Category: Cultivating Peace

Irregular contributions from friends and personnel of Forging Ploughshares.

Forgiveness 

This is a guest blog by Brad Klingele

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can We Ever Escape from Our Surroundings?

Guest Blog by C J Dull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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)

“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.

The Salvation of the Curse Through Christ

By: Allan S. Contreras Rios

Could it be that the drama of fall and salvation or of sin and deliverance are interwoven and simultaneous? The creation is suffering the consequences of sin and death, introduced by humankind (according to Genesis 3), but the consequences of which are directed onto all of creation, and which Paul describes (in Romans), as already salvific. In Romans 8 Paul tells us that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth until now (v. 22), but not only it, but we also groan within ourselves (v. 23), and in the same way, the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be uttered (v. 26). Paul is, however, describing the pain of childbirth suffered by creation as part of the pain of new creation. The indication is that each of the curses of sin (the futilities inflicted on creation), take on an intrinsic salvific element through Christ.

The Redemptive Suffering of Birth Extended to All Suffering

The idea of “pains of childbirth” for Jews and Christians is an apocalyptic image that has to do with the suffering that accompanies God’s eschatological action of bringing in a new age. Yes, childbirth hurts, but through it a new life is being born, a New Creation. In Galatians 1:4, Paul tells us that Jesus has delivered us from the present evil age. As Richard Hays says commenting on that verse, “Jesus’ death not only procures the forgiveness of sins; it moves us into a completely new reality by freeing us from the power of the ‘present evil age.’” In other words, childbirth is part of the eschatological conflict in which God vindicates and redeems the entire creation. And this new life, this New Creation, is inaugurated through the death (the agonizing pain) and resurrection of Jesus. God’s saving work in Christ, transforms the suffering of all creation into an eschatological suffering of hope.

In Genesis 3:16: “To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth.” Pain, as the consequence of sin, is not exclusively that of the woman. In fact, the Hebrew word עצב translated as “pain” describes the “pain” of childbirth, the “pain” for the man to get his food, due to the curse that falls upon the land, and God’s “grief” at seeing His creation ruined in Genesis 6:6. This painful sorrow is something that involves mankind, God, and the entire creation. It is no surprise Paul says the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth, but now each element of suffering(due to Christ) implies hope and adoption into the family of God (Rom. 8:22-23).

Redeeming Death

In Genesis 3:15 (known as the protoevangelium), God says: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you will bruise his foot.” Although, at first glance, it would seem that the wound in the head is mortal and the wound in the foot is not, this is not entirely true. While it is true that a snake dies when its head is crushed, the venom of a snake through a bite on any part of the body (in this case the foot or heel) is also deadly. The prophecy indicates they would kill each other. Jesus’ feet are nailed to a cross but he is not only wounded, but on that cross He dies. In his resurrection Jesus defeats death itself (which is why the cross cannot be separated from the resurrection), dealing the final blow to the serpent’s greatest power (crushing his head) but also why entropy and death cannot be separated from the hope of childbirth.

The Fruit of the Tree of Calvary

Genesis 3:17-18 says: “Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you will eat of it all the days of your life. ‘Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field.’” There are two things I want to highlight from what God says to man and what Jesus does on the cross.

The first has to do with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that was not to be eaten. On this tree hung a curse and it is through the ingestion of the fruit that this curse falls, not only on humanity, but on the earth. How does Jesus reverse this curse? The connection between the fruit of the tree and the cross may not be obvious. However, Paul tells us in Galatians 3:13 that, “Christ redeemed us…having become a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.’” Paul is quoting Deuteronomy 21:23 which says everyone who hangs on a tree or (pole) is cursed, linking Jesus to that curse that hangs on a tree like a fruit. However, as Jesus becomes cursed for us, He redeems us, but not just by hanging on the tree (remember ingestion is important).

Jesus says in John 6:51: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he shall live forever; and the bread which I also will give for the life of the cosmos is My flesh.” To partake of “the Lord’s Supper” is precisely to eat of that bread and wine that poured out His life (kenosis), not only for humanity, but for the entire cosmos. Through the ingestion of one fruit came the curse to the entire creation, and through the ingestion of another fruit (the metaphor of bread in this case) comes the redemption of the entire creation. Following the imagery of fruit hanging on the tree, when a fruit falls dead from the tree, the seeds of that fruit fall on the earth, giving the possibility for more trees of that fruit to sprout from the earth.

The Kenotic Fruit Renewing All Things

What do I mean by the above? Jesus becomes the curse that hung on the tree; by dying He drops the seeds of the Gospel on the earth giving the possibility for more trees and fruit like Him to sprout (Matt. 13:3-9, 18-23). This is what we know as “the fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22-23). As long as a person constantly ingests “the bread” which is Christ (1 Cor. 11:23-26), as long as a person remains “in Christ”, they will be producing fruit, blessing all of creation. It is through Jesus’ hanging on the tree that the fruit of curse is transformed into the fruit of blessing, becoming the fruit of life, like that of the other tree in Eden. It is precisely from this new life of New Creation, inaugurated through the death and resurrection of Jesus, that in the New Jerusalem there is no longer the dualistic tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but only trees of life (Rev. 22:2).

The second thing to highlight from Genesis 3:17-18 are the thorns that the earth produces after being cursed. These thorns make it more difficult for man to gather food, for they become painful inconveniences for mankind. Jesus, on the cross, also absorbs this curse into Himself. The King of Kings rules, not with a crown of gold and diamonds, but with a crown of thorns (Matt. 27:29), making accessible the food (Himself) that man needs for life. Pierced by the thorns (thwarting nourishment), in suffering humility, he offers the ultimate nourishment of his life.

The Curses Have Become Blessings

It could be said from all this that, not only is Genesis 3:15 the protoevangelium, but every one of the consequences of sin in Genesis 3 point to the Savior’s reversal of the curses. Focusing on the event of the cross, it is not merely that Jesus is providing forgiveness, which is what his work is often limited to, but is reversing the consequence and curse of sin in all of creation, such that the elements of the curse have become the vehicle of blessing.

Connecting this with John 14:6, what Jesus does then is to renew our way of thinking and acting (“He is the way,” see my previous blog). He replaces the alternate (un)reality (enslaving creation) with the reality (truth) which has obtained victory over death through the resurrection, giving us the opportunity to live eternally with Him, not only as an extension of our days, but as a quality of existence (true life) retroactively changing curses into blessings.

The God Humanity (A Conversation with Dostoyevsky on Free Will)

By: Allan S. Contreras Rios

Note: The quotes found in this blog come from the book The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky, unless specified otherwise. Also, this is a translation from a blog in Spanish, so the quotes are translated from Dostoyevsky’s book as well and not exact quotes from an English version of the book.

After the second creation narrative of mankind in Genesis 2, mankind (represented by Adam) is given a warning about eating from a certain tree in the Garden of Eden. The perennial question concerning this tree is: “If God knew mankind was going to sin, why put this tree there?” The common answer: humankind cannot really love God if he does not have the choice to hate him. Not having the choice would be kidnapping, not love. And not having that choice would make us robots instead of humans, according to this reasoning. But is the focus on choice mistaken?

The problem is, that instead of opting for the simple, to love God and what He loves, namely His creation, the alternative is the continual complexity of choice. As Dostoyevsky says, “It is true that nothing pleases man so much as free will; and yet there is nothing that makes him suffer more.” The suffering option cannot resolve itself, as having free-will, in this mistaken understanding, demands choice. That is, free-will (equated with choice) is already a choice against the definitive Divine resolution.

The story in Genesis indicates human choice is a shaping force and the names of the trees indicate how this is the case. The tree of life represents simplicity: to love God and what He loves. This tree does not contain the complication of a dualistic choice. It is a single thing: the tree of life.  It requires participation in relationship with God and His creation and this constitutes life. It is simplicity itself. But the second tree represents the complex in a dualistic choice. That is, the second tree affirms the possible existence of good and evil as independent antagonistic realities coexisting in creation. The lie is, that without one (good or evil), the other cannot exist or be defined (i.e. as in yin and yang). For the choosing to remain open, a dualistic reality is posited.

Another way of saying this is that by not eating of the fruit of the second tree, life is simple (e.g., no bad decisions or false choices, as there is clarifying singular reality). But eating from the second tree constitutes a grounding in human decision: the decision between good and evil. And this complexity and its decisionism displaces the simplicity of knowing God, and it poses an alternative, dualistic, reality.

 It is on this basis that we become our own guides, and the problem is, as Proverbs 16:2 says, “All the ways of a man are pure in his own sight.” As Dostoyevsky writes in several dialogues,

“Well,” I asked him, “what would become of man if he did not believe in God and immortality? In that case he would be allowed everything, even the greatest atrocities.”

What is our destiny if God does not exist… If the idea of God is nothing but the fruit of man’s imagination, how could man remain virtuous?

Everything is permitted to man… If God does not exist, there is no virtue.

Once God is displaced, humanity becomes its own ground, its own god, but it is only in a dualistic world that this god can exercise (deciding) power. The free-will choice already constitutes a world made in the human image. Free-will (in this definition) requires a subjective decisionism, dependent upon human moral choices, which displace transcendent virtue.

We might wrongly blame the first couple for all of our troubles, but the option posed in Genesis continues to present itself: divine versus human or life versus death. Dostoyevsky says that, “Men have eaten the fruit of good and evil, and they continue to eat it.” Day by day we decide, we are the ethicists, and our decisionism is a displacement of divine goodness and virtue.

Maybe God did not place the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to tempt us to do evil, but to give us the opening to the good; to live in eternal simplicity instead of complexity; to live with God as opposed to living in antagonistic dualism, clashing with others and ourselves. The complexity is continually compounded and exponentially multiplied, as Dostoyevsky describes:

New people are living, who want to destroy all that exists, and return to anthropophagy. How stupid! And they have not come to ask my advice! In my opinion, it is not necessary to destroy anything, except the idea of God in the mind of man: that is what we must begin with. Once all mankind has come to deny God, and I believe that the epoch of universal atheism will come at last, as the geological epoch came in its time, then by themselves, without anthropophagy, the old moralists will disappear. Men will gather to ask life for all that it can give, but only and absolutely to this present and terrestrial life. The human mind will be enlarged, will rise to a satanic pride, and it will be then that God-Humanity will reign.

Who determines morality in an atheistic world? If humanity is composed of a quasi-infinite number of humans with different wills that compete, not only with each other, but within themselves, antagonism, opposition, decisionism, constitutes the world. The virus of dualism introduced by the ingestion of decisionism infects from within but manifests itself as a self-imploding “reality.”

Dostoyevsky could be describing the human predicament inaugurated in Genesis 3, but it is continually re-inaugurated. This ongoing “Fall” is not atheism per se but the exaltation of humanity. There is a closure, which implicitly or explicitly excludes transcendent morality. Although many subject themselves to the absurd concept of atheism, they try to live a moral life, which Nietzsche criticized as a form of hypocrisy. Why feel obliged to live out Christian morality if the God of the Bible does not exist? Nature is cruel and we are products of nature, so we should be cruel. That would be a consistent atheism. However, most who consider themselves atheists, live in the discrepancy that reaffirms the dualism of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (presuming, without reason, the good).

We live in a time when as, Dostoyevsky says, humanity “asks life” for things. Let us replace “life” with “mother nature”, “vibes”, “spirit”, “universe”, etc., and we will realize that we do not live in atheism, but in idolatry. As the apostle Paul says, we have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and we worship and serve the creature instead of the Creator (Rom. 1:25). But this projection of divinity onto the creaturely is, as Dostoyevsky portrays it, a continued swallowing of the serpent’s venom. The deadly lie continues to kill. Dostoyevsky writes that, “The important thing is to know how to flee from the lie.” However, this is easier said than done. We live in a world where the lie has become “reality.” What we need is the truth to displace the lie. And that is where the last Adam comes in, namely Jesus (1 Cor. 15:46; cf. Rom. 5:14).

The Gospels describe Jesus’ mission as exposing the lie. The problem is, we may not understand the saving ministry of Jesus as He and the early Christians understood it: deliverance from the bondage of an enslaving lie. The tendency is to reduce salvation to His propitiating death, while his life and his resurrection are not seen as revelatory or salvific. By reducing Christ to a sacrifice, we leave out His ministry, his healing, his teaching, his resurrection, and we cease to see Jesus as the God/human Savior and turn Him into an instrument, displacing the holism of the Gospel. Instead of being “the way” Christ is reduced to a point of law, another decision, in which the focus is human will and choice.  Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Here is the true fruit, lost in the lie, and it pertains to everything. Where Christ is reduced to an instrument of the law, rather than being “the way,” He becomes a tool of decisionism rather than a relinquishing of this enslaving “freedom.”

In its metaphorical use, “the way” is the universal symbol of human existence that describes the dynamics of life. In the Old Testament we are told that man is guided by God (e.g., Israel in Exodus), that path of righteousness is the one to walk in order to be wise and not foolish (Prov. 15:19). Similarly, in the New Testament, “the way” is used as a figure for the way of thinking and/or acting (2 Pet. 2:21). What is lost in the lie, is the way of thinking, acting and being. As a sacrifice, Jesus does not constitute the way, but serves an already established way.

The same holds with regard to “the truth.” We tend to think of truth in terms of a concept rather than a person. Truth is embodied in the God/man. To live in relationship with Him, to live “in Christ” (Rom. 8:1) is to live in truth, but this is a relinquishing of the common notion of free-will. This truth does not leave humanity alone, with its free-will, its choices, its imagination, or its autonomy. In Paul’s description, choosing does not enter into the equation, as the two Adams are the heads of two streams of humanity. Romans 5:12 says death entered the world through one man, and through death, sin, and death spread to all men, whereupon all sinned (Rom. 5:12). Paul’s ordering of this sequence (as rightly translated by David Hart) indicates that death posed as final reality, and Christ exposes this lie, displacing the lie and death with truth and life. In the first, death and evil constitute an alternative reality, in the second this alternative is emptied (eliminating the false choice).

This fits Dostoyevsky’s description in Crime and Punishment, where the false choice is exposed: “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” The power of choice, as in the novel, is by definition murderous and transgressive. Raskolnikov exercises the power of life and death through murdering the old pawn broker. It is a heady drug, this power of life and death, which reduces to nothing and ruin.  Raskolnikov’s power is literally a covenant with death, which Isaiah pictures as the universal predicament. “Because you have said, ‘We have made a covenant with death, And with Sheol we have made a pact. The overwhelming scourge will not reach us when it passes by, For we have made falsehood our refuge and we have concealed ourselves with deception’” (Is. 28:15). Their guilt is to imagine they can manipulate death, as if it is a reality on the order of God. The resolution of Isaiah, is on the order of that of Romans, in that this false choice is eliminated. Isaiah says the covenant with death is annulled (v. 18), exposed by the costly cornerstone of Zion (v. 15). By relocating God as God in our life and denying ourselves (including our power of free-will choice), by Jesus gaining victory over sin and death (exposing their unreality), we put on the singular truth indicated in Eden.

Rereading Romans, Part 2

A guest blog by Brian Sartor

Protestant era readings of Romans take 1:18-32 as the foundation. Our reading takes it as a false pretense. The voice of 1:18-32 is that of one who “passes judgment” (2:1) and “boasts in God” (2:17). It names boastfulness as a practice of the unrighteous (1:30), yet each remaining occurrence of the word ‘boast’ in the epistle refers to the boasting of one who presumes himself to be righteous (2:17-29, 3:27, 4:2, 15:17). The conventionally acceptable practice of boasting in God, boasting in law, and boasting in an outward form of righteousness (and Jewish identity) is the implicit tone of voice in 1:18-32. In 2:1—3:20, Paul exposes that tone—that mode of approaching life and law—as one of subtle self-deceit, hypocrisy, and death.

The last two verses in 2:1—3:20 conclude: “Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of law no flesh will be justified in His sight; for through law comes the knowledge of sin.” “That every mouth may be closed” is where Paul is taking us as we proceed from the boisterous claims of 1:18-32. The nature and function of law is that it closes all mouths, as law is not a foundation from which anyone may boast. “That every mouth may be closed” also pre-figures 11:32, the very last line in Paul’s argument: “For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all.”

“There is No Partiality with God”

The ethnic distinction between Jew and Gentile was a hindrance to gospel living, and addressing it was essential to Paul’s mission as the apostle to the Gentiles (Galatians 2, Acts 15). Writing to establish a base for his future ministry in Spain (1:10-11 and 15:22-24), in Romans Paul sought to address this false distinction from the ground up. He alluded to it subtly at first with an ironic use of the phrase “…to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” in 1:16. Then in 2:9-10, Paul fully twists this conventional phrase back in on itself, neutralizing, or canceling out, any significance it could possibly have for common use in relation to the gospel.

Then Paul states the first point in his argument: “For there is no partiality with God” (2:11). The phrase originates in the Torah (Deuteronomy 10:17), shows up in the wisdom literature, and gets repeated in a passage from the synoptic gospels (Matthew 22:16, Mark 12:14, Luke 20:21). It becomes a fundamental theme in Paul’s corpus and in other New Testament writings (Acts 10:34, James 2:1-9, Galatians 2:6, Ephesians 6:9, Colossians 3:25, 1 Timothy 5:21). The first eleven uses of the word ‘law’ in Romans begin to explain why the ethnic distinction between Jew and Gentile has no place in the righteousness of God:

For all who have sinned without law will also perish without law, and all who have sinned under law will be judged by law; for it is not the hearers of law who are righteous before God, but the doers of law who will be justified. For when Gentiles who do not have law do by nature the things of the Law, these, though not having law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of mankind through Christ Jesus (2:12-16).

Notice the different uses of ‘law’, with and without the definite article: 1) “the Law”, i.e., Jewish Law, God’s Law, and 2) “a law to themselves” i.e., conscience. Paul equates these two in the way they function, saying that “Gentiles who do not have law [and who] do by nature the things of the Law… show the work of the Law written in their hearts.” He is saying that the Jew and the Gentile each participate equally in a universally human and highly consequential relationship to this thing that we call law. Therefore, there is no distinction. Jews participate in law; Gentiles participate in law. There is no partiality with God.

 “He is Jew Who is One Inwardly”

The next eleven references to ‘law’ also support Paul’s primary point, that there is no partiality with God. To analyze the nature and function of law, showing why there is no basis for partiality, Paul takes us to the essence of what it means to be Jewish:

But if you bear the name “Jew” and rely upon law and boast in God, and know His will and distinguish between the things which differ, being instructed out of the Law, and are confident that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants, having in law the embodiment of knowledge and of the truth, you, therefore, who teach another, do you not teach yourself? You who proclaim that one shall not steal, do you steal? You who say that one should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who boast in law, through your breaking law, do you dishonor God? For “the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you,” just as it is written (2:17-24).

For indeed circumcision is of value if you practice law; but if you are a transgressor of law, your circumcision has become uncircumcision. So if the uncircumcision keeps the requirements of the Law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? And he who is physically uncircumcised, if he keeps the Law, will he not judge you who through the letter and circumcision are a transgressor of law? For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God (2:25-29).

Paul names five things that on the surface may seem advantageous and consequential about being Jewish: bearing the name “Jew”, relying upon law, boasting in God, knowing His will, and distinguishing between the things which differ. What does the last one suggest? Along with circumcision, the primary identity marker of the Jew by which he may set himself apart from the Gentile is by his knowledge of the Law, his ability to “distinguish between the things that differ.” This description of law is an essential feature of the concept of law itself, echoing God’s command for Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Who ultimately sets and distinguishes between the things that differ, between such things as good and evil? What is the nature of the command to Adam in Genesis 2? Does it go well for Adam after he gains the knowledge of good and evil? Did it not bring death like God said that it would? If so, how? These are the questions Paul is addressing in Romans. The letter of the law distinguishes between the things that differ and relies upon a dialectical knowledge of good and evil, but the spirit as the source of law inwardly habilitates the true Jew to rely directly upon the one who is faithful, Jesus Christ, the tree of life himself. In my next post, Rereading Romans, Part 3, we will look to the latter half of Romans 3 at the next 11 occurrences of ‘law’ and consider the meaning of faith in relation to Paul’s analysis of law.

(Register for the class with Michael Hardin: René Girard and Nonviolent Atonement here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings). The course will run from the week of October 7th to December 6th.)

Rereading Romans, Part 1

By Brian Sartor

In the Torah, life and death hinged upon our mode of approach to a tree: “…the tree of life in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. …from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat from it, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die” (Genesis 2:9,17). In Saint Paul, life and death hinge upon our mode of approach to the law: “…the letter [of the law] kills, but the spirit [of the law] gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6).

Paul possessed unique insight into the concept of law. After abiding blamelessly by law as a Pharisee (Philippians 3:5-6), he had been dramatically reoriented to it by an encounter with Jesus (Acts 9:1-30). As a result, his analytical insight into the nature and function of law was unique, even among his fellow apostles. It was for this reason that Paul became the apostle to the Gentiles (Galatians 1:11—2:21).

Jew-Gentile relations were troubled in early Christian communities due to commonly held assumptions about law, so in Romans Paul addresses the issue from the ground up. Attention to what Romans says about law therefore lends deep unity and interpretive structure to the epistle’s argument, clarity concerning its occasional purpose, and high resolution to its picture of the universal human condition.

The word ‘law’ occurs seventy-eight times in Romans; seventy-one of those occurrences are in 2:12—8:8; sixty of them occur within the eighty verses that comprise 2:12—3:31 and 7:1—8:8. This means that in these two sections of Romans, the word ‘law’ is found on average three times every four verses.

This would not be so remarkable if Protestant era readings of Romans did not fail to see the unity of these sections. Indeed, the unity of Paul’s argument about the nature and function of law, the unity of his overall aim to address the issue of Jew-Gentile relations in Rome, spans the entirety of Romans 1-11. Romans 3:21 sums up Paul’s announcement, “But now apart from law the righteousness of God has been manifested…” The universally presumed fundamental category of nature we call law is set aside for a divine righteousness that is based on something completely new and wholly other than law as we know it.

Yet Protestant readings of Romans have written law as we know it right back into the gospel. The natural, conventional, and perennial guiding assumption is that law remains fundamental to all things, even to the righteousness of God. As a result, we have read Romans as if Paul were addressing two different topics: the legal aspect of salvation (justification) in chapters 1-4, and the practical aspect of salvation (sanctification) in chapters 5-8.

However, Paul is not using justification as a legal term. Faith is not a precondition for, nor a means of access to, divine righteousness as a legal concept. God’s righteousness itself is a person who is our only mode of direct participation in the power of God, the wisdom of God, the tree of life. Life and death are not two topics, even as the spirit and the letter of the law are not two topics. The dual-designated tree of life at the center of the garden of Eden is not two trees. Life is life, law is law, and it turns out that all that matters is the way we go about them both. The spirit as the source of law gives life, and the letter as an agent of law leads to death.

As Protestants, we have been unwittingly befuddled by the characteristic mistakes of our age. We have interpreted Romans according to “a great mass of common assumptions”[1] about law in the West. St Augustine misread Romans and gave us original sin through the federal headship of Adam. Martin Luther misread Romans and gave us justification as an imputed righteousness. Both are nonsensical apart from a legal paradigm so definitive in the West that it has shaped even our theology.

Rereading Romans, however, promises in the words of C.S. Lewis, “to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds.”[2] This patient and slow-moving breeze, Lewis says, is the only palliative to the characteristic mistakes of eras and individuals. Rereading Romans, we see Paul deliberately analyzing the concept of law, exposing its deadly natural function in the human psyche, naming something better that both perfects and displaces law.

“They exchanged the truth of God for the lie.”

Protestant era readings of Romans place the old lie about law right back at the center. Romans 1:18-32 describes the moral decline and the naturally occurring consequence of wrath among those who presumably do not have the Law. Their depraved condition and their condemnation are due to their own suppression of a basic, nascent, universal human knowledge of God. This purportedly highlights their absolute moral culpability, explaining why they are without excuse.

For many it will come as a shock to hear it suggested that in Romans 1:18-32, Paul is merely giving voice to conventional wisdom concerning the universal human condition. It sounds familiar, harmless, and true enough to many of us at first, just as it would have to the original recipients of the epistle. However, in Romans 2:1 Paul clearly begins exposing the lack of depth, and the inadequacy, of the conventional view to which he had just given voice. Romans 1:18-32 does not sufficiently describe nor accurately describe the human condition from the standpoint of Paul’s gospel.

Here we are following the groundbreaking work of Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul.[3] Campbell’s work is extensive, detailed, and monumental. He reads Romans in such a way that the position given voice in Romans 1:18-32 is a voice-in-character speech attributed to a false teacher in Rome. Occasionally, the false teacher is given voice throughout Paul’s argument, representing either conventional human wisdom or an elemental false teaching (as I would read it), if not also that of a specific false teacher who had been influential in Rome (as Campbell reads it).

We already know that throughout the letter Paul spars with an imaginary interlocutor, a rhetorical voice interjecting thoughts and questions that are not Paul’s own but that ultimately serve his point. In this rereading of Romans, we are saying that the dialogical exchange between Paul and this rhetorical voice begins boldly and abruptly in Romans 1:18-32 where Paul steel-mans the position of his interlocutor.

Eventually, in Romans 7:7-25, Paul describes the human condition according to his own analysis of the nature and function of law. The description of the human condition in Romans 1 is woefully bereft of the analytical depth Paul offers in Romans 7. The contrasting relationship of these two passages ought not be overlooked, otherwise the unity of the entire argument is lost. Romans 1 and Romans 7 cannot be synthesized or assimilated to one another as statements made from the same voice or vantage point. This is why Protestant era readings fragment the structure of Romans 1-8 as if Paul were addressing two different aspects of the gospel, first the legal, then the practical.

Romans 1:18-32 is familiar and resonant to Protestant era Christian insiders, yet it feels uncharacteristic and troubling to outsiders, unbelievers, and dissenters. Romans 1:18-32 has been mistaken by both groups to be Paul’s actual voice and therefore his basic, final account of the universal human condition. Meanwhile, the passage where Paul actually gives his own final and accurate account of the universal human condition, Romans 7, is rendered obscure and irrelevant to the gospel. Moreover, it is often read as a description of normal Christian life, even though it is actually a description of enslavement to the law of sin and death apart from Christ.

Atheist psychologists, philosophers, and outliers within Protestantism, have not missed the plain meaning of Romans 7. Paul Axton brilliantly presents this point in his understated, overlooked, and invaluable contribution to any future rereading of Romans, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul.[4] Axton’s teaching ministry at Forging Ploughshares and Ploughshares Bible Institute has been the catalyst to this writer’s rereading of Romans. Douglas Campbell’s work on Romans 1-4 and Paul Axton’s work on Romans 5-8 converge decorously to expose and elucidate the characteristic mistakes of the Protestant era about law.

The subtle deceit granted character and voice in Romans 1:18-32 is apropos, as the conventional voice it represents is surely that of the serpent. We ourselves within Protestantism have been deceived even as we have read Romans in earnest. We have completely missed the fact that this passage gives voice to an incomplete picture of the human condition, one that is recorded precisely because it represents conventional wisdom. The position having been steel-manned by Paul, we ourselves are easily deceived by it (not purposefully by Paul, of course). The conventional view is partially true and partially complete, both of which are characteristic qualities of the serpent’s voice in Genesis 3. Although Romans 1:18-32 may sound right to many of us at first, it gives voice to a view that is twisted, wrongheaded, and incompatible with the gospel. In Romans 2:1-3:20, Paul proceeds to expose the conventional view as such. This passage will be the focus of my next post, Rereading Romans, Part 2.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Introduction to On the Incarnation, by St Athanasius, St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1998, pp. 4-5.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Douglas Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. Eerdmans, 2009.

[4] Paul Axton, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul, T&T Clark, 2015.