complete understanding of the world: Christ “upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Heb. 1:3). The character of God revealed in Christ permeates the universe, as he creates and sustains, but also because he perfects and purifies. Though the world of man is given over to violence and persecution of Christ and Christians, we now have direct access to God, behind the veil that previously obstructed access but through Christ has been removed (chapter 10). Jesus has brought peace between God and man, where formerly hostility reigned, and he has established peace within human conscience (9:9-14): “how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” (9:14).

 Though the writer does not explicitly equate the incompleteness of the old covenant with violence, nor the completeness of the new covenant with peace, this is the implicit comparison throughout. The danger is one of perishing in the wilderness like the Israelites rather than entering God’s sabbath rest (chapter 4); there is the danger of clinging to repeated blood sacrifices (dead works which leave one with a troubled conscience) rather than being united with God in the once and for all sacrifice of Christ which leads to a clean conscience (chapter 9); or there is the danger of dealing in death and being ruled by this fear, rather than finding eternal life through Christ’s defeat of death: “Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, that through death He might render powerless him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and might free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (2:14-15). Rather than dealing in death, Christ has opened “a new and living way” (Heb. 10:20). In the book of Hebrews Christ fully reveals God and this revelation amounts to the passage from dealing in death (the incomplete, the fearful, the sacrificial, the mediated, the shadows) to dealing in life (peace, rest, sanctification, clean conscience, faithfulness, hope, forgiveness, etc.)

John: God is Revealed in Christ’s Defeat of Violent Death On the Cross

Perhaps the most famous passage equating the revelation of Christ with knowing God is John 1:1-14. This passage identifies Jesus as the Word who “was with God” and who “was God.” He is creator and redeemer: “All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men” (John 1:3-4). The Word is God in the flesh, revealing the reality of God in and through his divinity and humanity. Throughout his Gospel John identifies Jesus directly with God, assuming the highest name for God (ἐγώ εἰμι, “I am” or YHWH)  in his “I am” statements (e.g., John 8:58: “Before Abraham was, I am.”). He tells Philip, that to see Him is to see the Father : “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me?” (Jn 14:9–10). Jesus is the full revelation of who God is, and again the two-fold characteristic of this revelation is that Jesus reveals the truth about God and the truth about all of creation.

In his confrontation with “the Jews” Jesus contrasts himself with their understanding: “You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44). The Jews will kill Jesus to protect their understanding of the law and the temple, which certainly points to their failure, but also to the inadequacy of the Jewish system to change their thought world, grounded in violence and death. They speak the native language of their father, a lying murderer, while Jesus is offering the word of life (8:51). There are two streams of meaning or two heads or fathers of language (8:38); the deadly language of the devil and the Living Word of Christ. The law and the temple are not inherently evil, but taken as an end in themselves they are the basis for rejecting the reality about God revealed in Christ.

In their understanding they would kill Jesus to save their religion, and Jesus would rescue them from their entrapment to violence. Those who “continue in” or do the word of Jesus “will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:31-32). They could be free from sin, which in the context pertains directly to killing Jesus, but their attachment to the law as an end in itself leaves no room for the Truth: “you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you” (8:37). They are committed to killing Jesus due to their understanding that Abraham is their father, and Jesus explains they have confused their paternity: “They answered and said to Him, ‘Abraham is our father.’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you are Abraham’s children, do the deeds of Abraham. But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do. You are doing the deeds of your father” (John 8:39-41). They think they know God, and in killing Jesus they imagine they are doing the works of their father, but Jesus suggests they do not know God at all: “Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I proceeded forth and have come from God, for I have not even come on My own initiative, but He sent Me” (John 8:42).

The mistake to be avoided is to imagine this misrecognition is a peculiarly Jewish problem. The Jews are representative of humanity, and their problem is the human problem. All people are captive to the violence (the murderous devil) that gives rise to the cross, and at the cross Christ exposes the lie behind the universal violence, and shows who God really is: “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). The ruler of this world rules through the sort of violence that put Jesus on the cross. This should be Satan’s triumphal moment, as he has accomplished the end goal of his work throughout history. He has enslaved the nations to the death dealing lie that puts Christ on the cross, but the lie behind violent killing is exposed and the fear of death is defeated.

In John 3, Jesus explains to Nicodemus, who seems to represent the Jew veiled from understanding the Scriptures (he has no concept of being “born again”, a theme of the Hebrew Scriptures) and in Jesus estimate he seems incapable of receiving things of the Spirit (3:6,11,12). Here too it is the being “lifted up” that unveils the truth of Moses in Jesus: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life” (3:14-15). The sting of death warded off by the upraised serpent of Moses is fulfilled in Jesus destroying the work of the devil on the cross. “Now judgment is upon this world; now the ruler of this world will be cast out” (John 12:31). Sin and the devil rule through death, but God has decommissioned the singular weapon in the devil’s arsenal.

It is the “lifting up” which reveals Jesus’ identity as the “I am” (YHWH): “So Jesus said, ‘When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He’” (John 8:28). Here is the realization of Isaiah, that through the “lifted up” servant “you may know and believe that I AM” (Isa. 43:10; 52:13). The universal appeal of the gospel is found in the death of Christ, as it is in his violent death that violence and death are defeated. Universal violence is overcome in the cross, as the peace of God in Christ defeats the violence of the world through the final and full revelation of the peace of God. As J. Denny Weaver writes, “God’s overcoming of death puts on sharp display the contrast between God’s modus operandi and that of the forces of evil. Whereas the forces of evil employ death-dealing as the solution to their supposed problems, God’s answer and response is the overcoming of death, the restoration of life. God saves, not by taking life but by restoring life.”[1]

Universal Salvation Through Peace

The claim that God is not violent is strangely controversial, though this understanding is at the very heart of the gospel. It is the orthodox understanding of the Trinity, and part of a theological commonplace that the persons of the Trinity share the essential divine characteristics such as peace. The nonviolence of God is tied to salvation as incorporation into the universal peace of God realized in Christ (see my previous blog here dealing with Paul’s epistles), in that universal peace also speaks of an originary peace in God (the very definition of universal peace). Neither God nor the universe are built upon an originary violence in which peace is a by-product of violence (peace through war, harmony through an original disharmony, unity as obliteration of the other, divine satisfaction through violence and death, etc.). God’s capacity to extend and incorporate into his peace through the Trinity, through creation, and through redemption, is the reality revealed in Christ. The peace of God revealed in the cross (inclusive of the life, death and resurrection of Christ) means we know God in and through the peace he gives in giving himself. We know God most completely through Christ, who is the very image of God, and the peace of God revealed and realized through Christ is the gospel.

Conclusion

A “gospel” focused on God’s violence as that which killed Christ misses the gospel. Violence projected onto God obscures God as God is the very definition of peace, and Christ reveals God through enduring, exposing, and defeating the reign of death and restoring the peace of God. The final and full revelation of God in Christ displaces violent notions of God and the seeming necessity of the war within and without, as not only is Christ nonviolent, but his entire life journey through death and resurrection defeats the cudgel of death constituting evil. In Christ God defeats evil and the confusion between the devil (in the violent image of God) and the Father of the Prince of Peace. The power that killed Christ is exposed, and the death-dealing of the world is defeated in the peace that passes understanding. Jesus ends the violent hostility by defeating death and making the God of peace known and knowable.

[1] J. Denny Weaver, The Nonviolent God (pp. 32-33). Eerdmans. Kindle Edition.

The Interlocking Necessity of Universalism and Nonviolence

The nature of violence is division within and without. Warfare is by definition divided, antagonistic, and set for one side to be destroyed. Peace through war is the contradiction that lies behind all warfare. The reign of death is the violent, fearful, grasping, utilizing death to gain life (as in the story of Cain and Abel, the first use of the term sin, Gen. 4:7). Paul’s picture in both Corinthians and Romans is that sin reigns in and through death, with death giving rise to sin. His point is not merely that sin results in death, as in the sin of Adam, but that the spread of death has meant the spread of sin (as witnessed in the sin of Cain, then Lamech, then the generation of Noah, and the ongoing history of a world at war), as sin is what people would do to save themselves from and through death (the death of the other). Sin’s struggle, in Paul’s explanation (Rom. 4, 6, 7) is a violent struggle for existence in the face of the reality of death. There is a hostility toward others and God which is connected to every form of evil (Col 1:21; Rom. 8:7-8). The violent division between people utilizing murder, war, borders, walls, antagonism, punishment, delimitation, exclusion, is the human attempt to violently utilize and control death. Paul refers to it as the “wall of hostility”: the division between Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, which are characteristic forms of the infectious violence (Eph. 2:14; Gal. 3:28). Evil, violence, murder, war, suicide, genocide, and deicide describe the hostility definitive of the world. Universal salvation must entail the universal deliverance from death and violence.

Universal or complete peace, at the cosmic and individual level, is the predominant picture of salvation in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:22; Rom. 5:18; 2 Thess. 3:16; Isaiah 26:3; Eph. 2:14; Col. 1:19-20, 3:15). There is an interlocking logic and necessity between the all-inclusive nature of the gospel of peace (its universal import – for all), and the universal realization of the peace of Christ (in and through all, Col. 1:19-20). The universality of the one entails the all-inclusive aspect of the other. All creation must be brought into the peace of Christ and everything within or about the individual and existence must be incorporated into this peace. The “all in all” (I Cor. 15:28; Rom 11:36) of Christian peace is necessarily universal in this double sense. Partial peace, with a remainder of violence, death, or division is not the absolute peace of Christ. It cannot be as Aquinas and others imagined, that those in heaven could delight in watching their loved ones burn in hell. For the individual to find peace, there must be an all-inclusive cosmic peace for there to be an all-inclusive inner peace. Thus, salvation as universal peace means a total abolishment of violence between and within people and powers. Salvation from death and violence cannot be partial, only for some, or parts of some (e.g., their soul) or only for some things. If some part of the cosmic or individual is not included there is division that disrupts at every level. For peace to reign, there cannot be the continuation of either mega or micro violence as the universal is tied to the particular and the particular is tied to the universal.

Universal however, also applies in the negative sense throughout. There is a universal problem, inclusive of all people and extending to the cosmos.  “For as in Adam all die” and “death reigns in the world” (1 Cor. 15:22; Rom. 8:20-21). Again, the negative universal is inclusive of the cosmic and particular. The universality of death extends to all people and to everything about each. To be dead in sin (Eph. 2:1) is an action (“the law of sin and death,” Rom. 8:2) instituted in a misorientation to life, death, and the law. Death is both a practice and orientation, which is not so much about mortality as an active dying. The “law of sin and death” is not primarily about either law or death, but an orientation to the law that is deadly. A way of characterizing this law is in its divisive violence.

In a catena of quotes (from the law) which apply in their original context to Jews and sometimes to their enemies, Paul weaves together a picture of sin in which the organs of speech, due to taking up a deadly lie, function as a grave and entrap and poison, leading to bloodshed and violence (Rom. 3:10-18). Nothing or emptiness seem to have been taken up into the organs of speech, to become there a grave or a sarcophagus. Throughout the list the organs of speech deal in death: “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit” (3:13 quoting Ps. 5.9). David, in this Psalm, compares two kinds of speech, as they orient one, either to God’s presence or his absence. The lie of sin deals in death even among those who have been entrusted with the oracles of God (3:2). Violence and death reign, having taken root in the inner man.

The divide among people applies as well to the warring divide within the individual. The war of the mind would also destroy itself to gain peace: “for sin, taking an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. . . I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:11, 14,15). Paul characterizes the self-antagonism of sin as “the law of sin and death and “the body of death” crying out at the end of the chapter: “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (Rom. 7:24). The recognition that death accounts for the universal human sickness at its root in the inward self (death drive, Thanatos, masochism, etc.) locates this universal sickness within the individual, so that the cosmic cure must begin here. In its universality the peace of Christ is the resolution to psychological violence that is the seed of every form of violence.

If sin and death are a violent struggle for life, resulting in death, then the gift of life, as in Paul’s depiction, is the universal resolution to the problem: “For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (I Cor. 15:21-22). The universal problem is universally resolved, and this resolution pertains not only to all people but to the cosmos: “For God was pleased to have all his fulness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross” (Col. 1:19-20). Peace is the breaking down of the universal wall of hostility (Eph. 2:14). The wall of separation between Jews and Gentiles is the characteristic form of hostility undone in the peace of Christ: “there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11). “For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall” (Eph. 2:14). Christ’s peace, resolves the enmity, in and through himself, extended to all people and then to the cosmos: He abolished “in His flesh the enmity . . . so that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near; for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:15–18). Universal salvation through defeat of violent antagonism and putting on the peace of Christ are a singular move. The warring factions between Jews and Gentiles, slave and free, male and female, or any other antagonistic dualism in heaven and earth (Col. 1:19-20) are finished in the peace of Christ, inclusive of the inner depths of the individual.

The resolution to the deadly struggle is found in Christ: “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:1–2). The holistic peace of Christ is universal in its penetration of the mind and body of the individual: “For those who are according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who are according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:5-8). The inward hostility, in which the mind and body seem to be obeying separate laws, is overcome through the unifying work of the Spirit.

Once again, Paul connects the inner depth of peace within, with cosmic peace: “the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom. 8:21–22). The new birth of the individual, involves the same suffering futility and corruption imposed on the universe, and so too the new birth is inclusive of cosmic peace and reconciliation. The creation and all that is within it is being set free from violent, alienating, futility, and this universal release from death and violence is the “all in all” peace of Christ. Universal salvation is by definition the telos of a peace that dispenses with all violence.

Two of the most neglected and perhaps reviled doctrines stand at the very center of the gospel: salvation for all in the peaceable nonviolence of Christ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Reader, 73.

[4] Reader, 199.

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

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

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

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

[9] Hegel’s God, 4.

[10] Hegel’s God, 3.

[11] Hegel’s God, 4.

[12] Hegel’s God, 5.

[13] Hegel’s God, 64.

[14] Hegel’s God, 64.

[15] Hegel’s God, 64.

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

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

[18] Hegel’s God, 66.

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

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

[21] Hegel’s God, 67.

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

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

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

As a Lutheran, Bonhoeffer once held to Martin Luther’s notion of two kingdoms: Christian truth and salvation pertain to God’s (heavenly) kingdom and not the temporal/secular realm ordered through God-ordained government. The Sermon on the Mount may work in church but it will not work on the battlefield, in the courtroom, or in the government’s suppression of evil. The Christian lives in both of these realms and so, she must sort out one from the other so as to avoid conflicted obligations. The way to do this, is by recognizing Christian ethics and obligations are for the kingdom of heaven and not the kingdoms of this world. Practically this meant the church’s witness was silenced as it allowed State ethics to dictate church action or inaction.  In Bonhoeffer’s estimate, this gave rise to the notion that the church exists for itself, rather than for the world.

Recognizing this two-kingdom understanding (and the consequent notion that the Church exists for itself) caused the failure of the German Church, Bonhoeffer takes Luther’s Christocentrism beyond Luther by grounding all reality in the incarnation. The incarnation is definitive of the center of God’s activity, constituting a singular truth: “The most fundamental reality is the reality of the God who became human. This reality provides the ultimate foundation and the ultimate negation of everything that actually exists, its ultimate justification and ultimate contradiction.”[2] Christian life and Christian ethics are not to be centered on some other world or kingdom. Bonhoeffer sees this two-kingdom split as giving rise to a split in ethics and a dividing up of Christian commitment. The Christian life becomes a means of escape – a kind of “redemption myth.” However, “Unlike believers in the redemption myths, Christians do not have an ultimate escape route out of their earthly tasks and difficulties into eternity. Like Christ . . . they have to drink the cup of earthly life to the last drop, and only when they do this is the Crucified and Risen One with them, and they are crucified and resurrected with Christ.”[3]

Christ gives himself completely for the world and the Christian is called, not to serve another world or another kingdom: “The world has no reality of its own independent from God’s revelation in Christ. It is a denial of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ to wish to be ‘Christian’ without being ‘worldly.’”[4] By “worldly” Bonhoeffer means a commitment to this world: “The earth that feeds me has a right to my work and my strength. . .. I owe it faithfulness and thanksgiving. . .. I should not close my heart . . . to the tasks, pains, and joys of the earth, and I should wait patiently for the divine promise to be redeemed, but truly wait for it, and not rob myself of it in advance, in wishes and dreams.” As Bonhoeffer explains, “Only when one loves life and the earth so much that with it everything seems to be lost and at its end may one believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new world.”[5] Christ’s death and resurrection are not for life in some other place, but speak of redemption and new life in the place he died and was raised. We are not to flee this world and its suffering, but face it and so share in His suffering and thus share in redemption.

Rather than a divided reality or a division between heaven and earth, Bonhoeffer pictures all of reality centered on the incarnation of Christ. Christ opens up the world in a new way. We are no longer bound by alienation and isolation but graced with a new form of human relatedness and community. As Brian Watson writes, “Now that Christ has redeemed the world, a new humanity restored by the grace of God and exemplified by Jesus is bursting forth in this world and this life.” Bonhoeffer replaces the dictum “God became human in order that humans might become divine” with “the view that Christ’s humanity makes true humanity possible – now human beings as they were intended are exemplified by Jesus himself.”[6] Jesus Christ, the truly human one, is “the human being for others” and this human connectedness is the experience of His truth. This is neither a rejection of God’s good creation nor is it the typical ecclesial predisposition to dominate it. God’s presence is not in “some highest, most powerful and best being imaginable.” Christ makes possible a new life in being for others, through participation in His life of self-giving love (pouring out his life in love for the world).[7]

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

In the end, Bonhoeffer considered the German Protestant church, no church at all. Even the Confessing church, consumed with its own survival “has become incapable of bringing the word of reconciliation and redemption . . . to the world. So the words we used before must lose their power, be silenced, and we can be Christians today in only two ways, through prayer and in doing justice among human beings. All Christian thinking, talking, and organizing must be born anew, out of that prayer and action.”[10]

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

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

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, (Fortress Press, 2004), 223. Cited in Brian Kendall Watson, “The Political Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Ethical Problem of Tyrannicide” (2015). LSU Master’s Theses. 612.

[3] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John de Gruchy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010) 447–48. Cited in Peter Hooton, “Beyond, in the Midst of Life: An Exploration of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity in its Christological Context” (PhD dissertation, St Mark’s National Theological Centre, School of Theology, CSU, 2018), 90.

[4] Ethics,  99.

[5] Letters and Papers, 213.

[6]  Watson, 14.

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

[8] Ethics, 139.

[9] Ethics, 140.

[10] Letters and Papers, 389. 

The Sublime Experience of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published November 5, 2020

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

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

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

Can We Ever Escape from Our Surroundings?

Guest Blog by C J Dull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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