Forging Ploughshares

The Necessity of Sergius Bulgakov’s Personalism as Supplement to David Bentley Hart on World Religions

The brilliant Russian Theologian, Sergius Bulgakov, captures both the truth in the world’s religions and the possibility that, perhaps for this same reason, the various religions may hold, at a minimum, a pedagogical danger (missing the uniqueness and finality of Christ), and at a maximum may threaten captivity to the demonic (though he constantly and at length qualifies the nature of this danger, and even maintains that to reduce pagan religion to the demonic is blasphemous). David Bentley Hart, largely inspired by Bulgakov, captures the positive moment in world religions and shared humanity, but Hart is not concerned to highlight the uniqueness of Christ in comparison to the religions, and does not warn, as does Bulgakov, of the danger of misapprehension. As a result, Hart’s abstractions float free of the intimate Christocentric and Trinitarian Personalism, which pervade the work of Bulgakov. Hart (in his book The Experience of God )[1]waxes eloquent on the divinely inspired element in human religion, thought, and experience, with Bulgakov providing a necessary delimitation to Hart’s expansiveness.[2]

Their shared starting premise is summed up by Hart: “God is not only the ultimate reality that the intellect and the will seek but is also the primordial reality with which all of us are always engaged in every moment of existence and consciousness, apart from which we have no experience of anything whatsoever.”[3] As Bulgakov states it: “There is no place and can be no place of its own or independent ground for the world which would belong to it alone. If there is such a place, it must be established by God, for there is nothing that is outside of or apart from God and that in this sense is not-God.”[4] Human experience, at its foundation and in substance, is living and moving and having being in God. According to Augustine (and cited by Hart), God is not only beyond our highest thoughts but is more inward to me than my inmost thoughts.

Bulgakov ties the substance of human experience, not simply to an abstract concept of God, but directly to Christ, in that all of humanity shares in the experience of the first and second Adam: “The new Adam redeemed the whole old Adam and in this sense replaced him with himself. And no pars pro toto, or series of successive and partial redemptions, could correspond to this task, which is a universal one.” Adam, “necessarily presupposes the existence of an integral all-humanity, which is redeemed by Christ in its entirety and not only in its individual parts or persons.”[5] Bulgakov pictures this as working in two directions, from Christ to each person and from each person to Christ. In the incarnation, “The Lord took His humanity not from impersonal nature but from each of us personally. He thus became one with His humanity, introducing it into His own hypostatic being. And only on this basis can it be said: ‘Christ lives in me.’”[6]

Bulgakov grounds the most abstract concepts in the Person of Christ (personhood itself), in which Christ’s Personhood is a summing up and ground of each individual person. Christ as the all in all, is what I am most intimately in myself, and he is what I am becoming.

Every person is a point on the surface of this sphere, connected by a radius to the center. The whole and a particular variant, the genus and an individual, exist with one existence, are inwardly one. The historical chain of individual human lives with all its diversity manifests the multiplicity of the genus; far from abolishing the multi-unity, it even presupposes it. Thus, each human individual, being a generic being, is at the same time personal and all-human.[7]

Hart describes this finite experience of the eternal as the guiding substance and quality of thought, experience, and desire: “The vanishing point of the mind’s inner coherence and simplicity is met by the vanishing point of the world’s highest values; the gaze of the apperceptive ‘I’ within is turned toward a transcendental ‘that’ forever beyond; and mental experience, of the self or of the world outside the self, takes shape in the relation between these two ‘supernatural” poles.’” Rational experience continually goes beyond the immediacy of finite experience and objects, comprehending them in “more capacious conceptual categories.” The mind conceives of the world only “because it has always already, in its intentions, exceeded the world. Consciousness contains nature, as a complete and cogent reality, because it has gone beyond nature.”[8] The values providing impetus to thought and judgment cannot be accounted for within the material world, a fact immediately available in experience, which Bulgakov explicitly identifies with the deity and humanity of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Bulgakov, through a careful exegetical process, arrives at the universality of experience with which Hart begins. He poses as his point of inquiry a refutation of the notion that pre-Christian paganism was lacking in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, making the case that paganism consists of a “natural old testament” and that all people, in the words of Romans know of God: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Rom. 1:19–20). To imagine that paganism was totally deprived of the Holy Spirit and even the spirit of God, is contrary, as Bulgakov demonstrates, to both the Old and New Testament.[9] “In conformity with the spiritual maturity, particular gifts, and historical destinies of paganism, the knowledge of God is realized in it in multiple and manifold ways; and this knowledge is possible only because the Holy Spirit ‘bloweth’ also in the unrevealed (and in this sense) ‘natural’ religions.”[10]

We know that God has been preparing and speaking to all peoples, as the Word of Christ translates into every culture and tongue. On the day of Pentecost “every man heard [the apostles] speak in his own language” (Acts 2:6). There is a deep grammar, or a shared Spirit (the Old Testament “spirit of God”), giving rise to every culture and religion. As Hart puts it, there is “a sort of universal grammar of human nature, which makes it possible to overcome any cultural or conceptual misunderstanding; and, without discounting the immense power of culture to shape and color our encounter with the one world that we all together inhabit, I also believe there are certain common forms of experience so fundamental to human rationality that, without them, we could not think or speak at all.”[11]

According to Bulgakov, not only Judaism, but the religions and cultures of the nations have prepared for Christ “by a special mode of knowledge, by their own gift, by a language proper to this natural Pentecost.” The historical religions and cultures of the world have also been “touched” by the Spirit of God, and for this reason it should not surprise us that they have something to teach, and that “we directly experience this breath of the Spirit of God” through them. “[W]e should not shy away from this experience because of an unjustified fear that the uniqueness and truthfulness of our Revelation will be shaken. On the contrary, one should rejoice in the gifts of the Spirit of God bestowed upon these ‘prophets’ as well, who came ‘from the river’ like Balaam, or upon the ‘wise men from the east,’ who came to worship Christ.”[12]

Bulgakov compares world religions and experience to Judaism, referencing the “pagan church” found in the ancient liturgy. This “pagan church” or “natural old testament,” reached a fullness or maturity, that enabled acceptance of Christ, proving “the gifts of the spirit can be present in paganism too, gifts that are diverse and ascend from measure to measure.”[13] As he argues, the gospel is founded upon the notion of its universal reception and receptivity, meaning all have been prepared by God. “What does this calling of the Gentiles, of paganism, signify? Is it merely an act of divine arbitrariness and coercion, as it were; or does it have sufficient inner justification, in virtue of which the Gentiles turned out to be receptive to the preaching of Christianity, and even more so than the Jews, except for the chosen? And how should one understand this receptivity if one believes that paganism is a realm of demonic possession?” He maintains this does not fit with biblical testimony, and “it contradicts the fact of the conversion of the Gentiles, their reception of the Spirit, the openness of their hearts to Christ.”[14]

In making his case for this universal preparation of the nations, through the Spirit, Bulgakov turns to the books of Acts and Romans. “This marvelous testimony of the apostle Paul about the common seeking of God on the part of all the brothers by blood of the one human race places before us not only the fact of the divine election of the chosen nation but also the fact of a universal divine vocation: ‘we are also his offspring’ (Acts 17:28).”[15] It is not that paganism is equal to Israel, as she is His special “vineyard,” but she too, like the pagan nations has obscured the truth with sin and “pagan contaminations”: “when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful” (Ro. 1:21). Israel may have received a purer revelation but as Paul notes in Acts, God is working with all peoples and nations: “[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him; and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:26–28). Bulgakov notes the contributions of the Gentiles to philosophy, art, science, and providing the “wise men,” which means “this is not foreign to the spirit of God.” “There should be no doubt about this, just as it should not be doubted that the founders of the great religions and their books were, to some extent, divinely chosen and even divinely inspired.”[16]

While the Jews may have been “chosen,” Bulgakov points out that theirs is still part of a universal experience in Paul’s description. “Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil; of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile.… For there is no respect of persons with God.… For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which shew the work of law written in their hearts” (Rom. 2:9, 11, 14–15). As Bulgakov sums up, “Without in the least diminishing the election of the Jews, the Apostle equates here in a certain sense the Jews and the Gentiles as equally needing salvation and equally called to salvation.”[17]

The gospel, in Bulgakov’s estimate, is premised on this fact of a universal “accessibleness” to God and the Holy Spirit, and at the same time the “abolition of Judaism” indicates that both Judaism and paganism are limited. “It is noteworthy that the Acts of the Apostles, which tell about the establishment of the New Testament church by the action of the Holy Spirit, end and are inwardly summed up, as it were, by the definitive abolition of Judaism, which stopped being the Old Testament church.”[18] In turn, he notes that with the inception of Christianity, paganism also, poses a peculiar danger. “It became an anti-Christianity.” That is, like a Judaism which would refuse its synthesis and completion in Christianity, paganism also posed as a competitor (where its inadequacies were not acknowledged). Thus, much like Judaism in Bulgakov’s estimate, “Paganism is justified only as the past of a religion which does not yet know Christianity but which is preparing to know it.” Just as there may be a necessary separation from Judaism (as an end in itself), so too the early church and Christian apologists felt the need for a complete break from pagan religion: “The fate of the pagan old testament is the same as that of the Jewish Old Testament. Just as Judaism, not recognizing its proper fulfillment in the person of the Messiah, was transformed from a divinely revealed religion into a fierce anti-Christianity, so the natural religions too become anti-Christian in proportion to their conscious rejection of and opposition to Christianity.”[19]

Unlike Hart, Bulgakov combines deep appreciation for world religions with the sense that they pose a danger, not so much because they are demonic or untrue, but because they contain a powerful truth which should rightly find its end in Christ.[20]

[1] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, (Yale University Press. Kindle Edition, 2013).

[2] Hart does not seem to share Bulgakov’s sense of the danger of pagan religion. On the other hand, philosophical atheism is his primary target in The Experience of God.

[3] Hart, 10.

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

[5] The Bride of the Lamb, 111.

[6] The Bride of the Lamb, 109.

[7] The Bride of the Lamb, 110.

[8] Hart, 244.

[9] Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter (233-234). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Kindle Edition. He does a great deal of work with Melchizedek, and sights the case of the pagan prophet, Balaam.

[10] The Comforter, 239.

[11] Hart, 15.

[12] The Comforter, 239.

[13] The Comforter, 242.

[14] The Comforter, 235-236.

[15] The Comforter, 233-234.

[16] The Comforter, 239-240.

[17] The Comforter, 234.

[18] The Comforter, 235.

[19] The Comforter, 241.

[20] This is a reworked blog indicating the personalism definitive of Bulgakov, largely absent in Hart’s formalism.

The Irreligious Arc of David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart’s recent Valentine’s Day revelation (in his Substack) of being temperamentally irreligious, not disposed to belief in his own resurrection (though he is convinced of Christ’s), and his lack of personal spiritual devotion, contained doubts and expressions of disbelief with which I am personally well-acquainted, but I suppose I have never taken my own proclivities as seriously as Hart does his. In fact, I have never considered either my capacity for belief nor my tendency toward doubt to be of primary importance. Belief is no great accomplishment, and to think it is, is precisely the problem in imagining doubt is determinative of moral engagement. Hart’s “dishonesty,” as he terms it, is not really his keeping his irreligious tendencies a secret (“no natural aptitude for religious sentiment, enthusiasm, devotion, or ritual observance”) but his abandonment of any hope in making a difference by forsaking the church and Christian identity. This failure is no revelation, however, as its unfolding is evident in the arc of his work and thought.

Given Hart’s Confessions, How Can it Be That All Shall Be Saved?

It is focus on personal salvation, going to heaven (missing hell) when you die, that Hart supposedly traded for a more expansive universal salvation in That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven Hell and Universal Salvation. He was so insistent on universal salvation, that he considered “hopeful universalism” a “timid” form of faith, and his more robust dogmatic universalism the only honest option. He can know universal salvation is the case, and hope need not enter into it.

But what can this mean for one who cannot “conceive of any kind of postmortem existence” and for whom life after death is perceived as “banal, tedious, or horrific” and who seems to prefer personal annihilation (Hart says he “could unresentfully cease upon the midnight without pain, knowing that afterward no one would bother me”)? He concludes, “Never having been fully convinced that existence is much of a blessing, I cannot think of nonexistence as obviously a curse.” Everyone may miss hell, only to go to the grave and obliteration, but what about the universal salvation upon which he was so insistent?

He abandoned hope for knowledge it seems, only to play his own game of “oddly unregenerate ‘rational’ fundamentalism” (of the sort he attributes to William Lane Craig). In light of his revelations about near total lack of belief in resurrection (which is Christian salvation), this turns out to have been mere posturing and formal argumentation (my original critique here). Hart’s tone, his entertaining arrogance, is not a side-light of his work but is gained from a perspective in which formal argumentation replaces real-world engagement in combating evil and living out the Christian life. While one might be certain of formal statements about God and salvation, does this form of certainty give rise to ethical behavior, to resistance to evil, to assuming personal responsibility, or does it in fact have the opposite effect? (Hart confesses, he has little to no interest in the church or in the practice of Christianity, which is the place of moral engagement in combating evil.)

The Problem of Evil Looms Too Large

Among Hart’s revelations is that he finds the problem of evil irresolvable and therefore admits a sort of defeat. “I have never, moreover, been able to get very far past the problem of evil when it chooses to spring up in the road before me like the Lord in the path of Moses on the way back to Egypt; nothing the staretz Zosima says provides an adequate response to Vanya’s ‘rebellion’.”

Hart has long resisted any notion of a theodicy. A position I appreciated enough that I used his Doors of the Sea in the classroom, but even then I detected he was making a weak case for the problem of evil, inasmuch as it never touched upon God. In order for God to not be implicated in the problem of evil, Hart calls upon divine apatheia, which is beyond comprehension. A book devoted to disclaiming theodicy, reverses course in the case of God so as to provide Him, if no one else, a way out through God’s transcendence. God is beyond evil and the world, and Christ does not enter into the equation (which, as I understand it, is God’s real-world answer to the problem of evil). For Hart, the Cross, rather than being an unfolding defeat of evil (as an ongoing battle) is “a triumph of divine apatheia” (p. 81).

Hart’s confident universalism and divine apatheia function in much the same way. Formal cause is protected in both instances, by dismissing the contingencies of evil as entering into the equation. He never explains the how of universal salvation, but affirms it as a formal necessity, and by the same token evil is not explained and yet God is formally free of evil. This is accomplished not by focusing on what is knowable about God in Christ, but by trusting primarily in what is apophatic, ahistorical, and ultimately unknowable. One might speak of this trust as “certain” as part of a formal argument but it is a certainty that has nothing to do with the real world-defeat of evil found in the historical Jesus. In Christ, God does not wash his hands of evil, but directly engages it.

The fault is not in the logic of the argument but the limited perspective. His dogmatic universalism plays the role of a theodicy, in that it relieves him of any personal responsibility of organized resistance to evil. Then he can paint the bleakest picture of evil, and resist any possible explanation, including the explanation that Christ is defeating evil.

I too would resist a theodicy, other than that God in Christ is defeating evil, but this is not a formal argument and does not explain evil, and it falls short of the sort of formal certainty upon which Hart depends. In fact, this may be unsatisfactory for one who demands certainty and makes no room for hope. Belief in Christ does not function as a formal argument or theory, rather there is real world resistance and hope of defeat of evil in the eschaton.

There is no Hope in the Church

Of his books, the one I appreciated most, may have been the one in which he drops the mode of formal argument. Hart painted a bleak picture of the church in Tradition and Apocalypse, suggesting there is no relation between the church of the apostolic era and the institution that took its place. The latter, he claims completely contradicts the former. There is no continuity, no “organic vitality,” no “living idea” which can possibly connect them (pp. 826-829). In this book however, the entire argument depends on the apocalyptic hope of the title bringing the kingdom to a future perfection (see my previous discussion, here).

What he did not tell us at that time, is that he has given up on the church. “I find myself now barely able to abide most hymnody, litanies, the psalter, or even (I am ashamed to say) sacrament.” His identity is no longer that of a Christian: “Most important of all, it seems to me, is the absence of any interest in ‘Christian identity’ on the part of someone with my irreligious tendencies.” Apart from apocalyptic hope, which he has apparently abandoned, this reduces Tradition and Apocalypse to a negative history without apocalyptic possibilities.

In the book Hart did not attempt to address the gaps he notes, which make later forms of the faith a contradiction of the Christianity of the New Testament and the early church. He admitted, he is offering no practical solutions and no program of action. It is now clear that he needed no answer, no program of action, because he does not identify with any church, including the Orthodox Church. He has no interest in “Christian identity” or identity with any church, most especially the Orthodox Church (he describes his particular dislike of Orthodoxy), which in his public persona he never abandoned.

I concluded a review of his book with this statement: “Mine is a more peaceful and anti-institutional inclination (while recognizing none have escaped Christendom and its seeming necessities). I presume we really should attempt to reduplicate the economy, the nonviolence, and the disempowerment of the first church and the first Christians so as to put in place the lived reality of the peace of Christ. I presume it is not enough to name the failures, without specifying their nature and striving to rid ourselves of the specific forms of violence, the oppression and contradictions which have negated and continue to negate the gospel preached by Jesus and the Apostles. Specifying the nature of this failure comes with the practical necessity of doing something about it; an imperative of which Hart remains free.”

I wonder how many have been pressed into service of institutional Christianity following Hart’s public example, not realizing his true, secular stance?

Empty Gnosticism and Neo-Platonism

Hart also confesses that he finds the Japanese Tea Ceremony preferrable to celebration of the Eucharist, and would make the Tea Ceremony the center of any religion he invented. His glorification of the East and especially of Japan, already betrayed orientalist notions (as explained by Edward Said), which scholars of Japan recognize as part of the nationalist mythologizing (Nihonjinron), to which non-Japanese are peculiarly susceptible. The irony is that the Tea Ceremony has been traced, some argue, to an imitation of the communion service, which is Said’s point: Orientalism is primarily a reification of the East undertaken by the West.

The significance of Hart’s focus on Vedantic religion and privileging of the East, and raising it to religious significance, is the end-point of his gnostic Neo-Platonism, favoring formal and rational arguments. He had previously rejected the bodily – enfleshed resurrection, arguing that Paul was a dualist, holding to a Platonist split between flesh and spirit, arguing that resurrected bodies have no flesh and that the writers of the New Testament were, indeed, denigrating the flesh and did not hold to the notion that flesh was a designation for the “sinful nature.” [1] It is no surprise he has now gone a step further, not only relinquishing the importance of the enfleshing work of Christ in the body, but giving up even on the vague survival (spiritual resurrection) he formerly espoused.

As I previously pointed out (here), Hart is wrong in presuming that it is Protestants who have innovated the notion that Jesus was raised and ascended in a fleshly body (it is the overwhelming position of the early Church) and he is wrong in presuming that Paul’s contrast between spirit and soul (in I Cor. 15) is typical of the ancients. But Hart is bent upon making his Platonism Christian by reading the New Testament in the context of contemporaneous thought, presuming Paul and John are mostly reflecting and not critiquing the received understanding found in Plato and the Gnostics.

Hart has long argued for a standard rationality, inclusive of Christianity which, as with his own thought, does not challenge the pagan worldview. He presumes there is a given understanding (knowledge of God as creator and law giver) available to all persons (whose capacity for reason remains largely intact in spite of sin) and that salvation does not pertain to epistemology. For him, flesh means being mortal and not sinful. As he puts it, “In the New Testament, ‘flesh’ does not mean ‘sinful nature or ‘humanity under judgment’ or even ‘fallen flesh.’ It just means ‘flesh,’ in the bluntly physical sense. . ..” This means death is a natural outworking of creation, and salvation is deliverance from what God calls good (a “shedding of flesh”).

However, when Paul describes the “body of death” and connects it to the working of the flesh, he certainly does not mean that this flows naturally from what God has created or that sin is an inevitable result of creation. In presuming Paul is just an extension of his time (more of the same), Hart misses the deep nature of the Pauline critique of human wisdom and he falls into the very dualism constitutive of this wisdom.

Conclusion

The justice enacted in Christ, deals in the realm of human history and human experience, and allows for human understanding of the finite kind and not the transcendent reason of formal argumentation (Hart’s focus). Christians might refer to certainty, but it is a certainty in progress, working itself out in history, and engaged not in terms of an absolute philosophical certainty but the “hopeful” certainty of faith. The former need not take into account the realm of evil or the contingencies of history. The latter, is a humble “hopeful” certainty which deals in the reality of human perspective and the existential fact of suffering and evil. It is not clear Hart has shifted or abandoned a belief he might have once had, rather it is doubtful that he ever adhered to a humble, hopeful, faith centered on the historical work of Christ. His recent confessions indicate the end point of the trajectory traceable throughout the course of his work.

[1] David Bentley Hart, “The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients,” in Church Life Journal (July 26, 2018), https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/

Blessings in the Bottom Lands

Jonathan Totty

Where I come from in Missouri, rivers run through low flat and fertile valleys that we call bottoms. Both river bottoms and creek bottoms make great places to raise crops, excepting the occasional flooding. My family has long farmed a bottom on Middle River. The Middle River bottoms consist of creek bottoms rather than river bottoms, because despite the name, Middle River is just a glorified ditch attempting to be a creek during the wetter seasons of the year. Anyway, descent is the only way to get into the Middle River bottom we farmed, and this descent began with a grand view framed by trees. Looking down from on high across the bottom was like a vision of the Promised Land from Mt. Nebo.

Indeed, in times past, flat easily accessible low places represented God’s providential blessing, for life grows easily in these places. Oddly, modern technology and new farming methods made farming that fertile plain more difficult in our case. My great-great-grandfather and his father before him lived in that bottom and had no cause to transverse the surrounding hills with farm equipment. On the other hand, for us, technological progress meant that each Spring and Fall we would descend and ascend those hills with large pieces of heavy machinery.

I’ll never forget the experience of pulling 18-wheelers loaded with grain up those hills by tractor. My uncle would drive the 18-wheeler while I pulled him up the hill in four-wheel-drive-tractor. We were attached to each other by a log chain, and thinking back about it now, that arrangement wasn’t likely very safe. I remember looking back at the truck behind me to see the front wheels of a Mack Truck come completely off the ground as I pulled that truck over bumps and the contours of the hill. It can be a lot of work to make a living even on blessed land.

Jesus, also, descends onto a low plain in our Gospel reading this morning. He descends to proclaim the vast indiscriminate blessing of God. Though, Scripture often associates theophanies, that is the appearance of God, with high places, Jesus has inverted the pattern. We might expect to behold the glory of God on the mountaintops, but God’s grace meets us in the valleys. On this low plain, after healing the multitude of people, Jesus proclaims,

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

“Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.

“Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man.

“Be glad in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets.

“But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full.

“Woe to you who are well-fed now, for you shall be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep.

“Woe to you when all men speak well of you, for their fathers used to treat the false prophets in the same way.” (Luke 6:20-26)

Jesus preaches a message of blessing and woe, of affirmation and denial, for the judgement of God is salvation.

Hearing Jesus’ words read aloud again in our time, we will be tempted to interiorize his words. We find it much easier to reckon with Jesus’ words, if “hungry” and “weep” refer to mere interior states of mind. For example, feeling poor, unsatisfied, dejected, and rejected is not so bad if I have plenty to eat and a warm roof over my head. In fact, I can endure a lot of mental, emotional, and even spiritual turmoil as long as my life remains secure in this world. Likewise, we might hope Jesus judgmental woe to the rich, the full, and the laughing, constitute a mere spiritual metaphor. But woe to me if I bend the truth so you will speak well of me, for poor means poor, as in being economically disadvantaged (BDAG, 896).

Thus, Jesus demonstrates a preferential option for the poor in contrast to most people and governments who prefer the rich, the well clothed, the well fed, the well-adjusted man of good repute. Jesus says, blessed are you who are poor, who are hungry now, who weep now, etc. We might wonder, then, what sort of kingdom Jesus expects to build with the ragged and the wretched. His kingdom does not adhere to the customs and culture of this world. For, he builds the kingdom of God, and the kingdom of God is for all who know they need God to be fully alive.

Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain instructs about the proper disposition of kingdom citizens. Jesus himself serves as the exemplar citizen of God’s kingdom. So, his teaching constitutes a self-revelation. Jesus reveals himself to us as the Son of God eternally in love with the Father and the Spirit, and he reveals what a fully alive human life looks like. To be a citizen of the kingdom of God means to be fully alive living the life of God.[1] Furthermore, the disposition of kingdom citizens is toward God and the things of God rather than wealth, comfort, or worldly happiness.

Jesus lives the life of the truly blessed kingdom citizen. His life is one of continual sacrifice. He pours out his life for the marginalized and oppressed. He pours out his life for the powerful and the oppressor. Ultimately, he gives his life for the life of the world. He establishes his kingdom nonviolently by being killed rather than killing. Jesus loves both his neighbor and his enemy. Jesus unique life as fully human and fully God blesses humanity with an offer to live in God’s kingdom according to God’s values and culture. We, then, become kingdom citizens when we live lives recognizable as Jesus’ own way of life.

Counterintuitively, the more we desire the blessings of this life, whether they be wealth or self-satisfaction, then true blessedness alludes us. The more we Christians run the errands of this world rather than take up the life of discipleship, the less happy we become with our worldly lives. And the more the Church preoccupies itself with success by the world’s standards, the church fails in its God given mission. To return briefly to my opening metaphor, I find it strange and slightly prophetic that advances in agriculture technology can make farming a naturally farmable place more difficult—this is not true as a rule of course, but a good reminder all the same that blessedness is not within our own power.

Another fond memory of grandfather comes to mind not about farming but about church. When I was a young child, until the age of six or seven, my mother and I attended the First Baptist Church of Fulton, Missouri with my grandparents. There, I remember a woman who was fascinated with my grandfather, particularly that he was so tall. He still is tall, by the way, about 6 foot eight inches tall. This woman on the other hand was short. She had Down Syndrome and was only as tall as I was then, the height of a six- or seven-year-old boy. Her name was Gloria, and her name was fitting. For her presence in this world gave glory to God. Each and every week she would greet our family with hugs and a smile. She was happy to be at church and happy to worship. While Gloria was fascinated with my grandfather’s great height, we were fascinated by her lowliness, which was the blessed lowliness of one beloved by God fit for a grand reward in the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you, also, who know Jesus and follow him.

[1] Irenaeus of Lyons

Recapitulation (with a difference) as Opposed to Repetition (of the same)

The summing up, bringing together, recapitulation, or synthesizing of all things (ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι) in Christ (Ephesians 1:10), in the earliest development of atonement theory by Irenaeus (A.D. 120-203) and several of the early church fathers, captures the New Testament picture and the early church’s understanding of the work of Christ. As in the context of Ephesians, this recapitulation is at once cosmic and directly concerned with personal salvation: “We have redemption” in Christ (Eph 1:7), but so too do “all things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph 1:10). The all-inclusive nature of recapitulation, includes elements such as the life of Christ, which will come to be neglected (Irenaeus is focused on Christ’s life of obedience as opposed to Adam’s disobedience). Later traditional theories of the atonement, and even early confessions (the Apostle’s creed) skip over the life of Jesus, to say nothing of the cosmic and the historical. The focus on the legal aspects of the death of Jesus tend to center on his birth and death, and the practical, experiential, and psychological, even in the nature of his death, are not addressed. In the developments of Anselm and Calvin, death is reduced to a payment, while in Paul, the obedience of the Son to death on the cross (Phil. 2:8) is not simply a legal condemnation nor a single historical fact, but it takes in the totality of what God has done in Christ through the whole movement from the incarnation of the gift of the Spirit.[1] Recapitulation plays out in the texture and details of the life of Christ, tying together the life of Christ with the manner of his death. Likewise, the believer in imitating and being joined to the life of Christ, is taking up the quality of eternal life (a lived reality and not simply a legal abstraction).

Being joined to Christ, the head of a new humanity, is not a consequence but the substance of salvation. Where legal theories separate the life of Christ, ethics, and the lived reality of the Christian life from salvation (focused as they are on divine satisfaction), recapitulation is a practical salvation, in that being in Christ, being joined to Christ, living the Christian life, putting on the mind of Christ, is the content of salvation. In turn, the problem or condemnation of sin, is not simply a future punishment but a present form of humanity, as in the first Adam (Romans 5, a focus of Irenaeus). Thus, the difference between the first and second Adam is one way of depicting the content of what it means to be saved, and what exactly one is saved from.

Repetition in the trinity of Self Versus Recapitulation in the Trinity

Though being in the first (Adam) or the second (Christ) type of humanity, entails a form of imitation and repetition, recapitulation describes a repetition with a difference rather than a repetition of sameness. In the simplest terms, Jesus did not repeat the failures of the race of Adam. He identified with sinful humanity, with suffering, pain, and death. He traversed birth, childhood, adulthood, Jewishness, maleness, and death, but he took this to a new place and experience, and did not repeat the failures of the former race, but summed it up, so as to become the head of a new race. The difference between these two is the difference between the trinity of ego, law, and the body of death, and entry into participation in the Father, through the Son by the Spirit.

Repetition captures the relationship to the law or the symbolic order, which Paul describes as an antagonism between the ego, the law, and death. Where the law is made primary, as in forbidden desire or in the notion that life is in the letter of the law, the relationship is to an object and the image it holds out (the ego or “I”) is one of lack. Not just that one cannot keep the law, but life or the self is lacking. Deceptive, death-dealing desire overtakes the will in compulsive repetition, attempting to obtain the object of desire. The trinity of law, absence or loss (“I”), and desire define the Subject of sin.

A key difference between living death and life in the Spirit, is that the death of the “I” divides and alienates, while life in the Spirit is a communion founded by the Father who has sent his Son (Ro 8.3) who leads by his Spirit (Ro 8.14). The Father is the primary agent who subjected creation in hope (Ro 8.20), who makes all things work to the good for those who love him (Ro 8.28), who has foreknown and predestined those he called (Ro 8.29) and these he has justified and glorified (Ro 8.31). This communion is “in Christ Jesus” who was sent to free from the law of sin and death (Ro 8.2,3) by condemning sin in the flesh (Ro 8.3), who gives his Spirit of life (Ro 8.9) so that those who suffer with him will be glorified together with him (Ro 8.17) and who died and was raised and intercedes so that nothing can separate from the love of God (Ro 8.34-35). Recapitulation founds the new race in life in the Trinity.

In the recapitulated form of this relation, the child of God relates directly to Abba, through the Spirit, with the image of the Son before him. The Trinity, fills in the trinitarian absence. Through the work of the Trinity, relation with the Father is no longer mediated through the law but through the Son, and the Spirit is the enabling power of righteousness (Ro. 8.10). The law marked a covenantal relationship fulfilled in Christ who makes it possible to keep the covenant relationship with God through participation in the Trinity.

The Power of Death in the word and Life in the Word

The stark difference in the two Adam’s of Romans 5, is that one introduced death, and the other introduces life. “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (Ro 5:17).

The power of death to produce sin, has been largely obscured due to the Augustinian misreading of the problem, but the power of death is identifiable in multiple ways. The power to kill, to sacrifice, and to oppress is the obvious form of death’s power. But the law of sin and death can also be described psychologically, as mistaking the human word for the Word of life.

The power of death in the law, is death denied, obscured, or covered over. The law poses the possibility of an eternalizing repetition of the same, in which the inanimate letter, the law, language, does not suffer or die. Interpolating oneself into the law, being a law keeper or even identifying with the letter, poses an escape from death through extracting the self from life. This orientation to the law (or to death), is the drive behind destructive compulsions, addictions, or repetitions, which rely upon the letter, or the word, to repeat the self.

The lie which the serpent tells in Genesis, and Paul’s explanation of that lie (Ro 7), pictures absence (of God) and presence (of the symbolic order or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) as its own kind of false power (attaining divinity). The negative (death, absence) does not take an obvious or conscious part in the binary of language (or the knowledge of good and evil), but symbolic features are dependent on presence and absence. To imagine the symbolic contains a real presence is to miss the absence upon which it depends.

Freud illustrates this with his grandson, who learned to talk while playing with a spool. In Freuds estimate the spool was functioning in place of relationship to mother. The boy could make it appear and disappear, accompanied by the German equivalent of “Here/Gone.” He was in control of the spool, but his mother continually left him. According to Jacques Lacan, words are always “a presence made of absence.”[2] The law, the knowledge of good and evil, or perhaps every child’s entry into language would produce life and being through absence.

Recapitulation entails at its heart, the recapitulation in and through the Word, which brings about life and presence through the Spirit. The Spirit can be equated with life (Ro 8:2,10-11), and with the introduction of the Spirit, Paul’s question of 7:24 is definitively answered: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.”

The Law of the Father Versus Abba, Father

Rather than a relationship with a person, the impersonal law poses as father (in the role of God). The insistence to be through the law, is the repetition of death or the letter that kills. That is, the compulsion to repeat is a product of the attempt to establish the self like an object, to repeat the self, in and through a medium (the Scriptures, the letter, the symbolic) that is inherently impossible. There is no life in the law.[3]

The ego or I in the mirror of the law, is a false construct, and the father in this relation is the superego or the law taken up into the self. “The father, the name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of the law.”[4] In Freudian theory, the Subject arises from the self-negating activity of sacrifice (castration or passage through the Oedipus complex). “Sacrifice is a guarantee that ‘the Other exists’: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice.”[5] In other words, there is an inherent hostility towards the Other of the law (the symbolic or superego or father) as this Other demands continual service and sacrifice.

The inheritance of life in the Spirit, is indicative of the ontological shift from being one’s own father to being a child of God. The former inherits alienation and death while the latter will be glorified with Christ (Ro 8:17). The former is a slave serving the law of sin while the latter is enabled to please God (Ro 8:8). This status of being the sons of God means that “you put to death the deeds of the body” (Ro 8.13). Pleasing God, and not simply serving the demands of the law, is the goal, but this entails true righteousness (and not simply the imputed kind).

Righteousness is not individual, but it is to be made right in relationship. God’s covenant faithfulness to his people is the fulfilment of his righteousness, and in turn the faithfulness of his children to this relationship is their righteousness. Righteousness is being brought into a right relationship with God and overcoming the alienation and hostility towards God, and this resolves the alienating conflict with the self and others. God is fulfilling and has fulfilled this righteousness in those he has called in Christ (Ro 8.30).

Paul’s cry at the end of Romans 7, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7:24), is followed by a cry of joy, “And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (8:15). The God who was known through the law previously (Ro 7) is “Abba” in the recapitulated relationship. This difference is wrought through “The Spirit himself” who “testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (8:15). Christ, as the firstborn son of this new family (8:29), provides the perspective of the successful outcome of a justification or righteousness already received. There is a recapitulation of relationship.

Recapitulation as Salvation

In recapitulation there is a positive repetition with a difference, and this allows for “following Christ”, or putting on Christ or being imitators of Christ. Repetition and imitation (as in Girard), may describe the seat of neurosis and violence, but in Christ imitation does not give rise to mimetic rivalry, and repetition is not focused on an object but on a person. The root cause of sin is addressed in the very term of salvation (recapitulation displaces repetition).

Recapitulation (anakephalaiōsasthai) is to change the head (kephalé), to sum up, synthesize, so as not simply to repeat but repeat with a different outcome.[6] The root word occurs in describing the summing up of the law in love (Mark 12:31), and those united under his headship are united with him in this loving recapitulation. Resolution to the alienation of the Subject of the law is to become a child of God. Where the sinful mind is “hostile to God” and cannot even recognize God, the one adopted as a child by the Spirit has overcome this hostility enacted against the law (Ro 8:7). As in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the heart of stone will be replaced with a heart of flesh and God’s Spirit will indwell his people and enable them to keep the law (Ezek. 36:26-27). Those who miss the summing up of love in Christ, get stuck on the letter, pitted against love.

Though fully human, Christ is obedient unto death, without sin, and with this comes peaceableness, love, non-violence, and a new ordering of the human psyche. To say he died for your sins, may miss that he lived and died to defeat evil, recapitulating human life so as to break the bondage of the law of sin and death. Christ incarnates a new form of human experience, and in being adopted into his family or joined to him, Christians enter into this alternative human experience.

[1] Theological dictionary of the New Testament Vol. 3, 1964- (G. Kittel, G. W. Bromiley and G. Friedrich, ed.), 951 – 2.

[2] Ecrits: Selection, 65.

[3] Where Freud grounded the compulsion to repeat in a biological need to return to the stable material realm, Lacan explains the compulsion as arising from dissonance between the two registers (the imaginary and the symbolic). The image or ego is a visual static image, and the symbolic (the repeated “I”) is the means of establishing it.

[4] Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI , 34.

[5] Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom , 56.

[6] David T. Williams describes the various word studies of recapitulation in “Another look at recapitulation,” Pharos Journal of Theology (ISSN 2414-3324 online Volume 101 – (2020) Copyright: ©2020 Open Access/Author/s – Online @ http//: www.pharosjot.com) 3.

Decline in the Independent Christian Churches: Part II, the Pastoral Segment

A guest blog by C. J. Dull

The Pastoral Segment, preachers/ministers for all practical purposes, is more or less where we started in our break from the Disciples. The major educational institutions, institutionalized missionary organizations, pension fund, national publishing house (Bethany) and official national assembly (the International Convention) all went with the Disciples, often referred to as “the cooperative work”. Their enthusiasm did not seem dimmed by the closing of a significant institution, the College of Missions, nor the continuous deficits from 1927 (the date of the first North American Christian Convention) to 1936. The major exception in all this was the ministers of large congregations. While many of those ministers (e.g., P. H. Welshimer) attempted to maintain positive relations with both camps, increasingly they became more conservative.

One of the central dilemmas or enigmas of the group is the uncertainty of the theological position of ministers. On a practical level, they are indispensable, and credit is generally given to ministers for any significant growth of a congregation. Yet, they are clearly not deacons, even though Latin (cf. Pliny the Younger’s famous letter) “ministrae” refers to deaconesses. Many would like to be considered “elders” in some sense although some congregations expressly forbid it. Elders have no doubts about their biblical status and are generally jealous of it. Among Noninstrumentals that is emphatically true. The preacher is most often called officially an “Evangelist” regardless of how long he stays. The use of that title among Independents in that sense has been minimal, and the use of “bishop” seems to have currency mostly in the Black community.

Ministers are what I dub “church managers”. The analogy is with city managers, a professional that is skilled in running a particular organization. Like city managers, they are often hired from outside, often with no particular connection to the congregation that hires them. A successful “ministry” is increasingly thought of in business terms, growth (cf. “church growth”) being the sine qua non of any congregation. Historically, methodology is the strong point of such congregations. That type of methodology has reached a level of sophistication that it is now not unusual, such that a new congregation, within a few years may have attendance in the thousands, thanks to a stake in the millions being borrowed. When church growth experts say that only big churches are growing, they do not mention that the methodology of growth that causes such growth will only work in a large church. Since typically smaller churches tend to imitate larger ones; the results are not the same because the methodology is self-limiting in a smaller congregation. Recently, ministers have become a type of impresario, someone who manages a big show for a big theater or movie scene. Small churches often have little more than a piano or small DVD player. Almost without exception, a kind of theological minimalism results. Those who succeed most in numerical terms—and this seems the dark side of congregational autonomy—are those who are most flexible in agreeing with the predilections of their audiences. Many openly boast of differing theological positions among their membership. Unlike Jews, there is no definitive tradition to hold together an autonomous congregation.

Since the absence of “growth” has almost come to have a negative theological implication, perhaps it is worth looking at some ways it can take place and how such activities can affect both large and small congregations.

Probably the most tried-and-true means of building up a congregation is simply the personal charisma of the minister. This is applicable for both large and small congregations in different measures. Typically, the former have a number of related groups and institutions to maximize their efforts. They also have examples of such personal skill used for unseemly purposes. As in the classic novel by Sinclair Lewis (Elmer Gantry), preachers even today have at times become notorious for their sins, personal and financial, although many, amazingly, afterward are received back in the fold. Order and organization seem almost subsets of larger groups. P. H. Welshimer managed a congregation in the thousands with only a part-time assistant because of the organization of non-specialists of his congregation, perhaps women most of all.

The next item is fidelity to a tradition or book. Technically, that is possible but now unlikely. Before the split, editors often constituted a subgroup because of the paucity of preachers available. A “sermon of the week” was often part of a periodical’s offerings. There was no exaltation of the Millennial Harbinger or other earlier documents, in this pre-college-press era. There is nothing like the Talmud, which ties small synagogues to larger ones with the same interpretive options. Those with centralized structures can make the same resources available to all. Small Roman Catholic parishes, for example, can instruct with the same Jesuitical scholarship as the largest archdiocese. Sadly, we have nothing comparable except perhaps a love by flexible-minded preachers for the same sermon series.

Basic demographics can often be determinative. It is obviously easier to build a big church in a densely populated urban area than a small town. New suburbs seem especially congenial for the formation of megachurches. Many decreases in attendance are little more than a commentary on the wider community’s population. I once asked Medford Jones, Sr., later president of Pacific Christian College (now part of Hope International University), if in his years as a traveling evangelist he had come across a congregation that grew when the population of its area was declining. To my considerable surprise, he did respond: Sullivan, IN under the ministry of Ben Merold, who of course had a number of other significant ministries. Demographics is not always destiny! It seldom hurts to have something to say.

Some examples of academics who have become pastors: Charles Sackett, Dean of Lincoln seminary (doctorate Trinity) to congregation in Quincy, Ill (Madison Park), Johnny Pressley (doctorate Westminster) from Cincinnati seminary to Washington, NC (First Church of Christ), Leroy Lawson (doctorate Vanderbilt) from Milligan to large congregations in Indianapolis and Mesa, AR. David Wead (doctorate Basel) from Emmanuel to Boones Creek and Nashville. Results ranged from spectacular to solid to minimal. More recently, both “Marks” (Scott and Moore) and Ric Cherok have left Ozark Christian College, and Jon Weatherley and Mark Ziese, left Johnson. Some took up interim ministries for a change of pace such as John Castelein (Lincoln) and Jim Girdwood (Kentucky Christian). Presumably this sort of “brain drain” will strengthen the position of congregations and other nonacademic institutions even more.

Way back in 1977 I had a conversation with a professor who had just left a seminary and was interim preaching at a country church of some size. I asked him if he was going to another seminary. His reply was that he had had offers, but a move was unlikely because it would mean a pay cut of half. He retired a preacher. Perhaps the best predictor of the future may be the adage made popular by a movie about Watergate: follow the money.

End Part II

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

The Scriptures, Gospel, and the Exegesis of Jesus

To say that the Hebrew Scriptures are about Jesus, in the normative sense, does not convey what Jesus meant when he said the Scriptures “testify about me” (John 5:39), or what Paul means when he writes, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). The Gospel which Paul delivered (παρέδωκα, “traditioned”) is not a reference to the four Gospels but to the Law, the Psalms and Prophets, which (in and of themselves) do not deliver the story of Jesus but given the life of Christ, they testify to and interpret Jesus. Apart from events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of Christ, the Scriptures are a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. As John Behr writes, “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it.”[1] Paul calls this regulative interpretive method the rule of faith (Rom. 3:27), which is not only a basic premise for reading Scripture but is the situation in which Scripture is constituted. Scripture is an interpretation of the person of Christ (in both Testaments), and this is the substance of its unity and meaning. The ultimate meaning and significance of the text, is not in the original intent of the author, in the history behind the text, or even in the immediate reference of the text. The meaning is in Christ.

As in the Gospel of John, the point in either the Old Testament references or the Gospel explanation, is not to provide a mere account of the history or story of Jesus, but rather there is an intertextual weaving in the Apostolic explanation, which relies upon the Scriptures, the living tradition, the witness, providing the Gospel (preached first, then written). As John says of Jesus, “He has explained Him” (Jn 1:18), but this exegesis of God in Jesus is through Scripture. The exegesis of Scripture itself is never the point, but Christ is explained through the medium of Scripture (the exegesis of God). The point is not to understand the text, the original meaning, or the author’s intent, as in historical-critical scholarship. The point is to understand Christ, and through Christ to understand God. Christ explained, “according to the Scriptures,” becomes the sole subject of Scripture throughout.

As Jesus says, “It is they that bear witness about me” (Jn. 5:39). We understand that it is on the basis of the Old Testament witness to Christ, that the identity of Christ (who he is, in the language of the Gospel) is spelled out: “We found the Messiah” (1:41); “You are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel” (1:49); “This is the prophet” (6:14; 7:40); and, “My Lord, my God” (20:28). Jesus as the Logos (of Genesis and the Targums), is the initiator of a new humanity in his first week: showing in day one, with John the Baptist, the transition to a superior kingdom, and in day two with John pointing to Jesus as a new sort of Passover Lamb a new atonement, and in day three the first disciples and the assembling of the Church (true Israel begins), and day four and five the chief apostle and the apostles selected, and day six Israel, without guile, is selected, and day seven with the Cana miracle, pointing to the passion, resurrection, and wedding feast of the Lamb. The new creation of John 1, followed by seven days of unfolding new creation culminates in a new Israel. Jesus then inaugurates a new Temple, lending new significance to the feasts, the Sabbath, the Father’s household, the law, which at the same time provide the interpretive frame for understanding who he is.

Jesus indicates his signs inherently bear testimony about his identity, “for the works which the Father has given Me to accomplish—the very works that I do—testify about Me, that the Father has sent Me” (Jn. 5:36; see also 10:25, 37–38; 14:11). However, even the seven signs in John have as their interpretive frame, the Hebrew Scriptures: 1. the new wine (a phrase related to God’s blessing in the Hebrew Scriptures) of Cana points, as indicated, to the passion – or to the “coming of the time” of Jesus’ death and resurrection. 2. The cleansing of the Temple is an overt reference to the death and resurrection and a new understanding of kingdom and temple. 3. the cure of the royal official’s son (4:46-54) demonstrates Christ’s power to speak events into reality, as at creation. 4. the cure of the paralytic at the pool (5:1-17) points to the healing of the nations fulfilling the prophecies of Isaiah. 5. the multiplication of loaves (including walking on water) (6:1-66) speaks of the period of the Exodus when God led Israel through the Sea and fed them in the wilderness and revealed his true identity (I am that I am). 6. the cure of the man born blind (9:1-41) is a direct fulfillment of Isaiah 35:5. 7. the raising of Lazarus (11:1-44) points to Jesus’ resurrection, and the raising of all Israel. In Isaiah God promised to raise up Israel on the third day after they were cut down and killed in exile, and in Ezekiel, God promised to gather scattered Israel again, and this gathering is described as a resurrection (“The dry bones shall rise again” Ezekiel 37:1-14). Christ’s resurrection is more fully understood in this light, and gives a new depth of meaning to the rescue of Israel.

Throughout, Christ is duplicating and fulfilling or giving final meaning to the history of Israel. The Exodus of Israel and the original Pascha (or Passover) is the type of the true Passion of Christ (Christ is the true Passover Lamb). In turn, Moses warded off the deadly snakes in the wilderness but this event finds its true meaning in Christ: “Just as Moses raised the snake in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, so that those who believe in Him may have eternal life” (John 3:14).

The intertextuality in John is sometimes an overt quote, an echoing of an event or a name, a fulfilling in a prophetic sense, or a filling out of meaning, but throughout the life and sayings and events of Christ, are witnessed to or according to Scripture. The true bread from heaven (6:41–42), the heavenly King and Truth (18:36–38), and the true prophet (7:47–52), resonate with and complete the prior understanding of the Scriptures. The Jews Jesus addresses (in Jn. 5) fail to understand their Scriptures, and he accuses them of voiding Scripture: “You do not have His word abiding in you, for you do not believe Him whom He sent” (Jn. 5:38). They may have memorized much of Scripture, and they may have literally been wearing Scripture on the phylactery around their head, but nonetheless, they have emptied out the word of God by focusing on the Scriptures apart from Christ.

John is simply a case in point of what Paul means about the testimony of Scripture. It is not that Scripture alone is enough, or that the Gospel is understood in isolation from Scripture, but the Gospel is the point of Scripture. Paul illustrates (in 2 Cor 3:12-4:6), seeming to build upon the saying of Jesus: “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me” (John 5:46). There is no accepting Moses and rejecting Christ, as Moses is all about Jesus. In Corinthians, Moses’ veil is simultaneously a cover-up of the fading sort of glory, whose only function is to point to the unfading glory of Christ: “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Co 3:18). The veil of the law, taken as adequate, hides the true glory, but taken as a type is itself an indicator of the unfading glory of Christ. The limit of the one is a means of understanding the other.

The true proclamation of Scripture, found in Christ, means that Scripture must be read within the interpretive frame (the hermeneutic) of the Gospel (Christ crucified and raised). “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it, so justifying the claim that Christ died and rose according to the Scriptures.’”[2]

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

[2] Behr, 27.

Decline in the Independent Christian Churches: Part I, the Theological Segment

A guest blog by C. J. Dull

The subject of “decline” has held a fatal fascination ever since the appearance of the first volume of the classic work of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in that storied year 1776. Three more volumes finished the opus in 1788. Since Gibbon attributed the Roman Empire’s decline in significant measure to the rise of Christianity, that ensured Christians would want to deal with the concept. More recently and more commonly known now is William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in 1960 with its Wagnerian overtones. He refers to its last days as a Goetterdaemmerung (twilight of the gods).

It is pretty obvious that this is a period of decline for this group. Its main annual gathering, the North American Christian Convention is no more. The main publisher, Standard Publishing, exists only in vestigial form as a section of David C. Cook. That many of the same personnel are still part of it does not augur well for any particular new initiatives but rather an increasing milking of existing assets. The educational situation has seen some especially striking developments. Two of the three graduate seminaries, all with full accreditation at one time, are now gone with the third only surviving by being absorbed by its undergraduate associate; even as Lincoln’s seminary has been absorbed by Ozark so Emmanuel has been absorbed by Milligan.

One major consideration yet to be resolved is the absence of a congruent approach between the two most dynamic segments of the group, especially as it relates to seminal influences. Scholars, whom I designate the theological segment, typically and overwhelmingly look to the liturgical churches for not only background, but guidance. More significantly—certainly financially—the managerial and perhaps pastoral segment, especially the larger congregations, continue to dominate virtually all our institutions. They look to different groups for leadership or inspiration, most often Baptists, Nazarenes and Pentecostals. Influence from business techniques is not lacking. That these two major sources of influence do not integrate well clearly is a significant issue, problem even.

Independents created an impressive educational establishment fairly quickly and inexpensively. The regional schools, of which Lincoln was the most successful, often were able to establish themselves in areas of relatively low cost (Norfolk, NE; Grand Junction, CO; Sturgis, S D; Scottsbluff, NE; Joplin, MO; Moberly, MO; Oklahoma City, OK; Elizabeth City, NC; ) Some older schools had benefitted from the nineteenth century tradition of locating colleges in remote areas or small towns (Milligan College; Kentucky Christian College, Johnson Bible College) as others did by being located near major universities (Manhattan Christian College, NW Christian College, Minnesota Bible College). Newer formations in major metropolitan areas had varied success. Atlanta, Southern California, to a lesser extent Dallas and Boise, seemed to do well. Others such as Puget Sound (Seattle), Eastern Christian College (suburban DC), Memphis Christian College (among other names), Iowa Christian College (Des Moines) often found the going tougher. Many, like Lincoln, began as institutes and never got beyond that stage (NY Christian Institute, Clarence, NY). At least one Spanish language school, Colegio Biblico, has endured. The Ottumwa offshoots (Midwest School of Evangelism, Portland, Dorr Drive, Rocky Mountain, as well as a number of congregationally based schools) often prospered and sometimes in theologically unpredictable ways. Most of the doctoral faculty got their degrees from state universities largely in the Midwest but whatever was approachable in their area. There was a twofold advantage in this. The cost was less, and any particular religious tradition would have to be dealt with only tangentially. The major graduate seminary, Southern Baptist in Louisville, had a number of advantages: central location, free tuition and an atmosphere in which baptism by immersion was supreme. By contrast, Fuller with its California location (and higher cost of living), and significant Presbyterian faculty representation was much less influential even with a Disciple on that faculty, Donald McGavran.

One of the major issues in any movement is what emphases will be dominant or even significant. The paramount need now is to begin work toward a stable synthesis, intellectual and institutional—and above all one that is distinctly ours! Most theological faculties might be a simple example of the problem. There systematic theology is distinctly a Calvinistic specialty while historical theology generally is dominated by graduates of Catholic universities. Integrating the two has obvious difficulties. One can only wonder how difficult it would be to add “liturgical theology”, as in the Orthodox Churches, to the mix. Yet, for better or worse, there will have to be major trends that must be addressed.

First, there is the theme of Christian unity. To put it bluntly, the sooner it is jettisoned, the better. That many will cringe—for lack of a better word—at that thought is a monumental understatement. Yet there is much about “unity” that is a no-win situation. On the frontier, the concept in the form of “union” definitely prospered, creating the impression that even as a major nation could be formed from disparate units, so could the Christian world be similarly addressed. Yet, its increasing identification doomed it in the long run. Connections with current national trends are hardly restricted to specific continents or languages. Such movements seem increasing and ubiquitous. Most movements for unity presuppose a single dominant or at least lingua franca language, a situation becoming more rather than less difficult.

First of all, it ought to be very clear by now that the creation—or re-creation– of a single unified church will never happen. The situation becomes more emphatic when we add research on Eastern and other non-familiar groups. Almost every nation and ex-mission field can claim a plethora of approaches to historic Christianity. Then there are very real and germane issues about connections to various political movements. Many ancient and medieval religious officials owed their positions to what we would consider secular rulers. Pope Gregory the Great became pope because the Byzantine emperor said so. The phenomenon is not limited to that period. During the period of my graduate study, there was in 1973 a coup d’état in Greece by the military. Shortly after they took power, they appointed a new head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Greece.

Next, unity essentially is a validation of the work of others, not a discreet, creative process. The fact that many of the positions of those groups are stable would also seem to leave little room for creativity or growth. In short, it is a recipe for stalemate, not progress. Then there is the issue of the philosophical foundations of ancient and medieval doctrines. They may impress because of their intricacy, but that does not make them any less pagan, from Platonism to Neo-Platonism to Stoicism inter alia. It is haunting that Augustine of Hippo did not quote Scripture on his deathbed, but Plotinus.

The ancient church’s synthesis is in many ways simply a triumphal procession over earlier work and may resemble it only as much as Augustus does Curius Dentatus. The analogy is comparable because the first figure is dominant and familiar while the second is obscure, but both were elected to multiple consecutive consulships. A look at the texts of some early important writers (e.g., Irenaeus, Origen) shows the immense sophistication employed merely to get a workable text—my favorite is the Sources Chretiennes text of Irenaeus on Heresies. Their work was often superseded through neglect, new theological insights, or even outright condemnation, and yet they were much closer—certainly timewise – to the primitive church than what finally prevailed.

End part I.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

Epektasis: Gregory of Nyssa and the Eternal Ascent of Redemption

“Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13–14).

Transcending the self, or going beyond the self (being stretched out, epektasis in Paul’s description), in Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation, not only captures the life course of the Christian, but the eternal goal. There is an unceasing evolution toward the eternal likeness, or an ongoing progress of participation (theosis) in being joined to Christ.[1] For Paul, this simultaneously refers to “knowing Christ” in “resurrection life,” through being “conformed to his death” (3:10-11), which means “forgetting what lies behind” (3:13), even counting as “rubbish” legal accomplishment (3:8) so as to “lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus” (3:12). There is a going beyond (past accomplishments or failures), a forgetting and moving forward, which involves what Christ has done (he “laid hold” of Paul) and Paul’s response (a “laying hold of Christ”). Paul uses the term “perfect” (τετελείωμαι), to indicate he has not achieved this end (3:12), and those who are “perfect” (τέλειοι) he indicates should have the same attitude (3:15). He may be ironic in describing them as perfect, or he may, in fact, be describing the goal as the process of perfecting.

Gregory, in his Life of Moses, presumes perfection is an unceasing growth: “The perfection of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness.”[2] According to Gregory, Paul “never ceased straining toward those things that are still to come. Coming to a stop in the race was not safe for him. Why? Because no Good has a limit in its own nature but is limited by the presence of its opposite as life is limited by death and light by darkness. And every good thing generally ends with all those things which are perceived to be contrary to the good.”[3] Progressing, evolving, perfecting, being joined to Christ, participating in the divine life, becoming like Christ and God, according to Gregory, is an eternal process.

[Paul] teaches us, on the one hand, that what is ever and again discovered of that blessed Nature that is the Good is something great but, on the other hand, that what lies beyond what is grasped at any particular point is infinitely greater; and during the entire eternity of the ages this becomes the case for the person who participates in the Good, since those who participate in it receive increase and growth in that they encounter ever greater and better things.[4]

As I previously described (here), conversion and salvation are not one-off events of the past, but as with Christ, the beginning and end are interwoven and thus eternal. The expanding and spiraling realization of divine love, through an expanded moral sense, to a broadened intellectual engagement, to a psychic experiential shift (the fruits of the Spirit) sums up the New Testament dynamic, which by definition stretches out eternally. The knowledge of God, and the accompanying expansion of virtues and understanding, and the experience of love and peace never come to an end. We are created to be in the divine image and this is an unending goal. Becoming like God, and not just self-improvement, is the human purpose, and this purpose entails the eternal. This eternality is more than a long or infinite time, but is a qualitative goal in which the finite and the creaturely are ceaselessly transformed. The limited enters the unlimited, the finite takes up the eternal, such that the stretching forth (epektasis) in God cannot be finalized.

Gregory also takes up this explanation in his homilies on the Song of Songs, which means he is describing an expanded desire or even a divine and eternal eroticism. As he describes, thirst for God is never quenched:

The wellspring of good things always draws the thirsty to itself—just as in the Gospel the wellspring says: “If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). For in using these words, he sets no limit, whether to thirst, or to the urge to come to him, or to the enjoyment of the drinking. Rather, by the open-endedness of his injunction, he issues a continuing invitation to thirst and to drink and to be impelled toward him.[5]

While physical thirst and satisfaction has its limits, the spiritual thirst for God is unlimited as God is infinite. In the soul’s longing for God there is no ultimate satisfaction, no final union, no perfect vision, no final satiation, and to imagine there is, would amount to considering God as finite. In Gregory’s allegorical interpretation of the life of Moses, Moses is an allegorical Christian pilgrim, desiring to see God, but recognizing there is no end to this pursuit. “Whereas, Moses, your desire for what is still to come has expanded and you have not reached satisfaction in your progress and whereas you do not see any limit to the Good, but your yearning always looks for more, the place with me is so great that the one running in it is never able to cease from his progress.”[6] It is not that there is a lack of satisfaction, but an ever deepening desire and satiation. “He still thirsts for that with which he constantly filled himself to capacity, and he asks to attain as if he had never partaken, beseeching God to appear to him, not according to his capacity to partake, but according to God’s true being.”[7]

When I described this to my daughter, she said, “It sounds exhausting.” It may be that we tend to attach notions of rest and peace to stasis. Luther’s disparaging of works may tinge our conceptions of effort with a physical, or sinful agonistic struggle, but Gregory is offering up an alternative form of peace and stability. There is a stability in standing on the rock. “I mean by this that the firmer and more immovable one remains in the Good, the more he progresses in the course of virtue.”[8] It is the one who “is tossed one way and another (as the Apostle says)” or the one who is “doubtful,” or in Paul’s picture the one who seeks stability in the law, or something less than Christ, that experiences the exhaustion of effort and works. There is rest and peace to be found in putting on Christ, and this putting on is not subject to the “body of death.”

As Gregory describes, there can be a futility of effort, on the order of climbing a hill of sand, in which one is ever sliding back down the hill. There is a lot of effort but no progress. “But if someone, as the Psalmist says, should pull his feet up from the mud of the pit and plant them upon the rock (the rock is Christ who is absolute virtue), then the more steadfast and unmovable (according to the advice of Paul) he becomes in the Good.”[9] Gregory compares it to putting wings on the heart, and flying upward through the upward stabilizing draft of the good.

The cleft of the rock, in which God placed Moses during his vision of God (his being planted on the rock), Gregory says is “a heavenly house not made with hands which is laid up by hope for those who have dissolved their earthly tabernacle.”[10] The heavenly home, or the spiritual rock, is absolutely secure and stable, but this is not a delimiting stability, but a rock of ascent. According to Liviu Petcu, there is a stability in this “continuous ascension” on the order of climbing the rungs of a ladder, with each step leading to a higher step. “This movement is born out of the forever infinite distance between what he is from God and Who God is. The spiritual life is thus a permanent transformation of the soul in Christ, in the form of an ardour which grows more and more, as it becomes more united with and stabilised in God.”[11]

As Gregory says of Paul, “he is still hastening toward something higher and never leaves off his ascent by setting the good he has already grasped as a limit to his desires.”[12] There is a continual surpassing of the self or self-transcendence, as “God is always within us in unification and always outside of us, in His transcendency.”[13] The move toward God who is simultaneously dwelling within, and yet beyond and without, is not an object obtained at death, but a person with whom one is continually converging in eternal life.

Hence we find that the apostle taught this truth concerning the nature of the inexpressible goods when he said: “eye has not seen” that Good even if it be ever gazing upon it (for it does not see as much as there is, but only as much as the eye is capable of taking in); and “ear has not heard” the full extent of what is revealed, even though its hearing be ever receiving the Word; and “it has not entered into the human heart” (1 Cor 2:9) even though persons who are pure in heart may regularly see as much as they are capable of.[14]

There is a progression from glory to glory, a continual moving beyond to the ever-greater, the ever-fuller, and the ever-higher. While there is rest and peace that are incorporated into knowing God, this rest does not mean stasis but effort toward completion. “But now finish doing it also, so that just as there was the readiness to desire it, so there may be also the completion of it by your ability” (2 Cor. 8:11). With every end accomplished there is a new beginning, for where the beginning is in the end (which is Christ), the beginning is eternally stretched out, enabling a new step in the ascent to divine likeness. “Thus, no limit would interrupt growth in the ascent to God, since no limit to the good can be found nor is the increasing of desire for the good brought to an end because it is satisfied.”[15] There is a continuing depth of desire and satisfaction that knows no end in the stretching forth of being joined to Christ.

[1] Gregory spells this out in his sermons on the Song of Songs. Gregory of Nyssa, ‘Homilies on the Song of Songs’, in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, ed. and trans. Richard A. Norris (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012).

[2] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1978), Book I paragraph, 10, p. 31.

[3] Life of Moses, I:5, 29.

[4] Gregory, Homily 8, 259.

[5] Gregory, Homily 8, 268.

[6] Life of Moses, II, 242, p, 116.

[7] Life of Moses, II, 230, p. 114.

[8] Life of Moses, II, 243, p. 117.

[9] Life of Moses, II, 244, pp. 117-118.

[10] Life of Moses, II, 245, p. 118.

[11] Liviu Petcu, “The Doctrine of Epektasis. One of the Major Contributions of Saint Gregory of Nyssa to the History of Thinking,” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia (ISSN 0870-5283; 2183-461X, Pages 771-782, 2017) 774.

[12] Gregory, Homily 8, 259

[13] Petcu, 774.

[14] Homily 8, 259-261.

[15] Life of Moses, 239, p. 115.

Transcending the Self Through Conversion: Bernard Lonergan and Sin and Salvation

In teaching theology the problem is where to begin, as both a nonviolent and apocalyptic theology require a reconception of reality inclusive of the entire theological catalogue (from the doctrine of God and Trinity to the doctrine of atonement and revelation). Beyond the practical problem of the classroom, it could be argued conversion marks the lived entry point, but defining conversion poses the same problem, as it is only adequately defined and realized in connection to theology as a whole. Conversion cannot be separated from the reconceptualization of God, self, and the world (the reworking of the moral and religious imagination), so conversion itself must be rightly realized (making every beginning an ongoing task). The entry point into theology through conversion, illustrates the predicament that no singular beginning is adequate, but the beginning and end are necessarily tied together.

Conversion is first of all conversion from something; it is dynamic in its movement (from one thing to something else). Conversion describes a turn; the turn from out of a self-enclosed world in which stasis and permanence are experienced as synonymous with the self. To convert means, at the most basic level, an abandonment of the human project conceived at an infantile, and narcissistic stage. The construct of the ego, the experience of the superego (the law), the drive for being, all speak of basic and immediate experience and it is this most immediate reality that is rendered false in conversion.

The theological problem is, there is a fortress of religion protecting and substantiating this false experience. Conceptions of God as law-giver and punisher, conceptions of humanity as continually given over to guilt and struggle, are supported by economies of salvation in penal substitution and divine satisfaction which reduplicate the human disease as an economy of salvation. Whether or not the sickness is the root of this theology, nonetheless the entire theological catalog poses a potential obstacle to the cure (attached to conversion). Bad theology and failed Christianity, more than simple atheism or paganism, pose an obstacle to a nonviolent, apocalyptic, transformative faith. This is the case, as human notions of righteousness replaces divine rightness (in absolutizing the law), masochistic self-punishment is given divine status (in notions of conscience and guilt), the human word (in a depth psychology) is reified and deified (in doctrines of the logos), love and forgiveness are confused with anger satisfied, and this shows forth in contractual theology and in various theological dualisms (in the Trinity, between heaven and earth, between nature and grace, etc.). So religious conversion must include, not simply conversion from one religion to another, but conversion from particular religious sensibilities and this entails conversion from inadequate conceptions of self and the world (which may sound like a restatement of the problem).

Bernard Lonergan describes conversion as an ongoing, lifelong process, or an unending dynamism.[1] There is no clear place to start, other than the place we each individually begin, so perhaps every conversion is adequate to the task of the continuing journey, with the caveat that conversion pertains to everything and intersects with everything. The problem then is perhaps not with where to begin but with the danger of ceasing to begin in a stunted conversion. Everything must be incorporated into this beginning, but this beginning cannot cease. Conversion must continue, and all things must be reconceptualized and reworked in light of the person and work of Christ. Conversion is a life-long turning, which may be stunted by pietistic notions focused on guilt and repentance, or any notion that sees conversion as a one-off experience in the past.

Conversion and repentance must be expanded and reconceived (Lonergan again), and Lonergan recognizes that there is a reciprocal process between conversion, self-transcendence, and authenticity. In the description of Robert Doran, “Authenticity is achieved in self-transcendence, and consistent self-transcendence is reached only by conversion.”[2] Doran goes on to describe the ever-spiraling relationship between these three poles: “what makes a person an authentic human being is that he or she is consistently self-transcending, and consistent self-transcendence requires that one undergo a multiple and ongoing process of conversion. The process moves causally, if you wish, from conversion to self-transcendence, and from self-transcendence to authenticity.”[3] To be an authentic self, there has to be movement beyond the strictures of infantile egotism, which may be necessary to survival and the developing sense of self, but taken as an end this egotism is a lie. The passage is from out of “self-absorption or self-enclosure to self-transcendence,” which may occur apart from awareness of the details of its happening, but entails moving beyond the “self-referential” or loveless horizon to the realm of love.

This conversion is religious, moral, intellectual, and (Doran adds) psychic; in other words, it pertains to everything about the self. It is notable that the intellectual is last in this sequence, coming at the end of one’s life course.[4] Self-transcendence is religious conversion, as one awakens to the divine realm and to the realm of love; it is moral, not in the sense of moral perfection, but in taking account of others in one’s decisions; it is intellectual in that certain questions are raised and there is pursuit of intellectual truth and integrity in understanding and judgment; and it is psychic in that the above connections are linked to “affective and imaginal components” such that empirical consciousness synthesizes the religious, moral, and intellectual into experience.[5] This synthesis of love gets at the ever renewed dynamism in conversion.

It is easy enough for the immature to live and experience the religious, moral, and intellectual, as separate realms, none of which necessarily impinge upon shaping emotions and imagination. The content of morality, intellect, and religion, often pertain almost completely to the self.

Morality may be nothing more than loveless self-interest, and moral decisions may be nothing more than utilitarian (which describes entire moral systems). “My delight in eating is for the sake of me. My studies are for the sake of me. My good works are for the sake of merit, and merit is for the sake of rewards, and rewards are for the sake of me. If it is for the sake of me, there is no need to inquire further. I have a sufficient and efficacious motive for acting.”[6] The immediate experience of desire is the driving force in this morality, and there is no questioning of the end of moral pursuit, and there is no doubting the self which it serves. The fact that this experience and conception of self is false (dead, in Christ’s description) is not up for consideration. This self may be the Girardian self, guided by imitation of the group, it may be the ethnocentric self in which one’s group is an extension of the self, or it may be one’s tribe, family, or religious cohort. That is the self-enclosure may be constricted or more expansive, but it is self-enclosure nonetheless. “Greed is good,” “knowledge is power,” “self-interest is corporate interest,” are all ways of maintaining self-enclosure on a more expansive scale. But so too I would argue, is a contractual religion focused on “my” moral transgression, “my” forgiveness, “my” going to heaven, etc.

As long as one is egotistically self-enclosed, intellect is also self-absorbed and stunted. The intellectual world of the egotist, is the world that refers to the self so that desire, drive, self-interest, commonsense, and the God that supports this world are left undisturbed. Intellectual conversion may be the most difficult to measure, but it would seem its cosmic scope, as opposed to micro-scope, focused on the individual, is its measure. The theological equivalent of the Copernican revolution is a Christocentric revolution, in which not only this world but eternity revolves around this person. The New Testament, the work of Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, the work of Maximus, and Sergius Bulgakov, point to this all-embracing possibility, in which the intellect along with morality is opened to deification.

Psychic conversion may occur in small increments and the overall effect/affect may be slow in coming, yet all of the other elements of conversion depend upon this psychic aspect. It is psychic conversion that establishes connection between the other elements of conversion. “And the reason for establishing or re-establishing that connection, in terms of authenticity, is that affective self-transcendence is frequently required if we are going to be self-transcendent in the intellectual, moral, and religious dimensions of our living.”[7] Conversion begins to bear fruit in our emotions and imagination, so that peace and love pervade all things. As we experience this psychic reality along with the reconceptualization of all things, the experience brings forth renewed understanding. The mind is transformed and with it all things are understood from a new perspective or horizon.

The summation of this conversion is love: religious conversion is lit up by love through faith. God realized as love is a rescue from the lovelessness of the self enclosed in the world conceived from a loveless horizon. Whoever abides in love abides in God and this love pervades the intellect, the morals, and the human psyche, in a dynamism of participation. Love is participation in God, synonymous with participation in a community of love. This community of participation, of course, poses its own hazards; just as there is a loveless theology, there are loveless communities brought together by fear and coercion. As Doran warns, “profound religious inauthenticity can also be mediated by participation in a religious community.”[8] So while being part of a community is no guarantee, it may be that small communities of friends formed out of the spontaneity of love, best serve purposes of self-transcendent love. The unconditional love of God received, and the response of loving unconditionally, realized in community, is the ever-renewed end of conversion.

The unconditional love through which one transcends the self, entails then, a shift in faith (religious conversion) and this comes with a shift in values (moral conversion from primarily valuing the self), and an opening up of the intellect to the cosmic and eternal, and all of this arises in an ongoing psychic conversion of all-embracing, unconditional love and peace. This is where one begins and ends the theological project.

[1] It is appropriate that for the first time Ploughshares Bible Institute is holding two classes simultaneously, Sin and Salvation and Lonergan and the Problem of Theological Method.

[2] Robert Doran, “What Does Bernard Lonergan Mean by ‘Conversion’?” (2011) accessed on 1/22/2025 at https://lonerganresource.com/media/pdf/lectures/What%20Does%20Bernard%20Lonergan%20Mean%20by%20Conversion.pdf p. 2.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 4.

[5] Ibid, 5.

[6] Ibid, 14.

[7] Ibid, 6.

[8] Ibid, 7.

“The Weight of Things”

A guest blog by Monroe Johnson

Tom stood in his father’s study, holding a worn wooden spoon. The pancake batter stains had darkened the wood over decades of Sunday mornings. He remembered the rhythmic scraping sound as his father stirred, telling stories about his childhood breakfasts, each memory layered like the rings of an old tree.

The spoon felt heavier now than it should have. It was like his father’s watch, neatly placed on the desk, its brass face scratched from years of construction work. A box of old nails caught his eye—”$0.89″ written in his father’s precise handwriting. Each object seemed to pull him deeper into the reality of their relationship, anchoring moments he hadn’t known he needed to hold onto.

Tom had always known he loved his father, but now, handling these everyday items, that love became tangible. It wasn’t that the objects themselves made him love his father more. Rather, they provided concrete points of connection, like anchors holding abstract feelings in place. Each item was a thread in a web of shared moments, making what had always existed more visible but was sometimes hard to grasp.

The pipe on the windowsill still smelled faintly of cherry tobacco. Tom remembered summer evenings watching his father pack it carefully, their conversations about life flowing as easily as the smoke. These weren’t just memories – they were touchstones that gave his love substance and shape in space and time.

What had been a floating, undefined feeling now had weight and dimension. Through these ordinary objects, Tom could trace the outline of their relationship, feel its texture, understand its depth in ways that thoughts alone never quite captured.

He sat in his father’s chair, the wooden spoon still in his hand. The late afternoon light filtered through the window, catching dust motes that danced in the air. He chuckled, remembering how his father would always say “Time to make the magic happen!” before starting the pancakes, as if stirring batter with a wooden spoon was some kind of sacred ritual. Maybe it was. His dad had a way of making ordinary moments feel special, not through grand gestures but through small constants – the Sunday pancakes, the careful pipe-packing, the meticulous labeling of even a simple box of nails.

These ordinary moments, lived so fully and freely in their own time, had somehow carried forward. Each item held not just memory but possibility, as if his father’s complete presence in every simple moment had created its own momentum, reaching naturally into the future. The spoon wasn’t just a reminder of Sunday pancakes past; it carried the echo of his father’s laughter forward, a thread of joy that would weave into new stories, new mornings.

The love between father and son wasn’t preserved – it was alive, growing from the soil of those fully-lived moments. His father hadn’t tried to create legacy; he had simply lived each moment with such authenticity that the future grew naturally from it, like oak trees from acorns.

Tom set the spoon down gently on the desk, next to the watch that still kept faithful time. His father’s absence was still a raw wound, but these ordinary treasures somehow made it bearable, even beautiful – turning grief into a kind of promise, memories unfolding into hope.

Luke 24:30-31: 30 And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. 31 And their eyes were opened, and they knew him, and he vanished out of their sight

An afternoon of scriptural discourse – words upon words, prophecies analyzed, meanings debated. Their hearts burned within them, but their eyes remained dim. Until that simple, everyday act: the breaking of bread.

Perhaps it was the way His thumb pressed into the crust, that familiar indent they’d seen a thousand times. Or how He lifted the loaf slightly, pausing as He always did to inhale its warmth – a habit so characteristic they’d once teased Him about it. Maybe it was the precise angle of His wrists as He tore the bread apart, a gesture as unique as a fingerprint.

In that moment, theology became touchable. Like Tom finding his father in a worn wooden spoon, they found their Lord not in the grand interpretations of scripture they’d discussed along the road, but in this intimate choreography of hands and bread. The abstract Truth they’d debated became flesh and bone before them, recognized not through intellectual assent but through the tangible grammar of shared meals and familiar gestures.

What all their scholarly discourse couldn’t accomplish, this simple act achieved – like how a father’s old pipe can say more about love than a thousand words. The gap between symbol and reality, between scriptural knowledge and living presence, closed in the breaking of bread. Their eyes were opened not by more explanation, but by witnessing this physical signature of the One they knew so well.

Before them stood not a theological concept, but their teacher, known in the flesh through the material language of bread and familiar gesture – just as Tom found his father’s love made tangible in the objects that carried the imprint of his presence.